Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.
LOS ANGELES — During the six years I begged my husband to get me pregnant, I kept certain images locked away in a mental hope chest. The first was the moment of conception — one of those lazy Sunday afternoons, post-brunch and newspaper, pre-dinner and a compelling HBO lineup, the two of us resting atop rumpled sheets.
In another snapshot, we're in a delivery room, the kind with soft lighting and birth plans. My parents and brothers and sisters-in-law are out in the hallway and my husband is at my side, his hair tucked inside a blue surgical cap, about to meet our child.
But it was the moment between those two that I held dearest.
Three months into the pregnancy, a sonographer rubs gel on my swollen abdomen and rolls her transducer over it. My husband and I gaze at the black screen as the grainy image of a fetus emerges, its head nearly as large as its tiny sea horse body. And then, a thumping sound, echoing like a signal picked up from deep space. My husband looks from the screen to me, and I can see in his eyes that he finally understands what I have instinctively known for years — that all of our ambitions, world travels and spiritual practices never brought us this close to the mystery.
My longing for a baby didn't kick in until my husband and I married when I was 36. My faith in him combined with the stability of marriage helped me overcome my twin fears of motherhood — suffocation and failure. I knew he'd never much wanted kids, but I stubbornly kept hoping he'd come around, like so many other men I'd heard and read of who started out ambivalent and ended up utterly in love with their children.
He didn't come around. Instead of a sonogram there was a vasectomy, then an open marriage, and finally a divorce.
The grief of the empty womb is electric with fury, a live wire that could spark anytime. At the grocery store, at the post office, upon the first glimpse of a pregnant belly or stroller, a voice in my head roared, "Why am I being wasted?" Like an evil queen in a fable it scanned the offending woman and spat: "Her? Her and not me?" How had she convinced a man to work long hours and do without luxuries in return for the mundane, mammalian joys of wife and child?
I wanted to strangle and claw things. I'd run out to my car, roll up the windows and drive around the block screaming. That way, no one would hear and become alarmed. No one would know that my maternal instinct was neither gentle nor generous. It was fierce, irrational, entitled, and the fact that no helpless infant was coming to save me from my narcissism only magnified the rage. It took less than a minute to scream myself hoarse. Then I'd park the car, walk quietly into my postdivorce apartment and collapse in tears.
The upside of allowing yourself to grieve like a 2-year-old instead of writing in a journal or forming complex sentences with a therapist is that the grief tends to disperse more quickly. Within a year or two I was able to react to pregnant mothers and their offspring like a normal person again — with smiles and coos. I took my vestigial longing over to the local children's hospital and volunteered to play games with the sick kids. Watching the sorrow and barely disguised terror on their parents' faces softened my envy for good.
Then, last year, my heart started acting strangely. Each evening after dinner as I sat down to read or watch a movie, it would flutter fast and hard up into my throat like a hiccup, making me cough. This happened five or six times an hour until I fell asleep. My doctor said it was might be a mitral valve prolapse. She ran an EKG on which the technician noted "Borderline left atrial enlargement" and made a cardiologist appointment for me. I didn't want to Google that and try to decode what it meant. I forced myself to wait for the echocardiogram.
In the waiting room, a half-dozen septuagenarians, mostly men, some attached to portable oxygen tanks, read magazines while their wives filled out paperwork. A technician called my name and led me into a room marked "Echo," where a cushioned table stood next to the same kind of machine I'd seen in the movies.
"That looks like a sonogram machine," I said.
"It is," she said, smiling. "An echocardiogram is just a sonogram of your heart."
I climbed onto the table and lay on my left side. She affixed several electrodes to my chest, dimmed the lights, smeared a little gel onto my skin, and rolled the hand-held transducer alongside and underneath my left breast, instructing me when to inhale and when to hold my breath.
"Hold, hold, just a little longer," she urged as she zeroed in on a spot and hit a button to save the image. "Beautiful shot." That's what you want to hear when someone is photographing your heart: beautiful shot.
"You must be a swimmer," she said, eyes still on the screen. "You can hold your breath a long time."
"Yes," I said. I badly wanted to look up at the picture, but I couldn't bring myself to look that closely at my beating, bloody heart. I kept my eyes on my knees.
Then she turned the sound on.
There were clicks, lots of clicks, as if she had pried open a grandfather clock, and also a surge of liquid flowing wildly between pauses. Like water rushing over a falls in gusts.
My eyes widened. "Why is it so fast?" I asked.
"Those are your valves," she said. "They open and close several times with each heartbeat."
"And that liquid sound is the blood?"
"Yes, blood filling and leaving each ventricle."
She saw the tears gathering.
"I'm telling you," she said, putting her free hand on my arm, "I've been photographing the human heart for 20 years. It's made a believer out of me."
"It's amazing," I said. "I mean… what starts it? What keeps it beating?"
"That's the million-dollar question," she said. "But something had to create this." She snapped another image as my valves clicked open and shut like miraculous little dams.
"O.K., hon, you're all done." She turned off the volume and removed the electrodes. "You can get dressed, and your doctor will call you next week with the results."
It turned out that my heart was normal. Its reason for giving off extra beats would remain unknown to me, as would the grainy image of its chambers pulsing with a thirst both perpetual and fleeting.
But I do know one thing: I didn't need a baby to get me any closer to the mystery. We couldn't escape the mystery if we tried.
Robin Rinaldi is the author of the forthcoming memoir "The Wild Oats Project."
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