First published on Coffee + Crumbs: Nesting.
I refused to say that I was infertile. It felt like a permanence, that I was admitting I was entirely incapable of fertility, of motherhood; I preferred to say instead that I was struggling with fertility—as if I were en route, but just hadn’t arrived at that fertile destination yet.
After three years of trying and failing to get pregnant, ranging from a casual mindset of “I’ll just stop taking birth control and see when it happens” to months of unsuccessful IVF treatments and procedures, I decided that perhaps stress might be contributing to my struggle. I had spent over a decade working my way up from an entry-level HR role to Head of HR, and finally COO. Earlier that year, the global organization that had recently acquired our division had announced that hundreds of layoffs were forthcoming. In response, I penned an essay entitled “Why I Stay” that became widely shared amongst my teams. I was fully committed to the work, to the people. But I was desperate to have a baby. I was in my late thirties and with every month that ticked by, I began to believe that I could feel my remaining eggs dying inside of me. In July of that year, I gave my boss the shocking news that I was going to resign and worked out a lengthy transition plan for my teams. I had a new personal plan: I would remove the stress, and then I would get pregnant. It had to work.
On December 1, just a few weeks shy of the glorious stress-free “funemployment” I had envisioned, my husband and I went to our fertility doctor’s office. The room was devoid of art; instead, to the right of the doctor’s desk was a mounted banner boasting the fertility center’s statistics: More than 96% of patients would recommend our clinic. Every 2 hours a baby is born to one of our patients. I suppose the stats were intended to inspire hope, but to me they were a reminder of my failures and the shame of being unable to conceive a baby of my own, on my own.
As we settled into our chairs, I pulled out the list of questions my husband and I had made together. We were both rather intimidated by the doctor and the process, and we found that we would freeze up when we met with him, so we prepared in advance this time. Before I could jump in, the doctor said he had some unfortunate news to share.
“Oh, we know,” I said, “the nurse called us yesterday and let us know that none of the embryos developed. That’s why we made this appointment, we want to talk about what we should change for this next round.”
“No,” he said, letting out a sigh. “Actually I have other news. We’ve had a discussion internally and, well—the bottom line is, the other doctors and I, we have agreed that we are not willing to continue with you.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, “what does that mean?”
“We just don’t think the likelihood of you getting pregnant is—well, we just don’t think there is a likelihood of you getting pregnant. We don’t feel it’s in our best interest to continue treating you.” He doesn’t say it, but I can hear in his tone what he is really trying to say—every time we try and fail, I am bringing down their statistics. I am an unsightly blemish on their pristine marketing banner.
“But do we, do I—have a choice?” I ask. I have never heard of a doctor refusing to treat a patient before. I feel panic and desperation as my heart begins to race. This can’t be the end. “I mean, what if I want to continue, do whatever it takes, try a different method, can’t I just—can we pay more, is that the problem?” My husband shifts uncomfortably in his chair; I’m about to walk away from half our income, we don’t necessarily have “more” to pay.
“No, I’m sorry,” the doctor says. “You could explore getting an egg donor, or adoption.” I’m stunned at what he is telling me. I want—I need—to have a baby, my baby, our baby.
“You haven’t even asked us if we would consider that, and we wouldn’t,” I spit out. My arms are shaking as I clutch the cold rails on the sides of my chair, trying to steady myself. I tell him again that I don’t understand, my husband says the same, we ask more questions but the rest of the meeting is a blur. At some point, they move us into a small room down the hall, so I can finish crying where I won’t be heard by other patients.
That was December 1 and come January 1, I am unemployed. I feel I have lost a baby that was never even mine. I am suffering an immeasurable grief as I attempt to absorb the notion that this group of doctors has decided there is no hope of me becoming a mother. I feel I have no control. I try to fill my days writing and volunteering, but in the empty hours, the loss is so present. Someone gifts me a puzzle, and I find solace in the satisfaction of building the picture of the cityscape, piece by piece, little tiny victories I can control.
By early spring, I have accumulated dozens of puzzles; boxes of landscapes and images of hot air balloons and pastoral scenes line our basement bookshelves and stack into tipsy towers on the floor when I’ve run out of shelf space. My husband comments now and then about the amount of clutter building up, but there’s no stopping me, I’ve branched out to 1,000 piece puzzles and have purchased a special felt puzzle table that I can spin around as I work on different sides.
Around me, every acquaintance is announcing their own upcoming bundle of joy, every TV commercial is Mom-related, and every passerby outside my kitchen window has a baby in a stroller. I buy another puzzle.
It rains for days and days. During a particularly severe storm, the cover on an exhaust vent that runs from our main floor bathroom across our ceiling to the external wall had blown off in the wind. My puzzle table sits in our dining room, below the vent that runs overhead, and one day as I’m deeply focused on constructing a Parisian cityscape puzzle, I hear a tinny-sounding pitter patter above me, very light and airy but echoing off the aluminum of the vent. Tink, tink, tink. With the external flap missing, a bird has found shelter inside our vent, seeking solace from outside predators and weather.
Over the course of a few weeks, I can hear her tiny feet pattering around above me as I have my morning coffee. As the days progress, she becomes more frantic in her steps, restlessly hopping back and forth. I know she is not trapped, as I occasionally catch a glimpse out the window of her swiftly swooping down and away. There is no mistaking the anxiety and determination in the sound of her tiny footsteps, and I come to realize that in her trips in and out of the vent, she must be bringing in twigs and leaves and other materials to build a nest. She is pregnant. Of course she is.
I call an exterminator, explain my problem over the phone. “Well you don’t want us to try and kill the bird, do you? It’s a pregnant mother bird, you said?”
“Oh well no, I don’t want her to die,” I say, “but can’t you get her out of there, move her nest?” He laughs and says no, suggests we wait until after the babies are born, after they are old enough to leave the nest, and then he’ll come and close the vent. I am usually kind even to the peskiest of phone solicitors, but I scream at him when he tells me this. “You don’t understand!” I shriek, my voice shaking. He is silent, awaiting my explanation. She can’t have her babies in my house. This is my house, this is supposed to be my nest. I realize he can’t ever understand; I hang up.
This bird, this pregnant Mama Bird has invaded my house, is building a home inside my home, a place to become a mother, and I am sitting here incapable of becoming a mother, and I’m forced to just sit and listen as she does. I hate this bird, I loathe her. She has chosen this place to torture me. I detest this bird, but I also so badly want to be this bird, that I cannot harm her, cannot evict her.
We listen to each other’s every movement as the days go by, my placement of the puzzle pieces on the table as soft as her small feet on the vent floor, the sipping of my coffee falls into rhythm with her constant tink, tink, tink. I notice that if I turn on the overhead light in the bathroom, she freezes in her steps, silent and uneasy, so I take to going to the bathroom in the dark so as not to disturb her.
I sit at the dining room table, journaling about my failed fertility journey and all the while, she is racing around above me, preparing her little nest, inside the home that should have been my nest for my baby. Her anxious steps seem to go in circles, as if she is reinforcing her tiny abode, over and over and over. I imagine what her materials must be, gathered from our Baltimore city streets—an abandoned shoelace, receipts from the dive karaoke bar down the street, a gum wrapper, perhaps. It is torture and comfort, all the same. She is both taunting me—”I am pregnant. You are not. I am so pregnant, listen to me, building my little nest right above you!” and reassuring me—”Look at me, a tiny little bird, fertile and safe, awaiting my babies.” In some ways, I am the perfect host for this little Mama Bird—over time, she has convinced me that it could happen for me, too, somehow, that this house was meant to be a nest. I start to believe that this Mama Bird is here to give me a sign. I tell my husband that I think we should get another opinion, find a different fertility doctor. He agrees, says it’s worth a shot, and I set up an appointment with the highest-rated fertility doctor in our state.
One morning, as I am walking, yawning, toward the kitchen for my coffee, I hear the unmistakable little peep of a baby bird, just hatching. Grabbing my coffee, I tiptoe into the bathroom, gently put the toilet seat down, and sit on top. I stay there all day, listening to the baby birds hatching one by one, hearing the tiny crackle of the egg shells splitting, the weepy first cries of the newborns, and the continuous pitter patter of mama bird’s feet echoing in the vent as she circles the nest. She welcomes each new baby one by one as I sit transfixed below them, softly crying out for joy for Mama Bird.
She begins taking trips out during the day, and the baby birds are silent as they rest, only an occasional sleepy peep audible. But when she returns, presumably with some sort of food, the babies erupt into raucous chirping, vying for their mother’s attention.
The day of my appointment with the new fertility doctor arrives, and rather than telling me he agrees with the other doctor’s assessment, that I am a lost cause, as I expect, he tells me that he doesn’t see any reason why I can’t get pregnant, naturally even, that he is confident I will be a mother one day. I cannot wait to go home and whisper the news through the vent to Mama Bird.
But when I arrive home, the baby bird peeps have stopped; the house is silent. I wait for hours to hear Mama Bird return but they are gone, all of them. The babies have left the nest and taken flight. It is probably for the best, as I had anxiously fretted to my husband for days about how they would manage to fly out of that narrow vent and master their wings before hitting the concrete sidewalk below. There were no bushes or soft spots to land outside on the city street; I had even suggested we blow up an air mattress and set it outside the house under the vent for a few days, but he kindly noted that it would likely be stolen. But Mama Bird and her kin didn’t wait for me to observe their grand exit; they were ready and they had left me.
Within just a few months, I am pregnant. Four years of doctors and needles and hormone meds and egg retrievals, and all I had really needed was the little bit of hope that Mama Bird had laid above my head, in her nest inside my nest, one twig at a time.
