Four Infertile Friends

I have a notebook to write about these women.  I am falling in love with each one.  You don’t know them yet but I want to introduce you. 

Grace Carr is the young wife of an aspiring politician.  You’d assume she has it all.  She’s beautiful, young, wealthy, social with a hunky husband and all the attention she could want.  They tell her she has plenty of time to have kids but she has a secret that will cost her everything.  Does she leave her lifestyle to save her husband from ruin?  Does she stand up for her ideals even if it means his career will be permanently tarnished, chastise her husband for the choices he helped her to make when he knew the cost and tell the world the truth of her new dysfunction?  Both choices could leave her in ruin.  Only one path is politically correct.  The other will set her on the path to freedom.  Could she handle that freedom when it goes against his politics and her religion?

Jada Miller is a woman scorned by life.  After a long battle against pregnancy loss she is widowed young, loses her adopted daughter and has a lonely future ahead of her.  Her many losses have broken her and given her wisdom beyond her years.  People don’t appreciate that wisdom.  They leave her isolated in her grief.  She is not responsible for any pain caused to her family but she hears the assuming whispers of others who think so much could never happen to a person undeserving.  Can one stranger heal a past full of so many dark memories?  How does she grow after all this loss?  Will she be strong enough to allow the love of another man into her heart?  Could she stand to try again?

Cynthia Barker is a sassy independent woman.  She transferred across the country to live with her boyfriend of 6 years.  He never wanted kids and she thought she was infertile from a surgery she’d had years earlier.  They were a career-minded couple with the nice house, expensive cars and many expensive creature comforts.  Then she got pregnant and he abandoned her with a mortgage and a car payment she couldn’t afford.  Her friend moved in after she sold most of her belongings because she had nowhere to go.   She finds out her baby is sick and the choice she makes leads her to road of activism for families everywhere.    Her boss fired her but no one will recognize that she was fired unjustly, based on the trauma she just experienced. What is that choice that changes so many?  How could one woman stand up to feminists and politicians alike and win? 

Alicia Attali is a heavier woman with endometriosis.  Her added weight in a circle of beautiful people creates self-esteem issues that make her want to eat more.  She tries to be good-humored for her husband.  She laughs a lot and privately she cries a lot.  Every month she wants to please her husband.  She wants to be pregnant more than anything but even with the help of drugs she never is.  It’s been almost a year that she’s been taking the drugs and it was two years before that when she started trying.  She wants to do more but her doctor keeps telling her to lose weight.  He doesn't want to put her health at risk so he sends her to a nutritionists and she sees a personal trainer.  She tries not to binge. She’ll do so well and then someone will say something to her that will make her despair and she’ll cry and eat from shame.  This is how she learned to cope as a child when the teasing began and now it’s ruining her life and her marriage.  During a charity ball  she meets Grace.  They don’t know it yet but they will save each other from ruin.

It’s a story of friendship and a story of the hardship it is to become a parent.  These women wade the dark waters of infertility and live to tell about it.  They come together to stand up against a world that would try to silence them and the world is made better for it.  It’s about the power that women have and what can happen when they harness their voices in the right way.  There is love, passion and heartbreak.  You will be wildly attached to these women and realize they could be your neighbor, co-worker or even your best friend.

Time is Relative

When I was little I got sick; really sick.  I went into a coma and I was given 6 hours to live.  A wonderful doctor was flown in from a research hospital who saved my life and here I am today.  I left the experienced changed.

 A seed of doubt was planted in my tiny mind.  It has grown over the years into a tree with many branches.  I started noticing clocks and the ticking sound they made.  It made me wonder if I was really out of a coma at all.  Was the clock mocking me?  Was I ticking down to the hour I would wake up and everything I know would be gone or changed?  Was my life from a lie?

I asked the fundamental question.  Can people in a coma dream?  Now I know you have to reach a state of REM and they must dream sometimes because if you don’t you will die.

As I grew the idea got more complex.  Could your mind create people with independent personalities and backgrounds?  Could you create a world in your mind?  I can’t be the only person who’s ever wondered if I am really a bit actor in someone else’s dream.   When they wake up will I cease to exist or do our thoughts have the power to bring these dreams into creation?  If that is the case there are a lot of worlds out there where I can fly and others where zombies chase me or houses consume me.   

There is one thing Inception shared with this concept.  In dreams time is relative.  You feel you’ve lived years and it’s only been minutes.  It could also feel like moments and you’ve been out for 8 hours. 

After seeing that movie I watched one of the many science fiction films where astronauts’ are put into suspended animation and shot into space.  That opened a whole new branch of thought for me. 

We are so close to figuring out how to freeze a person and bring them back.  Call me optimistic but I can see that happening in this youngest generations’ lifetime.  I don’t see people discovering a way to travel faster than light soon.  I think “warp speed” is firmly in fiction.    But if we know it’s possible to freeze someone and send them back to life a light year is no obstacle.  By the time you make any significant discoveries and return home no one will remember you left and people will have evolved significantly.    But with endless funding and interest this could be possible.

If you are in stasis for thousands of years traveling trillions of miles away would you dream?  If you could I imagine your mind would starve for interaction.  If it’s possible to create a whole world where life exists at such a relative pace you could watch a world come into creation, flourish, interact with generations of lives and manipulate it like a god.  It wouldn’t take long for you to forget you aren’t really a part of that world.  What would you think as you lived on while whole civilizations rise and crumble around you?  Would you assume you are god? 

   

You wouldn’t know how fragile your whole foundation is.  You would live never knowing that you would wake up and it would all be gone. 

When you do wake up what kind of effect would that have on your mind?  Suddenly, you have a group of astronauts’ coming back to consciousness after thousands and perhaps millions or even billions of years in dream time.  Even if they do remember a life before they have to live knowing that everyone they ever cared about or talked to is dead aside from the few they are traveling with.  They are utterly alone where they used to be gods of their own universe. 

My husband told me I was fucked up.  He said if I ever wrote that into a novel everyone would hate me.  The main characters would all die lonely in the depths of space and even if they did make it home it would be to a foreign world that doesn’t know them.  I think it’s a cool idea even if it is depressing.