Love Works Like This: Moving from One Kind of Life to Another - Couverture rigide

PROGESTERONE

You can hold it in your hand. You can define it, a multipronged sex steroid with an exacting beauty and a mission inscripted in its code. If you peered closely, and if you had, on top of that, excellent eyesight, you could see progesterone, its molecular pattern like a series of tiny tiles forming a ring. The tiles are weightless, and yet indescribably weighty. They are not glass, or clay; they are not granite, and certainly not cement, but they are indescribably weighty, planetary almost, as heavy as the moon, as certain sucks of air that bring down planes and birth big winds, progesterone. Respect it, as a hormone, as a physical force, for it is, she is, the primary chemical of pregnancy—pro-gestation—she is heat.

The first symptom of pregnancy, days before the store-bought test turns its colors, is heat. Under the influence of progesterone your body’s temperature edges up as much as one degree. In a body built for homeostasis, that degree is significant. Raise the earth’s temperature a simple single degree and the tarmac will melt, the seas swell. Similarly, raise the body’s temperature just this tiny increment and it will mean one of two important possibilities. You are fighting an infection. You are building a baby.

Which has, just this minute, slipped down the piping of the fallopian tubes and is burrowing into the uterus. At this point, the baby is very small, smaller than the hormone which sustains it.

The baby is a few, marvelous cells, and very unstable. A simple glitch and it will bleed out your openings. Progesterone, on the other hand, is solid. Its cells, like tiny tiles, strong as a suck of wind; it brings the baby down.

The strange thing is, progesterone is so similar to testosterone in its excellent design and yet so different in its spirit.

Progesterone is undeniably female. It is, or she is, made not of protein, like the peptide hormones are, but of fat. Many molecular structures in our body are held together by protein, but the sex steroid progesterone is held together at its core by cholesterol, so maybe, in your hand, it has a Crisco quality; maybe it casts not a shadow but a shine.

Like the neurotransmitters—serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, which send chemical signals to the brain with a da da dum—progesterone tells your brain—da dum, da dum—to build up the endometrium in the uterus. In this sense, progesterone is not a minimalist hormone. It leans toward excess, toward velvet, toward a thickening of the blood. Under its spell, the womb’s endometrial mat goes from a thin brown covering to a thick crimson pile, a wild, expensive carpet, bedding fit for a king. No amount of money could buy a mattress with the thickness, the precision, the pure comfort that progesterone produces; here is where you started your first perfect sleep. Shhh. Every night, when we lie down, we remember this, our original bed. Shhh. Quiet now. Your period is late. Maybe, inside of you, you can hear her coming.

Praise for Lauren Slater

“A consummately tricky and captivating book. It is difficult to believe, at times, and from the first page to the last, it is almost impossible to put down.”
—The Washington Post Book World, about Lying

“Like Oliver Sacks...Ms. Slater writes about her patients with enormous compassion and insight....A revealing memoir and thoughtful meditation on the therapeutic process itself...powerful.”
—The New York Times, about Welcome to My Country

“With the playful mind of a philosopher and the exquisite, unique voice of a poet, Slater renders a self-portrait that challenges our understanding of illness and health—and illuminates both.”
—The Washington Post Book World, about Prozac Diary

“Stunningly written...[Welcome to My Country] is relentless in its mask-stripping, yet instead of indulgence the act of revealing is handled with beauty and bravery.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review, about Welcome to My Country

“The beauty of Lauren Slater’s prose is shocking....Slater’s vision is, ultimately, one of unity and possibility.”
—Newsday, about Welcome to My Country

“Evocative and moving...Slater is more poet than narrator, more philosopher than psychologist, more artist than doctor....Every page brims with beautifully rendered images of thoughts, feelings, emotional states.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, about Welcome to My Country

"I think Lauren Slater writes with truth and beauty about the risks and fears and joys of motherhood. From her unique perspective--the trained psychologist with the deep personal experience of mental illness, the carefully balanced professional woman who decides to head forward into motherhood, the lyrical writer who finds in even her most unexpected emotions a source of powerful images and poetry--she has created here a book which speaks both to her difficult and complex medical and psychologic journey toward motherhood and also to the universal experience of learning what it is to love a child."
--Perri Klass, author of Other Women's Children and Baby Doctor

"Slater lifts the gag order on prgnancy with candor, wit and a lyricism that stuns as well as instructs. Lauren Slater is a writer's writer--Love Works Like This reaffirms her obvious gift for language and empathy. A must-read for anyone finding themselves in the wondrous yet precarious position of motherhood."
--Suzanne Finamore, author of The Zygote Chronicles