It felt like having a high-stakes lottery ticket, only with science involved. By
the time the preliminary medical work was finished, rather unfortunately, the
state legislature had returned to its fall session, swallowing up my sweet, attentive
husband and leaving me largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive
system into peak efficiency. This would involve giving myself a regimen of daily
shots over the course of several weeks. The plan was I’d administer first one drug
to suppress my ovaries and then later a new drug to stimulate them, the idea
being that they’d then produce a cascade of viable eggs.
All the work and uncertainty involved made me anxious, but I wanted a
baby. It was a need that had been there forever. As a girl, when I’d grown tired
of kissing the vinyl skin of my baby dolls, I’d begged my mother to have another
baby, a real one, just for me. I promised I’d do all the work. When she wouldn’t
go along with the plan, I’d hunted through her underwear drawer, searching for
her birth control pills, figuring that if I confiscated them, maybe it would yield
some results. It didn’t, obviously, but the point is I’d been waiting a long time for
this. I wanted a family and Barack wanted a family, too, and now here I was
alone in the bathroom of our apartment, trying, in the name of all that want, to
screw up the courage to plunge a syringe into my thigh.
It was maybe then that I felt a first flicker of resentment involving politics
and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work. Or maybe I was just feeling
the acute burden of being female. Either way, he was gone and I was here,
carrying the responsibility. I sensed already that the sacrifices would be more
mine than his. In the weeks to come, he’d go about his regular business while I
went in for daily ultrasounds to monitor my eggs. He wouldn’t have his blood
drawn. He wouldn’t have to cancel any meetings to have a cervix inspection. He
was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do. He read all the
IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual duty
was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm. And then, if he
chose, he could go have a martini afterward. None of this was his fault, but it
wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is
important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting
my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. I found
myself in a small moment of reckoning. Did I want it? Yes, I wanted it so much.
And with this, I hoisted the needle and sank it into my flesh.