Don't Fertilitease Me (A memoir) by Amanda

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.”