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Catherine
London, United Kingdom
Five Days Before
Do you need to dress up for Halloween if you're a parent? This has never been an issue before. Theodore turned three a few months ago so until now I've just dressed him up as something cute (a carrot, then a lion and then an adorable fireman with a fuzzy helmet) and taken photos of him in the house. I don't want to be a boring parent who everyone thinks is snooty and above the joy of dressing up. I also don't want to be embarrassingly keen. Do all the other parents make an effort? Do any of them? Why does no one ever explain this stuff to you in advance?
Beatrice, my only real friend at Theodore's nursery, said she would rather die than dress up in something flammable but she works in investment banking and buys £2,000 handbags when she's "had a bad day" so I don't think she's necessarily a good indication of what the other mothers in this quiet part of South London will do.
I'm eyeing up the costumes uneasily. "Sexy witch." No. "Sexy Handmaid's Tale Handmaid." Will get me banned from the St. Joseph's Parent Teacher Association for life. "Sexy pumpkin." Nonsense. What would Phoebe do? She's the most sensible and pragmatic of my friends, with an uncanny ability to conjure up an easy answer to a problem as if it had been there, waiting for you all along. Phoebe would say to just wear black and throw on a witch hat, so that's what I decide to do. I suspect the results of Phoebe's daughters' trick-or-treating will be slightly more upmarket than the sweets we'll be collecting tonight. She lives in a terrifyingly expensive area of Battersea thanks to a huge inheritance from her father last year. He left her his five-bedroom house with a massive garden but, as she likes to joke, her Roman nose was a steep price to pay.
Looking down at my watch I realize I'm running late for pickup again. I take the hat and leg it to the nursery. I'm charged £20 per five minutes that I'm late, a rate so extortionate I'm tempted to set up my own nursery because it must be the highest legal interest rate in the country.
I do the rushed Hi, hi, hello, yes, I know, late again, despite working from home a lot! Ha! Yes, I am disorganized, funny, hilarious, such humor interaction with the other mothers as I throw myself through the door and pick up a forlorn Theodore.
"Mummy was late again." He sighs.
"Sorry darling, I was buying a witch hat for tomorrow."
His face lights up. The power of distraction. Halloween has suddenly flipped from being a thing he had a remote understanding of last year to being the most exciting event imaginable (until Christmas). This is what I always imagined being a parent would be like. My parents died when I was ten and I don't have any siblings so babyhood was an unpleasant series of surprises. I'm how tired? He's getting sick how often? I feel this lonely? Halloween, Christmas and birthdays are safe spaces in which my dreams of being a perfect, Pinterest mother can be briefly indulged.
We bundle in the door from the cold, and I dive straight into cooking. I've been trying to feed him before Anthony gets home and the chaos of seeing his father leaves vegetables and the appeal of eating forgotten on a sad-looking plate. The negotiations required to ensure a three-year-old eats a reasonably balanced diet know no bounds and tonight's are particularly excruciating. One more pea, and then you can have two more pieces of pasta. Five peas and then you can watch a movie on Saturday.
Anthony arrives home just as Theodore has trudged up the stairs, weary of the requirement to bathe before bed, yet again. He's still on the phone finishing up a work call as he walks in the door. He looks tired and worn. We need a holiday. Now that we're in our mid-thirties I seem to say that every fortnight, even when we've just had a holiday.
Anthony is finally off the call. Something to do with blockchains and other indecipherable words that mean nothing to me. After a decade of marriage, I've happily moved from feeling guilty about my lack of understanding about my husband's work to being merrily ignorant. If an in-depth understanding of your spouse's job was a requirement for a long-lasting and happy marriage, no one would stay married. Besides, Anthony could no more name one of my most recent published papers than I could write a script in Java, a word that never fails to make me think of body lotion before it leads my mind to programming.
I get a hello, a kiss on the cheek and a quick hug before Anthony makes his way upstairs. Bath and bedtime are his. School pickup and dinner are mine. It's a rare and wonderful night when they're shared. As I pour a glass of red wine-stacking the dishwasher can wait, although answering e-mails can't-the thought pops into my head that I couldn't do this if we had another baby. No quiet, tidy-ish kitchen with a glass of wine in hand. No evening stretching ahead of me for conversation with my husband, watching TV undisturbed and a long night of brain-enhancing, relationship-maintaining sleep.
"How was your day?" Anthony is back downstairs. No wine for him tonight, I notice, as he throws some of the pasta I left for him into a bowl.
"Editing, editing, editing. My favorite bit of writing a paper," I say, my sarcasm heavy. One of my tutors at Oxford once told me that becoming an academic meant a lifetime of homework, and I didn't believe her at the time, but God she was right. Three beta readers have all read my latest paper on the differences between parenting styles in Denmark and the UK and their impacts on educational attainment, and somehow they all want the paper to change in different, conflicting ways. By the end of an eight-hour day deciphering the comments, I was so exhausted I wanted to throw my laptop out the window. I suggested hopefully to my lovely boss, Margaret, that that probably meant I could ignore them but she just tutted sternly and told me to have an extra-large glass of wine tonight before picking them back up tomorrow.
I explain the witch costume situation and Anthony looks at me seriously. "That's a good plan," he says. "Plan A: Witch. Plan B: Normal lady in black." The gravity with which he approaches these issues when we discuss them is one of the many things I love about him. He would never say, "This is such a silly conversation, why are we having it?" Once, my friend Libby's ex-boyfriend told her she was being ridiculous raising something-I can't remember what now-when we were having a double date at a sushi place in Soho. Anthony said, without a trace of humor in his voice, "If she's bringing it up then it's not ridiculous. She's not ridiculous."
Libby says Anthony is one of the reasons she's single, because she can see what love should be like. I try to remind her of what we were like at university. We've been together half our lifetimes now. You don't become two halves of a whole overnight. I think I once might have said something about a relationship being a "journey" and Libby refused to talk to me until I'd bought her a double gin and tonic.
After Anthony has finished clearing the plates away, which I kind of, sort of, definitely left for him to do because he's tidier than I am, I sit back with a contented sigh. He's looking at me intensely. He either wants to have sex or he wants to have the big F conversation. To have IVF or not to have IVF? The question that couples have only had the luxury of pondering for forty years. I saw in Anthony's work diary a capital F in the corner of the page for Friday a few months ago. Immediately I assumed, despite no evidence whatsoever, that he was having an affair. Freya? Flora? Felicity? Who is she? For a few weeks I kept dropping women's names starting with F into conversation worrying that he'd go a bit pink and look guilty but he just thought I was trying to subtly suggest baby names.
I kept checking his diary, every few weeks after that, and kept seeing the F. I don't know why I didn't just ask him what the F was. He doesn't lie to me and it was probably some boring work thing but something about it stuck in my brain. I wanted to figure it out for myself. And then, a fortnight ago I realized. The F was always on a day that we ended up having a conversation about fertility, or my lack thereof. I went back through my journals and there it was. On the day he would mark F, we would somehow end up sliding into our recurring conversation. Anthony is a planner and cannot let things just take their course. It's wonderful for holidays as I don't have to do anything and before I know it, I'm in a beautiful hotel in Lisbon that he booked for a decent rate eight months ago. It's even better for date nights and school admissions. But for the Big Conversations that can ruin a Wednesday evening when you were hoping your husband was trying to seduce you, it's a bit of letdown.
In some ways I envy the women who were in my position before the torturous miracle of fertility treatment. Lots of women had one child, or no children, and that was that. There would be tears and prayers, maybe some self-pitying wondering "Why me?" But there would be no choice in the matter. It would be out of my hands. I dream of such a lack of control.
We've been having these conversations for nearly a year now. We tried for a year before that, assuming it would happen. But then, nothing. Radio silence from my ovaries. I tried a drug called Clomid to "wake them up," but they pressed the snooze button and rudely ignored my pleas for cooperation.
"I was talking to my boss, at work today." I flinch at the mention of her; not again. She's always trying to persuade him to persuade me to start IVF. I've never met her but I loathe her. It's none of her business. But I promised in our wedding vows to always listen and never judge. I was twenty-four! I didn't know anything about how annoying it can be to have to listen when you just want to have a glass of wine. But I did promise, so I smile and ask, "What about?"
"She was saying how much better things are for Alfie now that he has a sibling. He's more sociable. Talks more. She thinks it's made him more empathetic."
I bristle at the implied criticism of my family setup from this awful woman. As though I'm raising a creepily silent future sociopath because I haven't produced multiple children. I make a noncommittal noise and drain my wineglass, an act of defiance in the face of alcohol's fertility-busting qualities.
"We should do it," he says with a burst of reckless energy. I've heard this before. "I've really thought about it. We need to stop going back and forth on it. Neither of us is getting any younger. You turn thirty-four in two months' time and the statistics for IVF only get worse as you get older." He's looking at me as though the answer is simple, I just need to get on board and everything will be fine!
"We've had this discussion before. We know about the statistics, but . . ." I don't really have anything to say that I haven't said a thousand times before. If I could guarantee that a round of IVF would give me a baby-that new member of the family we've wanted for so long-I would do it in a heartbeat. But that's not a promise anyone can make me. I know the odds of it working. They're not good and I've never liked gambling. It feels nauseatingly reckless to start IVF when we already have Theodore and I can devote all my time to him and I've learned to accept our family the way it is. What if I can't look after him when I'm sick from the hormones they'd pump me full of or emotionally drained from the disappointment? What if in pursuit of another child I stop being as good a mother to the child I already have? Still, the desire for another Theodore, and to see him playing with a sibling, sometimes punches me in the gut, and for a day I'll understand Anthony's steadfast certainty that we need another baby.
I go through phases. Sometimes I feel determined and ready. I can do this. Send me the needles, shoot me up, strap me down. I will do anything for a baby. Other weeks, the idea of all of those people and objects and wires and things being inside me makes me want to curl myself in a protective hunch. No, my body says. This is not right. Anthony's more prone to baby-induced broodiness than I am. A friend's snuffly newborn or his godchild doing something adorable will inevitably lead to an earnest declaration that we should just do it, let's do it, what have we got to lose? Like tonight.
What do we have to lose? Everything, Anthony, I want to cry each time. Occasionally I'll convince myself I can do this whole IVF thing but I can't do it flippantly. For a man so keen on planning, he can be remarkably gung ho about the impact of IVF and babies or, worse, IVF and no babies, on our lives. I need an acknowledgment of the potential worst-case scenario. I need him to understand how hard it's going to be for me. Because, as with all things involved in the growing of a human child, it will be the woman in this equation who experiences the negatives. And that assumes it would even work; what if it was for nothing?
"I need some more time to weigh it up, think about the pros and cons."
"Why do you always assume it will go wrong?"
"I don't."
"You do," he says, frustration moving right to the front of his voice and staying put. "You talk about the financial cost and the emotional cost and the physical cost as if it's guaranteed you're going to be having IVF for the next three years. What if it works the first time? What if it's a success? What if having a baby is completely within our grasp but we just don't take the chance?"
