The Last Captain's Log

June 18, 2026

This morning I woke up at six thirty to the sound of my phone playing a song meant to function as an alarm. It is not the harsh buzzing of the alarm clocks of my childhood – the type with red LED letters that screams at intervals and will not be ignored. Instead it is a gentle song, a melody in a happy major key, meant to ease me into consciousness.

Still, when I wake, it is always the same – I am startled, falling outward from the formlessness and ambiguity of my dreams into the physical body and mind I have become so familiar with. A sense of urgency about the day begins to form instantly. Despite the best efforts of the music, waking is not a gentle process.

Today the urgency is about meeting with the people at the IVF clinic.

I'm not so much nervous about talking to them as I am about my wife's responses and conduct. She is often unfocused, wishing to talk to the doctors at the clinic about her past experiences with other clinics instead of sticking to the task at hand.

I sing to my wife to wake her up, lyrics that I have put to the melody of the Song of Waking coming out of my android. It's time to wake up Penny, and start the day. IVF clinic calls us from far away.

She smiles and stretches, her arms rising upward along the headboard of the bed. I tell her I will put on coffee. I get out of bed and throw on jeans, socks, and a t-shirt, go into the room of my office, and take a full tab of modafinil. I take this occasionally – more often than I should – to help me have more sustained energy throughout the day. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't – sometimes it just increases my tension and anxiety. Then I go into the bathroom and take a 30mg pseudoephedrine pill, ostensibly for allergies but actually because it helps to jolt me awake. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder, briefly, how I got so old, trying to imagine what other people see when they look at me. Do they see a fifty year old man? Or do they see glimpses of the child within, as I sometimes do?

Five minutes later I'm in the kitchen downstairs. I put coffee on. I take a few ounces out of the carafe as soon as it's available – the first bit is always sludgy and super strong. My friend Sheldon from college named this technique extracting jet fuel when he introduced me to the idea thirty years ago.

This is all well and good but if I keep writing like this it will take forever to get anywhere in this entry so I'll speed things up.

I take vitamins and supplements along with the jet fuel, then make Penny a cup of joe using a pressure steamer nozzle off to the side of my espresso machine to foam milk before adding the coffee. Sometimes I add cinnamon and honey. Today though, no honey. Penny is attempting to cut carbs for her health. And for the baby's health.

We are childless. Penny is forty six. We have been doing IVF for four and a half years without a positive result. This is our last attempt. We contacted a clinic outside of the United States that does some kind of mitochondrial work to help give eggs and sperm a better chance at developing into a healthy egg.

The last cycle was a success. We have a single fertilized egg that is ready to be transplanted into Penny's womb. It is of high grade, the clinic tells us, and free from genetic problems – they've done the testing for us. Our call this morning is to discuss preparation for the transfer.

We've had a couple of attempts at transferring already. They both failed. One was a very early stage miscarriage that Penny still mourns. The second didn't even make it that far. Penny is, in turns, hopeful that this time it will work, and terrified that it won't.

I always tell her that I'm hopeful no matter what I feel. But I don't feel hope. What I feel at this point, in year 5 of IVF hell, after so many disappointments, hormone treatments, needles, supplements, medical appointments, and tough, emotional conversations, is something closer to grim resignation, the sort of resignation that I imagine a captain at sea has when he has lost all bearings but must point his boat in a single direction to have any hope of finding a place to port and recover.

This captain, I imagine, knows full well that he will most likely die before randomly discovering land suitable for survival. And yet, the alternative to picking a direction and praying for the best is surely death by inaction.

The problem is that I feel like I am running out of steam, with no hope of seeing land anytime soon, if at all. The problem is keeping those weighty thoughts and feelings out of the main throughway of my consciousness, because dwelling on it means sinking downward: certain death. Thoughts and ballast have equal weight when sailing the high seas.

Penny and I join a call with the clinic. They are located in the city of Tirana – this is in Albania – and we are in Boston in the United States – so it's early afternoon on their clock. The doctor advises Penny to get an autoimmune panel prior to the transfer, and also requests medical records from our previous clinic, the one we had failed with, in the hopes that some of the data they recorded might help to formulate a successful pre-transfer protocol.

Mostly it is Penny talking. I listen and take a few notes – action items. I worry that Penny won't remember. She is not as task oriented as I am. Years of working white collar jobs in office environments has conditioned me to be this way. Penny is happy. I hear the energy and hope in her voice. She feels it is going to work this time.

I just want the whole thing to end. No more IVF. If the transfer succeeds, I become a dad. I won't be the worst one that ever was. Surely I cannot be worse than my own father. That's what I tell myself when I'm thinking about what life might look like with a kid. I'll figure it out as I go along, the way that I've done my entire life.

And if the transfer doesn't succeed, I will have to spend a lot of time and energy consoling Penny, all while explaining that I am absolutely fucking done with IVF. I imagine the horrible things I will have to say to her as she protests. I will not attempt any further cycles and we need to come up with new goals and dreams for our life together. You're 46! I'm 50! It's over!

What I really want, much more than a child, I think, is to not work an office job any longer. I am a programmer and Information Technology professional and the past year has been the most difficult of my professional life since my late twenties. I took on a project with an inflexible deadline and the past twelve months have, as a result, been like living inside of a pressure cooker. The stresses have been threatening to reduce my body and mind to a stringy pulp.

But still – it's a child! And one who I would call my own. I used to think a lot about what this would mean for my life but those old thoughts I have become numb to.

Typically, the first thing that enters my head is the work involved – the work and the disruption. The sleepless nights of early babyhood, the constant pee and poo, the laundry and the expense, the inevitable disruptions and forced changes that this new person will make to our current routines.

But sometimes better thoughts creep in. Between me and my sister and my brother, I'll be the only one with a kid. I bet my dad will be happy. And my mom, too.

Maybe I can be more social after the IVF thing is over and we have a kid. IVF is terribly isolating.

Maybe I'll meet new people that I like, as a result of you know, having to interact with other parents at school or whatever else.

Maybe it'll help me grow as a person – at the very least I'll empathize more easily with other parents.

It is never love. I never think about loving another person, or "meeting my new best friend," as I have seen it put on the Facebook pages of exuberant soon-to-be parents. I probably should try to think about it in those terms. My manager, who is hopelessly constrained in his communication by years of using business-language to describe everything in his life, would say something like It is important to have the correct framework before starting a project. Creating a framework out of love surely has to be better than one made out of duty, or one formed from the expectations of others.

I think back through my life and see clearly that every time I have allowed more love into my life, I have not been disappointed. Love is work and love is scary but love is also immensely valuable because without it, there is no purpose. There is no point to money and order and career without the underpinnings of love gluing everything together. I'll have to work harder to protect the growing nest egg of love in my life from harm or disruption.

After the call, Penny and I finish our morning routine. She takes the dog out, I clean the kitchen because neither of us had the energy to do it last night. Penny reminds me to get the book on hold at the library during the day, since she's in a neighboring town working throughout the day and can't escape for such an errand.

I read the title: Nine Months that Count Forever

It is a book about constructing a diet that will give any mother the best shot at creating a healthy baby. I'm instinctively bored by the topic and hope Penny won't make me read it. But at the same time, I'm astonished by her continued optimism and hope, particularly after so much failure.

This is probably why we are a good match. She is optimistic when I am not, and I am pragmatic when the dreaming starts to run away with the rest of her.

I want to tie her to the mast, hoping to maintain control in the face of the ocean's drift, only dimly aware that she's already released us into the safety of the sky.