Operagirl

DON’T FERTILITEASE ME The three months leading up to my 40th birthday were like a slow countdown to D-Day. There is something about that particular birthday that feels like a day of reckoning – a time to take stock of the first half of your life and face what you have accomplished or royally screwed up. When I had cast forward in my imagination as a young girl, it had never occurred to me that I could end up an unmarried 40 year old with no kids. In my teens, my sister and I used to fantasize about how old we would be in the year 2000. “Can you believe I will be 35 in the year 2000? I bet I’ll be married with 3 kids and be famous, probably a rock star.” Wrong, wrong and wrong. When I danced to Prince’s “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999”, I never dreamed that I would be single, living with a hairy roommate named Harry, no kids, not even marginally famous, and being contacted by short 50 year-olds on match.com. Every time my mother asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate my 40th, I felt slightly suicidal. “Do you want to see Jersey Boys on Broadway?” “No.” “How about we get two pound lobsters at the Palm-Two?” “God, no.” “Well, honey, you have to decide on something, or it’ll be too late to get reservations.” This didn’t feel like an out-to-dinner birthday. This felt like a bury-yourself-in-dirt birthday. A crawl-into-the-bottom-of-your-closet-and-cover-yourself-with-clothes-so-nobody-finds-you birthday. Can you make a reservation for that? This was no time for a celebration. This was an emergency. Like an ambulance should arrive with a handsome boyfriend with commitment potential and good genes giving me mouth to mouth resuscitation, but a Broadway show and a piece of cake brought by the waitress? Fuck no. It occurred to me that I was most likely at fault for ruining my own life. I had always wanted to be a mother, to have a family. What if all the lousy decisions I had made had culminated in this disastrous drama of a decade birthday from hell? I started contemplating how I got here. There were other people involved. I couldn’t have arrived here completely by myself. So, I went back to the beginning. BECOMING A PERSON IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY Every girl’s first love is her daddy. Mine was a psychiatrist. Any kid of a psychiatrist knows that being the child of a psychiatrist means that you' re basically being raised by a mental health professional sans mental health. Your shrink parent will most likely not apply his mental health training to your parent-child relationship. My Dad was charming and hard to reach. He had a fabulous sense of humor, played the piano completely by ear in a Rogers & Hammerstein style, and has always liked to be mostly by himself. I worshipped him because he was such a captivating personality and like the Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s, he seemed available for a limited time only. Personality-wise and looks-wise I felt more alike him than I did my mom. I got my sense of humor from him. I got my nose from him. We played and sang together from the time I was two. Like a fish in his tank, I grew up inside the bubble of my father’s narrative. He was a storyteller, and told more stories about my own mother than she ever told about herself. He often repeated a story about the day I was born. He was in the waiting room of Strong Memorial Hospital, and he was watching the Johnny Carson show while he waited for my mother to give birth. Men were not allowed in the delivery room in those days. Johnny Carson was out that night, and Ed McMann, his sidekick, was also missing. Doc Severensen, the band leader, had to host the show, which my Dad claimed really shook him up because that was unprecedented. It made him think that things were off kilter in the universe on the day I was supposed to be born. I was being induced because I had been in there for almost 10 months and my time was up. When the waiting room phone rang, he was profoundly relieved to hear from the doctor that I was normal with all 10 fingers and toes. The day they drove me home from the hospital it was snowing hard. My Dad drove the car over the wintery lawn and right up to the apartment steps, because it was so icy he was worried my mother might slip and drop me in the snow. He said I looked tiny and red, like a little turtle, and he thought they should put me in a glass terrarium and give me fish food, but mom said no. My Dad’s sense of his parental obligations were honed in the 40’s and 50’s when men did nothing for kids and women did everything. According to my mother, if I awakened in the night as a baby, my father would do one thousand pats and hand me back to her. One thousand pats was the limit. Cloth diapers were status quo then, and my mother said she would return home to find poop laden diapers soaking in the toilet, but that was the end of his attempt to clean them. I remember him being a terrible babysitter. When I was about 8, my brother was 7 and my sister was 3, my mother was out and he was babysitting us. Things weren’t going well and we were all crying. I remember my Dad calling us into the living room for a “pow wow”. We all sat on the floor in a circle and he told us not to tell my mom we had all been crying when she got home. “I’m telling mommy,” screamed my sister. “I’m telling mommy too, “ I shrieked. I remember, another night, asking him what was for dinner and he responded, “I just had a can of tuna, you kids can eat whatever you want.”

Don’t Fertilitease Me A memoir by Amanda The Act of Story Statement Our heroine hits her 40th birthday in NYC in a state of despair. She has always wanted a family but is single with no prospects. She is running out of time. Has she ruined her whole life? In a panic, she examines her history and romantic past to examine how she learned to love and to figure out if she can save her future. Antagonistic Force in the Story There are multiple antagonists in this story. The various boyfriends and lovers are antagonists in different ways. The mean ones or hostile ones are obvious, but even the lovely ones who vanish or don’t commit allow love to be an antagonist in its own right. Our protagonist’s mother has moments of antagonism with her judgments about the protagonist's romantic choices and her fertility pressure. Our protagonist is at times an antagonist herself when she, not acknowledging her own needs or truly understanding who she is, makes poor choices and self-sabotages, getting in her own way of finding happiness. Breakout Title Don’t Fertilitease Me The Big Fertilitease Still Blooming Comparables Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Atherton Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord Laughing is Conceivable: One Woman’s Extremely Funny Peak into the Extremely Unfunny World of Infertility Core Wound and the Primary Conflict As our author comes out of her childhood, she wonders why her father did not love her and doubts whether anyone will ever truly love, accept, and choose her. After all, she was just born to her father and didn’t have any choice in the matter, so she wonders if there is something intrinsically wrong with her being that could cause other men not to want her? She has been dating since she was 15 years old. As she closes in on age 35 and her biological clock is ticking loudly, her panic increases. Her mother was the goddess of her family. She wants to be just as essential to a child. Will it be too late for her to have a baby? Other levels of conflict The closer our protagonist comes to the success of her core self and artistic identity with her acting and comedy, the more inappropriate the men she encounters become. The men she is taken with seem both utterly incapable of and uninterested in parenthood, and she begins to lose hope that she will ever become a mother or have a family of her own. She is an audience to friends who are getting engaged and pregnant, is barraged by engagement announcements of seemingly perfectly suited couples in the NY Times, and has a mother and sister who constantly pester her about her dating choices and demand to know when she is willing to “just buy some sperm and get inseminated already!” Settings The protagonist’s life has moved through many environments through her 25 years of dating before she was married. Each environment was distinctly different, and affected the dating relationships. Rochester, NY The Hometown. Our lead character grew up in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Rochester, in an over protected family, in a quiet neighborhood where nothing ever happened. If the lady across the street, Mrs. Hoffman, came out of her house to rake her leaves, it was an event, and her father might pull out his binoculars and report the sighting. Oberlin, OH A sleepy, corn field-surrounded small college town, where you knew everyone on campus at least by sight. It had a small-town feel and a cosiness. It was a dry town and the most you could get was 80 proof liquor. Oberlin was also a politically radical school, and the first one to accept women, Jews, and Blacks in the US. It was a stop on the underground railroad. It had a bisexual dorm/coop that had nude breakfasts and coed showers, a lesbian dorm, and an afro house. Punk was in full force in 1983 and there were punkers slamdancing in the “Sco” which was vaguely terrifying. Oberlin had some good sports teams, but its football team was weak. We used to yell “Our SAT scores are higher than yours!” from the stands New York City The intensity and anonymity of NYC was a challenge to our main character. When she first arrived, it was dangerous. White women were being stabbed with pins tainted with an unknown substance in what appeared to be racially motivated attacks. It was scary to take the subway. Chains were being snatched from people’s necks. Her mother forbade her to wear her gold earrings on the way to work. Taking a bus 9 blocks in Times Square after dark felt like risking your life. She and her mother heard a woman screaming after being shot near Prospect Park when they were in bed. Park Slope was cozy but the restaurants were full of families, lesbians and there were no single men. It had an old-world feel, but as a single woman it felt like a desert island. Manhattan was electric and she roved around with her posse to bars and dance clubs, like MacAleer’s on Amsterdam, where she knew the bouncer. People talked to you on the street. There was big money in the 80’s. The concrete jungle was intense with shoulder padded bankers spilling out into the streets at lunchtime. It was tougher to do basic things in NYC, like laundry. Even simple chores became a dog-eat-dog competitive act. NYC during 9/11 felt like a very small town. None of us were allowed to leave and everyone walked around in hushed voices. The sound of bagpipes were heard frequently in fireman’s funerals. After Guiliani’s Disneyfication of Times Square, things felt safer. Our heroine walked home from acting class at Carnegie Hall after midnight. She heard the clomping of horse shoes out her window as carriages returned to the stables from Central Park South. She got her nails done at 9 pm and snuck McDonald’s cheeseburgers into the movies alone.. She could be free and safe at night which felt revolutionary as a woman. She lived in a two bedroom apartment with her 50 something roommate Barry, which was great except for the Barry part. She glanced at sidewalk diners,, their entitled heads close in intimate conversation and took her take-out to eat on her sofa in front of the tv. Central Park was her backyard, though she had a small planter of grass on her windowsill that she trimmed with scissors to get the “fresh cut grass” smell. Tucson, Arizona A western rambling town with the most sunny days in the US. Davis Monthan Air Force Base is in Tucson and trains 11,000 pilots. They fly training missions over Tucson on most clear days. This is a Sonoran desert climate with more vegetation than any other desert in the world. It has giant saguaro cacti, and many other varieties which bloom in the Spring. There are wildflowers, rabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, javelinas and scorpions. The colors are different there. There is much less green than the East coast. There are few deciduous trees and lots of palm trees.It is a more muted, desert landscape. It looks like the bottom of the sea without water. The colors are beige and tan and the tiniest little blooms stand out. There are painted sunsets and big blue skies with clouds that sweep and ripple. The air smells like the creosote bush when it rains. In the summer there are violent monsoons with freezing rain and the cacti sometimes are struck by lightning and power is lost. There are lots of apartment complexes with pools and blooming bougainvillea and charmless streets with strip malls and Circle K’s. San Francisco, CA A town full of hills with old fashioned vibes and Victorian and Edwardian architecture. This is a romantic city with houses painted vibrant colors, streetcars trundling up and down hills and sweeping views. Foghorns can be heard throughout the whole city on foggy days. The fog, nicknamed Carl, is a personnage. Each realtor knows how it crisscrosses the city creating microclimates. It can be blazing sun in Noe Valley and grey and damp 10 minutes away in the Sunset. Our protagonist arrives 5 mos pregnant in July, fresh off the plane from 96 degree steam-scorched NYC, stunned to find herself in 55 degrees, fog, winds and sporadic rain. Nature and culture are in balance there.

SHADOW BOX I always wonder if, on my death bed, I will flash to a highlights video of my life – the faces of my sweet daughters, being passionately slammed against the wall while kissing a semi-famous actor, my stoic Swedish husband crying during our wedding when the Rabbi said, “take her sacred as your wife”, or cuddling my preemie-baby when she finally came home from the NICU on Thanksgiving Day. All of these memories swim inside me. Past loves are precious like that. Even if you have ended a relationship, if you truly loved another person, part of them remains with you, sleeping beneath your skin. This shadow love occasionally breaks the surface for air and pops into your psyche, like Peter Pan drifting in your window. I didn’t meet my husband until one month after my fortieth birthday. I wasn’t a naive virgin. I had been engaging in serial monogamy since I was 15. In the 70’s and 80’s, it was far easier to get over people. Before the internet, if you broke up with someone or vice versa, you probably never saw or heard from them again. The rare newsy blurb about them in your college alumni magazine arrived like ice water dumped on your head – a sick pit in the stomach flash, “he’s married!” or “I can’t believe she started a rock band!” If they dumped you, it was in your best interest to pretend they died in a fiery car crash or vanished without a trace. You could enter the Witness Protection Program and you never had to find out what they amounted to. Fast forward to 2015, when I am sitting at my computer Googling the current sale price of my ex-boyfriend’s house and silently lamenting that when we were dating, we ate at Arby’s Roast Beef, and now he is running one of the top real estate companies in Dallas and probably taking his wife out to 5-star restaurants. I had seen pictures of her on Facebook under a shag of bleached blonde hair, perfecting her smoky eye and redecorating their kitchen. Two weeks prior, I had been followed on Twitter by an ex lover who had tantalizingly almost left his wife for me but chose not to. He also friended me on Facebook. This set off a waterfall of questions inside my head. “Well, obviously he was thinking of you,” my best friend Alicia chirped on the phone. I had to agree with her. It was hard to know what to make of it, but she was probably right. Yes, he had thought of me, at least for a split second. He must have Googled me to find out where I live and what I’m doing. But he was still married to HER. He may have followed me on Twitter, but he didn’t follow me when it counted. He devastated me and was as cold as Antarctica. I couldn’t forget the mummified look in his eyes when he told me, in the lobby of the NYC Hilton on 6th Avenue, that we couldn’t be together. I was crying. We were surrounded by a cartographer’s convention, and maps were unfurling all around us. My life was unfurling too. Exciting as this blast from the past was, I knew deep down that just because he followed me on Twitter didn’t mean he loved me all over again. He was just clicking a mouse. Took him one second. Something about him following me reminded me that he was still out there. Something about knowing he was still out there made me think about him. Something about thinking about him made me remember that it was not all sadness. There were glorious moments. And so the shadow love emerged within me, quietly at first, and then stronger. At first he came to me in dreams. The teasing, the courtship, the ecstasy of being in love, and also the devastation when he turned his back on me. Something about remembering made me remember, not only him, but also others. His following me on Twitter made me follow myself into the past. At night, in the twilight moments of sleep, l I would drowsily, secretly flip through the loves of my life. One Sunday, I wandered into a flea market on Columbus and 76th fenced inside a schoolyard. In one booth, a woman made tiny boxes of miniature rooms. She called them shadow boxes and said I could provide my own pieces of jewelry or photographs and she could shrink them down. I had seen a museum show of the artist, Joseph Cornell, who created boxes of objects he called shadowboxes. He collected baubles and knicknacks and magazine cut-outs to create dreamlike visions of nostalgia. I guess one could call the objects vintage – treasures that had a previous life, that mattered to somebody once. At my current age, it occurs to me that I may also be vintage. I also mattered to somebodies once. I think about the single pearl earring that sits sullenly in my jewelry box that I can’t seem to throw away. There is really no reason to keep it. An ex-boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday, when we were on the verge of ending our 6 year relationship. Wherever I look at that one earring, I am taken on a trip of remembering how he resentfully described standing on an hour long line at the jewelry store to buy them for me, and how inappropriate I thought that was, how we made love all weekend in my mother’s Park Slope Brooklyn apartment on the pull out bed, enrapt in anxious yearning. It was the next-to-last time I ever saw him. That earring is a bittersweet journey, yet one I seem compelled to take once a year or so. Its unpairing mirrors our unpairing. Maybe all human beings are like walking shadow boxes … a locket, a torn photograph, a single earring, an empty bottle of perfume. Little compartmentalized vessels of experience. After that Twitter follow, I found myself dreaming of my lost loves. Sometimes I stole them away from a current wife or girlfriend and we were gloriously reunited. Sometimes we had an Adele-song-like confrontation. Some nights I hurtled back into the past remembering how it felt to be in love in a doorway or on a commuter train. Sometimes we had a conversation that has waited a lifetime. In this time travel, I examined the genesis of my capacity to love another. So, I’m going to start at the beginning. BECOMING A PERSON IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK MY HEART BELONGS TO DADDY Every girl’s first love is her daddy. Mine was a psychiatrist. Any kid of a psychiatrist knows that being the child of a psychiatrist means that you' re basically being raised by a mental health professional sans mental health. Your shrink parent will most likely not apply his mental health training to your parent-child relationship. My Dad was charming and hard to reach. He had a fabulous sense of humor, played the piano completely by ear in a Rogers & Hammerstein style, and has always liked to be mostly by himself. I worshipped him because he was such a captivating personality and like the Shamrock Shake at McDonald’s, he seemed available for a limited time only. Personality-wise and looks-wise I felt more alike him than I did my mom. I got my sense of humor from him. I got my nose from him. We played and sang together from the time I was two. Like a fish in his tank, I grew up inside the bubble of my father’s narrative. He was a storyteller, and told more stories about my own mother than she ever told about herself. He often repeated a story about the day I was born. He was in the waiting room of Strong Memorial Hospital, and he was watching the Johnny Carson show while he waited for my mother to give birth. Men were not allowed in the delivery room in those days. Johnny Carson was out that night, and Ed McMann, his sidekick, was also missing. Doc Severensen, the band leader, had to host the show, which my Dad claimed really shook him up because that was unprecedented. It made him think that things were off kilter in the universe on the day I was supposed to be born. I was being induced because I had been in there for almost 10 months and my time was up. When the waiting room phone rang, he was profoundly relieved to hear from the doctor that I was normal with all 10 fingers and toes. The day they drove me home from the hospital it was snowing hard. My Dad drove the car over the wintery lawn and right up to the apartment steps, because it was so icy he was worried my mother might slip and drop me in the snow. He said I looked tiny and red, like a little turtle, and he thought they should put me in a glass terrarium and give me fish food, but mom said no.

A memoir by Amanda This tale of self discovery follows the trail of romantic breadcrumbs that lead one to know oneself. The Act of Story Statement Our heroine must find love and choose a partner to create a family with so that she can feel and inhabit her own presence in the world as a woman, a mother, and a person. This partner must respect her so that she can respect herself. Antagonistic Force in the Story There are multiple antagonists in this story. The various boyfriends and lovers are antagonists in different ways. The mean ones or hostile ones are obvious, but even the lovely ones who vanish or don’t commit allow love to be an antagonist in its own right. Our protagonist’s mother has moments of antagonism, and our protagonist is at times an antagonist herself when she, not acknowledging her own needs or truly understanding who she is,, makes poor choices and self-sabotages, getting in her own way of finding happiness. Breakout Title Shadow Box The Lone Earring I am a Jewelry Box Comparables Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Atherton Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord Core Wound and the Primary Conflict As our author comes out of her childhood, she wonders why her father did not love her and doubts whether anyone will ever truly love, accept, and choose her. After all, she was just born to her father and didn’t have any choice in the matter, so she wonders if there is something intrinsically wrong with her being that could cause other men not to want her? She has been dating since she was 15 years old. As she closes in on age 35 and her biological clock is ticking loudly, her panic increases. She wants to be as important to a family as her own mother has been to hers, but she has no idea how to make that happen before it’s too late to have a baby. Other levels of conflict The closer our protagonist comes to the success of her core self and artistic identity with her acting and comedy, the more inappropriate the men she encounters become. The men she is taken with seem both utterly incapable of and uninterested in parenthood, and she begins to lose hope that she will ever become a mother or have a family of her own. She is an audience to friends who are getting engaged and pregnant, is barraged by engagement announcements of seemingly perfectly suited couples in the NY Times, and has a mother and sister who constantly pester her about her dating choices and demand to know when she is willing to “just buy some sperm and get inseminated already!” Settings The protagonist’s life has moved through many environments through her 25 years of dating before she was married. Each environment was distinctly different, and affected the dating relationships. Rochester, NY The Hometown. Our lead character grew up in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Rochester, in an over protected family, in a quiet neighborhood where nothing ever happened. If the lady across the street, Mrs. Hoffman, came out of her house to rake her leaves, it was an event, and her father might pull out his binoculars and report the sighting. Oberlin, OH A sleepy, corn field-surrounded small college town, where you knew everyone on campus at least by sight. It had a small-town feel and a cosiness. It was a dry town and the most you could get was 80 proof liquor. Oberlin was also a politically radical school, and the first one to accept women, Jews, and Blacks in the US. It was a stop on the underground railroad. It had a bisexual dorm/coop that had nude breakfasts and coed showers, a lesbian dorm, and an afro house. Punk was in full force in 1983 and there were punkers slamdancing in the “Sco” which was vaguely terrifying. Oberlin had some good sports teams, but its football team was weak. We used to yell “Our SAT scores are higher than yours!” from the stands New York City The intensity and anonymity of NYC was a challenge to our main character. When she first arrived, it was dangerous. White women were being stabbed with pins tainted with an unknown substance in what appeared to be racially motivated attacks. It was scary to take the subway. Chains were being snatched from people’s necks. Her mother forbade her to wear her gold earrings on the way to work. Taking a bus 9 blocks in Times Square after dark felt like risking your life. She and her mother heard a woman screaming after being shot near Prospect Park when they were in bed. Park Slope was cozy but the restaurants were full of families, lesbians and there were no single men. It had an old-world feel, but as a single woman it felt like a desert island. Manhattan was electric and she roved around with her posse to bars and dance clubs, like MacAleer’s on Amsterdam, where she knew the bouncer. People talked to you on the street. There was big money in the 80’s. The concrete jungle was intense with shoulder padded bankers spilling out into the streets at lunchtime. It was tougher to do basic things in NYC, like laundry. Even simple chores became a dog-eat-dog competitive act. NYC during 9/11 felt like a very small town. None of us were allowed to leave and everyone walked around in hushed voices. The sound of bagpipes were heard frequently in fireman’s funerals. After Guiliani’s Disneyfication of Times Square, things felt safer. Our heroine walked home from acting class at Carnegie Hall after midnight. She heard the clomping of horse shoes out her window as carriages returned to the stables from Central Park South. She got her nails done at 9 pm and snuck McDonald’s cheeseburgers into the movies alone.. She could be free and safe at night which felt revolutionary as a woman. She lived in a two bedroom apartment with her 50 something roommate Barry, which was great except for the Barry part. She glanced at sidewalk diners,, their entitled heads close in intimate conversation and took her take-out to eat on her sofa in front of the tv. Central Park was her backyard, though she had a small planter of grass on her windowsill that she trimmed with scissors to get the “fresh cut grass” smell. Tucson, Arizona A western rambling town with the most sunny days in the US. Davis Monthan Air Force Base is in Tucson and trains 11,000 pilots. They fly training missions over Tucson on most clear days. This is a Sonoran desert climate with more vegetation than any other desert in the world. It has giant saguaro cacti, and many other varieties which bloom in the Spring. There are wildflowers, rabbits, coyotes, rattlesnakes, javelinas and scorpions. The colors are different there. There is much less green than the East coast. There are few deciduous trees and lots of palm trees.It is a more muted, desert landscape. It looks like the bottom of the sea without water. The colors are beige and tan and the tiniest little blooms stand out. There are painted sunsets and big blue skies with clouds that sweep and ripple. The air smells like the creosote bush when it rains. In the summer there are violent monsoons with freezing rain and the cacti sometimes are struck by lightning and power is lost. There are lots of apartment complexes with pools and blooming bougainvillea and charmless streets with strip malls and Circle K’s. San Francisco, CA A town full of hills with old fashioned vibes and Victorian and Edwardian architecture. This is a romantic city with houses painted vibrant colors, streetcars trundling up and down hills and sweeping views. Foghorns can be heard throughout the whole city on foggy days. The fog, nicknamed Carl, is a personnage. Each realtor knows how it crisscrosses the city creating microclimates. It can be blazing sun in Noe Valley and grey and damp 10 minutes away in the Sunset. Our protagonist arrives 5 mos pregnant in July, fresh off the plane from 96 degree steam-scorched NYC, stunned to find herself in 55 degrees, fog, winds and sporadic rain. Nature and culture seem balanced here.