  An ertswhile friend was fond of ocean metaphors, i.e. "friendship is an ocean, you accept the ebb and flow and see what happens;" "anxiety is an ocean, you accept the ebb and flow and see what happens" and on and on. I said that's fine -- as long as you have a raft -- or an anchor. My ocean is different. It has rules and order. I guess you can't tell that to the guys in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but when I stand on a beach, I get my head straight the way that other people sometimes do when they stand in a cemetery.
There's an absolute Godliness behind that back and forth of the water, and there's a whole world out there that we know nothing about, that goes on just because it does. I feel intimately connected to the Almighty in the matter of&nbsp;P's own creation and birth. We struggled to have P. It was not an easy road; it was, for me, a trial of epic spiritual proportions. I basically had to move a body that they said could not have a baby into a place where it could. This required a good deal of medical intervention and the genius of Dr.&nbsp;V (my pet name for him because he likes to draw a LOT of blood. The&nbsp;'sweet spots'&nbsp;of my inner arms are complete scar tissue and the phlebotomists really have to dig now to find anything and when they do, the vein blows instantly if they don't use a kid needle.
) Making a baby&nbsp;this way is not for the faint of heart and sadly, many more people are having to go through it. It's a lonely place, like a mountain where there's no sound, and on the top of that mountain are lots of women who don't want to talk to each other, because to encourage means to succeed, and to succeed means to get off the mountain -- a place where everyone desperately wants to be. It's an area of the female experience that is filled with isolation. Yet just because someone else succeeds in making a baby doesn't mean you ever will. There are no guarantees in this business of bringing forth life. In fact, for an anxiety-prone type as myself, the panoply of things that could go wrong and often do is so vast that it nearly stops you in your tracks.
In the early part of my Quest, as I came to call it, I stood by the ocean in February next to S and with a friend -- M -- and it was frozen and cold and hideous and I was wearing my NATO field jacket and wishing I were anywhere else, even though I had asked to go there. Talk about paradox. Months went by. We had a glimmer of hope in April -- but only a glimmer. There were two follicles, and one took, but only briefly. So the&nbsp;wrench of positive tests when you in fact know&nbsp;there is no baby, the pink stripe fading and fading as the hormone levels go down and down.
My two boys' and two girls' names stayed where they were, on a piece of paper in the drawer. I grew a brittle shell and I made a lot of sardonic comments in my daily interchanges. I took all the fertility statistics and adopted a 50% stance instead&nbsp;-- everything in life has a 50% chance of happening, either it does or it doesn't. By July I was saying to Dr. V, "Look, character building is all well and good but I want a baby out of this nightmare. " And he said, "Do you want to take some time off? " And I said yes.
No drugs except the baseline one for my metabolism. Those drugs are hardcore, by the way. You have to really WANT it. Listen, you read about all these egg donors and so on -- there's a reason they pay these ladies for their gift. It's not sweet tarts and sugarwater you're putting in your body. I used to say to Dr. V, "How come one of the side effects of everything you put me on is death?
" He smiled in his cryptic way. I knew I should've bought the man a Magic 8Ball when I had the chance. So the decision was made in July to just monitor August. Just keep up the bloods and scans and see if anything looked promising, but not to stampede forth with yet another "cycle. " In early August I went with M alone down to the shore again. The evening we arrived we went to the Lighthouse Beach at sunset.
Just because we could. I stood there, breathing in and in and in, the way I always do in front of the ocean, as if to put some of THAT air in my lungs will offset all the pollution and black death I breathe in living in the city. I was praying -- as usual. I had taken to wearing a St. Jude medal-- patron saint of lost causes --and I was saying to God at that moment,&nbsp;if I'm not supposed to have a baby, then take away the desire for one. Just take it -- make it go! Make me not care, make me not want it, make it go away.
I've been fine without one this far and I expect I'll be fine without one if I never have one. And suddenly, I saw something, out there in that vast ocean, that place that God made and ordered according to His plan, just because it pleased Him and because&nbsp;He felt like it. What I saw was a fin. M is from coastal Florida, and knows from aquatic life. I said to her as fast as I could, before it could disappear, "What is that -- a shark? " "It's a dolphin," she said.
As if she expected to see one. Never in my life had I seen a dolphin in the wild. "Really? " I said. "Have you ever petted one? " "Yeah," she said.
"I have. " "What did it feel like? Was it rubbery? " "It felt like wet leather," she said. So we stood there -- watching the dolphins. They were show-offs, those dolphins, doing all kinds of things that a figure skater might attempt.
There was a mom and baby, and for the first time in a very long time I felt the shell softening, the thing that had consumed me and that I had tried so hard to effect of my own power for so long becoming, just for that brief moment in time, less subject to my own control. Like something that could be let go. The sun was coming down and the mellow light played in diamonds off the dolphins' backs as they came closer and closer to shore. Suddenly I prayed,&nbsp; God, you order all this! All this! The tides and all the life in this vast world.
I am one woman, with my own tide and cycle that will not order itself, that will not bring the life that is natural to it. Order me! Order me. Monday we returned home and I saw Dr. V. He saw a follicle, so he recommended treatment and I figured, what the hell. Assume the position. Why waste the chance.
And two weeks later, when I peed on the final test of my stockpile on the morning of day 28 -- expressly to know if it was time to start treatment again, because V had told me "bad cycle, bad levels, bad sample, bad lining"&nbsp;--&nbsp;well, wouldn't you know that that stick&nbsp;turned a nice, instant, definite pink. And now she's out at the mall with her dad today. 
