Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,44

chose my subject line carefully (An Unusual Question) and left the email vague (Hey, remember me, from that networking event?). Then I invited him to meet for coffee so that I could ask my “unusual question.” Alex responded, wondering if I could email him the question. I replied that I’d prefer to discuss it in person. He wrote, Sure. And the next thing I knew, we were set to meet for coffee Sunday at noon.

I was, to put it mildly, nervous when I arrived at Urth Caffé. After sending my impulsive email, I was certain that Alex would say no and then tell ten of his friends what I’d done, leaving me so humiliated that I’d never be able to go to a networking event again. I’d considered backing out, but I wanted a baby so badly that I felt I had to do this, just in case. The answer to an unasked question is always no, I repeated to myself over and over.

Alex greeted me warmly and the small talk came easily—so easily that, before I knew it, we were having a great time. After about an hour, in fact, I’d almost forgotten what we were doing there when Alex leaned across the table, looked me in the eye, and asked flirtatiously, as if he’d concluded we were on a date, “So, what was your ‘unusual question’?”

Instantly my face felt hot and my palms sweaty, and I did what any normal person would do under the circumstances—I went mute. The gravity and lunacy of what I was about to do rendered me speechless.

Alex waited until I began forming words, flailing, using incoherent analogies to explain my request. I was saying things like “I don’t have all the ingredients for the recipe” and “It’s like donating a kidney, but without removing the organ.” The second I said the word organ, I got even more flustered and tried changing course. “It’s like giving blood,” I said, “except there’s sex instead of needles!” With that, I willed myself to shut up. Alex was staring back with a strange look on his face, and I thought, Life does not get more humiliating than this.

But then it did. Because it quickly became apparent that Alex had no idea what I was trying to ask.

“Look,” I managed to say. “I’m thirty-seven years old and I want to have a baby. I’m not having luck with the sperm banks, and I’m wondering if you’d consider—”

This time Alex clearly got it, because his entire body froze; even his mocha chai latte stayed suspended in midair. Other than one catatonic patient in medical school, I’d never seen a person sit so still before in my life. Finally Alex’s lips moved and out came one word: “Wow.”

Then, slowly, more words came out. “I wasn’t expecting that at all.”

“I know,” I said. I felt terrible for having put him in such an awkward situation, for bringing this up at all, and I was just about to say so when, to my amazement, Alex added: “But I’d be willing to talk about it.”

Now it was my turn to freeze before eventually saying “Wow.” The next few hours flew by: Alex and I discussed about everything from our childhoods to future dreams. It seemed that talking about sperm had broken down all the emotional walls, the way having sex with somebody for the first time can open the emotional floodgates. When we finally got up to leave, Alex said that he needed to do some thinking, and I said okay, and he said he’d be in touch. I was sure, though, that once he actually thought this through, I’d never hear from him again.

But that night, Alex’s name appeared in my inbox. I clicked on his message, expecting a nice rejection. Instead he wrote: So far I am a yes, but with more questions. So we set up another meeting.

Over the next couple of months we met at Urth so often that I started calling the café my “sperm office,” and my friends started calling it simply Spurth. At Spurth, we talked about everything from semen samples and medical histories to contracts and contact with the child. Eventually we got to the point where we talked about how to do the transfer—whether we should have the doctor do the insemination or have sex to increase the odds of conception.

He picked sex.

Honestly, I had no objection. And more honestly? I was thrilled with this development! After all, I imagined that in my future