The Brotherhood of Joseph: A Father's Memoir of Infertility and Adoption in the 21st Century
256
The Brotherhood of Joseph: A Father's Memoir of Infertility and Adoption in the 21st Century
256eBook
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Overview
Offering men a chance to be heard and women a rare opportunity to view the struggle with infertility from a male perspective, The Brotherhood of Joseph brings to life the anger, frustration, humor, heartbreak, and sense of helplessness that come to dominate the husband's role. As his remarkable account reaches its finale in Siberia, however, Hansen's once again becomes the story of a husband and a wife who, even after years of medical frustration and fruitless paperwork, still must take one last risk together and trust in their most basic instincts before their new family can be born.
"Literary grace that has the remarkable power to act as a lens" is how the New York Times Book Review has described Hansen's writing, and that grace has never been more evident than in this remarkable memoir.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781605299235 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Harmony/Rodale |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 445 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PART ONE
INFERTILITY
CHAPTER ONE
THE TROUBLE STARTS
7/20/04
INT. cabin of a plane, 36,000 feet--Night
I am headed back to New York City from California. Elizabeth and I have come back early from our annual West Coast swing to get the last of our paperwork ready for the trip to Russia: Tomsk, Siberia. The far side of the world, where maybe we will meet . . .
. . . Ha ha, very funny. Even as I was writing that--the first sentence of my live account of what we hope will be the end of this long journey--the light above me flickered off.
So let me set the scene, forced by faulty circuitry back to yet another seat. Flying east, we've plunged into night. The lights in the cabin are out. A sparse array of passengers are reading, sleeping, or watching CBS programming. I have shifted seats several times to give Elizabeth more room and to focus on my notes, but also to see if I can find better sound on my headphones. Two and a Half Men is playing, but lost my attention, so I wondered if the time had come to begin this.
So I began the very simple, but very daring, sentence that rides the top of the second paragraph there, but as I did, would you believe the reading light above me failed? Blotted my page completely black and stopped my pen; flickered on again to see if I would continue, which I did, and off went the light again. Three times the light did this, and three times I persisted.
Elizabeth noticed from across the aisle. She smiled at the inconvenience, but didn't grasp the irony.
The light came on again, but I had enough. I disentangled myself from the headphones, flung them down, and sassafrassed my way back to the seat behind her, the seat I'm sitting in now, which I presume will let me finish my sentence because I will not be stopped. If this is the seat that lets me finish, then this is the seat I'll sit in, and it has not betrayed me yet. The light, I mean. It has let me write all this, so let me finish, then, before it changes its mind:
My wife Elizabeth and I are headed back to New York City tonight to get the last of our paperwork ready for our trip to Russia:
. . . Tomsk, Siberia.
. . . the far side of the world
. . . where we will finally get to meet our son.
. . . And that, right there in a nutshell, is the story of our last six years.
My wife and I first met when we were teenagers. This was back in 1979. Elizabeth was sixteen. I was fourteen. We met because, though I was born and raised in New York City, large contingents of both my mother's and father's families lived in California. My roots are eucalyptan, so during most of my childhood vacations, my family would go back to a small town just south of Santa Barbara called Carpinteria to see relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.
One summer--we're pretty sure it was 1979--all the parental types had arranged to go off and visit an island off-coast that my grandfather had leased from the Navy, back in the '20s and '30s, to raise sheep. My best friend, Nick, and I were left behind with a gaggle of younger cousins to care for, among them baby twins. Being fourteen, and boys, we weren't quite adequate to the task, so it was wisely decided that an honest-to-God babysitter be brought in, the same girl who usually took care of the twins. This was Elizabeth.
Over the course of those two or three days, she and I developed an apparently mutual infatuation to which neither of us would fess: she being a little older and therefore out of my league; me being a slick New York City kid, and therefore dauntingly sophisticated.
We didn't see each other again for another nineteen years, though we never quite forgot each other either, thanks to the acquaintance of the families. Not only did Elizabeth babysit my cousins, her parents were fixtures and icons at the boarding school that both my father and younger brother attended; Elizabeth's father taught my father French back in 1951; Elizabeth's mother served as a lay minister, bringing communion to my grandmother. So yes, there are any number of Carpinteria-Babylon scenarios that have Elizabeth and me being unwitting cousins or siblings, which may help explain much of what follows. It also may explain why, even during the years of our hiatus, our minds did wander in the direction of the other from time to time. I always thought of her on her birthday, for instance, which tells you something, since generally speaking I've got a lousy head for dates.
It wasn't until the summer of 1995 that the fates conspired to bring us together again--this time in New York, and once again with the notable and non-too-subtle assistance of our near and dear. Elizabeth had been accepted at a summer-session Shakespearean acting course at the Stella Adler Studios downtown, right next to the Public Theater. Her mother called up my mother to ask if she knew of any free rooms or cheap sublets Elizabeth could use. My mother offered her place. She and my father weren't going to be around much. The apartment was occupied by my younger brother and his roommate fresh out of college--though "fresh" may not be the word.
I was living in a one bedroom (with office) down in the West Village, and took my cue. Vividly I recall the first time I saw her that summer. It was the Fourth of July weekend. My mother had invited her out to Long Island for a couple days before her Shakespeare classes began. I happened to be there as well--with a bunch of friends, a pair of married couples (old friend Nick among them). We were all in the kitchen when she first appeared, entering the back door and setting her duffel on the floor. I took one look at her from across the kitchen island and thought to myself, "Damn. There goes my next six weeks."
So Froggy went a-courtin' that summer--a familiar tango of feigned resistance and hot pursuit, all spiced by secrecy: no one must know; they and their prying eyes would only spoil it. That developed into a much less clandestine cross-country romance. Elizabeth was living in San Francisco at the time, teaching. I, a writer unencumbered by external responsibilities, shuttled back and forth between the two cities for another year or so before managing to lasso her back to my little apartment in the Village, sans ring. I am told it was another ten months before I proposed, which at the time didn't seem all that slow to me, though I would later learn there were members of Elizabeth's family who'd all but given up on us, writing off my wife's honest womanhood to my intractable bohemianism (which says more about them than me, trust me).
That was the fall of 1997. We had discovered a small museum up on 107th Street near Riverside Park, a slender brownstone dedicated to the work of a Russian painter/writer/thinker/set designer named Nicholas Roerich. The museum hosted free chamber music recitals on Sunday afternoons, and Riverside Park never looks better than in the fall--all those elm trees with their blondish, jigsawed trunks, the leaves in their resplendent final blush--so we'd decided to stroll along the esplanade above the baseball fields before the concert started. There, on the approximate landing site of a home run I'd hit sixteen years earlier off a lanky Collegiate southpaw named Randy Weiner (and not far from the spot where Elizabeth's father proposed to her mother some forty years before that), I offered my hand. She accepted, and the point of my story is not to raid the privacy of our courtship any more than I have to. It is simply to say a) that ours was a union that seemed, as these things go, pretty celestially ordained; and b) Elizabeth let us bask, oh, I'd say about three minutes in the glow of our newly forged commitment before hooking my elbow and starting to schedule, by mutual consent, how soon after the wedding we would start actually trying to have children.
Her urgency was not without cause. She was thirty-four. I was thirty-two. So we settled on four months--a carefree season. The cork landed, and we proceeded to the concert. Schubert. 959.
It can't have been too long after that that, I had an interesting phone conversation with a cousin of mine. He is about ten years older than me, and I've always enjoyed his company, but for reasons having mostly to do with age and geography, he is not someone I ever spent a great deal of time with. He hadn't even meant to call me, in fact--I just happened to be the one who picked up the phone that day in the kitchen of my parents' apartment.
He'd heard my big news. He offered his congratulations, then somewhat out of the blue asked whether we were planning on having kids. I said yes. He asked how old we were exactly. I told him, and he said, "Well, get going, because that fertility stuff is no joke." Something along those lines.
I wouldn't say I felt at all violated by the suggestion, and I guess I'd had a vague sense that he and his wife had struggled a while before having their children--two beautiful chips off the ol' block--but at the time it did strike me as odd that he should be offering up this fairly intimate bit of advice, given the fact that this conversation probably constituted a good ten percent of our one-on-one time up to that point in our lives, but I said, sure, thanks, I'll tell Mom you called.
In retrospect, I have to commend him both for his prescience and his forthrightness, and many are the times in the years since I've thought about passing along his wisdom. My brother is nine years younger than me, which doesn't make him as young as it used to, but he has been sowing his oats for a while now, and there have been times I wanted to take him aside and tell him, "Don't mess around. If you meet a young woman who lives in a shoe, nab her." I doubt he'd hear it, though, and good for him. Infertility just is one of those things that happens to the other guy, even if he is your brother or your cousin, but my cousin and I have a very simple message, is all I'm saying. There's no point candy-coating it with pat baloney about the Lord's mysterious ways and what was meant to be, or how when it's all behind you it'll feel like it never happened. All that is true enough, I suppose--in a mood--but just as my cousin was there to tell me, I am here to tell you, brother, reader, friend: This fertility thing really is no joke. The journey down the road of Western medical ingenuity can fleece you, gut you, £d you, and stunt you. It can worm its way into every corner of your existence, make you feel like you're in a tunnel headed down, and no matter how this book happens to end, there are no promises. For me, the years we spent in all those doctors' offices and clinics was my own personal Viet Nam; a thankless war that lasted far longer than it should have, so staggering, baffling, and punishing that I don't care how much light there is on the other side, nothing will ever make sense of, or remotely justify, what went on inside that tunnel--the length of it, the solitude, the excruciating sense of loss. Nothing will ever give us back the years we spent there, just the two of us clinging to each other, and if I say otherwise, that I'd do it again or it all worked out, or if I so much as mention Nietzsche's name, spank me--I'm a liar. Or shame on me--I just forgot.
Anyway, the wedding went great, thanks, and our four months of spontaneity all proceeded according to plan, following which we started "trying"-- meaning all that business with the circled dates and thermometers and post- coital headstands. I didn't mind all that much--kind of kinky, in its way. Nor was I particularly concerned that nothing was coming of it. The whole approach seemed so absurd and premeditated, it only stood to reason that we would need some time to make it work.
After about four or five months, though, and still no success, Elizabeth began confessing fears that something might actually be wrong, or at least not right. I still wasn't convinced. I figured we just needed a few more cracks at it--nothing a little Marvin Gaye couldn't fix--but I could sense that her concern might itself be turning into an impediment, so for peace of mind, we scheduled an appointment with a doctor on the Upper West Side, a specialist named Park.
I did not attend, as perhaps in retrospect I should have. According to Elizabeth, Dr. Park glanced at her stats--meaning her date of birth--and advised in vitro immediately. Maybe not that bad a call, looking back, but at the time Elizabeth was appalled, and I was too. We weren't going to jump right into the deep end like that. We just wanted a little help, was all. Not that. Not yet. So that's the last we saw of Dr. Park, but it was our first official step down the path that would take up the next four years of our lives, leading us through what seemed an endless maze of waiting rooms and doctors' offices, butcher-papered examination tables, plastic plants, pie charts, fishtanks, video fishtanks, "Sample Rooms," counselors' offices, church pews, Lincoln Town Cars, Amtrak platforms, pharmacies, about thirty thousand little vials, thirty thousand shiny needles, and half as many pin-prick bruises, all come and gone like none of it ever happened.
But let me not tax you, or distress myself, with a too-too detailed account of those early years. Suffice to say, and just to orient the novice reader a bit, the Candyland trail of most self-respecting one-bridge-at-a-time child-seeking couples back at the turn of the 21st century snaked its way through the following stops.