Lost Luggage

My road trip with my sisters this weekend was great, but I did have one rough night.  Never underestimate the power of bland hotel rooms in the middle of nowhere to provoke an existential panic.

Why is it that the deeper we get into fertility treatments, the less it feels like they’re going to work?  The first month we tried, back when we thought it was going to be easy, I could easily picture me pregnant and us with a baby.  Now, we might as well be trying to teach the dog to make coffee for all the success I anticipate.  In the middle of the night, in the middle of upstate New York, our struggles feel very Kafka-esque.

Being, as I was, on the road while these thoughts were keeping me awake, I decided (oh so creatively) that the journey to parenthood is like any other trip.  Besides the obvious parallel that both trying to conceive and a vacation involve a lot of sex (well, not vacations that you take with your sisters, but you know what I mean), in both travel and babymaking things are bound to go wrong but we tend to attach a disproportionate amount of meaning to things that go wrong in the beginning.  Which reminded me or my and Henry’s one year anniversary trip to France.

We had been planning this trip for a while; our honeymoon had been spent lounging on a beach, so we were hungry for some real travel.  But when we arrived at the airport, the entire northeast was under a severe thunderstorm warning.  Every TV monitor in the airport showed the same band of red thunderstorms advancing east and stretching from DC, where we were taking off, to Boston, where we were transferring to our flight to Paris.

Our flight was canceled, but our airport rep was great.  He quickly booked us on a flight that would transfer in Detroit.  We’d have to switch planes quickly, but we should make it!  As we waited in line for that Detroit flight, though, we got increasingly discouraged.  Our departure time came and went, and we were still waiting to board.  How would we ever make the transfer?  And why were we flying west, towards the thunderstorm?

So we went back to our rep who was, again, great.  This time, he got us on a flight south, through Atlanta, where there were no storms.  We took off just before the storm arrived in DC, transferred without a problem, and were on our way to Paris!

All good, right?  Not really.  In retrospect, there are few more appropriate comparisons to how it feels to see a negative pregnancy test month after month while everyone else is having babies and moving forward with their lives than the feeling of standing at a baggage carousel, seeing everyone else pick up their luggage and hail a cab, watching it go around and around and around while your bag just never arrives.  Our bags, it turns out, never made it off of the Detroit flight, and predictably had missed their transfer.

There is one flight into Paris from Detroit per day (I have to wonder – is this Detroit’s preference, or Paris’s?).  We’d be in Paris for 24 hours without our luggage.  Instead of spending our first day sipping wine and looking at art and being chic, we’d be spending it in our sweaty, wrinkled plane clothes trying to figure out where to buy cheap underwear.

Clearly, our trip was doomed and France hated us.

But of course it wasn’t doomed, France loved us, and it ended up being one of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. Over the next 11 days, plenty went wrong (such as when we picked up our rental car for the second, countryside portion of the trip and managed to get terribly lost within about 30 seconds) and plenty went right (such as when, shortly after we finally figured out where we were, we discovered that the rental car had a GPS), but nothing carried the emotional weight of that first series of snafus.

Infertility is like a bad start to your vacation: it makes you feel doomed, not meant for parenthood, in a way that the other problems, big and small, that you will no doubt encounter later in pregnancy and parenthood just don’t. When nothing has gone right yet, it’s hard to imagine anything ever going right. But of course, you’re not doomed because you got off to a bad start, any more than your vacation is doomed because of a canceled flight or lost luggage.  It’s just something to be gotten through before you get to the good part.

Right now I’m shopping for underwear in my stinky tee shirt, and this entire trip feels doomed.  I just have to remember that it still has the potential to be the best journey ever.