I'll Be You(67)

Nothing worked, of course, and the compounding failures made me feel frail and useless, like a hollow egg missing that essential yolk. Chuck watched me from a distance, unable to relate to my mounting panic. I could feel his eagerness to grow our family waning, in opposition to mine. “I’m not sure all this stress is good for you.” “Is it so awful, just the two of us?” “A baby would get in the way of my CrossFit schedule anyway,” he’d joke, trying to cheer me up, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.

Of course, it turned out that the problem was something that pomegranate juice and massages could never fix, something buried deep in my genes. By the time I finally convinced Chuck that we needed to suck it up and do the IVF, we’d been trying for nearly four years. But in preparation for my first round of progesterone shots, I underwent a barrage of ultrasounds and blood tests that revealed what I wished I’d known on day one: My ovaries were incapable of generating viable eggs.

Four years I had spent single-mindedly pursuing a goal that I never had the slightest chance of meeting. The endgame—a baby of our own—had become the singular driving force of my life, and so the news of my infertility made me feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football away from him. A chump, a blindly trusting fool.

No wonder I was so angry when I finally found out: at my own faithless body, at Chuck for his lack of support, at my sister for being able to conceive when I could not. No wonder that when the dam broke that night in the den, and everything finally came flooding out, I found myself so deep underwater.

No wonder I was so primed for GenFem.



* * *



—

The important thing about GenFem isn’t how I got there the first time (it was a woman in my Pilates class, who noticed me weeping during stretches and suggested I visit her “women’s support group”), but that I joined. That Dr. Cindy noted my presence from my very first meeting, where I sat in the back with my Pilates friend, and singled me out. “Come up here, new girl, pretty girl, sad girl,” she said, gesturing me to the front of the room where she sat on a high stool like an eagle on a perch. “You look like you’re in need of a Confrontation.”

I didn’t know what a Confrontation was and didn’t much like the idea of going onstage in front of all those strangers (I had gratefully left all that behind when I was eighteen), but something about the way Dr. Cindy was looking at me made me feel like I had no choice in the matter. The pamphlet I’d been handed when I walked through the door said that Dr. Cindy Medina—but just Dr. Cindy to us!—was a world-renowned psychologist with ninety-seven international patents for behavioral therapy breakthroughs. She had a PhD plus a string of unrecognizable abbreviations after her name that made me feel stupid and uneducated.

In person, she exuded a friendly gravitas, an aura of success, that demanded you take her seriously. Nearly twice my age, she had finger-wide gray streaks in her black bob, neat wire-rimmed glasses, and a gold silk scarf knotted loosely at her neck. I will never figure out how to tie a scarf like that, I thought as I stood up. It looked both effortless and utterly intentional.

Did Dr. Cindy know who I was when she singled me out from the crowd? She pretended she didn’t, but looking back on it now, she must have known. Dr. Cindy always did her research.

In any case, on that first day, in just half an hour onstage, Dr. Cindy tore my whole life story out of me: from the day I was born eleven minutes after my twin sister to the night when I kicked that sister out of my house, telling her to “get out now and don’t come back.” The whole messy tale of Sam-and-Elli, and by the time I got to the end, I was in tears. The injury of it felt just as raw as it did in the moment—just two weeks earlier!—when I’d caught my sister drunk in the den, dressed as me, trying to get my husband to impregnate her.

I found myself publicly weeping at the unfairness of it all. That I couldn’t get pregnant, but Sam, my flighty twin? The one who didn’t even want a kid? She could.

I’d spent my life being the counterweight to Sam, I told Dr. Cindy in that first Confrontation. I was always trying to balance Sam’s chaos and destruction, making myself small next to her larger-than-life persona. Always being the hand she could use to steady herself when things got rocky. I’d told myself that I was being a positive role model, and that Sam was the one who had things wrong. And yet, as Dr. Cindy pried the story out of me, I began to realize that I’d just been a doormat, letting Sam step on me as she saw fit. I’d done everything “right”—reliable husband, beautiful home, creative job, lots of money, blah blah blah—and yet none of it made me happy because I’d been denied the one thing I wanted the most. A baby of my own.

I was angry, and I didn’t know what to do with my anger. I never had.

As I told my story, Dr. Cindy sat across from me on the small GenFem stage. Her eyes held my gaze so tight that I couldn’t look away; her breath was in perfect time with mine; her voice like a smooth pond upon which I could trustingly skate. She nodded at the end of each of my sentences, encouraging me, making me open myself wide.

In the audience, two dozen women watched the Confrontation, their damp eyes mirroring my tears, all of us as one in our common understanding that life isn’t fair.

“You’re right. Life isn’t fair,” Dr. Cindy said when I was finally done talking. “But so what? We can make it fair. We can grab life by the balls and force it to give us what we want the most. That anger you feel? It’s time to start using it. So now that you’ve put a name and face on your pain, I want you to look it right in the eye and tell it to go away. You’re going to choose not to be a victim.” When I shook my head, laughing a little, she repeated herself, suddenly impatient. “I mean it. Scream it. Be rude.”