Eleanor Kedney
Twelve Days From Transfer
Three: A Taos Press
Reviewer: Erica Goss
If we are to believe today’s infertility specialists, the inability to conceive a child is a temporary inconvenience, easily solved with an array of safe, reliable treatments. Eleanor Kedney’s latest poetry collection, Twelve Days From Transfer, explores infertility’s emotional and physical tolls. These deeply personal poems are a testament to the profound, unsettling experiences resulting from Kedney’s quest to become a mother.
Twelve Days From Transfer hinges on the concept of the fractured self. Kedney describes procedures that reduce the infertility patient to a collection of parts—uterus, follicles, and blood, to name just a few—rather than a whole person. As a result, a system intended to help bring new life into the world often results in dehumanizing the patient.
This attitude towards the female body has existed for millennia. Although we’ve come a long way from “the cures” of the past: “urine, / the blood of pregnant animals, / powdered boar penis,” “the hind paws of weasels” (“Infertility Compendium”), modern fertility treatments result in an array of side effects that range from uncomfortable to agonizing.
As Kedney soon discovers, the first step—becoming pregnant—is often the most difficult:
They tell you don’t worry, the symptoms are temporary, you take the headaches,
hot flashes, vaginal dryness, bruising at the injection site, abdominal bloating,
breast tenderness, moodiness, and irritability.
These lines from “Twelve Days From Transfer,” the book’s title poem, describe just a few of the emotional and physical challenges inherent to modern fertility treatments. The poem leaves no doubt as to the invasive nature of the procedures: natural cycles are enhanced and suppressed with synthetic hormones, eggs are sucked out of the body, fertilized and re-implanted, and then, as the title indicates, the waiting begins. “In twelve days you know if you’re pregnant. // Twelve days is a long time to wait.” This period is fraught with anxiety and anticipation, and the knowledge that if the procedure fails, Kedney must endure another in which her mind and body suffer a long list of indignities, from “speculations of the best doctors as to what is your next best shot” to “the vaginal ultrasound microphone covered by a rubber and cold, sea-green gel before you even have your breakfast.”
“Six Gray Moons on a Screen,” named for the uncanny sight, via ultrasound, of microscopic human eggs, describes the grief resulting from their loss:
We were name-making.
Violet for its heart-shaped leaves.
… If a boy,
Ethan, meaning strong,
Or David, beloved.
… the month’s work of my body
shattered.
The poem tallies the well-meaning, yet profoundly insensitive things people often say in the face of such a loss: “There’s always adoption. / Trust me, you’re lucky you don’t have kids. / Maybe you weren’t meant to have kids. / It’s not the end of the world.” In this context, words carry extra weight, each phrase like a dagger: “They said / everything, but, sorry.”
In situations where so much depends on the cooperation of one person’s body, self-blame becomes an automatic reflex. In “Imagine,” Kedney picks apart small acts of daily life, searching for something to absorb the guilt she feels:
Did I rest enough; did I lift
something too heavy? A book box,
our thirty-two-pound beagle, a jug of water?
“Imagine” focuses on a group of women sharing tales of pregnancy loss. When Kedney’s turn comes, she reveals this heartbreaking fact: “No one ever asked me about it.” The IVF treatment did not result in a pregnancy; therefore, “there wasn’t a baby, / it was a family imagined.” And yet those six “gray moons” were real, at least for a short time.
The language around reproductive technology is cold and inexplicably heartless. Doctors say things like “There are no more fertility tests left to do” and “Your eggs are old.” In “Thirty-Ninth Birthday,” the doctor can’t explain Kedney’s infertility, causing “hormone-induced tears.”
Most of the poems in this book describe the post-IVF phase of Kedney’s infertility treatments, a long arc of desolation and grief. The comments of “Women who didn’t know we were trying,” from “No Reply,” echo the pain Kedney carries. The poem, a series of short stanzas spread out over seven pages, takes the reader from the anguish of giving up, and the need to explain that decision—“my clock was ticking. / I was selfish, I’d be sorry, / you’ll want them later, / motherhood is the best joy in life” to a hard-won acceptance that she was not going to be a mother after all:
a woman asks, You got kids?
No, I was unable to have them.
Her face widened, and she leaned back
on the porch step, not knowing
what to say.
“Regret Requires Choice” explores the outcome of Kedney’s decision to end her fertility treatments:
It can be said, I couldn’t say,
I don’t want children, bristled against
strictures, admission tickets,
while regret is the purview of the childless.
Here Kedney shows us that the aftermath of this decision will remain in her mind and body for a long time, perhaps for her entire life.
A series of poems woven throughout the book tells an alternate story: Kedney’s sponsorship of a young Indian woman named Katta Sarita. Because of Kedney’s support, “Sarita will live in a hostel, continue school, be given vitamins” (“Drawn Out of Water”). Sarita’s mother tells Kedney, “She is your daughter now. I give her to you.” The relationship stirs unforeseen complications; in “A Row of Threaded Bangles on Her Wrist,” Kedney’s doubts surface: “I knew I wanted to help her, but would I / love her like a daughter I had birthed?” Through Sarita, Kedney meets Sri Ram, with whom she forges an instant bond: “Sri Ram asked if he could call me mom. He added, You treat me / like my mother.”
Kedney’s connection with Sarita, conducted mostly via virtual devices, highlights the complications of a long-distance relationship, as detailed in “When Birds Fall Out of the Sky:”
When the monsoons arrive, I side with God to keep Sarita, faint from typhoid, alive … Her hair dwindles, and she eats only rice. Her sister tells her, You’re too thin; no man will marry you.
The connection between Kedney, Sarita, and Sri Ram expands and redefines the definition of motherhood. In “Random Field Stones,” Kedney writes, “When I speak of Sri Ram as my son, I offer you magic. The unseen flurry when a bond / begins in one’s heart and mind and flows as if a kiss blown into the universe.” Even though “I didn’t hold and feed Sri Ram as an infant,” Kedney discovers that the concept of motherhood is flexible enough to include two people from opposite ends of the earth.
The desire to become a parent is one of the most powerful we know. Infertility upends this natural process, subverting it without removing the yearning to have a child. Steeped in compassion, loss, and acceptance, Twelve Days From Transfer merges multiple narratives about motherhood, as both a role and a choice, ushering in new meanings of the word “family.”
