Golden hour; a middle-aged woman walks in a field, background of bush lit with sun.

Michelle Langstone (Photo: Dean O’Gorman)

BooksMay 20, 2021

It goes like this: Michelle Langstone on IVF

Contributing writer

Michelle Langstone (Photo: Dean O’Gorman)

This is an abridged version of the essay ‘Stars’, from Michelle Langstone’s new book Times Like These: On Grief, Hope and Remarkable Love. As this section begins, Langstone is preparing for egg collection.

I read about fertilisation, and learn that when a sperm fertilises an egg there is a tiny flash of light, a little burst of energy – enough to turn the lights on. I watch a video, see a stranger’s egg in a laboratory light up like a firefly or the twinkle of a far-off star. It is a magic I am unprepared for, and I can’t stop thinking about when my eggs will meet my husband’s sperm in the lab and light up in recognition. Nobody will be there to see them turn on. In the dark of the laboratory they will wink and glimmer in a cellular constellation. Some will fall dark and die, and others will survive until the next measurement. I can’t get it out of my head that there will be nobody there to see them. They are away from home. I have traded the soft comfort of my ovaries for the sterility of test tubes, and the thought leaves me ragged with sadness.

I forget I have left my underwear on. I lie down in the hospital room to have my eggs retrieved, and the doctor has to ask me to take them off. Crimson, I wriggle them down my trembling legs and hand them to Arun, who puts them in his pocket, looking nonplussed. I sit back on the bed, lift my legs into the stirrups and lie down like an uncomfortable starfish. When the drugs come I feel an ocean pour through my veins, a warm flood of softness that lifts me away from the room. I can’t see, but I hear Arun and the doctor chatting about television, while the nurse and lab technicians prepare to receive my eggs. I come in and out, yelping when the needle pierces the most quiet parts of my anatomy, and then I drift, my blood a boat I float in. I hear the embryologist counting as the individual eggs are passed through the window to her. One, two – Arun squeezes my hand and I come round to see his face hovering close to mine. Six, I hear, and then I slip away again.

When it’s over I wobble back to the cubicle, drag on my undies and wrap up in my warm clothes. They make us wait, make me drink hot tea and eat Marmite on toast. The drugs leave my body, and the doctor sticks his head around the door to give us the final count. Fourteen. I ask him if he is sure, and he says he is, though they won’t all be mature enough to fertilise. It’s a good number, and he smiles and closes the door. I sob, and we are hustled back out into the day, clearing the cubicle of the traces of our hope, making way for the next woman. I go home and climb into bed, and the ache comes upon me, spreading through my womb, an iron warming up and pressing down. Mum comes round and sits beside me on the bed and asks what happens now. Now we wait, I say.

We have to wait a day to see which of the 14 eggs will achieve fertilisation and become Day 1 blastocysts. I lie in bed through the afternoon, imagining them mingling with Arun’s sperm, wondering which of our eggs and sperm will be wallflowers and which will be bold and go for it. I close my eyes and see the lights come on one by one. I am awake for some of every hour that night, checking the time, staring into the dark, imagining the lights.

Book cover of Times Like These, and head and shoulder portrait of Michelle Langstone in a beautiful floral shirt. — Langstone and her superb collection of essays (Photo: Dean O’Gorman)

It goes like this: you wake six times in the night, every night, and when dawn comes you drag yourself up the maunga, filling in time until the next phone call. You never know when they will ring; it could be any time of day. You leave the volume on your phone up high and jump each time there’s a text, feeling rage when someone who is not from the clinic calls you. Your nerves jangle, you can’t eat, your hands shake. You have no control over anything that happens, or over the torrent of emotions that arrive at unpredictable moments.

On the third day, a crucial day, when you are waiting to hear how many of your 11 surviving blastocysts have made it to Day 3, you sob in the rain on your second trip up the maunga, at four in the afternoon. There has been no news. You imagine them all dead, the test tubes being rinsed in a basin and placed into a steriliser ready for the next devotion to attempted life. You play out the conversation at the clinic: your doctor demurs about being the one to call, and the nurses draw straws about who will make contact and give you the bad news.

“Michelle,” they will say – “is this a good time to talk? Could you give me your date of birth, please? Michelle, of your 11 blastocysts, none have made it to Day 3. I’m sorry. Have a rest and have a think, and then perhaps come in to see your doctor about what we can do next.” You can hear the words before they are said, and grieve for the end you know is coming.

In the rain, up Maungawhau, no birds are singing. You stand under open skies and let the water pound on the hood of your raincoat. You sniff the collar and it smells like a circus, and you remember the visit to the big top when you were a child, before they banned live animals. You watched greyhounds jump over spiked metal fences that got higher and higher as they cleared them, until the spikes almost touched the top of the tent and you expected to see those grey dogs impaled up there. The audience gasped and you wanted to scream for it to stop, but still they jumped, higher and higher, their bellies so soft and vulnerable above the metal. You hated that circus. You never went to a circus again after that.

The phone rings, but for a moment you don’t notice, because you’ve changed the ringtone to the song of tūī and think the birds up the maunga have started singing again. You dash for the trees that line the road to the crater and shelter beneath them, the fat drips of water falling down the back of your neck because you’ve pulled your hood back to take the call. “Ten of your eggs have made it to Day 3,” the nurse says. “A very good number, but expect to see them drop away by Day 5,” she cautions. “We always see them drop,” she says.

You hang up the phone and you can’t even be happy about this news, because there are another two days to wait, and another round of news that may be bad. It is always like this – no chance to celebrate a milestone, because there is another to clear, and then another and another. Make it to Day 3; now make it to Day 5. Whoever survives to Day 5 gets tested for genetic soundness; whoever passes those tests can be transferred. Then you will wait to see if the embryo takes to your womb, and that will be 10 days of agony and wondering. If your embryo embeds in your uterine lining and you are pregnant, you will take blood tests to watch if the hormones rise higher each day, and then you will wait for the seven-week scan, and then the 12. It is never over. You walk home with your hood back, the rain all through your hair and your jersey and your trousers and your socks. You are just like those greyhounds, jumping for your life.

Times Like These: On grief, hope and remarkable love, by Michelle Langstone (Allen & Unwin, $36.99) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.

Keep going!

Black and white portrait photograph of a middle-aged woman with curly hair, looking to camera.

Clare Moleta (Photo: Stan Alley)

BooksMay 19, 2021

I wrote my worst nightmare

Clare Moleta

Guest writer

Clare Moleta (Photo: Stan Alley)

Unsheltered is a story about a woman searching desperately for her daughter in a climate-ravaged Australia. In stores any day now, it’s the first novel by Wellington writer Clare Moleta. She explains the haunting that started it all.

In the second half of 2017 I was talking to the novelist Emily Perkins about the manuscript that became Unsheltered, when she said something that stopped me in my tracks. “It’s your worst nightmare. That’s why you’re writing it.”

If I’d had to articulate my reasons, I might have said I was looking for a way to write about things I couldn’t stop thinking about: the loss of home, the search for refuge, the unavoidable consequences of the way we persist in living on this planet. But what I was actually writing about was a woman searching for a missing child roughly the same age as my own child. And yet what was self-evident to Emily hadn’t even occurred to me.

The obvious follow-up question didn’t occur to me either, until I started trying to send the book out into the world: why would anyone else want to read about my worst nightmare?

For a few years I’d been carrying an image in my mind of a group of children exiled and wandering across a failing continent, always just out of sight, just out of reach. Then in 2016, I read that 10,000 unaccompanied children who had reached Europe and registered as refugees had disappeared. Such a vast, quiet story. They kept me awake at night, those vanished kids. There were too many of them to hold onto. The idea of them was overwhelming, numbing, until I decided to try to bring one child into focus. And in the grief of the loss of that one child, I found the question that came to haunt the rest of the book: how to be a parent when you’ve lost faith in the future.

“All at once … something we could only have imagined was upon us – and we could still only imagine it,” wrote the author and journalist Philip Gourevitch. “That is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real.”

The setting of Unsheltered has been described as futuristic, but I wrote it four years ago and it didn’t even feel like the future then. There’s really nothing in the book that isn’t happening now: it’s just not happening to me yet.

Colour portrait photo of a middle-aged woman, looking out to the side of the shot, pensive. Plus a cover of her book Unsheltered. — Clare Moleta was raised on Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia, and now lives in Wellington (Photo: Ebony Lamb)

I spent years involved in campaigns for environmental justice and human rights. There were times when I felt like it was making a difference. But as I came into my 40s and watched my own child growing up and walking out into the world, my efforts seemed so pitiful. And maybe I just wanted to write about these things that cause me grief and bewilderment because I didn’t know what else to do with them.

But I must be more optimistic than I realised, because hope kept finding its way into the book. People with so little power try so hard. In the midst of a long unfolding climate and human catastrophe, strangers do what they can to build communities and help each other. And Li, the mother searching for her missing daughter, tries so hard. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s betrayed her child by bringing her into the world in the first place, but she keeps loving her and fighting for her anyway, stubbornly and imperfectly. Because how can you be a parent at all, now, if you just submit to the future we’ve brought down on ourselves? Don’t you have to see what’s coming and keep fighting? Not blind hope, Li tells herself, but not blind hopelessness either.

In her 2016 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, ‘Let Them Drown: the violence of othering in a warming world’, Naomi Klein put it plainly. “Unless we demand radical change, we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.”

When it comes to climate change and forced migration, Australian governments turned away from morality and imagination a long time ago. Aotearoa presents a kinder face but, like every country that has the power to make a real difference, it’s punching below its weight. And Li, who exists outside the walls, understands how this works, the fear behind it. She understands what people like her represent to the sheltered. They couldn’t let them in, she thinks. Because if they got in, if they all got in, then the whole continent would tip and go under and they’d all drown together.

That logic holds as long as the sheltered are able to deny or minimise the humanity of others. But the hope in Unsheltered lies in recognitions of shared humanity. And, for me, one way to strive for that is to read and think about, and then try to imagine, experiences I have no parallel for. At least, not yet.

Unsheltered, by Clare Moleta (Simon and Schuster, $35) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington.