From Here To Maternity

WRITER ELIZABETH HOLMES ALWAYS DREAMED SHE’D HAVE TWO KIDS BY AGE 34. SO WHEN SHE AND HER HUSBAND STRUGGLED TO GET PREGNANT, THEY TURNED TO SCIENCE

- Elizabeth Holmes

Do you want to know the gender?” my doctor asked. “Yes!” I responded without a moment’s hesitation. I’m a journalist, always wanting to know more. And yet this wasn’t the moment I had dreamed about. I wasn’t standing beside a frosting-shrouded cake, armed with a knife to reveal the pink or blue crumbs. I wasn’t lying on an exam table with a sticky ultrasound probe pressed against my abdomen.

I wasn’t even pregnant.

I was on the phone, standing awkwardly in a quiet hallway at work. What my doctor was offering to reveal was not the gender of a baby but the gender of a clump of cells. Two, actually—a pair of frozen embryos my husband and I had spent tens of thousands of dollars to create.

“They’re boys!” he said excitedly.

The news gave our embryos life and filled me with dread. It was the latest surprise in my years-long march to motherhood, a precursor toWhat to Expect When You’re Expecting that could have been titled This Is Not What I Expected at All.

As a teen I had scripted a tidy life plan: married by age 27, two daughters before 34. I assumed that when I was ready to have children I would have them, in no small part because my mom used her own fertility as a threat. She cornered me as a high schooler with a rotating cast of boyfriends and grabbed me by the shoulders: “Your father and I got pregnant on the first try,” she warned.

I met my husband, Matthew, when I was 27 (already behind schedule!). We got married four years later and started trying for a baby two months before our first wedding anniversary. I anxiously peed on the fanciest ovulation sticks I could find. With every twitch or pang in my pelvic area, my heart soared. It sank just as quickly with the start of my period.