Avalanche Page 3

  We never made it back to the clinic together. We scheduled appointments, we were ready to begin treatment, but more than once—at the very last minute—Paul changed his mind. I got the blame for falling asleep at 2 a.m. on a day we were due to begin. We had been up all night talking about our future as parents, he was worried he would be stuck holding the baby, he was worried he was too old. I did my best to assure him all would be fine, better than fine, a joy, a gift . . . but I was bone-tired and soon begged off to sleep. When I woke up Paul told me he was canceling the cycle. He said that if we’d been talking about my work in the early hours of the morning I would have managed to stay awake. He was unsure, he wanted to wait. Wait! I felt like I had been stabbed—and wanted to stab him in turn—but I needed his permission and did my best to persuade him to please reconsider. Nothing worked. I was a hopeless supplicant.

  Things fell apart. Fall down, get back up, fall down. Stay down, duck for cover. It was a long, sad, immensely difficult time for both of us. He said I was relegating “Us” to my insistent desire for a child. I couldn’t bear his deliberate procrastinating, his brooding, his rages. The weight of his reproach. My friends and family despaired for me; his friends and family despaired for him. But we were not entirely sad—that was our problem. Our relationship didn’t fade out . . . it was syncopated, tender—terrible. So many small things were quietly wonderful. We both sincerely claimed to love one another more than we’d ever loved anyone before, we told ourselves ours were only the best intentions.

  My film was selected to be “In Competition” at the Festival de Cannes. The experience was intense and marvelous and I couldn’t have survived it without Paul by my side. The night of the screening was also his birthday. At the after-party, held on a beach, he stripped off his tuxedo and went for a swim. Emerging from the water he was radiant. That was in May 2011—but we slid downhill through June and by July we had drafted divorce papers. Over a year had passed since our separation around the time of the property settlement and a formal divorce could now be granted. The paperwork wasn’t signed and sent to the family court until October. I sent it in: Paul told me he had started sleeping with other people. Our body seal was broken.

  And still, and yet, and don’t let go, even after we were officially divorced we continued to see one another. In February 2012 we planned a weekend away at his friend’s beach house down the coast, he said we would go there to “create something new together.” My hope, as always, was that it would only take a tiny breakthrough and our relationship would crystallize, a slow process culminating in a sudden and unpredictable transformation. We ate fish’n’chips, drank wine, watched DVDs. It poured with rain. When I said “I love you” he flinched. “Why say that now!” “Because we’re sitting on the couch, nothing special.” Nothing special: nothing worked. Nothing worked. Nothing within me worked. We failed to understand one another deeply. I’ve revisited that weekend a thousand times. Reenacted—rewritten every conversation, every stillborn attempt at openhearted conversation. An endless restoration. That was the weekend when we did truly divorce, when even the McGillicuddys had to call it a day. I was grateful to Paul for one thing: we agreed that if we were to irrevocably part he would allow me to use his frozen sperm and go ahead with being a single mother. He knew I didn’t want to use a stranger’s sperm; he knew how old I was; he knew how I’d found myself in my predicament. I would take full financial responsibility and he could be involved in co-parenting as little or as much as he liked. Since we had been friends for so long—twenty-three years—we felt we could maintain harmony in the future. Our child had taken root. I believed I would forever be fond of Paul. He was tattooed under my skin.

  I was happy to be a single mother. If the choice was between not being a mother and being a single mother then I had no qualms. Again, millions of women around the world had been or were single mothers, not all by choice—granted. I have several friends who reached the same impasse and made a different and difficult decision. They couldn’t see how they would be happy as a single mother, how they could manage the financial pressures, the squeeze of time, the sole responsibility. Some thought that it wouldn’t be best for the baby, that a child needed more than one parent, that the bond between a single mother and child could curdle or suffocate. Other friends were perfectly content not being parents; childlessness didn’t bother them in the slightest. “Why do it to yourself?” a male friend asked me. He was single, mid-forties, without a child but patiently hoping for a family.

  My 42nd birthday passed without celebration. In March 2012 I arranged to visit Paul at home because I needed his signature on a new consent form. Same as before. Our most recent form had expired, each was only good for six months. It was so strange to be standing in the living room, looking at the sofa and rug we had bought together, the chairs we’d upholstered, the framed map on the wall that was an exact replica of the map on my own living-room wall, an Operational Navigation Chart of the South Atlantic Ocean, a map I’d pinned up wherever I’d lived ever since I first came across it over a decade ago. My period was due and I was prepared to begin treatment. For the past couple of weeks I had been slowly gathering strength, adding pregnancy multivitamins to my iodine-folate pill (I’d been on that for ages); cutting down my coffee; doing more exercise; talking to a counselor about proceeding alone. I’d been gathering strength and weeping and weeping. Paul refused to sign the consent form. He announced he had changed his mind. He didn’t think I should be a mother; I was too selfish; I didn’t know how to love. “You had no commitment to my happiness.” What he needed was a clean break. “I’m a decent man who wants nothing more than to live and love simply with family at the center of my life.” Plunge into the deep circular pit. He tried to bundle me out the door, took hold of me, and I scratched him, hard, broke his skin. I refused to leave, sat down on the sofa. He threatened to call the police and then left. I waited for him to return. I thought about taking a knife to the sofa, ripping it open, ripping my leg open. When he got back he said that earlier that morning, in anticipation of my visit, he had called my parents for their advice. My mother had agreed with him.

  Was it true! Outside on the street I called my mother and she confirmed that yes, she didn’t think I should be a mother. “And anyway, how would you get to the hospital on your own?” I told her that I would never speak to her again. Then I called one of my sisters. We have long experience with our mother’s Honest Tourette’s. My sister called my mother, my mother called me back. She didn’t think I should be a mother, not with him as the father. I hung up. Mothers and daughters—not always sunshine stories. She never really got on board with my IVF: she thought it a bad idea and because she is so forthright, never insincere, she couldn’t fake support. My father took the same view. With wax in my ears I reassured myself that making babies in the lab was virtually unknown in their generation, hence the cool reaction. All updates went through my sisters. In the last months my mother softened and sent kind messages, chicken soup. After one particular disappointment, the latest in a long chain of disappointments, she reminded me of how surprised she’d been when I came home from high school one day and informed her I’d won the cross-country race. “I asked you how you did it and do you remember what you said? ‘I pass them on the hills when I’m crying.’ ”

  Whatever was left of my dignity I threw in the bin. I wrote to Paul and apologized for losing my temper. I said I completely accepted our marriage was over. I asked if he could look past his immediate pain and imagine himself in six months’ time, in a year’s time, happy and vital. Probably with a new love. The choice was his—unquestionably—but could he reconsider with an open heart? I said it was rare that we ever faced such a stark complex decision, so rare for the Fates to reveal themselves. Out of our relationship could come a beautiful childbeing. His life would only be enriched, not ruined. To no avail: he remained unmoved. Still, I was convinced that—after the worst of the bitter pain of divorce had eased—the blood would drain from his eyes and h
e’d see clearly. Just as before, on so many occasions, I’d seen him burn with fury and then make amends.

  I’m an expert at make-believe. Our child was not unreal to me. It was not a real child but also it was not unreal. Maybe a better way to say it is that the unknown unconceived had been an inner presence. A desired and nurtured inner presence. Not real but a singular presence in which I had radical faith. A presence that could not be substituted or replaced.

  My sleep was infected. I had dreams of searching in frustration for clothes that mysteriously vanished; a golden necklace, opera length, which at 10 cm intervals was broken up with small old-fashioned watch faces; a foul image of biting into a hamburger with a giant blood clot at its center. A nightmare in which Paul came to the door and I saw that he was cradling a dead toddler in his arms. He wasn’t smug or victorious, instead he looked at me as if he had only just realized he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. In that dream my main concern was not to lose my composure, not to unnerve him, because I was holding the hand of another child by my side whom I had to protect.

  I could have walked away there and then and used unknown donor sperm from the clinic’s sperm bank. That sperm would have already cleared the three-month quarantine period required for any donated sperm. Quarantine is an industry standard in order to guard against HIV and other transmissible diseases. But in the IVF world we all have our parameters, our personal lines in the sand. At least we do when we start out, before the harsh desert winds cut across the dunes. (And some resile from starting out altogether: I heard of a German writer who told her audience that children created through IVF were Halbwesen, “twilight creatures,” “half-human, half-artificial I-don’t-know-whats.”) My own parameter was that I couldn’t face using a stranger’s sperm. I wanted to have a special personal bond with the father of my child. Also, I harbored doubts about anonymous sperm because I figured the donors self-declared their medical history, filled out forms, and that there was very little if any fact-checking, double-checking, very little investigation of that medical history. I was especially concerned about things undetectable in the blood. At heart, I wasn’t ready to abandon our child. Couldn’t face the grief, I suppose. Doubled grief: lost marriage, lost childling. I envied the widows—innocent—whereas I was complicit in my loss. I know a friend who would shrug her shoulders: when she was in her early forties and single she went straight to the sperm bank, did one egg collection, and on her second transfer with a frozen embryo fell pregnant, gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Her life was transformed, filled with love.

  I asked again for Paul’s frozen sperm. And again. He told me it was too late, I’d had my chance, I’d blown it: “Sillybilly.” A couple of months later, when Paul was on holiday, he invited me to join him in Shanghai. An invitation, an opening. What bravery. I read the email, my heart leapt, flared. All the chemicals of love spilled through my bloodstream. Imagine: lying in his arms again; his smell; his face softening, losing its edges. Imagine: beginning again. Standing very close to one another. Holding hands. But by morning I was trembling. Hadn’t we always been in love and hadn’t we tried, and tried, and hadn’t we never managed to make things work. So I wrote to say it would be better if I saw him when he returned. He said I was blind to the only truly great thing in my life, “Us,” and that his deep sadness was due to my doubting, my hovering, my lack of trust. Soon we were in touch again. He drafted the letter that he wished I’d written him, my mea culpa, from me to him. If I’d been able to write that mea culpa he would have forgiven me everything, he said, but as I hadn’t, he was turning away. A month later he met his new partner—or re-met, since they had known one another as teenagers. I was happy because she was older, closer to 50, and had two primary-school-age children of her own: she wouldn’t want his frozen sperm. I thought that now Paul was happy, head over heels, we could move into a kind of brotherly-sisterly après-love. They hadn’t been together long before I bumped into them at the art gallery. I saw him first, alone. He was glowing. A new shirt, new jeans, new haircut. He greeted me warmly, we hugged. Had a polite chat, parted. When I moved into the next room I watched him kneel down and raise a young girl onto his shoulders. He glanced up at me with the chill dead-eyes of a shark. The two-headed man-girl went to stand alongside a woman and her son and they gazed into a large mirror, an Anish Kapoor work, admiring a distorted family portrait. The flow of the exhibition was such that I had to walk directly past them. On the way I went up and introduced myself. Asked her for a quick word. We stepped aside. I wanted to confirm how long their relationship had been stewing. She said it was all very recent. I passed to the next space which happened to be a cul-de-sac filled with Kapoor’s Memory (2008), a gigantic rusty blimp or ordnance that obliterated the space in the room, crowded out the space, and I crawled into a tiny pocket under the sculpture, hid myself away from view, was crushed and obliterated, started quietly sobbing.

  I asked Paul again for his help. “Grow a dick,” he said in a jocular spirit. “Here’s a tip for the future: go somewhere in Southern Europe, find a bar, and just go home with someone.” A friend said the same thing, more or less, lightly, a young guy ignorant of the odds of a 42-year-old falling pregnant naturally. The very thought of standing in a bar, at 42, going home with a drunken stranger, having unprotected sex, all with a secret and sad agenda—the suggestion filled me with horror.

  My youngest sister, who is very wise, could not understand why I was so attached to using Paul’s sperm. “It would be a disaster,” she said. “It wouldn’t be a gift. He’d hold it over you. There’s no civilized friendship. Listen to me, it isn’t like that.”

  I gave up, abandoned our child. I dropped my heart from its thin slippery sack. Let that go.

  I had an appointment with Dr. Rogers at the clinic to discuss freezing my eggs. I couldn’t help feeling ashamed to be there on my own and if he scented this shame—which I think he did—he kindly overlooked it. I would do an egg (oocyte) collection just as I would if I were doing a full cycle, only this time, without sperm, instead of immediately using those eggs to create embryos I would put them on ice. The eggs would be “vitrified,” snap-frozen. The survival rate for eggs after vitrification was about 60 percent. He let me know no one could say how well the eggs would fertilize after thawing nor could he give a number about the likelihood of a thawed egg resulting in pregnancy. As for the health of children conceived after egg-freezing, well, yes, he advised that knowledge in the field was limited.

  We did not talk much about side effects. I recall discussing ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome—a potentially life-threatening condition which involved abnormal swelling and fluid retention. It apparently affected around 1 percent of IVF patients. No doubt a complete nightmare for whoever was unlucky enough to get it. But I didn’t blink when the doctor mentioned this risk; if he was cavalier then I was the Commander in Chief of Cavaliers. Freezing my eggs seemed like my only chance to take action, to do something, to break out of my force-frozen stasis, my own icy Ninth Circle of Hell. Crack ice with ice! I knew it was far from ideal but it was better than nothing.

  At the front desk I handed the receptionist the new consent form filled in by the doctor. I told her I was freezing my eggs. “Oh.” She made a correction on the form, crossed out a couple of treatments and charges, replaced them with two others. I was uneasy with the receptionist determining my treatment and asked that the doctor confirm it.

  There is an enormous amount of paperwork involved with IVF. There are underlying consents and then consents along the way for each specific treatment. I had another look at the underlying consents. They very clearly spelled out—among other things—that there was no guarantee of success for any procedure; that assisted reproduction has complications (including ovarian hyperstimulation; pelvic infection; damage to the bladder, bowel or blood vessel at the time of egg collection); and that the doctor managing my care might have a financial interest in the clinic. With those consents I felt the same sense of empowerment, fair barga
ining, ability to discuss and negotiate a document, as I did when I signed off blindly on the terms and conditions of the latest Adobe update. Take it or leave it: well, not entirely, I was asked if I would allow my unfertilized eggs to be used for laboratory training. I circled No.

  The all-up cost to freeze my eggs was around AU$11,300 (US$11,820)—none of which was covered by public health care.

  How did I fund all of this, the IVF, cycle after cycle? A screenplay I wrote under a pseudonym went into production. I spent that windfall—a privileged decision I could afford to make. Once on the phone a friend unwittingly said something hurtful. I was moaning about the high cost of IVF and she said, “I know, my sister had to sell her house to buy her kids.” Buy her kids.

  I went back to the nurses.

  I love nurses. I have a nurse fetish, I think I acquired it after my illness in my twenties. It’s not acutely sexual, unlike the nurse fetish of a male friend who managed to spark an affair with a nurse while recovering from a heart operation. (No one ever said he had to buy his life.) I love nurses because they are kind. I love submitting to their care. At the clinic the nurses played a large role in the IVF treatment. During a cycle they were the point of first and frequent contact. I say “the nurses” because they had their own division: when I called the nurses, or the nurses called me with a result, I wasn’t always sure exactly whom I’d be speaking to—it could have been any nurse from the greater body of nurses. In this way “the nurses” were a kind of timeless ideal, swap out one nurse for another and the nurses would remain untouched in their humble glory. Because I started the process at the city clinic my early visits to the nurses for tests happened at that location, but when it came time to do the egg collection we decided it would be better if I moved to a sister clinic in a suburb closer to my home. The daily monitoring would be easier that way, less travel time. My results would be sent back to the city clinic, which would remain my “operational headquarters.” I did have a favorite nurse at the local clinic. Rebecca. Scottish, with pale blond hair, pale skin, soft and pillowy. She was the most adept with the needle. I learned to ask on arrival at reception if she was working that day, as a strong hint I would like to see her. Also, this was awkward, there was a nurse who had twice massacred my arm and by asking after Rebecca I hoped to avoid her. Rebecca was so kind; Gerasima to my Ivana Ilyich. What grace—to take blood from all these women every morning, day in and day out, to know of the great unspoken hope and misery, the high stakes, to greet each patient with a gentle smile and no judgment.