Exploiting My Baby Read Free Page B

how I ended up getting my privates checked out by a staunch nurse with a tight blond braid at a Planned Parenthood nearby, meaning in the ghetto. She said I seemed fine, and by that, I think, she meant white; she sent me home with some yeast infection medication. Before leaving the clinic, I used the bathroom. When I went to wash my hands, I noticed the soap dispenser was empty and I remember thinking, “No soap? Doesn’t soap prevent the spread of disease, and isn’t that what this place is all about?”
    Several visits and Pap smears later, I learned I had chlamydia, which a guy can carry and be totally asymptomatic, so I could hardly blame the comedian, although I might have felt better about the whole thing if he hadn’t “all of a sudden” remembered a cocktail waitress in Charlotte who mentioned something about having something, which didn’t seem relevant to mention until, um, it was.
    Lots of bad medical care later, I finally went to a real doctor, who told me I had pelvic inflammatory disease from trying and failing to treat the bug with various gnarly antibiotics from the clinic.
    There was such a sense of euphoria when I was being treated by an actual doctor, with a white coat and everything, that I almost didn’t want to ask if there would be long-term effects, but I did and he told me my tubes might be scarred and I could have trouble having kids later. He said he didn’t think so, and I asked how we would know for sure. “If you try to have kids and it doesn’t work,” he answered.
    That was over ten years ago, but it haunts me as we commence baby making.
    I take my friend, a mother of two-year-old fertility treatment twins, out for margaritas, and grill her about the entire process, taking down the name and phone number of her fertility specialist. The forty-seven-year-old redhead from Pilates who finally conceived after five attempts at in vitro fertilization, I corner her to get every detail, marveling at her determination (not to mention bankroll). When I run into a pregnant neighbor at the Coffee Bean, I trap her in a fatal talk hold while I soak up tales of daily hormone shots, Clomid cycles, acupuncture, cryopreservation of embryos and intrauterine insemination. I see her eyeing the door as her latte goes cold, but I can’t let her loose.
    I’m on a need-to-know basis with every woman who has ever had trouble getting pregnant. Furthermore, the girls who just flat out procreated with no trouble? I need to know their stories, too. Mainly so I can resent them. Mentally, I am socking away money for assisted reproductive technologies. I will need them all, I am certain.
    Within just a few days off the pill, I am consumed with infertility and certain that because of my age and my dubious STD history it’s going to be a long, barren haul that may never ever actually yield a baby. Infertility is everywhere I look until I am convinced that no one gets pregnant just like that , and that one-night-stand pregnancies must be an urban legend or the province of teenagers with more youthful vaginas. I walk by the newsstand, and it seems like every actress I see is either having multiples from fertility treatments or hiring a surrogate. When I think of my reproductive system, I literally picture one lonely egg, as if human eggs look like chicken eggs, covered in cobwebs and dust like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. While I’m probably supposed to be making vision boards filled with giggling babies and gloriously pregnant bellies, I’m mainly picturing that egg, decayed, rotting and old as fuck.
    I start peeing on those ovulation kit sticks and trying to squeeze through the so-called fertility window. When I calculate that a day is the optimum day , based on half-assed knowledge cobbled together from searching the Internet and reading parts of books and unscientifically polling various women, I pressure my husband into having some very un-fun, desperate, high-strung sex the second he gets home. Afterward, I