After Years of Secondary Infertility, I Finally Ate What I Wanted

In The Fourth Trimester, we ask parents: What meal nourished you after welcoming your baby? This month it’s a polka-dot grilled cheese from editor and cookbook author Kristen Miglore.

My first pregnancy happened swiftly. “Textbook,” as my doula said after my daughter’s bat-out-of-hell delivery on a clear March morning in 2019. It was so seamless, and we were so lucky I thought we should only try for a second child when we were really ready. We don’t want two under two—can you imagine?

The week our daughter turned one, she took her first tipsy steps and we went into lockdown. We stopped planning for the future, took walks with masks on, watched our toddler learn to run and jump and tell jokes. When I finally felt safe enough in fall 2021, I quickly got pregnant again. Good thing we waited! I thought. And, almost as quickly, it was over.

I knew that miscarriages were heartbreakingly common—one in four pregnancies, by some estimates. But I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

As my body transitioned from pregnant to recently pregnant—both categories the CDC considered high risk for Covid, I noted—I made oatmeal with my daughter and sat in meetings. I led a Zoom class of kind home cooks stirring eggplant pasta, as if everything was as it seemed.

Later that winter it happened again. In spring, a third time. Each pregnancy was a little longer, more hopeful, the recovery more grueling. I baked banana bread with my daughter. I screamed in the car. I drove to beaches and laid on the cool sand.

In time, I started telling more people. Almost everyone had a story of loss—if not their own, someone they cared about.

If I couldn’t stay pregnant, I could at least try to find out why. Fertility doctors explained that my uterus had grown contorted with adenomyosis, a cousin of endometriosis, making it difficult for embryos to land and stay. IVF medications might be able to temper the inflammation, and I had the privilege of being employed in New York, a rare state that mandates insurers for larger companies pay for up to three rounds of treatment.

The first embryo we transferred briefly, faintly took hold, then faded away. Desperate for agency, I controlled what little I could. A naturopath told me to quit dairy and gluten and eat at least 30 different plants a week. I counted purple radishes, yellow dragonfruits, all manner of sprouts and leaves. I gnawed gluten-free bread from the freezer, toasted with vegan butter. I made waffles with my daughter and didn’t eat them. I don’t know if any of these choices mattered or none of them did, but they gave me a place to rest my spinning mind.

We watched our second embryo move across the screen like a shooting star. With each scan, my doctors encouraged me that the baby was eclipsing every growth forecast, that he’d miraculously found a good place to latch on. I went swimming with my daughter, and she asked if I might have a baby in my belly.

I started making cinnamon toast for midnight snacks, then failed my gestational diabetes screening. A nutritionist taught me to prick my finger after every meal, to make sure that the sugar in my blood, which was now coursing through my baby’s body, wouldn’t reach dangerous levels. I retreated to 30 plants a week.

As my due date neared, a superstorm was coming. We wanted to be sure our daughter was safely at her grandparents’ by the time the baby came, so we gave in to the pressure to schedule an induction. He wasn’t budging, until suddenly he did. In the bubble of love and pain and bone-deep relief, we never heard the storm outside.

It took time to grasp that he was finally here, that we were all blessedly healthy. I cocooned at home, held my two children tight, remembered how to feed a baby and myself and get to sleep as fast as possible for the few hours before he woke up again.

In these hurried moments after my daughter’s birth, I got by on pre-cut pineapple and protein bars and was just happy for any snacks I didn’t drop on the floor. This time, I wanted hot, crunchy, salty. I was hungrier than I’d ever been.

Alone after putting my son to bed late one night, my body took over. My husband had stockpiled our kitchen with his college staples: sliced sourdough, salted butter, a huge orange block of cheese. They were all I needed.

For much of my adult life, I had chased a buttery grilled cheese that my high school ex’s mom, a talented pastry chef, had made us shortly before we broke up. But I was never patient enough, and inevitably charred the bread before the cheese could melt in my haste. This time, I would need to feel my way to something faster.

I grated a pile of cheddar. No time for butter to soften, I cut it into cold bits, then scattered them over two slices of sourdough. I slid the butter-dotted bread under the broiler—a gratifying toast method I’d learned from my old coworker Amanda Sims Clifford, and later read was how the great cookbook author Edna Lewis liked to make hers too.

When the butter melted in tiny puddles, leaving ombré rings of golden softness radiating outward to bronze crunch, I pulled out the sheet pan, flipped over the toast, blanketed both slices with grated cheese, and slid it back under the broiler. When the cheese bubbled, I smashed the melty sides together, sliced the sandwich on the diagonal, and stirred two tall spoonfuls of Ovaltine into a glass of whole milk.

Less than 10 minutes after the craving hit, I crouched on the floor, eating only for myself for the first time in years. I went to sleep full, content, and calm, the white noise machine humming softly in the dark room, my son swaddled in the bassinet by my side.