Infertility
I dipped my net into the pond,
scooping jellied frog spawn
into a mason jar. I was six.
In 49 days, froglets. Bubbles
divided, pulsed, hatched: polliwogs
wriggled through eye-like sacs
in the way I—thirty years later—
prayed for sperm to wriggle
through my tubes, not stopping,
not suctioning to the sides like
those tadpoles’ anxious,
flapping tails.
Nose to glass, I watched hearts
beat into thin, see-through skin.
Gills, legs, arms: metamorphosis!
Follicle, ovulate, luteal: menstruation.
Month after month, menstruating.
Blood flowed, like the river
into which I released those
hatchlings’ tiny, quivering bodies,
calling after them by name.
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Reflection:
My husband and I are trying to get pregnant with our second baby. At this stage – we are four months in – I am not actually, or diagnostically, infertile.
But I was before I had my daughter. It took me and my husband three years, off and on, to get pregnant with her. My periods were irregular, coming every twenty-one day to every three months, in large part because of how heavily I drank and threw up and in part because—who knows. The fertility specialist didn’t have answers, either. Month after month we tried. Month after month I menstruated.
Then one day, after innumerable negative tests, a plus sign appeared on the stick. “We’re going to have a baby,” my husband said, wet-cheeked. We danced in the bedroom, ran to the pharmacy just to make sure, and called my brother. The news launched an era of growing, birthing, nurturing, breastfeeding: the fruits of fertility. It was verdant and ripe and brimming with life.
Enraptured by my new identity as mother, I temporarily forgot what the trying was like: the intense roller coaster of hopefulness and disappointment, sadness and anger—grief, really. The desired, but unattainable, control. The bleak, shriveled up, gray emptiness.
I remember now. The despair has returned, but with a different story: not that I am barren, but that—at almost 36—I am too old. Each month I get my period, I become more convinced that my time has passed. The disappointment turns to panic. In my more dramatic moments, I believe all of my eggs are gone.
I begin to believe that I am unable to conceive, despite my deep knowing that I will.
And so this poem honors feeling infertile, despite reality or diagnostic criteria. It is more a tone than a data point, a visual snapshot than an epic, a validation than a prediction. It gives homage to the idea that feelings are not facts, but they are no less real; that, especially when unconscious or unspoken, feelings govern our experience in the world.
I do believe, underneath all the doubt and fear, that I will get pregnant again, but I also believe that sharing—and releasing—my longing is an important step in my process. That giving voice to my experience, whether logical or not, honors my intuition. That, when empowered, my intuition has inexplicable and magical effects. That revealing my inner woman—whether hopeless or hopeful or caught between the two—creates the space for growth.
