Anniversary

One year ago today I found out I was pregnant. It took a lot to get to that moment, but not in the way you would think. I did not struggle with infertility. I didn't have to do iui, or ivf, or have shots of Clomid. I didn't have multiple miscarriages. All I had to do to conceive Balthazar was convince my husband to try for another child. Once I did that, I was pregnant in four months.

The convincing, however, took years. Jasper was born in 2005, and raising him was much harder on our marriage than either of us expected. It took awhile for things to calm down. Then the economic collapse of 2008 dovetailed quite nicely with a total drought in our writing careers. With no money coming in, no jobs to be had, living off of a bequest from my aunt, it seemed foolish to have another child until things improved.

Except they didn't. I waited. I squirmed. I worked on a memoir. I tried not to bring it up. Sometimes I couldn't help but bring it up. My husband wrote a thriller and then another thriller while we fought about what to do. I waited some more. And then the spring of 2011, when I turned 40, I decided I couldn't wait any more. In the very near future the decision was going to be made for us by the passage of time and the realities of biology, and I wanted to talk about it before it was irreversible.

He had to make up his mind, I said. We could get a cat, and he could get a vasectomy. Or we could try to have another baby. It might not work, I said. Not everyone can get pregnant at 40. A lot of things could go wrong: miscarriage, Down's syndrome. We would be sorry if we didn't at least try, I said.

I said those things to ease my husband into the idea, the way I ease him into anything he's afraid of. Let's just go look at the house. Let's just see what the hotel is like. Let's just try and maybe nothing will happen. But I knew it would work. I knew I could still get pregnant. He thought about it for awhile and then he said he would do it. I didn't force him, I didn't manipulate him, but I did push him.

When I said we'd regret it if we didn't try, I wasn't blind the fact that something could go wrong. But if I am honest I must admit that I believed in the pregnancy from the very first. I believed in Balthazar, and I believed in myself. I believed in my body and my health. I believed in the law of averages and in Western medicine. I must have believed, too, in the protective power of my own privilege. I'm white. I have health insurance. I'm not overweight, I exercise, I have no underlying health conditions. It isn't something to be proud of, that presumption, though I don't think I assumed any more than any other woman with an uneventful pregnancy who wakes up on the 264th day thinking she will soon be bringing home a live baby.

I could make a list as long as John Lennon's of all of the things I've stopped believing in over the course of my life. But, like him, at the core I've always believed in myself. Now I'm not sure I have that anymore. It's one thing to fail, to not get the fellowship, to be rejected by the publisher, to have toxic sales figures. It's another thing entirely when your failure, involuntary as it may have been, takes someone else out.

Now I can't decide if I am sorry or not, that I pushed my husband so hard to conceive Balthazar. I thought that there could be nothing worse than living the rest of my life with the regret that I didn't have another child. But this, this is possibly worse. If I regret it, though, then I am sorry that Balthazar was ever born, which is the saddest thought of all.

I didn't mean to bring darkness and tragedy into our lives. Balthazar certainly didn't mean to. He was just a little boy trying to be born. But now that's where we live. In darkness.