I Was a Mother Once, For 9 Weeks and Five Days

I was a mother once, for nine weeks and five days anyway.

Or  seven weeks and five days if you count from the date the doctors plucked my eggs from my uterus and fertilized them in a Petri dish with my husband’s sperm, and then re-deposited “the most promising looking one” back inside me two days later.  (Pregnancy, I learned then, is medically dated from the date of your last period, the “start of your last cycle,” not the date of conception.  In this case, since the doctors themselves presided over the moment of conception, I know that my first and only offspring sprung into existence exactly 14 days after my last cycle commenced.)

Or maybe I was technically a mother for only six weeks and five days, if you don’t count the last week, the seven days during which my body became a maternal mausoleum, a secret graveyard holding fast to the little embryo whose heart had stopped beating, the doctors guessed, two days before the ultrasound that confirmed it had gone quiet.  One hundred and sixty eight hours, approximately, from the time my “missed miscarriage” (when the fetus dies in utero but the mother’s body does not spontaneously miscarry) began to the time the same doctor who had, almost two months earlier, removed my egg for fertilization, now began to administer anaesthesia through an IV in my arm, so I’d be unconscious during the egg’s second, and final, removal.

I can’t say I acquired a great wealth of wisdom during my almost-ten weeks of motherhood.  But I did learn a few unexpected things (beyond the meanings of all the acronyms on the “over 40 IVF online listserv” I had joined, being 41 and new to the processes both of trying to get pregnant and facing infertility.  Acronyms like TTC, ET, 2WW, and PUPO, or “pregnant until proven otherwise,” really just a kinder interpretation of the two week wait during IVF, when you know you have an embyo inside you but you don't know it it has implanted or gone still).

I learned―the night after the ultrasound that confirmed the fetus’s heart had stopped, as my husband lay his cheek against my stomach and cried silently and the banal love-song coming from the television made my chest burst with grief like when I was a teenager mourning a crush-gone-bad, only it now felt a thousand times worse―that motherhood means a whole new way to have a broken heart.

Pigeon Envy

The last time we tried to make a baby in a petri dish, a pigeon laid its eggs behind the air-conditioning unit on our balcony, right in the middle of downtown Osaka.  I had gotten my period that morning, meaning that one more attempt at natural conception had failed, and it was time to start IVF.  It was mother’s day.   I took the eggs as a personal affront.

“I can’t believe the audacity of that bird,” I thought. “Procreating on my property. When I’m reproductively challenged.

Two days later, I started my shots.

My husband T―a Japanese salary-man who couldn’t be more different from the Jewish-doctor-son-in-law my parents had envisioned, but who’s the best thing that ever happened to me―grumbled when he saw the offending orbs sitting mock-innocently on the balcony floor. But eventually he bowed to the inevitable. “We have to at least try to save them,” I argued when he suggested removing them.

“Even if that evil bird did steal my eggs.”

So T builds a cardboard nest, pulling out old Sanyo boxes from our futon closet .  He dons rubber gloves and a mask. (“Don’t get bird flu!” I yell stupidly as he steps onto the balcony) and puts the eggs and some twigs in the box.

Every morning after that, I shuttle to the clinic to get my shots―because although in the US, women are allowed to give themselves their own hormone injections, apparently in Japan, infertile women can't be trusted with sharp objects. Then I sit at home trying to work. The pigeon and I pass the time side-by-side, she perched in her little box just outside the glass, warming her eggs, me on the couch inside, tapping the computer keys.  Every so often, I put my laptop down, slide open the door, and try to see what’s happening beneath her.  She stares sideways at me, blinks her beady eyes.

"We're both creatures out of nature,” I announce to her one afternoon as she fidgets.   “You’re just a silly bird trying to hatch your babies behind the air-conditioning unit of an apartment eight stories high, in a huge, polluted urban maze, tucked inside a Japanese salaryman’s discarded cardboard box.

“And I’m a 41-year-old woman with ‘poor ovarian response, trying to get knocked up by a Petri-dish and an army of doctors who don’t speak my language.”

She cocks her head away from me, stares into the bowels of the air-conditioner, rocks lightly on her genetic loot.

At the clinic, the doctors tell me that some follicles are developing, although more slowly than average.  “Well, my eggs are growing, slowly,” I tell the pigeon.

“But better than they expected,” I add quickly.

She blinks blankly at me. Later, when she flies away on one of her pigeon-errands, I peek into the box. The eggs lie there, silent, white, obscenely oval.

The morning before my egg retrieval, when they will puncture the four follicles that have finally grown and suck out the oocytes inside them for “remote fertilization,” I slide open the glass to check the pigeon.  There’s a broken shell in the box, but the other egg is hidden beneath the bird. 

When I meet T  on the subway platform later, he asks excitedly, “Did you see the pigeon? The egg?”  He has taken the afternoon off from work so he can go to the clinic with me.

I grab his hand.  A housewife and some dark-suited salarymen shift slightly away, noting the public affection without doing anything as gauche, in the lexicon of Japanese manners, as staring.

“Yes! What did she do?  Did she smash the egg herself?” I sound disapproving, but secretly I’m a little relieved that perhaps, after all, she’s not going to turn out to be the better mother.

“No,” T laughs.  “It hatched. She’s sitting on it.”

“Oh,” I say, relieved but twistedly, a little disappointed.   “Well, that doesn’t seem like very good mothering, to sit on your babies.”

“It’s what pigeons do to keep them warm, like with their eggs” he says, rubbing my palm with his thumb as the signal for the oncoming train sounds. It’s followed by a voice over the loudspeaker, crisply offering information, or maybe warning, in a blur of words I cannot decipher. 


The chicks learned to fly a few weeks later. They were practicing taking off when I took the HPT on the 14th day and saw a faint blue line.

They were long gone by the time our embryo’s heart stopped, which the doctors estimate was at 8 weeks, 5 days.  They told me at my 9-week scan.  Or they tried to make me know, with their broken English, their Japanese insistence on politeness-at-all-times:  the examining doctor didn’t ever actually say, “I’m sorry, your baby has died.”  He just kept shaking his head and sighing, sucking in his breath, moving the ultrasound wand around inside me, shifting the screen so I could see the stillness splayed across it, waiting for me to say something.

But I wouldn’t.  I wasn’t going to be the one to birth those words.

This weekend, T and I are celebrating our anniversary.  And today, after months of recovering from the miscarriage and trying everything possible to make another pregnancy occur, my period has once again announced itself.  With its impeccable timing.

So soon I’ll start going back to the clinic, the same place where they knocked me out with anesthesia and scraped the little embryo out of me last time.

I'll have shots every morning for around two weeks. A few days later, I'll most likely have another embryo inside me, another little being who’s half-me, half-my-beloved.  I'll stay around the apartment resting, hoping that if I don't knock about too much, the embryo might implant.  Maybe I'll go to the balcony door then, look out to where the pigeon and her babies used to be, and touch my belly, wondering whether life stirs or has gone still inside.