All of motherhood, always, has been about such trade-offs and choices, as sociobiologist and scholar of motherhood Sarah Hrdy tells us. Like our female early Homo ancestors, and like animals everywhere, we seek to balance the well-being of our offspring with that of our future offspring, and with our own. Otherwise everyone dies. Or does less well than they might. Whether privileged or poor, Hrdy notes, “women are constantly making trade-offs between subsistence and reproduction that are similar in outline.” My conundrum was ages old, nothing special. But it felt catastrophic.
I stayed in the park, next to the water, for hours. When it was nearly dark, I went home and spoke to my husband at length. I called my doctor’s answering service, and he called me back himself shortly thereafter, and I told him I would not be having the procedure the next morning, after all. He asked if we should reschedule and I said no, we were going to skip it entirely. Falling into our bed a few hours later, our children tucked into their own rooms for the night, I marveled at how soft it was, and how comfortable. Sleepy and satisfied and finally peaceful, I pulled my husband’s arm around me. “We’re lucky,” I said, and he agreed.
Being a baby or child has always been a relatively dangerous proposition. Prehistorically, historically, and even today, there is no more perilous period of human development than infancy and childhood—except being a fetus. Even in the industrialized United States, with all our prenatal care, the majority of conceptions do not make it to term. An oft-cited 1988 study found that 31 percent of clinically recognized pregnancies ended in miscarriage. When you factor in unknown pregnancies, many estimates suggest that more than half of all pregnancies “spontaneously terminate.”
Once you’re born, the odds are strongly in your favor in the US and many other developed countries, of course. Nearly 994 out of every 1,000 babies born in the US survive infancy. But a million babies still die worldwide every single day—mostly from complications of prematurity, disease, and malnutrition. The risks during infancy and childhood were tremendous in our not-so-distant historical past and staggering in our evolutionary prehistory, and they remain so for many traditional peoples. For example, 43 percent of children living in “untouched” hunter-gatherer groups die before age fifteen. And Sarah Hrdy estimates that an astonishing half of all !Kung San women die childless—but not because they have had no children. On average, they have 3.5. The devastating math is personified in the case of Nisa, a !Kung San woman who was interviewed extensively by anthropologist Marjorie Shostak in the 1970s: Nisa had suffered two miscarriages, given birth to four children, lost two before they became adolescents, and then lost two more before they became adults.
Where childhood is perilous, how can motherhood be anything other than terrifying in its delicate contingency? Even today, even in a context where you can forget it is or ever was hazardous to be a child and a crapshoot to be a mother, it began to seem to me, as I watched my anxious mommy friends and watched myself, picking up and dropping off and cuddling and losing our tempers, that we could never really forget.
Inside us, I began to suspect, as we held our breath at playgrounds and watched warily for milestones at playgroups and released tension at girls’ nights out, informing our mothering is this deep truth, this inescapable collective calamity: that forever, we have lost our babies as often as we have kept them. Burying our babies is as much a part of our fundamental, deep, inherited experience of motherhood as is holding and nursing them. Consoling ourselves and others over our lost children is very possibly with us, in there, every time we console our children over a scraped knee. As is the case with so many other pressures that contribute to who we are, so many other realities that form the shifting and variable backdrop against which we become mothers, the software of motherloss is and must be, I became convinced in my years in the ostensibly safest of places, the Upper East Side, still in there. And on some level, the very deepest one, mustn’t it inform every single decision and choice we make about our children? Aren’t we all mulling it over all the time, even when we don’t realize we are, just like Candace?
Evolutionary psychologists who seek to understand the impact of loss on mothers and on our entire species put it this way:
Child death has played an important role in the evolution of humans. Of all stages of development, and at all historical times beyond modern history, childhood has been associated with the highest levels of mortality. Compared to other evolutionary pressures such as surviving as an adult or finding a mate and having children, the odds of failure to directly contribute to one’s genetic line are greatest in childhood. The enormous potential evolutionary pressure exerted by child death should have significantly influenced human psychological adaptations. Despite this potential influence, child death may be one of the least studied influences on human evolutionary psychology (Volk and Atkinson, 2008).
In a town like Manhattan, in a tribe as privileged as the one I studied, tragedy hits with a strange double force. You are knocked in the head by the fact of it, first of all, and then by another echoing pain—the knowledge that you are neither cosseted nor safe, in spite of all your attempts to have made it so. You work out. You have the pediatrician’s number memorized. Your home is insured in detail and carefully ordered—you have a professional organizer, for God’s sake, who charges $200 per hour to hold the chaos and uncertainty at bay. And yet. When you scratched the surface, just about every mother I knew had lost a child, or her sister or best friend had, in ways that are practically unspeakable. At two weeks pregnant, or at twelve. At thirty-nine weeks, a cord looping its way around the baby’s neck, a vine killing a flower. The newborn suffocated by the baby nurse who rolls on him in the night in her sleep. The two-year-old who falls at the playground—a little fall, nothing, she didn’t even seem to hit her head—and dies of a concussion a few days later. The toddler who tumbles from the window, dying in traffic, breaking every single heart in the city. The one-year-old who goes to the best hospital in town for a simple, straightforward procedure and never comes home. Three girls, swept away in a fire. The ferocity of the fire, of the loss. Here. Right here. In our world. On the Upper East Side, a place that feels safe, a place where anything is possible, until it is not.
I had been sick a lot during the pregnancy, nauseated beyond anything I had experienced before, but no one was alarmed by this. I threw up daily, but I had with the other pregnancies, too. I threw up first thing in the morning, and then when I brushed my teeth, and then when I took my son to school. I threw up midconversation with moms outside school and on the phone. I threw up in bags in taxis. I took it as a sign that the baby was doing well, since that’s how most obstetricians take such things. Still, it did take a toll, being sick and exhausted every day, and I felt bad that I couldn’t play with my younger son the way he’d like. “Let’s pretend Mommy is a blob and you’re a little boy,” I’d say, lying on the floor of his room. He would pull all his toys up and play around me. Later in the pregnancy he would pat my breasts and my stomach, smiling. “Funny,” he managed one day through his pacifier, patting.
I had lost some weight, but I had in the last pregnancy as well, and the baby was progressing nicely, passing all the measuring tests and genetic tests and amnio with flying colors. When we found out it was a girl we were stupefied—We don’t have girls! We have boys! we wanted to tell whoever was in charge of these things—and that is when my husband, who had been ambivalent about doing this all over again in his fifties, came around. Sometimes he would say, excitedly, “There’s going to be a baby!”
She was a burden, in a way, this baby, taxing our space and stealing the older one’s crib and requiring private school and college tuition and a renovation and four or five more years of a full-time nanny. That was why I had felt, until the very last possible second, that this baby could not possibly be. But now, the more we planned for her, the more excited we were about having a her to plan for. We prepared and plotted and slept easily. I decided I wanted her to have my last name, and my husband,
who had put up a terrible fight about it with the previous two, agreed without a single bit of pushback. I also decided, without telling my husband, that I wanted to name her Daphne. How could I not submit to her, this baby who so wanted to be born? How could I not give her a name?
You don’t think of New York City as a place teeming with nature, but it is. There were lots of trees on our block, and a leafy entrance to Central Park not far away. In the early summer mornings the birds do not sing—they screech. I could hear them before we even stepped off the elevator to walk through the lobby of our building, on our way to my obstetrician first thing that wet day. I had called the previous afternoon to report that I might be bleeding, it’s hard to tell with black underwear, and when I put a Kleenex down there it was light pink, not red, and that was okay, right? In a tight voice my doctor told me to lie down—from his tone I knew he meant really lie down, not some halfway, maternal kind of lying down where you keep popping up to read one of your kids a story or get dinner ready—and drink some water and call him back shortly. Then I called my husband, who said, “You bleed when you’re pregnant. You always have. It’s what your body does.” I agreed with a sigh, mentioning that my doctor seemed to be taking this very seriously, but that it would be fine. He went to a work-related event after my sons’ nanny agreed to stay late. “It’s probably nothing,” I told her.
When I called my OB later to check in as instructed, he said to drink more water, and hold absolutely still until I was in his office first thing the next morning.
Now the doorman swung the lobby door open, and the bird sounds were nearly overpowering, mostly blue jays making their urgent, unbird-like screams, and we stepped out, first under the awning and then into the rain toward the waiting black town car. That’s when my husband, never one to be rude, asked, “No umbrella?” Our building’s doormen typically walk you to your car carrying an umbrella for you when it’s raining. That way you experience seamless cosseting and comfort, door-to-door. But the rain wasn’t really serious—not yet—and our doorman shrugged it off with a laugh, as did I. Then I crawled into the car and lay down across the backseat with my head on my husband’s lap, and my husband said, “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people.” He looked out the window as we drove across the park—quiet and desolate and gray in the rain, not the hepped-up, crowded, insipid park of sunny weekend days but the park I loved, emptied out, quiet, moody—and shook his head. “He should have used a fucking umbrella. My suit is soaked.”
“What do you see down there?” I asked the doctor. I didn’t feel nervous. I had been told to go on bed rest before because I might well have had a miscarriage—most recently a year and a half ago or so, I mused now, my feet pressed against the Minnie Mouse washcloths, if that’s what they were, that covered the stirrups, and everything had been fine. Lily, the calmest mother I knew, had exchanged long, reassuring emails with me about it for days and talked with me on the phone for hours as I cried. I went on bed rest, and we got a home health aide who did Sudoku and made me penne with Bolognese sauce. I watched The Real Housewives of Orange County. I told Lily and Candace about every episode, in great detail, and they listened and laughed and kept me afloat. Everything was fine, the way it had been fine with all the other things: the time I started bleeding bright red in my first pregnancy and the doctor gave me fifty-fifty odds; the time during the birth of my first son when the nurse, watching the baby’s dipping, arcing vital signs during the absurdly long labor, exclaimed to the doctor, “This baby is coming and going, and I don’t like it!”; the problems with my husband’s ex-wife and his daughters as he and I tried to make a life together; the dramas and disasters that seemed to never end. Everything was always fine.
“You don’t want to know,” my OB sighed from underneath the pink sheet draped primly over my lower half. Now he pushed back in his rolling chair to where I could look at him, and when I began to hoist myself up on my elbow for this conversation, he said, very quietly, “Lie down.”
Lying flat on your back is a strange way to get bad news. Unless the person looms over you or you close your eyes, you’re just staring up at the ceiling and listening. And then, depending on the severity of the badness of the news, you might experience what I had previously thought to be a cliché or a dramatic device—you might find yourself looking down at your own body. A voice was saying “bulging membranes” and “incompetent cervix” and “her foot is sort of sticking out of your cervix” and I was wondering, How did I get up here, and who is that woman down there who looks so upset? It was as if her whole face were crying—contorted, red, melting into itself. Her roots were pretty dreadful, too.
When my husband grasped my hand, I slammed back into myself. It was a painful sensation, like bumping your elbow, except your whole body is your elbow, and I felt dazed and flattened somehow as I demanded, croaky-voiced and incredulous, “What?” Now I could see my OB’s face as he said, simply and with a forced calm quietness, “These things usually don’t end well.” He looked pale and tired. I noticed then that I was wringing my hands together, but it felt more like searching for something and trying to rub it away at the same time, and I willed myself to stop.
“So do you think I’m going to lose the baby?” Now I felt almost serene. Was that the worst thing? Okay. Was he going to tell me something worse? I doubted it. We hadn’t been sure we wanted this baby and at the very last minute we decided that we did, and now we might not have her. But we would. Wouldn’t we? Everything was going to be fine. He mentioned a cervical cerclage, a little stitch or two to hold the cervix shut, and I said that I knew what it was, and told him I had written a story about it for a woman’s magazine once, it had prevented a woman I interviewed from going into preterm labor, and then she hung upside down for a few weeks, and everything was fine.
It can only have sounded like so much yammering to my doctor, who nodded and repeated that he was sending me to the hospital right now.
“Like, right now?” He nodded. For how long? my husband asked, squeezing my hand. “Well,”—my obstetrician played for time here, I have to suppose in retrospect, and then he said, slowly and precisely—“it really depends. It could be a long while. Or not.” There was a doctor at the hospital who specialized in high-risk cases, he went on, mentioning this other doctor’s name—oh yes, I loved him, he had done my amnio all three times, he was wonderful, I prattled and chatted—and this doctor might have some other ideas. So go. Go right now? I asked again, aware that I had asked this before but unable to remember the answer. Yes, he said, unsmiling. I got myself ready and he told me he liked my shoes. I told him that they were called skimmers, and that they were for the rain, and that girls have all the fun.
Once I was admitted, I asked a resident who came in why they hadn’t elevated the foot of my bed. Why was I just lying flat? Wasn’t the point to keep the baby in there? She smiled. “Do you really think it’s a good idea to spend the next eighteen or twenty weeks with your feet up? Come on, now.” I stared at her, smiling at me as though we were in on the same secret, like we knew the same things. I nodded in confusion, my impulse to agree apparently unaffected by the dim realization that I was agreeing, quite possibly, to a tragedy. For a moment I understood what she was saying, glanced it, and then I ducked away.
What the hell did she think I thought? I thought there was going to be a way to make this all better. I was waiting to talk to the high-risk OB who had done my amnio every time, the one who was so young and cute and smart that all the mothers and expectant mothers called him Doogie Howser behind his back. He could fix anything, and he would.
They were going to do an ultrasound later, hours and hours later, so my husband would go home for a bit. I made a list of things I wanted him to bring back to me when he returned that afternoon. This included makeup and toiletries, a collection of academic papers on women and aggression, and a Henry James novel I had already read four or five times. And I wanted a picture of my sons. Looking at their faces would be like reading H
enry James again and again—I knew the outcome, and it was comforting, in spite of the difficulty and sometimes the pain, to trace those same familiar contours over and over with my eye and with my mind. Someone brought me some horribly vivid green Jell-O and I thanked her and asked her to take it away and, with an understanding smile, she did. Another doctor came in later and asked me how I was and what I did and when I said I was a writer and researcher she said, “Don’t research this, please. You’ll drive yourself crazy.” I promised not to, and then I started to cry and she said something kind like they all did. Gesturing to the photo of my two young sons I had taped up next to my bed—my older son laughing while his baby brother screamed at the top of his lungs, perhaps because his big brother was pinching him off camera, or perhaps just because—I told her that I already had two kids. If I didn’t I don’t think I could bear this, I said. So it could be worse. She looked at me for a moment, and then she said, very quietly, tilting her head to one side, “It could be worse, but it could be better, too,” and she was right.
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 19