Everything doesn't happen for a reason

Surviving the divine timing industrial complex and major life transitions

This week my wife and I and both of our moms and our seventy-five pound dog drove from LA to Nola. We moved! Our truck full of belongings is a couple of days behind us, last seen in Amarillo, Texas according to an air tagged suitcase that made it on board the truck.

I’m wearing slippers with sequined cowboy boots embroidered on them. I acquired them in the first Buc-ees we passed on I-10 in central Texas. I’m sitting outside and it’s the perfect temperature and the birds are chirping multiple different songs.

Driving my mom to the airport this morning she said the humidity is 89%. I think, This is the closest you can come to living under water without living under water. I’ve always wanted to be a mermaid.

If you tuned in last month, hopefully you had a chance to read my longer piece “Almost Pregnant” in The Adroit Journal. The funny thing about its release was realizing that everything that gets published seems “new,” while for me the story in that essay is almost a year old. It is the ghost of last spring.

If things were different, I could still have been pregnant by now. Hell, I could have had had a baby, which would have made it even more wild that some people’s response to the essay was advice on how to get pregnant (which is wild if you have read any part of it). But the past year has not offered more grace or wishes granted on that journey.

It has offered roadblocks in the form of sunk costs, long waits for medical test results, providers who are too busy to tend to non-urgent patients like me, office holiday closures, and even a change in our donor’s genetic testing results that sent us on an unwanted three-month hiatus. We can talk details another day, there are stories in this story.

I want to talk about the urge to find peace by narrativizing hardship till it makes sense. As a writer, often a creative nonfiction writer at that, I obviously do my share of this. But the more I have written my hard times and disappointments into print, the less I have liked the idea that everything happens for a reason or in its right time.

All of my relationships before my marriage didn’t fail so that I could find my wife. Yes, eventually they had that effect and I’m so glad things ended up the way they did, but it doesn’t give purpose to the hurts that led me to her, and it doesn’t change the possibilities and pitfalls of those relationships. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t ready for love and partnership, or that I didn’t deserve it, earlier on.

But even that isn’t really an apt analogy for how it feels to be told to trust in the timing when it comes to having a baby. Maybe it’s not as common of a platitude when it comes to love, or maybe I’ve just had enough distance from singledom to forget it.

But when you want to get pregnant and you don’t, it swiftly falls into “divine timing” territory. There’s lots of reasons this makes me mad. Namely, that I want to have a baby now and I can’t be convinced that there will be a better time if only I am patient.

It’s also because we all know that pregnancy often happens whether you want it or not. It doesn’t happen because you made all the right choices and you saved a lot of money and found the right partner and won at life. It doesn’t happen because you manifested it and took more supplements than everyone else.

Pregnancy happens when sperm meets egg at their biologically perfect right time, and makes its way through the barrier and fertilizes the egg. It only happens if an embryo successfully implants into the uterine lining, and so on and so forth.

This happens to people who don’t want to have any more kids. This happens to people who don’t want any kids at all. This happens to people who don’t want to be pregnant right now. This happens to people who had sex less-than-consensually or with someone they don’t want to parent with.

For me, the adage to have faith in timing and suggestions that I haven’t gotten pregnant yet because the conditions of my life since we started trying weren’t “meant to be” doesn’t fit. Maybe it relies on a privilege I don’t have.

Maybe it’s easier to believe your children arrive at the right time when you have a heterosexual partnership without fertility complexities. When the opportunity will continue to present itself in your bedroom every 28 days, for free.

When your ability to conceive is bound in the red tape of cryobank sperm availability, doctors, and out of pocket medical fees in the thousands per try, you don’t have the luxury of divine timing. You do everything you can to control the conditions, and you’re still a feather in the breeze of outside inputs. You’re lucky to get a few tries in a year, or ever, with intense planning, saving, and figuring-it-out required.

Regardless of your conditions, if you are trying to conceive, trying to adopt, trying for anything all consuming and vital to you, it’s okay if you want it now, six months ago, six years ago, not later. It’s okay to say it’s unfair, it sucks, and you deserve it just as much as everybody else does. In fact, for me, it’s been vital. There’s no need to face the added expectation that you should be good, no, you should be perfect, to start your family.

We’ve made this move to New Orleans in large part to financially support our ability to conceive, and to become parents in a lower cost of living city where we have supportive family and friends (within a ten minute radius instead of an hour in traffic both ways). That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been sweet if we had already been able to become parents, even if it meant a cross country trip and moving with a tiny baby, which for sure would have sucked. Yeah, it would have been a lot harder for me to pack up the house if I was six months pregnant, but in the scheme of things it would have been awesome.

It bugs me to think of how this timing will be narrativized one day when I have a babe in arms. The way our move to New Orleans or a new job I don’t yet have or some other shift in our lives ahead will be calculated to equal what had to happen first before our “right” time came.

Sure it will be a right time, because we will still want it, we will still be ready. But it won’t mean that right times haven’t passed too. There are many of them. The right time is when you are ready, and you’re in charge of that.

This rant is not one against hope. It is only to say that it feels empty and more painful to me to chalk up my efforts so far to being “the wrong time.” After realizing I would not be one of the lucky ones who gets a successful pregnancy on the first try, the months of attempts turned into enough decision fatigue and failure to fill me with grief.

The way back to hope and possibility has been patience with myself, permission not to answer questions about where we’re at with fertility when it hurts, acceptance that I have done my best, and the space to feel my true sadness and loss over the divine times that have passed me by. It is hard to face the yearning and lack of control that pulse in the background. I give myself the kindness of acknowledging they are there.

The narrative is imperfect and it contains loose ends and consequences that aren’t tied to moral lessons. Things don’t always make sense. I am an animal who cannot breathe under water but I live below sea level. May wonders never cease.