Oh, the Duchess of Cambridge. Making infertile women everywhere feel inadequate, since 2011.
Since we are as always, still waiting — I thought I'd tell a little story. Recently, we were asked for personal recipes and the story behind them for a corporate cookbook at work, but I didn't give this story, as I felt it was a little too personal.
This is a story about a time in my life, many years ago, when I was a young (I didn't think I was, but boy, was I), international student in California.
I lived in a row house, which is a little like a fraternity house central to campus and without a theme, and we were allowed to self-employ the staff. We lucked out on a little Thai lady who cooked for hotels but wanted to work with kids. Her name was Toi and she made the most wonderful stir-fried asparagus and prawn, curry chicken and pad thai.
While other college kids ate high-fat carb and protein diets, cooked by Mexican line chefs, we luxuriated in our healthy, light and delicious meals. Or I did, at least. There were plenty of hot-mess American male counterparts who lived out of the voracious and expensive snack storage that my board rent helped pay for (before I lived in the US, I had never seen entire pantries stocked with so much artificial sweets).
Toi came with a husband, John, an old American veteran with a bloated, kindly face and a penchant for large Hawaiian shirts. Over the year, I discovered that they had met after the war, when John was in Asia — he was a friend of her father's. They had fallen in love and she followed him back to America, but given their age difference, she very soon found herself working and supporting the care of his failing health.
I always wondered about the grainy sepia romance of their past life — was she getting old for marriageable age, did she already have children, had he seemed, as a grown man, someone who could take care of her? To me, it seemed like she had actually spent most of her adult life taking care of him.
They were a very loving couple, always calling each other honey, Mum and Dad; he would wait for her to get off work every day and often when I came home early from school and she was busy in the kitchen, I would look for him in the carpark for a chat, a walk to the nearby playground swings or even a drive to the beach.
I would tell him about my day, about what we were learning in classes, about the politics of college friendships, and he would tell me about his time in Asia, the war, his travels.
He was a good cook too, he bragged. My favourite dish at that time, was a blueberry cheesecake that Toi would make for special, celebration dinners and he told me that was his Southern cheesecake, he had swapped a family fried chicken recipe with an old black lady in the South to get it. I wanted to ask what the recipe was, but since he'd mentioned it was a family recipe, I felt it would be impolite.
Initially, I sought him out because I felt bad that he was waiting around for Toi to finish and I knew it relieved her stress for someone to keep him company. Maybe I felt a kinship with her, as strangers to this country. I knew attention and duty to elders, was not necessarily something my other college dorm mates could be counted on for.
I guess to most passer-bys, we must have looked an odd sight, a heavyset, failing old man and a gawky, skinny 19-year-old. Growing up, I had never had any grandparents and I never thought of them as a necessary concept. It was only many years later that I realized this was probably the closest I'd come to having any. I never asked about his own children, but Toi told me in a wistful moment that they had all opposed their marriage and relationships had soured.
As time went on, John's health started to deteriorate very quickly. My dorm mates and I sometimes ran hospital runs, to the nearby veteran facility, to help Toi as her struggle to manage became larger and deeper, her realization of loneliness more desperate.
There was one time that stuck in my memory. I had gone to pick John up after a triple surgery on his eye, his bad leg and some other internal organ, which I can't even remember. Toward the end, he was in and out of hospital all the time. I had driven my own new car, a flashy Chevron yellow Mustang sports (don't laugh, I was young), instead of taking their utility van that day and there he was lain flat out, swollen everywhere and with a large bandage across his head and one eye.
Looking at him, I knew, that it was now a matter of time. I think it showed in my face and John must have noticed my concern and look of sadness.
And even though he must have been in so much pain, he smiled weakly and said, "Honey, you know this is the most beautiful car I've ever been in. Everyone is going to be turning and looking, and I just wished I looked in better shape." I had to turn away, to fit his wheelchair in the back, and so he would not see my eyes starting to mist over.
After I graduated, I moved away, first to New York, then to Boston and then back to Singapore. I heard from friends that John passed on and at his funeral, so many college students turned up, that his own kids were amazed. Several years of working in Asia went by, before I found myself back in California and bounding up the kitchen back steps of the campus row house.
And there Toi was, bustling around the kitchen as she had always been. After her joyful hug to me and to my husband (then-boyfriend), I told her I was sorry I hadn't come, sorry that I had not gotten to say goodbye. It okay, honey, she told me. We sat at the kitchen table and she told me how after John died, she had learned to drive and how the kids had taken her to a Tahoe ski weekend, "I get drunk, first time!" she laughed and I laughed too, at the thought of her knocking back her bereavement with red Solo cup tequila shots.
I asked her how she was doing for money and if she might now want to go back to Thailand. She told me that she felt John was still looking down on her — several months after his death, the bank had called her, to tell her that there was a safe box in his name.
I told them, sorry, I don't know the key, my husband is dead. Inside the box, there was an envelope with her name on it, and a card that said simply, "Honey, I love you". In the envelope, was his war pension. So much money! I always asked him, what happened to his war pension and he said he spent it, in business. I was crying, and the bank manager, bank teller, they all crying, oh God, she said.
We sat there, both crying, and then she reached out to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. Oh, she said, I forget, I so excited. John say this is for you, because you are family. He say, you will come back, so I keep it here, everyday. I opened the folded sheet, even though I already knew what it was. It was John's Southern Cheesecake recipe.
Why am I reflecting on this now? I guess it's because I realize that these experiences have helped me believe that family is what you make of it. It's about effort and loyalty and love and just communicating until you understand each other.
Family is loving and providing for each other, even when you can't see each other or when they are not there yet. Sometimes that's even more true than when they are in present company. In a way, it is like this child that we long for and that we keep working toward. I have to remember that because most days I believe we will get there and some days are so bad, that I dissolve into the sadness that has become our infertility shuffle, the one step forward-two steps back disbelief that we are still here, that we haven't progressed past the bad news, the risks, the failed, miserable cycles.
I've also been seeing a lot of articles that talk about alternative parenting and how IVF has driven down the rate of adoptions. As much as I would love to easily be able to have children with the hubby, it is not about who is born to whom, or divining your own flesh and blood.
I openly admit to being scared of the many personal tales of adoption that I have heard, because of their own overwhelming, psychological identity confusion and abandonment issues, but I have never believed that love needs to be biological to be whole, consuming and sufficient. I have always believed that you are a poorer person for it, if you only choose to extend love that way.
It's, as Les Miserables says, because "to love another person is to see the face of God" — a family is something that grounds belonging, even if you don't see each other, and it helps the world make sense.
