Bringing in Finn by Sara Connell Page A

difficult it was to schedule the “scheduled sex.” “After a while it really stops being fun,” one of my clients lamented after her fourth round of stim.
    Each month we had a forty-eight-hour window during which we were supposed to have sex three times. Our first time around, the
window happened to fall on a weekend. We’d purposely not scheduled anything else, and finding the time was easy. The following month’s window came on a Wednesday and Thursday. Bill had client meetings booked for months, I had already scheduled clients for sessions, and Bill’s father and stepmother were coming to town and were staying with us.
    Over a late dinner the week before his parents’ visit, Bill and I compared calendars. We’d lit a large pillar candle, and aside from the small radius of its glow, the room was dark. The light from our cell phones illuminated our faces in the semidarkness as we scrolled through our schedules for the week. Once we’d overlaid our commitments and the parental visit, we identified two twenty-minute windows, in addition to late nights, which had never been our ideal sex time.
    â€œI guess we can do it after breakfast the first day my parents are here—and then again before dinner the next night, as soon as you finish your five o’clock session.”
    I looked at Bill and shrugged. “We’ll make it work,” I said.
    The first morning of his parents’ visit, over an awkward breakfast of muffins and fruit, Bill talked really fast and I lost the thread of the conversation several times as Bill’s stepmother told me about a show opening soon at the Cincinnati Museum. Bill and I had let his parents know that I had a “conference call” at 8:00 AM that I needed to take upstairs, “because the reception was better.” At seven fifty-five, I went upstairs and then, as planned, called down to Bill to ask if he would help me with calling in to the conference line through my computer. We were like bad actors in a play. I had no idea what his parents were thinking.
    Bill tore into our bedroom, where I was already lying naked, holding some organic lubricant. I’d removed the fertility goddess in favor of a single red candle, only to burn my hand trying to light it.
We did our best to be amorous, but I felt the time pressure. So we just did what we could (quietly) until we reached our goal—like athletes racing in a sprint.
    We did not become pregnant that month, either.
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    As we continued, the scheduled sex became more like regular sex. We planned around and for it, streamlined our travel schedules, and spent more weekends in Chicago, nesting at home. On the prescribed injection days, I gave little more thought to the nightly jabs than I did to flossing my teeth or taking out the garbage. I experienced no hormonal mood swings or noticeable side effects from the medication.
    Dr. Colaum adjusted our dose of Follistim each cycle. “We’re looking for your magic number,” she said. “Too little, and you’ll have less egg/follicle growth. Too much, and you’ll hyperstimulate and we’ll have to cancel the cycle. We didn’t hyperstimulate the first time, but I did develop some tissue buildup, like debris in a river, which took a few weeks to clear. I felt afraid of hyperstimulation, mostly because it meant another month that we wouldn’t be able to be pregnant, as well as potentially an additional month off to rest in between—a wash of that precious investment of time. My trust in Dr. Colaum and her many years of experience was what allowed me to be more optimistic than worried.
    In November, during our fourth cycle, I flew to New York City for a friend’s bachelorette weekend. Amanda had become my best friend in the sixth grade, when I transferred to public from Catholic school. She was consistently the smartest person in the class and a consummate athlete. The boys in our school loved her