How Do You Know When It's Time to Stop Trying?

One room in our house remains empty, or rather has become a repository for every object my husband, Scott, and I can't find a place for—a de facto storage room. For a couple of years now, the door has remained closed. We do not call it a nursery.

Everyone has unsolicited advice: You just have to relax. When you stop trying, you'll get pregnant. Go get stoned. Have sex in the car. Stop thinking about it. I feel like I'm acting in the movie of someone else's life. Fertility treatments—one round after another—are for fortysomethings in power suits or fringe weirdos with septuplets and their own reality show. Not for boho graduate students in their thirties with rock-musician spouses. Still, here I am.


On Sunset Boulevard, I run into an old friend one morning. I know that, like me, she's been having difficulty getting pregnant. I've long been jealous of her slender figure, fashionable clothes, and chic friends. She always seems to be coming from a SoulCycle class with Gwyneth or book club with Beyoncé. When she turns around, I see that I can add a baby bump to the list of things she has that I want.

With a beatific smile, she tells me that she got pregnant with the help of Maori tribal healers from New Zealand, who happen to be in town again right now. "I heard about them from (insert movie-star name here). Have you seen her baby, (insert name of fruit, Hindu god, obscure blues/country singer)? Adorable! Ridiculous! The baby was breech, and she almost had to have him in the hospital, but the Maori healers laid hands on her and turned that baby around, and three days later it shot right out of her before her husband even had time to fill the birthing tub."

When I get home, I look up these healers before my coat is even off. Indeed they're in Santa Monica, being hosted at the home of a Vedic astrologer, whatever that is. I book an appointment for the next day. I am elated.

I show up at a 1950s beach house, painted powdery pink. Two dachshunds dressed in lederhosen—little Peter Pan collar shirts, embroidered suspenders, the whole thing—greet me at the door. You can read that sentence again if you need to. They're followed by a plain-looking woman in the kind of shapeless dress you buy at the Hare Krishna Cultural Center off Venice Boulevard. She rubs her pregnant belly. Of course she does. Everyoneeveryoneeveryone is pregnant.

"The dogs are so cute," I say, because it would be strange to not remark on this canine cast of The Sound of Music. "Are you doing a photo shoot or something?"

"No, no. I would never make them be models. The rejection isn't healthy. I dress them up every day because they like it. I sew all their clothes myself."

She gives me that same pregnant smile my fashionable friend gave me. The one every pregnant woman gives me. The one I uncharitably imagine to be smug.

"I'm sure you'll make lots of great baby clothes," I say, still haunting her doorway.

"I've already got a closet full of gender-neutral clothes for three different ages. After the dog outfits, it was really challenging to figure out the place to put the baby arms and legs, but I've got the hang of it now." She gives a snorty little laugh. "Would you like to come inside?"

I'm thinking the dog clothes are strange and maybe sad. Then I check myself; that's not exactly getting off to a non-judgmental start. If the astrologer were a drag queen, I might think that the dogs in suspenders were eccentric or charming. Because how these things read is all about context. It's all about tribe. I suppose you never know where you may find one. Mine might be right through the door. The astrologer and her Teutonic wiener dogs lead me into a room with two massage tables set up in the center and a half-dozen or so people sitting on couches around the edges. Some of them look like what I imagine Maoris to look like—thickset and wide featured, with almond-shaped eyes. Some look more like the dog costumer's friends—tanned and beflip-flopped and stylishly tousled.

No one looks up or stops talking. I stand there, hovering somewhere between the doorway and the couches for a long moment before I start to panic. I'm such a schmuck. I've handed $200 over to yet another charlatan. I think of the angel healer I saw the week before, who had a visitation from the archangel Michael, telling her that all I needed was a ritual cord-cutting, where she'd sever the invisible cords tying me to my past. She could do it right then and there, she said, for a mere $300. Or the storefront psychic I went to on a whim, if desperation can be classified as a whim, who told me there was a curse on me that could only be lifted if she traveled to the village where she was born and, at the foot of a mountain there, buried a jar of nails that I'd peed on. All she'd need from me was my urine and $2,000 (true story, I swear).

One of the men starts asking what people want for lunch. He hands around a Chinese menu. He turns to me. "You want some Moo Shu or something?"

"No, thanks. I'm just here for..." What do you call it anyway? Without getting up, another of the men indicates that I'm to lie on one of the tables—I haven't even told them why I'm here. Are we really going to do this in front of the smug dog lady and everybody? Do I have to admit in front of all these men that I can't get pregnant? Ashamed or not, I lie down.

Then a third man, slight and muscular, approaches the table as his friend orders Chinese. "Why are you here?" he asks. I'm grateful that he leans in close so I don't have to speak loudly. When I'm through explaining my situation, he walks to an ample woman of impossible-to-determine age, who's been sitting on the couch with her eyes closed and her hands on her knees, like a statue. He whispers in her ear. I don't even know what language they're speaking. I don't know anything about these people, and I'm completely at their mercy. Is this what smart people do?