The long walk to baby bear, part 1: How it started

Three and a half years ago, a few months into the pandemic, I went to see my ob/gyn to let her know that Bear and I were going to start trying to get pregnant — thinking she might tell me which prenatal vitamins to take, or do some test to make sure everything was working ok, and also knowing she would say something discouraging about my age. I knew enough from several friends’ long struggles with fertility that doctors use disheartening names like geriatric pregnancy and will likely say even worse.

A month before that doctor’s appointment, Bear and I had gone on our first yoga retreat together in the Blue Ridge mountains. One morning we went for a walk to a waterfall, and though it was almost winter and definitely and without question too cold to get in the water, he could not resist. When he got out, I told him I was willing to start trying. He’d been wanting to have a child for as long as I’d known him, and had asked me if I was ready to start trying, but I wanted to be married first. That day by the waterfall was the day I admitted to myself that he was my chosen one, no matter what, that I wasn’t leaving even if we didn’t get married on my timeline.

Going back further than that, we were on one of our early dates, at a park overlooking the water — the park where we would get engaged a couple of years later. He kissed me and said something about our future. I was surprised, thinking that with my being 10 years older than him that it was understood we weren’t headed toward anything serious, and said something along those lines. He probed and I gave some canned answers, and when he kept probing I’d said to him honestly and directly that he was very clearly meant to be a father and that he should choose a younger woman, that I probably wouldn’t be able to give him children. He told me it was his choice and he chose me; I gave in and we kept falling in love.

Going back further than that, when I’d turned 40 with no partner in sight, still recovering from a devastating breakup and not even willing to date yet, I’d privately and thoroughly mourned my fertility. I would still be a mother someday, through adoption or stepmothering, but I accepted that I wouldn’t have a child through my body. It wasn’t an easy grieving process, but in time I reached a place of peace.

I was a long way from there, sitting in my ob/gyn’s office and waiting to tell her that I wanted to have a baby. I was prepared for whatever horribly insensitive thing even a good doctor might say to me. What I wasn’t prepared to hear was that she could tell even before an ultrasound that I had fibroids — a condition that afflicts an inordinately high number of Black women and that the medical field knows next to nothing about (two facts that are connected).

The ultrasound revealed that she was right; I had fibroids — plural, several, large. She told me that if I tried to get pregnant without removing them — through an intense abdominal surgery — that the embryo might have nowhere to implant, or that even if it manages to implant, that the growing baby might run out of room and I would be at risk for a series of miscarriages. She told me I needed to have surgery — which would take a few months to prep for and schedule — and then heal thoroughly — another six months — before I could even try to get pregnant. She gave me a referral to a fertility surgeon and I went out to the car and cried like a baby. Wrecked. And it was only the beginning.

I’m writing a series of short pieces to process and share my long and challenging fertility journey to my current thriving pregnancy with baby bear.