During one of my routine and increasingly frequent checkups I overheard two doctors speaking in solemn tones about another patient, a pregnant woman who sounded like she was in terrible health. “Previa . . . advanced age . . . advanced endo . . .” How horrible it all sounded! I thought about the poor woman, the complications that would surely come with her rare elderly pregnancy, imagining her brittle bones, her bruised and spotted skin, her body’s imminent revolt against itself. Then one of the doctors began to spell the woman’s last name, “L-A-K-S-H . . .” She was me. Those conditions were the titles of my miseries. Mine, I learned, was a “geriatric pregnancy.”
I knew my pregnancy was high risk. Given my age and the late date at which we finally found out I was really pregnant, I worried about the health of the baby. Had I gotten enough folic acid? Would my endometriosis be a hindrance to the baby’s coming out okay? Given the fact that I had only one fallopian tube on one side and one working ovary on the other, had the embryo even implanted properly? So I focused instead on a less dire worry: how to stay active, for my physical and mental health. I’ve long been a gym rat, and up until that appointment, I had expected to continue my boxing, spinning, and the rest. When Seckin commanded otherwise, I picked his brain for alternatives. Running was a no. So was lifting any weights over a measly three pounds. I couldn’t jump or bounce or jostle.
“Can I even walk?” I asked, frustrated.
“Yes, you can walk,” he said.
“Well, can I walk up stairs?”
“Yes.”
“Aha.”
I started on the stairs at the gym, walking up and down the two flights about fifteen to twenty times, but soon stopped. I felt silly and self-conscious, like I was always blocking traffic. Instead, I took to walking the emergency stairs in my apartment building. A fire-exit stairwell, encased in dingy, bare cement walls, connected the floors. There were no windows, no people, no distractions. I walked up slow and steady, skipping one stair with each step. When I traveled for Top Chef, Michelle would help me suss out each hotel’s emergency stairs.
I listened to music on an iPod at first, but I quickly abandoned music for the rhythmic echo of my footsteps, the cadence of my breath. The stairwell came to serve as a sort of flotation chamber, except that my mind, not my body, needed stilling. Outside of my cement cocoon, my thoughts churned: What am I going to tell people? How am I going to wedge motherhood into my life, then how am I going to wedge my life into motherhood? And how am I going to fit into my clothes?
I admit that I started my slow climbs out of vanity, as a reaction to the desperation I felt when I looked in the mirror and saw my newly bloated body and contourless face. But my daily ascents and descents began to take on a meditative quality. I spent twenty-five to forty-five minutes a day on stairs, depending on the time I had to spare or how much I could bear. Sometimes I realized that the beads of salty water streaking my face were not sweat but tears. It was in these scattered stairwells that I waded through hormone-fueled emotion and egocentric impulse. It was in these stairwells that I came to understand that the time for self-indulgence was over, that my primary purpose now was ensuring the health of the creature growing inside me, that I’d soon be a helpless little person’s only succor. I rarely looked forward to a session on the stairs. But once I emerged, blinking at the brightness of the day, I felt happy to have done it.
Then in mid-December, I felt a dull cramping, nothing outrageous or comparable to when I had my period, but definitely there. This startled me because I hadn’t had a cramp since becoming pregnant. I called Seckin, who asked me to meet him in his office. When I got there, he determined I was having early contractions and he said we needed to go to the hospital. This rocked me to the core. Up until that time, I had pretty much managed to keep my good humor in spite of everything. But the moment Seckin announced that I might have to be admitted, I felt a sudden helplessness and impotence I had never felt before. An invisible rock formed under my sternum, a heavy ball of dread I could not shake. The ride from Seckin’s office to Lenox Hill Hospital is a short one, a mere handful of New York City blocks, but it seemed like an eternity. I felt like a prisoner waiting to be executed.
Adam had yet to decide the correct course of action or determine his desired involvement in the baby’s life. On the way to the hospital I phoned to inform him of what was developing. He was in Texas. He did not come to New York.
At the hospital, nurses and other staff struggled to get an IV in me. I became mostly mute and stone-faced as the doctors discussed giving me steroids to expand the baby’s lungs in case she did come early. Right now, her lungs weren’t developed enough for her to breathe on her own, they explained. They gave me medication to stop the contractions, a drug used for heart patients that worked on the muscles of the heart but also calmed other organs, in my case my uterus. I had extremely low blood pressure, so they monitored not only my heart but the baby’s, too. I had pads and patches and tubes taped to various parts of my body and I felt more like a science experiment than a patient. I felt utterly immobilized, paralyzed with fear. I pushed back the only thoughts I had, which were that this was happening because of my emotional callousness. For most of my life I had been a serial monogamist; perhaps this was my punishment for acting like a female Casanova. But why punish the baby? Karma was a big part of my beliefs as a Hindu. So when I first found out about my pregnancy, I immediately attributed it to good karma for starting the foundation with Seckin. Now I considered my current plight also a result of karma. It didn’t altogether make sense, and I was afraid of delving even deeper into my thoughts, lest I create some further turmoil in my system. I was too afraid to let my mind wander, and so I mostly stared out the window of my hospital room. People kept bustling in and out for the better part of the rest of that evening.
The drugs eventually calmed my contractions. Seckin and his colleague, another sweet-faced doctor with kind, twinkling eyes named Sam Levin, decided I would get more rest at home. So late into the night I was released. Several days earlier I had given a keynote address at MIT. The Endometriosis Foundation of America had helped to launch a Center for Gynepathology Research there in conjunction with Harvard Medical School. I couldn’t believe I was actually standing at a podium in such an institution. We owed much of that success to a biological engineer and professor at MIT named Dr. Linda Griffith, who had read the Newsweek interview about my journey with endo and had reached out by cold-calling Seckin’s office to see if we could partner on something. She was the real brain and fire behind the center. Dr. Griffith had herself suffered from endometriosis, hiding her illness for years. She even had a couch installed in her office so she could lie down without anyone noticing. She had surgery after surgery, but she told only those closest to her for fear of being passed up for tenure and promotions. She said that reading my story helped her to realize the science and research community needed to devote more resources to the disease. I was just lucky to be standing in the glow of her efforts.
I had also competed in a celebrity charades tournament just days before, and my team had won, beating out other really talented actors and performers. I had been feeling really good, great even. But now I saw that my body could withhold information, that it did not always indicate there was any trouble afoot. It could still dupe and betray me. On Christmas Eve, I began to feel uneasy again. Soon Teddy would be leaving for Africa with his sons and Mukesh Ambani and his family. They were going on safari. Teddy wanted at all costs to improve how his company IMG was functioning around the world, and he needed partners as capable as he was to do so. Mukesh was the person he had handpicked in India. He thought the best way for Mukesh to get to know him better was to go on vacation with him and his family. It was of course too late in my pregnancy for me to fly anywhere, let alone to the heart of Africa. I felt sorry for myself that he was leaving. But my uneasiness took the form of a physical listlessness, a feeling that something was not right. A real growing discomfort. I had trouble getting to sleep
and my lower back hurt. There was a general, indescribable ache in my belly, or faint cramping down low. I am not really sure what it was that made me feel so out of sorts, so weary and upset. I had been on the phone with Adam a lot, too, in those days, trying to figure things out.
I wound up in the hospital again the day after Christmas with early contractions. This time, I would spend five whole days there. Teddy came to visit me in the hospital before he left. It was the closest I have ever gotten to feeling utterly alone. Manu rode with me in the taxi uptown. As before, I informed Adam. Again, he did not come. My mind was utterly frozen with fear that my child would suffer some defect or handicap due to all the stress I had hoisted upon myself. I felt impotent. I lay there, blinking, with the same belts across my tummy, the fetal heart monitors, the EKG patches, the oxygen and IV tubes.
Sometime after the New York Post broke the story that Adam Dell might be the biological father, Adam had decided that he wanted to be fully involved in the baby’s life. It felt to me that seeing the news in the paper or online had been some tipping point for him. While prior to that he had said he didn’t want to be in the birthing room, now he wanted to be there when the baby was born. I found this ridiculous. I didn’t want him in the room. He didn’t know about the pregnancy until after the first trimester, but since then he had been absent during almost all of it.
Now, with the distance of time, I can understand the terrible situation Adam found himself in. But back then I really could not. What did the state of affairs between us have to do with his relationship with his child? What happened or didn’t happen between the two of us should have nothing to do with his own relationship to the small person-to-be already wiggling around in my belly. Looking back, I can also see that from Adam’s view, all he had known firsthand was a traditional family environment. Both his siblings as well as his parents had married young, stayed together for a long time, and produced several kids, in stable, conventional, and happy homes in Texas. He most likely saw his future unfolding in the same way. Now he was forced to see that if he wanted to be a father to his child, this would not be so.
I started to be disappointed in Adam. Each time I informed him I was going to the hospital, I thought for sure that he would come. I had explained to him the danger of the baby coming too early: his own flesh and blood was in peril of not arriving into the world intact and healthy. I was dismayed that he didn’t see fit to be there. If not for worry about my safety, at least out of worry for his unborn child. I thought his questions when discussing options sounded selfish. They seemed to be focused on his rights, versus what was best for the baby. At one point he suggested that after the baby was born she and I move to Austin, where I knew no one, had never worked, and would be far away from my friends, family, and Teddy, just to accommodate his personal needs.
I suppose it would have been much easier for all if I had never insisted that Teddy and I conduct that paternity test, but I had to know. And I had to make sure our child knew the truth. I didn’t want her to grow up not knowing who her father was. It was why, despite everything I still felt, it was vital to have Adam in our child’s life as her father. My own personal history and my paternal abandonment compounded the anger I felt at Adam’s vacillation.
Krishna was born on a Saturday. It was cold and crisp, and my mother had opened the window in my bedroom to let the cool air in. I had been beached on my bed like a whale for the better part of three months. But even with all the complications and trips to the hospital with fetal heart monitors, et cetera, I felt that I had had a blissful and happy pregnancy. Now I was ready to meet my child, ready to have my body belong primarily to myself again, ready to not sit around like Humpty Dumpty in my bed. Other than my arms, I could only exercise my feet, so I moved them up and down, pointing my toes and then flexing my feet. I did what little I could, but nothing really took away the feeling of being trapped in my own body. I would have jumped out of my skin, except that I was happy for those three months to lie, languorous and perfectly still, a scarab-bodied Cleopatra, because I knew Krishna’s life and well-being depended on it. It was easy to do, but enough was enough. I began making little circles in the air with my toes as the early-spring breeze flitted through and puffed the curtains.
There are certain days you know will be strange or special right when you open your blurry eyes. And even though I knew I was to give birth any day very soon, the air felt different, charged. In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn’t fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It’s like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience. I didn’t feel any contractions, but I felt a slow, growing discomfort. Nothing drastic, mind you. But something was there. I was listless, a princess sitting on a pea.
My mother came in with a tray of green tea and honey, grapefruit sprinkled with cinnamon, and an egg in a hole, its round, soft center quivering under a shiny green slick of olive oil. Usually the egg in a hole would be topped with a drizzle of hot sauce or a smattering of pickled jalapeño slices, but with the pregnancy I had experienced heartburn for the first time in my life. So a good coarse cracking of black pepper and sea salt was all I could take. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to eat today, even though I was hungry. I was playing with my grapefruit when my mother started chastising me. “Eat the egg before it gets cold, kanna. And put the tea on your nightstand. It’s hot, no? And very full.” No matter how close you are to your mother, having her move back in with you at the age of thirty-nine is challenging. We were two women who had been through a lot. Like most mothers and daughters, we had had our share of fights and feasts. The very instincts that made my mother an excellent professional nurse also made her a Herculean mother. She had a knack for taking over completely and relished the role. All of which was mostly fine with me. It was just that sometimes being bossed around when you’re a bossy woman yourself is a little frustrating.
I was toying with the gravelly pepper and oil with the side of my knife when I felt a swift kick to my side from deep within. I punctured the yolk and as it oozed its golden richness across the plate I could feel the baby shift. Suddenly I became ravenous and began to sop up the golden fat and white albumen with the crunchy edges of the bread. It was so delicious, I found myself ignoring the baby’s kick. Just as I took another perfect bite of egg and toast, olive oil and gritty sea salt, she suddenly decided to shift her body so that I could see my belly literally move under the tray. In a second the tray moved so much that the cup of tea toppled over, sending hot green liquid cascading down the duvet, wetting everything. The cup rolled and bounced off the bed and onto the floor. Damage done, I somehow didn’t care. I kept eating that luscious egg.
My mother came in when she heard the teacup hit the wood floor. “Eh! Are you all right, you didn’t get burned? I told you to put that cup over there.” She rushed in to remove the tray so she could change the wet bedding and rather than thank her, I whined because I wasn’t able to sop up the last of the yolky fat on the plate. She asked me to get up and sit in a chair until she cleaned up, and as I did I felt a twinge, a turning inside. But it could have easily been from getting up too fast, or indigestion. I waited and then returned to bed and the twinge came again. I called Seckin, who said I should wait until the contractions got more frequent and severe. He encouraged me to relax, and not to eat too much (too late for that). He suggested I swing a bit in the living room.
egg in a hole
Serves 1
1 to 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more as needed for the pan and for drizzling
1 slice sourdough bread
1 large egg
Fleur de sel
Coarsely ground black pepper
Heat a frying pan over medium heat. Drizzle 1 to 2 teaspoons olive oil into the pan, distributing it evenly.
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Cut a hole about 1 inch in diameter in the center of the bread. Toast one side of the bread in the pan for 2 to 3 minutes, or until golden, then flip the bread to the other side, adding a few more drops of oil if needed. Let the second side toast for another 2 to 3 minutes.
Gently crack the egg into the hole.
Once the egg white is opaque, delicately flip the bread over with a spatula, being careful not to break the yolk, which should be nestled in the hole. Cook for a couple more minutes, until the egg is cooked but the yolk is still quivering slightly. Do not overcook.
Carefully transfer the bread from the pan to a plate and drizzle with a bit more olive oil. Add a healthy pinch of fleur de sel as well as 4 to 5 turns of a pepper mill over the top. Serve hot.
A year and a half earlier, I had got it into my head that I wanted a swing in the middle of my living room. Traditional old South Indian homes had swings called oonjuls in Tamil or julas in Hindi. They were bigger than the American playground swings common in parks. Rectangular planks of rosewood or teak, four to six feet long by almost two feet wide, they were held up by four long, ornately carved brass or iron chains, hooked into rings in the ceiling. Most were used to rock babies to sleep or for reading. A vital part of the Indian wedding ceremony was also performed on these types of swings. Before the tying of the Hindu wedding thali and just after exchanging flower garlands, the bridal couple would sit, rocking back and forth in the swing (adorned especially with flowers, too, for the occasion), signifying the waves of life the couple would experience together in harmony. All the women on both sides of the couple form a semicircle around the pair. They sing love songs, specific Sanskrit songs that everyone knows, blessing the couple to have a long, happy married life. Usually the women with the best voices get pushed to the front. In places of honor, the mothers-in-law or women really close to the couple slowly wave a plate of flowers, rice with turmeric and vermillion powder, as well as a ritualistic flame round and round in front of the couple.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate Page 25