Page 18 of Storm in a D Cup

Surreal, Julian had called my pregnancy. It turned out he was right. It was a surreal,three-weekpregnancy, followed by a major, major period. And according to my gynecologist, Dottoressa Bardotti, probably one of my last.

The thought was unbearable and I swallowed and nodded in a business-like manner as she sat us down with my file and test results. When I explained our situation she blinked. I tried to convince myself it was just a reflex or a spasm, but who was I kidding?

‘Hmmm…’ she said, flipping through my file, and by the time she looked up I was hanging on the edge of my seat as Julian squeezed my hand under the table, paler than my grandmother’s linen embroidered sheets.

‘So you’re looking to get pregnant,’ she said matter-of-factly and I almost expected her to add, like Judy,What the hell for?‘Well, given your age I suggest we get a move on. Every month is precious, you understand.’

No, I didn’t understand. I had always beenveryfertile. If it hadn’t been for birth control I’d have stocked the entire NFL, given enough time.

And now this woman was telling me I was a monthly time bomb, waiting to go off; that is, to dry up into arid, horrid menopause? She was practically saying if we didn’t crack our eggs pronto there wouldbeno baby. Great. Why did Julian decidenowthat he wanted a child? Why hadn’t he told me before, preferably seven years ago when I was still bursting with eggs like a bloody Mexican piñata?

I had been happy with Julian and the two kids. But now, as you can imagine, hearing the doctor say that I couldn’t do it was a slap in the face to me. I had failure-phobia. Not because I had never failed before, but because I had failed only too many times. Hearing Dottoressa Bardotti say that becoming parents wouldn’t exactly be a cinch because we only had a margin of virtually what – twelve, twenty-four more periods if I was lucky – triggered in me a number of contrasting, gut-wrenching feelings. She explained that the menarche occurs when a girl has stored at least seventeen percent of body fat. As you can imagine, having always been quite plump, I’d had my period very young, meaning that I would very probably face menopause earlier than most women.

So there you go – once again, fat had managed, even retroactively, to ruin my life. There was no escaping from it. My weight had kept me a social pariah throughout my school years. It kept me standing against the wall at my high school prom (Peter DeVita, the closest thing I’d ever have to a boyfriend had just moved away and Tony Esposito had dropped out, thank God). I thought I could beat the effects of fat on my life with a good job, but even then fat had left me sweating buckets on my first job interviews, making me look like a real loser. Fat did nothing good for me.

But I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Farthington who didn’t care about looks and just wanted the job done. He got me as far as I wanted. But life was not full of Mr. Farthingtons. Life was teeming with young, skinny-assed women having children right, left and center.

Sometimes I wished I could be a thin, non-existent paper doll, like one of Maddy’s childhood, pretty-in-pink, lifeless creations. You know, all legs and no room for any organs whatsoever, much less a heart to break, or a soul to ache.

Paul and Maddy would sit for hours on end at our kitchen table back in Boston and draw all sorts of outfits for these size zero sticks. Everything looked good on them. Funny how no one’s ever made a pregnant paper doll. I imagined drawing one with an eight-month bulge. That would be fun.

And to think I’d got over all this. To think I had finally reached a stage where I was OK with everything. But according to my doctor, my weight was still too much. Countless doctors had told me I was never going to be a stick figure, so seven years ago, at eighty-five kilos and thirty-six years of age I had come to terms with myself and had started to accept myself – and more desserts as well.

I’dtrieddieting but my weight yo-yoed miserably. Even when I temporarily got back to seventy-five kilograms, I was always told that The Former Me would always have the upper hand. Because my lifestyle as a fat woman had taken charge of me, ruining me for good.

And if at first having Julian’s baby wasn’t exactly on my Top Five Things To Do Before I Die, now it had become anecessity. Not just because I’d wanted to make Julian happy, but also because I needed to succeed in this relationship. My previous marriage had left me devastated. I couldn’t be a loser anymore. I had lost most of the battles in my life and was just beginning to savor an equilibrium within myself. The kids were doing great. Julian was doing great. Me, I wasn’t so sure anymore. Especially if I failed at this as well.

And now when I thought about it (because now, dammit, I could hardly think of anything else), I actuallymissedthe nausea, the all-nighters, the endless, sleepless nights of dragging myself out of bed and looking at my bump in the mirror, trying to guess what sex it was, what he or she would look like and sound like. The memories of pregnancy had returned with a nostalgic sweetness, waiting to become a mother. Again. Was I nuts or what?

I must have been, if I was willing to do it all over again, even the hard parts. Pregnancy was nothing, compared to what came after that – the parenting.Thatwas the hard part, the part that absorbed you completely, sucked you into the parallel universe of multiple sacrifices and absolute self-effacement.

*

My doctor gave us a list of tests to run, first of all – you guessed it – Julian’s sperm. It turned out to be super-sperm (why was I not surprised?) – particularly lively and healthy. I could almost imagine them not swimming butshootingaround in the Petri dish, showing off.Look at me! Wee! I can zing and dart across the universe! Yay! I’m Super-sperm!

And all while my little,oldeggs watched in awe, thinking, ‘Oh, he’ll never want to stick aroundus!’

Well, at least we now knew it was all my fault. And so the ordeal began. By ordeal I mean a one-thousand-two-hundred-calorie-per-day diet to up my chances of conceiving.

As per Dottoressa Bardotti, there was no point in IVF or anything of the sort if I weighed what I weighed. Prior to the procedure I’d have to take fertility drugs that would have the same effect on me as on a cow (yes, she really said that), that is, none whatsoever, unless I lost weight.Lots of it.

But because time was running out, I took hormones against my doctor’sprofessionaladvice, although, between you and me, she said, ‘What the heck, go for it – it’s now or never.’ I guess female solidarity stretched beyond professional boundaries. Fine by me.

So if on one side I was supposed to be losing weight, on the other side they were fattening me up with artificial crap intended to make me more fertile but in actuality was only making me more bloated. And turning me into a raging grump. No one could say anything to me that sounded remotely related to confrontation, and even the slam of a door would ignite me and I’d burst into tears.

‘Sweetheart,’ Julian said. ‘I don’t want you in this state. Let’s not do this.’ To his credit, he was concerned for me. But after weeks of munching on carrots and rice cakes, I had passed the point of no return. Reverting to my previous eating habits would’ve been bliss, but I didn’t want to blow the whole thing off and dash Julian’s hopes. He’d done so much for me in the past seven years. Now I wanted to do this for him.

6

Hysterosalpingography Hysteria

To be on the safe side, and because I couldn’t believe it was only my fat ass stopping us from having a baby when all around me enormous women my age were getting pregnant, I had some routine tests done to make sure all my hardware was in place.

The first, a hysterosalpingogram, was to determine whether my tubes were clogged or not via sticking a catheter way up there with a dye that spread all around and into them. If the dye reached the end of my tubes unhindered, it meant they weren’t blocked and we were home free.

They wouldn’t let Julian in with me because of the X-rays so I lay sprawled on a table with my feet up in the stirrups while a guy I’d never met before (I know I’m a bit old-fashioned but at least ahellowould have sufficed) told me it wasn’t going to hurt in the least and shoved this contraption way up inside me.

‘Yeowhh!’I hollered, seeing spots, and they all stood above me bewildered while I was doing my best not to pass out from the pain as he ripped my insides apart.

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