Start here: An Unexpected Turn, Part 1 - The Donor
I awoke to the chatter of children—hordes of kids surrounding the van I had parked at a pulloff in the middle of the Nevada desert. I peeled up the corner of a curtain and peeked out to see them spilling out of a yellow school bus and descending on a cluster of picnic tables behind my rig. They must be on a field trip, I thought—either visiting the petroglyphs down the trail that I’d explored with my dogs the night before, or just stopping for lunch and a pee on their way to some other destination. America’s Loneliest Road suddenly wasn’t so lonely.
Ever since the 7:30am launch of fighter jets from a nearby air base, I’d been awake and making phone calls to doctors back home in New Hampshire to schedule the tests I’d need before moving forward with donor-egg IVF. I was able to book a mammogram, EKG, and urine test back-to-back the third week of June. That would get me home in time for my mom’s surprise 80th birthday party and my friend Anne’s baby shower.
Now I just had to drive 3,000 miles.
Before leaving the petroglyph pull-off, I took the dogs for their morning business. On my way back to the van, I picked up an orange peel and an apple core off the sidewalk discarded from the kids’ lunches. My good deed felt motherly, like I was an imaginary chaperone. These kids looked to be middle-school-age, the age of the kids I would have had if I’d gotten pregnant with my first husband in my early 30s. I scanned the children's faces and imagined one of them being mine. What would they tell me about their trip when they came home from school? As I pulled my van back onto the highway, my chest filled with warmth. My geographic movement away from my Alaska trajectory and toward home allowed my heart to finally open to the possibility of becoming a mom.
The basin-and-range topography of the Nevada desert unfolded before me as I bisected the state on Highway 50. The road was flat and straight for half an hour at a time, slicing through a landscape painted in shades of ochre and mahogany, sepia and burnt umber, taupe and tan. I had expected the drive to be boring, but the Great Basin bore a wild and desolate beauty, with folded mountain ranges of bare desert rock dabbled with juniper and pinyon pine intersecting the highway every 25 miles, and low-elevation sagebrush and saltbush punctuated by occasional snow-capped peaks in the distance. This was the historic route of the Pony Express, bringing mail and news from East to West and back again.
As the sun cast its final rays at a low angle across the folded earth, I arrived at Great Basin National Park. I had chosen this route to have a second chance to visit the ancient bristlecone pines I’d missed in California. A grove of them lived above 10,000 feet on the flanks of Wheeler Peak, the highest peak whose mass lay completely in Nevada (technically the state’s high point is Boundary Peak, but half of that mountain resides in California). I circled the campground to find that my reserved site had a white van occupying it, and they weren’t waking up as I shined my headlamp in their windows at 9:30pm. Luckily a nearby spot was vacant and it was late enough that I felt confident pulling in for the night and claiming my reserved spot in the morning.
I let the dogs out for one last pee and looked up. At first, I thought it was cloudy, but the clouds didn’t move. I put my glasses on and realized I was gazing at the brightest Milky Way I’d ever seen. I sat on the picnic table for a while marveling at the universe, struggling to find the familiar constellations because there were so many stars filling the spaces around and between them. Then I fell asleep in my van with a rectangle full of stars sparkling through my window in a black sky.
When I opened my eyes in the morning, my throat unexpectedly tightened, my fists clenched, and a feeling of dread took over my body. In six months on the road, I hadn’t had a poor night’s sleep or a bad dream, or woken up with this sense of doom. Before I left in November, every night and every morning I awoke to a strangling anxiety that barely released its grip in my waking hours. The sudden resolution of that feeling upon leaving home was a miracle; I’d been physically calm and relaxed even when my trip had been stressful. What was going on now?
This dread feeling had also happened a couple days earlier when I woke up in Tahoe. That morning, I had dreamed that I was walking alone down a wooded dirt path when I came upon a wagon carting a monster in a cage, like a scene out of Lord of the Rings. I had known in my bones that the monster was about to escape and kill everyone in its path. I needed to get out of there as fast as I could. Instead, I woke up, fists and body clenched. It was the first morning of my journey east, though I still hadn’t made my final decision to continue home to New Hampshire. I’d chalked up my stress that morning to the bad dream, but what if the monster itself was a sign?
I tried to pinpoint the thoughts behind this new strangling dread, and then it hit me: if I got pregnant and had a baby, there would be no more relaxed mornings or evenings; no more lounging in bed; perhaps no more road trips. I would be up early, sleep-deprived, stuck in my house, and struggling to make it through the day. The thought weighed on my body as if I’d been sucked into a pit of quicksand.
It was a familiar feeling.
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