unlikely wallflower

After my my midwife broke my waters and they came out clean, active labour came on pretty quickly. I tried and failed to get comfortable in the beautiful but poorly designed tub in my room. The next contraction that came as I was making my way back to bed was enough to put a look in my eyes that made it pretty clear to both me and my midwife that the next right step was an epidural. I really hadn’t wanted one, but there was simply no option left: my tank was empty, and I needed sleep if I was going to make it through active labour.

Sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, hunched over and clutching my friend’s elbows for dear life, riding out intense contractions while trying to sit perfectly still, was one of the hardest physical things I’ve done in my life, but 20 minutes later, when the anesthetist came back, his prediction had come true: he was my new best friend. Epidurals are FUCKING MAGIC. I was under the mistaken impression that I was going to be numb from the waist down, but instead it was the most curious sensation of being able to feel pressure but not pain. In “natural” circles, epidurals get a bad rap, and I had bought into this with my desperate dreams of a fully “natural” birth, but I am so, so grateful I had the option. (The idealization of a “natural” birth is so problematic that it’s hard to swallow now how deeply I was invested in it, but that's a whole other post…)

I slept through most of active labour, waking only when my fetal heart monitor needed to be adjusted. Sometime in the early morning hours, my midwife and student midwife had to leave after having been awake for 24 hours, and a new midwife arrived. The next few hours were a blur: I spiked a fever from the epidural, kicking off the Covid protocol and a round of antibiotics; they gave me oxytocin to get me from nine to ten centimetres; I slept some more; then, the time finally came. I was ready to push. My friend put on some Beyoncé and I got ready to meet my daughter.

Many birthing parents describe pushing as their favourite part of labour, and I was no exception. I am an athlete and a yogi, and I know how to isolate specific muscles to get a job done. Finally, I had something active to do that I had some control over, and after having slept a few hours with the blessed relief from pain, I had energy. At some point during a break between pushes, I turned to my friend and said, “this is awesome!” The midwife kept telling me to hold my breath while I pushed, but my conditioning to be compliant was so strong even in this most fierce moment that I couldn’t tell her I had zero intention of doing that. Instead, I did as I’d intended, which was to use my breath, but I exhaled quietly so she wouldn’t hear me, which my friend thought was hilarious. Regardless, I managed to push quickly enough that my daughter came before the backup midwife even had time to arrive.

I wish I could say that when they laid her on my chest, I was filled with a love greater than I ever thought possible. I wish I could say that I was fully present and drinking in this new life I had literally grown inside me and birthed into the world. I wish a lot of things, but mostly, I felt numb. I don’t remember much about this time, other than trying to still myself amidst the bustling of my midwife stitching me up, the respiratory therapist wiping my baby’s face to clear the meconium, birthing the placenta, the backup midwife arriving and taking her to be examined across the room. But I held her, I breathed her in, I felt her sucking on my cheek and knew it was time to feed her. I stared at her in relief and awe and numbness and thought, “holy shit. You’re here.”

Here’s how it actually went down: six days past my due date, I got my first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, ate a few too many cookies with eggs in them (which I normally avoid), saw my acupuncturist, and saw my midwife for a stretch and sweep (which, given I was only about half a centimetre dilated, was more like just irritating my cervix). When I laid down for bed that night, I started having what felt like intense gas pains, which I attributed to the cookies. They came and went and the little sleep I got was fitful. The next day when I got up, the pains were thankfully gone, and I enjoyed a long walk around the neighbourhood with my mom, chuckling at the stares my gigantic belly was getting. I also had another ultrasound; at this point I’d had so many (“advanced maternal age” + overdue = a million ultrasounds) that the techs were joking that they hoped they would never see me again. That night when I laid down, I had what felt like menstrual cramps, on and off all night, again enough to keep me from sleeping. The next night, those cramps progressed to pain beyond what I’ve felt before (and I’ve been on prescription muscle relaxants for cramps). At some point, I asked for another stretch and sweep to get things moving faster, but my backup midwife explained that all the babies were being born and no one would be available to be with me if I went into active labour at that point. I mostly had been able to avoid feeling sorry for myself for being single throughout this process, but I cannot describe the loneliness of being awake and alone for the third night in a row, in pain, anxious, and exhausted. Nothing my friend and I had talked about in terms of her being my birth partner had included what might happen if I was in prodromal (“false”) labour for days, and there was no sense in her being as exhausted as I was when things finally ramped up.

After the third night of little to no sleep, my friend came and set up and filled the birthing pool. Being in the pool felt heavenly; I was able to rest a little in between the contractions, which were picking up, albeit not very steadily. At one point we went for my envisioned forest walk, which had the opposite effect I had intended: my contractions stopped completely. At that point, given it looked like things were going to take a while yet, my friend went home for a bit to get some rest in her own bed and see her family. Every time I tried to rest, even with Tylenol and Gravol and propping myself up on pillows, the contractions would come on even more intensely. 

Around midnight that fourth night, the contractions had intensified enough in duration and frequency that I called my backup midwife (my primary midwife was off call). We spoke for a while, with her listening to me during my contractions. She didn’t think I was in active labour yet, so she recommended I try to get more rest, which after three nights and countless unsuccessful attempted naps, was incredibly frustrating. I called my friend, realizing at this point that I could no longer be by myself, but she didn’t pick up. Panicking, dialing her number over and over, feeling helpless and alone, I started to think I would maybe have to call my mom, but eventually, my friend did pick up and she came over. I alternated between being in the pool, which was soothing to the point of slowing my contractions, and getting out so they would pick up again. In between contractions when I was out of the pool, we played Quirkle and I read. No one felt like baking a groaning loaf. By the time my midwife’s student called and said I could come to the clinic if I wanted, it felt like there was no longer a point. They said my backup midwife would call to make a plan for the evening a little later.

In thinking about what I would want that plan to look like, I realized I’d hit a wall: I’d then gone four days and nights without any real sleep, and while I could handle the pain of the contractions easily enough, I had absolutely no juice left. I was truly and utterly exhausted. I knew, without a doubt, that even if I went into active labour that very minute, I wouldn’t have the energy to make it through and deliver my baby safely. I turned to my friend, sobbing, and just said, “I’m so tired. I think we have to go to the hospital.” (to be continued)

By this time, my belly was huge, and I had the stretch marks to show for it. I vacillated between hating these glaring marks stretching themselves across my abdomen like I’d been clawed by an angry tiger, and being immensely proud of them and what they signified: I—and my baby—had made it this far. I had a couple of friends help me with a pregnancy photo shoot, and while I did cry at the vulnerability of having someone see my tiger marks, and had a hard time looking at the photos of them after, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the photos in which I was clothed, radiant, caressing my belly full of a baby I had wished for, longed for, cried for, and prayed for for years. I framed one of them and hung it in our bathroom to commemorate this slice of my life full of possibility and trepidation.

I didn’t have a car and wasn’t taking public transit at this point (see: pandemic), so I was walking everywhere, and the belly garnered me quite a bit of kindness from lovely strangers. There was the lady who, upon seeing me trudging down the street lugging my grocery-laden granny cart behind me, said “you got this, mama!”; the man who saw me resting on a post at a street corner (after a looong walk uphill) and asked if I was okay, leading me to burst into grateful tears; the countless times neighbours saw me struggling (because asking for help is something I was/am still definitely working on) and came to my rescue. There were, of course, also the times when there were no neighbours or kind strangers around to witness the moments of loneliness and exhaustion, when having lugged the groceries home once again, I would think to myself, “if I had a partner, they’d be doing this for me.” If the Land of Infertility was an isolating place, being single and pregnant in a pandemic was even more so.

As I got closer and closer to my due date, I began to feel this strange sense of existing in several places at once. I was in the liminal space of waiting: one toe into (at least the idea of) motherhood, one foot in the “before”. Life hadn’t really felt like “before” for over a year, and this pandemic pause made the sense of liminality all the more poignant.

One way or another, I was going to get to meet this baby in the next few weeks. Amidst all of my walking (endlessly around my neighbourhood, up and down stairs, or with one foot on the street, one on the curb—whatever people said could help get my body ready and bring on labour), I had this grand idea of spending a day in meditation, communing with Cupcake and declaring my sense of readiness. knew I would never feel truly ready—no one can ever be ready—but I was, and felt, as ready as I would ever be. I’d done all the things that felt necessary, and I was feeling good. I had read the childbirth books, had made a birth “preferences” list (which if you know me, you know was obviously quite extensive and detailed), had visualized my ideal birth. There were moments of terror at what could go wrong, but they were more and more dominated by visions of holding my newborn babe to my chest—weeping, in bliss, both, or something else entirely; of actual excitement at welcoming this being into the world; of awe at seeing God in the form of this baby I’d grown; of thanking my baby for choosing me as her mother.

This was my mom’s second cancer. When I was a teenager, she survived non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and I effectively shut down emotionally and threw myself into extra-curricular activities to avoid dealing with my  fear. This time, I was alone and pregnant in a pandemic, and terrified all over again: that I couldn’t be there for her through this in the way I wanted to, given the pandemic; that she wouldn’t be able to be there for me throughout my pregnancy; and most terrifying of all, that I would lose my mom before she’d even get a chance to meet her granddaughter. 

Reassured that they’d caught it early, I focused on what I didn’t have the capacity to do the first time around: being there for my mom, in whatever limited ways I could. This was hard to do from a distance, and it was hard to know what support I could provide that would actually feel helpful for my mom. Eventually, as a way of feeling connected, we landed on watching TV “together”: eschewing the fancy “watch party” apps, we would text “3, 2, 1, play” and start the same show at the same time and text each other throughout—something we still do to this day. It was a way of feeling connected without actually being physically together, and without putting any pressure on my mom to talk about anything she didn’t feel like she could.

Not entirely unrelated, I’m sure, the other less-than-fun (to say the least) thing that re-announced itself in my second trimester was insomnia. Almost as soon as the first trimester can’t-keep-my-eyes-open exhaustion wore off, I started waking up in the middle of the night and just staying awake, for hours. It felt like a cruel twist of fate that at this critical time when I was gearing up for the most exhausted I’d be in my life, when everyone was oh-so-helpfully telling me to “sleep while you can!”, my body was saying “nope!”. So I (mostly) learned to cope, got a lot of reading done, and napped as much as I could. Many, many people joked to me during this time that the insomnia was “practice” for when I would have a newborn, which made my weary brain want to punch them in the face (sorry, if that was you; I know you meant well).

Being pregnant again on the 14th attempt and after two miscarriages was very, very strange. It was clinging desperately to my nausea, hoping against hope that it was in fact the pregnancy hormones rising, and not just some ingredient in the prenatal vitamins causing it. It was practically demanding a relatively unnecessary second blood test just for the tiny bit of reassurance that the hormones were doubling as they should be, even though the hormones did that in the first two pregnancies and those still didn’t end well. It was being elated one second and terrified the next. It was compulsively checking my heart rate on my FitBit to ensure it was still slightly elevated. It was buying a home baby Doppler and setting self-imposed limitations on how often I was allowed to listen to the baby’s heartbeat to reassure myself (side-note 1: the first few times I did this, I mistook my own heartbeat, which the machine was picking up through the veins around the placenta, for the baby’s). It was telling more people than I normally would, because those were all people I would want to know if I had another miscarriage, and what was even the point of going through this alone? It was reading poetry to my little blastocyst (then embryo, then fetus) every night, and waking up at least once every night with anxiety that could keep me up for hours. It was checking the toilet paper every single time I peed, convinced that I would see blood. (Side-note 2: apparently it’s not just anxious pregnant people who’ve had miscarriages who do this; I know at least one friend who did this too.) 

It was sending screenshots from the Bump app of what foodstuff my embryo was the size of that week to SD1 and my mom, then wondering if it was actually even still growing inside of me. It was rejoicing when my nipples start to get sore, because hooray! Another symptom! Of course, for others, it may be none of these things or all of those things and more. For me, it was all of it and then some.

It was hard to distinguish, while on the progesterone, what was emotional side effects, what was simply heightened anxiety, and what was pregnancy hormones. Crying multiple times a day was normal during that time, as was going from zero to 100 over something relatively insignificant a colleague would say or do. Once I stopped the extra hormones at 10 weeks in (when the placenta had formed enough to produce its own progesterone), however, it became very clear: it was the drugs. Holy shit, y’all. The jump from hot mess to (relatively) stable was swift and merciful.

SD1 was a gracious godsend of a human being throughout the NTU ordeal (a reminder, since it’s been a while: NTU=Not The Unicorn). When NTU and I fell in love and I told SD1 that I wanted to pause our baby-making activities and focus on my relationship and trying with NTU, SD1 was nothing but supportive and happy for me. When NTU and I fell apart and I told SD1 what had happened, he was nothing but supportive (and appropriately aghast). And when I went back to SD1 to say that I was ready to try again, there he was, affable and open as always, and more than okay with resuming our non-traditional baby-making activities.

Starting again meant going back on several meds, including progesterone, which has the intention of preventing another miscarriage, and fun side effects that include but are not limited to randomly bursting into tears at the drop of a hat and being irritable AF. If you were ever under the illusion that you had any control over your emotions whatsoever, I recommend adding some extra hormones to the mix and seeing what happens.

Starting to try again felt like the first time all over again. I was hopeful beyond reason, convinced that after so much pain in the last year, maybe this would actually be easy. By easy, I don’t mean that being on that many medications is easy, or trying to conceive for the 13th time after two miscarriages is easy, but easy like maybe it would happen right away. Easy like given it’s a pandemic and my fertility clinic was operating under much more restrictive safety guidelines, I was subjected to way less invasive medicalization: instead of between 5 - 8 days of daily blood draws and transvaginal ultrasounds, and an injection to make me ovulate when I was going to anyhow, I did a few ultrasounds at a community clinic the month before to ensure the results lined up with my at-home ovulation tests, then I was left to my own devices (along with the medications) for the next cycle. So once we’d tried again, riding on this hope of “easy”, I scrutinized every symptom, convinced that they meant I was pregnant, instead of just feeling side effects of the progesterone.

When the millionth stick I’d peed on still stubbornly refused to produce a second pink line, I was devastated. It felt like such a punch to the gut that my story of an easy pregnancy after all I’d been through hadn’t come true, and the extra hormones didn’t help. I began to feel, for the first time on this whole journey, like maybe I was getting close to being done. I’d been through so much pain, and while I am resilient and I always get through it, l felt like a boxer who’d been through round after round, still hanging on despite having been repeatedly beaten to a pulp. In the Land of Infertility, my journey, interminable though it  has seemed at certain junctures, has been a relatively short and inexpensive one; inexpensive both in terms of the actual monetary costs, and in terms of what it has cost me emotionally and physically. That said, I’d been through almost two years of focusing an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy on getting pregnant, at the expense of a lot of the rest of my life. Maybe instead of framing it as giving up, I could give myself the gift of allowing myself to think of it as stepping out of the ring and moving on with my life. What would it be like to date without the insistent and deafening ticking of my biological clock in my ear? What could I devote my energy to if it wasn’t mostly taken up by managing the emotional side effects of fertility meds and the rollercoaster I’d been on for so long? 

While some people might find that thought depressing, or at least sad, I found it incredibly freeing. I was giving myself permission to say that at some point, I could choose to put myself first. I wasn’t saying I was ready to do it right away, or even after a definitive number of future attempts, but I was saying it was a possibility. I did, however, admit to myself that I had maybe one more attempt at “natural” conception in me before I seriously started thinking about IVF. As much as I didn’t want to go through IVF, I had already done the harder part (growing and having the eggs extracted) years ago, and at least it would give me a higher likelihood of both getting pregnant and being pregnant with a genetically normal embryo.

As the initial shock of the pandemic wore off and I began to stabilize, I was finally able to grieve the end of my relationship with NTU properly. In other words, I was finally able to feel beyond the anger over how it devolved and ended, beyond the gripping fear of the virus and of lockdown, to the sheer sadness of losing something that had once seemed infinite. We were so happy and so in love, before we weren’t. It was like there were two NTUs: one, the Dr. Jekyll with whom I fell in love, who was incredibly sweet and thoughtful and romantic; and the other, the Mr. Hyde he became. I should be clear: I don’t think NTU is or was evil; the duality just seemed so stark. In the aftermath of my anger at Mr. Hyde, I was left able to finally grieve the love we had and the man I fell in love with, and to realize that despite the seemingly stark duality, the man who ultimately ended our relationship was still a good one. He was just one who was in an immense amount of pain, one whom I couldn’t love the way he needed, and who couldn’t love me the way I was.

I still wonder sometimes if there is anything else for which to take responsibility. Not responsibility like taking the blame or fault for him treating me the way he did, but responsibility like “how could I have responded differently?”. Obviously, everything I did at the time was what I could do in the moment given the tools I had. Looking in retrospect, though, as is typical, I can see some things that I couldn’t see when I was in it. Ironically, I think that if, instead of walking on eggshells and trying to cater to his every mood, I had been able to tell him straight up that he couldn’t treat me like that, had spoken up more forcefully for my needs, things might have gone down differently. I know from the one time I exploded in anger-fuelled truth bombs (“of course I don’t want to marry you right now!!!”), he was hurt but actually appreciated the honesty. Perhaps, if I had done more of that, the difference would simply have been that our relationship would have ended sooner, which might have been a blessing for us both.

Now that the perverse urge to scroll endlessly through my Instagram discovery feed in hopes of seeing a photo of him has abated (having been able to resist just going directly to his open account), the memory of the experience has faded to a kind of surreal quality. Less than six months ago, I still had a diamond ring on my finger, a gift from a man I thought was my person; now, he seems like a stranger I had a passing (if rude) conversation with once upon a time.

And so, I moved through the paces of the pandemic post-breakup, taking walks and petting my newly adopted rescue cat to keep myself relatively sane. In April, two of my closest friends had their second baby. I was supposed to have been a support person at the birth, but given the risks, that obviously ended up not happening. When I saw the photo of my friend with her newborn pop up on my phone, in the middle of leading an online executive leadership development course, I held back tears as long as possible until I could explain that I needed to leave the call for a moment to talk to them. It was an explosion of joy and relief like I have seldom felt in my life. The birth had gone smoothly, and everyone was well.

The sadness and grief came afterward in intense waves mixed in with the joy: sadness that I couldn’t be there to support them, to have that experience, to hold him in my arms on the day of his birth like I had his older brother; sadness that I didn’t know when I would get to meet him in person, when I would get to hold him, or how to support his moms from afar. And so many memories, so much grief from my own fertility journey that I had thought were behind me, but as grief does, got re-surfaced and stirred up by the circumstances. It is a curious thing to feel that much intense emotion ranging from joy to grief at the same time, but all there was to do was to feel it.

As I slowly began to come to terms with what had happened, I let my anger well up in a way I can’t remember ever having done before. Spurred on by encouragement from friends who knew how justified it was, who wanted me to feel the cleansing burn of rage, I surrendered to it. When I finally felt able to sit down and write—which had felt scary, because, you know, facing feelings—what poured out of me at first was a long string of “FUCK you”s. After a few lines of this, I went on to type a two-single-spaced-page list of “fuck you for…”. It was gloriously cathartic, and people were proud of me for having written it. (And no, I will not be publishing this list, even though it’s SO good. At least not for now. Maybe in the book version...)

I focused on this rage because it felt good, because it felt right (and righteous), and because it was easier than feeling the less glamorous feelings I was feeling—the feelings of embarrassment, and most of all, the feelings of shame. It was at lunch one day that a friend first named it: NTU’s behaviour had been not just not okay, not just manipulative AF, but emotionally abusive. This hit me, hard, because it felt right, and it felt true, and it also felt so disempowering.

When I was finally able to let myself admit these convoluted feelings in therapy, I coughed up what felt the most shameful piece of all: the thought that if he had been emotionally abusive, then I had let him. And if I had let him do that to me, what did that say about me? The judgmental part of me said that meant I was weak. Some higher-order but still judgmental part was horribly ashamed for even letting that thought enter my head—I, a woman who has worked with survivors, who would never ever say that to or about any woman, who would be horrified if a friend said that about herself. My lovely therapist spent a long time unpacking this thought and the accompanying shame, but the truth was, it mostly just needed to be said out loud so that I could see it in the light of day (or the warmly lit glow of my therapist’s office) and return to what I knew to be true—his behaviour was unacceptable, and weakness had nothing to do with it.

I loved this man. I fell in love with his intelligence, his excitement about life, his seeming ability not only to keep up with me, but to handle me. I have big feelings, a big life, and a big heart. I have been looking for a man who could handle and love all of me for a very long time, and I thought I had found him. When he went into crisis and we began fighting, I did what I do best (to varying degrees of effectiveness): I showed up, and I worked hard. I worked my butt off to try to make that relationship work, to get him and us back to a place of stability where we could address some of the fundamental things that weren’t working. I did not do this work perfectly; certainly, many of the ways I found to cope and to relate to him were likely the opposite of what he actually needed. But my god, did I try.

It turns out he couldn’t handle all of me, and we were never going to be the right people for each other. I was never going to be the partner and woman he wanted me to be, because I was never really going to make myself or my love or my life smaller to make him comfortable.

Who knows how long it would have taken me to wake all the way up and understand that I no longer had the capacity or the desire to keep going. I was certainly getting close, and had voiced that very concern with people. I was exhausted, both by the relationship and the sleepless nights it was causing both of us. But NTU ended up engineering his own exit, which, as dramatic as it was, was a blessing in disguise.

I had long ago made peace, in my own way, with the fact that NTU was not going to do the Landmark Forum. Yes, it had been important to me, but as long as he was doing his own work in his own way, that was what was far more important. It took me a few fights and working through being ungraciously attached before I got there, but I did get there. Then, at a point when things were temporarily feeling okay between us, NTU decided to dive deep into an internet rabbit hole about Landmark and all the worst things the fringe elements of the internet have ever said about it. He didn't tell me at first that he’d done this, but he did tell me that he was scared and concerned, and we agreed to talk about it in our next therapy session.

We had a few days before that session, which included my birthday. The night we came home from my birthday party, in the midst of his anger at the affection I’d shown my friends, he blurted out that he wasn’t sure we would survive our next therapy session after I heard what he had to say. I knew, in that moment, that it was over. The next day—my actual birthday—I alternated between sheer exhaustion, naps, crying with anticipatory grief, and private thoughts of relief as I catalogued all the ways in which I’d be grateful to have my life back when we were done.

In our session the following day, he fulfilled his own prophecy. I won’t go into everything he said about Landmark (mostly because, despite his protestations about it, I don’t believe it actually had anything to do with our demise). The short version is this: He spilled the beans on his internet deep dive, and essentially laid down a decree that if I didn’t stop doing a whole lot of things and stop seeing a whole lot of people, we were done.

I was heartbroken that he didn’t trust or respect me enough to believe my direct experience of incredible benefit—the experience of the woman he was purportedly in love with—over fringe internet elements he’d never met. I also knew in that moment, to my core, that while he was completely entitled to his view, I was so done with being told what I could or couldn’t do, and what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my life. I tried as calmly as I could to explain that I understood his view, that I simply didn’t share it, and that I was not willing to isolate myself in the way he was asking.

So there I was, sitting on the couch in our therapist’s office, having finally let someone fully into my heart and my life, feeling like both were being rejected. This feeling was dramatically underscored when he handed me back the wooden heart I had given him—the one that I had held onto for a decade until I met the person I thought would be my life partner. He had brought it to therapy expressly so he could hand it back at this ending point he knew was coming, because he knew, deep down, that the line he was trying to draw would be his last with me.

And this, I think, is what it came down to: he didn’t have the tools to handle what was happening in his life or in our relationship, couldn’t handle me or the way I live my life, so he tried to control what he could, and when that didn’t work, he found his out. I was shattered that it had all gone so wrong, but relieved that the nightmare was over.

I said I would sleep elsewhere for a few days while he figured himself out and found another place to go, but he ended up packing and moving out that evening. At the urging of another worried friend, I changed the locks a few days later.

The following week was filled with wave upon wave of all the feelings: sadness, grief, anger, and relief. The first wave of relief was perhaps the strongest, when I walked back in to my condo the morning after our breakup to see the den that had previously been piled high with his un-integrated belongings mostly empty. My friend who was graciously supporting me said my relief in that moment was palpable, and she was right; not only was I so relieved he was gone, I was so thankful that we had never gotten married, never purchased a home together, and (thank God) never gotten pregnant.

Of all the emotions, the anger was the one I had to deliberately allow myself to feel. It has never been an easy emotion for me to access, because I typically am so afraid of it that I stuff it down and it comes out only as tears or in pent-up (and still teary) explosions. But this time, I allowed it all (more on this in the next post).

Beyond the waves of feeling, the weeks following our breakup also involved a process of slow and steady de-programming from the conditioning of his insecurities. The voice that he had programmed into my head that piped up “that’s not okay!” when I would say “I love you” to my friends or use a term of endearment began to quiet. The voice that said “that’s not allowed” when I showed them physical affection began to fade away. The bedtime anxiety simply at the thought of going to bed and facing another disrupted night softened; my body slowly re-learned to sleep through the night and ride the remaining waves of sadness, anger, and relief.

I was embarrassed at how this fairytale had gone sour, and at who I became in the face of its denouement, but most of all, I was happy to be regaining my strength, my space, and my power.

Back to our story: the morning after the symphony, shortly after I woke up, NTU exploded with rage at how “inappropriate” my friends had been at our engagement party, flaunting and “performing” their polyamorous life. I was perplexed, angry, hurt, and tearful; we had fought about monogamy before, and I had clearly maintained, as I had from our second date onward, that what I was looking for was to build a solid, trusting foundation in a monogamous relationship, after which we could talk about opening up to something like “monogamish”. At the time, he had agreed that that sounded great. Despite my repeated reassurances that I was not looking for anything like the polyamorous relationships my friends enjoy, NTU could not believe, in his insecurity, that I was doing anything other than biding my time waiting to get to be with other people. He was also incredibly judgmental about my friends’ openness about their relationships. As we had in our previous fight about it, we managed to find a place to settle in the argument, a common ground about what we both wanted, now and in the future. Yes, I was angry about the fight, and, I was also petulantly upset that he had burst the bubble of our blissful weekend. This fight started off the week that became the shit-storm to end all shit-storms (and eventually, it turns out, our relationship).

A few days after our engagement, NTU had his surgery. Despite the fact that it was a planned, routine day surgery—one that he’d already had once before, no less—I was terrified of something going wrong, and of losing him. I felt awful that my fear took over our preparations, given that he was the one actually having surgery, but he was understanding and loving about it. The surgery went perfectly smoothly, and when I walked into the recovery ward and saw his face, I was flooded with relief and the most intense love I’ve ever felt in my life. We went home, got him settled on the couch, and had one day of peace and recovery. The following day, the fertility clinic called and we got news that was, to put it mildly, bad. And that was the beginning of the end.

NTU took The News very badly, which was completely understandable. A big part of what had drawn us together was the clarity that we both very much wanted, and were very much ready for, a family, and now, it seemed, we might not be able to fulfill that dream. This earth-shattering news was enough to take what was moderate and mostly managed anxiety and blow it up in to a full-on crisis. Add in a few weeks of recovery during which he was off work and had nothing to occupy his mind but his own dark thoughts, and during which he couldn’t work out (which was his main mode of self-regulation), and this crisis was intensified a hundredfold.

When two people like NTU and I put ourselves together in a relationship on hyper-speed and in the aforementioned relatively small space, you get a container not only for growth, but for all the issues to crop up on hyper-speed too. So there we were, dealing with my independence and reluctance to make space, his insecurity and need for reassurance, and the holy mess that those two patterns make when you mix them together, with an added dash of crisis just to spice things up. And it was not pretty.

NTU’s way of responding to this was to yell, to nitpick, to blame me for his insecurities, and to try to control my behaviour. My response to this was to shut down, cry, and push back, hard. At first, it seemed like we were just in a really hard shit-storm of events, and we could make it through, especially with the help of our amazing couples therapist. We did some great work in those therapy sessions. I tried to open up about my anger at how he was behaving—an emotion that is incredibly difficult for me to feel and express, and the hiding of which made things a thousand times worse for him. He tried to see my view, tried to see me, and fought to have his own pain seen and his own needs met. Despite this work, things between us were devolving, and his efforts to control my behaviour were ramping up.

Looking back now, I can see that, over time, bit by bit, I began to contort myself into a human pretzel in order to pacify him, make him more comfortable, not arouse his insecurities or his ire. You’re uncomfortable with my level of affection with my friend I dated for three months 15 years ago? Let me take it down a few notches and just not spend as much time with her. You’re uncomfortable with me using terms of endearment with anyone other than you? Let me try to edit myself. You’re uncomfortable with me saying “I love you” to anyone but you? Let me try to edit myself a little more. You wake up at 5:30am and spend an hour scrolling on your brightly lit phone in our shared bed? Let me put on a sleep mask so I can try to get a little more sleep. You’re terrified I no longer want to marry you? Let me consider taking you to City Hall just to appease you, even though marrying you right now is the last thing I want to do. You want to spend all of our time together, because you’re tired and you need reassurance? Let me put aside my friends and my creativity to make that happen.

The next week or so became a rollercoaster of joking about when/how he would propose and both of us getting anxious the closer we got to it. The plans that he jokingly shared with me alternately included a mariachi band, a marching band, the top of Mt. Everest, doing it the next day and doing it six months later. I knew that with his upcoming surgery, it was either going to be soon, or a month or two down the road, and given he’d said he needed some time to put his plans in place, I figured it was further away.

As the anxiety swelled and crested New Year’s Day, our worst habits of testing each other and our love came out in full force, and we had our first big, tearful fight. We were, fortunately, able to move back toward each other with some tenderness before I got on a plane to Alaska the next day for work. Part of this was coming to a place we felt like we could rest in the conversation; part of it was recognizing and granting compassion for the fact that while both of us would have loved to be in the fantasy of an easy, fairytale love, we are complicated, anxious, intense people who don’t make much of anything about life easy for ourselves. Another part of it, at least for me, was recognizing that there was a purely chemical aspect to this unbalance; having not had a truly restful night’s sleep for weeks, I was beginning to unravel at the seams. When I got home from Alaska, I was so happy to be home in his arms (and to eat the delicious roast chicken he’d made us). And, for the week or so after, I still felt somewhat unsettled and disconnected. It turns out, that was me unwittingly absorbing and protecting myself from his anxiety, which he was feeling but couldn’t tell me about just yet, because he was busy planning the biggest surprise of my life.

Because he was having surgery just a few days before his birthday, NTU told me one day that he’d booked us a reservation for the week before his birthday at Union, the beautiful restaurant where we’d had our second date (during which I’d told him about my baby-making plans). He said he’d done it so that we could go out and have a fun night before he was in recovery for his actual birthday. He’d also bought us tickets to the symphony for the following night. I thought it was a little weird that someone would plan his own birthday (especially with me, the Queen of Celebration, for a partner), but I rolled with it. That is, until it began to dawn on me that maybe there was a very real reason we were having two super-fancy back-to-back dates in one weekend. Can you blame a girl for thinking that one of those might not be “just” a pre-surgery early birthday celebration? I was simultaneously in excited overdrive, and replaying every scene in every romcom where the female lead builds up what she thinks is going to be a proposal in her head, only to get very different news. (To be clear, I wasn’t actually afraid NTU was going to break up with me instead of proposing, à la Warner and Elle in Legally Blonde. I just thought that there was a real possibility that I was setting myself up for ridiculous and ungrateful disappointment if it really was “just” a pre-surgery early birthday celebration.) I still went out and bought two fancy new outfits and filed my nails, though; it couldn’t hurt to be prepared and looking fabulous.

For the next part of the story, I need to backtrack a bit. The day after we met, when NTU told me how little sleep he regularly got, I teased him about it, wishing him a long, restful night. The next morning, he texted me the single number 7.5. Confused, I asked him about it, and he told me it was how many hours of sleep he’d gotten the night before. Abashed, I assured him that I hadn’t intended that he report his sleep hours to me every day, but I was glad at the increase. He replied, “So it wasn’t just a phenomenally transparent excuse to say hello?”. Laughing, I told him if he needed an excuse, he could just text me a random number every morning. From the next morning onward, NTU texted me a number every single day. Sometimes the number had to do with something we’d done together, or talked about, or something one or both of us was into. A game developed wherein I had to guess what it meant; after a while, I got very good at this game, falling into a pattern of first asking, “animal, vegetable, or mineral?”, and then deciphering from there. NTU kept a spreadsheet of all the numbers, my guesses, and the correct answers.

On the morning of his early birthday dinner, I woke up, for the first time in almost two months, to no text message, no number. Disappointed, my heart fell. I’d known it would have to happen sometime; we’d talked about how it couldn’t go on forever. Gathering myself, I walked out of the bedroom and found a handwritten note on the coffee table with the number ‘55’ written on it. I broke into a grin and immediately texted NTU, beginning our morning guessing ritual. But that morning, he said there were to be no guesses, and that at some point in the day, it would all fall into place. My certainty that he was going to propose that evening mounted, but I was also driven nuts by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to guess. At some point, a thought occurred to me and I pulled out a calendar; that day was 55 days from the day we’d met. Ignoring his “no guessing” decree, I texted NTU, and he told me that I was wrong, and not allowed to guess anyhow. So I chilled out on the guessing for the remainder of the day (well, I stopped guessing; chill would be a stretch).

After having gotten all gussied up, and running a little late, we made it to Union for our dinner reservation. The host said “right this way” and began to lead us to heated, walled-in patio at the back of the restaurant. In my head, all I could think was “It’s cold back there! Couldn’t we ask for a table up front?”, but I bit my tongue. And when I walked through that door to the patio, it was filled with loved ones: most of my closest friends, my brother, a couple of NTU’s friends. My heart and my eyes filled, and I knew that it was happening.

NTU made a beautiful, nervous speech about the numbers, our guessing game, the handwritten note that morning, and about how it had been 55 days (and 3 hours, to be exact) between the moment we’d met to the moment he was now asking me to join him in the adventure of a lifetime. My life was a fairytale, and this beautiful man was down on one knee, asking me to marry him. After an answer of “yes, a thousand times yes”, he stood up, slid the ring on, and kissed me. We turned to our people, and I realized that my brother’s phone wasn’t just recording the moment; my parents (one of whom was at home in Sarnia, one of whom was on vacation with friends in Mexico) were on FaceTime. We spent the rest of the blissful evening canoodling, talking with our loved ones, and eating the absolutely incredible meal that NTU had worked out with the restaurant to cater to our very wide selection of dietary needs.

It was everything I’d dreamed of, and more. He’d fulfilled everything I’d asked, and made it so incredibly special by having my people there to celebrate with us. We went home deliriously happy and tired, and kept floating in that bubble through the next evening at the symphony.

It turns out that when you take two very intelligent, intense, opinionated, and anxious people, and you confine them to a relatively small (i.e. 722 square feet) space for the better part of a few weeks, and add in the busyness of the holiday season, what you get is a lovely, loving, and very messy time. On the way back from our trip to Ottawa, before I’d even met his family, but after I’d made him swear that we wouldn’t talk about moving in together until January 1 (which was only a few weeks away), we pretty much decided that he would move into my condo and give notice on his apartment. We didn’t so much decide when the moving part would happen, but over the next few weeks, it started happening. He would make trips back to his old place, pick up a few things, and bring them home. I, sleep-deprived from my only semi-successful adaptation to sharing a bed with a man who wakes up at 5:30am every morning, would see said things piling up in the den and try not to freak out (another endeavour that was only semi-successful).

I very much wanted NTU here. I very much wanted him to feel at home and like it was his place too. And, I had lived alone for a very long time. The best word I can use to capture the feeling of this time, other than blissful love, is uncomfortable. I was just so freaking uncomfortable with shifting my ways, making space for another body in this relatively small space I had carved out for myself, seeing things that felt like clutter but were really his relatively few belongings, which the poor guy needed to even begin to feel at home. Mostly, I was uncomfortable with having another person around all the time. I was used to a lot of alone time, and then, suddenly, I was getting what felt like almost none. My first fumbling attempts at sharing my concerns about this with NTU were just as messy as my feelings, given his own completely understandable feelings of being unmoored and unwanted in a new space. We kept working through this, with him granting me all the loving patience he could muster as I learned to actively make space for him.

Three weeks of holidays went by incredibly quickly, between that trip to Ottawa, visits with both of our families (a somewhat non-traditional Jewish Christmas of sushi and euchre with my family, and a few days after that with his family), catching up with friends, and our first trip to Ikea together, through which we miraculously and rather easily managed to maintain both our like and our love for each other.

Never mind that I’d dictated that we couldn’t even discuss moving in together until January 1 and then almost immediately overturned that decree; while we were in Ottawa, we went from getting my ring finger sized (which was both overwhelming and hilarious when the Spence sales associate asked me how long my partner and I had been looking for a ring, literally the day after our “3 week-aversary”), to mulling over potential ring designs together, to NTU rolling over in bed the next morning and showing me the order confirmation on the ring. On the one hand, this did feel super-rushed; on the other hand, we were madly in love and clear about our future together, so why wait?

Leading up to this sequence of events, as we’d been discussing getting engaged, I had “offered” the following “guidelines”: 1) I wanted to be proposed to, and I wanted it to feel special; 2) This proposal could fall anywhere on the spectrum between (but excluding) rolling over in bed one morning and throwing the ring at me, and organizing a 200-person flash mob; and 3) You may not propose before I tell you explicitly that I am ready.

I knew that that last one was ridiculous, given the conversations we were having. I knew I wanted to marry this man, and relatively soon, but somehow the idea of actually having that ring on my finger was terrifying. Before heading back to my parents’ place for Chanukah/Christmas, we picked the ring up from the FedEx depot, and for the rest of the vacation, the box was never far from sight. This was both exhilarating (okay, okay, there are some parts of me that are still traditional/tied to gender tropes of lusting after gorgeous diamond rings) and scary. We had already said to each other that there was no back door in this relationship, no out, none of the re-calibration one normally does in the early days of a new relationship when it feels like you could just leave if too many small things fell on the “negative” side of the scale. We were, to use the catchphrase made popular by the Bachelor, “all in”. Now, there was a (lab-grown) diamond ring around to cement that. It was getting even more real, really quickly.

Fifty-five days from when we met to when he proposed.

Less than two days between our engagement and our next big fight.

Six days between our engagement and The News.

Fifty-two days between our engagement and The End.

It turns out The Unicorn wasn’t so much a unicorn as…well, Not The Unicorn (and yes, for the grammar freaks among you, I capitalized ‘The’ on purpose, because he’s not just Not a Unicorn, he’s not capital-T ‘The’ Unicorn for me).

This dramatic breakup happened nine days before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic—the week before the world as we know it shifted on its axis and my elbows quickly became the most useful part of my body. This was both inconvenient and divinely perfect in many ways. A global pandemic is extremely useful for eclipsing personal problems such as the end of a relationship with the person you thought was the love of your life. Fear and grief of that scope go far, far beyond the sadness, relief, and even the hot rage that all followed in the wake of the breakup. On the other hand, eclipsing doesn’t mean I escaped feeling those things altogether. Dramatic break-up + global pandemic = all the feels, all at once.

It also means that I went from being touched almost constantly, even when things were tough, to absolutely zero human touch, in the span of a week. I didn’t even have time to adopt a cat, much to my regret (which is probably for the best, because, you know, potential toxoplasmosis is still a thing when I still plan on trying to have a baby when the world returns to some semblance of normal). I have one stuffed toy in my household: an Ugly Doll™ that is bright yellow and is oddly phallic-shaped with little hands and feet. I bought it over a decade ago on a whim, when a friend, trying to shake me out of the mire of a different dramatic breakup, bopped me over the head with it and dubbed it the Ugly Stick. Since then, I have kept it and taken it out when I need a good bop on the head, and now, in the absence of a human or feline companion, I have taken to cuddling it at night.

The absence of human touch has left me feeling completely unmoored and deeply lonely, but when I think about the alternative, of being isolated with Not The Unicorn during this madness, I am nothing but relieved that we split when we did. The situation in our home and in our relationship had become almost untenable near the end, and I shudder to think what the added pressure of a global pandemic would have done to us. Now I look around my empty, safe haven of a condo, and know I can cope however I damn well please; for that, I am eternally grateful. I deal with my loneliness by spending an inordinate amount of time on FaceTime and Zoom, and going for walks in the park during which I hug trees and tear up at the feeling of holding and being pressed up against something alive. I deal with the excess of anxious energy coursing through my body by moving it as much as I can, pouring it into volunteer efforts, and spending way more time on social media than normal. And I deal with the grief of uncertainty and the grief of the breakup in tandem, riding the waves like I always have, holding on for dear life and being held in love by family, friends, and community.

The following few weeks were a wild whirlwind: him meeting my community, spending almost every night together staying up for hours talking about all the things, answering the Arthur Aron research “36 Questions to Fall in Love”, our first intense disagreement (Western medicine vs. alternative care approaches—it was a doozy but we managed to come through it relatively unscathed and with our love and respect for each other intact), and our first road trip, which was home to meet my family and family friends at our annual Chanukah party “Latkefest”. My mom was already in love with him before we stepped in the door, given everything I’d told her, and he exceeded every expectation in person. The rest of the family loved him too--even my dad after we euchred him in dramatic fashion at the card table. He was a shining star at Latkefest. Our discerning family friend, who is known for her inquisitive nature, declared after questioning him intently, “well, he’s perfect!”. We spent the night falling in love all over again as we watched each other—him watching me, in my element, with these people I’d known and loved my entire life; me, watching him integrate himself easily and lovingly into this family. After the group singing portion of the evening had concluded, The Unicorn picked up my dad’s acoustic guitar and started playing, and we all swooned; when he later sat down at the piano and started playing a simple 12-bar blues riff, my mom looked me straight in the eye and said: “don’t fuck this up” (something she would never say to me sober, but indicative of her feelings about him).

I wish I could say that this whirlwind of falling in love has been smooth, and easy, and a perfect fantasy. In many ways, it has been: we are aligned on almost all of the important things, and with the ones we disagree on, we can have productive, respectful, and loving discussions. I have never felt safer, more seen, more cherished, or more respected and matched in partnership by a man in my entire life. We are both the kind of humans who find something we are interested in and/or love and dive in headfirst, so we have already talked with relative ease through all the big things: engagement, moving in together, marriage, babies (not necessarily in that order). All of this has been wonderful; and, if I’m honest, the past few weeks have also been riddled with doubt and uncertainty, on both of our parts.

Mostly, we are not in these moments at the same time, and can support each other through them. Mostly, his certainty grounds me in moments when I am overwhelmed by the surrealism of having my life story change on a dime in a matter of weeks. And there are times when he is not there to talk and hold me through it—times when I get overwhelmed with how quickly things are changing, how much it will require of me to alter the path I had chosen for myself, no matter how badly I wanted this. I have identified my independent strong suit and the myriad ways it has been a barrier to me a million times over, and it still confronts me. I am a Strong Independent Woman™: one who has lived alone and been self-sufficient and community-interdependent for years; one who has not only made peace with but gotten excited about conceiving and raising a child without a partner; one who, despite never giving up on love, was not really sure, deep down, that this kind of love would ever be possible. In short, I am in love, and I am absolutely terrified to be getting everything I’ve always said I wanted, and at such a rapid and intense pace. This, coupled with the guilt and shame of feeling anything but ecstatic, makes for a lot of feelings butting up against each other.

The Unicorn is slowly helping me to see that allowing myself to be partnered and loved and taken care of is not incompatible with being a SIW™. When we were packing for the road trip and he brought up bringing everything down to pack the car the night before we left, since I would be driving alone to pick him up from work on our way out of town, I started with “that’s not necessary! I can do it!” When he said, “of course you can, but why would you?”, I said “because I’m a strong independent woman and I don’t need you to do it for me!” He laughed and gently challenged me: “or you could be a strong independent woman who lets me take care of you sometimes”. And so, I let him. I also let him open the door to his car for me--something I have never expected of anyone--and I love it.

Text-based witty repartee ensued, in which I put next to zero stock after too many experiences getting excited about text exchanges only to have zero chemistry in person, and we planned our first date. As a general rule, I keep first dates simple and short; we can always extend or plan another if we want to spend more time together, but I like to have an out without having to make up an excuse if it’s not going well. In keeping with that rule, we agreed to meet for coffee, exactly an hour and a half before I needed to be at the hospital around the corner for an MRI (just for lower back pain, so no need to worry).

I came away from that hour and a half feeling, perhaps for the first time in my entire life, that I had met a man who could actually keep up with me. It was a surreal feeling—a surrealism that would foreshadow the weeks to come. The texts started up again the second we were out of each other’s sight, and continued, for hours at a time, for the next few days while he was traveling for work (including for an entire evening he spent with his out-of-town friends, who were wonderfully understanding). By the time he raced, or rather slogged, through a road trip home and rush hour traffic to make it back for our second date, we both knew (though hadn’t told each other yet) that we were falling for each other. I always know I’m falling for someone by the songs I start singing, and Ani’s “Falling is Like This” and Elvis’s “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You” were on heavy rotation. Leading up to that second date, though, my trepidation was mounting: he didn’t know what I’d been up to for the past year. He didn’t know that I was potentially already pregnant. I knew he wanted a family, but could hardly dare to hope that somehow he would want one like this, and this fast. I also knew that I couldn’t make it through a whole night with him holding this in, and that, as wild and early as it seemed, it was time to put my cards on the table.

I asked him to meet me outside the restaurant when he arrived, because I knew that I would be calmed, at least temporarily, by a moment alone with him before we sat across the table sharing a meal. I was right, and our first gentle kiss was a feeling of coming home and setting off on the adventure of a lifetime all at once.

I managed to hold off freaking out until I could call my mom when I got home to talk me off the ledge. She calmly asked me questions to help guide me toward my own answer. With only three truly mature eggs, what were the actual chances of all three of them being fertilized? Low, but definitely within the realm of possibility. Given my history of miscarriage, what are the actual chances of all three of them being viable and surviving? Again, probably low. Could I actually see myself with three babies? No f’ing way. Wildly, the previously terrifying thought of twins was starting to look good compared to the—what’s the word for terrifying x 1000? petrifying doesn’t seem strong enough—possibility of three or more. Would I be able to cope with considering multifetal selective reduction? It would be hell, but I’d get through it if it came to it, knowing it’s actually what’s medically best for me and the babies, and knowing that I’m resilient as fuck. What kind of support could I envision being able to count on? More than most new moms, and probably more than many new parent couples, given my community. I was off the ledge, but still teetering, still asking myself if I was so blinded by wanting to be pregnant that I was taking a ridiculously stupid risk.

The ensuing couple of weeks were a wild hormone ride, given the progesterone that had been added to the cocktail—a ride that, cruelly, included exactly the same symptoms as pregnancy (nausea, bloating, constipation, mood swings, delayed period). Even though I felt like hell, I still managed to laugh about it some of the time, including when I took myself to see Brittany Runs a Marathon and had to stop myself from openly (and loudly) sobbing in the theatre because it was just so damn inspiring.