Why I Don’t Call My Child a Miracle

This is the problem with the vocabulary of miracles when it comes to childbearing: It ends up equating failure of conception or birth with a divine curse.

It’s difficult deciding where to begin and then draw the line with fertility treatments. At the beginning, you tell yourself, if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. You imagine your life without a baby and all the traveling you and your husband will do together, how many books you’ll write. But as roadblocks litter your path, you hedge your initial position: If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen, sure, but why not try this first before giving up? And . . . this. And this, too.

You get accustomed to treatments, acclimatize yourself step by step. You grapple with questions of how comfortable you are with what you’re getting yourself into. While you wouldn’t balk at medical interventions to save a life, it’s another thing to rely on them to create a new one.

And as much as you hoped you could be casual about it, as much as you wish you could think through your decisions rationally, you can’t. There is fate, but there are also things you can do to massage your life into the future you want. Coax it in the right direction.

You are often exhausted without being able to pinpoint exactly why.

*

My story isn’t unique: My husband, Andrew, and I tried for a baby; nothing happened. After six months, I brought it up with my doctor. “Just in case!” I tried to say breezily, as if I wasn’t really concerned. She scheduled tests for both of us and as a result of Andrew’s sperm analysis, we jumped into IUI right away.

While problems are relatively simple to diagnose on the male side, they’re more opaque when it comes to women. It wasn’t uncommon for us to think we had a handle on our problems, only to get a call from a nurse with a prescription for a drug for me to take to regulate a hormonal issue I had no idea existed a month earlier. So when multiple rounds of IUI failed and another half year passed, the next step was IVF. In retrospect, it sounds methodological, like we were following a flowchart, but at the time it felt as though we were inching our way through a dark, twisty maze. I wasn’t sure where we’d end up or how long it would take for me to get pregnant or if I would get pregnant at all.

After our first IVF consultation, we came home with a thick folder of information. I wanted to know all the details, but I was intimidated, so I paged through the materials quickly until the description of the embryo transfer slowed me down.

During the transfer, the five-day-old blastocyst embryo is microscopic: less than 0.2 millimeters in diameter. It’s loaded into a catheter, inserted into the uterus and then squeezed out, where it will hopefully implant. I’d assumed the process of IVF was sturdy with science, but learning the exact measurements of the embryo made me realize we were creating something impossibly small, the size of the period at the end of this sentence. How would it not get crushed during all that human, error-prone handling? If someone accidentally sneezed, it might shatter. To be paying thousands of dollars for this seemed in vain, but we’d already gone so far down this path and besides, what else could we do?

The Brothers Grimm’s The Sleeping Beauty starts off, In times past there lived a King and Queen, who said to each other every day of their lives, “Would that we had a child!” and yet they had none. It’s not until the Queen is visited by a frog who prophesizes a daughter that they’re finally graced with one. Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina begins similarly: There once was a woman who wanted so very much to have a tiny little child, but she did not know where to find one. So she went to an old witch, and she said: “I have set my heart upon having a tiny little child. Please, could you tell me where I can find one?” The answer, it turned out, was a grain of barley that, when planted, produced a strange flower that unfurled itself to reveal a literal tiny little child.

That’s what I’d expected from the clinic: prophetic frogs, magic barley grains. Instead what we were given was cruder, more sterile. Synthetic hormones from a syringe. The snowy gradient of an ultrasound screen. Soft catheter tubing, a swab, a Petri dish. I wanted more. Something like a fairy tale; something more miraculous.

It’s difficult deciding where to begin and then draw the line with fertility treatments. 

This word miracle (“an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore attributed to a divine agency”) is used often when it comes to babies. Most frequently it’s used to explain the ordinary phenomenon of getting pregnant. For a word reserved for something extraordinary, it’s thrown around casually. “During the early months you may become more introspective as you consider the miracle going on inside you,” Dr. Sears advises mothers in the first section of The Healthy Pregnancy Book. Yet in the past five years, Canadians have, on average, given birth to 386,000 babies per year, more than a thousand each day. That’s a lot of miracles.

“Miracle” is also used frequently in the world of infertility. The first babies born in North America from IVF lived in Oakville, just outside of Toronto. It was 1982, four years after the first successful IVF, and their parents had traveled to the UK to work directly with the doctors who had pioneered the fertility treatment. They returned to Canada to give birth to twin boys, made newspaper headlines, and then went on with their lives. When one of the twins eventually became a father, a handful of articles popped up. His baby (a perfectly average seven-pound, twelve-ounce boy) and the conception (“the old-fashioned way”) were not particularly notable, but since his birth had been part of a new narrative arc, the birth of his own child tied a neat bow on the circle of life. He demurred, though. “Every birth is a bit of a miracle,” he told the London Free Press. But if a regular pregnancy is a miracle, then one that happens against all odds must be even more miraculous.

And, at its heart, this is the problem with being accustomed to the vocabulary of miracles when it comes to childbearing: It ends up equating failure of conception or birth with a divine curse. If you’re trying but not having a baby, there isn’t just something biologically wrong with you; there’s also something cosmically, spiritually, wrong.

Maybe this is why I was so tired.

*

When our first IVF attempt failed, I knew I needed distractions. Andrew and I took a trip to New York City and reveled in traveling when you have no responsibilities, when you’re not concerned about whether or not you should drink, when you don’t have to rush to the clinic by 6:30 every morning so that you’re not late for work. Going through infertility had made our relationship stronger—the way Andrew was able to make me laugh when I felt my worst, or how he would come with me to an appointment without hesitation for moral support, even if he wasn’t required, reaffirmed this—but it was hard to focus on the more light-hearted parts of our relationship when our lives revolved so tightly around fertility treatments.

Finally, I signed up for pottery classes. I said it was because I’d always wanted to learn, but deep down I knew it was more because if I couldn’t make a baby, I could at least make something else while I waited. I was also sick of being stuck inside my head, of worrying, of imagining all the worst possible scenarios. Pottery classes, then, would be perfect. For three hours a week, my mind would have a break from those thoughts as I worked with my hands. Even better, I would have tangible proof of my efforts.

I secretly thought I would be good at pottery. I had vague memories of easily molding shapes out of play dough as a child. Despite my reproductive difficulties, I’d forgotten that the simplest things are often the hardest to make. A bowl, a plate. Shapes you should be able to make from muscle memory, but when you try to replicate them, you realize you were never taught how to do so in the first place.

At the first class, the teacher showed our small group how to pinch off some clay and knead it until it was pliable. Once it was ready for the wheel, it was time to center. You take your lump of clay and smack it down in the middle of the wheel. You then cup it between your wet hands and as the wheel spins you form the lump into a dome. If you don’t center the clay properly, it will show in your finished project. Your pots will be off-kilter; they will warp, or worse, collapse into a wet pile of clay so that you’ll be forced to start over again from scratch. Our teacher demonstrated a few times and then made us try.

“I did it!” I said that first class, proud of myself for mastering the skill so quickly. Our teacher could eyeball a wheel from across a room and tell if the clay on it was wobbly.

“Great try,” she said. She came over and fixed it with a quick sleight of hand. “See?”

It seemed so simple when she centered, but as much as I tried, I could never do it myself. I’ll figure it out by the third class, I thought. No, the fourth. But it wasn’t intuitive to me, and whenever a bowl went wonky, it could be traced back to my failure to center the clay. Often I would try my best, and then ask my teacher to tweak it so I could just move on to the next step.

When my bowls and cups were glazed and fired, I loved them, imperfections and all. But a part of me was sheepish for not having fully centered them myself, that they were all made with a little help. Was it cheating? Did I really need help for everything, from baby-making to now this, what was supposed to be a light-hearted hobby, a distraction? Did it matter? They were mostly my creations. I just needed a boost at the very beginning.

*

Months passed. Another IVF cycle didn’t work; I signed up for another session of pottery classes. We had a frozen embryo transfer scheduled, but I was wary. Initially, it had been comforting knowing that it was possible to bank embryos. It meant that the physical lengths I went to during the egg retrieval wouldn’t go to waste. But I’d also found it hard to believe that an embryo could not only survive a deep freeze, but then go on to flourish. Humans were not designed to thrive in sustained cold; other mammals can hibernate in the winter, but we can’t, our systems don’t allow it.

As the date approached, I revisited our informational packet. Our clinic used a freezing technique discovered in the early 2000s called vitrification. Unlike the old method, vitrification is practically instantaneous, a freeze so quick that ice crystals that might corrupt the embryo’s cells don’t get the chance to form. The word for the process is unusually poetic too, especially in comparison to the scientific lexicon of fertility treatments. Vitrine, a glass cabinet to store your precious things, your fine-boned china, your Fabergé eggs. I imagined a Christmas display of shimmering glassine ornaments, or a window on a winter day, the pattern of crystallized ice against the glass intricate and beautiful. The informal term for a child born from a frozen embryo is “snow baby,” one of those overly cutesy phrases you’ll see on infertility message boards, embarrassing until you fall for it too as you picture a ruddy-cheeked baby swaddled in soft furs, nestled in a snowdrift. You have been walking through a storm for days, for months, for years, and then you look down. Oh, there you are! Come, let me warm you up.

The day before the transfer, Andrew and I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario. A Henry Moore retrospective had just gone up and we needed the distraction. I’d always admired Moore’s work and the way he scored and etched plaster casts to look like worn-down bone. At the gallery, I stopped in front of one of his larger works, Woman, a giant seated nude of a woman with huge breasts and hips and then, up top, a tiny pin of a head. Many of Moore’s sculptures focus on the female form, but this one, I read, was specifically a tribute to fertility. “The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasize the massiveness of the body,” he’d written about her. “If the head had been any larger, it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture.”

Standing there, I felt like the complete opposite of Woman. That the head wasn’t an important part of his representation of fertility bothered me. If I’d made the sculpture myself, the head would’ve been huge, swollen with thoughts and worries and hopes. It was as important as those hips, those breasts. I was suddenly furious. Fuck you, Henry Moore, I thought. I will prove you wrong.

I’d forgotten that the simplest things are often the hardest to make. 

A few days after our transfer, I became aware of my breasts in a way I hadn’t been before. It was probably nothing, I told myself, but they felt like a bigger part of me, emphasized, almost grudgingly, like Woman’s. The feeling never went away and two weeks later I woke up early to take a pregnancy test. Andrew was still in bed and when he heard me gasping as I walked back to the bedroom clutching the stick, he assumed the worst. Instead I sat down next to him and showed him what the test had indicated almost immediately after I’d peed on it. Two lines.

And then, I was pregnant. The miracle was not so much that it happened, but that the time waiting to get that point—just over two years—suddenly softened, stopped feeling like such a tax, a burden. In the same way that the pain of childbirth loses its intensity after the baby is born, the sharpness of infertility shifted from a sting to a duller throb. The pain didn’t go away, but it became easier to ignore.

*

I took note of another Moore sculpture that day in the gallery. Mother and Child was inspired by Moore’s wife nursing his daughter. Unlike his other motherhood sculptures, all rounded corners and soft curves, this one is almost violent. The baby’s face is bird-like, its sharp beak lunging for its mother’s breast. The mother, her head with a serrated edge to it, clutches the strange creature tightly. Informally, Moore called the sculpture Nora because when he saw his daughter at his wife’s breast, he thought it looked like she was gnawing her. “Gnaw her” = “Nora.” Unlike Woman, this sculpture didn’t anger me. I suspected there was maybe a kind of truth to it.

In the early days after our baby was born, I sometimes thought of Mother and Child. Usually it would be in the middle of the night when we’d all be in bed together in a sleepy twilight haze. The way my daughter lunged towards my breast, ferocious even though her eyes were closed, was enough to remind me that we were animals. Our behavior was pure animal instinct: her feeding, my feelings of protectiveness, the surge of overwhelming love. It was all natural, despite the lengths we took to get there, despite the hours spent in the sterile environment of a clinic downtown.

I eventually looked into why Moore was so obsessed with fertility and motherhood. I’d assumed it was because he was awash in these images, that his life had a fecundity to it that naturally spilled over into his work. But it turned out not to be the case: Moore had one daughter, Mary, who was born when he was forty-seven. His wife, Irina, was thirty-nine, and had had a series of miscarriages before Mary arrived. While Moore had already made some female form sculptures, it was Mary’s birth that marked the increase.

I realized that this made more sense than my original assumption. Obsessions are rarely steeped in what we have in abundance; they’re based on things we want but can’t have, or that we had and then lost, or what we finally manage to get, but only barely, by the skin of our teeth.

*

So what was the right formula for making a baby? Was it waiting for someone divine outside ourselves to say, it is now your turn; you are blessed? Was it something complicated and subtle, like turning a wet lump of clay into a smooth, sturdy vessel? Was it the sum product of x number of early-morning clinic appointments and y vials of medication? Even after giving birth, the question weighed on my mind. I had been desperate for a clear path, even in hindsight, and I wanted to summarize it with the simple elegance of a fairy tale.

Eventually, I came across Frida Kahlo’s painting, Henry Ford Hospital. Kahlo never had children, but had many miscarriages, and the painting was an explicit representation of one of her experiences. It had occurred when she’d accompanied Diego Rivera to Detroit, where he’d been commissioned to paint frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Art. In the painting, Kahlo is crying, curled up naked on a hospital bed with blood blooming on the white sheets. She holds six strings each tied to different objects hovering around her like balloons: a fetus, a grey snail, an anatomical model of the female torso, a stainless steel machine, an orchid, a pelvis. They represented different parts of the miscarriage—it wasn’t just about the fetus, but also the slowness of the situation, the medical intervention, the impacts on her body, and also, a glimmer of beauty. While the painting depicted a miscarriage, I could easily relate my experience with infertility to it. The assortment of objects was a more accurate way to describe what goes into conceiving a child when you can’t simply rely on divine order.

Ultimately, the things that helped me understand the complexity of what I felt, of what had happened, were completely unrelated to the actual mechanics of reproduction: pottery, sculptures, a painting. Something as simple as a fairy tale never could have captured it all. But my favorite stories were never fairy tales, anyway. I’ve always preferred the circuitous ones, the ones with plot twists, minor characters and surprise endings where happiness isn’t a guarantee, but a privilege. And so, despite acknowledging that good fortune had a part in the conception of our daughter, I don’t think I can say it was a miracle. It was more than that.

*

This essay originally appeared in Through, Not Around: Stories of Infertility and Pregnancy Loss (Dundurn, Jan. 2019), edited by Allison McDonald Ace, Ariel Ng Bourbonnais, and Caroline Starr.