“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” my hairdresser asked.
Her fingers tugged a few short, spiky strands that stood straight up at my hairline, no more than an inch or two long. I looked more closely and they were everywhere— little hairs frizzing around my forehead and along my part, catching the sunlight that streamed through the storefront windows on an unusually mild November day.
“This is all new growth, which means you’ve lost a lot of hair recently,” she explained.
I’d just sat down in the low swivel chair, draped in a black polyester cloak that would keep clippings off my clothes as she chopped five inches off my dark blonde hair.
Stress? Where to start?
The kind of stress that would cause my hair to come out by the fistful with every shower, enough that I had to clear the drain four times in ten minutes?
The kind of stress that would keep me up until dawn, multiple times a week, ruminating and crying and screaming and sobbing?
The kind of stress that would clench my teeth so hard at night (if I did sleep) that they hurt when I chewed food?
The kind of stress that would tense my jaw muscles in such chronic, burning pain that a TMJ specialist quoted me $9,000 to fix it?
The kind of stress that left my body shifting between fight, flight, and freeze throughout the day—the unprompted rage, the urgency to escape, the numbness and emptiness—sending my sympathetic nervous system into a state of collapse?
The kind of stress that compounds over years of recurrent miscarriages, fertility treatments, and failed adoptions—of making every effort to start a family and enduring one agonizing loss after another?
The kind of stress that comes when, after all of that, a social worker called and gave me an hour to decide whether to foster a newborn boy, and later that day a nurse placed the eight-pound baby in my arms and said I could take him home in a few days, and the next morning a different person called and said never mind, a family member has stepped forward?
The kind of stress that comes with deciding whether to finally surrender to a childless destiny?
”Yeah, the past few months have been really stressful,” I told my hairdresser.
“I need to shorten my hair to about here,” I said, holding my flattened hand level with my armpit, “so it will be easier to wash and dry when I drive my van to Mexico this winter.”
“Mexico? That’s exciting! When are you leaving?” she asked.
“Hopefully next week?” I said, my voice rising at the end of the statement, betraying my uncertainty.
”Is Seth coming with you?” she wondered.
“No, he has to stay home and pay the bills,” I said.
I’d rehearsed this line with every friend and acquaintance I’d talked to in the past few weeks, adding that Seth hates sand, he doesn’t like the beach, he loves winter in New England, he enjoys his job, he supports me in whatever I want to do, and he’ll fly out and visit wherever I end up.
I had the same conversation with my sister a few days later, my new haircut bouncing across my shoulders as my family gathered under the cathedral ceiling of her two-story log home to bid me farewell. As we hovered over a bowl of bean dip at the kitchen counter, she asked, “How long will you be gone?”
”Maybe a year?” I told her. “Maybe forever?”
My 24-year-old niece, who was locked in a staring contest with her phone screen, chortled and looked up.
”I’m hoping to drive up the West Coast from Baja to Alaska next summer,” I said. ”And then…”
I trailed off, interrupted by the arrival of pizza. My sister turned for a plate, and my niece returned to her phone. I dodged my nephew, husband, and brother-in-law as they circled the kitchen island. By the time we sat down at the dining room table, the topic turned to their family’s winter trips to Florida and the Caribbean. No one asked me what “forever” meant.
I didn’t know what “forever” meant. How could I explain this urgency to escape my life—that on top of the decade of painful memories that haunted every corner of my house, my neighborhood, and my town, now I couldn’t drive downtown without passing the playground where I had caught my one-year-old foster daughter at the bottom of the slide while my four-year-old foster son played pirate ship? That those two beautiful children could have been mine, but now they’re not, and I made the decision, and I can’t unmake it, but I lie awake every night wishing I could? And because I can’t, I have to leave, so that every trip to the store won’t trigger tears?
Even if I run away, I can’t escape the grief. Everyone else’s child is a reminder of what I could have had, if the pregnancies had stuck, if the fertility treatments had worked, if the foster placements hadn’t been so difficult, if the newborn’s family hadn’t changed their mind.
On Halloween, a little blonde girl dressed as a pumpkin toddled up my porch steps and held out her tiny hand, her blue eyes looking up at me expectantly. I placed the bite-sized bag of jelly beans in her palm, wished her a Happy Halloween, then turned to Seth and buried my face in his shoulder as she waddled down the driveway. I stifled my sobs until her parents turned toward the house across the street. Seth wrapped his arms around me. When I came up for air, I handed him the bowl of candy, went inside, and closed the door.
Leaving feels like the only way to soothe the ache that twists my insides. I’ve cycled through denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. The stage of grief that still eludes me is acceptance, and I’m not sure I can find it in a place filled with so much sadness.
As I’ve been sitting in my round wicker chair writing these words, the sun that streamed through the bedroom window dropped behind low gray clouds, the gray turned purple and cobalt, and the world outside became a black silhouette of a telephone pole and bare branches reaching above the hills. By 4:59pm, I couldn’t distinguish the silhouette from the sky. I lowered the blinds.
Winter looms, with its short days and its frigid nights. Soon the gray and brown days of November will yield to ice and frost, but usually not enough snow to enjoy until February, before it melts the first week of March. Three months is a lot of gloom to endure for the promise of a few magical weeks in the winter woods, followed by another two months of mud before it’ll be warm enough to sit in a chair on the deck again.
I could instead spend the next six months chasing sunshine in my 1999 Roadtrek camper van, making a beeline across the United States to the desert Southwest and on to Baja California, returning to the trip I abandoned exactly one year ago when I thought for sure I was going to become a mom.
It was hard coming home last fall after four months on the road through Alaska and Canada, the trip I’d conceived to answer the question, “What comes next after infertility?” Chased south by freezing temperatures, I’d made it to Utah’s redrock country when I turned and drove east into another New Hampshire winter. After months of waiting, Seth and I had been matched with a 13-year-old boy to adopt through foster care, and I wasn’t going to let my disdain for the cold deter me from my dream of motherhood. It seemed like only a detour, and by now I thought I’d be heading west again with my son in tow, embarking on a grand family adventure. I was counting on that happy ending, not another year that wove disappointment and despair into the fabric of hope and love.
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