Josh and Gemma Make a Baby(30)

Regardless, maybe it’s time to go. I set my wine glass on the empty chair next to me and stand. “It was nice meeting you all, but I think I’ll be going. I, um, have somewhere to be.” I smile at them.

Carly tsks. “Brook, shame, you scared her off. I told you after the last one to stop doing that.”

Last one? Have others left after the first meeting too?

“Don’t go,” Hannah says. “Really. Please don’t. You have great, positive energy. Your aura is a nice canary yellow—”

“Not helping, Hannah. She’s freaked out by us,” Brook says.

“That’s not it,” I say. “I just realized that I don’t actually need a support group. I’ll be done with this whole process in a month and that’s that. Easy peasy. It’s better if I don’t waste your time, or wine.” I’m rambling, as usual. I start walking toward the door.

Brook blows out a long breath. “Stay. Please.”

I stop and look at her. Instead of the cynical expression that she’s worn since I met her she has a different look on her face. Embarrassment, maybe?

“Well…I…” I pause in the middle of the room.

Carly clears her throat. “We aren’t bad once you get to know us. The problem is, we’ve all been doing this for a long time. I’m on cycle number seven.”

I stare at her and try to compute what that means. She’s gone through seven IVF cycles? Jeez.

Brook holds up her hand. “Number four.”

Hannah says, “I’m on two.”

I don’t know what to say. When I said that I’d be finished with IVF in a month, I meant it. I didn’t think that it might take seven tries. Or more.

“It’s nice to have friends going through it with you, whether you get pregnant on your first cycle or not. You should stay,” Carly says.

“You should,” Hannah says. “If you do, I’ll bring you some of my husband’s honey. He’s a beekeeper. And Carly gives really nice presents. Last Christmas she gave us Cartier tennis bracelets. And Brook, well, she’s not always this annoying, so there’s that.”

Brook snorts.

I look at them all, at the rusty folding chairs, at the uterus-pink room. Then I walk back to my chair and sit down. “Okay. Sure. I mean, every journey is made easier with someone to share the load.”

Brook laughs again and rolls her eyes. “Glad you’re staying, but honestly, what’s with the quotes?”





An hour later the wine and the pomegranate juice are gone and I’m glad that I stayed. I got a rundown of all the fertility acronyms I need to know—CB is a cycle buddy, DI is donor husband aka Josh, then there’s others like 2WW or two-week wait, BD which is baby dance (aka sex), and gross ones like CM for cervical mucus, or EWCM for egg white cervical mucus. Hannah literally pulled a stapled document out of her bag with all the acronyms on it.

“So my PGT results are garbage. Only one embryo is normal, maybe,” Brook says. She’s been talking about her week. Which sounds like the week from hell. When she described her job as a public defender as “just like living in Dante’s Inferno,” I asked her why she did it. She just looked at me and said, “I’m the best shot they have. If I don’t help them, who will?”

“What do you mean the embryo is normal, maybe?” I ask.

“PGT is a genetic test. All the embryos were no-gos except one, which was mosaic. Basically, in laymen’s terms, that means ‘maybe it’s normal, maybe it’s not.’ Which as a lawyer, I find really offensive.”

“I’m not doing PGT,” says Hannah. She shrugs at me. “Call me old-fashioned.”

“Or an Earth Mother,” Brook says. She waves the thought aside. “Anyway. I’m stressed. Worried. And slammed at work.” She looks at us all. “Damn, I want a cigarette. Ugh, I hate that I want a cigarette. I’m going to quit. Starting now.”

“Try hypnotism, I heard that helps,” Hannah says.

“Will you do the transfer?” Carly asks.

“I don’t know, we might try another retrieval first,” Brook says. Then she blows out a long breath and rubs her hands through her bright copper hair. “You know, why can’t my husband have had superman sperm? I told him all that biking would crush his nads and kill his sperm. But did he listen? No. And all those hours in the hot tub. It fried them. And who wears tighty-whities? They should call them the sperminators, cause that’s what they do, they eliminate sperm. I swear, it’s hopeless. If I had neon lights pointing to my eggs his little buggers would swim the other way. Enough about me, let’s talk about you.”

Everyone turns and looks at me.

“Me?” I ask in surprise.

“Sharing is caring,” Brook says.

Carly crosses her legs and then says, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

I shake my head. “No. That’s alright. I’m…I have stage four endo, tubal factor, and I’m single, so I’m using a donor.” I look at the understanding expressions on the faces of the women around me and decide that I don’t need to hold back, “I’ve been waiting years for Mr. Right to help me make a family, and on New Year’s I decided Mr. Right isn’t coming and I’m done waiting, I’m moving on. I want a baby, a family. So here I am.” I hold out my hands, encompassing me, sitting in the basement of Clive’s Comics at the fertility support group.