What Alice Forgot

I was having lunch with the Infertiles.

We met about five years ago when I joined this “Infertility Support Group.” At first we were meeting at the community center and we had a facilitator, a professional like you, Dr. Hodges, who was there to keep us on track. The problem was that she kept trying to make us be positive. “Let’s try and reframe that in a more positive light,” she’d say. But we didn’t want to be positive, thanks very much. We longed to say out loud all the bitter, negative, nasty things we kept in our heads. The medications, the hormones, and the relentless frustration of our lives make us bitchy, and you’re not allowed to be bitchy in public or people won’t like you. So we formed our own private group. Now we meet up once a month, at a swish restaurant, where we’re not likely to come across Mothers’ Groups and their circles of prams. We eat, we drink, and we bitch to our hearts’ content—about doctors, family, friends—and most of all about the insensitivity of “Fertiles.”

At first I resisted the idea of splitting the world into “Fertiles” and “Infertiles,” as if we were in some science-fiction movie, but soon it became part of my new language. “What Fertiles can never understand . . .” we say to each other. Ben hates it when I say things like that. He doesn’t really like the group, either, although he’s never met them.

I’m making them sound awful, but they’re not. Or maybe they are and I can’t see it because I’m exactly the same. All I know is that sometimes it feels like lunch with those girls is the only thing that keeps me sane. And it’s Mother’s Day next Sunday. (As the television keeps loudly reminding me every two minutes.) That’s the most painful day of the year for an Infertile. I always wake up feeling ashamed. Not sad so much. Just ashamed. Sort of stupid. It’s a version of that feeling I had in high school when I was the only one in my class who didn’t need to wear a bra. I’m not a proper woman. I’m not a grown-up.

Today we met at a restaurant in Manly right on the harbor. When I got there, they were all sitting outside in a dazzle of sun and water and blue sky, huddled over something in the middle of the table, their sunglasses pushed on top of their heads.

“Anne-Marie’s pregnancy tests,” said Kerry when she saw me. “We disapprove, of course, but see what you think.”

Anne-Marie does this every time she does an IVF cycle. They tell you not to do a home pregnancy test after you’ve had an embryo transfer because the results are not conclusive. You might get a positive when you’re not really pregnant because your body still has hormones left over from the “trigger injection” that mimic pregnancy, or you might get a negative just because it’s too early to tell. The best thing is to wait for the blood test. I never do a pregnancy test because I like things to be conclusive and I’m a good girl, but Anne-Marie starts doing them the day after the transfer and admitted once that one day she did seven tests. We all have our own versions of this obsessive-compulsive behavior, so we don’t scoff.

I squinted at Anne-Marie’s tests. There were three, wrapped up in aluminum foil, as usual. They all looked negative to me, but there was no point telling her this. I said I thought I could maybe see a very faint pink line on one of them, and she said her husband had said he was sure they were all negative, and she’d yelled at him that he obviously wasn’t trying. You have to want to see the second line, she’d told him, and they’d had a big fight. Anne-Marie has never had a successful IVF cycle and she’s been trying for over ten years. Her doctors, her husband, her family are constantly campaigning for her to give up. She is only thirty, the youngest of us all, so she has time to ruin another decade of her life. Or maybe not, of course. That’s the thing for all of us. The elusive happy ending could be just a cycle away.

Kerry (two years of IVF with donor eggs, one ectopic pregnancy that nearly killed her) said to Anne-Marie, “Elisabeth is ten days past transfer and I bet she hasn’t even been tempted to do a test.”

We all keep up to date with our IVF cycles by e-mail. Anne-Marie, Kerry, and I are all in the middle of cycles. The other three are in between, or just about to start.

To be honest, all the drama about Alice has meant that I haven’t even been considering whether or not this cycle will work. In the early years, when I still believed in the power of the mind, I used to meditate each morning after a transfer. “Please stick around, little embryo,” I’d chant. “Stick, stick, stick.” I’d offer it bribes: I’ll take you to Disneyland when you’re five. You’ll never have to go to school if you don’t feel up to it. If you would just please let me be your mother, please?

But none of it seemed to make any difference. So now I just assume that it won’t work, and that if it does work, I’ll lose it anyway. This is meant to protect me, although it doesn’t, because somehow the hope sneakily finds its way in. I’m never aware of the hope until it’s gone, whooshed away like a rug pulled from under my feet, each time I hear another “I’m sorry.”

The waiter came with our drinks and said, “Let me guess—you’ve left the kids with their dads and escaped for the day!”

Ah, the sweet innocence of the Fertiles. They assume any group of women of a certain age must surely be mothers.

“What’s the point of looking like f**king mothers when we’re f**king not,” said Sarah, who is our newest recruit. She has only been through one IVF cycle, but she’s already energetically bitter about infertility. She makes me realize I’m even jaded about being jaded. I admire the way she swears.

That sets us off on listing the ways we’ve been offended since we last met.

We had:

The boss who said, “Going through IVF is a choice, it’s not like getting the flu, so, no, I can’t sign your sick-leave form.”

The aunt who said, “Just relax and have a massage, you’re not getting pregnant because you’re too tense.” (Oh, there’s always one of those.)

The brother who said (with screaming child in the background), “You’ve got such a romantic idea of having children. It’s just bloody hard work.”

The cousin who said sympathetically, “I know exactly what you’re going through. I’ve been trying to finish this Ph.D. for six years.”

“What about your sister?” Kerry said to me. “You said something in your last e-mail about something she’d done that had you infuriated.”