When You Can't Have A Baby Like You Always Dreamed
How one couple
struggled to watch everyone but them become parents.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SIMONE BECCHETTI
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Not far from my home in rural North
Carolina, across the Haw River from an access shared with neighbors, bald
eagles have nested for at least a decade. When my husband and I bought our
house—a cabin on 5 steep wooded acres—with plans to start a family, the chance
to watch the eagles raising their young was one of the attractions that sold us
on the place. I grew up along the Mattaponi River, in Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay
watershed, and had memories of sighting bald eagles as a kid. In school,
Richard and I both learned about how the once-prolific raptors had dwindled in
number as a result of hunting, habitat destruction, and the pesticide DDT. How
lucky we felt to watch their comeback.
I imagined that one day soon,
Richard and I would walk with our children to see the eagles across the river.
I envisioned myself hoisting a toddler to my hip and pointing to the wide,
ragged shape of the nest, and I could almost feel a child’s legs wrapped
around my waist, a little hand holding my shoulder for balance. The river
turned out to be a great place to observe the rituals of all kinds of
family life—ducklings dutifully following their mothers, spotted fawns sidling
up to watchful does.
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I
could almost feel a little hand holding my shoulder for balance
My own family story went
differently than I expected. Month after month, we waited for the good news of
pregnancy. Then the months turned into years. We finally saw a reproductive
endocrinologist and learned that we were unlikely to conceive without
medical help. We tried oral medication, then intrauterine insemination, before
our doctor recommended in vitro fertilization, an expensive process with no
guarantee of success. We investigated adoption and discovered it was
similarly expensive and uncertain, and our cabin—a one-bedroom “hippie house”
(that’s the actual label, listed on the plat)—was unlikely to impress a social
worker.
I had never imagined my life
without motherhood, and I was devastated. Seeing families with children left me
paralyzed with longing. In the children’s section of a bookstore, I fell apart
in front of a Frog and Toaddisplay. These were books my mother read
to me, books I’d imagined reading to my own children. I avoided holiday
gatherings. I grew distant from friends and family.
In spite of the apparent rebuke of
the fertile natural world, I still found solace in walks to the river. I’d
crane my neck and squint through binoculars, trying to peer inside the great
nest at the gray-fuzzed eagle chicks and their serenely guarding parents.
Though the nest signaled absence for me—another reminder of what I wanted but
did not have—it was also becoming a powerful force in my imagination, a kind of
talisman of endurance and recovery. Life along the river felt so different than
the one I feared was gradually consuming me, a highly mediated dance of
appointments, tests, and worries. Doctors and nurses, boxes of injectable
medication, a sterile room in a suburban clinic: This was not the way I’d
imagined starting my family. And yet it was in many ways the most direct path
to a family. We decided that it was the best choice for us.
The summer before I began
treatment, a severe storm tore through the woods near my home.
Afterwards, I jogged to the river and was dismayed to see that the eagles’
tree, a tall pine, was gone, toppled along with the nest, which by then must
have weighed hundreds if not thousands of pounds. On walks by the river after
that, I gazed at the spot where the pine once stood and thought about my own
nest, full of books and music, and hope.
We confirmed my pregnancy on a warm
spring morning and celebrated with a walk to the river, where we spotted one of
the eagles in flight—a good sign, we thought. I had a healthy pregnancy and
gave birth to a strong, 7-pound baby girl. Beatrice was beautiful, with round
cheeks and pursed pink lips, a fast grip, an appraising gaze. We were smitten.
A few days after we brought her
home, our heater broke, and while it was being repaired we took Beatrice to a
hotel in town. We met friends at a nearby restaurant with an outdoor patio; I
tucked Bea into a wrap that held her, warm and sleeping, against my chest. A
friend took a photograph, and I was struck when she sent it to me later by how
happy I looked, how in love.
The past two years have been a
joyful whirlwind. I often wake before Beatrice, and even though I depend on
those uninterrupted minutes to write, I’m never sorry to hear her yelling,
“Mama! I’m awake!” I bound up the stairs to lift her, smiling, from her crib.
She is an avid mushroom hunter (we taught her early to look, not touch), says
hello to every animal she meets (even spiders), and requests her own
beloved Frog and Toadstories. She has started to make up little
songs; my favorite, which I often hear her singing softly to herself, goes, “I
know Mama...I know Dada.”
My daughter is kind and gentle,
funny and smart: I feel so lucky to know her and to be known by her. One
of the projects I’ve worked hardest on since she was born is a book about
the emotional, cultural, and financial barriers faced by infertile people. As
part of my research, I interviewed women and men who built their families
through adoption or foster care or assisted reproduction, and some who chose to
live child-free. Though it was important to me to be up-front with my
readers that I eventually had a baby through IVF, I don’t write much
about Beatrice in those pages. Writing about her in some ways felt dangerous;
it also felt impossible. I didn’t think I could capture, in a few paragraphs or
chapters, the utterly absorbing, transformative love that belongs to mothers.
And I didn’t want to, in case reading about that love caused pain for someone
who yearned for motherhood but had not experienced it.
My
daughter is kind and smart: I feel so lucky to know her and to be known by her
The same winter that I became
pregnant, the eagles built a new nest near the top of a huge, stout pine. It
now faces away from the river, so it’s no longer possible to see the eaglets as
they jostle for the best feeding position. I miss being able to watch them, but
I also understand something I only guessed at before I had my daughter. In all
my years of longing for a child and daydreaming about my life as a mother, I
never came close to understanding what it would be like. In some ways, I expect
this mystery is protective—how could I have coped if I’d known? How could
I have waited? No matter how long I stare at the nest, the life inside
will remain unknown to me. Still, I tilt my head back and crane my neck to
look—who can resist? My daughter, who will turn 3 this year, has started
looking too.
