“I’m still in a ton of pain…” I start in.
“You can continue to manage any pain.…”
Manage it.
I’ve been here before. I remember the very first doctor who wrote the very first prescription during our very first year of marriage. He told me we could manage it, but managing pain isn’t the same as healing it. This hurting and medicating and needing to lie down can’t be fixed, only covered up.
I get off the phone, go inside, and take the neck brace off for a few hours. I keep following instructions; they are the last instructions I get and I cling to them. I let my skin soak up the air-conditioning for a few hours and I put the giant plastic prop in my closet next to the hats.
I lie on the beautiful bed in the beautiful room I designed for myself, for my new beautiful beginning, and I think about promises. The quiet bargains we make between ourselves and the invisible things we think hold the power to turn hope into change.
If you smile big, people will like you.
If you lose God, he’ll come find you.
If you take your medicine, it will make you better.
“Just hang on,” they say, my mom and Jack and the church and the hospital.
But what happens when you don’t have anything left to hold on to?
13 C. Diff Is Not a Rapper
I was six years old when the baby came to visit us. He had bright pink cheeks and fleshy, star-shaped hands and he reached for me every time I entered the room. I sat on the couch and his mom laid him on my chest, the flutter under my ribs against the beat of his busy little heart making the most perfect, awkward jazz. I lay with him until time got lost, while his parents talked to mine, trying to figure out why it all felt so sacred, why the weight of his body felt like the answer to a question I hadn’t come up with yet. I knew in that moment as he laughed at me for trying to find bones under his puffy, cloud-shaped thighs, as I drank in the sweet and sour of his skin, that I was meant to be a mother. Every single year from then on, I asked my mom for a baby for Christmas. As a child, I knew it was something that I would need to be whole as a woman.
At thirty-two years old, falling to pieces in the darkest dark, I still believe it.
* * *
It takes me a while to realize that our marriage is falling to pieces too. I can hardly see it withering as I wither alongside it. It happens slowly and I miss things. I miss the moment Jack starts touching me the way a doctor touches a patient, I miss the moment I stop aching for him when he’s away, I miss the page on which I begin to write him out of my story. After the brace is off and I finish my treatment, after we know what I am and what our life will be—chronic, everlasting pain—I go back to my bed and Jack goes back to work. His heaviness returns and I don’t even think to help him; passion dulls to fondness, fondness to friendliness, friendliness becomes duty. He checks out, and I let him go. The distance between us becomes so great and impassable that we’re just hazy dot people on each other’s horizon. I see his fuzzy dot waving at mine but I can’t tell if it means hello or goodbye.
We try working on it. We go to our therapist to fix the communication things. I buy an on-sale vibrator from the Hustler Hollywood store to fix the sex things. I throw him a birthday party and bake him a cake from a box, but it isn’t enough. How could it be? For years, when he was busy taking care of my pain, he had his own hurt, and with nobody to tend to it, it grew wild. He looks at me, at us, through a shadowy, pain-filled lens of his own. There’s only one thing I can think of that could close the gap.
We’ve both always wanted a family: pure, unspoiled, sustaining love that fed us both well growing up. We’ve never used protection. Every single month since we married at St. John’s, the gunmetal-gray church on Old Laurel Hill Road, I’ve secretly hoped I would get pregnant. It hasn’t happened yet and I don’t know why. I’ve gone to hundreds of baby showers, and at every single one, I’ve ached for my own bundle of helium-filled pink and blue balloons. All of Jack’s friends have kids. They play on little soccer teams with Day-Glo jerseys; they go on fishing trips; they get little toy drum kits and tap away together. I know that he’s ached for all of it, to be loved that way. A child, the biology of his parts and mine together, the science, is all we have left to give to each other.
One morning when the sky is just waking up in long strands of light, I think about the baby with the cloud thighs and I wake Jack, who’s snoring beside me, face pressed down into the pillow.
“Let’s have a baby. Let’s really try. Let’s be intentional.”
He blinks at me a few times and he agrees. We force a new chapter.
Baby-making sex is not a steamy, against-the-wall thing, it’s an unromantic, clinical, at-just-the-right-time thing. I learn about ovulation and periods and buy a plastic barrel of prenatal vitamins from Walgreens. I ask my doctors which medicines I’m allowed to take during pregnancy and I imagine decorating a nursery, which will be pretty but not dainty. We have official baby-making sex three times a month on the days that babies are supposed to like to be made the most, and afterward, I lie in bed with a pillow under my butt and my legs stuck up in the air.
“Do you think it worked?” Jack asks, leaning across the bed and looking at my belly. I laugh at him, we both laugh. It feels so good.
Often I think about what our baby will be like, long, lean body and little Tic Tac toes, bright blue eyes that will turn to mahogany just like her daddy’s, a mop of wet-looking dark hair that will fall out onto her crib sheet and give her silly bald patches. Having a thing we can yearn for together feels like stepping into a warm bath. I imagine the weight of her on my chest; I imagine her on Jack’s chest. I imagine all the ways she will heal me, heal us.
Every month for half a year, my period comes. The excitement of the trying wears off. We step out of the warm bath and all the little bits of hope have been sloughed off. The baby that was supposed to heal us begins to destroy us. I sit on the couch and cry as the cramps radiate around my middle like an inner tube, mingling with the pain, the awful burning that goes up and down my spine. Jack sits with me on the twenty-eighth day of each month and rubs the big red splotch on my back that the heating pad leaves behind. He brings me my water and cares for a brand-new affliction: infertility. Like always, he does the best that he can. He says the things he’s supposed to:
“It will happen when it’s meant to happen.”
“Don’t worry, the worrying isn’t good for you.”
“I love you. We could adopt.”
None of it helps me. The only one that can help is the baby.
Some days, I blame him. I get angry. I tell him he’s drinking too much, that he’s not trying as hard as I’m trying and it isn’t fair. He shuts down, shakes his head, and walks away from me. Our ocean grows a little deeper, a little wider, and our dots take a few steps inland. I start to blame my own body too. I look at it naked in the mirror. It’s a shitty, broken-down, malfunctioning machine with a tampon string hanging out and I just fucking hate it. I hate the way the light settles on it, I hate the hip bones that still stick out like a child’s, I hate it for all the ways it’s failed me. I decide to take it to a new mechanic.
Miss Carol is an ob-gyn in Baton Rouge. She delivered my brothers’ babies and she’s friends with my mom. She works in a giant women’s health complex where you can go to get liposuction or chemotherapy or a green smoothie. She’s called me “sugar” for as long as I can remember. Miss Carol wants to help us have a baby.