Girls' week

Nico had to jet off to Montreal once again for work and I, well, don't have any. (Projects, yes, but that's another story.) It's not often I have some downtime to fill, so I invited my mom over to come take advantage of the Bay Area's most beautiful weather of the year for a week of unplanned chill. We walked—so much walking, we sought out specialty caffeinated drinks, we hit up the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, we split a volcanic bingsoo, we tested our knowledge at the Wolfhound's Wednesday trivia with friends, we ate sushi, we mini golfed and drank, we face masked, we went to the historic Grand Lake Theatre for a movie, and we hit up Sonoma for a boozy Saturday with a sampling of gator meat tots. (Can pescatarians eat reptiles? I did.) I squeezed in some studying and professional meetings in between the fun. We otherwise had no agenda or deadlines: very out of character for me, and probably overdue.

Mom came out for a girls' week while Nico was (mostly) off on business.

Kind words to close a chapter

No matter how many times you fantasize about how it will go, when it's finally time to say goodbye to a project to which you've given nearly a decade, it's never easy. But here's what I had to say on Monday.

Saying goodbye is never easy.

From there, the love kept pouring in all week. I'm not going to lie, it's been bittersweet. 

Taking the leap into the unknown is terrifying, even if it's time. I've got half a mind to think the next adventure I'm embarking on is completely insane, but if I'm not going to try it now, then when? So, I suppose, stay tuned.

She did, he did, I didn't

Last weekend, Colby officially joined the family and Hayley got a new last name. The entire event was absolutely beautiful and full of love, at least the parts of it I got to see. Work has been so horribly crazy lately that I found myself trapped in the car, tethered to my phone for wi-fi, praying that my battery didn't die, and sweating down my black-tie gown while desperately trying to coax Grok to write fast enough for me to not miss the entire wedding. After missing the ceremony, I stepped out for family photos, but got sucked in again and only emerged for real starting at the tail end of the cocktail hour. Everyone was beautiful, well-behaved, and even down for a cousins' hoe-down. I think it slipped into the background just how very lucky I am to be a part of the Aloia clan. This family really is a very special crew.

Hayley and Colby have tied the knot!

Bonjour Hi!

"Bonjour Hi", the typical greeting when entering any establishment in Montreal, positively tickled me. For the first time in my life, I discovered an outside world that linguistically mirrored our own household. The trip to Montreal was the first chance of many to discover a new city: Nico and I are fleshing out plans to make this our next big move (with a potential pit-stop in Texas if the fates align). California was never my thing — it feels like 8.5 years ago I borrowed someone else's West Coast dream just to try it on for size and the zipper's been stuck ever since. A city with European charm that lets me flex my French and brings us several time zones closer to the City of Lights? Sign me up. There are arts, there's culture, and there's plenty of winter for me to bitch about. There aren't the neurotech opportunities of the Bay, but I don't think I'll be looking back.

The goal this weekend was to scope out some potential neighborhoods. But in the end, the goal for me was mostly staying awake. A red eye at the end of a sleepless week of work didn't kick things off in the best manner, especially when our hotel check in wasn't until after 3pm. After a short nap, my vacation properly began around 5pm on Saturday and ended two hours later when a work emergency arose. I postponed putting out fires to finish dinner and test out Ripple, one of the top-rated ice cream shops (the chocolate raspberry and raspberry cheesecake pairing did not disappoint), but then I had to grind from 10pm until 3am, while my work colleagues were none the wiser of my international whereabouts. Sunday morning tea at 10:30am precluded fighting that 9am alarm clock, which meant the entire weekend was a blur of sleep deprivation. Nonetheless, meeting up with folks with whom we could just be honest about our lives — our plans to move, our hopes for children via carriers, our failed embryo transfer — was all so wonderfully refreshing in stark contrast to the folks who fill my days at work and aren't allowed to hear the first bit of all this.

A whirlwind ~30 hour first peek at our future home city, Montreal.

We haven't figured out where we want to live yet, but we know it's over there. What a wonderful chance to get to know the country that surprised me by claiming me as one of its own last December. I love that I now have a light at the end of the tunnel. I cannot wait.

Not to be

Her due date would have been May 7. She and Nico would have nearly been birthday twins. There would have been years of celebrating the pair of them together, of watching Daddy's little girl dictate the flavor of their joint birthday cakes, the same way Nico took over his big sister's birthday growing up.

This won't be our baby girl.

It took us seven cycles to make her. Our one, unique, perfectly scored female embryo. And that was it. That's all she'll ever be: a beautiful ball of cells, a reason that had made the full seven-cycle hellscape seem like it had been worth it And she's gone, and with it the hope, the light at the end of the tunnel.

I won't be a just-turned-40 kind of mom. I'll be a pushing-41 now, best case. It's so old, so selfish, so unfair to those poor future kids. If it happens at all. If we haven't just lit half a million dollars on fire for funsies.

The two weeks of hoping collapsed into a colossal headache around a normal chaotic workday. Brain implant technology can't wait for hearts to heal, and they don't care about how much sleep the engineers behind them might need to feel like functioning human beings. Instead of breaks to stare at the beautiful, single perfect bundle of cells that it had taken us seven cycles to make, I now get breaks to curl into a heap in vivarium hallways and sob into my facemask when no one is looking, hoping I don't accidentally swipe an eye with a gloved hand and rub Herpes B into my eyes.

Our fertility journey has been a story of swiping defeat from the jaws of victory: getting no-call PGT-A results on 4 of 23 embryos (expected in roughly 1% of tested embryos); seeing inexplicably high arrested development of embryos (up to 90% in one cycle, when the expectation is closer to 50%); taking seven cycles for what our doctor assured us would only need two, tops three. I'd ben thrilled to crawl out the other side at the end of 2024. I don't know why I'd expected the next stage to go any better, why I'd thought we could count on the stats: with a gestational carrier and a top-scored embryo, chances were better than not that we'd have that long-awaited pregnancy. As we've seen in our journey, the medical literature stats don't apply to us.

Best start to the weekend

After a month of basically non-stop working (and very little sleep), it was just short of a miracle that I managed to dip out of work by noon this Friday to make my "appointment" with a ferry to  Angel Island for a camping trip we'd reserved back in mid-March. The only weekend date/site open in the entire available bookings window was this single date for the 30-person site. With that sort of upper limit on headcount, we threw out a blanket invitation and let the RSVPs roll in. Unsurprisingly, our 17-person team whittled itself down to 9 in the final days leading up to the event, but the crowd that did pull through made for a memorable night escaping into the wilderness via public transport, in the middle of one of the mostly densely populated urban centers in America. For an entire night I was not glued to my phone. We ate dinner outdoors, surrounded by conversations and the rustling of the trees instead of the dulcet sounds of Netflix. I did not awake to check my latest push notifications first thing in the morning. It felt so '90s. I'm not sure why we don't do this more often.

And then, by noon on Saturday we were back in SF, an entire weekend still available to us after our escape from reality.

A night on Angel Island with our crew

How should I feel...

Tonight I asked Google's AI assistant Gemini how I should feel the night before my gestational carrier's first embryo transfer, which is surreal and dystopian and terribly exciting. Maybe. Two (or more) things can be true at the same time.