The Road From I to Us

The call came in early August, a little more than a month after I had left New York. A perky woman from Safeco Insurance informed me that she had recently been made aware that I had filed a change of address, which meant that, by law, I needed to register my car in Louisiana and get a new license.

I am a law-abiding person. I have never been arrested; I’ve never cheated on my taxes; and other than the one Charlie’s Angels trading card that I pilfered from Kristen Hansen’s bedroom in fifth grade because it completed my set, I’ve never stolen anything in my life. So when the Safeco lady was done chirping, I did what any honest person would do: I lied.

“It’s not a permanent move,” I said nervously. “I’m just working on a movie here for a few months. And then I’m going back home to New York. Where I really live.”

At one point, that sentence had been true. The previous fall, the cable network for which I worked was about to film a movie in New Orleans that needed a producer. I could do it, but if I did, it would mean two months away from my house and routine in the Hudson Valley.

While I would have denied it, I loved routine. A lot. Growing up in chaos had left some deep wounds, and routine was a soothing balm, as was the serene energy of the light-filled converted barn that I called home. But recently, the reliable pattern of my life had begun to feel like it was turning on me. While I wasn’t unhappy, the feeling was uncomfortable enough to throw me back into therapy, where I spent a lot of time feeling guilty for not being more grateful for what was a pretty charmed life.

I knew something needed to change—I just wasn’t sure what. When I heard about the opportunity to go to New Orleans, I marched into my boss’s office. “I’ll go produce that movie in New Orleans if you want,” I announced.

I remember him looking up at me, surprised. “You will? Really?”

I remember nodding, all the time thinking, What the fuck am I doing?

He agreed to put me on the job. It was that easy. But as soon as I got back to my office, I called my friend Nicole in a panic about how I had just screwed up my life. Sure, it was only two months, but for someone who got anxious when someone was in “her” seat on the train, it was an eternity. Nicole, on the other hand, thought it was great. It was an adventure. It meant getting out of the Northeast chill for a little while. “Who knows—maybe you’ll meet someone down there,” she added.

As usual, I scoffed. At 43, with a string of the same relationship but in different heights and hair colors behind me, I had accepted my fate as “that writer who lives alone in the big pink barn.” It made me sound exotic and eccentric, like a character in a quirky indie film. But a few weeks after getting to New Orleans, I did meet someone. Not just someone, but — as I told my father in a rare burst of openness about my personal life—I had met The Guy, capital-T-capital-G. A six-foot-three redheaded Southerner named Lewie.

Over the years, maturity and disappointment had taught me that while potential reigned in that first flush of hormones, it was better not to plan anything longer than three days out with a man. But with Lewie, it was different. With him, that ever-present feeling of holding my breath while walking a tightrope for fear of screwing things up was absent. Instead, I felt a peace that allowed me to stay in the moment due to some inexplicable belief that there was, indeed, a future for us.

While I had been with men who were smart and funny and well-traveled like he was, I had never been with someone so kind and gentle. Part of it was that he was a genteel Southern gentleman, but it was more than that.

It was a kindness born out of an immense gratitude for second chances.

Lewie had been through a lot, and his appreciation for life was touching and inspiring. He didn’t take anything for granted—including me. I felt safe and protected with him, and his gentleness allowed me to open up without fear of being judged or discarded.

One morning, as we watched a little girl play at breakfast, a voice deep within me said, You’re going to have a child with this man. I believed it. Up until that point, I had thought I didn’t want children, but as I watched him smile at the child, I realized that I hadn’t found the right partner to have one with—until now. It was as if I had intuitively known that all the other men I had been with wouldn’t have been able to show up as a father. But not only would Lewie be able to—he wanted to.

Surprisingly, this drastic change in course didn’t feel dramatic or alarming. It was actually kind of quiet. That’s the thing about things that are meant to be: there’s not much adrenaline behind them. They’re devoid of the drama that accompanies self-will run riot.

Our romance was fast and furious, and the ache of having to say goodbye when the movie wrapped was mitigated by the fact that I already had a ticket to return for a long weekend. But when I got to the Albany Airport parking lot and saw the familiar gold-and-blue New York license plate of my Subaru Outback, there was also relief. Relief that grew with every mile I drove towards my big pink barn, where I could once again be alone.

Aloneness was my set point.

While I had achieved a great deal—success in two different careers; lots of friends; a beautiful home; money in the bank—it was all just armor to protect me from having to be vulnerable. Although I said that I wanted to couple up and create a life with someone, there was a big part of me that believed that by remaining self-sufficient, I could somehow avoid hurt and disappointment.

Over the next six months, Lewie and I saw each other every three weeks. The regularity of our visits made it so that we were able to experience a semblance of real life, but after our weekends together, my Subaru was always waiting for me at the airport to whisk me back home, where I could recover from the uncomfortable process of opening my heart.

As a veteran of long-distance relationships, I was well aware they had a shelf life. So when my consulting gig at the cable network ended and I no longer had a paycheck tethering me to New York, we made the decision to move in together. We found a house to rent in Louisiana—one that wasn’t his nor mine, but that would be ours. Almost seven months to the day after we met, I drove 23 hours in my Subaru with two screaming cats towards our new home, coupledom—and hormone shots.

Our desire to have a child hadn’t just been a side effect from the cocktail of dopamine and oxytocin that accompanies new love. Once we sobered up, it not only remained, but grew. After months of trying naturally, in an attempt to goad my 44-year-old eggs to perk up, we were about to bring science into the equation via fertility drugs.

Adjusting to the Deep South when you’re an East Coast Jew isn’t easy. Moving in with someone when your relationship has only heretofore been long distance adds a whole other layer of stress. But to find yourself obsessively watching YouTube videos about the proper way to stab your abdomen with a syringe and visiting voodoo shops in the French Quarter for fertility totems is enough to send anyone over the edge.

Between ultrasounds and guided meditations, I learned that there are not enough beignets or biscuits in the world to quell the anxiety that results when someone who has spent her life being pathologically independent attempts to partner up and (literally) create a new life.

My anxiety wasn’t just triggered from being outside my comfort zone. It was about my fear that, if I couldn’t conceive, sooner or later Lewie would leave me for a woman whose eggs were viable. Despite his proclamations that this wasn’t true, and that his actions were those of a man who loved me unconditionally—fertile or not—my well-developed penchant for worst-case-scenario thinking made it difficult to trust in him.

So I continued to dodge the biweekly check-ins from the chirpy Safeco lady as if she were a bill collector. I had no intention of giving up my New York plates and driver’s license. The more attached I became to this wonderful man, my happiness-challenged brain told me, the more likely it was to fall apart. So what if he sent me random texts telling me he loved me? So what if he brought me flowers just because? So what if he made me laugh like no one else could? So what if, when I confided in him that my big fear was that one day he’d find out just how crazy I was, he laughed and said, “Oh, I already have…and I’m not going anywhere.” There had to be a catch—there always was. Despite the fact that we had flown to New York two months after I had moved to Louisiana and loaded up a U-Haul with all my furniture, sooner rather than later I’d be on my way back with my old eggs to live the rest of my years alone in my barn with my cats. Why bother to register my car in Louisiana when I’d just have to change it back?

But as the months together in our new home went by and I got more adept at shooting myself up with Menopur and Gonal F and Ganirelix without leaving bruises, the fear that our relationship was on borrowed time began to dissipate. As I began to allow Lewie to see the very human me versus some carefully constructed persona —the one without makeup; the one who sometimes wore Lanz flannel nightgowns to bed instead of black silk negligees; the one who sobs hysterically after being told by a vet that, yes, there’s a slim chance that the lesions in her cat’s mouth may be cancerous—he didn’t pull away and leave like I still feared he would.

Instead, he stayed as, one day at a time, I transformed from a self-reliant I to one half of an open-hearted us.

He stayed after I found out I wasn’t pregnant when the first IUI didn’t take. When we moved on to IVF, he drove me to the fertility clinic at five in the morning. He listened to me babble nonsensically as the anesthesia wore off, and he helped me to the bathroom and waited to make sure I didn’t fall off the toilet as I peed. Eleven days later, on a Friday afternoon, when I found out I wasn’t pregnant that time, either, he listened to me hiccup out the news through my tears over the phone and told me that he loved me even more, before rushing home with a dozen tulips.

Three days later, I went to the DMV. I waited as patiently as a New Yorker can for my number to be called, and when it was, I told the woman behind the window that I had recently moved to Louisiana and needed to register my car. Unfortunately, I needed my passport, which was at home. If I had attempted this any earlier, I probably would have taken it as a sign that it wasn’t meant to be and gone back to living with only one foot planted in my new life while the rest of me plotted my return to the safety of being alone. But something about that phone call when I told Lewie I wasn’t pregnant—the way he had let me just sob, and the way I didn’t try and stop myself, and the way I truly believed him when he said he loved me even more—made me realize that I wasn’t a New Yorker anymore.

The next morning, passport in hand, I returned to the DMV and surrendered my New York plates and license. Five months after moving to Louisiana, I finally lived there.