The Longest Date: Life as a Wife by Cindy Chupack

Author:Cindy Chupack [Chupack, Cindy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Retail
ISBN: 9780670025534
Amazon: 148056804X
Barnesnoble: 148056804X
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2014-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

We’re Having a Maybe!

Twas the day after Christmas, and I was reading Newsweek’s cover story on diet and fertility when I stood up, ripped the roof off a gingerbread house, and ate it, like Godzilla.

This was not something the cover story recommended, by the way. It was, however, a reaction to something the cover story recommended—namely, that you shouldn’t eat a lot of red meat if you were trying to get pregnant.

I was, as it happened, trying to get pregnant. I’d been trying for the past two and a half years. I also had a steak on the grill, a petite filet that was going to be my lunch before I decided to have the gingerbread house instead.

“Trying” is a good word for this process. At first, “trying” just meant sex without birth control, but when you marry at forty, “trying” quickly becomes more trying, and eventually Ian and I had enlisted the requisite army of experts, most of whom insurance didn’t cover—but of course, you can’t put a price on a baby.

You can put a price, though, on not having a baby. By now that was running us close to $45,000 in credit card debt.

So by the time I was reading that Newsweek article, I’d done it all . . . drugs, shots, suppositories, IUI, IVF, that test with the blue dye, acupuncture, stinky teas, human growth hormone injections. . . . Once, while we were driving to see a doctor in Beverly Hills, Ian asked what kind of doctor he was, and I said, “I don’t know, but someone said to see him, so we’re seeing him!” It was that doctor, incidentally, who told me to visualize my husband’s face on a cartoon sperm with arms welcoming my egg to him. We decided the guy was a quack, so I saw him only two times a week for about four months.

The thing is, when you’re racing your biological clock, people can tell you pretty much anything and you’ll do it. At that point I was still worrying that I needed to track down some saint named Amachi so I could bring her red bananas. Recently a friend had said something about inversions—standing on your head. He hadn’t been sure if you were supposed to do it before sex, during, or just in general, but the method had worked for two women he knew, so I figured I had to start standing on my head, too. I’d probably visualize Ian’s face on a cartoon sperm while I was at it, not because I was on board with that. It was just a hard image to shake.

I did have limits, though. Several friends had highly recommended a fertility doctor in the Valley, but I would go to China for a baby before I’d go to the Valley.

We had become accustomed to paying people to tell us we weren’t pregnant, so it was almost revolutionary that, for the holidays that year, we made the decision to return to the old-fashioned method of not getting pregnant on our own.

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