Why don’t we start with the happy ending. Tell us about the baby.
Her name is Vivienne Rose. She’s blond and blue eyed and just gorgeous. Nine months old, and I cannot believe how fast it’s all going. Because this is probably it for me in terms of having children, I desperately do not want it to go too fast.
Should we go back to the beginning? You’re speaking at this year’s Classical Singer Convention about women’s issues and, let’s face it, for many women in the performing arts, when and how to start a family is a major issue.
It’s very hard to find someone who will tell you the truth. I was fortunate to have some wonderful girlfriends who shared their stories, and I’m happy to share mine.
When did you decide you wanted a family?
My husband and I have been married for over 15 years. When we married, my career was just starting, and I was grateful to be singing at several opera companies, so we decided to postpone. About seven and a half years later, we started discussing children and we thought we’d just try it naturally. Am I being too honest here?
Nope.
Well, it didn’t happen. So I started to visit a well known fertility doctor. I live in California, and this doctor had a long list of glamorous clientele. Both my husband and I went through a lot of tests—which, in addition to being uncomfortable, also cost a significant amount of money. I saw this doctor on and off for about a year and a half.
We decided I would go through a series of natural cycles to treat the infertility. This involves frequent ultrasounds as they monitor the egg’s growth and the approximate time of release. When they would say, “OK, you have an egg that’s ready,” my husband and I would have to time everything and follow instructions exactly. This is not, let me tell you, good for one’s love life.
It didn’t work.
That must have been incredibly frustrating.
I haven’t even mentioned that insurance generally doesn’t cover this. Every time I went for an appointment, it cost me $400 to $600. Ultrasounds, blood draws, thousands of dollars—and IVF was never mentioned. This is where I warn others to be careful, because fertility treatment can become a racket when we look at how much we are charged for so little time, effort, or medication.
So what did you do?
I remember going to New York for some auditions. I was on high doses of hormones and felt incredibly bloated. Not exactly the way one wants to feel when hopping from one audition to another. I had to find a doctor in Manhattan to get the appropriate testing because I was away from my doctor in California and, again, I didn’t get pregnant. I thought, “I’m done. I cannot emotionally handle this.”
One thing people often don’t understand is that when you’re trying this hard, every month that you don’t get pregnant, you mourn the loss of that potential child. It is devastating when you get your period.
After that, I pressed “pause” and took a year off from trying to conceive.
Throughout all of this, you were busy singing. Can I ask you when you decided to let your managers know what you were going through?
My voice teacher knew before my managers. But I’m fortunate to have managers with big hearts, and everyone there was very kind. They said, “You know what? This is life. Someday when you’re not singing, you will still have a beautiful child who will be part of your life.”
During this time, I was seeing an endocrinologist who diagnosed me with another bewildering array of problems to explain why I wasn’t getting pregnant. The best thing that came from it is that I was eventually referred to Dr. Terence Lee (a reproductive endocrinologist). This was a phenomenal change. I think that I was 37 at the time. I made an appointment and told him my story. He looked at me and said simply, “I am terribly sorry for what you’ve gone through.”
We decided to try artificial insemination. I went back on all the hormones while still singing a lot. I was trying so hard to balance my personal and professional life and, the truth is, we’re all married to both. We did the artificial insemination. I went on tour with Andrea Bocelli. I didn’t get pregnant—again.
Now it felt like my entire body shut down. I was singing an opera in Utah. I had laryngitis. I stopped the hormones and jumped into back-to-back performances. I felt like something was wrong. I dieted. I finally called a friend and said, “I think that something is wrong with me, something is wrong with my voice.” She said, “You know what? I think the repertoire you’re singing is too light.”
I’m sorry to stop you, but let me clarify: You find out again that you are not pregnant, you’ve got engagement upon engagement, you’re losing weight, your body feels foreign to you, and now someone says that you’re singing the wrong repertoire?
Yep. I think you can imagine the psychological drama I was in. I was doing absolutely everything in my power to hold it together. My voice had taken a leap and I didn’t know it. The minute the hormones stopped, my voice got thicker and heavier and deeper. What would have worked the year before was suddenly not working.
I discussed everything with my teacher, we started to work on different repertoire and, thankfully, my voice started to heal itself. I decided to take a break from all medication, all hormones, everything. I would concentrate on my voice. Over the next two years, my fertility doctor would drop me an e-mail every once in a while and just say, “I want you to know, it’s not too late.”
That’s a big change.
It was. I had a lot of people making judgment calls about my voice. Some had known me in a certain repertoire forever, but then my body was telling me something different. Who do you trust at that point?
Who do you trust?
Ultimately, you have to trust yourself. So I spent the next couple of years with my voice teacher. I had a manager and a conductor on my side. Those people were the secret to getting me through this vocal transition. Did I mention that during all of this, I was running a conservatory?
I read that and wondered how on earth you had time for it all.
You make time. You make your priorities. Fate is a funny thing. Maybe having a child wasn’t my priority. Maybe it was just one more thing I was trying to stick into my life. It finally occurred to me that I was looking at pregnancy as a project that needed to be completed, like a show. You learn your music, you do the performances, the show ends, you move on to the next project. But it’s not the same at all.
After all of these set backs, what lead you to try once again to have a family?
I was in the middle of Texas doing a “Bohème” with Sari Gruber and we had a lot of time to spend together. Sari has a beautiful daughter who was conceived through IVF. During that period with Sari, something in me clicked. She gave me courage, and I sent an e-mail to my fertility doctor. A week and a half later, I met again with Dr. Lee. We decided to do IVF.
At this point, I was so wary of fertility treatments that I hardly told anyone except for my closest girlfriends. The hormones were awful. I had to give up caffeine, which nearly killed me. But I committed to it.
The eggs were harvested and all went well. I was sent home to rest. When it was time to implant the healthiest two, I was asked to sign a consent form, because when two eggs are implanted, twins are a distinct possibility. I asked them to remind me what the chances were that this would work: one in three for each egg. I said, put three in.
You would have thought a bomb had gone off in the room. They did not want to do it.
Well, that’s a big risk to take.
I asked them to use three because I knew this was it. I would never put myself through this again. My husband, the saint, signed the papers. I came home after the procedure, stayed off my feet, and read every magazine there is. I did not move.
Two weeks afterward, I was standing in the Neiman Marcus parking lot (my girlfriends and I have a running joke that all good things happen at Neiman Marcus). My phone rang. It was my husband. He had grown impatient and called the doctor. I was pregnant!
One week later, I went in for an ultrasound and they told us they saw a third sac. “What does that mean?” my husband asked. “Triplets.” He nearly passed out. When I went in for the next ultrasound, there were only two heartbeats. We had lost the third embryo.
At this time, everything was on track for me to sing Salome and Pagliacci. The day before I was supposed to leave for Pagliacci, I had another appointment. They couldn’t find the heartbeat in the twin. Now I’m nine weeks pregnant and devastated. I texted my manager from the hospital room to say I lost one of the babies and I’m not sure what to do.
That’s wrenching. Did you do the gig?
Yes, the opera company was incredibly accommodating. They made it as easy as possible for me to come into that opera. I did the Pagliacci, but then I called my manager and said there’s no way I could do the Salome because I was afraid I’d lose the other baby. It was heartbreaking to bow out, because I had worked for a year and a half on that role.
I came home after that and did nothing until I had the baby. Because of some other medical issues, we had decided early on that I would have a cesarean section. Everything happened on time and in order. My doctor even played my CD during the delivery, so my daughter heard my voice when she arrived.
Now I can sing at the top of my lungs, and she’ll fall asleep in my arms.
