“I have one picture of the three of us together. I really hate it: My husband doesn’t look like himself at all”
Photo: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStoc/Getty Images Rebecca was in high school when she met the man she eventually married. They fell in love quickly, and stayed together while she finished college, then grad school, always assuming they’d have kids together someday. But it was a medical diagnosis that led them to get married at City Hall, then to take concrete steps toward family planning.
From there, they sent us to an oncologist. He got the final diagnosis — a blood cancer — on March 15, 2007. That’s the same day we got married. We’d decided to get married while we were going through the process of being diagnosed; it just seemed like a good idea, with everything that was going on. But it was never the plan we would get married the same day the official diagnosis came in.
I think we knew each other so well that we didn’t need to talk about worst-case scenarios. We kept doing all the things we liked doing: traveling, seeing family, hanging out with friends. We bought a weekend house upstate. There was always the subtext that he might not be around, eventually. But we didn’t live our lives with that always hanging over our heads.
Making the final decision wasn’t something that either of us wanted to put on the other person, I think. Which was a problem, because someone had to make the decision. I knew I’d throw all my concerns out the window if this was really important to him. But I think he didn’t want to put any pressure on me — he didn’t want me to do it just because it was important to him. I had a hard time gauging how strongly he felt about it.
It was exciting; I was excited to get started. I didn’t feel too bad, just a bit bloated. I minored in chemistry and do a lot of science-adjacent work at my job, so mixing and measuring the medications was not a problem for me. But I kind of marveled at the fact that they send those medications home with just anyone, though. They don’t seem that easy to figure out, and it’s a lot of responsibility, to get it right. The stakes are high.
I didn’t feel that great, however. I was nauseous until about 20 weeks. I had really bad hip pain, especially when I was trying to sleep. I was dizzy because I had to take progesterone after having some bleeding early on. I stopped running, because I just felt like the stakes were too high — I know it’s fine to exercise while you’re pregnant, but after doing IVF, I didn’t want to do anything that could jeopardize it. I just did not love being pregnant.
The next day, my water broke. I can’t know for sure, but I think it was either the stress, or maybe the knowledge of what was happening, that made it happen. I didn’t really have a strong birth plan. I’d read one book, and felt like I had a good sense of the phases of labor. I knew so many people who’d given birth, and none of them had it go the way they thought it would go. So I figured, what’s the point? I thought I’d probably get an epidural, but I wanted to see how it went.
We didn’t talk much about our son’s future, in those last two weeks. I think my husband was confident that I would raise him the same way that we would have raised him together. Plus, he just got so sick so fast — he was rushing to wrap up his affairs. He needed to make sure I knew how to access his computer, his passwords, his credit cards.
This was right around the inauguration, in 2017. Crazy things were always happening; there was always something to be reading about, when I’d be up in the middle of the night with the baby. I was on maternity leave for about five and a half months. I was originally going to go back after four months, but I decided to extend my leave. I didn’t want to leave him, but also, getting back to my previous life felt weird and wrong.
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