My husband, David, and I were at the obstetrician's office for what seemed like the 39th exam and discussion of my reproductive goods: How many eggs this month? How's that uterine lining coming along?
But this visit would be different. Two weeks earlier, right after my hormones indicated I'd ovulated, we had transferred our last single frozen embryo into my uterus. Since we wanted children by any means, we had also sent a check to an adoption agency. And to cover all of our bases, we also had sex.
Science and nature came together that day, much to the confusion of our doctor, who found two embryos when he examined my uterus.
"How did this happen?" asked Dr. C. "They must have made a mistake during the transfer."
But there was no mistake. There were two embryos, and they were both mine: One that I had conceived the old-fashioned way, and one a newfangled way (frozen embryo transfer). At that moment, I didn't care how it had happened. I only knew that after many painful years spent trying to conceive, I was finally knocked up—twice over!
A few weeks later, when I walked into the waiting room for my very first pregnancy visit, I felt like I'd crossed into the Promised Land. But soon I started to feel like a stranger there, not wholly at one with the fertile women who surrounded me. We would chat about our pregnancies, and the conversation would grow uncomfortable when I would say I was having twins.
Women would say, "Oh, twins. Wow! Were you surprised?" I quickly learned that this was code for "Did you have fertility treatments?" I could say yes, of course, but those treatments wouldn't really explain my twins. Instead of answering honestly—"Yes, but..."—and launching into my story, I would simply say, "I was so surprised." And when I was inevitably asked whether twins run in my family, I'd answer (honestly), "Yes, they do."
That would end the conversation but not entirely wipe away the suspicion, or their curiosity. In this day and age, if you have twins, most people assume you've had fertility treatments. Any privacy you've cultivated about your treatment is gone, and now you must be prepared to respond to the incessant questions.
Why are other women so interested? And why was I suddenly coy, now that I was pregnant? When I had been going through my fertility treatments, I had divulged every last mind-numbing detail of my ordeal to anyone who asked how I was.
We all tell one another our stories at different stages of our lives. During the first year of motherhood, we talk about our conception timetables and births. Behind any playground swing, you overhear snippets like "It took us six months, and I was starting to worry," or "I was in labor for 10 hours, when suddenly everything changed and the midwife said, 'Let's get this show on the road!'"
On the one hand, you could call this just natural, womanly story sharing, the tried-and-true way women get to know each other. On the other, the passage into biological motherhood is so fraught with expectations and fears, and so romanticized by our culture, that it's hard not to harbor some suspicion that the swapping is weirdly competitive, instead of supportive.
Why else would my friend Stephanie have felt she couldn't tell the women in her Mommy and Me yoga class that her natural-childbirth plan hadn't ended like theirs, but with three hours of pushing, a failed forceps delivery, and an emergency C-section? And why else, when I went to an online bulletin board for twin moms, did I find multiple posts that opened with "I am the mother of natural twins"? Natural twins! What are my twins? Aliens? Is one more natural than the other?
Pregnancy and birth seem to have become a way in which we prove our authenticity as women. How quickly we conceived, where and how we gave birth, whether we nursed and for how long—these become scales by which we qualify the "realness" of our pregnancy experience.
My son and daughter are two very different children. One loves strawberries; the other prefers apples. One loves the sandbox, the other the slide. But these differences have little to do with the particulars of their conception. The kind of mom I am has been affected by how long it took and how hard I fought to be one. I'm pretty sure that I'm not a better mother because one of my kids was conceived spontaneously. We're all just in the playground, making birthday cakes from sand.
