Chapter 3: White
The fertility clinic was a cursed chapel where I buried my unborn children.
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Chapter 3: White
Summer started early that year. With the warmer days, I made it a habit to explore all the parks, plazas and open spaces in my new neighborhood every day as I would leave work. I’d rather spend time on a bench under a tree until it was time for bed than go sit in that apartment where I felt like a trespassing stranger. Or I would clock out the city bike and cycle through the streets all the way down to the beach.
I needed to see the sky above me, like a newborn needs a fuzzy baby-blue blanket. I needed to hear the ruffle of the leaves on century-old trees, like a child needs her mother’s whispers. I needed to feel the summer sun warming my lonely skin. I needed to smell the salt rising from the waves of the sea. I was turning to Mother Nature to hold me raw in her arms.
When you spend 17 years in long-term relationships, as I had been all my adult life until then, becoming single came with a large dose of physical insecurity. It was almost like I didn’t remember how to live life on my own. I turned to the elements of the world, to the earth and the wind, to the fire of the sun, the waves, the wood of the trees, for support and to teach me how to continue living.
I was in my second month living with the new roommates and while still spending lots of time out of the house, I started making an effort to befriend them. A weekday evening, one of them took me to meet a group of her friends. She danced salsa and was going to this dancing bar not too far from our place.
We walked to Kalimba, the club where my roommate spent three nights per week practicing salsa. She was excited and was telling me a story about a guy with whom she liked to dance the most and that he would join that evening too. I listened to her story and her loud and cheerful Southern Spanish tone. Life around me was continuing just as before. People were going out and having fun, people were having crushes on their dance partner, people were not relying on Mother Nature after work every day.
As we walked up on the Gran Via boulevard, the giant iron letters on top of a building caught my eye. They spelled out the name of a private fertility clinic. The building in which my married life took a turn for the worse. My scalp started prickling on the right side of my head. I raised my hand to touch my right ear which was ringing sharp. My brain buzzed with an intense sound, the painful memory approaching like a speeding double-decker bus a few inches too close.
My roommate must have noticed I stopped paying attention to her story and she got quiet. She walked with her head turned sideways, looking at me. When she asked if I was OK, I tried to downplay it and say it was nothing, I’d just seen something on the other side of the street. She turned to look around, not convinced by my excuse. She insisted on it and I told her about the fertility clinic. Pointing to it with my chin in an upward movement, I told her it had been there, inside that building, that I had learned a couple of years before that I wouldn’t ever be able to conceive a baby naturally.
‘Ay, madre! I’m so sorry to hear that’, my roommate said in her Southern Spanish accent.
That was definitely not a conversation to have before a fun salsa class. But she wanted to know more details. So I gave them to her, because anyway they were all congesting my mind at that point.
‘We had trouble getting pregnant, so we did some advanced tests to find out some more clues. As I expected, I carried all the faults. I was the one who was damaged, with ovaries refusing to produce the right kind of eggs to get fertilized.’ I blurted it all out, still angry at my body after all those years.
As I was recounting what I had lived inside that building, I remembered the unusual whiteness of the room, almost like a Catholic church prepared for communion. The doctor’s desk was glossy white, the stack of papers with our test results printed on them, white. The doctor’s white robe, a priest’s cassock ready to start a ceremony. The pristine environment contrasted with the black hole starting to form inside my chest upon hearing the bad news. Our embroidered dreams started disappearing inside that black hole by the minute. The fertility clinic became a cursed chapel where I buried my unborn children.
‘What shocked me the most’, I continued telling my roommate who was really quiet by then, possibly sorry she had asked, ‘was how matter-of-fact the doctor’s tone was as she was demolishing the lifelong dream of a 32-year-old woman. I instantly hated her.’ Most patients probably hate the doctors who bring them bad news. They have to focus their anger externally so that they don’t turn it against themselves. And I had done the same. I hated that doctor, after which I hated my husband.
That day of my life, a cold Tuesday one January, when I got the bad news from that fertility doctor, that was the first day of the crackdown on my marriage. Because my then-husband wanted us to wait to have children while I had been ready for years, I blamed him for the situation we found ourselves in. I had given him the power over my own life, neglecting that I was the only one responsible for my wishes, not him. I had taken the comforting path of waiting patiently, like a good girl does, for him to decide the fate of both our lives. It was easy to hate him that day. It was harder to hold myself accountable for giving up the responsibility. But the crackdown had started. The first rift in the foundation of our marriage came with a black hole in my chest, no doubt about the exact moment when it appeared.
‘We arrived’, said my roommate, stopping in front of the salsa bar, but the usual cheerful Southern Spanish tone was missing from her voice.
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Hi Monica! In this chapter I appreciate very much the ending with the reflection on the feeling of hate, the blaming and taking up responsibility for own wishes and choices.