Swimming Lessons
By: Benjamin Russack
Tags: Secondary Infertility, Pregnancy, Miscarriage, Infertility, Dating

“But this one makes you look like a cartoon.”

My long-time friend rotates her phone to reveal an image of my forty-five year old self, now hung with tired eyes, porous, pallid skin and a Jewish nose proven by science to grow larger with age.

“One more!” she declares, turning the device back around to snap another photo, the fifth since we arrived at the café. Brooke is helping me set up a dating profile, a welcome distraction from her expanding midsection and puffy hands, from such conditions as “Sudden Onset Cravings”, or “Eat Everything Now Syndrome” : deep bowls of potstickers at 1 AM, butter-fried chard with garlic for breakfast, frequent and very large mugs of non-fat hot chocolate, the latter of which Brooke now grasps with monastic revelry while not taking her eyes from my flagging portrait. While my participation in these matters is not a requirement, I somehow know it is mandatory. Regardless, I welcome the task. For Brooke’s mental well being, I am more than happy to serve up the sad but apparently entertaining details of my largely non-existent dating life.

“For Tinder, maybe?”

Brooke takes a first sip of her third refill and cocks her head at the follow-up image, as though trying to find the good in it. While I have offered up the use of a more youthful image from years past — smoother skin, slightly reduced nose— my stalwart matchmaker insists that all images remain current. To my disappointment, Brooke’s contention is that a prospective date may bear a fundamental expectation that I will actually resemble my photograph.

“You just don’t look good today. Let’s wait till tomorrow.”

A long-time Bay Area resident, Brooke is familiar with the torrential, competitive waters of the San Francisco dating scene. She therefore knows, with unsettling clarity, that whatever feedback needs saying must be said, delicately, beautifully and without mercy: “This bio makes you sound narcissistic. / Stop telling everyone that you are a black belt. / Ben, this photo is from ten pounds ago. / No one cares how much you like cheese.”

Brooke lays down the phone and winces, placing a hand on her belly. Neither of us comment, which is also part of my mandate: to say nothing. After four miscarriages this year alone, Brooke has resigned herself to the idea that her child is not yet a child, that the fetus within her is just another organism springing from what may be yet another unviable egg, that any acknowledgement, spoken or not, will only serve to validate the existence of an organic process and therefore give it life, a life she can lose.

Thus muted, I am nevertheless tasked with remembering that hot chocolate assists with nausea so pervasive that its frequency is measured by abatement rather than onset. Also, I must not fail to approximate, quietly and to myself, how far along she is — about six to eight weeks by the looks of things — an unwelcome skill acquired through repeatedly witnessing Brooke’s heartbreaking process. Additionally, my job as Brooke’s friend is to arrive at a thorough understanding of her lived experience, of her regimen of abdominal self-injections by way of a wide, bobby-pin sized needle, injections that must be followed by sex within twelve hours, of pills at noon and pills before bed, of weekly trips to the doctor for egg-counting ultrasounds, and how she often bleeds, and that sometimes the bleeding means nothing and that sometimes it means everything.

Brooke presses both hands against her belly and takes a long, slow breath. Recently turned thirty-nine, Brooke is negotiating the reality for many women over thirty-five, where fifty percent of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.

“And it doesn’t matter if you have made it through the first trimester, or if you’re even far enough along to hear an actual heartbeat,” Brooke has told me. “You are never in the clear. The pregnancy can terminate at any time.”

Such daunting statistics require a near-religious vigilance and commitment from Brooke, and silence from myself. And so I wait without words as my friend fights her way back into the room, her eyes grasping for focus as she anchors herself in space. Besides functioning as passive entertainment, my mid-life futilities seem to ground Brooke as she breathes life into my own catastrophic endeavors — if her wishes are not granted, perhaps mine will be. Or does she instead identify with our respective processes: the hunt for a viable egg versus the pursuit of a willing human being? Whatever the case, my role is to remain present but not to console; to lay bare my largely inconsequential pain, thereby tempering her own. In short, I must support Brooke by allowing her to support me.

Just one table over, a slim, vase-like brunette with a French manicure sits upright, tapping intently into her iPhone. This image, reinforced by a pair of firmly planted white earbuds, renders her with an air of accessibility roughly equivalent to that of Fort Knox. For a few moments, I continue to stare at what is essentially a carbon copy of nearly every attractive, single woman of marriageable age in San Francisco. I look to Brooke to see if she has noticed, but her focus has also relocated:

In a far corner of the café, a family nestles around a table. The woman appears to be in her twenties and has a beach-ball belly. A man in a dark sweater sits across from her. Between them, their curly-haired toddler bangs its little legs against a highchair. And here is a commonality that my friend and I do not share: while I lament over the distant shimmer of nail gloss, for Brooke, that family must glow with a yellow light.

Then again, like my careworn friend, life’s implacable currents do seem to run against me as I paddle upstream. This is partially my own fault, as I limit my pool to women younger than thirty-nine, a brutal irony that Brooke fully endorses. She understands that like her, I ultimately want to have a family. Unfortunately, in my experience, women generally seek a partner within five years of their own age, a parameter which places me out of the running given my slightly advanced years. Worse still, I live in a town that keeps getting younger as college grads move in from out of state. Like two trains passing in opposite directions, the speed at which I drift from the mean acceptable dating age is effectively doubled. And so it goes. With each grim statistic, the shores tighten around my diminishing pond.

Even if I do manage to land a date, my odds still do not improve. What if there is no chemistry? Maybe I look too much like her father, or not enough like her father. Some even inquire as to why I am still single at forty-five, though I wonder if ask themselves a similar question. Then there are the dates that spontaneously go sidewise: The former ballet dancer who was forty pounds heavier and at least five years older than her photo; the woman in six inch heels whose parting words indicated that I was half an inch too short; the neuroscientist who realized, four drinks and two appetizers in, that she just wasn’t ready to date.

Brooke pulls her attention away from the child and stares squarely into her hot chocolate. I wonder: Why can’t I make my friend happy? Isn’t that my real job? I consider telling a joke involving my stillborn pallor, but think better of it; I look old, and maybe that’s ok. Instead, I inwardly dialogue about the drive to date, to marry, to reproduce.

The vase-shaped brunette places her phone down long enough to sip her latte. Still, she appears disengaged from her environment: probably listening to a podcast or music. Like Brooke, I may only gaze at this luminous, living treasure. Like Brooke, I can’t seem to get anything to stick. Still, the brunette is not so different: it is probably no accident that she finds herself lounging in a public café, perhaps waiting for the right man to brave her defenses and boldly step into her life. I suppose in one way or another, we are all dancing to the sound of our biological clocks. At the end of the day, Brooke and I must process, audibly or not, the sheer ferocity of our single-minded, cell-driven desires, statistics be damned. Also on denial’s chopping block is the ease with which life’s blessings may come to others: here is a woman who could easily conceive a second or even third child, here is another who could get a date simply by unplugging her head and turning around.

Still, what right have I to complain? My odds of not only landing a successful date but conceiving another human being somewhere in the process seem magnitudes greater than Brooke’s chances of bringing a pregnancy to term. Is it truly fair to compare the tribulations of a forty-four-year-old man dating in San Francisco to the anguish and frustration of a woman attempting to conceive at the age of thirty-nine…anywhere? What do I know of hording saltines on the nightstand in order to settle my stomach first thing in the morning, of checking to see if there is blood in the toilet every time I use the bathroom?

“It’s all worth it,” Brooke once told me. “When I was pregnant with Quincy I told myself I would never do this again. But here I am, doing it again, and again and again.” Quincy. Her first child. Which leads me to the question I have never asked: With a fabulous husband and a gorgeous two-year-old, why submit herself to all of this pain? Why can’t Brooke remain satisfied with two-thirds of a complete family, while I am left to wake alone, dine alone, and return at night, every night, to a silent and darkened apartment?

Last week, Brooke told me how she had taught Quincy to swim. She described his high and happy squeal as his fat little arms splashed up and down in clear blue water. While my pond of possibilities shrinks, Brooke’s has grown into an ocean. For just as it is not about racking up dates or one-empty-night stands, it is not simply about having a baby, but also the love and joy baby brings. With one child, the world is hers. What will it become with two?

In the end, few of us will ever stop reaching for a goal if the reward we seek is greater than the pain involved in obtaining it. This is where Brooke and I truly meet in our shared experience. More than simple biology, we both harbor a bone-deep conviction that love and connection lie at the core of this overwhelming journey: that indefinable, ineffable you-and-me that rewards and enriches. Families grow, friendships deepen. What we seek is not propagation but an expansion, an emotional more-ness to life.

The girl with the phone smiles and removes her earbuds as a guy in khaki shorts and a collared shirt joins her table. They kiss. I feel a dull, inward pinch. Oh well. Seemingly on cue, the man in the dark sweater lifts his child from the highchair as Mom smiles and they ready to leave. I wonder if Brooke is relieved. Or is her mind in a place like mine, sparkling with fantasies of sitting down to coffee and cookies with our respective spouse and child, a child we will one day hear speak a first word or teach to swim? The family finishes gathering itself up and vanishes out the door. I watch them go. I catch Brooke watching me watch. She takes another sip of her hot chocolate, and smiles.

End.

Update: Brooke now has two children and is in her third trimester with her third.