False Labor
“Rehab really puts the brakes on baby plans. To start with, it’s an awkward place from which to ask for adoption recommendations,” writes Lena Dunham.
Each Saturday, Harper’s Magazine editors will share a free reprinting of a piece. To gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe today. Lena Dunham’s essay, “False Labor,” was published in the December 2020 issue of Harper’s.
False Labor
Giving up on motherhood
By Lena Dunham
The moment I lost my fertility I started searching for a baby. At age thirty-one, after almost two decades of chronic pain caused by endometriosis and its little-studied ravages, I had my uterus, my cervix, and one of my ovaries removed. Before then, motherhood had seemed likely but not urgent, as inevitable as growing out of jean shorts, but in the days after my surgery I became keenly obsessed with it. Bedbound and tending to the five small laparoscopic holes in my abdomen, I scrolled through adoption websites as if they were furniture outlets. If I could no longer grow a baby in my womb, I could at least get one elsewhere, and fast. But there were a few obstacles. Some of the sites seemed too Christian to want me; others too back-alley for me to want them. Plus, I could barely move, and I was tapering off opioids, so how was I going to handle a six-week trip to some foreign country to collect the child that I did not doubt was my God-given right? I wasn’t delusional enough to think that made sense. But wasn’t there some kind of delivery service?
When my family and friends told me to slow down, I insisted that they didn’t understand. Worse yet, they were being ableist and old-fashioned. What were five holes in my stomach and a Vicodin habit twenty milligrams deep? Michael Jackson dangled his baby from a hotel balcony for everyone to see, and he got to keep it. Who was going to question me?
As an interim measure, I adopted hairless cats. Two of them. I gave them the kind of names I’d give a daughter, classic with a twist: Irma and Gia Marie. Their suedelike texture and general clinginess could pass, in the dark, for the feeling of a newborn’s warmth. I was weeks out of a nearly six-year relationship, highly public and fraught with adult tensions, and I’d hurled myself into a renewed romance with the first guy I had ever really kissed, one that seemed miraculous in its seclusion and sweetness. My new boyfriend called the cats the little wontons, which I took as a sign that he would make a good father.
Around this time, it became clear—first to everyone who knew me, and then, finally, to me—that I was addicted to benzodiazepines. The fact that I had myriad explanations for this dependency (among them chronic pain, heartbreak, the cracking of the brittle facade created by public life) didn’t matter; everyone has good reasons to stay in bed if you really think about it. And so I went to rehab, where I earnestly committed to becoming a woman worthy of the most fuck-you baby shower in American history.
I was in a hurry. I fantasized in the face of mounting evidence about a quick stay at the facility, a blessing from a doctor, and then—nine months later, give or take a few weeks of processing time—a child delivered into my arms. The people who had doubted me would weep when they saw just how right this child looked nestled between my breasts. My parents would feel complete in a way they had never dreamed possible; my father would come to believe in God after seven decades of agnosticism. I would receive nothing but praise on the internet—for having patience, for never giving up, for sticking to my dream, for being a natural mother.
But in practice, rehab really puts the brakes on baby plans. To start with, it’s an awkward place from which to ask for adoption recommendations. And in getting sober, I was realizing how sick I really was. The sight of pregnant women began to make me ill. Their bodies made me think of the stretch and tug of the false labor doctors had induced before my hysterectomy, the way the pain sat in my back and climbed its way up my spine in waves.
While I was there, three of my close friends got pregnant. Each told me she was hurt and confounded by my actions during those months. I had to realize that I was the common denominator. Two pregnant women could be a coincidence. Three is a nation. When they’re angry, it’s a global movement. That’s when I started looking for friends online.
They call themselves IVF Warriors. On Etsy, they purchase in abundance items that claim this title, T-shirts and socks and organic cotton onesies that say my mom is a warrior! infertility met its match. In their photos—shared early in the morning, after perfunctory ultrasounds, and late at night, after trigger shots or missed periods, always with the hashtag #IVFwarriors, which returns hundreds of thousands of Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest results—they appear triumphant, running marathons with their estrogen cranked up to ten times the average of an ovulating woman, flushed and flashing pearly teeth; or bereft, bloated with yet another needle in the curled fat of their bellies. They make charm bracelets from the caps of medicine bottles (I was encouraged by a nurse to save mine for “an art project or something”) and display the dozens of syringes needed for the project of making a person.
When harvests and implantations fail, the IVF Warriors mourn together, and when they succeed, the women celebrate in a swirl of pink and blue, while allowing that some of their IVF friends may be too shaken by the news to attend the baby shower or, perhaps, to ever speak to them again. It’s hard to be happy for anyone when you’ve been through twelve forced menopauses in as many months.
They share diet tips and wellness strategies and images of patient spouses who never expected to gain the medical expertise of physician assistants, shuffling in and out of kitchens that have become laboratories, careful not to spill the synthetic hormone solutions that are as precious as breast milk—and much more expensive.
Once you’re inside, you learn the customs. Celebrate when you start a cycle. Pray as you end it. Save any leftover medication for the next cycle, which is not only possible but probable. Brag: You gave yourself your own injections while your partner was golfing. You screamed at only one co-worker this week, and frankly she’s had it coming for months. You held someone else’s baby without weeping or sniffing the crown of its head too obviously. You fit back into your old jeans, or found a smart way to rig the waist with a hair clip.
Their crest depicts a pineapple, because the fruit contains a blood thinner called bromelain that may or may not help with implantation—and anyway, it’s “a symbol of being a proud womb warrior who kicks ass as they struggle to get knocked up!”
The IVF Warriors are mostly white. (White women are five times more likely than women of color to undergo fertility treatment.) Some, many, are wealthy, while others describe mortgaging their houses, taking out massive loans, and working multiple jobs as they attempt to undertake as many cycles as possible (there’s a consensus among specialists that a dozen frozen embryos comes close to ensuring a live birth). The women have given up jobs, moved across the country, gotten divorced and then remarried, losing friends and precious fertilized embryos along the way, in a process that is designed to make Mother Nature your bitch and to defy a basic fact of human existence dating back to Sarah and Abraham: fertility is not a right, it’s a privilege.
When I first found my way to the #IVFwarriors, I didn’t know in vitro fertilization was still an option for me. But I’d spent time with related bands: the #endowarriors, #adenowarriors, and #pcoswarriors, also known as #spoonies, which is another name for sufferers of #invisibleillness. These are the hashtags among which I made my home from 2016 to 2018, scrolling through Instagram until my eyelids drooped—from beds in hotels, hospitals, and a residential substance-abuse treatment center where the woman in the room below me used a motorized wheelchair that made her beaded necklaces jangle as she rode to the bathroom each night and the one above me wailed in her closet from unexplained stomach pain.
These hashtags are what you seek out online if you want to ask questions that doctors won’t answer, if you want to be cautioned or pardoned for excessive medication use, or sometimes just believed. There is talk of fertility, too—who still has it and who isn’t sure and occasionally, if you’re like me, who has come to the end of the road and knows without a doubt that she will never, ever carry a child, an isolating grief that seems to justify weeks or months of hot rage at other women just for existing in their bodies.
Chronically ill mothers boast of benign achievements: making chicken nuggets that aren’t still frozen or crisped to black, taking walks to the park, or ordering Halloween costumes early. Many childless spoonies (the term was coined by a woman with lupus who used spoons to explain her limited energy stores—each small daily task costing a spoon) crave babies, crave the eternal connection and lack of judgment that only a child can provide. A baby doesn’t tell you to put on real pants. A baby doesn’t know that you’re supposed to be able to spend a full day on your feet. You don’t have to beg a kid to see you as something other than hysterical. But you could also forgive an outsider for wondering why you want a baby when you’re also looking for tips on how to wash your own hair without standing up.
I switched reproductive-medicine doctors when the first refused to understand that my concern was not my fertility but my pain. (“My pain,” which a professional pain therapist urged me not to personalize. The pain. Some pain. Or give it a name, like Bernard.) I was still hurting almost all the time. But when the second doctor informed me that I might have a chance of harvesting eggs, I flushed with an odd and unearned pride. It turned out that after everything I’d been through—the chemical menopause, surgeries by the dozen, the carelessness of drug addiction—my one remaining ovary was still producing eggs. If we successfully harvested them, they might be fertilized with donor sperm and carried to term by a surrogate.
The next day, my mother woke me up by whispering, “Good morning, little noodle,” and when I saw her face hovering above mine I knew she felt it, too. I was no longer her daughter—willful, ambitious, and terse, whose illness had cracked and bifurcated her life. Now my pain could have a purpose. My body was doing its job.
My boyfriend agreed to offer up his sperm with the cheery good nature of someone helping an old woman cross a busy intersection.
“I have to go to the fertility doctor—will you come?” I texted him. “I know it’s not your problem.”
“BABY!” he wrote. “It’s OUR problem—u know I wanna be there for my girl!”
At the last minute he told me he couldn’t make it. I later discovered he’d relapsed on vodka, and we broke up after he came home in a cropped Forever 21 sweatshirt and another girl started texting me about getting it back. I thought about how I’d lost the chance to change my life forever.
At the office, the receptionist mistook my sixty-nine-year-old father for my husband, which nauseated me, though one look around the waiting room confirmed it was an innocent mistake. We were right at home among the silver-haired men and blondes in yoga gear flipping through issues of Parents magazine. These men—tagging along to start their third families—were the most buoyant patients, the ones who seemed to have the least to lose. The women, meanwhile, were fragile and bloated, boxes of tissues between their knees, waiting shakily for information that would make them cancel their plans for the next two weeks, in either a fit of nesting ecstasy or exquisite pain.
The doctor gave me a bunch of new labels. With one functioning ovary, I was a “good candidate.” Without a husband, I was a “solo starter.” With a gay donor, I was “a user of fresh homosexual sperm” with “FDA-ineligible” jizz. (I didn’t know this when I chose my donor: If you find a hetero art school kid with a ketamine addiction, drag him off the street, and convince him to say he’s dating you, you’re congratulated. If you carefully select an accomplished gay friend of child-rearing age, you are taking a risk that the reproductive authorities won’t sign off on.)
The doctor looked at my father as the appointment finished and extended his hand: “All right, sir, let’s make you a grandpa.”
My father, usually so Waspy and stoic (he was dressed in a three-piece suit for the occasion), was disarmed. “That would be . . . ” he stammered. “That would be wild.”
In third grade, my class took an overnight trip to a nature camp, where we were given an assignment to carry an egg with us for the whole trip without breaking it. We were each given a cup, which we fashioned, with yarn and a hole punch, into a necklace. We could decorate it freely, with stickers and sequins and colored pens, and we were given instructions on how to properly pad it with tissue paper. That afternoon, we walked carefully along stone paths and through the woods, ate potatoes au gratin in somber silence at long picnic tables, and fought for space so that we could set our eggs down while we built a geodesic dome out of plastic rods and packing tape. At the end of twenty-four hours, if our eggs remained intact, we were praised for our delicacy and focus.
But I didn’t leave my egg at camp. I kept it, and on the way back to the city I put the necklace on underneath the baggy cashmere sweater of my mother’s I was wearing, so that I could feel it on my naked skin. A teacher who looked like Sinéad O’Connor led a busful of white kids in civil-rights protest songs while I huddled against the plexiglass window. Back home, I placed the egg cup on my nightstand and the next day nestled it into the front pocket of my overalls. And then, at 3:45 pm, as we bounded toward the school buses, buzzed on freedom, I tripped on the stairs and the egg hurtled out of its little cup-bed and cracked on the floor. I shook with rage as the smell of rotten yolk rose up from the linoleum.
So on day fifteen of my IVF cycle, when my endometriosis flared and immobilized my distended lower half and I wondered why I had done this in the first place, the answer wasn’t hard to grasp: the egg cup. We were bred for this.
