Storm in a d cup, p.6
Storm in a D Cup, page 6
I put my mug down and straightened my hair, flashing him my version of the famous Cantelli smile – all teeth and no confidence whatsoever. Because Renata’s words kept ringing in my ears. A baby fixes a marriage. Did I really agree with her? My mind said I didn’t. My heart told me I was crazy, but me was terrified of getting pregnant for all the wrong reasons. All I could think was: What if we do need a baby to change things?
‘Yeah, absolutely. I’ve thought about it. I’m ready.’
Julian squeezed my hand and dropped a delicious kiss on my lips and pulled me out of my chair with a mischievous, sexy smile that promised a couple of fun hours.
Judy and Renata, zero – my marriage, one.
*
‘Keep your legs up, sweetheart,’ Julian whispered as he finally pulled out of me some time later. Did I say finally? I didn’t mean it like that, but he was really taking his time. I mean, don’t get me wrong – he has never been hasty in the bedroom; on the contrary, Julian’s always been deliciously thorough – but now, it was like he wanted to make extra sure his parcel had been delivered and signed for. I sure hoped it would work. I hated to see Julian disappointed.
But then again, not being a parent would actually spare him some other major disappointments, i.e. some huge milestones in the parenting process. Like when your kids become teenagers and eat the flower of Superior Knowledge. Suddenly they know everything and all you are is a blooming idiot. Nothing you say holds its weight anymore. You’ve lost all your clout and they spend more time in their bedroom doing God knows what when we only had a telephone and magazines, a stash of junk food, plus the occasional joint. What harm could we get up to?
But this generation – if you so much as even looked at them in a manner they didn’t like you’d get a shower of expletives that would last you a week. But a mother’s gotta be a mother, no matter what. I was the opposite of my own flaky, glamorous stand-in mom in every way. And to be honest, it was important to exercise my authority over my children while I still could. It made for great learning moments to remember throughout their lives. And boy did I make sure I did it thoroughly.
‘No, Maddy. You can’t wear high heels,’ I later told my daughter. ‘They’re bad for your back and Mila is against them. And I’m against them.’
‘Mo-om!’
‘They ruin your posture. Besides, you’re already five foot eight.’
‘Mila knows nothing,’ she huffed. ‘She says I’m no good at ballet because I’m too tall. She says it, like, slows me down or something.’
I took a long hard look at her. Her ballet instructor had a point. Maddy’s long, lanky legs gave her a funny gait that her hips hadn’t quite yet mastered. While Angelica had already filled out, Maddy was still on the slender side and a little jealous of her friend’s confidence. As much as Maddy flaunted her prettiness at home and acted cool in front of her friends, I knew she was scared of not being accepted. She was the Terrified Leader who was waiting to be caught out for not even believing in herself. Remind you of anyone?
But there was a big difference between us. Maddy was afraid of others not appreciating her. She personally appreciated herself immensely, and when she referred to her thighs as ham joints, she didn’t really mean it. Apparently it was the thing to talk bad about your body nowadays. Today when girls say they don’t like their body, they mean they absolutely love it. In my day, when we didn’t love our bodies we just shut the hell up, hid inside huge sweaters and hoped to go through life unnoticed.
So if her dreams of ballet dancing were quickly disappearing, was she really aiming toward being a model as she had lately announced? Please God, no, I fervently prayed. She had artistic talent and a flair for fashion. Why not put it to work as a fashion designer? But ultimately whatever she decided to be, I only hoped the definition included the word happy.
Which made me wonder if I had been an adequate mother after all my efforts. And while asking myself that, I asked myself what the hell had possessed me to agree to have another kid with Julian. Blimey, as Julian would say, did I really have any clue at all? Kids these days were more difficult to handle – they weren’t the shy, docile idiots we… well, I was once upon a life ago. These kids today were like tsunamis. If you didn’t want to get in their path you had to run to higher ground and pray for damage control. Which I did.
‘Madeleine,’ I finally concluded. ‘I’m not discussing high-heeled shoes any further with you. Now go wash your hands and set the table.’
At that, Maddy stared at me, wide-eyed as if I’d just been assigned to her that very instant as her mother and had started giving her orders and rules out of the blue for the very first time. Then she huffed and marched out of the room.
I groaned and rubbed my aching head. Maybe I was still in time to change my mind and retract my baby promise to Julian?
*
Ironically enough, a few weeks later I found out Julian’s precious parcel had actually arrived at destination.
I stared at the stick, my mouth opening and closing like a fish’s. A pregnant fish. Pregnant. I was actually, really, pregnant. At forty-three years of age. Now really, what were the odds the minute I went off birth control? Had Julian speed-delivery-ordered the kid?
‘Exactly why do you want to be a father, again?’ I asked Julian as we were finishing dinner that night, my big piece of news burning a hole up my sleeve. Maddy was having another sleepover at Angelica’s and I was glad for the privacy.
Julian pushed his now empty plate forward and folded the tablecloth over to rest his arms on the clean, crumb-less underside. Although I hated it when he did that, tonight I hardly noticed.
‘Erica… are you having second thoughts?’
‘Of course not. I’m… happy to do this. And…’ I flashed him a shy grin ‘…that’s one thing we can cross off our list now, by the way.’
‘What is?’
I smiled, pushing my own crumbs before me into one little pile, Julian-style. ‘Baby Mission accomplished, baby…’
His eyes widened. ‘What? You’re… pregnant?’
The look on his face told me that there was no crisis to worry about. Screw (or, as Julian would say, sod) Renata and Judy and their paranoia. This man was in love with me, no doubt.
I smiled. ‘Uh-huh…’
‘I’m going to be a father!’ Julian yelled, lifting me and twirling me around the kitchen like in a cheesy Monday afternoon movie, but the look in his eyes opened up a new world to me. A world I never knew existed. Jesus – all these years he’d wanted to be a father and never told me? What did that say about our marriage? Paradoxically, now I was even more worried than before.
‘Oh my God, Erica, this is so amazing, isn’t it!’ Julian cried as he smacked one last delicious kiss onto my mouth.
‘Oh, yeah, wow, it is!’ I assured him, not quite sure how I felt about it. I mean, I could have been happy, but my joy was overclouded by The Big Doubt – why Julian wanted this baby in the first place. He had a career, a business, two stepchildren whom although he loved immensely, had given him much ado the past seven years. Why go through it all over again just when you are about to sit back and begin to relax for once?
‘Idea!’ he cried. ‘We’ll decorate the study and paint—’
‘The study? But you love your study!’ I argued. ‘That’s your sacred ground! You don’t let anyone in there.’
‘But a baby’s a baby! Honey, we’re going to be parents!’
I already was one, and so was he, but pointing that out would be party-pooping at this point. Still, I had to draw the line somewhere. ‘Hold your horses, Julian. I haven’t even had an official blood test yet.’
‘You don’t need one. I know you’re pregnant.’
Yes, so did I. I could feel it.
*
Surreal, Julian had called my pregnancy. It turned out he was right. It was a surreal, three-week pregnancy, followed by a major, major period. And according to my gynecologist, Dottoressa Bardotti, probably one of my last.
The thought was unbearable and I swallowed and nodded in a business-like manner as she sat us down with my file and test results. When I explained our situation she blinked. I tried to convince myself it was just a reflex or a spasm, but who was I kidding?
‘Hmmm…’ she said, flipping through my file, and by the time she looked up I was hanging on the edge of my seat as Julian squeezed my hand under the table, paler than my grandmother’s linen embroidered sheets.
‘So you’re looking to get pregnant,’ she said matter-of-factly and I almost expected her to add, like Judy, What the hell for? ‘Well, given your age I suggest we get a move on. Every month is precious, you understand.’
No, I didn’t understand. I had always been very fertile. If it hadn’t been for birth control I’d have stocked the entire NFL, given enough time.
And now this woman was telling me I was a monthly time bomb, waiting to go off; that is, to dry up into arid, horrid menopause? She was practically saying if we didn’t crack our eggs pronto there would be no baby. Great. Why did Julian decide now that he wanted a child? Why hadn’t he told me before, preferably seven years ago when I was still bursting with eggs like a bloody Mexican piñata?
I had been happy with Julian and the two kids. But now, as you can imagine, hearing the doctor say that I couldn’t do it was a slap in the face to me. I had failure-phobia. Not because I had never failed before, but because I had failed only too many times. Hearing Dottoressa Bardotti say that becoming parents wouldn’t exactly be a cinch because we only had a margin of virtually what – twelve, twenty-four more periods if I was lucky – triggered in me a number of contrasting, gut-wrenching feelings. She explained that the menarche occurs when a girl has stored at least seventeen percent of body fat. As you can imagine, having always been quite plump, I’d had my period very young, meaning that I would very probably face menopause earlier than most women.
So there you go – once again, fat had managed, even retroactively, to ruin my life. There was no escaping from it. My weight had kept me a social pariah throughout my school years. It kept me standing against the wall at my high school prom (Peter DeVita, the closest thing I’d ever have to a boyfriend had just moved away and Tony Esposito had dropped out, thank God). I thought I could beat the effects of fat on my life with a good job, but even then fat had left me sweating buckets on my first job interviews, making me look like a real loser. Fat did nothing good for me.
But I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Farthington who didn’t care about looks and just wanted the job done. He got me as far as I wanted. But life was not full of Mr. Farthingtons. Life was teeming with young, skinny-assed women having children right, left and center.
Sometimes I wished I could be a thin, non-existent paper doll, like one of Maddy’s childhood, pretty-in-pink, lifeless creations. You know, all legs and no room for any organs whatsoever, much less a heart to break, or a soul to ache.
Paul and Maddy would sit for hours on end at our kitchen table back in Boston and draw all sorts of outfits for these size zero sticks. Everything looked good on them. Funny how no one’s ever made a pregnant paper doll. I imagined drawing one with an eight-month bulge. That would be fun.
And to think I’d got over all this. To think I had finally reached a stage where I was OK with everything. But according to my doctor, my weight was still too much. Countless doctors had told me I was never going to be a stick figure, so seven years ago, at eighty-five kilos and thirty-six years of age I had come to terms with myself and had started to accept myself – and more desserts as well.
I’d tried dieting but my weight yo-yoed miserably. Even when I temporarily got back to seventy-five kilograms, I was always told that The Former Me would always have the upper hand. Because my lifestyle as a fat woman had taken charge of me, ruining me for good.
And if at first having Julian’s baby wasn’t exactly on my Top Five Things To Do Before I Die, now it had become a necessity. Not just because I’d wanted to make Julian happy, but also because I needed to succeed in this relationship. My previous marriage had left me devastated. I couldn’t be a loser anymore. I had lost most of the battles in my life and was just beginning to savor an equilibrium within myself. The kids were doing great. Julian was doing great. Me, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Especially if I failed at this as well.
And now when I thought about it (because now, dammit, I could hardly think of anything else), I actually missed the nausea, the all-nighters, the endless, sleepless nights of dragging myself out of bed and looking at my bump in the mirror, trying to guess what sex it was, what he or she would look like and sound like. The memories of pregnancy had returned with a nostalgic sweetness, waiting to become a mother. Again. Was I nuts or what?
I must have been, if I was willing to do it all over again, even the hard parts. Pregnancy was nothing, compared to what came after that – the parenting. That was the hard part, the part that absorbed you completely, sucked you into the parallel universe of multiple sacrifices and absolute self-effacement.
*
My doctor gave us a list of tests to run, first of all – you guessed it – Julian’s sperm. It turned out to be super-sperm (why was I not surprised?) – particularly lively and healthy. I could almost imagine them not swimming but shooting around in the Petri dish, showing off. Look at me! Wee! I can zing and dart across the universe! Yay! I’m Super-sperm!
And all while my little, old eggs watched in awe, thinking, ‘Oh, he’ll never want to stick around us!’
Well, at least we now knew it was all my fault. And so the ordeal began. By ordeal I mean a one-thousand-two-hundred-calorie-per-day diet to up my chances of conceiving.
As per Dottoressa Bardotti, there was no point in IVF or anything of the sort if I weighed what I weighed. Prior to the procedure I’d have to take fertility drugs that would have the same effect on me as on a cow (yes, she really said that), that is, none whatsoever, unless I lost weight. Lots of it.
But because time was running out, I took hormones against my doctor’s professional advice, although, between you and me, she said, ‘What the heck, go for it – it’s now or never.’ I guess female solidarity stretched beyond professional boundaries. Fine by me.
So if on one side I was supposed to be losing weight, on the other side they were fattening me up with artificial crap intended to make me more fertile but in actuality was only making me more bloated. And turning me into a raging grump. No one could say anything to me that sounded remotely related to confrontation, and even the slam of a door would ignite me and I’d burst into tears.
‘Sweetheart,’ Julian said. ‘I don’t want you in this state. Let’s not do this.’ To his credit, he was concerned for me. But after weeks of munching on carrots and rice cakes, I had passed the point of no return. Reverting to my previous eating habits would’ve been bliss, but I didn’t want to blow the whole thing off and dash Julian’s hopes. He’d done so much for me in the past seven years. Now I wanted to do this for him.
6
Hysterosalpingography Hysteria
To be on the safe side, and because I couldn’t believe it was only my fat ass stopping us from having a baby when all around me enormous women my age were getting pregnant, I had some routine tests done to make sure all my hardware was in place.
The first, a hysterosalpingogram, was to determine whether my tubes were clogged or not via sticking a catheter way up there with a dye that spread all around and into them. If the dye reached the end of my tubes unhindered, it meant they weren’t blocked and we were home free.
They wouldn’t let Julian in with me because of the X-rays so I lay sprawled on a table with my feet up in the stirrups while a guy I’d never met before (I know I’m a bit old-fashioned but at least a hello would have sufficed) told me it wasn’t going to hurt in the least and shoved this contraption way up inside me.
‘Yeowhh!’ I hollered, seeing spots, and they all stood above me bewildered while I was doing my best not to pass out from the pain as he ripped my insides apart.
‘Impossibile,’ another guy said shoving the instrument even further up. ‘It shouldn’t hurt – this is not normal.’
‘How come no one ever told you your uterus is retroflesso?’ the doctor barked at me.
‘Retrowhat?’
‘Not in the right place…’ fumbled one of the doctors, searching for the right word.
‘Not in the right place?’ They made it sound like it was someplace completely different.
‘Tipped!’ he said in triumph.
Tipped? Was he kidding me? I think I’d know if my own uterus was tipped.
Believe me, if I hadn’t had that thing inside me I’d have jumped off the table and headed for the hills. Abnormal, my uterus? It had worked just fine for the last forty-three years.
‘Oh, no, no. It’s OK – false alarm. It’s just the speculum that’s broken inside her,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘Can I get a new one, somebody, please?’
And this was a private, expensive fertility clinic. I wondered what would’ve happened if I had been poor and sent to just any doctor. But then I realized that, according to Murphy’s law, if I had been too poor to afford a fertility clinic, the babies would have spilled out of me like in Shrek’s nightmare.
And so, as the doctors looked down on me, all smiles, we waited for the delivery of an unbroken speculum that wouldn’t just snap inside me again.
‘Live nearby?’ one of them actually asked me. I raised my evil eyebrow at him and then turned away to fight back the tears burning at the back of my eyes as he hacked his guts out, wiping his mouth on his glove.
I don’t know how or why, but a feeling of total humiliation was setting in. Ladies, to those of you who are in the uncertain process of trying to have a baby, or have managed to do so with great difficulty, I salute you to the moon and back. You have to really, really want a child with all your heart to put yourself through all that. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I admire you. I don’t think that I could ever have that kind of strength.
