It’s not just what we do, but what we believe that sets relatively privileged Western parents apart from the rest. Here we take for granted that our families of two, three, four, five, and even six children will not only survive but thrive. They will brush off colds and flus and chicken pox, if they get them, bypassing the more awful things—the disfigurers and paralyzers and killers like measles and whooping cough and polio—thanks to immunizations. They will go to school and then to college, our children. And medical school or business school or law school. They will marry, in time, and have children of their own. They will make us proud. They will bury us. This is our script.
And so, as I mothered day to day as one did on the Upper East Side, I didn’t contemplate, in any sustained or careful or serious way, just how closely the territories of mothering and loss overlap. It’s a secret, until it happens to you.
How could I possibly be pregnant? Like some protagonist in a sitcom—or Lifetime Television for Women tragedy—I stared at the two purple lines on the pee-soaked stick and then back at the instructions on the cardboard box.
No way. It was impossible. We had used birth control that failed, those couple of months ago, yes. But we knew it had failed, and so I had immediately used emergency contraception prescribed by my doctor, following the instructions to the letter. Then I had my period. Scant, but a period. Twice. And so there was just no way I, the forty-three-year-old mother of a toddler and a seven-year-old, could be pregnant. What were the chances of emergency contraception failing after contraception failing? And what were the odds of getting accidentally knocked up at forty-three? “How’d you manage that?” I could imagine my friends who had gone through round after round of IVF asking. Gripping the marble bathroom counter, I now vaguely recalled family lore about Cherokee and Scottish ancestors having babies at improbably late ages. “Change-of-life babies,” my grandmother had called them, the bizarre-sounding euphemism suggesting, in retrospect, that it happened often enough that there was a term for it. It was possible, then. Barely. Maybe the test was wrong. I grabbed the second one, hopeful, hands shaking, and peed on it.
Then again, I considered as I flushed the toilet and waited, these double purple lines might explain a few things. I had been pretty sure I was going through an early and very sudden menopause in the weeks preceding this moment in the bathroom. Or losing my mind. Or dying. My head had felt stuffed with cotton. I couldn’t think. I snapped at my kids and my husband. Everything—Where is my phone? Why aren’t the teachers helping him more? When will the renovation overhead end?—irritated me more than usual. And I was so tired that I fell asleep at my desk, and standing on line at the grocery store (“Excuse me, miss? Um?”) and at Pilates, right on the reformer, mid-stretch. I called my doctor and told him something just wasn’t right. We made an appointment—for what, I didn’t know, to talk about how it felt to become suddenly insane and sick with an ineffable but undeniable whatever it was?—and I waited. Coffee didn’t help my foggy, tired, weak-feeling malaise—the smell of it made me sick.
Oh my God. I was nauseated. By coffee. And now, I realized, other things, too. A lot. Duh. I glanced down. Yes, of course: another set of double purple lines. Do not pass.
Naturally, unnaturally, against all the odds, I was pregnant.
I sucked on a ginger candy in my OB’s waiting room, waiting. I was here to tell him what we were going to do, he and I. I considered, as I glanced at all the magazines covers of happy, smiling pregnant women all around me, what a peculiar yet entirely predictable situation in which I now found myself—in primatologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Hrdy’s formulation, a bipedal, hairless, semicontinuously sexually receptive higher-order primate living in the shadow of agriculture.
Throughout our evolutionary prehistory, as remains the case among many foragers and hunter-gatherers today, women had babies spaced by three- or four- or five-year intervals. After all, a life of foraging and gathering and just-right caloric consumption of mostly plants and nuts and just a bit of meat kept you trim. Women with low body fat ovulated and menstruated less frequently—maybe four times per year. This, plus the burdens of lactation, nursing and child rearing while foraging kept our ancestors in a very low fertility state long after their babies were born. By the time the next baby rolled around, you had a four-year-old to help out a bit with the newborn. But put women on farms, a drastically more sedentary state of affairs than gathering, and make calories more plentiful, and you quickly ratchet up body fat levels—and fertility. This lifestyle, with its hallmark monthly menses, stuck with us when we moved out of the fields and farmhouses and into the malls and McMansions and apartment buildings, of course. And so babies spaced a couple of years apart became the norm. This is why, in every town in America, you see mom pushing her tiny baby in a stroller while the two-year-old rides on the stroller board. Over time, the original, pre-agricultural state of affairs has come to seem strange to us. We humans are forever changing up our own game.
And so here I was. I had a young toddler and a second-grader (I just shrugged and said, “It’s a Pleistocene parenting gap,” whenever people asked about the age difference between the boys), and I was ten weeks pregnant, I figured. Once my doctor invited me in and closed the door, I lost all semblance of composure. I tearfully explained what my husband and I had discussed after the day of double double lines—at my age, with a young toddler, and my medical history, and so on, we simply couldn’t. My OB nodded and said the right things. He gave me some forms he had signed, and I left and went to the hospital and filled out more forms for the procedure. I felt numb around the edges as I wrote down the information and handed the chart to the quietly compassionate administrator who told me, with a small, sympathetic smile, to come back the next morning.
Instead of going home or to my office, I walked to Central Park and sat near the lake, in a little wooden pagoda under the trees. It was a weekday morning, sunny and cool but not cold, and there was hardly anyone else around. As I watched a few turtles swimming around in the murky, algae-covered water, I thought about motherhood. I thought about being, all at once, a loving, generous, giving, doting mommy and a flexible, dry-eyed strategic thinker, dispassionately playing the odds like David Lack’s mother birds. I thought about reproductive tradeoffs and retrenchments in maternal care—those moments, all those moments throughout history and evolutionary prehistory when breeding females of every species had to make hard choices. Feed both twins, or just this one? Sometimes, there is only so much, and so much of oneself, to give. Send this babe to a foundling house, where he might well die, in order to continue to work and provision the children who had made it out of the danger zone of infancy already? Or keep him at home to invest in his well-being, thus possibly pulling down the chances of the others? Eject the joey while running from the predator so I have a better chance of surviving? Only if I’m a young enough kangaroo to breed again, and willing to place a bet on just-right ecological conditions—plentiful food, good weather, few predators—the next time around. And so on.
All of motherhood, always, has been about such tradeoffs 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 otherwise. Whether privileged or poor, Hrdy has noted, “women are constantly making tradeoffs 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 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 thousand 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 women die childless—but not because they have no children. One average, they have 3.5. The devastating math is personified in the case of Nisa, a !Kung woman who was interviewed extensively by anthropologist Marjorie Shoshtak in the 1970s: she’d suffered two miscarriages, given birth to four children, lost two before they became adolescents, and then 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 moms’ nights out, informing our mothering is this deep truth, this inescapable collective calamity: that forever, we have lost our babies as often as we kept them. Burying our babies is as much a part of our fundamental, deep, inherited experience of motherhood as 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 contributed to who we are, so many other realities that formed the shifting and variable backdrop against which we became, 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 decisions and choice we make about our children? Aren’t we all mulling it over all the time, even when we didn’t realize we were, 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 scratch the surface, just about every mother I know has lost, or her sister or best friend has, 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 in the morning first thing, and then when I brushed my teeth, and then when I took my son to school. I threw up mid-conversation 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 for my younger son that I couldn’t play with him 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 whomever 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.”
Primates of Park Avenue Page 19