Widowish: A Memoir(13)

I could hear Sophie onstage telling a joke.

Joel should be seeing this.

I wiped the steady flow of tears streaming down my cheeks. “Sophie’s doing OK,” I told him. “Do you think it’s a virus?”

“They’ve taken a lot of tests for all of the California viruses. The rapid results came back negative, but sometimes that can change. They will keep testing him, but we are going to have to wait and see. The MRIs show nothing new. Could be the MS, his medication. Probably is a virus, though. Let him rest. Go be with your daughter.”

We hung up. There was no new information. Joel had been in the hospital for two weeks. By now, I knew that a healthy person could get a virus and not necessarily know it. It may seem like a mild flu or a cold. But to someone with a compromised immune system, like Joel, any of the viruses he was being tested for could be lethal. The doctors all believed, though, that because Joel was young and otherwise healthy, even if he did have a virus, he could recover, albeit slowly.

I went back into the auditorium. Sophie was center stage. There was applause and laughter. She was beaming.



Long before Joel was diagnosed with MS, we were dealing with another medical diagnosis: unexplained infertility. We had been trying to get pregnant since we moved to our second home near a coveted elementary school. Sophie was two and a half years old, and we wanted to fill our new house with more children and give her a sibling. We would vary between trying really hard for a baby, and at other times, just sort of trying. We both felt like we had time. I was in my midthirties, Joel was approaching forty, and other than us not getting pregnant, we were happy.

Joel was a partner in a music marketing company that he started with his friend Ben. His office was around the corner from our house. He would walk or ride his bike there every day and often come home for lunch so he could spend some time with Sophie. I had just wrapped my work as a writer and producer on Lizzie McGuire, a show that helped put Disney Channel on the map and gave meaning to the word tween. I was also doing some film writing work and pitching a movie. We were successful and busy. We both thought a baby would come when it was supposed to.

It didn’t help that friends who had started their families when Joel and I had Sophie were now pregnant with their second or even third child. Just like the curiosity that came when Joel and I first lived together (Think you’ll get married?) to questions about the wedding and beyond (When are you going to start a family?), now came the incessant and, in hindsight, insensitive questions about having more (When are you going to make Sophie a big sister?).

Sophie was at an age where she noticed that some of her friends had brand-new siblings at home or babies growing inside their mommy’s tummies.

“Why don’t they just get a dog?” she would say.

She was in no rush to become a big sister. And why would she be? Not only was she the center of our world, but she also had six doting grandparents. Two grandpas and four (four!) grandmas. She had an entire wing of the house to herself. As far as she was concerned, her sister was our dog, Lucy, her brother was our cat, Puddin’, and she seemed very content to be the sole recipient of all of our love and attention.

But every month, as hopeful as I may have felt that this time I might be pregnant, we were met with the fact that we weren’t. I would sometimes blame myself. I loved being a mom! But I also loved having a career. No matter how many times I drove through the gates of the Disney lot, I got a thrill. I loved being on set. I loved pitching ideas and, even more, when I sold them. I often thought of that feminist adage that has been attributed to everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Gloria Steinem to Madeleine Albright: “Women can have it all, but not all at the same time.”

After a few years of trying and not getting pregnant, we finally consulted a specialist. We each got tested to make sure everything was in working order, and apparently it was. This brought us no relief. In some ways, a diagnosis of any kind would have led to possible treatment or at least an explanation for why nothing was happening. But with nothing medically wrong, there was nothing to fix. We were at a loss.

“You probably want a boy!” I’d cry to Joel at night.

“Hun,” he’d say lovingly. “A healthy baby. A sibling for Sophie. More of us combined into one little creature. That’s what I want.”

“I want a boy,” I’d admit in a whisper. I had grown up in a house of women. While I was close with my dad, boys were always so foreign to me. I always wished for a brother myself, so I wanted one for Sophie.

“If we did have a boy,” Joel would say, “I’d want him to be left-handed.”

“Your mom and Andrea are lefties.”

“I know! Do you know how successful a great left-handed pitcher could be?” he’d say. “I’ll tie his right arm behind his back in case he’s a righty. If he could play ambidextrously, even better.”

It seemed there were babies around us at all times. It was hard for Joel and me to see pregnant friends—why wasn’t it happening for us? We tried to stay positive.

“Why are we stressing over having another?” Joel would ask as we’d watch Sophie draw . . . or play . . . or sneeze. “She’s perfect in every way. Maybe that’s why we can’t get knocked up. She broke the mold.”

One of my friends who had success getting pregnant recommended acupuncture, so I made an appointment. Needles were stuck all over my body while soothing candles flitted in the background. The sweet Chinese couple who ran the place would turn on a sound machine with relaxing ocean waves; the wife asked me about my diet.