Even before I open my eyes I can feel my muscles weeping, stiff from a night of sleeping on a glorified plank of wood after trekking 15 kilometers. My mouth seems to be filled with glue and the room, where I lay alongside my wife and her family, is hazy with smoke that has crept up from the cooking fire downstairs. I can’t breathe. Realizing this, I try frantically to do two things at once: open a damn window and fumble for my basal body thermometer. For my fertility chart. I’m not about to miss a day just because I seem to be choking. Not after we’d been trying for so many months. I shove the thermometer under my tongue and huddle in my sleeping bag for a moment longer, trying to force air through my nose and into my lungs. Anything to get the chart right. When it beeps an eternity later I hastily record the number in my phone, stumble down the wooden stairs into the open air, fall against a wall and burst into tears. My sisters-in-law catch me in their arms and hold me while I sob.
—
My wife, Ella, and I are the kind of couple that begins every big life decision with a spreadsheet, and having a baby was no different. First, Ella attended a Queer Family Building info session led by two midwives. Then we researched various types of insemination, read books, pored over donor profiles, ordered a thermometer, interviewed midwives, and weighed the pros and cons of using a known versus an unknown donor. Having compiled, collated, and weighed the various data, we felt confident that this would take three or four months. Max.
That was November. By the end of December, I was proud to see that my cycle seemed pretty stable. We’d successfully narrowed down the donor choices to two or three candidates. Satisfied with our progress and eager to get the show on the road, we took a brief intermission and headed to Israel to visit our families. Ella spent most of the trip with her family in her small northerly hometown, flowering trees lining the quiet streets and cyclamens poking their delicate heads out of sidewalk cracks. I stayed with my family in Jerusalem, a city of stones and prophets on the cusp of the desert.
We don’t sleep well when we’re apart, and the jet lag never helps. We stayed up late all those nights, texting until we dozed off bleary-eyed and exhausted. I don’t remember what we talked about, just that she and her family were optimistic. Her mom seemed to be doing much better and this new course of oral chemotherapy was really making a difference. She was in far better spirits, well enough to go shopping with Ella and work on an article she was researching and writing. Things were turning around.
I’d be peeing on a stick twice daily while we vacationed. We were confident we’d be able to inseminate in March. Everything was going to plan.
Ella and I returned to New York in mid-January even more determined to get going. We felt as though we had been granted a reprieve; a little more time in which to make it happen. On the flight home, we talked about what a magical grandmother Ella’s mom would be. Like a fairy godmother, with crafts and games and surprises up every sleeve.
—
The day after I awoke in a smoke-filled cabin, in an area of Montenegro only accessible on foot or by horseback, the family holds a small ceremony. We sit in a circle on hard dirt dusted with pine needles, by the banks of a turquoise lake. It actually glitters, audaciously gorgeous in the face of our grief. Pine trees encircle us. Up a nearby incline a coffee shop stands where a throng of families chatters over ice cream and espresso. It’s Ella’s mother’s birthday. That’s the reason we’re here at all, to mark a day that speaks of her life. Unable to fathom being apart on this day and equally unable to face its meaning in a country haunted by familiarity, we’d gathered in a place foreign to us all. Now we’re trying to breathe together. But the breaths come out choppy as we read poems she loved, poems we love, and try to feel her present with us. To summon her back into the circle of the living. We are simultaneously hollow and overflowing.
—
New York City in the winter is a frozen, dreary wasteland. Knowing this, we had planned a trip to Mexico in early February with the intention of briefly thawing our limbs before returning to the insanity of freelancing for a living. Before we headed to JFK we made sure to stock up on ovulation tests. I’d be peeing on a stick twice daily while we vacationed. We were confident we’d be able to inseminate in March. Everything was going to plan.
On our third day in Mexico Ella awoke, breathless, from a nightmare about her mom’s health declining to a missed call from her dad. Which was peculiar—he knew we were on vacation, why would he be calling? He texted that he had called by accident, sorry about that. Both unsettled, I tried to assure her that it was just a dream. Later that same day my cousin, who worked with Ella’s mom, texted to ask if I’d heard any news. She suggested we might want to call home.
I ovulated while we were in Mexico, right on time. Just one month after our visit to Israel and we were basically ready to go.
The night before our return to New York Ella and I both got food poisoning. We spent long hours alternately vomiting violently and passing out, soaked in cold sweat, our breath shallow. The flight was torturous. When we finally made it to our Brooklyn apartment we fell, heavy, onto our bed and didn’t set an alarm.
The next morning was clear and cool. I stepped gingerly out of bed, stumbled into the kitchen to pour a glass of water and check my phone. A message was waiting from Ella’s sister: “Hey, are you back? Can we video when you’re up?”
I thought: This is the call. I messaged back, “Hey, Ella’s asleep—how about in an hour or so?” I thought: The least I can do is give her one more hour of peace. I thought: How can I stop this from happening?
We sat on the floor of our bedroom, Ella holding the phone. Her parents and sister were in a row, filling the frame of the small screen. Her mom said we should probably come home very soon. The doctors had discontinued treatment. How soon? Soon. We sat there for a long time under the weight of the words that couldn’t be said, silent tears trickling down our faces.
The veil between birth and death is not so thick as it seems.
On the flight to Israel we both took sleeping pills. My parents picked us up from the airport, drove us to Ella’s parents’ home. February is spring in Israel, and all the trees were clouds of flowers filling the air with fragrant promises. The car had barely stopped when Ella leapt out, sweeping down the stairs to her mom’s bedside. Soon my sisters-in-law and I crowded onto the bed. Her mom joked that we were having a pajama party. Tea and wine were poured and left untouched. Ella stayed up late that night, singing songs to her mom, while I caught up with her sisters in the living room. Eventually the house fell quiet as we all slept.
We didn’t sleep long. Soon deep, laboring moans filled the house. I thought: This is the sound of a wounded bird calling out into the darkness. My sister-in-law crawled into bed beside me and I held her in my arms. We huddled close and listened, terrified.
I had never heard anything like it: the sound of a soul ripping itself from a body, taking on a new state of existence. The sound of the world as we’d known it rupturing, all our truths gushing forth.
Many moons later, when our son emerged from the dark, warm, wet of my womb into the harsh light of a delivery suite, I would think of these moments. It was now my turn to howl into the darkness, to pray for a force to show me the way through as we were ripped into two separate souls. The veil between birth and death is not so thick as it seems.
Eventually, she grew quiet and the room filled with the trilling of dawn-dappled birds. We gathered around her, in the bed, on the floor, in the doorway. With her family holding her, she left.
—
One night, our group of hikers is eating at a long table. It’s the six of us—Ella’s family, me, and Ella’s brother-in-law—alongside 10 strangers. We’re on a pilgrimage, in the middle of nowhere, looking for solace. They’re just on a hike. We sit, drinking red wine and eating fish, chicken, and potatoes. The food is bland and overcooked, but we are ravenous after a day of getting lost in the wilderness. Suddenly my sister-in-law gets a contorted look on her face. She can’t breathe. Clutching her throat, she stumbles outside and falls to the ground, retching up a fish bone. Thick, yellow vomit splatters on the ground. She takes a few ragged breaths before shaking with waves of loss that course through her. Her sobs tear through the otherwise silent night and we hold her, as though perhaps our arms can keep her from breaking.
—
It took nine months from that worst morning until Ella and I stood in our bathroom, staring at a positive pregnancy test in disbelief. The time it took for our son to grow into his fully formed self is equal to the time it took for us to begin to breathe again.
The time it took for our son to grow into his fully formed self is equal to the time it took for us to begin to breathe again.
During that time we encountered myriad hurdles that seemed, at the time, senseless. The genetic testing got sent to the wrong lab—four more weeks until we could inseminate; we figured out the testing, but by that time someone had bought all the donor sperm we’d chosen—add six to eight more weeks of waiting. Finally all the stars and bureaucracy aligned, but my cycle, which had fallen into disarray during so many months of stress and wine and red-eye flights across the ocean, didn’t line up with the dates we were in New York. Six more weeks until we could inseminate. Nothing helped. We couldn’t get it done. I began to feel as though I was losing my mind.
All I wanted was to be pregnant, to bring a small circle of light into the cavernous reality my wife’s family was living. Each discarded ovulation test felt like a failure. Another loss. Bit by bit, we were forced to let go of any idea that we could control what was happening. As organized as we tried to be, our very existence was in disarray. I now understand that we were trying to take back control over our lives by forcing my fertility to submit to our demands. But grief isn’t linear, it’s mercurial and slippery and will not be controlled. We kept getting to our feet only to fall again to our knees.
Months of living in both Israel and New York culminated with the family trip to Montenegro, where we hiked for seven days over unfamiliar terrain. At least we had a guide for the physical landscape. The spiritual one proved trickier. We finally returned home, for good, in October, eleven months after that first workshop. Shortly afterwards, I ovulated. We inseminated for the first time. And I got pregnant.
All I wanted was to be pregnant, to bring a small circle of light into the cavernous reality my wife’s family was living.
—
My eyes are closed and I’m trying to focus what little mind I have left on my breath. My affirmations are taped up around the hospital room like talismans to ward away the fear and pain. “Giving birth is an act of love.” Breathe, two, three, four. “I will submit to the waves.” Breathe, two, three, four. The room around me dissolves as my consciousness fractures. I’m murmuring to our little one, reminding him that we’re a team, in this together. The contractions crash into me harder and harder, not at all like the waves I’d naively read about, back when I believed I could prepare for this day. One cannot prepare to straddle the worlds of the living and the not-quite-living. My body is being split apart, struck repeatedly by lightning, and I am howling into the abyss, pleading with whatever gods are listening to help, help, please help. I can’t breathe. Ella is holding me up, supporting my whole weight. I have been rendered limp by the force of these waves. “Breathe with me,” she says quietly. Inhale. Exhale. I open my eyes and see her knuckles, white with effort. She isn’t afraid. She isn’t blinking. She is looking deep into me, finding the parts of me that have not yet been ravaged by my animal self. I growl at her in a voice I don’t recognize. I’d only ever heard that voice once before, in an impossibly long, dark night a world away. “Breathe with me,” she says again. She is holding me. She is holding us.
I take a breath.
—
Toward the end of my pregnancy our little one wouldn’t stop moving. His insistent feet pushed incessantly against my rib cage, readying himself for the journey through a dark canal into the world. A world that makes no sense unless we make it for ourselves. Sometimes that’s easier in hindsight. I think now that the timing was what it had to be; we couldn’t nurture a new soul into being while our insides were hemorrhaging sorrow. All of the maddening impediments demanded that we call upon our mothers’ wisdom and, as we did so, we inched our way closer to being mothers. Every day demanded strength we didn’t know that we could muster, but we did. Accepting this lack of control has been an important part of steeling ourselves for motherhood, an experiment in letting go if there ever was one.
One cannot prepare to straddle the worlds of the living and the not-quite-living. My body is being split apart, struck repeatedly by lightning, and I am howling into the abyss.
Ella’s mom once told me that it’s not the destination that matters, necessarily, as long as you’re being true to yourself every step of the way. During that longest year, at each impossible juncture, we pulled those words out of our pockets like a compass. In this way, she’s been with us in every shattered moment. We know that she’ll be with our son as he traverses the world as well and that her wisdom and humor will guide him. We’ll make sure of it. I’m sure we will never be whole again, but perhaps we’ll relearn to breathe. Our weary lungs will take in air, our chests will rise and fall. Slowly, at first, then more steadily. Until it’s as though we’ve been breathing all along.
Like this piece? Subscribe to our newsletter for real stories about women on their journey to motherhood.