by Carole Maso
My sister Cathy guesses immediately when I tell her I have something important to tell her. She is ecstatic. I think all women with children are somehow pleased when someone else joins their ranks. Company of sorts—this island of motherhood. The deep isolation of it on one level. I feel it already. Or is it just my natural predilection?
I’m eating bread with lavender honey. A hot chocolate. I’m petting a gray poodle. Eating new potatoes out of a glass bowl. Hoping.
I’m dreaming of France again.
In The American Woman in the Chinese Hat, I tried to write a novel that appeared desultory, like a memoir or notebook, a day book, a chronicle of a life as it unfolded. How difficult that was—to artfully make events seem random, senseless. To unmake while I was making. This kind of writing is such a new experience for me. Just allowing thoughts to occur, with a kind of coherence and randomness, without a concern for shapeliness of any kind. A weird feeling—like I should be doing some thing more here. All my tentacles on end. Hard to relax. To simply allow—it is something I am not at all practiced in. Oh, now I have a thought about—my kangaroo pouch—Well, OK, write it down!
A dream in which the entire animal kingdom paraded out displaying the various ways they carry their young.
Why, I also wonder, do I find myself protecting my privacy far more in this journal than in my fictions? I create a slightly pristine version of myself here. I need to consider the ordinary assumptions again about fiction and nonfiction. This interests me, having never written like this before.
A certain reserve. Protectiveness already. Becoming a mother.
I can begin to understand surrogate motherhood. So far at any rate. So much serenity. As if there had been a visitation by angels.
I wait for the quickening. That first flutter within. Feel part of some ancient process—women whispering, “It’s the quickening. She’s got the quickening.” I believe I have already felt the baby move, though the books say probably no. I feel exactly like a pioneer woman for some reason.
This flying inside one’s own body. The women are whispering.
15 DECEMBER—FOURTEEN WEEKS
Time for a small celebration! I have passed the first trimester without a hitch!
At Thanksgiving my mother wishing out loud for another grandchild. How can she love babies so much? I have got to tell them soon. Louis and Louise are here with us this year. They just moved nearby. I couldn’t be happier about it.
A strange dream last night. The message: “Go to sleep like the flowers.” Something elegiac about it.
I have finally told my parents. The first trimester up. Thanksgiving come and gone. I had wanted to tell them in person but have not been able to get home. And there seems no more delaying it. My sister Cathy has known for some time and can scarcely contain herself. I call them on the phone from my office, filled with both excitement and trepidation. Mom is delighted, if a little incredulous. Poor Dad, gasping like a ghost.
Of course my mother would have been happy even if I had stolen a baby from the Kmart, so desperate was she always that I have one. But this! She couldn’t be more thrilled, though she has to be a little tempered for my father, who is having a harder time integrating the news. My mother says he hasn’t spoken for days. It is not convention, but it is something, something that is troubling him.
My friend Mirielle, when thinking of adopting a half-white, half-black baby from the South. Her mother: They throw babies like that away in the garbage and you want to adopt one! Now of course she is madly in love with the child.
Stretched out she might fit on a thumbnail now. I like to think of her stretched out and floating in there on a little raft perhaps.
As Christmas nears. My favorite season. A father’s fear. A mother’s delight. I am their child. First born.
Nothing to dispel the strangeness that we were seven people in one house late at night, dreaming our dreams. My family.
At twelve weeks she turns away from anything that touches her. Avoids rather than seeks. Her eyes are closed. She floats.
Ten years ago in the midst of a profound depression/breakdown. When I surface at last, after much, much suffering, why is the “solution” always children?
18 DECEMBER
Why shouldn’t the old models, which are working with less and less success, be challenged—the world reimagined? Heterosexual privilege and power—and all its attendant rigmarole. Such a system, if it were to be taken seriously, would have precluded me from having a child. Luckily I have never taken it even the least bit seriously.
But I have been outside of everything from the beginning—except the system of love. My mother’s love and care for all those years, my father’s mildness and iconoclasm, have allowed me the audacity, the courage to do what I must. But I resent, I do, that it should have to take what seems like so much more than even the ordinary courage just to be happy. Just to live. Things most take for granted. Still I am grateful for the confidence to be flexible, to do what I must, without inordinate anger or fear.
The future for you, but not only for you.
Stamped on the street some years ago before Gay Pride Weekend: Every Kiss a Revolution.
The jig, I’m afraid, is increasingly closer to being up. As soon as cloning is perfected. A sheep now made from two eggs… Dolly.
Ate for lunch today many turkey sandwiches.
When I was little my mother was always pregnant. No one ever explained to me how this happened, and my assumption of course was that it was all some cruel and useless roulette: God would decide and that was that. The question was how to hide from Him, how to make yourself invisible, inconspicuous. All women victims of His Whims. My mother always seemed to me exhausted, burdened. All the responsibility fell to her. It was a terrible thing. I felt for her a great deal.
When I was little, and God was big.
Our lake life. Bliss in every way. Except—something nags, gnaws—even in my preconsciousness, when I was very, very young. Why are there always so many babies? We live—minuscule, laughable creatures on that bobbing platform in water at the mercy of that whimsical, practical-joking God—women do, girls do, even here in Paradise, in bright light, next to shining water. I am always braced for the news: we are having another baby.
I decided early on through sheer will, through presence of mind, sheer attentiveness, whatever it might take, that I would not allow this to happen to me. I remember as a little girl repeating it in my room over and over and over. Casting spells to keep Him away. I would ask Mary when the time came to intercede on my behalf. So enormous a hindrance to living one’s life, children seemed to me. I could not have been more than eight years old at the time.
And when I got my first period at twelve years old, one of the first things my mother said to me was, now you can have a baby. I sat at the dark keyboard practicing my scales, and wept.
And a few years later when she comes into my room and asks whether I would mind sharing my room with a new baby. Yes, I say, I would mind. The child never arrives. I do not ask why.
A cautionary tale I took to heart.
I think of my mother often these days. That she did not have a mother to talk with, to console her, to reassure her as she went through her pregnancies. And pregnancy of course brings up one’s own mother hundreds of times.
No feminine support of any sort for her back then. I feel her loss more keenly now than ever before. A loss now over fifty years old.
Poverty. A mortally ill mother. Other things, unmentioned. The saddest of all childhoods.
I tell them on the way to the concert that in this child I will have a part of them always. I picture their deaths, the way I did obsessively when I was little. This makes me weep uncontrollably as we drive through the darkness and the cold. I am a child again. Completely vulnerable. I have always loved them too much. My father is beginning to speak again. He has found the way to voice his concerns: what about money? What about my writing? What about my health? Will it be dangerous?
Th
e most difficult things about having a baby at my age are, first, conceiving at all; second, keeping the child, that is, not miscarrying in the first trimester; and third, getting past the possibility of birth defects. All those old eggs, etc. All that bad environment on the body. All the compromised earth one has taken in having lived this long. Oh, God. The third is the only real worry now.
And money? It comes, it goes, there is nothing really that can be done about it. At least I have a so-called real job. My writing? I pretend I am not worried about it. It will make my writing better, I say, having no real idea what I am talking about.
Apparently if I can make it through the first trimester and the amniocentesis, then I am as home free as anyone ever is in this. Some risk, but not undo. He is concerned about me. I am his daughter. His firstborn. Of course.
Exhilarating to finally be this near to having a child on my own terms. To have made the whole thing up.
The Lord is with thee… Never have I understood these words as I understand them now. Certainly someone, certainly someone or something is with me. The light is with me—at least that.
That I had walked at 4 A.M., most terrible hour of the day, of the night, in utter fear and dread, in utter sorrow, scarcely breathing, to kiss my dead friend good-bye, and that now I walk through that exact door again in such elation and hope, and some fear also. It does not seem possible, not in one lifetime. West Twelfth Street. Saint Vincent’s Hospital.
That same threshold.
No visitor’s passes needed to visit the dead. They direct me solemnly an alternate way. I still remember.
A journal is interesting in that it records the instants of life as they pass. And an instant of thought and of writing as it takes shape, the words as they form. Fragile, evolving, and in motion. Continuous and discontinuous. Stated, erased, restated. Not made or shaped as fiction for the most part is. Not one invented thing. As much as is possible.
An honoring of the contingent, the mark on the page—without embellishment, without revision or amendment.
The revolving doors were locked at 4 A.M. Michael and I had breakfast together afterwards. Patrick later in the hallway, because I went back, because I could not leave yet. Where is Gary?
He’s been taken to be cremated, I think.
I am losing a certain edge. What a relief to be a little free of myself. A break from the intensity. This bovine happiness. I think about trying to complete Frida but it seems far away—and I’m really too sleepy. I am only grateful that I finished every single aspect of Defiance before this all began. It would not have been possible to keep up the tautness of mind, the high rage that fueled it, the extremity of emotion. Even back then I had to work hard to keep up that emotional tenor. I am frightened to even read from it out loud with this child in me. I do not want her to hear. I can scarcely believe I was once, and not so long ago, the person who wrote that book. When the (extensive) corrections to the galleys arrive for checking one final time I only glance at them with my side eyes.
I did my best. Especially considering part of me was never there for it. I knew even then that I was writing for the last time in a quaint and fast-waning tradition: the conventional novel. Well, conventional more or less.
Is it not the oddest combination of tenderness and resignation, the way I feel now?
I feel at last prepared, when the time comes, to die. I know it will be all right. God bathes us in hormones for death. Of this I am quite certain now. And protects us. As I am protected now. All worry has dissolved. I hover above the world without a care.
The quality of the fatigue, which is different than any other: the fatigue after hard work in the garden, or after swimming, or after writing, or the fatigue that comes with concern or worry. It is like none of those fatigues. And the quality of hunger—as if one is eating for one’s very life. The urgency of the need for protein. These have both been revelations for me—but perhaps the most extraordinary of all is the quality of music. Listening today to The Magic Flute. Almost impossible. Unbearable in its beauty. Unable to contain my emotion I wept into my bathtub in Providence, where I sat trying to—what else—read student papers. I remember after Gary’s death how it was nearly impossible to listen to music. Music too beautiful then, too, but in an entirely different way. That music should exist at all seemed an impossibility.
The swelling. The body begins to transform itself.
My life a transfigured rose.
You died at Saint Vincent’s, and it is where I shall give birth. I have not walked into that hospital since the night I said goodbye before they took you away to be burned. I have been afraid many times in my life, but I have never been as afraid as that night. And how for a year afterwards I changed all walking routes so as not ever to have to pass that place. A little difficult with Angela there on Greenwich Avenue—still, I could not. Next week is the amnio and I will walk through those doors again. The same entry way—West Twelfth Street. How is it possible that so much sorrow and so much joy, and right up to the last moment, so much hope—can be held by that entryway? Eleven years separate the events. I still miss you. More than I can say.
I do feel a little better understanding that you were probably bathed in those death hormones. And that protection came. This has been a way back to you. We purposely chose Saint Vincent’s. It is what I wanted.
Having conceived her, having kept her this long, I am home free, I tell myself. Foolish to think…
Here then my foolproof test for whether one is pregnant:
The inability to listen to Mozart.
The desire to wear nothing but cashmere.
Uncontrollable cravings for protein. Milk, cheese, beasts, egg-salad sandwiches. Egg-salad sandwiches?
I request that we not have lamb or veal for Christmas dinner. Just not in the mood to eat babies this year.
Emily, my niece, in fatigue moves toward the baby, flings herself on the belly—going back to the place of her making, toward the little one she was not so long ago. Her thumb in her mouth. Something I haven’t seen her do in some time.
Although I love fish, not a morsel of fish since I have become pregnant has passed my lips. Christmas Eve and the traditional seven fish stare at me and I stare back. Is it the body rejecting the sea’s impurities? Some sort of intelligence is at work, I guess. I do not question.
Never have I felt happier. Enjoying immensely my identification with the Virgin. Steve insists if anyone is capable of an Immaculate Conception… I quite like the idea.
Christmas Week.
A fluttering—without doubt. Small bird. A fluttering in the belly—strange motion. Late at night.
This life inside a life—now palpable in another way. Swim. Live.
A Dr. Seuss book to read to the child in utero—a gift. I think the only things I will be able to read to the baby are Gertrude Stein, Dr. Seuss, poetry, Beatrix Potter.
More green eggs and ham please! I request from the bed. Sam I am.
In the doctor’s office today for a routine checkup. Fifth Avenue at Nineteenth Street. These precious days. Dr. Rehrer, very cool, low key, like a friend really. For Manhattan you are not even an old mother, she jokes. It will be fine. But she has been sick intermittently and hard to see. Now I see her partner, Dr. Dennis Matheson, most of the time. Everyone is relaxed over there. Happy to have babies around in every stage of becoming. The most natural thing in the world, he says.
I know that many women get a great dark stripe down their bellies when they are pregnant, and I request one please from Doctor M., but he just smiles. Not everyone, he informs me, gets one. Still, it is possible, of course, I tell him. I don’t think so, he says, shaking his head.
Olivia, Helen’s niece, on receipt of the news, joyously: “I know a beautiful name for a baby! Kalina!”
I think of the birth marked each year at this time. The amniocentesis next week. How can I summon the courage to know what to do if the results show a problem? The occurrence of Down’s syndrome in women over thirty-five. I
look at the graph. How it rises and rises every year after that. I must somehow prepare—even though I feel exempt, free from harm. Carrying this charm.
30 DECEMBER, TUESDAY
Quickly I walked through the entrance to Saint Vincent’s. Fear not, he said. Fear not. Helen would be with me shortly—she had gone to park the car. Amnio today. It was snowing.
First we were ushered in to see the geneticist. I felt a little nervous, but not too nervous.
We were shown the chromosomes on film, which looked beautiful, translucent. We saw perfect ones, we saw defective ones—all beautiful I thought to myself. The counselor is as reassuring as possible. Sitting there I tried in different perfectly senseless ways to run the odds in my head. When I got home finally to my perfect sanctuary of worry I pored over the pregnancy books looking for hopeful things.
Dr. Mangano, who is, despite his name, Japanese, I think, performs a high-tech sonogram, and makes all kinds of measurements, takes all kinds of pictures. What a gorgeous sight. The spine like a fish bone. The great blossom, the bloom of the heart with its four chambers. Beating. It looks like a small bird in flight. Helen is holding my hand. First the baby is sucking its thumb. Then it seems to be waving. The doctor, as astounded as if this were the first time he was seeing a child in the womb. He stares, riveted. “What a beautiful—” he says, and then trails off, adjusting the focus.
“What a beautiful what?” we cry out.
“What a beautiful brain!”
Brain! We sigh.
“Look! Look!” he says, completely engrossed. “Would you like to know the sex?” Yes, we say, please, and it seems like for ever before he says he thinks it’s a girl. He thinks it’s a girl. And at this news I begin to weep. Helen holds my hand. And such a pretty face. Look, he says, “she has a mouth like Brigitte Bardot.” We stare incredulously into the shadows. No!