pregnant after four years of infertility

It’s been 170 days since I wrote anything unless you count the note in my phone about the afternoon I felt our baby kick and then saw an owl in the tree the night before the moving truck arrived. Because we moved. Because I was infertile and am now pregnant. 27 weeks today. And all I keep thinking is that I am a writer who no longer writes.

It began in October, when I wrote about moon and midnight but not about how we woke with the sun and drove in silence to the fertility clinic for our frozen embryo transfer. I went to acupuncture twice that day, listened to a meditation while trying to manifest the child nestling into my womb. We ate fries and watched comedy. Even when I woke in the night soaked with sweat and panic, I refused to remove the purple socks with googly eyes that my niece sent me for “good luck.”

The baby kicks as I write this. Confirmation that I’m back where I belong. I imagine the movement is a response to my anxiety; she knows (yes, she) that if I don’t feel her elbows in my ribs then I will wake up from this dream and realize none of it was real. How could it be after four years of poking my body with needles and watching bruises blossom across my skin? Not even my therapist can help me put names to nameless emotions. Instead she asks what I feel in my body. Only kicks, I tell her. That’s all I ever want to feel again.

In the morning, I wake with my hand on my belly and drift towards a version of my life that I never thought was possible. She will be here in June, and so far, she has had six different names. We can’t decide. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. How untrue this feels of choosing a name for the daughter I feared I would never meet.

My instincts tell me she will be more grounded than me, less lofty. Uninhibited by thought and feeling. Of course, this is projection—she will be who she is even if I want her to be everything that I am not. My blood but not my pain. My dreams but not my anxieties. I often wonder what my mother felt and projected while pregnant with me.

Five days after our embryo transfer we went to a Hans Zimmer concert—a late birthday gift from my husband. It was then that I felt two truths in my body the way I used to feel God in church. The first: you are pregnant. The second: you are carrying a girl. Loire Cotler howled and it was the howl of women throughout all of time and space. The cry echoed in my bones but also in cells that were not mine. Have you ever cried without tears? I knew then that two feminine spirits existed in that auditorium seat. When the song ended, I noticed my hands were clasped across my womb.

I still doubted, of course. I peed on sticks like a mad woman, even when the second line consistently turned pink. Stop testing, my sister responded to my frantic texts. She was the only person other than my husband who knew in those first days. Pee sticks and text threads with my sister. That’s all I really remember.

So here are the updates: We are finally pregnant. After so many years of fighting, we are living in a moment that feels ordinary and peaceful. And yet that peace doesn’t erase the version of myself that had to exist in order to get here. I still cry for her. I still cry for those who haven’t reached this version of their story yet.

kaytichristian

A post shared by @kaytichristian

I’m in my own infancy with learning how to navigate the complexity of pregnancy after infertility and IVF. Maybe that's why I’m feeling the ache to write again. I’ve been putting off words and books to eat popsicles in front of the TV. Also to make weekly runs to ikea for baskets and curtain rods. Because this is the other big update: we moved in January. Our apartment walls were haunted by all they’d witnessed. I thought I could renew them in time for her arrival, but then the LA fires happened, and ash and smoke solidified its fate. I couldn’t imagine bringing her there. I couldn’t imagine doing all the necessary clean-up. Was it the start of a mother’s instinct? Impulse? Fear? Whatever it was, it led us to the water, to a small back house two miles from the beach with a side yard and windows we leave open. On weekends, we paint with colors named like manifestations: beach cottage, first snow, after the storm.

And so, after 170 days, I am learning to put words to the space that exists between what was and what will be. It is here that I can finally look at my open wounds and witness them turn to scars. They heal as I wake each morning to this new life by the water. They heal as I fall asleep to kicks from my growing daughter.

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Other updates:

• I had an essay published in Brevity earlier this year. You can read it here.

  

• My friend Amy and I have been so, so busy with the FriedEggs Podcast (we are now on season two and just had a social post hit 3M views!!). We recently added a substack newsletter component for anyone else going through infertility and/or IVF.

• I hope to get back to writing regularly on substack, though I feel this space is going to evolve in terms of both name and publication frequency during this new phase of life. For this reason, I’ve turned off/paused paid subs as I figure out what’s next.