service of important monthly hormonal markers but rather in concert with the
Illinois legislative schedule. This, I figured, was one thing we could try to fix.
But our adjustments didn’t work, even with Barack flooring it up the
interstate after a late vote so that he could hit my ovulation window and even
after the senate went into its summer recess and he was home and available full-
time. After many years of taking careful precautions to avoid pregnancy, I was
now singularly dedicated to the opposite endeavor. I treated it like a mission. We
had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every
worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which
left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we’d felt. Seeing
women and their children walking happily along a street, I’d feel a pang of
longing followed by a bruising wallop of inadequacy. The only comfort was that
Barack and I were living only about a block from Craig and his wife, who now
had two beautiful children, Leslie and Avery. I found solace in dropping by to
play and read stories with them.
If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in
the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely,
painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you
will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which,
regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What
nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than
you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I
mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping
me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take
away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during
mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal
biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason,
had needed to bail out.
One of these friends also steered me toward a fertility doctor whom she and
her husband had used. Barack and I went in for exams, and when we later sat
down with the doctor, he told us there was no discernible issue with either of us.
The mystery of why we weren’t getting pregnant would remain just that. He
suggested that I try taking Clomid, a drug meant to stimulate egg production, for
a couple of months. When that didn’t work, he recommended we move to in
vitro fertilization. We were inordinately lucky that my university health insurance
would cover most of the bill.