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