Hazel on the beach in Half Moon Bay, Fall 2009

I began trying to get pregnant shortly after getting married in 1999.  I assumed it would be easy; it was not. After two years of failed fertility treatments, my then husband and I decided on one last IVF cycle.  This time we would go to St. Barnabas in New Jersey, home to a well known fertility clinic.  I was, to put it mildly, desperate to be pregnant.  The culmination of failed attempts, of squandered savings, of the hope/failure roller coaster, had left me exhausted.  My husband at the time, was traveling two weeks out of the month.  I needed to be at the clinic for close to two weeks while they monitored my blood work and waited for everything to align before they took my eggs.  My sister Bridget came with me for support.  We holed up in a musty long stay hotel in Morris Plains, New Jersey. It was the end of October – cold, piles of leaves on the ground.  In the mornings, my sister and I would drive to the clinic where they’d take blood and scan me via ultrasound, to see the progress of my eggs.  There were always dead deer on the road I remember.  My sister gave me the injections at night.  It was a process of icing and warming and then injecting and wincing.  She got good at giving the injections and I got good at tolerating them.   In fact, soon enough I was doing my own injections.  When we returned from New Jersey the injections had to continue and so I did them myself.  Once I injected Progesterone in a cramped batroom stall in San Francisco State, where I was getting my master’s degree.  My teacher saw me emerge from the bathroom with my needle and vial, and I remember wondering if I should explain to her that I was not a junkie.

Oh 22 gauge, 1.5 inch needles, how I hated you.

At the long stay hotel in New Jersey, there was a video rental libaray in the lobby, full of dated 80s and 90s movies that I’d never bothered to see in the theatres.  I don’t remember what we watched anymore, but they were all romantic comedies.  There was one with Alicia Silverstone and Benicio Del Toro I think.  I remember one night there was an argument in the next room, one sided, with a man on a phone shouting at whoever was on the other end of the line.  Another time Bridget and I watched from our window as a man berated his wife in the car down below.  She sat in the passenger seat looking ahead.  He was shouting so loudly we could hear some of it even from way up on the 4th floor.  I don’t know why I still remember that, but I do.

I had been to an acupuncturist before we left for New Jersey.  Desperation and hope made me cast a wide net for solutions:  I looked to acupuncture, diet, standing on my head after sex, yoga, herbal remedies, vitamins.  I had been diagnosed with “unexplained infertility” which meant simply I should be able to have a baby and they just didn’t know why it wasn’t happening.  The acupuncturist had put me on a special diet.  I could have no sugar, which was torture for someone with a sweet tooth.  At night she had instructed me to submerge my feet in a very hot bucket of water, up to my calves.  It had something to do with circulation.  It made only partial sense, but every night I did it anyway, as Bridget and I sat in front of the television.

When it was finally was time for the eggs to be harvested, my husband flew to New Jersey.  A day later the eggs were fertilized.  There were eight total.   They put two back and froze the remainders.  These are the two in the picture below. They are both eight celled, day three embryos.  Though they put back two, only one implanted.  There’s a common misconception, bolstered by media reporting, that you can implant embryos. You can’t.  You can simply transfer them to a uterous.  After that, the implanting that does or does not happen is a crap shoot, one not even doctors fully understand.  I don’t know which embryo is Hazel.  But one of these is her first baby picture.  The doctor showed them to me, under a higly magnified camera in the operating room where they did the embryo transfer.  They looked just like the picture – blobish, like amoebas and nothing like a baby.   I remember she said to me “There they are.  Aren’t they cute?”  Though it was a ludicrous thing to say, I cried.  They were cute.

The bottom embryo shows less fragmentation which generally means better quality. I suspect this is Hazel. The other one did not implant.

We retuned to the Bay Area.  Two weeks of agonizing wait went by.  I took a pregnancy test.  It was positive and I immediately assumed it was broken, or expired or otherwise part of a cruel trick.  I called my sister and said: “Something weird has happened.  Come over.” We went to get more pregnancy tests.  On the radio, Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir was playing.  The lyrics I heard when we backed out of the driveway were “I am a traveller of both time and space.” Bridget looked at me and said “This is a good sign.  Your traveller of time and space has arrived.  You have a baby in there.” Eleven more pregnancy tests agreed and when the doctor’s office called confirming my postitve blood work, I almost felt myself levitating with joy.  I have not known happiness like that before or since.  Sometimes I think that I willed her into existance, by sheer force of wishing on stars and candles and eyelashes.  She came to me through medicine and the manipulations of science and (if you believe) God too.  But I can’t help thinking that force of will, love and blind, rampant hope, played a part as well.

The 20 week ultrasound. I took this from her baby book. I'd kept that fortune in my wallet for years.

Hazel was born on a Tuesday night at the close of July in 2002.  I’d been laboring since the evening before – back labor it was called, which meant I mostly felt the contractions in my lower back.  I’d heard that first time mothers are often sent home from the hospital because they come in too soon, but by the time I went in, I was nearly hobbling with pain.  They wheeled me into a delivery room and asked what took so long.  She was born at 9:37 pm.  She came out laughing – a small, stiffled giggle.  It was not a cry.  I told this to my sister and she said it was because of all those comedies we watched in that hotel room in Morris Plains, New Jersey.  Hazel had been holding that giggle for months.

Hazel’s first word was “woof woof,” for dog.  Her second was “cock,” which was for cars.  This was awkward when we were in public and she’d shriek “COCK!” when a car drove by.  If people were around I’d say loudly “Yes that’s right Hazel, it’s a CAR.”  After a while it seemed kind of pointless.  All my correcting her did no good and she continued shouting the obscenity gleefully, sometimes accompanied by frantic pointing, any time a car went by, which was a lot.  So I stopped correcting her and would instead say “That’s right sweetie, good job, it’s a cock.”

She is not like me.  She is not socially awkward or even remotely shy.  She is outgoing and likes to sing and dance.  For an entire year when she was 3, she wore princess dresses and high heeled slip-on dress-up shoes.  When we had her first parent-teacher conference in nursery school, the first thing the teacher said to me when I sat down in one of those tiny chairs was: “I have never seen a child climb trees so well in high heels.  So now we just let her.” Clappy shoes, Hazel called them, shoes that made a clap-clap noise to announce her presence, to make people turn and look.

She has a temper.  She is small for her age.  She makes a clicking sound with her tongue when she is in a deep sleep.  She is a night owl and even as a baby, stayed up late and slept until nine or ten o’clock in the morning.  No one believed a baby would sleep so late, but she did.  On her cheek are three freckles, that’s it, just three.  If you connected them it would make a perfect triangle.  Hazel was going to be called Simone, because I thought she’d be darker, more earthy looking, with black eyes like her father.  But she arrived a redhead, with pale mottled skin.  And so we switched it.  Her favorite song when she was little, was Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” She called this song “Cop Car” for the line: “I backed my car into a cop car the other day.  Well he just drove off, sometime life’s ok.”  She’d request the song again and again in the car.

I wonder if Hazel herself will ever read these words.  If, when she is older and turning eight is a distant memory and she is 18 or 28 or 38 or 78, she will read these words and know the full force of my love for her.  If you find yourself reading this one day Hazel, then this is for you:  My sweet Hazel, no one loves you more than me.  Whatever you have done, whatever you do in your life, I will love you the same amount.  You used to ask me how much I loved you and I’d say: so much.  But what you wanted was something measurable. “Do you love me to the moon and back?” you’d press me.  Yes “And all around the world?”  Yes. Hazel, wherever you are when you are reading this, you should know that I am desperately glad you are mine.  I am sorry your father and I are not together.  I will likely never get over the idea that I gave you a home with parents who can’t be together.  Your sweetness, your cutting remarks, your temper, your heartfelt expressions of love, your need to still be cuddled at times, your anxieties, your distaste for sensible shoes, your laughter, your unadulterated joy upon seeing me after being with your dad – all of it slays me.

I love you to the moon and back.  And all around the world.

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