I’m Childfree, But Not by Choice

How my infertility journey led me down a surprising new path

Photo by Ch Photography on Unsplash

The first time I took a pregnancy test I was 36 years old and ready to be a mom. Leading up to that point, with each friend that announced a pregnancy, I felt the pull and noted in myself a hint of envy. It was time. I had pre-purchased the test at the CVS down the street from my house so that I had it ready the second I suspected I needed it. We had decided the month before that we would “start trying”, a phrase that lacks significance until you realize that “trying” isn’t always as fun as you’d assume.

I was living with my partner in a little brick row house on a quiet street in Astoria, Queens. After seven years in New York City, we had found a place we could afford that wasn’t a one floor apartment. It was spacious enough for a deep couch to watch movies on and bright enough for a variety of tropical plants—ferns, palms, and, ironically, one called the mother-daughter plant—to care for and love. It reminded me of the cozy home I grew up in, in a city just two hours south. It was a place I could picture sharing with more than just the two of us.

Best of all it was a four-block walk to the N train, which took me directly into Manhattan and dropped me off at Union Square, where I could head south to Washington Square Park to read my book and be distracted by the eccentric people watching or go west to Greenwich Village to admire all the brownstones, something I particularly loved to do at dusk when people started to put on their lights but had not yet pulled down their shades.

When it was time to take the test, it was an early weekday morning in late August. I woke up anxious and before I so much as rubbed the muck from my eyes, I was on the toilet trying to avoid peeing on my hand. When I was done, I balanced the stick on the edge of the blue porcelain sink and waited in anticipation, flooded with excitement and already sure it would be positive.

I was wrong.

I walked into my bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and stared out the window. I didn’t know what to think or how to respond to something that I wasn’t at all expecting. I hadn’t prepared a pep talk. No words of comfort. I thought, That can’t be right, can it? Should I take another one?

I had been so sure the test would tell me what I wanted to hear. What else could explain the week before when I had an immediate need to barf and shot up off the couch to run to the little half bathroom next to the kitchen and spit up in the toilet? Or the time that I was on the bus, a detour because my precious N train was down for the day, slinking through the streets of Queens on my way to Manhattan and I had to actually get off the bus because I was so nauseous? And then there was all the mid-afternoon sleeping that I couldn’t stop doing. What was that all about if not a positive pregnancy test?

But I was still living in a headspace where I was likely to get anything I pursued doggedly. I believed that when I wanted something all I had to do was work on it until I got it. I had control. I would figure out how to make it happen. I was good at that. I was born in 1980 and grew up with boomer parents who believed deeply in the power of hard work. The “anything is possible when you’re willing to work for it” mentality was etched into me.

When I wanted to get my own apartment in one of the coolest—and most expensive—parts of Philly at 18, I made it happen. I used to get up at six, take the bus to college for morning classes, leave in the afternoon to work my office job, head back to school for late afternoon classes, then work my evening waitressing job. I did all of this because it made it possible to have something that I craved deeply. When I wanted to move to New York City, I made it happen. When I wanted to travel the world, I made it happen. When I decided to start my own business, I made it happen. It was exhausting, sure, but to me it meant I had control of my life.

Never easy, but always possible. Why should becoming a mother be any different? If I wanted a positive pregnancy test, I would work on it until I got one.

I remember thinking that all those symptoms I felt throughout that muggy month of August were a sign that something had begun in my body, it just hadn’t completed. To me that meant it was only a matter of time. I would get that double line in the little window of the stick eventually. Like all the other things I’d desired in my life, I really did believe I had control over making this happen.

So when the negative test told me otherwise, I bought a few more boxes of tests to keep in the bathroom under the sink because I knew I’d be needing them again soon. These were still the days of trying “naturally” where every menstrual period that was even 12 hours late gave me butterflies of anticipation, every unsettled stomach wasn’t the week-old rice from Chinese takeout sitting in the fridge that I nibbled but certainly the beginnings of new life stirring in my insides.

I liked seeing the boxes in my bathroom. Pregnancy tests represented what life would soon be. I could see it already in my mind: Balancing business ownership and self-employment with an infant, creating traditions as a family of three, setting up my mom in the guest bedroom so she could help with childcare. I heard myself proudly making naive statements like “oh, we’ll still travel a lot, we’ll just bring the baby with us” at dinner parties with friends who already had kids so smiled politely while likely laughing on the inside, and having three Christmas stockings hanging from the banister of the blue carpet-covered staircase of our little Astoria rental house.

I smiled upon seeing the pregnancy tests under the sink—until six months later when I was still staring at those same fucking boxes every time I opened the cabinet to get the tampons I needed each month. Each time I spied them felt like a punch in the stomach. I was bent forward, wind knocked out me, breathless with disbelief.

“Nope!” they yelled at me. They mocked me, their pink boxes that for so long provided a sense of excitement, possibility, and happiness now created disappointment, sadness, and rage. They actually made me feel stupid, like I had believed in something that wasn’t real. Unused, unneeded pregnancy tests were my adult version of Santa Claus; they represented a fantasy, a story of joy and hope and magic. But not real. Nothing to believe in.

When I was six years old, I walked into my kitchen that December, looked at my mom, and said, “Mom, I’ll pretend since I’m the oldest, but don’t lie, it’s you and dad, right?” So matter-of-fact, so accepting. So sure.

But not this time. Now the magic that was being taken away left me curled up on the bathroom floor crying like I’d experienced a death, one that occurred every single month, leaving me in a constant state of mourning. My tears were so intense and plentiful that instead of being doubled over the toilet with morning sickness, I was contorted around the seat, gripping, dry heaving, snot and saliva dripping from my face. Another month passed, another negative, another fragment of hope taken away.

Words from my partner: “We’ll keep trying.” “It’s only been a few months.” “We have no reason to believe there’s a real issue yet.” I knew he meant what he said but I felt deep down that something was wrong.

And I was right.

I didn’t want to be right. I wanted to be pregnant.

But another six months of opening the cabinet to retrieve a tampon and seeing the pregnancy tests nestled under the bathroom sink went by before they finally got tossed.

Not because I was strong enough to do it on my own but because the doctor told me to. I was sitting in the gynecologist’s office, staring at her solemn face, hearing her say, “You’re 37 years old and it’s been about a year of trying naturally. I would suggest not waiting much longer to explore other avenues.”

My eyes immediately filled with tears hearing her words, but she seemed unconcerned. She said it not with warmth but in the most straightforward way. I immediately hated her.

How was this information not breaking her like it was breaking me? She was my doctor; didn't she care? Wasn’t I the very first 37-year-old woman sitting in front of her with this problem? If not, I certainly wanted to be treated as if I were.

Instead of empathy, tenderness, and understanding, I got practical, realistic, rational. At first it pissed me off. But eventually I started to appreciate her approach. The unemotional started to feel sensible. And I kind of liked that. Hope had a place in the story again.

When we started going to the IVF center, I didn’t need the pregnancy tests to give me that hope. The time of peeing on a stick was over. Determining whether or not I was pregnant would be through a visit to LabCorp, a needle prick, and drawn blood.

We now had science on our side and it was going to help us become parents. We are taught to believe that science has answers. I believed it would tell me exactly what the problem was and then it would suggest exactly how to fix it. Check and check.

After months of painful, invasive tests where long cold ultrasound wands were shoved inside me, maneuvering at unfathomable angles, looking for problems, I learned that there wasn’t anything obviously wrong. Nothing to point to for why we couldn’t have a baby. I decided this was great news! I was back to having reasons to smile. I could now see ads featuring babies without my eyeballs brimming with tears.

I remember telling my best friends, “There’s no real issue. That means we just need a little help making it happen.” I was back to calculating due dates and adjusting travel plans to accommodate my fertility.

While the need for IVF pulled me away from the belief that I personally had control over the outcome of our efforts, it pushed me toward the comfort of a more learned control—clinical, provable, deductive. I didn’t have to work so hard on my own; the experts were now involved. Someone else was responsible for making this happen. I could exhale.

I should have been more careful about what I wished for.

Because over the course of three years, my positive turned to a negative, more than once. I was angry yet unwavering that I wasn’t going to give up. I had become like a gambling addict. Broke but adamant that I just needed one more try. Just one more; it would work and I’d hit it big.

I never did.

And after two more years, I had to put the hope of a lasting pregnancy to rest. I could no longer stand to sit on my couch Googling “signs of pregnancy,” reading the long list, analyzing myself one more time—Are my veins more visible? Am I peeing more than usual? Do I taste metal? I was done. The hope I’d experienced over the years was the hardest part because it made it so easy to visualize what I wanted. With hope came the tendency to rub my flat stomach, choose my favorite names, believe I could actually feel an infant in my arms.

When I knew it was really over, when there was nothing left to try and nothing more in my bank account, I was sure that the only way to live with this grief of not being a mother was to live a life of intention. I crawled onto the window seat that my partner built for me in my home office, notebook in hand, slowly pouring out my ideas for all the things that would make life magical that didn’t involve a baby. The list was surprisingly long. Things like using my savings to buy a second home abroad and flitting back and forth with nothing but a backpack, closing a still-successful business that I had outgrown in order to start a new one from scratch, and spending entire days at a coffee shop writing a book. These were things I’d once dreamt of but hadn’t allowed myself to fantasize too much about once I hit my mid-thirties because motherhood would have erased their probability. Looking at the list, I remember thinking, This isn’t a bad consolation prize.

With that I had to start writing the next chapter of my life even though I hadn’t been able to close the last chapter the way I wanted. I now lean hard into the things that I wouldn’t have been able to do as easily, if at all, had I become a mother. A life of travel and freedom where I spend months at a time in Europe, where my daily morning routine allows for an hour of uninterrupted reading, and where money is spent guilt free on Barolo, hardcover books, and trips to the fancy cheese store. A life where I accept how little control I really have and one where I acknowledge that hope isn’t always the best strategy. Because hope is expectation—and can be its own form of suffering. Once I let go of hope, I was set free to be a new version of myself.

Nicole Giordano is the founder of Revel + Verve, a creative wellbeing studio supporting women in midlife and beyond. She writes about the grief of infertility, her multi-cultural identity, and the rollercoaster of midlife womanhood. You can usually find her exploring a new country, cooking something elaborate, or being cozy with a book at home.