046: Baby Fever

No one told me it could be so hard to conceive.

For someone as patently awful at mathematics, my head, as of late, is full of numbers. I was born when my mother was 30 years old, my father 36. It was not all that common for two people with their background – South Asian, middle class, arranged marriage, of a certain era – to have a child “so late”. Certainly not in their families and in the society they inhabited, and though my mother is the second eldest, I arrived after two of her younger sisters had had their firstborns. My grandmother was either 18 or 19 when my mother was born, and she was either 33 or 34 years old when her youngest arrived.

A beautiful model I have never met had her first child at 26. A friend in her early 30s recently gave birth. My cousin, who is 2 months older than myself, had her child at 33. A friend from university and his wife, who is a few years younger than us, welcomed their baby early this year. An artist in her late 30s shares a touching series of portraits of herself with her child, on the eve of her first birthday.

30, 36, 18, 19, 33, 34, 26, 30s, 2, 33, 30s, 1. On the first day of April I turned 35.

When I witness the sharing of a pregnancy or birth announcement – “Cat’s out of the bag!”, “A beautiful baby girl!” – or a video of a babbling baby or toddling toddler, or pass a woman pushing a stroller down Broadway or see someone imminently expecting turning the corner of 6th and Spring, I am first trying to determine their age. Sometimes they appear ten years younger than myself, which is painful, and other times we seem to be around the same age, which is also painful. Everywhere I look now, online and off, someone is pregnant or has just given birth. People have been giving birth since forever, this is true, but I perceive it now in a way I had never before, in a way that floods my consciousness with agony, the heartache of wanting something so terribly and being without.

Louise Bourgeois, in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pregnant Woman, 2002.

For several years, I have been experiencing a terrible pain, colloquially, down there. Until last year, I ignored it as I found it to be unspeakable. I feared it, despaired because of it, experienced deep shame because of it, felt less of a woman, and then a person as a whole, because of it. The first time I’d ever mentioned it to a professional was during a pap smear I had delayed and delayed. When I expressed pain, she became impatient with me, and like myself, ignored my pain. She told me to relax and that I was making it more difficult for myself; I was gripped with a feral urge to kick her, but focused on relaxation instead, or exactly what that entailed. I left the appointment with no answers.

I visited a second fast-talking gynecologist in Midtown who wanted to know why I was so dressed up and where I was going (“This is just how I dress.” “Nowhere.”) and who dismissed my discomfort, and recommended the use of dilators with no instruction. At the end of our five-minute visit, she handed me a survey which inquired as to whether the appointment had been conducted in under fifteen minutes. I checked the box and handed it to the receptionist at the front desk.

At the practice of a third doctor who never examined me, she called in, with permission, an ultrasound technician to perform an abdominal and transvaginal ultrasound. I had no idea what was required of the latter. The technician told me to think of a relaxing place. “Try harder to relax,” she admonished, and so I announced, under duress and in extreme pain, “A beach!” “Caribbean?” Through gritted teeth: “No. Mediterranean.” As I felt the probe press against just below my abdomen – I swear I saw it move, I told my husband later – the technician, a white Eastern European woman, who had transitioned from talk of relaxation to wanting to know where I was from and about my married life, told me that I was fortunate to have not married a man from Bangladesh but a man who was white, otherwise I would have been forced to cover my hair and stay at home. Had I not had the acute sensation of my insides exploding, I would have surely succumbed to that feral urge to kick her.

Based on the results of the ultrasounds, the doctor concluded that I have a type of pelvic floor dysfunction called vaginismus. What an awful name it has, vaginismus, which sounds like the god-awful cousin of a yeast infection, but what it is is an involuntary bodily response, often as a result of physical or psychological trauma or sometimes for no reason whatsoever. For someone who hopes to conceive, such as myself, it renders the very act of naturally conceiving unpleasant at best, impossible at worst. And how terrible it is to say its name out loud to the curiously sizable number of acquaintances, family members, and friends, some former, previously indifferent to the comings and goings of my life with whom I had never had such intimate conversations, who now had no shame in asking, unprompted, if I wanted a child and when I would produce one.

Help me or shut up, I want to scream at them but I do not, because society has taught me it is impolite and distasteful to openly discuss women’s reproductive health and that pain is a part of the woman’s experience. What a double standard, that people are empowered to so frankly ask if and when I will have a child, and yet if I were to tell them of my condition, of how I have for years felt like less of a woman, they would shrink.

I left the doctor’s office aching and with nothing more than an elevator pitch on vaginismus and a referral to contact a clinic that attempts to address the matter with botox, suppositories, and thousands of dollars. I searched for a more conservative approach and opted for physical therapy, which I have been doing for a year and has now plateaued, in addition to the psychotherapy I had already been doing, coupled with sleepless-nights discoveries found on an alarming large online community of people who are, like myself, floundering. I was once led to believe that America offered some of the most advanced and sophisticated healthcare, and yet the majority of knowledge and guidance I have amassed on this subject has been by searching the breadth of the internet. Women’s reproductive health is a curious business in this country, where suggestions have been made to penalize childless couples, yet comprehensive care for women’s reproductive health is remains elusive.

For a second opinion I visited a fourth gynecologist – shopping in one’s thirties is not just for thrilling things such as a new pair of shoes or a postmodern lamp, but for adequate doctors too – whose assistant insisted I relax. So I looked up at the grey-white tiled ceiling and wondered if anyone outside could see what was unfolding through the large window in the room. After running a series of tests, the appointment ended with the doctor cheerfully announcing, “I’ll see you when you’re pregnant!” Since then all I have is a bill my insurance company refuses to pay.

A few months later when I experienced a strange pain not far from my left ovary and the fourth doctor with no availability in the near future, I went to see a fifth. This doctor breezily recommended I was more than ready to naturally conceive. “You looked like you were in excruciating pain,” my concerned husband said to me when the doctor left the room. I had asked him to come with me to my appointment to witness how confounding they could be. It is on a woman to push past her pain, no matter the suffering that may transpire.

Thirty-five is hardly a death knell, but when I look back on how I had imagined my life would look right now, it involved the addition of a child. Plenty of people have children long after the age of thirty-five, some encourage. This is the beginning of the end, others caution. In a year, progress, mainly due to my own vigilance and self-education, has been slow and arduous, but I am still not close to being able to naturally conceive. There is no certainty on when those conditions will change. Alternatives have been proposed, wonderful options that open up possibilities to parenthood, but years of shame in silence and self-dehumanization have conjured a voice in my mind that whispers to me when I am vulnerable of my failings.

Soon after my husband and I were married four years ago, an aunt called my mother to congratulate her. Her wish, she said to my mother, was that we were blessed with twins. Twins are considered auspicious in our culture, I learn, and I think about her wish often. What has been interesting to me through this process (ordeal on particularly bad days), is how easy it is for others to speak about conception or potential motherhood or even pose invasive questions in contrast to how impossible it has been for me to even find the words to express the internalized shame and loathing I have been experiencing to my best friend, my husband, my therapist, keepers of my most twisted thoughts. For all my progressive values, how exact my idea of what defines a woman became only when it applied to myself.

Other than the cautionary tales of the “biological clock”, advanced maternal age, odiously once known as geriatric pregnancy, even infertility positioned as a faraway unlikelihood, I had never known to brace myself for the ways in which women’s bodies could counter a heteronormative society’s expectation of how they should be. A stunning absence of open conversations about women’s sexual and reproductive health is the norm. Instead, I have been conditioned to fill my head with numbers, to think of how much time I have left to be a mother, to compare my age and my life with that of friends and strangers and to feel sadness for myself that eclipses the joy I feel for them, to seek counsel from one two three four five doctors, to count the years gone by with regret.

No one told me it could be so hard to conceive. I wish someone had told me to anticipate the possibilities but to be unafraid, or that healthcare providers discussed my diagnosis and a recovery plan with me, or that we could be more upfront and comfortable with talking about our reproductive health. Maybe it would have allowed me to feel just as much of woman or at least, not so alone. No one told me, and so now I’m talking about it.