The first thing I thought when I saw my sons was, "I wonder if they'd look less like space aliens if I penciled in their eyebrows."

The second thing I thought was "They're both alive."

Which was by no means a foregone conclusion.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, by about seven years. In 1994 I started out as a youngish woman who inexplicably couldn't have a baby. If you keep doing fertility treatments long enough, however, you end up being a woman who can't have a baby for a very good reason: you're old. The phrase most often used by specialists is "advanced maternal age." But I appreciated the nurse at one fertility clinic who called it as she saw it: we were the "geriatric mothers."

Until this point I'd had little experience with disappointment. It's not just that my life had been blessed, though it had (my parents were still alive, I had work I loved, my husband annoyed me only fifty percent of the time). No, the real reason I never got disappointed was that I was the queen of low expectations. A close friend gossips about me behind my back. Eh, what can you do? People talk about each other; it's human nature. My husband, John, refuses to go away with me, after I'd been looking forward to a vacation for months.

Well, I knew he was moody when I married him; why should I expect him to change? Of course, the pleasant flip side of low expectations is that you're always a little shocked when something goes right. You mean to say the plane is leaving on time and I might make it home before the polar ice caps melt? Whoo! If you never want anything too badly, you'll never be disappointed: that's always been my motto.

So when disappointment hit, I wasn't prepared. What do you mean I can't get pregnant? Just look at me! I remembered years ago going on a blind date with a man from India; when we met he looked at me appraisingly, eyed my hips, and said, "I can see you'll bear many children easily." Hey, he meant it as a compliment.

When you start confessing to friends that you can't get pregnant, everyone has a surefire solution. Acupuncture! Herbal teas! Cruises! So many people suggested John and I sail to the Bahamas that I began to wonder if cruises weren't actually a form of time travel, by which I would end up with the eggs of an eighteen-year-old.

My own thoughts turned toward moving to a trailer park and drinking. Have you ever heard of anyone who lives in a trailer park having problems getting pregnant? Furthermore, most of these people seemed to conceive after a night of tequila shots. I tried this method. Many times. Had I gotten pregnant during those lost weekends, I imagine the child would have been born with a slice of lime in the corner of her mouth.

When you first decide to make a baby, you can't believe your luck: finally, you and this person you love enough to share a gene pool with can do what nature intended without pills, latex, foams, or goo! It's beautiful. It's almost sacred. But during those years of trying to conceive (or, as it's abbreviated on all the Internet infertility support groups, TTC), one's attitude toward sex evolves in a fairly predictable pattern. It goes something like this:

At the end, for many of us, that's exactly what it is: a science experiment. And a pricey one too. Insurance pays for only some of the diagnostic tests and virtually none of the treatments; a one-month round of in vitro fertilization costs ten to twelve thousand dollars. The only other medical field similarly shunned by insurance companies is plastic surgery. It seems that in some way the two are perceived as morally equivalent—medical treatments demanded by vain women obsessed by their DNA, attempting to get their hands on what nature has denied them. Boob jobs and babies, both life's frills. Or, as I heard so frequently about infertility, "Hey, it's not cancer."