Introduction

Breeding in Captivity is about a quirky, lovable couple that you root for through their fertility struggles and adoption adventures. It's about the hundreds of Internet message boards where annoyingly perky women from Kappa Alpha Fruitcake refer to sex as "babydancing" and sprinkle virtual "baby dust" on each other. It’s about meeting birthmothers and deciding on open adoptions. It’s about being chosen and then having a birthmother change her mind. But ultimately, it’s about hope, how life can surprise you, and laughing through the insanity.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

It started at the rehearsal dinner. The freaking rehearsal dinner. We weren’t even married yet and Dave’s Uncle Larry was shouting from one end of the long banquet table to the other, “When’re ya gonna pop out some babies?” I was always a big fan of Uncle Larry. He was equally adept at drinking and dancing and, as a result, I always had a great time with him at other people’s weddings. But at that moment, I wanted to punch him in the throat.

Turns out Uncle Larry was just the nosy canary in the rude- question coal mine. Over the next forty-eight hours, Dave and I would be asked some version of that same question a dozen times. And why not? People had finally gotten an answer to their previous punch-worthy question: “When are you getting married?” Now it was time for the sequel. Dave and Stacy, Part 2: The Breeding.

The answer to the first question hadn't come quickly. By the time we walked down the aisle, Dave Helfrey and I had been together for seven years. We'd met while working together at an advertising agency. He was a thundering nerd and proud of it. He read comic books, clung to his beloved '80s music, and sported a healthy thicket of dark, Irish curls. He was a cross between Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything and Duckie from Pretty in Pink. Per­ fectly imperfect. The only hitch was that he wanted kids someday. And I didn't. Or at least, I thought I didn't.

I was the last of five, born seven years after my closest brother. So my mom had seven long, luxurious years to settle into the idea of never having to be pregnant, give birth, or change a diaper ever agatn.

And then I came along.

I was the surprise child whose nickname was Whoopsie, and whose existence caused my parents to sever all ties with the Cath­ olic Church and their old-fangled rules about birth control.

So I grew up knowing I wasn't planned, which is different from being unwanted, but only a little. My parents made no attempt to shield me from the knowledge that they'd rather be doing just about anything other than raising yet another child. My father joked about it, because that's what he did. "Well, that's the last time I'll ever have to do that!" he'd laugh when he successfully taught me how to tie my shoes, or ride a bike, or drive a car. My mom just chain-smoked and sighed a lot.That was what parenting looked like to me: exhaustion, exasperation, and benign neglect. Call me crazy, but it didn't sound like much fun.

Years went by—three, four, five of them—and Dave and I were still together. I had all but given him permission to go. But he stayed.

“I’m not in a hurry,” he’d tell me when I openly wondered why, if he wanted to be a father so badly, he was still hanging around.

This was, of course, a relief to me. When I tried to picture my life without Dave in it, I couldn’t. There was just no other reason to end our relationship. I loved him. He loved me. And the thought of walking away made my insides turn hard.

So I changed my mind. Not immediately, but very, very slowly. Like a bad haircut finally growing out.

I assumed that he would propose immediately. But Dave is a man who needs to come around to an idea. He doesn’t jump on bandwagons for the sake of progress. He has to think about it. A lot.

So I began the first in what would turn out to be a very long line of waiting periods. It ’s worth noting at this point in the story that I am very bad at waiting. When I want something, I want it now. I have no patience for delay. And even after all that ’s hap- pened, I’m no better at it now than I was then.

In the end, it took him about a year to propose. He promised it would never happen on an obvious day. “You’ll never see it com- ing,” he told me, making me wonder if he’d bought a ring or hired a hit man. So when I looked down at my dessert menu on Valen- tine’s Day—the most obvious day imaginable—and saw the words “Queenie, I love you. Will you marry me?” I was, indeed surprised. But more than that, I was relieved.

It was finally time to get on with my life.

When I visited my ob-gyn a few months after the wedding and told her I wanted to get pregnant, she delivered one of the least­ effective pep talks ever.

"How old are you?" she asked, as I lay splayed out in the cru­

elly lit exam room, shivering under a thin paper sheet. "Thirty-five," I said.

"You know that's advanced maternal age, right?" she asked as

she warmed a speculum under the tap.

"I'm sorry? Is that, like, an official thing?"

"Yes. It's a thing. After thirty-five, your fertility starts to decline.You don't have as many eggs, and the ones you do have are less viable," she explained, as if to a third grader."Try to relax. This might be a little cold."

I have to question the humanity of a doctor who delivers this speech while simultaneously giving you a pap smear.

''And if you do get pregnant, you have a higher risk of miscar­

riage. Down syndrome, too," she continued, peeling off her latex gloves and casually tossing them in the garbage.

"But I just decided to have a baby,"I said."My therapist cleared

me and everything. Now you're telling me I can't?"

"Of course not.I'm just telling you that it might take a while. And that it would have been better if you'd decided when you were twenty-five."

"Okay. So. Do you have any advice?" I asked, wrapping the paper sheet around me as far as it would go. It didn't go far enough. "Is there anything we should be doing to help our odds?"

“Have lots of sex?” “Seriously?”

“Well, yeah. Kind of. My advice is to try on your own for six months. If you haven’t gotten pregnant by then, call me and we’ll take it from there, okay? Go ahead and get dressed.”

Thank you, Dr. Buzzkill.

Advanced maternal age. It sounded like a soap opera disease.

“I’m sorry Jessica, but you have Advanced Maternal Age. You only

have six months left to breed.” Whatever. I wasn’t old. My face was

wrinkle-free and I had yet to sprout a single gray hair. “Thirty-five

is the new twenty-five,” I told my mirror image as I searched for

gray hairs.

I went off the pill six months after the wedding. I wanted to

start trying right away, especially after being diagnosed as Old.

But Dave wanted to wait a year, for a handful of silly reasons

that included “ We’ ll be more ready in a year.” Six months was

our compromise.

I’d been taking the pill and other forms of birth control for

nearly twenty years. My fear of motherhood had turned me into

the Michigan Militia of contraception. Dr. Buzzkill thought it

might take a few months for my body to get used to ovulating

again. But it didn’t take any time at all for me to return to the vio-

lently painful periods that had begun when I was thirteen. Every

single month of my adolescence, I’d spent at least two days curled

up in a ball, feverish and vomiting. I sat in our family doctor’s

office and listened to him and my mother talk about what might

be wrong with me and what to do about it. He suggested birth

control pills as a way to ease the pain and help regulate my run­ away periods. Initially, my mom balked. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic. But she finally relented when I was sixteen, worn down by all my whining and wailing. A few weeks after I started tak­ ing them, I was thrilled to discover that birth control pills did, indeed, take away the pain. Completely. I clung to that plastic disc of candy-colored pills like a child with a pacifier. And now I was throwing them in the trash because I wanted to get pregnant.

When three months went by without success, I decided to get

some backup.

The infertility section at Powell's Books is located between Pregnancy and Parenting. I'm sure someone thought that was a logical placement. It's all about babies, right? But really, it's kind oflike putting the books about alcoholism next to the books about cocktail recipes. To make matters worse, the infertility section didn't even take up an entire shelf. There were half a dozen Oh You Poor, Poor Barren Woman titles butting right up next to 1001 Awe­ some Baby Names!

The book I ended up buying was called Taking Charge ofYour Fertility. Because taking charge is better than just lying back and waiting for nature to take its course, which, so far, was not work­ ing at all.

This book shocked me. Because, get this: Ihere5 a specific way to get pregnant.And it doesn't involve having sex all the time. It involves having sex at exactly the right time. I didn't know this. I really didn't. My knowledge of my own reproductive system was laughable.This is how I remember having The SexTalkwith my mother:

Me: We did Sex Ed in health class today.

Mom: (uncomfortable silence)

Me: They gave me a pamphlet.

Mom: Oh good. Do you, umm, have any questions?

Me: No, I guess not.

(See also: Benign neglect.)

The pamphlet appeared to have been printed in 1956. It didn’t

say anything about getting pregnant. It just told me not to go

swimming when I had my period. Plus, I’d been on the pill since I

was sixteen, so I never really had to worry about the mechanics of

getting pregnant. Not that anyone was trying to get in there. I was

a classic vision of awkward adolescence: tall, skinny, glasses, braces,

acne. But the fact remains that until I was thirty-five years old, I

had no idea that you needed to have sex at the time of ovulation

in order to get pregnant.

Taking Charge of Your Fertility completely changed my

approach to pregnancy. I was done screwing around, so to speak.

Where scented candles and massage oil had once graced my bed-

side table, now sat ovulation charts, a basal body thermometer,

and an increasingly dog-eared copy of the book that had become

my personal version of The Art of War. Every morning I took my

temperature and noted it on the chart. When it started to go up,

I knew my body was getting ready to ovulate. When it dropped

down, the big event had already happened. And in between those

two points, I earned a junior gynecologist ’s badge for my ability to

find and identify the harbinger of impending ovulation: egg-white

cervical mucus.

There is no dignity in infertility, a fact I had only just begun to understand.

Six months after the Advanced Maternal Age speech, I was back in Dr. Buzzkill's office.

"I think you should see an RE.I can give you a list, but I really recommend Dr. H. He's good,"she told me, shoving an oft-copied list in front of me with the doctor's name and number highlighted in acid green.

"RE" stands for Reproductive Endocrinologist. It also stands

for Really Expensive. I was hoping to avoid seeing one.

"Why do I need a specialist?" I asked. "Can't you just give me some Clomid?" Clomid is a fertility drug. I'd been doing my research. On the Internet. Doctors love that.

"Sure.In fact, I'm going to write you a prescription for it today.

You should take it while you're waiting to see Dr. H. Maybe you'll get lucky and not have to see him at all,"she said.

I left her office with a prescription, a phone number for an expensive specialist, and a sinking feeling that my life was about to get a lot more complicated.

Getting an audience with Dr. H was, as Dr. Buzzkill had

predicted, difficult. And my impassioned plea to the scheduling nurse ("Don't you understand? My. Eggs. Are. Dying.") was com­ pletely unsuccessful. Two months is the standard waiting period for all new patients. During that time, they wanted me to schedule something called an HSG test, which would show whether or not

my fallopian tubes were blocked. Then I needed to take the Clo- mid and chill the hell out for a couple of months.

The HSG test wasn’t nearly as “simple” as the doctor’s office made it sound. Simple is drawing blood and sending it to a lab. Simple does not involve the words “This might pinch a little” while someone inserts a catheter into my uterus. For the record, it pinched a lot. The catheter was used to inject me with a radio- graphic dye. If my tubes were clear, the dye would flow through them like Porsches on the Autobahn. If they were blocked, the dye would just sit in my uterus—a reproductive traffic jam. The whole thing was broadcast on a flat-screen TV, and as I watched the dye zip through my fallopian tubes, I breathed a sigh of relief and reached for Dave’s hand. “Your turn, sport.”

I’d spent the last six months toiling in the tedious minutiae of my own fluids and fluctuations. I was the one who did the research, kept the charts, and cracked the completely unsexy whip when it came to having sex. I was the one who got poked, prod- ded, and catheterized in pursuit of the child Dave and I wanted to have together.

And Dave? He got to jack off with a Playboy.

The cruel reality is that male infertility is a lot easier to diag-

nose. The little soldiers either swim or they don’t, essentially. And

his did. Swimmingly.

By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, we were almost a year into our attempt to become parents. We spent the holiday with

our friends Mark and Rachel, who had eight years of infertility under their belts. Together, they were the Yoda of not getting pregnant. Their home is an elegantly rumpled estate that sits on one of the canals that feed off Lake Oswego, which is both a lake and a swank suburb just outside Portland. As friends, they were way out of our league. They drove Lexii and had cocktails with politicians.We took the bus to work and drank during the day.We only knew them because they were friends with my sister Julie. For years we'd all been celebrating Thanksgiving with Mark, Rachel, Julie, and a rotating cast of friends. Dave and I always played the role of interesting outsiders. Over cocktails, we'd regale them with stories of what it's like to wear jeans to work every day. The only thing we really had in common with our hosts was infertility. So on that particular night, I knew I was in safe hands.

In other words, no one was going to ask me if I was preg­

nant yet.

Most of the people who knew I was trying to get pregnant would look at me expectantly when we got together, raising their eyebrows in some idiotic pantomime of decorum. But others would just come right out and say it.

"So, pregnant yet?"

Why in the name of all that's socially appropriate would any­ one ever ask a woman this question? No good can come of it. If I'm pregnant, and I want you to know, I'll tell you when I'm ready. And ifi'm not, this question is like getting a drink thrown in my face. It stings. It's embarrassing. And it makes me want to crawl into a corner. Right after I slap you.

That night, I was going to pull Rachel aside and tell her that

Dave and I were going to start seeing a specialist. I wanted to get her take on what to expect. But as we sat in their book-lined living room eating fancy things stuffed in endive, they dropped the bomb.

“We’re pregnant,” Mark blurted out, grinning like a kid in his school picture. “It ’s twins.”

My internal response to the news went something like this:

1. Stabbing pain in my heart and ringing noise in ears. Voice inside my head screaming, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

2. No, wait. It’s Rachel. She’s been trying forever. This is good news! Happy! I’m happy!

3. But Rachel was going to be my confidante. She was the only other person I knew who struggled with infertility. Who am

I going to talk to now? What about me, me, me?

4. I am a terrible person. I don’t deserve to have friends. Or a baby. Where’s the booze?

When Rachel left the room to check on the turkey, Mark leaned in conspiratorially.

“IVF with an egg donor,” he stage-whispered. “Rachel doesn’t like to talk about that part of it.”

He was still wearing his school-picture face. The man was giddy. “Isn’t IVF really expensive?” Dave asked. This is not a man who’s afraid to ask the rude questions. Had the situation been dif- ferent, Dave would have been one of the “So, pregnant yet?” people. “Well, yeah. Of course it is,” Mark answered. “But what ’s

another $20,000 when it comes to your kids, right?”

BREEDING IN CAPTIVITY

I might have spit out my drink at that point. I'm not sure. Mark was still talking, as oblivious to my shock as only someone who lives on a lake could be.

"But the truth is, we owe everything to Dr. H," he continued.

That's where I spit out my drink for sure. "I'm sorry, who did you say?" I asked.

Mark repeated the name of the doctor we were scheduled to see in just a few weeks, emphasizing each syllable.

"He's amazing," Mark said, leaning back into the soft, over­

stuffed couch and rattling the ice cubes in his Manhattan.

I felt Dave's hand grip mine as I told Mark that Dr. H was going to be our doctor, too.

"Well, congratulations," he said, raising his glass to toast us. "Because you're going to get pregnant."

On the drive home, Dave and I were buzzing.We were thrilled

that our friends were finally pregnant. And the fact that they'd gotten there with the help of the same RE we were using was just the dark chocolate ganache on the moist, delicious cake of won­ derfulness. But the $20,000 comment was sobering. Correction. The another $20,000 comment.

"Do we want it that bad?" Dave asked as he navigated our

banged-up Subaru down the steep curlicue roads out of Lake

Oswego.

"Like, $20,000 bad?" I asked. "I have no idea. How do you put a price on something like that?"

"Easy. You say, we will spend X amount of dollars on this and then we'll quit."

“What do you mean ‘quit ’? You want to quit? You—” I skidded to a stop just before driving off the “You’re the one who wanted a baby in the first place” cliff.

“I don’t mean quit trying to be parents,” he said, moving quickly to avert my impending freak-out. “I mean quit trying to get pregnant. Maybe we should think about adoption. How important is it for you to carry a baby?”

Beyond the windshield, the night was black and wet. I could see the city lights in the distance. Just beyond them was our home—a small, hundred-year-old Craftsman bungalow. It was a nice place. But it wasn’t on a lake.

The wipers swooshed back and forth, clearing and obscuring the view over and over again.

I didn’t answer him. I was thinking. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The book talks a lot about how other people react to someone who is dealing with infertility. Do you feel like you gained any insight on how to talk to someone who is struggling to get pregnant? Have you personally experienced any of the situations the author talks about?

2. Stacy and Dave made a decision to stop short of in-vitro fertilization. Do you think that was the right decision? Or should they have kept going?

3. In Chapter 18, Dave tells Fran that he believes Wendy and Josh “played” the agency, meaning they were never serious about going through with the adoption. Do you agree with that? Why do you think Wendy and Josh ultimately “chose to parent”?

4. What did you think of Stacy and Dave’s decision not to adopt Cathy’s baby? What would you have done?

5. How does Breeding in Captivity change (or not change) your opinions about adoption? Infertility treatments? What decisions would you have made if you were in Stacy and Dave’s shoes?

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