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In the last 15 months, I’ve held approximately 75 pregnancy tests up to the light looking for two lines. I have spent a total of 85 weeks pregnant over six years, and have one living child who was delivered via a last-minute C-section. Before him, I was pregnant twice — but there were complications, and we chose to terminate at 14 and 18 weeks. After my son’s birth, I eagerly anticipated a heartbeat and was deafened by a silent ultrasound. Twice. The second miscarriage was our only girl.
The week leading up to that most recent loss was the final straw. Two days before Thanksgiving we learned our baby was at risk. It was too early to tell definitively, and there was nothing to do but wait. Ten days of purgatory stretched out through family holidays and strained small talk. Our four-year-old son was on break from preschool, which happened to precede a series of toddler illnesses including strep and a double ear infection: He was home with me so much he began to feel like an additional appendage.
Meanwhile, I was struggling with morning sickness, mounting anxiety, and impending grief. I ate my feelings in pumpkin pie and watched The Lego Ninjago Movie with him on repeat. When it was finally confirmed that my baby’s heart had stopped beating, life just kept moving on. But I felt broken.
For those weeks, I was convinced we were done—with discarded, disappointing pregnancy tests, with putting my career on hold, with the look on my OB’s face when he isn’t able to find a heartbeat, or the one he makes when the ultrasound reveals a baby in distress. But instead I made an appointment with a fertility specialist to discuss a single round of IVF. Our last shot. I am going to try one round—just one—so I won’t always wonder what if.
I have six weeks before the IVF consultation. Before I voluntarily give up my body to the science of assisted reproductive technology: the hormone treatments and blood draws and multiple daily shots in my belly. Six weeks to eat and drink what I want, take hot baths, use moisturizer with retinol, and not overthink the ingredients in my nail polish. Like a Los Angeles cliché, I indulge in wine, facials, and back-to-back SoulCycle classes. But after all that—and before bracing to start again—I think I need something stronger, and I have five weeks left to find it.
After preschool drop-off on a clear, 75-degree January morning, I head into West Hollywood to hit up a marijuana dispensary I’ve seen advertised all over the city with billboards that read, “Heal, it’s legal.” OK, I think, I’ll try.
It’s 9 a.m. A security guard checks my ID and stamps my arm with an unsubtle red cannabis leaf. I find an employee with that “hipster with an expertise” vibe and ask for something that’ll feel like two glasses of wine. He leads me to a vape pen branded "Calm,” which he says he recommends to all the moms who come in (suggesting we are many). I smudge off the stamp with hand sanitizer I keep in my car.
Later that night I take a measured hit and subsequently have a panic attack. Great. By morning I feel as if the corset of everything pregnancy-related has begun to loosen, but it has become clear I will need something more than getting loose. I need to get away.
At the start of my third week, I post in a moms’ group on Facebook: “Anyone have an energy/crystal healer they like and trust?” And because this group caters to the crunchy Eastsiders of L.A., the recs are aplenty. I email one to inquire about her methods, and she swiftly responds that my spirit will tell her pendulum what to do. Seems reasonable. I book an appointment.
Before I lie on her table, I tell her about laboring for 24 hours with my son only to have an emergency C-section while shaking uncontrollably under the hospital’s fluorescent lights. I tell her about our babies who would have suffered, the heart-wrenching choice to terminate, and the medical procedures that followed. I tell her about my two miscarriages within a year and a quarter. About how much life and death has passed through my body, and that I haven’t had the space to process much of it because my four-and-a-half-year-old son is a constant living anchor to the present.
The pendulum guides her to smudge the room with sage before gently tapping orchestral gongs, tuning forks, and tinny bells. This sweet 60-year-old former music teacher puts a rose quartz in one of my hands, smooth onyx in the other, and a line of stones from my sternum to my belly. She makes contact with something otherworldly and chants it away. She tells me I am cleansed (but not of what, exactly).
I leave feeling relieved, maybe even hopeful, and head home to walk our dogs. I wonder if they sense something different in my energy (I don’t think they do). At preschool pickup, none of the other parents tell me I look lighter. But the mom who recommended this healer on Facebook told me to get ready for my life to change. I’m ready.
On week five, I look at my wrist and find solace in the delicate tattoo I got to mark the anniversary of my soul-mate dog Seymour’s passing. This pea-sized letter S brings me great comfort, and I know another appointment is in order. I plan to get one small solid heart followed by four heart outlines, representing my living son and his four lost siblings, on my inner forearm. This feels like the last necessary piece to my procreation vacation. An artful scar to make the invisible visible.
It is around this time that my husband begins wondering aloud if I was having a midlife crisis. And I realize I am. I've toyed with the idea of getting Botox and gone shopping for weed while my son was at preschool, and on occasion enjoyed three glasses of wine with dinner. This is my #sixweeks, as one of my best friend’s coined it; I am living life to the fullest. I have rediscovered living each day in the moment, finally without mom guilt and pregnancy pressure.
My therapist optimistically offers that it seems as if I am preparing for a celebratory life event. But, to me, it feels like preparing for a death too. I am savoring one last taste of what it has been like to have a freedom and identity outside of this existence between life, creating it, and death. A literal mid-life crisis.
Handing your body over to baby-making is no small task. The nine-plus months of pregnancy, the challenges of breastfeeding, the koalalike years of being hung upon by small people—and that’s if it goes according to plan. Experiencing loss and devastation amid all that only makes it more of a vortex in which everything can get lost, including oneself.
And so I dipped out for a while. Weed. Crystal healings. A tattoo appointment. These experiences brought me back to myself, before my self was consumed by pregnancies. When each moment wasn’t defined by how pregnant I was or wasn’t, and my body belonged to me.
Now my six weeks are up, and I’m ready to let it go again. To give myself over to IVF, which will require a steadfast dedication to limiting my body and following a strict protocol of shots and pills and timing. Now I’m ready to follow this path until it ends, wherever that may be.
