onto my painful abdomen.
I swallowed hard, my next words coming out in a whisper. “What if I’m a crap mother, Ben?” My own mother had done what I considered to be a satisfactory job, but she probably wouldn’t win any parenting awards. In fairness, she had raised my sister and me mostly alone, and we hadn’t made it easy on her. I had also spent enough time with Kate and young Ava—who had just yesterday flushed an entire roll of toilet paper down the powder room toilet, resulting in a very expensive plumber visit—to question if I was cut out for motherhood.
Ben laughed a little when I told him about Ava and the toilet paper, which for whatever reason made me cry harder. Probably because I knew then he wasn’t going to storm out of the bedroom and leave me to my cramps and tears and regret. “Everyone thinks they’d be a shitty parent, Hannah. That’s what helps keep you on guard to try and do the best job you can.” The tears came faster, hot and fresh. “If you think you’ll be stellar, you get cocky and miss things. People have been doing it forever. You’ll figure it out.” I almost believed him. “You’ll be a great mom, and I can’t wait to watch you in action one day.”
I blew my nose, honking into the tissues he handed me.
“I want you to promise me something.”
“What?” I blew my nose again.
“If you’re not okay, or freaked out about something, you have to tell me. I know you have Kate, and Claire in an emergency.” I snorted. Claire was pretty low on my who-to-call-in-an-emergency list. “But I’m not going anywhere. I love you. And for what it’s worth? I know having a baby right now wouldn’t have been ideal, but we would have made it work. So, promise me. Nothing but the messy truth from here on out, okay?”
“Okay.” I nodded. “Nothing but the messy truth.”
Except I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain.
What I never told Ben, or even Kate when she hugged me later that day after I confessed to her as well, was that when I realized I was losing the baby I didn’t feel sadness, or despair, or even loss... I felt relief.
I was relieved I wasn’t going to be a mother.
And that’s the sort of messy truth you keep to yourself, because perhaps that one time when you whispered, “Please, I don’t want to be a mother...” to the universe, it thought you meant forever.
* * *
A few days after the Lyla and restaurant incidents, Ben and I were sitting in Dr. Horwarth’s office getting the news I knew was coming but was still not ready to hear. How do you prepare for the brutal reality of being told you will never carry your own child? You can’t, I realized, as his words washed over me along with the sensation of drowning—I was circling the same stupid drain I’d been circling since that first negative pregnancy test, all those years ago. Except this time there was no rescue mission planned, no life vest, nothing to keep me from sinking straight down to the bottom.
“Remember at the beginning of all this how I suggested you draw a line in the sand, deciding how far you’re willing to go and what you’re willing to put your body through to make it happen?” Dr. Horwarth clasped his hands on his desk, his face gentle with understanding.
But while he might have understood what we were feeling on an intellectual level, the pictures of his smiling family displayed on the corner of his desk suggested he really didn’t get it, couldn’t get it.
“I remember,” I said, my voice breaking. Ben held my hand, like I expected him to, like he knew he should and had so many times before. But it brought me no comfort today.
“I’m wondering how close we are to that line now. I’m willing to keep trying. We can do another round of IVF...but I’ll be honest,” Dr. Horwarth said, pausing for a moment. “I’m sorry to say I don’t expect to have different results than what we’ve had.”
I was so filled with anger—at my body, at Dr. Horwarth, at Ben for sticking through this with me when he should have left to find a wife who wasn’t barren, at the woman in the waiting room who was having a hushed but excited conversation on her phone while she stared at her ultrasound photo, a smile stretched wide across her face. And tickling the edges of that anger was such a deep pain I was afraid of what would happen to me if I let it take over.
KATE
November
The waiting room was packed. Checking my watch I saw she was already twenty minutes behind. Settling in, I opened another magazine—this one with a young celebrity wearing a marshmallow-size diamond on her finger and declaring her three-month-long courtship “the time of my life”—and sipped my latte. While most might dread a trip to the gynecologist, I was always happy to be here. Not because of the exams—that would be going too far—but because Dr. Lisa Kadari’s practice had a self-serve latte machine, individually wrapped dark chocolate squares in a huge glass bowl and the best magazines. It practically felt like a holiday at her office.
I flipped through the pages—past silly articles on celebrities who did things just like us regular folk, like pick up their own dry cleaning and wash their cars—and put the magazine down a couple of minutes later. Scanning the other titles, I picked up the latest copy of Femme and turned to the food and recipes section. It was nearly Thanksgiving, and Hannah had done a two-page spread on putting a holiday-worthy feast on the table in under an hour. Seeing her smiling face in the corner thumbnail photo made me think about how she’d looked nothing like that happy woman at our drink date the other night—her eyes red rimmed, her ponytail disheveled and her spirit broken.
She’d tried to cancel on me; she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to infect me, and could we do it another night? When I showed up at her place thirty minutes later, saying that unless she was vomiting or running a 104-degree fever, she was coming with me, she’d gotten dressed without another word. Ben had watched her carefully as she left the room to get changed, after which we chatted about the nonimportant stuff like work and the girls’ recent soccer game until she came back out. But I knew he was worried, like I was. The past few months had taken a lot out of her, and it was as if whatever was chewing her up inside had just showed up on the outside for all of us to see.
Another twenty minutes and two magazines later I sat on the exam room table, waiting for the doctor. There was a knock, and a woman’s voice from the other side of the door. “Kate? You all set?”
Lisa Kadari was a petite woman with a big presence. She had thirteen-year-old twin boys—whom she had somehow managed to birth naturally at six and half pounds apiece—golden skin and hair that hung straight down her back in a glossy black sheet. When I asked her once how she got her hair so shiny, she’d said genetics and coconut oil. So I’d gone out and bought a giant tub of the stuff, slathering it all over my hair that night. I’d woken up with an oil-stained pillowcase despite the plastic shower cap and a new pimple on my forehead. That was the end of my beauty experiment with coconut oil.
She came in and took both my hands in hers in greeting, and I could see the remnants of a henna tattoo on her skin. “My cousin got married this past weekend,” she said, holding her hands out—her fingers splayed to show off the temporary tattoo.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, noting how intricate the designs were as they wrapped around her fingers and snaked up her arm in deep brown vines and leaves and starbursts, disappearing under the sleeve of her pastel-pink blouse, which poked out from her white coat.
“Thank you, I agree. Now, tell me, how are things?”
I dutifully filled her in for a minute or so on the girls and David and life before she asked, “And what can I do for you today?”
At this question I shifted slightly, clearing my throat and looking at my toenails, which I had fairly hastily polished that morning when I realized how ugly they looked bare. My feet were never going to win me any compliments, my toes slightly wonky and nails ridged thanks