Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,45
life as a mom, there wouldn’t be much opportunity to have sex with a gorgeous twenty-seven-year-old like Alex, with his ripped abs and chiseled cheekbones.
Meanwhile, I began obsessively monitoring my menstrual cycles. One day at Spurth, I mentioned to Alex that I was about to ovulate, so if we were going to try this month, he had exactly one week to make a decision. In other circumstances that might have seemed like a lot of pressure to put on a guy, but by now it felt like a done deal and I didn’t have time to waste. We’d already looked at our plan from every possible angle: legal, emotional, ethical, practical. By this point, too, we had inside jokes and nicknames for each other and had bonded over what a blessing this child would be. The week before, he had even asked if, like any other business opportunity, I had “gone out to others” or if this was an exclusive offer. I had the fleeting impulse to invent a bidding war to seal the deal (Pete is circling and there’s also interest from Gary, so you better get back to me by Friday. There’s a lot of heat around this). But I wanted our relationship to be based in complete truthfulness, and anyway, I was sure that Alex would say yes.
The day after I issued the deadline, we decided to take a walk on the beach to discuss one last time the final details in the contract we’d had drawn up. As we strolled along the shore, drizzle appeared out of nowhere. We looked at each other—should we head back?—but then the drizzle turned into a veritable storm. We were both in short sleeves, and Alex took the jacket from around his waist and placed it over my shoulders, and as we faced each other, getting drenched in the rain on the beach, he gave me the official green light. After all the negotiations, all the getting to know each other, all the questions about what this would mean for us and the child, we were ready.
“Let’s make you a baby!” he said, and there we were, hugging and smiling, me in an oversize jacket that went down to my knees, embracing this man who was going to give me his sperm, and I thought about how I couldn’t wait to tell my child this story one day.
When we got back to his car, Alex gave me his executed copy of the contract.
And then he disappeared.
I didn’t hear from him for another three days. This might not seem long, but if you’re in your late thirties and about to ovulate and your only other baby option is on indefinite back order, three days is an eternity. I tried not to read into it (stress is bad for conception), but when Alex finally resurfaced, he left me a message saying, “We need to talk.” I sank to the floor. Like every adult on the planet, I knew exactly what that meant: I was about to be dumped.
The next morning, as we sat at our regular table at Spurth, Alex looked away and began issuing the usual breakup clichés: “It’s not you, it’s me”; “I’m so unsettled in my life right now that I don’t know if I can commit, so for your sake, I don’t want to string you along.” And the perennial favorite “I hope we can still be friends.”
“It’s okay, there are other fish in the sea,” I said, protecting myself with a bad pun. I hoped to lighten the mood, to let Alex know that the rational part of me understood why he felt that he couldn’t go through with the donation. But inside I was gutted, because now this was the second baby I’d so clearly imagined and that I would never get to hold in my arms. A friend who had her second miscarriage around this time said that she felt exactly the same way. I went home and decided to take a break from the sperm-donor search because the heartbreak was too much to bear. And like my friend who had miscarried, I avoided babies as much as possible. Even diaper commercials sent me lunging for the remote so I could change the channel.
After a few months, I knew I had to get back online and resume my search. But just as I was about to sign on again, I got an unexpected call.