* * *
It turns out that even two committed go-getters with a deep love and a robust work ethic can’t will themselves into being pregnant. Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward. For me and Barack, this was as surprising as it was disappointing. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t seem to come up with a pregnancy. For a while, I told myself it was simply an issue of access, the result of Barack’s comings and goings from Springfield. Our attempts at procreation took place not in service of important monthly hormonal markers but rather in concert with the Illinois legislative schedule. This, I figured, was one thing we could try to fix.
But our adjustments didn’t work, even with Barack flooring it up the interstate after a late vote so that he could hit my ovulation window and even after the senate went into its summer recess and he was home and available full-time. After many years of taking careful precautions to avoid pregnancy, I was now singularly dedicated to the opposite endeavor. I treated it like a mission. We had one pregnancy test come back positive, which caused us both to forget every worry and swoon with joy, but a couple of weeks later I had a miscarriage, which left me physically uncomfortable and cratered any optimism we’d felt. Seeing women and their children walking happily along a street, I’d feel a pang of longing followed by a bruising wallop of inadequacy. The only comfort was that Barack and I were living only about a block from Craig and his wife, who now had two beautiful children, Leslie and Avery. I found solace in dropping by to play and read stories with them.
If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.
One of these friends also steered me toward a fertility doctor whom she and her husband had used. Barack and I went in for exams, and when we later sat down with the doctor, he told us there was no discernible issue with either of us. The mystery of why we weren’t getting pregnant would remain just that. He suggested that I try taking Clomid, a drug meant to stimulate egg production, for a couple of months. When that didn’t work, he recommended we move to in vitro fertilization. We were inordinately lucky that my university health insurance would cover most of the bill.
It felt like having a high-stakes lottery ticket, only with science involved. By the time the preliminary medical work was finished, rather unfortunately, the state legislature had returned to its fall session, swallowing up my sweet, attentive husband and leaving me largely on my own to manipulate my reproductive system into peak efficiency. This would involve giving myself a regimen of daily shots over the course of several weeks. The plan was I’d administer first one drug to suppress my ovaries and then later a new drug to stimulate them, the idea being that they’d then produce a cascade of viable eggs.
All the work and uncertainty involved made me anxious, but I wanted a baby. It was a need that had been there forever. As a girl, when I’d grown tired of kissing the vinyl skin of my baby dolls, I’d begged my mother to have another baby, a real one, just for me. I promised I’d do all the work. When she wouldn’t go along with the plan, I’d hunted through her underwear drawer, searching for her birth control pills, figuring that if I confiscated them, maybe it would yield some results. It didn’t, obviously, but the point is I’d been waiting a long time for this. I wanted a family and Barack wanted a family, too, and now here I was alone in the bathroom of our apartment, trying, in the name of all that want, to screw up the courage to plunge a syringe into my thigh.
It was maybe then that I felt a first flicker of resentment involving politics and Barack’s unshakable commitment to the work. Or maybe I was just feeling the acute burden of being female. Either way, he was gone and I was here, carrying the responsibility. I sensed already that the sacrifices would be more mine than his. In the weeks to come, he’d go about his regular business while I went in for daily ultrasounds to monitor my eggs. He wouldn’t have his blood drawn. He wouldn’t have to cancel any meetings to have a cervix inspection. He was doting and invested, my husband, doing what he could do. He read all the IVF literature and would talk to me all night about it, but his only actual duty was to show up at the doctor’s office and provide some sperm. And then, if he chose, he could go have a martini afterward. None of this was his fault, but it wasn’t equal, either, and for any woman who lives by the mantra that equality is important, this can be a little confusing. It was me who’d alter everything, putting my passions and career dreams on hold, to fulfill this piece of our dream. I found myself in a small moment of reckoning. Did I want it? Yes, I wanted it so much. And with this, I hoisted the needle and sank it into my flesh.
* * *
About eight weeks later, I heard a sound that erased all traces of resentment: a swishing, watery heartbeat picked up on ultrasound, emanating from the warm cave of my body. We were pregnant. It was for real. Suddenly the responsibility and relative sacrifice meant something completely different, like a landscape taking on new colors, or all the furniture in a house being rearranged so that now everything appeared perfectly in place. I walked around with a secret inside me. This was my privilege, the gift of being female. I felt bright with the promise of what I carried.
I would feel this way right through, even as first-trimester fatigue left me drained, as my job stayed busy and Barack continued making his weekly treks to the state capital. We had our outward lives, but now there was something inward happening, a baby growing, a tiny girl. （Because Barack’s a fact guy and I’m a planner, finding out her gender was obligatory.） We couldn’t see her, but she was there, gaining in size and spirit as fall became winter and then became spring. That thing I’d felt—my envy for Barack’s separateness from the process—had now utterly reversed itself. He was on the outside, while I got to live the process. I was the process, indivisible from this small, burgeoning life that was now throwing elbows and poking my bladder with her heel. I was never alone, never lonely. She was there, always, while I was driving to work, or chopping vegetables for a salad, or lying in bed at night, poring over the pages of What to Expect When You’re Expecting for the nine hundredth time.
Summers in Chicago are special to me. I love how the sky stays light right into evening, how Lake Michigan gets busy with sailboats and the heat ratchets up to the point that it’s almost impossible to recall the struggles of winter. I love how in summer the business of politics slowly starts to go quiet and life tilts more toward fun.