Alumni

The Greatest Gift
After his son is born on Christmas, a new dad considers a different celebration date for a birth made possible by in vitro fertilization—implantation day.

By James Barilla

What is a birthday? I’ve been wondering about the nature of what we commemorate in birth, how much is defined by the actual event, and how much is symbolic of a journey. I have a black and white photo of my son, Brook, or the possibility of my son, actually. There are constellations of cells in the image, their walls luminous and almost transparent, tucked into each other like the sepals of a microscopic bud. Three embryos awaiting implantation.

After several years of trying to have a baby, my wife and I chose in vitro fertilization with some sense that we were departing from the natural order of things, and that we would have to invent our own rituals to mark the milestones of this journey. It soon became clear that we would know more than many couples in some ways, and less in others. Certain mysteries would be dispelled, and others would arise. The fertility doctor gave us the photo of the embryos just before they were implanted. One had expanded to eight cells. But we didn’t know if any of them would succeed.

The implantation procedure that followed was over in an early morning blur, and then came the waiting. Days of easing about your daily life (no strenuous activity for the prospective mother), wondering if anything is happening, wondering if anything will change, thinking about it, trying not to think about it. Waiting.

The photo sat on a shelf with other documents until we got the pregnancy test results. Hormones were surging from the womb into the blood. Mysterious processes were at work. The embryo was growing, and we took out the photo to catch a glimpse of that wildly unfurling bud. We stared at it and imagined the magic of implantation. One of these clusters was our child.

Birth and implantation are variations on the same themes, and one of the foremost is waiting. Our son dramatized the anticipation further by choosing Christmas Day for his arrival. We waited for his birth through 60 hours of shift changes as Christmas Eve came and went and the doctors and nurses cycled through and finally gave way to the per diem staff and the least senior physician. She was on call, trying to spend the holiday at home with her family. Already the distractions from his birthday had begun, and Brook hadn’t even entered the world!

I remember the endless ambulations up and down the linoleum halls, the pitocin drip starting to kick in, and still the waiting, the isolation of the room, the things we brought that people told us would be useful and weren’t. Waiting for an end to all this waiting as much as for his entry into the world. Late that night the doctor said he had to come out, and out he came: the greatest gift. 9:24 p.m. Christmas Day. 

I have friends who came into the world around Christmas. I’ve never actually celebrated with them on the day, for obvious reasons. They always seem a bit wistful, a bit envious of the rest of us, since their families tend to get caught up in the mad rush of shopping and wrapping and opening and eating and seeing this relative and that relative. Everybody else has a bulletproof excuse for missing it, and a pretty good excuse for forgetting to send a card.

We got a taste of things to come with Brook’s first birthday. It wasn’t that nobody cared. It’s just that, having spent much of the day watching the wrapped mountain under the tree become the mountain of torn paper beside it, collapsing in front of the television started to seem far more enticing than watching Brook open his gifts. Nobody felt much like eating cake either. We made the effort, sang, blew out the candles and clapped. I don’t think he knew any different this year. But he will.

Lately, my wife and I have started talking about celebrating an additional milestone, and the day of implantation has become the clear favorite.

The idea of acknowledging some other day is not new. In England, the Queen has an official birthday, the day when the public commemorates her birth with a military parade known as “Trooping the Colours,” and then her actual birthday, which she presumably shares privately with family. Several months separate the current monarch’s actual birthday in April from the public festivities in June. There are worse precedents.

How should we celebrate an implantation day? Like a birthday, it honors the miraculous. Like a birthday it notes the movement from one medium, one world, to another. Of course, we wonder whether our son will want to acknowledge something that sets him apart from other kids. But isn’t that the point of a celebration? I imagine showing Brook this black and white photo some day. We’ll have a cake and candles. We’ll play games. We’ll sing a song in his honor, a song whose music is still unfolding.

James Barilla is an assistant professor of English at Lake Forest College. His memoir, West with the Rise: Fly-fishing across America, chronicled a solo road trip in which he contemplated becoming a father.