Giving Up (9 page)

want a child the way I do. Full disclosure: if I hadn't come to James and told him how much I wanted to start a family together (‘more than anything') then it's more than likely he would have been happy to wait for years before he brought it up. Knowing him, he'd leave it until I was way past menopause and then act all surprised, like ‘Really? I guess I never thought about it that way.' There's no way for me to prove it, but I'm almost one hundred percent sure that there's a significant part of him that would've been happy to keep doing what he was doing indefinitely. Nothing ever changing. I've always been the one to suggest that we take the next step. I'm the one who wants our relationship to progress, while James, from what I can tell, is determined to maintain stasis. It was me, not James, who suggested that we move in together after we had been dating (exclusively) for more than two years. And I was the one, after we had been living together as common-law for at least five years, who proposed that we finally make it official and get married, not in a religious ceremony, but in a civil ceremony, by a justice of the peace. And once we got married I was the one who gave the ultimatum that within a year I wanted to be
with child
. So when James insisted that this was just as important for him as it was for me I found it hard not to call him out on that. Not that he didn't want children – I'm sure that in an abstract, high-minded sort of way he did – but I knew that if I gave any indication that I didn't believe he wanted a child as much as I did he would freak out. The handful of occasions that I haven't been able to hide how I really feel on this subject have resulted in huge, multi-day arguments. He literally can't stand knowing that I don't believe him, even though he doesn't even bother concealing the fact that he doesn't actually believe himself. This is what I can't stand. If he admitted that he didn't want a child as much as I did I wouldn't be bothered at all. But since he insists that we both want a child with the same level of need and longing and urgency, and since he insists on this with such infuriating stubbornness, sometimes, when we are talking about getting pregnant (which is basically the only thing we talk about these days), I feel like I am losing my mind. Like I am actually losing the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. ‘Which is why we need to see a specialist,' James says, ‘so that we can stop living in limbo.' (One time, he said ‘hell' instead of ‘limbo.') ‘That way, even if it's bad news, we'll know what we're dealing with.' James wanted to stop ‘dealing in conjecture' and find out ‘what the real issue is.' ‘We don't have to live in ignorance like this,' he said to me, as if I was an idiot. ‘There's all sorts of resources available to people like us. What's the point of living in the twenty-first century, in one of the richest countries in the world, in one of the most privileged socio-economic classes within this country, with some of the most talented and educated specialists in the entire profession, and some of the most advanced technology known to
man
, if we aren't going to take advantage of our advantages?' When he gets worked up like this, when he starts dropping terms like ‘socio-economic,' and saying things like ‘take advantage of our advantages,' it's only a matter of time before he completely freaks out. Usually I try to hide what I'm really thinking and just agree with everything he says, although it's important that I agree enthusiastically, so that he thinks I don't just agree with him, but that he is actually explaining my own thoughts to me so that I can understand them more fully than if I'd been left to contemplate them on my own. Sometimes I slip up, maybe out of irritation, but most likely from boredom, and I end up saying the very thing that will make him hysterical. Instead of telling him the real reason I'm reluctant to go see a specialist, I make something up based on opinions and beliefs I don't possess but that I know from experience will drive him into an exasperated rage. ‘Nothing is one hundred percent, James,' is what I say. ‘All those over-educated doctors and their million-dollar machines still manage to get it wrong all the time. And even if they aren't wrong, they probably won't be able to tell us what we want to know. You haven't read as much about this as I have,' I say, knowing full well that it's things like this that make him almost speechless with anger. ‘All they can tell you is that there's nothing wrong. That's the best we can hope for. But even when there's nothing wrong people still end up not being able to have children. There's no medical explanation. One in ten women who can't conceive have no idea what's wrong with them. It just doesn't work. So I know you think that we're going to get some sort of diagnosis or something like that, but that's not really how it works. It's true,' I say, ‘that sometimes they can tell you if something is wrong, like if you have a
low sperm count
, or if they find
cysts in my uterus
or something like that. But a lot of the time they don't find anything. Most of the time they can't even tell you what's wrong.' Even though this was all true, I knew that James would disagree. I'll admit that there was a part of me that wanted to provoke him, to piss him off, but once I had finished I realized that he was going to argue with me, and I regretted saying what I'd said, because while I had accomplished my goal of enraging James, I knew that whatever he was going to say was going to be extremely upsetting for me, and that without intending to, I had brought on the exact scenario I'd been desperate to avoid. The thing that pissed me off so much was that James was willing to argue with me even when he had no idea what he was talking about. I had just stated some inarguable facts about what we could expect when we went in for testing. These facts came from the medical literature I'd been reading about pregnancy, as well as from my friends who had
first-hand experience
due to their own problems with getting pregnant. But just because he felt that what I had said was incorrect, even though he had nothing to base this feeling on, he had no problem telling me that ‘it might be a little more complex than that.' ‘Don't get me wrong,' he said, aware that he was about to provoke a full-on fight, ‘I know that you've read way more about this than I have, but from what I understand it's a little less mysterious than that.' While James was explaining conception to me my mind started to drift, and somehow I ended up at the memory of an episode of
Cheers
I saw only once when I was in junior high. In the episode, Sam and Kirstie Alley were trying to have a baby together, and there must've been a problem with Sam's sperm because Kirstie Alley kept on nagging him about wearing refrigerated underwear and other things that are supposed to help with
motility
. This was when I first learned that people had to
try
to get pregnant, and that it wasn't easy, that they had to try all the time, and that nothing may come of it. No baby. So I guess what I said earlier about being completely misled about the problems that women have with getting pregnant wasn't entirely accurate. My teachers, my parents, my aunts and uncles, my friends, my friends' parents – literally everyone I knew never – said a thing, nothing in school or in anything I read ever referred to it, but on TV I found out that people could have sex – constantly – and never get pregnant. I'm not talking about being barren. I'm not referring to the movies of the week that dealt with women who had to adopt babies, or steal them, or have them implanted in their uteruses, or in the uterus of someone else, in order to enjoy the privilege of being a mother. A barren woman is someone who knows that they can never get pregnant – maybe they've had their ovaries removed, or they had some weird infection that fucked with their tubes – whereas someone who is infertile is perfectly capable of getting pregnant, but for whatever reason it doesn't work for them. So I'm not thinking about the sweet middle-aged women in movies or sitcoms or shitty novels, who, despite the fact that they're always ridiculously likeable, have a really sad and lonely thing going on, and who you eventually find out can't ‘conceive' or ‘bear children,' usually because of something really traumatic (and lurid and incestuous, or luridly incestuous, from their past), and even though back then I couldn't appreciate what a unique service
Cheers
provided for everyone going through the same thing, I'm glad to know that at least one TV show was doing the right thing. Of course now that I'm going through it there's no end to the amount of shit you can find online. James is right when he says I know a lot more about it than he does, I do, but this doesn't stop him from trying to tell me about it. ‘They have all sorts of tests they can do now,' he said, ‘and usually they can tell you if – you know – something is wrong or not. And if there is then . . . well . . . you know . . . there's stuff they can do sometimes to fix it.' (What he didn't say was that if they don't find anything, and there's nothing wrong with me, then there's basically nothing they can do.) ‘This happens all the time,' he said. ‘I know you've read more and I'm not arguing that. I'm just saying that there's other stories out there. . . . I've met people, and everyone has a story like this. If it's not about them, then it's someone they know,' he said earlier this evening from his usual perch at the foot of the bed, while I'd taken shelter under the covers. We had just tried to have sex but he couldn't get it up and I wasn't up for going through the routine we had for this scenario. It requires a lot of effort and patience on my part, something that usually doesn't bother me (it's not all that different from some kind of boring but physically invigorating chore, like landscaping or snow-shovelling) but since on this occasion I could see that he took it for granted and expected me to go through this routine, I got annoyed. It was annoying, the way he expected me to go along with his little fantasies, and all at once I decided that there was no way I was going to be able to go through the motions this time. James basically expects me to do all the work. I'm the one that has to make it happen. There is really no telling what his dick is going to do. He might go on a streak for months, only to slip into a funk that lasts twice as long. When he gets like this, he speaks about his dick as if it's out of his control, like some sort of wild beast or a force of nature. According to him, the only way to get it to work again was if I pretended that there was nothing wrong. ‘Just keep doing what you're doing,' he said, ignoring the fact that it was physically impossible for me to keep doing what I was doing. So eventually I gave up and this led to an argument. So . . . fucking . . . predictable. The stupid thing about this specific argument we had on the night of the cat incident was that I had taken up the exact opposite side than the one I was actually on. It was me, not James, who first suggested that we go see a fertility doctor. I was the one who suggested that we should get tested. But the reason I was taking the other side and pretending that I wasn't entirely behind the plan of making an appointment with a fertility doctor for this month was that I could tell that James believed that if there was a problem, it didn't have anything to do with him. He was obsessed with the idea of seeing a fertility doctor because, instead of seeing our problem as something that we should go through together, like a quest, he saw the whole thing as a kind of game that we were playing against each other, and I could tell that he thought he was winning. When he said that he ‘just wanted to do it sooner, rather than later,' he was, as he saw it, calling my bluff. And instead of confronting him head-on by telling him that I had already looked into it and made an appointment for next week (all true), I messed around with him for a bit. Whenever he gets worked up he starts talking a lot of garbage, like complete nonsense, so it's easy to trip him up. He isn't really paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth. It's not like I made a conscious decision to piss him off, but in retrospect I'll admit that this was what I was doing. But now that I'm telling this I feel like I'm painting an ugly picture of our relationship. The majority of the time we're great. There is so much I'm leaving out, all the ways that we love each other and the daily kindnesses, the sacrifices, all that. But that's not really the story I'm telling because this isn't really about our relationship at all, this is just about what happened with the cat. So it's a coincidence that on the night of the cat incident we happened to be having a fight, that's why I'm focussing so much on all of this, and not because I think we have a bad relationship. So my point is just that James has been in a slump. The only time he goes down to the basement anymore is when we get in a fight, and the only time he leaves the apartment (and doesn't come back for hours) is when he's been down in the basement, working on something that he's been saying for years is ‘almost complete'. Which, as I said, doesn't really bother me, but definitely bothers him. That's the whole point to telling all of this. To give some context for how I was feeling that night. Whenever we fight I always get really tired afterwards. And we'd been fighting so much that week that I was in a sort of waking coma. We went from being really tender and sweet one moment, to saying the most bitterly hateful things the next. No matter how many times we fight I can never get used to how we change so completely. It's hard to describe. I invariably end up using the same clichéd expressions you hear all the time. ‘It was like he was a different person,' or ‘We were looking at each other like complete strangers.' But when I try to break down the feeling into the most simple components I have to admit that it's actually not all that complicated. When we are being kind to each other, when we are being patient, sweet, and understanding, it feels as though this is the way it always is, as if this is the only reality that exists, and even though I know that we fight all the time, the memory of these fights is completely unreal, like I'm remembering a dream, and somehow I end up believing that even though we fight a lot, it doesn't really matter, because that's not