by Laure Baudot
There are of course the babies. Most of them are fat, and many of them are crawling. Soft, disoriented quadrupeds, they bump into furniture and, turning, redirect themselves toward another bright thing that has caught their attention.
We dig into the cake. It’s spongy and iced — normally something I would hate, but after my daughter’s arrival, I revel in everything sensuous, regardless of where it comes from. Having children has awakened my senses: I experience life in an exaggerated way. I constantly feel pushed over the edge, sharpened to a point, nearly tipping into crisis.
Noreen, who’s been sitting on her hands, studies the icing cresting over the cake. “Still trying to shed pounds, ladies.”
“I made it with Splenda,” says Alison.
“Really?”
Sophie smiles as she helps herself to a second piece. “Nothing is fat-free.” She jogged here and is wearing sky-blue spandex pants and white Nike shoes.
“Maybe a little.” Noreen cuts off a triangle, which crumbles as she lifts it. “Oops.”
At the adoption agency in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian adoption agent kept smiling as she said, “There has been a delay.”
Despite having been warned of this very thing, we were annoyed.
“How much time?” Peter’s a man to get straight to the point.
“One week?”
“One week?”
“One week.” This time the woman spoke more firmly.
Peter’s considerable shoulders tensed. He’s built like a footballer, but he’s the most gentle person I know. Except when he has to wait for something. And we’d waited three years.
“Please,” said the agent. “You will have time for sights. You know Ethiopia?”
I put my hand on Peter’s arm. “We expected this. Let’s figure out what we can do.”
We walked back to the hotel through black-paved streets. Pink garbage bags rose in the breeze like flamingoes. From behind a fence towered an AIDS-prevention poster. At every corner, small children tried to sell us tissue packages. They touched our legs and bargained. We’d been told that men recruited the children to run this business. Of course, there were worse things than selling tissue. We bought a pack from each group.
At the hotel, we lay on our backs on our single beds. The heat exhausted me. I pictured the street toddlers scampering at our feet, their meant-to-be-pleasing faces running with sweat. Their attitudes were their only weapons. When I looked closely, I thought I could see in their eyes the fear of not making their quota. A waiter at the hotel restaurant with whom we’d become friends had informed us that street children who didn’t sell enough tissue were beaten.
I debated taking a shower in the trickle of water the hotel offered.
Peter opened the guide book. “How about the Simien Mountains?”
“Are we fit enough?”
“How hard do you think it is?” It was true that back home we did a lot of walking.
“I can’t stop thinking about —”
“Which is exactly why we have to.”
“Who’s going back to work?” asks Noreen. She’s the least attractive among us, but she doesn’t care. She wears heavy dark-framed glasses and rarely brushes her thick black hair. We don’t blame her for neglecting herself, though, because her son’s a handful. He crawls so fast we call him “The Commando.”
“I am.” I want to shout this from the rooftops. I can’t wait! Guiltily, I baptize my daughter with my hand. Her scalp is moss on a warm stone.
“Yeah,” says Sophie. “I like my job.”
“I didn’t want to,” says Noreen, “but John got mad. He said, ‘You will go back to work after one year, you will build a career.’”
“That’s extreme.”
“Can you discuss it?” Marjorie is a grade school teacher. The minute Emily was born, Marjorie was already thinking about her next child.
“He’s not a discusser.”
“Men.” Sophie works in human resources. She’s good at managing humans.
“What about you, Marjorie?” asks Noreen.
“We’re going to try to make a go at it with one salary. Child-hood goes by so fast.”
“Lucky,” says Noreen.
Travellers have always extolled the beauty of the Simien Mountains in northern Ethiopia. From a distance, they were ragged, giant peaks. Up close, they’re pock-marked rocks with pockets of bleached grasses and delicate white flowers. But it’s the light that was the most amazing. Just before dusk, the dying sun streaked the stones with pastel pinks, yellows, and blues, as if a schoolchild had run along the ranges and painted them with swathes of primary-coloured chalk.
Although it was hard going, I kept walking. If you get tired on a hike, you’re supposed to work through it. I thought about our future child. Like most Amharic Ethiopians, he would be dark and high-cheeked boned. He would be delicate. I felt sure that although he would feel out of place in Canada at first, we could figure things out.
At noon on the first day, we sheltered under tall boulders to eat bread and peanut butter, which we had bought for a fortune in Addis before boarding the plane to Gondar, a small town southwest of the mountains.
Peter folded a piece of bread over a gob of peanut butter. “What are you thinking?”
“You know. I just want to make sure we’re not stealing anyone’s baby.”
“It’s that whole Madonna thing. It freaked you out.” A few months before our papers had gone through, Madonna adopted an orphan boy from Malawi. A journalist discovered that, in fact, the boy had a father. “We checked and rechecked the agency.”
“But is it really better? I mean, than helping the locals help themselves?”
“Liz, we’ve talked about this.”
We’re all still eating. I love food and don’t feel guilty: I’m skinny no matter what I eat.
Sophie helps herself to another cracker with cream cheese. “I’m still breastfeeding, so.”
At this, Noreen asks, “I wonder what Lisa is doing?”
Lisa was one of our earlier group members, a school teacher obviously used to supervising a classroom. After getting to know her, I’d begun to think that her controlling nature must have caused her to leave situations often. She was the only one of us who couldn’t breastfeed. Either her milk wasn’t coming in fast enough, or she didn’t have enough milk — I forget the exact nature of the trouble. It bothered her, though. She knew that we all thought, but didn’t say, that breast is best.
Most of us breastfeed — at this very moment, some of us sit on the floor, leaning against the couch, cradling a cushion in an elbow; one of us is on the custom-made glider; others are on the couch itself, wrapping breastfeeding pillows around our waists like buoys.
Lisa had to give her baby, Zachariah, the bottle. When she fed him, she refused to look at us. Zachariah drank with great gulps that could be heard, even with all the slurping and sucking going on.
By the second day of trekking, I felt like I had the flu. My knapsack seemed heavy, despite the fact that it contained only water and a camera; a mule carried the rest of our gear. I put one foot carefully in front of the other and watched the red sand form a tide line around my ankles.
In the late afternoon, we stopped on a flat green plain to set up our tents. From there, we could see the green peaks of other mountains and the serpentine brown paths winding through them.
A tiny shepherd’s hut stood in the middle of the plain. In the distance, goats bleated. At one point, a small boy brought a baby goat to entertain us. The goat stumbled, and the boy, smiling, admonished it and lifted up its hind legs so that it wobbled toward us. Peter gave the boy a birr, and he left us.
That night, we cooked a lentil stew. As we waited for the stew to be ready, we sprawled on stones around the fire, taking occasional breaks to go outside and breathe some smoke-free air. A rag hung over the d
oor to the hut, and every time someone went in or out, frigid mountain air was let in.
At one point, the mule leader opened the curtain and hesitated on the threshold, wondering if he could join us for dinner. We normally invited everyone, including our guide, our armed guard, and the mule keeper, to eat with us, and we also paid for all the groceries. Since many families in this area rarely had enough to feed their families, this arrangement made sense.
“Okay!” I hissed to Peter. “Let him come in or go out. But let him decide, already.”
Peter, who was seated on a boulder, teetered slightly. “What’s wrong with you?”
By the third day of trekking, I could barely put on my knapsack after rest stops. Our guide suggested that I ride one of the mules. I could only just hold onto the mule’s mane. Each time the path steepened, the man leading my mule smiled back at me in reassurance.
I wanted to go home. I wanted my bed, my bathroom, my new wood-floored semi-detached house — the one we had bought in preparation for the child.
“Let’s turn around,” I told Peter that evening.
“Do you know how few westerners get to come here?”
The landscape was spectacular, but I didn’t care. “I need to go back.”
The last time Lisa came, she packed up her baby’s stuff carefully, like someone doing a puzzle. I caught up to her in Noreen’s foyer. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“It really doesn’t matter how you feed the baby. There’s so much more to it than that.”
Lisa slotted a bottle into the side of her diaper bag. “I read that it’s not about the breast itself, but about the physical bond. You can get it from giving the baby a bottle.”
“Exactly!”
After she finished placing Zachariah in the front carrier, she began putting on her jacket. The days were getting colder. We often debated about whether it was good to have our babies in the fall — you’re so sedentary the first few weeks anyway — or whether it would have been better to give birth in the spring, when the longer days keep you from sinking into postpartum depression.
“So we’ll see you next week?”
“Yeah.”
For weeks after that, although Lisa never showed up, I kept her on our group email list.
When we got back to Addis, a test confirmed what I already knew: I was pregnant.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud to myself in the empty bathroom. I came out and told Peter.
Peter’s eyes widened. “How is that possible?”
“It must be the hormones from the adoption process.”
“Awesome, right?” Now that he was over the astonishment, Peter’s face was full of joy.
“I read that morning sickness means the pregnancy is a good one.” Suddenly I felt confident that things would turn out differently — this time around.
“Well, we’re about to have a whole lot of work on our hands.”
At the time, I misunderstood him. I thought he was talking only about what was inside me, the baby he and I had made.
“Oh, Grace,” says Sophie. Grace has pulled herself up and knocked over a lamp.
Like her mother, Grace has a sunny, open disposition. She smiles frequently, sprouting a dimple on her left cheek. When Sophie told us she had rolled over for the first time, we thought it was a fluke.
“Could it have been a one-time thing?” I’d asked Sophie then.
“That’s what I thought, but then she did it again. Here.” Sophie put Grace on a sky-blue blanket covered with yellow ducks. Grace lifted one leg up and over, as if she were doing a yoga stretch, and flipped over onto her stomach. Then, before her toe had barely grazed a duck, she rolled again onto her back.
“I thought you were kidding!” The merriment in Noreen’s voice sounded genuine.
When we told the agency woman that we’d decided not to adopt, she smiled. But her eyes were calculating: she was already planning where else to place the child. Without looking at her, I signed the release papers.
“You’ll regret it,” said Peter quietly.
“It doesn’t seem right, now.”
“But why? We could have two. We have the means.”
Even after our all-night discussion in our hotel room, he continued to pursue this line of argument, and I continued to push back. I didn’t know then that the disappointment behind his eyes would last through my pregnancy.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
When we returned home, my mother, too, asked me why I’d changed my mind. She’s a church-going woman. Although she had grieved our decision to adopt, she had reconciled her-self to it quickly, especially because adoption gelled with her religious beliefs.
“What about the other child?” she asked.
My belly was already softening. I patted it possessively. “It was meant to be.”
How could I tell either Peter or my mother that I felt as if I had won the lottery? That I had personally succeeded where others before me had failed?
I turn toward the other mothers in our group. “Archana’s finally cruising!”
We named our daughter after Peter’s Indian grandmother. It’s a funny name for her because she doesn’t look a bit like her father’s side. She’s as pale as I am, freckled, and her hair is slightly red, like the just-ripening part of a peach. Peter jokes that he’s got some questions for the mailman. He doesn’t give a damn though. I see Peter and Arch together, how he blows on her belly to make her giggle like mad.
All the other babies in our group, apart from Malcolm and Arch, have been pulling themselves along the floor for a few weeks, and I’d started fretting out loud to the other moms.
Now, watching Archana inch forward on Alison’s carpet, Sophie says, “See? Nothing to worry about.”
Noreen looks up. “Those developmental milestones are off, anyway.”
We try not to stare at Malcolm, who’s not yet able to sit up. He’s looking right back at us. Alison has propped him up with pillows. He’s like the emperor with no clothes.
In the kitchen, I help Alison clean up. “Great spread.”
“Malcolm’s so quiet that I can get anything done.” She’s doing the dishes with her back to me. “Liz, what am I going to do?”
Although I know she can’t see me, I nod.
“The doctor’s sending us for tests next week.”
“I’m sure it’s all very preliminary.”
I can’t help thinking of a recurring dream I’ve been having recently. In the dream, the OB nurse hands me Archana, over and over again, and each time I’m amazed at how beautiful she looks — not in an objective way, I can already see she’s going to have my own Greco-Roman nose — but in that human kind of way, with ten wiggling toes and a neck that works, and on this neck, an active, thinking head, like a miniature, solid hard hat.
Alison stands with her fingers under the water, too long to be testing its temperature. As I stack the last plate and turn to go back into the living room, she speaks, her voice so low I almost don’t hear her through the running water. “Don’t tell the others, okay?”
As I became heavier, I began comparing myself to other pregnant women. I had stopped eating raw cheeses and fish and would criticize women who did. I would look at women on the street and ask Peter, “How many pounds do you think? Do you think she’s thinking of gestational diabetes at all?”
One night, we had dinner with our neighbours Linda and George, who were also expecting. Linda talked about the genetic tests they were doing, and about how they were arranging for cord blood banking. If their child fell ill, they would be able to use his own genetic material to help him.
“I wouldn’t mind —” I started saying.
Peter interrupted me. “That setup’s a little too pessimistic for my taste.”
George took a large bite of chicken stew. “I told her
it was another corporation playing on the population’s fears around pregnancy. She wouldn’t listen.”
“Hey.” Linda punched her husband lightly on the arm.
“Just kidding.” He swallowed. “We think of it as another type of insurance.”
Later, I brought popcorn to the TV room, where Peter and George were watching football. A commercial for the latest SUV — vehicles Peter hated — was on.
They started talking about people we knew, those who did not yet have children, and those who had become pregnant in the last few years. “What happens to these girls when they get pregnant?” George was asking.
“I know,” Peter said. “They get so competitive.”
“Like it’s a game,” George said. “Who can have the better pregnancy? Who can still look good? And look out if a girl is doing something like smoking. Then they want to kill them. They’re constantly at each other’s throats.”
Peter added: “Like gladiators whose audience is chanting for blood.”
In Alison’s living room, we’re splayed out like starfish on rocks. Around us, our babies use the furniture to pull them-selves up. Only Malcolm is still seated in his tugboat of cushions, as if he will suddenly be carried off to a more understanding place.
But then, Sophie says, “Look, guys.”
Like an old man who’s finally found his cane, Malcolm grasps the couch fully with his left hand and pulls himself to a standing position. Holding onto the couch with one hand, he sways, roly-poly, and makes contented guttural noises.
“Malcolm, yay!”
“Oh, my God.” Alison dashes toward him and then keeps her hands outstretched in space, as if she is afraid that touching him will upset his balance.
Malcolm drops. Alison grabs him and lifts him up in the air in front of her, then kisses him on both cheeks. “Baby!” She shakes her head in disbelief, already transitioning from feeling self-pity to mocking herself. “Ladies, I was so worried.”