This summer feels like the longest of my life. Usually, summer in New York City is a blur—a season of hedonism that ends too soon. Days melt into nights, and nights fade away like a fever dreams. The moment you catch your breath, the light contracts. September blows in. The sun sets at 8pm, and then at 7. The trees shiver off their leaves, scattering the sidewalks with gold.
But in trying to conceive, my experience of time has warped. It condenses and expands. With each passing month, I have a sense of time running out and yet, paradoxically, each day feels endless. I get my period. I wait. I count the days until ovulation, waking at dawn to tick another date on the calendar. Ovulation arrives. The sun sets. Rahul turns down the lamps, bathing the apartment in sleepy golden light. There is a frenzy of activity—hopeful, purposeful fucking— and then I wait again.
I’m now in what the message boards call the “two week wait,” or “TWW.” It’s the stretch of time after ovulation that an egg needs to travel down the fallopian tubes. If the egg has been fertilized, if it is viable, it will attach to the uterine wall. If it doesn’t, it flushes out, a red tide that signifies ebbing.
In parallel, we’re also trying to finalize our move into the new apartment. This is another exercise in waiting: We’re waiting for the co-op board to schedule our interview, after which we’ll wait for them to approve our application. We’re waiting on the bank to secure our mortgage. Then we’ll wait for the seller to sign the closing papers. All of this needs to happen before we can set a definite move-in date.
When friends ask, I tell them we’re living in a state of limbo. I hope that it sounds honest about the uncertainty and yet lighthearted—like the back-bending dance from Trinidad.
But the space between moving and not-yet-moved isn’t technically a state of limbo—it’s a liminal space. Classically, limbo is the outer edge of hell where the good pagans and the unbaptized infants dwell in torment-less sorrow. They’re stuck there.
The word limbo means “edge” or “hem.” It’s a fixed place. A liminal space is a threshold.
A liminal space is place people pass through, but do not remain, like a subway platform or a bar mitzvah. It’s a site of transition. The process of moving is liminal.
Trying to conceive feels like limbo. After I got my last period, I experienced a bout of paralyzing anxiety. My thoughts raced; I obsessed over any thing I might have done in the preceding month to impede conception. I imagined a future filled with grief. I couldn’t shake the overwhelming worry that we’ll be stuck here, between wanting to be parents and being parents, forever.
Trapped in my own mind and desperate to sooth myself, I meditated. I went to yoga. I walked. I watched TV. I read. I visited friends in Brooklyn. I drifted aimlessly in their backyard pool. I watched the the light filter through the green leaves of a pin oak tree. After 3 days, the panic subsided. I could live again. I could laugh.
Now we’re in our second IUI cycle and I’m staring down the barrel of the dreaded two week wait. Although the acute anxiety has passed, its phantom stalks me. To pass the time, I think of new ways to describe the light. I call it “limning.”
To limn has two meanings: 1) to depict or describe in painting or words, and 2) to suffuse or highlight with a bright color of light.
Monday was a dishwater gray morning; the clouds looked like damp t-shirts strung out on a laundry line. As the hurricane weather rolled in from the south, the sky became moodier, ink-stained, casting the city in shadow. The next day, the light is diffuse, filtered through billions of invisible water droplets suspended in the steamy August air.
The light is always changing. On the first of September, the sky is a cloudless blue dome. The humidity has evaporated, bringing a new clarity to the light, as if it were filtered through the finest crystal. I’m reminded that even though trying to conceive feels like limbo, it is yet another liminal space. The light changes here too. We will pass through this moment, no matter what the outcome. Just as these final days of summer tip over the threshold of the season and into fall, we are in the process of becoming.