Exploiting My Baby (3 page)

That’s why I’m writing about it, because a bug doesn’t have a personality, nor does it differentiate between nice girls and skanks. Lots of us have caught them, and it certainly doesn’t mean we’re dirty. There was nothing especially whorish about me; in fact, the stand-up who gave me the “lie down” was maybe my sixth sexual partner, all of whom were long-term boyfriends. It would make me feel all mysterious about things if I could spin a dark yarn detailing drunken nights with strangers, but despite the fact that my mom was a Frye boot- wearing, free love-celebrating,
Joy of Sex
-reading, laissez-faire kind of parent, I have always been kind of old-fashioned about sex. I refuse to feel like a slut even though I had the VD so bad I ended up at the free clinic in Hollywood, which is generally a sign that you are failing at life.

Even if I’d caught chlamydia from the pizza delivery guy, however, that still would not make me a bad person, and while it might rightly make you question my judgment, it seems critical to note just how common STDs are. With an estimated four million new cases of chlamydia alone occurring each year in the United States, there have to be lots of women of childbearing age who have jacked up tubes or worse. Not everyone is going to be completely forthcoming about why they have trouble getting pregnant, so you may not hear much about the clap and fertility, but I’m starting to think lots of us are in the same boat: the SS
VD
.

So, here’s my story. I had never even had a yeast infection when I started having some discharge and burning in the girl parts when I was twenty-seven.

I was living down the street from a cemetery in a $385-a-month studio apartment in a building that was basically the Village of the Damned; when people asked where I lived I would either tell them travel east on Beverly until you get scared, then go about three more miles, or I would simply tell them to look for the corner of Purse Snatch and Car Jack.

My neighbors were a glamorous bunch of
bon vivants
. There was the Asian transsexual prostitute turning tricks in her studio next door to mine. There was the pudgy, middle-age dude who showed me copious poems about his cat, Shadow, his “only reason for living,” and who regularly received Meals on Wheels. There was the baggy pants dude trying to be a choreographer who would play the same eight bars of “Unbreak My Heart” over and over until I wanted to Break His Face. There was the building manager, a guy on disability for chronic fatigue syndrome (Jesus, that man was tired), and there was the elderly man down the hall who rarely left his apartment but blasted every Dodger game from an old transistor radio. So this was life in the fast lane. That is, if your destination was the heart of freaking darkness.

Anyway, as you can imagine, I was uninsured, which is how I ended up getting my privates checked out by a staunch nurse with a tight blond braid at a Planned Parenthood nearby, meaning in the ghetto. She said I seemed fine, and by that, I think, she meant white; she sent me home with some yeast infection medication. Before leaving the clinic, I used the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, I noticed the soap dispenser was empty and I remember thinking, “No soap? Doesn’t soap prevent the spread of disease, and isn’t that what this place is all about?”

Several visits and Pap smears later, I learned I had chlamydia, which a guy can carry and be totally asymptomatic, so I could hardly blame the comedian, although I might have felt better about the whole thing if he hadn’t “all of a sudden” remembered a cocktail waitress in Charlotte who mentioned something about having something, which didn’t seem relevant to mention until, um, it was.

Lots of bad medical care later, I finally went to a real doctor, who told me I had pelvic inflammatory disease from trying and failing to treat the bug with various gnarly antibiotics from the clinic.

There was such a sense of euphoria when I was being treated by an actual doctor, with a white coat and everything, that I almost didn’t want to ask if there would be long-term effects, but I did and he told me my tubes might be scarred and I could have trouble having kids later. He said he didn’t think so, and I asked how we would know for sure. “If you try to have kids and it doesn’t work,” he answered.

That was over ten years ago, but it haunts me as we commence baby making.

I take my friend, a mother of two-year-old fertility treatment twins, out for margaritas, and grill her about the entire process, taking down the name and phone number of her fertility specialist. The forty-seven-year-old redhead from Pilates who finally conceived after five attempts at in vitro fertilization, I corner her to get every detail, marveling at her determination (not to mention bankroll). When I run into a pregnant neighbor at the Coffee Bean, I trap her in a fatal talk hold while I soak up tales of daily hormone shots, Clomid cycles, acupuncture, cryopreservation of embryos and intrauterine insemination. I see her eyeing the door as her latte goes cold, but I can’t let her loose.

I’m on a need-to-know basis with every woman who has ever had trouble getting pregnant. Furthermore, the girls who just flat out procreated with no trouble? I need to know their stories, too. Mainly so I can resent them. Mentally, I am socking away money for assisted reproductive technologies. I will need them all, I am certain.

Within just a few days off the pill, I am consumed with infertility and certain that because of my age and my dubious STD history it’s going to be a long, barren haul that may never ever actually yield a baby. Infertility is everywhere I look until I am convinced that no one gets pregnant
just like that
, and that one-night-stand pregnancies must be an urban legend or the province of teenagers with more youthful vaginas. I walk by the newsstand, and it seems like every actress I see is either having multiples from fertility treatments or hiring a surrogate. When I think of my reproductive system, I literally picture one lonely egg, as if human eggs look like chicken eggs, covered in cobwebs and dust like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. While I’m probably supposed to be making vision boards filled with giggling babies and gloriously pregnant bellies, I’m mainly picturing that egg, decayed, rotting and old as fuck.

I start peeing on those ovulation kit sticks and trying to squeeze through the so-called fertility window. When I calculate that a day is
the optimum day
, based on half-assed knowledge cobbled together from searching the Internet and reading parts of books and unscientifically polling various women, I pressure my husband into having some very un-fun, desperate, high-strung sex the second he gets home. Afterward, I sit in bed facing the headboard with my legs elevated against the wall for twenty minutes. Someone told me this helps the swimmers succeed in getting to their destination, which may be true, but it makes you feel like a character Meg Ryan would play, bursting with such extreme quirkiness and adorable self-doubt that she’s like a knife in your brain. Every morning before work, before rushing out at the ass crack of dawn to prep the morning news, I pee on a stick to find out my ovulation status. It’s the least romantic, most confusing, clinical, pressure-filled month ever. I detest those sticks, the legs against the wall, the lame, forced sex.

When I get my period that first month, I am crushed. I feel about as womanly as Steve McQueen listening to a Rush song while playing Call of Duty, which is to say I feel like a total dude.

And that’s when people start to quietly suggest that I am causing my own fears to come true. I should shut up about infertility and stop being so sure I won’t get pregnant, because my mind is doing some voodoo on my body.
This is all my brain’s fault.

Thus I came into contact with
The Secret
, the self-help documentary that posits the “Law of Attraction,” the idea that your thoughts and feelings attract events. Ostensibly, this principle is both hopeful and elegant; Oprah did two episodes on it, and I like to live according to her teachings. However, let’s just say you can’t master your negative thoughts. Well, too bad, because you are doing some major “manifesting” of all the disastrous bullshit that crosses your mind, or so says
The Secret
and all of the New Age-y schools of thought that run parallel.

One friend actually printed out a hundred quotes from
The Secret
for me, and I folded it and tucked it into my handbag, thinking, it can’t hurt. Unless, of course, I’m found dead and I can’t pretend from Beyond that I was toting that thing around with a sense of irony.

“Whatever is going on in your mind is what you are attracting,” read the handout. “You become and attract what you think,” it further taunted me. “People think about what they don’t want and attract more of the same.” And if I wasn’t already filled with New Age guilt, another quote warned me, “Those who speak most of illness have illness” and “You attract your dominant thoughts.”

Armed with this knowledge, I still could not stop the infertile thoughts, the ongoing calculations of how many in vitro fertilizations I could afford if I sold my condo, the image of that yellowing egg fixed in my head, burned there like an image paused too long on an early plasma TV screen. “Choose your thoughts carefully,” admonished the dog-eared page of quotes.
Like I can choose my own thoughts
. I have about as much luck with this as I have with betting on horse races or corralling killer bees.

If my thoughts could have made me infertile, believe me, they would have.

After the first month of unpleasant sex and legs on the wall, I sit next to a woman at a wedding who is both a cardiologist and a new mom. She tells me, “Throw away the sticks. The sticks stress women out and cause performance problems with men. The sticks don’t work. Your fertility window is three days long. Just have lots of sex, so you don’t miss it. Just have Lots. Of. Sex.”

Because I need structure, I ask her how much is lots, and she says every other day, to allow the Mister’s sperm count to recover (I’ve since read this is a myth, and that every day is better, but whatever). This sounds like a plan. And while this petite woman in a fringe shawl daintily nibbling on a dinner salad isn’t my doctor, she is
a
doctor, and that’s good enough for me.

Even for newlyweds like us, having sex every other day, without fail, can be kind of a chore. No matter how in love you are, carefully plotted procreation flies in the face of hot sexual abandon.

That’s why I always recommend porn to anyone who is trying to get pregnant.

Not only will X-rated movies increase your husband’s enthusiasm for the conception process, it may also increase his fertility. In my duties as a “news” reporter, I once did a story about an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia who found that looking at pornographic images of men and women together can increase the quantity and quality of a man’s sperm. According to this study, watching another male having at it with a female creates a perceived “competition,” thus inspiring faster, more motile swimmers. Yes, this is the kind of hard news I brought to the FM dial.

I was the Woodward and Bernstein of jizz.

It comes to me, having never actually watched porn, that I should spearhead a “let’s watch porn” campaign with my husband. I had interviewed lots of porn stars while doing morning radio with Carolla, and I always thought they were sweet girls—super molested and broken, but sweet. The porn stars and their agent-boyfriends were always handing out free product, which I dutifully took home because I can’t turn down free stuff, even
Sinner Takes All
.

Just about every man likes porn, and if you think yours doesn’t, you are probably wrong. I once read an article in
Cosmopolitan
magazine suggesting there are four things that are true of every male: He wants to earn more than you do, he wants more oral sex, he would rather hang out with you than his buddies, and he consumes porn, whether you know it or not. Yeah, I just quoted a
Cosmo
story, which neutralizes the
Great Expectations
reference I dropped earlier, but I must say I have found those four things to be universal when it comes to guys.

“Porn and sex every other day? Um, you know, if that’s what you want,” says Daniel, modulating his enthusiasm for my suggestion so he doesn’t seem too pervy or overeager.

For some reason, anything a married couple does just seems wholesome somehow, so I didn’t bother to find this gross and I still don’t.

So we delve into my stash of free DVDs. Wow. I don’t know if you realize this, but there is an angry, aggressive, extreme trend in pornography right now. The drooling, spitting, pierced, tattooed adult actresses of today do lots of deliberate gagging, uncomfortable cursing, and submitting to sexual positions that can’t possibly feel good unless your uncle fondled you and destroyed your ability to create personal boundaries. These girls are all penciled-in eyebrows and dry stripes of bleached hair. They are
hard
. And more to the point, they don’t look like they are having any fun, which makes me wonder how any woman watching them can have any fun. Like a virgin having bad sex for the first time, I wonder what all the fuss is about. This is a multibillion-dollar industry?

That’s when my husband suggests we delve into some retro porn, movies from back in the 1970s, when the women still had bush and it was all shot on film, like in
Boogie Nights
.

These foxy gals have their real boobs and the films have enough of a plot to keep me interested, ’cause I need a little something to hang my hat on, you know? Sorry to be a cliché, and I don’t need it to be
The English Patient
, but I do require some kind of context for why these folks are having sex. And while I’m sure they are also molested and broken, the ’70s chicks seem so much less wrathful about it. In fact, you almost get the idea most are just legit actresses working porn on the side to supplement their waitressing tips. Unlike today’s jagged, crystal-meth-addicted porn stars, the actresses of yesteryear are maybe on a couple of Quaaludes, but they genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Feathered hair, bell-bottom jeans and round figures make them even more irresistible. We experiment with some ’80s films as well, and while the production values are lower and the lace glove quotient is higher, at least you won’t see today’s female-boner-killing spitting and gagging.