Loving the Unknown

fertility — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Sakeenah El-Amin

Thirteen years ago, I gave away my eggs.

I sat at the table nervously clutching my purse, hoping I didn’t have lipstick on my teeth. And then I saw them. A handsome couple in their mid-forties. The husband, with strands of silver in his hair. Her, in a perfectly pressed blue blouse and manicured nails. Normal, I thought. But nothing is really normal about meeting the soon-to-be-parents of your egg.

They walked over to the table clasping hands—I stumbled a bit as I stood up. We hugged. She reached up, tucked a strand of loose her hair behind her ear, and sat down.

The next two hours turned into a peculiar exchange: a tender disclosure of precious information reserved usually for the most intimate of relationships. I learned that they had met later in life after two failed marriages. Soulmates, they called each other. And I believed them by the furtive glances they exchanged and the ease in which they unfolded their story. After years of searching for the right person, they were devastated to learn that they could not conceive a child together—a tangible expression of their love and commitment. They had tried for three years. There was nothing left.

And there I was, sitting across from them, fresh-faced from college, fertile, and in need of some cash. Making ends meet outside the gates of the ivory tower was not an intellectual exercise. I was sleeping on a bunk bed and barely earning minimum wage working a full-time job. My dream of going to law school was quickly slipping away. I wandered into the egg donation world on a whim—never expecting to meet two souls to whom I would connect so intensely.

The waitress leaned over and sat down a plate of pasta in front of me. I grinned at the thought of free food. I rattled off my personal stats: above average height, 3.43 GPA, Ivy-League degree, excellent health, no injures or prior hospitalizations, and a clean psychological evaluation. I was acutely aware that I was everything they wanted—not by anything I had done, but by sheer circumstance. I slid my baby photos across the table and saw his eyes linger on one. He picked it up and glanced over at his wife. “She looks like you did as a child,” he smiled.

They offered to give me time to think about my decision as they walked me to my car. But there was nothing for me that think about. This wasn’t some mediocre date spent listening to a man-child trying to impress me with his entry-level tech job. I wanted to be part of them in some way. My desire, perhaps, came from the little girl in me that yearned to have been born in such a stable and loving home.

“You can have my eggs, ” I said.

The wife, who had sat with her mouth pursed during our time, came close to me. Tears streamed down her face. “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear. I hugged them both, got into my Hyundai, and we went our separate ways.

I embarked on the egg preparation and retrieval process with the doggedness usually reserved for finding a closet to turn into a bedroom in NYC. I wasn’t giving my eggs to a faceless void —but to a couple who were in love—and my egg would be loved.

I have to be honest: The egg donation process isn’t for the faint of heart. I injected myself daily with hormones, visited the doctor twice a week to have a giant alien dildo shoved into me. I was poked, prodded, and stuck by nurses who often missed my veins and drew air. But after three weeks, I was ready and brimming with fresh follicles. I was so proud of my ovaries.

I enlisted my mother to care for me on the day of retrieval. “You’re selling my first grandchild,” she joked. But I felt no attachment to my eggs. I had spent twenty-three years trying not to get pregnant. Twenty-three years guarding my vagina like the United States Mint. Twenty-three years trying not to become a teenage mother like she had been.

I forced myself into the thin blue paper gown, shuffled onto the table, and opened my legs. The procedure was over before it even began. When I woke and dressed, the nurse handed me a gift bag. Inside was a hand written note from the couple, a lavender-scented Bath and Body gift set, and a check for $7,000. I read the note and cried.

You always wish that you had paid more attention to the list of “201 things that could go wrong” when of course, shit goes wrong. A week after the retrieval, I woke with a swollen stomach and could barely breathe. “Oh no, they got the wrong one pregnant!” I laughed.

I wasn’t pregnant, but I did have number three on the “201 things that could go wrong list” list: Ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome. An excess of hormone had flooded my system, causing my abdominal cavity to swell. Luckily, it resolved on its own with rest and lots of fluids. And even though it was scary and uncomfortable, I did not regret my decision.

I went to law school with the money they gave me. Our contract stipulated no contact after the egg retrieval, and I never heard from them again.

Time has passed with fierceness. After a career change and with the feeling of my own mortality creeping in the back room, I think back to our brief interlude. I am thirty-five years old now and childfree. My once fertile, blushing and bouncing eggs are committing suicide, jumping off the shelf one by one. Apoptosis they call it—spontaneous cell death. I guess I should be in a panic about the cliff-like decline in my fertility, but I am not. I do have a sudden aversion to omelets, though.

At twenty-three, I didn’t realize that my life would involve no children of my own. I naturally thought that I would marry, have 2.5 gluten-free kids, a modern husband, and live in an overpriced commuter condominium. But that’s not my reality. I’ve had a colorful and interesting life, stockpiling degrees like weapons, moving across the country, falling in and out love, and coming closer to my dream job. I’ve lived big and without restraint on purpose.

Dinner with most of my high school and college friends usually involves booster seats and sliced finger foods. “Don’t you want to experience unconditional love?” they chide. “Life is so much more meaningful with kids.”

I smile, each time, politely. (And then I want to hurl a chicken nugget across the table.) I appreciate their concern for my well-being and happiness. However, they know, and I know, that there are privileges I have as a child-free adult that they don’t. It’s an even trade.

I was never prepared to give birth to a child. My life was always coming together and falling apart in sweeping change. And for this very reason, I am eternally thankful for the opportunity I’ve had to play a part in bringing life into this world without possessing it. I could have never realized how meaningful the decision I made thirteen years ago would become. How three strangers with different needs could come together for a brief moment, change the course of each others’ lives, and never meet again.

I’ve read the note they left for me from time to time. And now, more than ever, after the passing of my mother. Sometimes I think about my egg, now a pre-teenager, and I wonder what (s)he has become. I wonder if (s)he is living their life with the certainty that (s)he can be their truest self and be accepted. I wonder if (s)he feels expansive. I wonder if (s)he is good and kind. I wonder if (s)he is as thankful his or her life as I am for it now.

•••

SAKEENAH EL-AMIN is a passionate social justice advocate. She manages a law education program for young adults in the juvenile justice system and is in the process of starting a progressive, social-justice oriented school for low-income girls of color. This is her first published piece.

The Cupcake Man

girl on bed — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Kate Banigan-White

The Cupcake Man was, at first, innocuous. He was part of an activity my daughter Charlotte devised with two girls—children of dear friends. For several years we had been spending time together as families: dinners at each others’ homes, throwing birthday parties, working on political campaigns, and eventually vacationing together. We camped on Cape Cod one summer and then took a holiday to Washington, D.C., over spring break. We stayed in a large glass hotel in adjoining rooms, taking the Metro into the city each day. It was then, I would later learn, during some interlude between Washington Monument and Smithsonian Museum touring, that the Cupcake Man was invented. It would take the aftermath of tragedy for me to understand this.

Many parents know that children can be captivated by something borne by a group of kids, but for one child, it can take hold and take longer to let go. It’s a benign experience, this, but it can make you cringe: soon your daughter may see that she has held onto the Cupcake Man longer than the others. She might face the hurt that she is now alone with her love for this character, this game.

One recent night, I told Charlotte that we’d be having dinner with her friends Lisa and Ellie, and she lit up, collecting materials for the Cupcake Man’s fiftieth birthday party celebration. She said that it was an event the three girls had been planning for late January. Today it was January 24: perfect! She found the bags of balloons that we had purchased weeks ago, plus other signs and stories they had written during recent dinner get-togethers. She even cried when she thought she had lost the illustrated story, one I could picture but had never really read. We found it, and still I hoped that the other girls were as into this as Charlotte.

We kept our same basic dinner routine that we’ve had for years: the girls ate together in the kitchen at the high table, chattering and devising an activity culminating in a show. The grown-ups sat in the living room, eating vegetarian pasta out of plates on our laps, splitting a bottle of red wine. We could now talk, unencumbered by children’s ears. We knew we’d ultimately be thrust in the middle of the Cupcake Man’s fiftieth birthday party celebration, but we’d stave that off as long as possible. I felt mild relief at the buzzing in the other room, with Ellie stringing up streamers and Lisa creating makeshift cupcakes out of buttercrunch ice cream globs, graham cracker crumbs, and candy bits. Charlotte was not alone in this. Whew.

•••

Six months before the Cupcake Man’s fiftieth birthday party celebration, my husband Dave—Charlotte’s father—died suddenly one summer morning at home after having an acute cerebral aneurysm. Only moments earlier, he was peeling plums and toasting bagels with Charlotte at the kitchen table. We had just returned from a vacation in Maine and were gearing up for a day of settling back in. Before taking our dog out for a walk and picking up the Sunday Times, I reached over Dave’s shoulder and took two casual bites out of his bagel slathered with cream cheese. I failed to kiss him then or say goodbye.

I returned from my walk and began playing a game of pretend with Charlotte as I had promised. Nothing seemed amiss and Dave was apparently upstairs. When he did not appear downstairs after a period of time, I checked on him, gasping at what I saw: my once vibrant husband, whose profile I had admired on a mountain just days before, was lying on our bathroom floor.

“Something’s wrong with Daddy,” I said to Charlotte as I raced to the phone. “I have to call 9-1-1.” As the police, paramedics, and fire truck arrived moments later, the only clear-headed thought I had was that now permanent memories were being formed in my eight-year-old daughter’s heart. I had to protect her. “I’m very worried,” I said, my voice shaking. “This is very serious. But we are going to be okay.”

•••

This is the charge, after all, of a parent who now presides over her grieving child: to make it okay. To let your child be a child amid a tragedy, knowing that her mourning will be the mourning of little girl and not the grown-up sorrow that is accompanied by planning a funeral, re-negotiating work schedules, selling the car, applying for survivors’ benefits, and arranging a make-shift child care and dog walking schedule. My grief is consciously ebbing or flowing as I find a way to have a decent supper preceded by saying grace, draw a warm bath, and tuck Charlotte into bed at night, now without my mate, her father.

In the early weeks in particular, just a day or two after Dave’s death, Charlotte needed to play, and play hard. Quickly, she surveyed the sudden influx of weeping visitors armed with flowers and food and books on grieving children, and she was having none of it. She was grateful to be scooped up by friends and family to go swimming, visit an art studio, and run around in various backyards. Meanwhile, I stumbled through the fog of the constant doorbell, the hugs, and the tears, alternately collapsing alone in the heat of summer on my bed, fan spinning above me. Each of us, then, did what we had to do.

During our funeral for Dave, Charlotte bent down her head and drew pictures on a clipboard of paper while I sat rapt, clinging to every person, word, psalm, and hymn. All throughout the reception, she ran around with her friends and cousins, making up games. I was front and center in a receiving line of grievers, embracing hundreds who endured the awkward wait to search for the right words, the gentle touch. I needed to be there, and Charlotte needed to be elsewhere. She seems to have such fond memories of this that she has asked me several times when her cousins can return to finish the game they played in the church basement. That was so much fun.

•••

I know that most grievers think that their lost one is special, that he or she possessed qualities that will be unsurpassed by any other living being. For Charlotte and me, this is beyond truth, the very reason we miss this man. He was the great creator of stories, mostly as a way of transitioning to the next fine thing. When Charlotte was a toddler, Dave would wake her up to “cat stories.” They would sit on her bed for long stretches, and he would tell an ongoing tale of the many stuffed kittens Charlotte had collected. Meanwhile, I was downstairs grinding coffee beans and scrambling eggs, so that the three of us could sit at the kitchen table for a cozy breakfast.

Dave was the inventor of games at all of Charlotte’s birthday parties, gathering the kids around the playroom floor, introducing musical hula-hoops, pin the whiskers on the kitty, What’s Different, and scavenger hunts. He also took Charlotte sledding on a huge hill near a local college. As they flew down the slope and marched back up its snowy paths, Dave made up a story. There would be a narrative flowing and this would guide their journeys as they made the arduous walk uphill. All this for the glory of the flight to the bottom. Whheeee!

•••

Charlotte’s way of mourning is mysterious to me. It’s evident in her anxiety at night, when she asks me to feel her heart and mine, making sure they are beating well, and when she staggers into my room, asking me if I am alive. In the early weeks, it poured forth in the deep dark of night when she would all of a sudden let out a wail like I’ve never heard before. Mostly though, it’s tucked away someplace, in her foul mood on a Saturday morning or in her defiance over small things: brushing her hair, locating her socks, completing her nightly homework.

The Cupcake Man’s fiftieth birthday party celebration might possess clues into Charlotte’s broken heart, and also, perhaps, her path through the loss of the man who invented him. The night we had supper at our friends’ house, the swirl of activity over the character picking up speed, my friend Jill said, “I think this whole Cupcake Man thing is intense.”

This is when I first realized that this game had special significance. My initial instinct was shame at the exposed neediness, my daughter’s sorrow as well as mine. Jill said that her daughters played the game now because they thought Charlotte wanted to, but they didn’t mind. She reminded me of its origin: it happened during some transitional period along the Washington Mall, where we had been the spring before. Maybe it was when we were waiting for the double-decker bus tour—though my memory then is of Dave organizing an impromtu soccer game with the three girls on an open green space. It was sunny and warm, and he had, somehow, carried with him a soccer ball, just waiting for time between activities.

Perhaps the tale was told just before we entered the cool marble space and gazed up at Abraham Lincoln on his throne. I had barely noticed it because my beloved was always inventing stories during down time. I adored that he did this, but paid precious little attention to the details.

At first, I thought it was odd, too. I suddenly fancied this ongoing game as a problematic expression of grief, a resistance to letting go of something and someone forever gone. Now this once-benign character took on an ominous tone, like a creepy clown. As we, the grown-ups, one of whom was now missing, reluctantly filed into the kitchen filled with streamers and balloons, eating the ice cream globs and singing Happy Birthday to the Cupcake Man, I thought I would die of sadness, right then and there. I cried silently to myself as Charlotte and I drove home in the dark. She, on the other hand, chattered happily in the back seat. She had had such a good time.

At bedtime, after Charlotte had me feel her heart and mine, making sure, once again, that they were beating well, she told me that she loved the Cupcake Man. “Why?” I asked. “Because he’s fun,” she said. “Because he’s all about celebration, and that’s fun.” I kissed her goodnight, and went into the bathroom to brush my teeth. Standing at the counter, I lifted a paper there, one that had been evident for weeks and weeks. I had seen it, but never read it. The paper included the by-lines and introduction to the Cupcake Man. It was written in Charlotte’s tell-tale perfect penmanship with sprinkles of misspellings. It read:

Cup Cake Man

By: Charlotte lisa Ellie

And help with Jill Sam and kate

An arigenle started

by Dave

Cup cakes all over the world have been sold Vanila too, Chocolate

too blue red purple

and orange and yello

and green and brown

and White

But, the Cup Cake Man — Yea, Yay.

He was a good, good man.

I can see him now: dancing around a fountain with the kids, near lunchtime, when we are idle. Abraham Lincoln presides over us at the end of the mall, on his throne, and words inscribed in his shrine tell us a story. Nearby, there is a place filled with soldiers’ names etched into a low-lying wall—each has a narrative all of his or her own. People file through to read the names and pay respect to the unspoken histories.

Meanwhile, Dave’s forty-three-year-old self is smiling, his graying hair is sparkling, his imagination brimming over. I could have been anywhere, really, which may account for my dim recollection of the Cupcake Man’s creation: stealing away for a solitary look again at Julia Child’s kitchen, the Greensboro lunch counter, or the sculptures of Louise Bourgouis. Maybe I was seeking stocking-stuffing treasures in some museum store, while my mate distracted our daughter. Most likely, I was right there, watching the whole character unfold and without seeing the specifics; I simply saw Dave, Charlotte’s father, leaping around the gleaming water. All I felt was unfettered joy. Maybe.

For my child, grieving over the inventor of such a sweet presence, I wish for her an ongoing celebration, without the burden of it being strange. Cupcakes all over the world. Monuments, history. He was, indeed, a good, good man.

•••

KATE BANIGAN-WHITE is a clinical social worker living in western Massachusetts with her family. She grew up in Louisville, KY. She has had essays published in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Hampshire Life, Patchwork Farm Journal, and the anthology Not What I Expected, published by Perugia Press.

No Cars on the Road

boy on floor — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Nicole Matos

My three-year old son and I are on the floor. Bless his occupational therapist, but her daily home-based tasks are killing us. I place blocks in a line and run a car over this road. “No!” Alex charges between me and the blocks and tries to rip the cars from my hands. “No! You don’t! I tell you!”

“Well, you can play your way”—I point to his pile of blocks—“But I will play this way. We can play differently.”

You and I are different, we are different people. His therapist (the “feelings” one, not Speech or OT) pushes me to say this, after I have explained the hairdryer battles, the sign-he-saw-that-I-didn’t-see, his new insistence that I have a penis, although he was fine before with me and my vagina for babies to be born out of. Babies like Alex? Did it hurt? Did we do it in a hospital?

But now his fears and his tantrums have settled around the truth that he and I do not always match. Over and over he tells me that I have a penis—I TOLD YOU, I TOLD YOU, as if his insisting on it will make it so. When I try, “We are different,” he goes crazy: “No! Not different! Not different! No! Please!” I reassure him that I love him, nothing is changing, we are already different, we are, after all—a bizarre sort of Platonic evidence I pull out of my ass—not always in the same place at the same time.

But the cars: “Alex will accept adult variations in his play.” He seems to know that this is an object lesson, a battle of reality paradigms, a showdown. “No! No! I’m so mad at you! I want to poke you in the eye [and does], I want to hit you [and does]!” And I hate my whole life. I hate every imaginary parent who has ever played cars with their imaginary child. I hate all my other imaginary children: those twenty eggs I saw on the ultrasound that month he was conceived. Nineteen other possible Alexes, but none of them here to help us, now.

Why? Why? Why no cars allowed on the road? And yet, the next day—“I want to play cars, Mommy”—he lines up the blocks, runs the car over the top, and eyes me carefully. “This car needs to wait his turn. Uh-oh! We can solve the problem! Look, relax and solve the problem!” Trying again. Showing me. So, what can we do to get second-day Alex on the first day? How do we beat down first-day Alex so second-day Alex can live, live, live?

If I had another child in my house, a child that picked up the car and ran it on the road, easily, heedless, I would backhand that child. I would sink my teeth into his shoulder and suck.

I tell my husband that, in my secret evil angry head, I call the therapy programs that are saving our lives—saving our son, by line items and inches—the Ghetto Where What You Wished Wouldn’t Happen Happened. That when I see the words “Special Needs” (especially if they are surrounded by rainbows or smiley faces), I think they should be renamed “Outrageous Needs.” That is how I think of Alex’s needs, on those days when he is just a bleat of screeching irrational anxiety—“Give me my blanket! No blanket! Take off my sock! No sock! [Hits me.] Mommy, I’m sorry! Mommy don’t go!” Outrageous needs!

And, I tell my husband, I am scared I have a worn spot in my mothering now that just won’t go away—a worn out, sagging, trampoline spot that other parents have time to patch up because it isn’t so often used, so outrageously. And it is holding—it has to hold, I have to make it hold. But what if it breaks? What if my love somehow leaks out?

The next day there is third-day Alex—not struggling, not overcompensating for having struggled, but just himself, total, complete. We have a great time at the park. We ride the swings and the slide and play pretend in the way that feels safest to him, in exaggerated fake voices, with the reminding anchor, “This is just pretend” sprinkled throughout. An old woman gives him a huge lollipop, spontaneously, and I let him take it, not thinking how close it is to Speech.

I spend the ride setting it up: “We will need to say goodbye to the lollipop, for Speech, but I promise it will be in the car when you get back.” And he does it voluntarily, giving it up, even waving the lollipop bye bye. But then he can’t hold it together. He lies down on the sidewalk, telling me with his body, I am overcome. He doesn’t want me to hold him, but I say I love him, touch his hand, and we count to ten and to ten again, calming.

After Speech, his therapist says, “He actually did great today—he used a big word, ‘promised’!” We look at each other, my son and I, co-conspirators.

Back at the car, the lollipop is waiting, and I grind it in for next time, the prophecy I’m determined, through all my human resentment and selfishness, to make true. “If Mommy promises, I will only promise when it is true. I will only promise if I am certain.”

And he says, sincerely, “Thank you mommy Alex promise.”

•••

NICOLE MATOS is a Chicago-based writer, professor, roller derby girl, and special needs mom. Her work has appeared in such publications as Salon, The Classical, The Rumpus, theNewerYork, The Atticus Review, Monkeybicycle, THE2NDHAND txt, berfrois, Chicago Literati, and many others. Follow her on Twitter at @nicole_matos2.