Columbia University Fertility Center

they are just plans

Yesterday, I had my first “morning monitoring” at the Columbia University Fertility Center, on the top floor of 5 Columbus Circle in Midtown Manhattan, a center that shares a building with the big Nordstrom that opened what feels like right before the pandemic and which I have an irrational attachment to succeeding despite the fact I’ve never set foot inside. 

Maybe I want the Nordstrom to succeed because when I used to live in Oakland I spent a lot of time at the Walnut Creek Nordstrom. After years and years and years of making almost no money, racking up credit card debt and then only getting out of it through the continued and astonishing grace of my parents, I suddenly started making bank. I’d started a small consulting company that provided public relations and editorial services to high-end residential architects and what started with one firm turned into five turned into seven eventually turned into eleven, with a full-time staff of three and a ton of consultants on deck. It’s funny because apparently most people who didn’t know me well just assumed I didn’t work. 

Anyway, I started making a ton of money and am constitutionally incapable of holding onto money or being “responsible” with it or doing anything besides getting it away from me as fast as possible and also I thought I might start doing “business development” trips and so I ended up at the Nordstrom in Walnut Creek with a personal shopper whose name I can’t recall but who texted me a lot of pictures of blazers and I ended up spending six thousand dollars every few months on clothes that I have worn maybe a grand total of twice. 

What I realize now of course is that the phrase “the road gets narrower,” which I learned in early sobriety, is true. As I stay sober my available outlets become fewer, as each one reveals itself to be some form of addiction, some form of trying to fill the god-sized hole as I’ve been taught to call it. What I thought at the time was me being a badass boss bitch was actually just me trying to fill the god-sized hole that had emerged, once again, even though I was doing my best to fill it with, of course, god. 

The Nordstrom at Columbus Circle reminds me of that time, of how confused and alone I felt. I'd been married for two years by that point, gone to the desert and come back, and still blamed myself for the destruction of what had felt, at one point, like a vital union. I thought that it was my fault for having gotten so sick I’d had to leave our home and go to the desert. I thought it was generally my fault for always needing to get surgeries and iron infusions and months of steroids after an anaphylactic reaction to an allergy shot and I also thought that no one else would choose me. That I should be grateful for having been chosen when I was six weeks post brain surgery and so sick I could barely move. That was the message that I heard, over and over again. And because I thought that it was my fault, I thought that I was in debt, and that’s why I started making so much money, and that’s why, then, I had to spend it. 

Now I live a different life. We’re trying to make some embryos so we can save them for later and take the pressure off ourselves, so we can have a little time to keep being together and keep renovating our condo and keep raising our cattle dog and keep sleeping in until ten and keep writing books and designing whatever he wants to design. I’m planning ahead and asking the world for some insurance in the form of a tiny collection of cells that might or might not one day become a person. I have been trying to cultivate a feeling of extreme detachment and absolute acceptance of whatever outcome happens. It’s also never occurred to me that it won’t work. They told me I had four follicles on each side. I know a little bit about attrition, that some people I know had twenty and ended up with one embryo, so I walked past the Nordstrom and to Central Park and just sat on a rock and drank a coffee and thought about what my life would look like if I did IVF and it didn’t work. I thought about going into Nordstrom just for old times’ sake but I stopped doing PR last year, when every single client called me during the same week in March to say that they had to put our contract on hold, and I’m no longer drowning in money. I’m also no longer drowning in sadness so it evens out, I guess. 

Whatever my best-laid plans are, they are just plans. I remember how many business trips I thought I would go on, how many Vince leggings or tiger grass serums I thought I needed. Now I think I need so many other things, and some of them I’ll get and some of them I won’t. The road gets smaller but so too, it turns out, does the hole. 

Columbia University Fertility Center is at 5 Columbus Circle, New York, NY.