Getting Sticky With: Abby Elliott

I went to Catholic school, which meant I spent most of high school convinced that if I so much as dry-humped someone I would get pregnant. The guilt was intense. I would take Plan B constantly. Of course, the great irony is that when I did actually want to get pregnant, it didn’t happen.

I met my husband, we fell in love, and we were both on the same page about how many kids we wanted. We thought that three would be fun. We still feel that way. When we got married in 2016, we thought, Let’s be newlyweds for a year and a half. Then we’ll start trying.

We started trying in 2017. Then 2017 turned into 2018. A whole year went by with no pregnancies. It was excruciating to feel that disappointment month after month; to feel gaslit by my own body into believing that I was feeling pregnancy symptoms when, really, it was just my period coming. And my periods were intense. From the two weeks after I ovulated up until I got my period, I felt like a different person—shut down, no energy, fatigue, bloating. I would gain around ten pounds every month, and it would feel like euphoria whenever it finally came. I was eventually diagnosed with PMDD and put on Prozac, which didn’t take it away, but it helped.

We thought IUI would be our route because we had close friends who had just gone through it. We loved their doctor immediately. She had a great bedside manner; she felt like someone who could help us. We did all the tests, including the dye test—the hysterosalpingogram—which was the most excruciating pain I had ever felt. (And I’ve had kidney stones!) They tell you to take a couple of ibuprofen beforehand, which clearly must have been a male doctor’s advice, because it did absolutely nothing for me.

Words by Abby Elliott, as told to AnaMaria Glavan / Images By Paris Mumpower

The doctor told us I had fibroids and that we should test my husband’s sperm. His sperm had two heads and swam in circles. She told us our best option was IVF, specifically ICSI, where they cut the tails off the sperm and manually inject them into the eggs. Strangely, it was a relief. No IUI, no dragging this out. This was our best path forward. 

Then, in the middle of all of this, I got a sitcom.

We shot the pilot in the spring of 2019. Everything else went on hold when it got picked up. We’d been on the IVF path for a year, but suddenly, I was working and didn’t want to be pregnant for the first season. I loved the job and the people, but at home I had been wanting a child for three or four years—and waiting felt unbearable. My mom once said she was so sick of herself by the time she had kids that she didn’t want to deal with herself anymore. She wanted children to focus on. I felt the same way. I was ready to take care of someone who wasn’t me or my husband.

When we wrapped the first season in December, I thought, I’ll be pregnant for the second season. We’ll make it work. They’ll write it in. I wanted this baby so desperately. 

I had a hysteroscopy to clear my uterus and remove the fibroid. While I was under anesthesia, the electricity went out after they’d inserted the camera. A generator kicked on, but they couldn’t reboot the imaging machine, so they sent me home and told me to come back the next week. When I woke up and they explained what had happened, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the universe was stopping me for somehow going against God’s plan. I’m no longer a practicing Catholic but, wow, that guilt has stuck with me. Thank you, high school.

It was February 2020 when we finally did the transfer. I waited the full two weeks. I didn’t test early. I waited for the call from my doctor. We both started crying when she called to confirm. My whole body was shaking. It was beautiful.

And then COVID hit.

I kept wondering what this new virus was going to do to pregnant women, and what it meant to bring a child into the world where no one knew what the future was going to look like. I remember reading comments on social media suggesting mankind might be wiped out. I also started to get depressed because the show wasn’t doing well. People were understandably more focused on whether we were all going to die and weren’t interested in a sitcom. All of this, and I couldn’t stomach drinking coffee?!? 

We decided to spend the rest of my pregnancy with my parents in Maine. My husband is a great backpacker and camper, so we drove across the country and camped the whole way. I was six months pregnant. We couldn’t go into stores, so we got drive-through food and packed a cooler. We masked up at gas stations. The hardest part was peeing. Not wanting to go into rest stops if it wasn’t necessary, I had to pee on the side of the road (I co-sign the Shewee). We pitched a tent every night on a six- or seven-day cross-country trip to Connecticut, where we quarantined before seeing my parents, who were older and more vulnerable. 

A friend of my parents connected me with a great doctor at Maine Med in Portland. She was amazing—kind and grounded. By October 2020, she wanted to induce me. Nothing happened for a while with the induction. To speed things along, we did the Cook’s catheter and then the Foley balloon, which was excruciatingly painful. Then they used cervical ripening tape. After that came Pitocin. My epidural only worked on half my body, so they had me lie on one side to try to let it drip down. It didn’t, so they had to redo it. Then they broke my water.

After two days of slow labor, suddenly everything happened so fast. Edie came into the world, and she is still that exact same human she was in that first moment. It was magical, though her first sight of me was with a mask covering my face. 

It felt surreal that this thing I’d wanted my entire life finally happened to me. I’d been so anxious about this moment for so long. My breath was caught in my chest for the entirety of my pregnancy, and then, here she was: so beautiful and perfect, with fuzzy blonde hair that eventually turned red. 

When we decided to have another child, we didn’t try naturally. We went straight to transferring another embryo. I had a strong gut feeling that my body wasn’t absorbing the progesterone properly. I kept telling the nurses and they insisted everything looked right. We did the transfer. I had bleeding and pain. I was told it sounded like implantation bleeding. Then my numbers stopped rising. Then they dropped. I was told it was a chemical pregnancy.

It’s such a strange term. Chemical pregnancy. It made it sound unreal, like it didn’t really count. But it did. I had been told I was pregnant, and even if it was only for a few days, it mattered to me.

We tried again the next month. I told my doctor—again—that I believed something wasn’t right. She didn’t think it was the issue, but she agreed to change the protocol. That was the cycle that worked. My son was conceived.

I tried everything to feel like I had some control during IVF. I went to acupuncture and energy healing. I drank maca smoothies. I ate Brazil nuts every day. I bought essential oils. I once asked a doctor if a smoothie I’d been drinking—with sea moss in it—was okay for the baby. There’s a disconnect between wellness culture and medicine, but sometimes believing that you’re helping matters. It did to me, at least. 

I’ve felt like an IVF fraud at times, talking about my journey, because at the end of the day: It worked. I have two children. I’ve had impostor syndrome around it. When I was going through IVF, I listened to a lot of podcasts. I remember hearing stories that gave me hope and just sobbing. It was emotional and so universal, and yet not in the zeitgeist enough.

Motherhood has been wonderful. It’s been everything and more than I ever imagined. The love I feel for my children is the ocean. It’s the stars. It’s the universe. I don’t even know where to start when explaining the love I feel for them. It’s been the most rewarding, life-changing, life-altering thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s a privilege to watch them go through different phases, and then you forget the baby phase and look back at pictures like, That’s the same kid? How is that possible? My daughter is five now. I always assumed that five-year-olds were fully “kids” and not babies anymore. But she will always be my baby. She’s never not going to be my baby.

Motherhood as a personal journey feels like this constant cycle of losing yourself and finding yourself again, over and over. You finally feel like yourself again, and suddenly you’re in another phase thinking, What am I doing? Who am I? New challenges come up constantly. 

Right now, my daughter has pretty significant eczema, and I’m constantly wondering if I should change her diet, if what I said was the right thing, if she understands, if I handled it correctly. 

After going through all of this, having a third child is something my husband and I talk about a lot. Work has picked up, so it’s layered: our house size, the car situation, the difference between an SUV and needing a minivan, my body, the shots, the surgeries. We’ll see. 

Motherhood has been wonderful. It’s been everything and more than I ever imagined. You forget what you went through because you have to. My daughter is five now. My son is two and a half. I was on FaceTime with him recently, just looking at his face, and something about it completely undid me. I couldn’t stop crying.

I spent so many years being taught not to trust my body—by religion, by medicine, by circumstance. Having children didn’t magically fix that. But it did give me moments where I remember what my body did, what it carried me through, and how much of it I survived without ever being sure I would.