Chapter One
The day I turned 30, I officially departed my childhood. Not the pigtail braids, devil may care, “don’t get your Sunday church clothes dirty” kind of childhood. At 30, I just knew it was the end of the dress rehearsal. I was officially grown. And to me, that meant a checklist. Education? Check. Good job? Check. Reliable transportation? Check. Down payment for some property? Check. Dating options limited to marriage material? Check, check and check. That checklist, I had it on lock. But then, at some point, once you get into it, the 30’s throws some major curveball your way and you realize that real life, not just adulthood, is what happens between the lines of that checklist. You learn that life isn’t really about checklist-type problems. And that’s when you have to find out who you really are, because one minute you had all the answers, and the next, you’ve got none at all. So of course, just when I started to gain a comfortable rhythm with regular life kind of concerns, my body went ahead and did the unthinkable.
“It’s bad,” I heard the doctor say. “I wish I had better news. The reality is, Tabitha, you’re only 33, but without taking significant steps in the next six months, you may never be able to have a family.” I had already left her office, but her voice still trailed me into my car, and stayed with me into my drive to work, echoing in my mind on continuous loop. The only merciful interruption was the real-time computer-generated interjections of Google Maps, steering me around the stubborn LA traffic. Even worse than getting bad news was that it was going to make me late. In my profession, late was tragic; but, on the day of our weekly newsroom meeting, late could mean you just lost the assignment that would’ve made your career. And for mine, I had already fought, cried, bled and eaten far more than my fair share of ramen noodles.
My mind was racing, so I’m sure it paraphrased, honing in on what was really the most important consequence to a person like me. In reality, the doctor could have been diplomatic. Maybe she said, “you’ll never be able to have biological children” or something like, “you won’t be able to use your own eggs to have children.” But, what I heard did not sound like hope. I had hoped to have “it all” and for me, that included being a wife and mother. In my mind, this version of family was going to be my family. This was going to fill the gap in my life that I had learned to ignore, but could never manage to completely forget. Only, the news on this morning, placed that all in jeopardy. I learned that I have something called Premature Ovarian Reserve Failure. Gotta love that kind of name, right? Rather than a much more friendly “disorder,” the word “failure” is already wrapped right in. So, there’s just no sugar coating this kind of bad. You know what this type of “failure” is caused by? Stress. The crazy thing is, if you asked me just an hour ago, before that appointment, I would have sworn that I wasn’t. “Stressed?? I’m not stressed,” I insisted. Well, really, I protested, but my doctor was unconvinced. Instead, she informed me that studies held all the unfamiliar warnings I’d wish I’d heard before. “It could be little things that you just aren’t noticing,” Dr. Ellis said. “Something happens that seems small at the time, or you’ve become desensitized, but it all adds up. Either way, the test results don’t lie.” But to me, those were just numbers and words, mistakenly delivered to me, but meant for someone else because I did not feel stressed. At least, not before leaving the doctor’s office. I was even normally unfazed navigating the infuriating molasses maze of morning traffic. I could proudly say, I barely cursed, I never had an episode of road rage, I held the door open for people, smiled at strangers and I always made time to put on some lipstick. What was there to be stressed about? Before today, everything was going according to plan—I was dating a “paper-perfect” man, suitable for marriage and tall enough for kids; I was up for a promotion; and I had just met my savings goal for a down payment for my very own first dream house. Sure, my family-making hormones were starting to bubble, but I thought I had time. And time meant that family was always something I planned to have, but that didn’t need to be the focus of my thoughts. I focused on my career, my friends, spending Saturdays with my grandmother and loving on Marc, who hadn’t quite mentioned marriage, but I’m sure would eventually. No need to rush Tabitha. That’s what I’d tell myself in every one of those moments even the slightest hint of “where is this going?” started to rise in my belly. Who needs to be pushy about things when you have time, right? With today’s news, I was just starting to discover how very wrong I was.
In my well-ordered world of focused professional upward mobility, crossed-off checklists and comfortable semi-serious dating, I thought I had prepared for everything. So, how was it being ripped apart at the seams by one little doctor visit that was supposed to be routine? I only went in for a very simple follow-up to review the results of my regular blood tests. I should have known it was a problem when Dr. Ellis insisted on seeing me in person, rather than just sending me an email. Evidently my fertility numbers matched those of a woman about to receive her AARP card. “Your body is working too hard to produce an egg each month,” she said. “It seems like there’s been an imbalance going on for some time. The good news is that we caught it while there’s still time to pursue options in front of you.” Options? In my mind, having a family was never an option. It was a given. Options were for things like the shoes you pack on vacation, or where you decide to meet your friends for dinner when nobody can quite decide what they want. But, I’ve always known what I wanted, at least since I was 9 years old. Because…because at 9, my dad left and married his mistress. Whoa. A memory triggered that I had long ago stuffed into the attic of my mind, far underneath even the dusty schoolbooks and scattered old pictures of my 33-year old life.
Crap. Distraction caused me to miss my turn, promoting Google to reroute me, proving a perfect metaphor for the moment. How did I get here? It’s not like I forgot that I was single or forgot to have children. Not possible. It hummed in the background on every night out with my girls, every trip to the supermarket and every solo tax return. And once I turned 30, no matter my accomplishments, educational or professional, there was no chance of escaping the question, “so, how come you’re not married yet?” I could almost see it written in cursive on perplexed faces, along the wrinkled expression lines crossing well-meaning foreheads. In the eyes of the even more curious, “what’s wrong with her?” twinkled in Morse code. It felt as if people thought that my degrees came with a free Mrs. option that I didn’t elect for at graduation. It just wasn’t that easy.
All along, I’d done my share of dating. Dating for me was always for the family you hoped to make, even at some level when I was “just having fun” in my 20’s. So of course, in my 30’s, I was dating with the care, intensity and dedication of a second job. Unfortunately, up to this point, dating itself hadn’t yet made for any relationship that I was sure should or could turn into a long-term plan—not even with Marc. It just seemed that once 30 hit, all the folks for whom marriage meant something, especially the men who considered having a wife and family as an accomplishment in its own right, they’d already taken their nearest best option to the altar. The men that were left and still single, well, they considered it an accomplishment that they had neither wife nor child, and never got “caught up” or “caught slippin” which likened falling in love to unprotected casual sex. They treated love like a disease you catch, and if real adult commitment was the incurable version of it, then for them family was basically death. And goodness knows, I wasn’t trying to kill anybody—what I wanted was that same-page kind of love, the kind between two people where there were a lot more answers than questions.