Sarah Jane Johnson - Batter Up

 

My partner and I are at a fertility clinic in a downtown Brooklyn high-rise. It feels sterile and expensive, because it is. I don't have any fertility issues, at least none that I know of yet anyways, outside of the fact that my wife doesn't make sperm. [audience laughter] I think Carrie Ann is pretty nervous too, but per usual, she's playing it pretty cool. She has a high-pressure job, so is often quite serious. But luckily for me, she's pretty soft on the inside. 

 

I remember the first time I saw her roughhousing with her nephews. [chuckles] She's just so throwing them around the air and they can't get enough of it. I thought to myself, “I can't wait to make a baby with this woman.” So, we're waiting for the specialist and I'm thinking about how expensive sperm is. [chuckles] It's also a really unfortunate word, so I like to call it batter. [audience laughter] So, unless you're using a friend's batter or a friend's of a friend, and this works beautifully for a lot of people. But if you are like me and are married to an attorney who manages risk for a living, this is not your path. [audience laughter] 

 

You are poring over anonymous donor profiles and reading case laws about same-sex couples having to adopt their own children. So, this process is starting to get a little tricky for me. I'm starting to feel myself pulling in these procedures. When I'm examined, I sometimes feel like my body is not my own, and it takes me to a place in my past that was one of the darkest things I've ever lived through. 14 years ago, I was studying abroad and I went to Paris for the weekend. And one night, I hung out with a couple of guys. 

 

When they offered to walk me back to my hotel room, one of them raped me in the lobby of an apartment building. He was caught three days later. And this thrust me into a seven-year journey being in a foreign legal system in a language that I could only order a sandwich in. But I chose to prosecute, and I went back multiple times. And one minute, it was wildly empowering. And the next minute, I was drinking my memories away. Being a survivor became my identity, and it determined my worth. 

 

There was a time when I was so broken, I actually thought it was the only thing that made me really interesting. The daily experience of living with it was like a boulder on my chest. It was suffocating, a weight I just didn't know how to carry. You really never know where a reminder will come from. I mean, going through airport security for me is a nightmare. I have no power. You have to fully submit. It doesn't matter if I don't want to be touched in that way. I used to even carry a card I could hand to an agent that said, “I'm a survivor of sexual assault. And please make sure you tell me everything you're going to do before you touch me.” 

 

A few years ago, I was living in a small town and I went to this cozy family planning clinic. It felt like the furniture came from staff members' homes over the years. And one of the exam rooms has posters of these different cities on the walls. I put my feet in stirrups. It's my yearly exam. You can imagine this is not the greatest day for me. [chuckles] I lean back and there on the ceiling is a poster of the Eiffel Tower. The postcard image of the city, the source of all of my pain. 

 

You think being a survivor are those moments where you're walking down a dark sidewalk, and the guy walking towards you gives you this feeling. It washes over you. Your ears are ringing, you have flashes behind your eyes, your stomach drops, heart pounding. And it is those moments. But it's also the cozy family planning clinic. So, you learn to keep your fists up. And I learned that is an utterly exhausting way to live.

 

So, I tried to work that boulder, rub it down, make it a little bit smaller. And eventually, I tried to believe, I tried this concept of thinking that maybe I deserved a little bit more stability in my life, some more goodness. And so, I'm out with a group of friends, and I meet a friend of a friend. She's pretty cool. They're bragging about their glory days playing college basketball, and I'm like, “I played basketball too in high school.” And they were like, “Yeah, cool.” [audience laughter] I was like, “No, no, no. I had a uniform and everything.” They were like, “Right. Cool.” And no surprise, there had been some drinks involved. And truth be told, I was not good at basketball in high school. 

 

I can't tell if I'm like, on her radar at all. And before you know it, I'm on my feet and I'm doing something that I actually was really good at in high school, which is cheerleading. I've got my best turkey, I'm landing jumps, spirit fingers, I do a kick and I get us kicked out of this bar. [audience laughter] That never happened to me before. And things got a little blurry that night. But two years later, we're married. [audience applause] 

 

The safety of Carrie Ann filled holes in me that I didn't know how to fill. I used to not know if I deserved a family or if I could be a mom. Now, I know. And the process though, of us starting a family relies on me changing the concept I have of my body. And it's stirring all of this stuff up. I just can't reconcile how I'm supposed to make a baby in the same exact place in my body that I received so much violence. 

 

So, we decide to try and get pregnant at home. And this is stretching her boundaries, but it makes me feel cared for in a way that I never had been. So, I read a 528-page gay Bible called New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, & Birth. And I'm a little cheap, so I don't have the batter shipped to our home. I schlep to Midtown. The tank is really heavy, so they have a special backpack for it and I strap it on and I walk to Grand Central, for babies, for a subway ride. [audience laughter]

 

I get home. When Carrie Ann comes home that night, she sees the tank on the counter and she looks at me, she looks at the tank, she looks at me and yells, "Fire in the hole!" [audience laughter] We're so nervous and excited. When finally the time comes, we put on garden club gloves, so that we don't burn ourselves on the dry ice to pull out the vial of batter. We do this routine for four months, but it's not working. We're getting really frustrated. But then, we hear about this midwife who will actually come to your home and help you be a little bit more exact and medical about this turkey baster situation. And just for the record, you don't actually use a turkey baster. [audience chuckle]

 

So, we're waiting for her to arrive and we're in the bedroom having a glass of wine, trying to relax. We have our lucky Cubs T-shirts on, because they had won the World Series that year. [audience laughter] The midwife arrives with her kit and the lights are low, so she plunks on this headlamp and essentially just hops into bed with us. [audience laughter] You can imagine the thoughts racing through Carrie Ann's mind like, “Good God, why are we not at a doctor's office?” But this is how much I needed to control this, and this is how much she loves me, and it works. 

 

And so, now I'm going through this incredible process of this pregnancy, and I'm actually feeling more in my body than I ever have and I'm dreaming of this super crunchy birth where I'm rolling around in a wheat field. [audience laughter] I desperately want to have a home birth, but you all know who I'm married to, so this is not my path. [audience laughter] But now, I'm obsessing about a birth plan, and I want no drugs. I'm truly terrified of being inside of a process where I'll have to have medical intervention and an epidural. And an epidural means that I won't be able to move from the waist down. This is a level of feeling trapped that I can't grasp. But those thoughts are opening the doors to this darkness and these doubts. I'm starting to panic, like, maybe I'm not as far along in my healing as I thought that I was. What if I can't show up, and what if I can't feel it all, even the good stuff?

 

But these feelings are countered with this carnal desire to finally push this boulder off of my chest and get on with my life. I think a lot of new parents worry about losing their identity. When I welcomed it, I couldn't wait for my baby to be the center of my story. So, I go to bed on a Tuesday. And just after midnight, the contractions start. I thought that it would have been a little bit more of a crescendo, but they start pretty strong. But it takes us a full day for them to get close enough for us to be able to go to the hospital. And once there, we spend another full day of me walking the halls trying to work this baby down. 

 

We're getting nervous, and it's getting complicated. I'm trying to believe Carrie Ann when she tells me that I'm a warrior. I'm trying desperately to not leave my body. I'm trying so hard to not let the pain of my labor talk to the pain of my trauma. The midwife had warned me that it could be similar. And in the darkness, these thoughts are creeping in, like, maybe you didn't get all of that darkness out, like there's still something in your way. But after 65 hours of labor that included four hours of pushing, I had a C-section. [audience laughter] [audience applause]

 

But they pulled this ray of light from me and lifted him into the air and said, "Welcome to the world, Harvey." [cries with happiness] And the room went wild. They finally brought him to me. Carrie Ann was at my shoulder and everything faded away. His skin was on my skin. I finally saw that little face. I realized in that moment, I had never been so proud of my body. 

 

Harvey is a daily reminder of where I have come from and the goodness that lies ahead. I know now that trauma is not linear. I suppose I take some comfort in knowing that it will always be here, but that I am who I am because of it. But I don't have to carry this boulder every day. It's small enough to fit in my pocket. It can sometimes be awkward. I might sit on it out of the blue. But my hands are free to do other things, like hold my baby boy. Thank you.