Modest Goddess

Have had a busy couple of weeks trying to get pregnant. This has involved many trips back and forth to the Center for Human Reproduction, sitting in waiting rooms with other depressed women, and a big grocery sack full of drugs and syringes. The ovaries are really checking out. They’re mad at me. I haven’t loved and respected them the way I should and now they’re taking buyout packages and going to lie on Florida beaches with uteruses and testicles. The only good thing about all the driving is the chance to come up with metaphors. For example, those shaggy hawks I now see perched in trees and on streetlights over the Nothern State Parkway: They were gone, but now they’re back because we took care of the environment and banned DDT … so maybe that could happen to me, if I took better care of myself. But then I saw a flock of Canada geese fly overhead – and their natural cycles are totally screwed up, because they no longer migrate and all they do is live in our office parks and leave their grassy green poo all over the place.

If there’s a metaphor for infertility in that, I don’t want to know what it is.

Irony is never far away, though. As I lay on my back in the doctor’s office after an insemination today, I heard "Bolero" playing on the sound system – you know, the piece by Ravel that’s supposed to be all about sex, the slow, delicious workup and the payoff. Which for some people actually results in a baby. But as Big Big Man told me, after dropping off a sperm sample, "We SORT of had sex. It just involved a lot of driving."