HALEY KENNEDY: Ode to a daughter

I was crushed by the news. A familiar exam room, a familiar face. My wonderful and kind doctor telling me in his serious doctor voice that he would do everything in his power to fix the situation. I knew what his eyes were saying a lot more clearly than the words coming from his mouth. I saw written there: “Don’t get your hopes up. It may not happen for you.”

Even as he described the beginning stages of what I now know is infertility treatment, I was still processing. Still beginning to picture a future that didn’t have children in it. Contemplating how I felt about that life. I agreed to some testing, some medication. I may have agreed to donate a kidney for all I know. All I could think was that this was the end of some primal hope I had always carried.

I left the doctor. I went back for the ultrasounds. And the bloodwork. And more bloodwork. More ultrasounds. More questions. More planning with my doctor, who I’d begun to think of as some evil genius plotting new and different ways for us to wage war on my body. And yet, my body kept failing me. I continued to not get pregnant.

I cried in the bathtub when my husband was asleep. I lay awake at night searching the internet for answers, support, research, anything that told me I wasn’t alone. Thankfully, I found that I wasn’t. I found a whole community of people in the same shoes. Walking paths multitudes worse than mine. I knew my doctor was in my corner because he kept trying. New combinations, new procedures, new research. His commitment sustained me in ways I can’t even verbalize to this day.

Finally, he thought he had an answer. He found a growth on my Fallopian tube. He asked me if I would agree to removing it. It was my best shot at conceiving, he said. We scheduled the surgery. I cried. I prayed. I complained to my husband, my sister, my mama, the mailman. I’d never had surgery before. What if it didn’t work? What if it made things worse?

In pre-op, I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. What’s your name? Date of birth? Who’s your doctor? What are you here for today? I don’t know. I couldn’t pronounce it. I had practiced spelling it, but I was still hesitant. My doctor walked into the pre-op area and I felt a sudden calm. Whether it was all the tears or the praying or just his determination and professional demeanor, I can’t say. But whatever it was, it worked. The surgery was a success.

About six months later, with varying degrees of side effects from all of the fertility medicine, I learned that a close friend was pregnant. “We weren’t even trying! It’s just a happy accident!” I was so damned mad. I was sad and frustrated and jealous. I was embarrassed by my own feelings because babies are such a blessing and deep down, I truly was happy for her.

But I couldn’t help asking myself, why her? Why not me? I know so many women who walk in the same shoes. Tread the same weary path to the doctor’s office, to the pharmacy, to the hospital. IUIs and HSGs and IVF and acronyms all day long but no answers. I got my answer. I don’t ovulate. I had a bum Fallopian tube. I am one of the few who get answers and get lucky. I finally got a positive test.

I found out I was pregnant when I was two weeks along. I talked to a nurse at my doctor’s office who told me to come in at eight weeks for a “viability ultrasound.” I had deleted those words from my memory until I sat down to write this article. For six weeks, I sat in turmoil believing that this would be just another false start. I just knew every day would be the day that my luck finally ran out. But I have never been so happy to be wrong in my entire life.

At eight weeks, I saw a tiny blip on an ultrasound. “Here’s the baby!” the ultrasound tech told me. It still didn’t sink in that I was really pregnant until I heard my doctor fling open that same exam room door and say, “We’re pregnant! We did it!”

At 16 weeks, we went for a gender reveal scan with Hope at Great Expectations. I didn’t realize when I scheduled the appointment that Hope at Great Expectations was the same Hope who did almost all of my infertility scans. It seemed like some great cosmic sign to me that Hope should be the one to tell me that the feisty little froglet turning somersaults in my belly was a girl. Every ultrasound that followed showed a healthy, growing girl. Every ultrasound also showed her with her tiny little legs crossed at the ankles — a habit she still carries to this day.

I’m not sure when we finally committed to naming her Caroline, but at some point I began to think of her as a girl baby and not just an alien creature growing in my uterus and making me throw up 24/7. I began to feel movements and hiccups and occasional kicks, usually in the direction of my bladder or lungs.

Finally, the time came to meet my little prize fighter and she decided that she would rather not. This, too, is a habit she carries to this day. If she doesn’t want to do something, she digs in her tiny heels and firmly says, “NO!” All manner of induction medicine and weird peanut pillows and medieval water-breaking implements would not persuade her to budge. So as difficult as she was to conceive — she was equally difficult to deliver. An emergency C-section nearing 9:30 p.m. (on New Year’s Eve no less), and, quite suddenly, she was here. She even did me the courtesy of making me throw up one last time right in the middle of the C-section.

Since that first moment when I heard her first cry and stupidly asked “Is that her?” I’ve studied every sound, every movement, every turn of her head, every inch of skin. Even now, as she’s growing more lanky and brilliant by the day, I can’t help but notice the single tiny freckle behind one ear. The way her big brown eyes get wider when you’re telling her something she knows is important. The curve of her delicate face. The way her hair flies out behind her when she runs. The sound her laugh makes when her daddy tickles her.

A million perfect miracles all in one amazingly tiny package. She’s stubborn and she’s sweet and she’s loving and she’s wild. She’ll kiss your cheek one minute and then dismissively wrinkle her nose at you the next. I don’t know who she’ll become. I don’t know where she’ll go in her life. All I know is that I am grateful every single day that I was chosen to be her mama.