Personal Essay: Better Late...
How infertility has improved my life.
by Maude Allen
July 28, 2009
Even though I know the American dream is bullshit, as a woman who has worked for the past twenty years in the entertainment industry, I have developed a really intense work ethic. Somehow working twice as hard as the men around me while taking ten times more
crap led me to think that in all situations, if I just keep pushing, it'll all work out. And while my workaholic tendancies helped me survive my job, they didn't help much when I woke up at age thirty-eight and realized I wanted a kid.
No matter how many times I took my temperature, penciled sex in on my day planner, or visited the fertility specialist, I still couldn't get pregnant. So after a year or so I began looking not just at what I was doing, but at how I was doing it. Treating
getting pregnant as just another project didn't account for things like my age or the fact that I had no balance in my life. So I decided to go the extra mile and began to radically change my eating habits, quit caffeine, take up yoga, and even do accupuncture,
all while questioning if being a workaholic for the rest of my life was really what I wanted.
Doing all this was thrown into super slow-mo by what self-help books might call "my family of origin issues." My dad is a high-functioning alcoholic who weighs 400 pounds and my mom, who has never eaten a scrap of food before two p.m., smokes a pack of Benson
and Hedges every day and refers to the never-ending box of wine in her fridge as her "therapist." I grew up thinking Chef Boyardee was really healthy, because it in some way involved tomatoes, and I can't remember a time when my family ever took a walk or a
hike or otherwise did any physical activity together. Quite simply, when I finally came around to the idea of self-care, I had no idea how to do it.
One of the first things to go was my non-stop multitasking.The first time I went to a yoga class I started crying, because the feeling of "being in my body," doing something good for myself, was so foreign and confusing to me. As I was sneaking out the back door of the gym, another realization hit me: taking care
of myself made me feel like I was in a car driving away from my family while flipping them off in the rearview mirror. Sure, they kinda suck, but sometimes staying on a sinking ship with people you know is a better proposition than floating solo on a life
boat in the open ocean.
One of the first things to go in my quest for healthy living ended up being non-stop multitasking. Typically my nights and weekends were filled with what I call faux-relaxing. Always on guard in case some crazy work emergency might come up, I spent most
of my down time catching up on emails while watching bad pay-per-view movies with my husband. Basically I had no boundaries between work and my life, something I knew I'd need not just to be less stressed out and therefore more able to get pregnant, but also to be present
as a mom.
You know those people who are texting all the time? It's like they are not really in the room with you and they are not really with the person they are texting either? They are nowhere. Well that's what I was like, even though I don't text that much; I was
nowhere. Not really at work and not really relaxing.
Yoga helped. Having a place where all I did was one thing helped me see the value of being focused. At first, taking the two hours out of my day to get there and back and attend the class made me completely insane. I was giving up two whole hours of scatterbrained
productivity! But when I came back to work, I chose more enjoyable projects to work on and finished them faster because I wasn't reading a fertility book with one hand, working the project with the other and writing emails with my toes. I focused, stayed present
and the most amazing thing happened: I started to leave work at work and slowly began to take my weekends back.
But even after I mastered the exercise thing and was able to do yoga sans tears, even after I figured out what quinoa was and added it into my diet, even after I learned to be more focused and present, I still couldn't get pregnant. It was time to admit
some other stuff I'd spent a long time denying.
About the Author
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Maude Allen lives in New York. |
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