On Violations, Macarons, and the Pursuit of Beauty I Can Control

It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and it had been trashed in my absence. My resentment was as precise as any recipe.

I’m not a likely candidate for a baking hobby. I can’t eat gluten. I’m married to a Type 1 diabetic. In my culinary life, I have come to disregard recipes for being too bossy. So when I picked up baking, it didn’t just feel sudden; it felt random. Stolen, maybe, from a better woman, a woman with no dishes in her sink.

First, it was a chocolate cake. It was pretty, but too simple. Then came the macarons. Hundreds of them. Pale pastel treats topped with edible gold leaf or glitter, beautiful and intricate. A worthy technical challenge to cut my teeth on. Too hard for most people, but not too hard for me.

They’re temperamental. That’s what every recipe says. They crack, collapse, are prone to fail. Search results are dense with guides for troubleshooting your macronage. I loved making them immediately.

Later, I’d realize the timing of this new obsession was no coincidence.

The first time I made macarons was shortly after a miscarriage. The macarons failed. I’d folded the batter far too many times; added too much rosewater, too much dye. They tasted like soap. They emerged from the oven shriveled and flat. No “feet,” as the ruffles at the bottom edge of the shells are called, a result gleaned from proper baking. I scraped the delicate pink remains into the trash. I was undaunted.

*

We started fertility treatment in the summer of 2018. Tests made it clear my husband and I would not get pregnant naturally. Ever. I wasn’t surprised by the news. There were no obvious clues; it was just something I knew, the same way I knew I was in love, or that a recipe called for too much salt. What my mother calls “women’s intuition.”

I didn’t go into treatment with any misgivings. The fertility center we chose boasted special care for women of color, glowing Yelp reviews, and a doctor educated at both Harvard and Yale. It did not occur to me to enter this arrangement with my antennae up—and even now, if that feels naïve, it doesn’t feel foolish. We should be able to trust professionals with the care of our bodies.

“Pregnancy is going to be hard for you,” the doctor told me. A signal that I was being too precious, too fussy. A gentle rebuke. I mistook it for candor.

We should be able to trust professionals with the care of our bodies.

It was the beginning of a process wrought with lies by omission, choices made on my behalf but not in my best interest. My chief concern that day, the day of our first consultation, was all the medication. It was a lot. But we plowed ahead anyway. Sure, this would be hard. All pregnancies are hard. That was okay, I told myself. I can handle hard.

I took a long and extreme list of medications leading up to the surgery in which my eggs would be extracted. For the entire week leading into the procedure, I was in so much pain—like menstrual cramps, but more insistent, sharper—that my life was suddenly limited. No coffee, no sex, no alcohol, no exercise. No sudden movements. These were the rules. I was constantly nauseated, forever teetering on the edge of vomit.

“Is this normal?” I would ask.

“All bodies are different,” the doctor would tell me.

The subtext was: Something is wrong with yours.

Later, another doctor would name what happened to me: Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome. An injury caused by overmedication. My ovaries had been pushed into such artificial productivity that they could not bear the weight of their own fruit. My surgery date was bumped up, because I was growing so many eggs. I was deeply uncomfortable, but I could handle that. I could handle that for a baby.

*

Macarons are essentially a French meringue with almond flour and powdered sugar folded into them. Their reputation is that they’re difficult, but I’d argue they just require extra attention. Get to know your oven; learn if it runs hot. Fewer folds of your macronage are better, but too few and they’ll be misshapen. Don’t bake on an especially humid day if you can help it.

Macarons are not hard, so much as they’re particular.

No one has been more pleased by my new hobby than my friends. They reap the benefits of my obsession, eyes closed as they chew, as if they have to ward away all else in order to fully reckon with such indulgence. This is the chief delight in baking macarons: the sharing. Pass the plate around, bear witness to joy. All that hard work—piping, filling, decorating—is worth it in an instant.

*

I felt it as soon as the medications wore off. Pain so acute, it pushed a moan from my throat. I’d been sitting on our couch when I realized that I needed to get to bed, I needed to get into the bed that fucking instant, or I’d never get there; the pain would only get worse, and I would be stuck, and there would be no respite. My husband was out walking the dog. I staggered down the short hallway alone, moaning and weeping, my hand dragging along the wall for support, until I finally reached the bed.

We called the doctor. “More meds,” he said. I took them.

Macarons are delicate and lovely. I can take the care with them that was not taken with my body. 

When I was seventeen, I had a spinal tap. I didn’t cry. When I was sixteen, a car accident left me in a neck brace for three weeks, and when I cried it was from shock, not pain. In my college softball career, when I took an unexpected line drive directly to my face, I didn’t cry—I laughed, which I’m told is a common reaction to the concussion I’d just sustained.

So when I say that the pain only got worse, when I say it is the only time I’ve wept from solely from pain, when I say it was the worst pain of my life, I mean it. It was ovarian torsion—which is when the ovary twists, cutting off blood flow from the body. I was put on an IV drip of painkillers again, just to manage. I was bedridden for two full weeks.

“Is this normal?” my husband asked.

“Some women just handle pain differently,” the nurse replied.

That subtext again—it isn’t hard for everyone; it is just hard for me. The problem was not the treatment; the problem was that I was weak.

*

My resentment was as precise as any recipe.

Macarons require order. They create pleasure. They are delicate and lovely, like a baby’s toes. I can take the care with them that was not taken with my body.

The months of attempts with that doctor left my body raw and aching. It felt as though I had been evicted from my own body, and that it had been trashed in my absence.

That feeling of being violated in absentia wasn’t new to me. It brought me back to years earlier, in my bed, the morning after being sexually assaulted. I’d woken up with the kind of pounding hangover one expects after drinking to the point of sickness. What I didn’t expect was to see him. A trusted friend, but not a chosen sexual partner. He told me we’d hooked up, that he’d seen “everything I had to offer.”

I went to the bathroom after he left and found drops of the thin, red blood of injury on the tissue. My body had been trashed, and I hadn’t even been there while it happened.

I wish I could say that I put a stop to the treatment I was receiving from that doctor, but it wasn’t me who raised the flag. It was my husband. He demanded we get a second opinion.

Doctors are reluctant to critique each other. At first, she assumed we remembered things incorrectly. But my husband is a thorough note-taker. And slowly, over the course of the phone call, it became clear that all of this had been unnecessary. Because the fertility issues lie with my husband’s body and not mine, medicating me at all had been a choice made to ease scheduling for the doctor’s office. It did more to hinder our chances than improve them. But having tightly scheduled cycles allows for more patients. And more patients means more money.

It was terrible. And worst of all, it didn’t need to be. My trust had been betrayed, again. All that suffering was for nothing.

Medical mistreatment around fertility is undoubtedly more common than we realize, just as sexual assault is more common than many believe. We trust doctors, just as we trust men—historically, the people with authority. We trust that it is worth it.

*

“I couldn’t make a baby, so I made macarons” is too simple. “I was raped, so I made macarons” is also reduction to the point of absurdity.

But with no precious, tiny shoes to buy, no birth announcements to send, no baby bump to show, I post endless pictures of these confections, delicate and precise.

Medical mistreatment around fertility is undoubtedly more common than we realize, just as sexual assault is more common than many believe. 

That I would be drawn to macarons and baking, with all its ladylike connotations, makes sense to me in a way. My body cannot seem to achieve its sole feminine purpose, but I can master this specifically femme art. It’s a gentle hobby, interwoven with a dedication to aesthetic, to details that lend beauty. It is done with the express purpose of bringing others happiness, a gesture devoid of self, the ultimate maternal posture. Maybe I fancied that I was offering something precious to a child who was never born.

The best pain, we’re told, is the pain that creates something beautiful. Pearls and cherry blossoms. Childbirth.

So what is there to do in the wake of pain that makes nothing? There was no result from my treatment, no baby with delicate toes and slowly blinking eyes. There is no bright side to rape. There is only me, and a recipe that can be endlessly iterated. Me, and the beauty I can control.