tomorrow

the day we've waited for

Photo by eduard on Unsplash

Tomorrow is the day I’ve been waiting for since summer. Tomorrow I will fall asleep while a reproductive endocrinologist inserts a needle into my ovaries to retrieve (hopefully) 19 eggs. Tomorrow our baby who is not yet a baby will enter the world as tiny cells, becoming an embryo and then a frozen life awaiting to be transferred back into my body. He or she will grow lungs, limbs, a heart, tiny ears and—my wish—soft blue eyes like my husband’s. Or so we hope.

It feels important to mark this moment in time—for me, for my family, for the future and all its possibilities. We are desperate for a win after three years. (God, how has it already been three years?) So many times, the grief has threatened ruin and darkness, the kind that entraps every edge of your soul. I’ve been pulled in and spit out and forced to reckon with my body, with my mind, with questions that I never imagined myself asking. We aren’t taught how to make sense of the unsensible. Instead, we learn to pray until our knees turn blue and our throats go hoarse, until the silence slices through and breaks our pain into millions of tiny pieces—pieces too small to bury but evident enough to carry for however much longer our lungs will last.

Oscillation has made me dizzy, exhausted. I’ve been ripped between the desire to be a mother and the desperation to be the woman I used to be—carefree, hopeful, most concerned with becoming a writer. This plight has marked my every breath. I haven’t learned how to be both versions of myself yet. Even in my yearning, I haven’t unlearned the self-imposed (and society-reinforced) shame of a woman desiring both motherhood and independence.

I miss the before. I miss living in London. I miss having a cigarette outside the pub. I miss living without anxiety. I miss feeling wild and independent and like I could spend eternity on my education and career and then have a baby if and when we decided. I miss being naive and not knowing about these years I’m living now. She is still here in various fragments and memories, but it’s getting harder to recognize her voice, her reflection. Not until I sink into bed and find my journal where a faded Polaroid photo bookmarks my place do I remember that I can be both. That I can mother myself and my future baby at the same time.

These are the questions that haunt me: Where do any of us fit into the storyline of our lives? Do I get my happy ending, whatever that means? Why do some of us get to live long and fulfilling lives while others don’t? How are we to make sense of small suffering amidst greater, more violent suffering? Can I celebrate my own breath while also mourning the end of another’s?

Tomorrow we will wait our turn in a building filled with ghosts, where stories have been written on the walls and spilled onto the tile floors; though scrubbed with bleach, the scent of what is, what was, and what may be lingers. It’s the fragrance of tomorrow, one of life beginning and one of life ending, one of life that was “almost,” one of life that was never meant to exist.

I will be thinking about that as they put me under, as they pierce my body, as they borrow potential life from my womb and use science to create something beautiful, to create a potential life.

Tomorrow is the day we’ve been waiting for.

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