by Tracy Slater
When our soup came, I eyed Lisa’s tempura. Her beer held no appeal, but suddenly the batter-covered shrimp sent a bolt of hunger through me. “Oh, my God, gimme one of those, please? Think I’m getting better already.”
After I ate the shrimp and finished my bowl of soup, my belly felt a little better.
“Leave it to me to crave tempura even when I have a stomach bug.”
“Maybe you’re pregnant!”
“Ha!” Then I added, “That would be like a granny getting knocked up. No way. I’m halfway to my forty-sixth birthday already. Think I’m just an oinker. Anyway, I just got my period, like, ten days ago.”
“Poor littlest!” Lisa said again, downing the rest of her beer.
If someone who had kids had made a joke about my suddenly becoming pregnant, I would have been annoyed. But now we just laughed.
• • •
A FEW MORNINGS LATER, I finished an hour of slow yoga in our tatami room before heading to the hospital for visiting hours. I still felt a little sick, but I had no fever. As I finished my last yoga stretch, I lay on the soft tatami mats and felt my limbs, watery and loose. Breathing easily, I rested a minute longer, and Lisa’s voice popped into my head. “Maybe you’re pregnant!” Then, “poor littlest!” and our laughter.
After a few minutes, I went into the bathroom, peeling off my Lycra top and turning on the hot water. I opened the closet door to grab a towel. Reaching in, I saw an old pregnancy test. I hadn’t used one in months. I turned it over, looked at the date stamped on the back of its shiny packaging. Not yet expired. But almost.
I let the shower run, waiting for it to steam, and felt the familiar tightening in my bladder from hearing water through a faucet. I stared at the package in my fist, then kept my palm curled around it while I streaked to our tiny toilet room next to the shower. Might as well use it, just because, I thought, looking again at the impending expiration date. I’d heard women approaching menopause sometimes got very faint false positives on early pregnancy tests from their hormones being so out of whack. Maybe I’ll get my first confirmation of perimenopause.
A few minutes later, the shower still running but now way past steaming, my entire body naked and shaking, my arms feeling like they might abandon their sockets, I grabbed my cell phone and texted Toru at work. The pregnancy test was positive. Not a faint positive, but the darkest one I’d ever seen. “What should I do?” I typed madly into the phone.
Trembling, I waited for Toru’s response. “Stay calm” came the first text. Then, “Keep warm your belly.”
I went back to the clinic where I’d gone before I’d ever started IVF. After I passed a urine sample through a tiny white window in the bathroom wall, a nurse called me into a closet-sized room. She spoke no English, so I tried to explain that I’d taken a pregnancy test that morning and seen a strong positive, but I’d just had my period ten days ago, so how could that be? Was it early menopause? The nurse motioned me into a larger room next door, where I repeated my confused tale for a doctor I’d never met. She tipped a stick in front of her toward me. On their test, too, the second line was as dark as ink.
She asked me when my period before the last one had started, and I puzzled over dates in my head. About six weeks ago? I guessed. I expected her to suggest a blood test, but she motioned me into the examining room a few doors down. Minutes later, she shifted the ultrasound screen toward me. Then she pointed to what she explained was my uterus, circling her finger around a dark mass inside it. Together, we watched as a little white light beat rapidly at its center.
The doctor measured the blinking blob and estimated I was almost seven weeks along. My spotting three weeks earlier had been early pregnancy bleeding, and now the embryo inside me was already throbbing out a strong, steady heartbeat.
Standing outside the clinic, shaking once more, I called Toru, and we repeated over and over to each other how incredible it all was, how stunning the news. “I guess, there goes the theory that if you just relax or stop trying you’ll get pregnant,” I said, since technically we’d still been trying, although without medical intervention, and we both felt racked with stress from his father’s illness.
Then we discussed telling Otosan, even though with my history of miscarriage and my age, we knew the situation was precarious. “But maybe it might give him some happiness, some hope,” I urged, and Toru agreed. His father might not even remember the pregnancy in a few days, so if I miscarried, we wouldn’t have to tell him that. Yet the echo of hearing happy news now might linger somewhere in his mind, might fortify him somehow to think of a lasting legacy growing with the potential of a first grandchild.
“Otosan,” I said that afternoon at his bedside, trying to swallow down a pale wave of nausea, “I have a secret.” He looked up at me and blinked, his body swathed in sheets and blankets, an IV line snaking from beneath. He was too weak to raise his head.
“Ninshin desu! Akachan-wa naka-ni!” “I’m pregnant! A baby is inside!” I patted my stomach to supplement my broken Japanese, then raised a finger to my lips. Otosan’s eyes went wider. He tried to clear his throat, considered the news for a moment, then whispered in English, “Does Toru know?”
I laughed. “Of course!” Switching back to Japanese, I attempted to explain the series of events: stomach felt sick, went to doctor, doctor gave me tests and looked and saw the baby inside, and Toru and I were so surprised. Otosan mulled the details for another moment longer. “Itsu?” he asked. “When will the baby come?”
January, I told him, and then he grabbed my hand and kissed it, and then he burst into tears.
• • •
BY THE TENTH week of my pregnancy, the clinic urged me to find a maternity hospital where I would be assigned an OB and, we hoped, give birth. They recommended screenings, too, because of my age and the increased incidence of genetic abnormalities for babies born to mothers past thirty-five. We had my first screening in my thirteenth week, a high resolution “nuchal” scan that tracks fetal measurements coinciding with Down’s syndrome as well as spinal and heart defects. The baby’s heart and spine looked fine, the doctor told us. But the fluid around its neck was just slightly more abundant than usual. Combining this measurement with my age, we were looking at a one-in-five chance of Down’s.
Driving to see his father that day after the scan, Toru remained upbeat, even though by now Otosan was hardly able to whisper. His veins were sometimes too weak for the IV, his wrists, arms, and ankles covered with bruises from where the nurses tried, and failed, to jam the line into a viable spot, and the hospital had encouraged Toru to begin looking for hospices. About the baby, though, he remained confident. “I really think baby is fine,” Toru told me, his hands clasped lightly on the wheel as he turned through traffic. “But I worry you,” he said, after I had burst into tears in the doctor’s office, the scan results pinned to the wall in front of us while a nurse reviewed them in Japanese and Toru translated. As usual, he was more optimistic than I. But now I wasn’t only scared, I was also torn.
When we had started trying to have a baby, five years earlier, Toru and I had agreed that if we learned the child would have a serious genetic abnormality we would terminate the pregnancy. Because of our age, Toru had said, we probably wouldn’t survive long enough to care for an adult child who couldn’t live alone. I’d agreed, not knowing in my heart whether I could even care for a baby who was healthy, let alone one with special needs.
Now, though, I sat in the car and stared dumbly at the dashboard, and the maze outside the windshield barely registered. I knew this was not the time to talk about terminating a pregnancy, or not terminating one and signing up for a lifetime of caretaking—exhausted and headed as we were to ache over the bedside of Otosan as his body faded further. But I also knew I wasn’t sure anymore I could stick to our original agreement. I didn’t know how Toru felt, but it seemed inconceivable to me that we would not do everything we could to finally hold this b
aby, in whatever form it came to us. Especially when Otosan was slipping away from us at the same time.
At the hospital, Toru asked his father to name the baby, although by now we all knew he’d never get to meet it. Then, within a few days, Otosan stopped being able to whisper, and he went silent, whatever names he’d chosen buried in a morphine haze. As I passed into my second trimester, the threshold beyond which the baby would most likely survive until birth, Otosan died. It was a Saturday afternoon in late July, and Toru and Kei dressed their father, now gone but still in his hospital bed, two nurses by their side who helped remove his gown and cover him in the pants and button-down shirt in which he would be cremated.
A few days later, we gathered at the crematorium to bid Otosan’s body a final good-bye. I felt my hand go instinctively to my stomach as a uniformed man pulled a metal tray out of the elevator leading to the furnace, and Otosan’s bones emerged, pieces of his skeleton shockingly intact amidst layers of white ash. Then Toru and I, Kei and her husband, Michiko-san and Hamatani-san, and Otosan’s only surviving brother and his wife each took turns picking up pieces of the bones with chopsticks, while another attendant wrapped them in a white box and cloth, which we would eventually bury next to Toru’s mother.
We had the baby’s final screening soon after, derived from a sample of my own blood containing both my and the fetus’s DNA. Then we waited three weeks for the results, the air around me feeling lighter, grayer, as if an uncomfortable weightlessness had materialized, a vacuum in the sudden absence of Toru’s father. I didn’t bring up whether we would terminate the pregnancy depending on the screening’s outcome, even though I knew I should discuss it with Toru. But how to broach that subject in the airless swamp of his mourning? Besides, I thought, by the time we get the results, it will be almost twenty weeks. Almost too late to terminate. I didn’t have Toru’s firm optimism about the baby being fine, but I was hoping time might make some decisions for us.
• • •
ONE MORNING IN mid-August, on another Skype call with my Cambridge therapist, she broached the topic of what we would do if the baby’s results showed evidence of either Down’s syndrome or a more serious chromosomal abnormality. She understood my reluctance to bring up the topic with Toru, given his recent loss, but she urged me to consider the repercussions of not discussing it: that when the test results finally came back, if the baby wasn’t healthy, we wouldn’t have a lot of time to make a joint decision, especially since we had spent years assuming we were on the same page about raising a child with a genetic disease.
I recalled the day we’d had the final screening. Before they drew my blood, the hospital had required us to meet with a genetic counselor who showed us a chart of statistics about chromosomal abnormalities and maternal age. The chart stopped at forty-four. “You’ll be forty-five when you deliver?” she asked in Japanese. “Forty-six. And a half,” I said, peering at the paper. “But you look so young!” she assured me, and then she laughed and waved her hand over the list, as if to convince me not to worry that I was two years past its most dire statistic.
I knew my therapist was right. If the test came back negative, it would provide a 99 percent guarantee the baby did not have Down’s, as well as significant assurance about two more serious conditions, putting our minds at ease. But positive results were more precarious to read and required follow-up testing, and then we’d have to wait for an amniocentesis, a more invasive procedure with a chance of causing miscarriage. Which would put us right near the twenty-four-week threshold, when abortion in Japan became illegal.
“It’s not that I’m sure I wouldn’t terminate the pregnancy,” I tried to explain. “Although I really think I couldn’t,” I added quickly, my hand once more traveling to my stomach. I thought back to my earlier realization of what I’d learned from all my years of fertility treatments: that you never know what you’ll choose when faced with difficult options, when reality is pushed up against your nose, despite what you always felt sure you’d do in the abstract. So I knew that, even though now I didn’t think I could terminate this pregnancy, who could say how I’d actually feel if we learned our baby was nothing like we’d always pictured? If we were suddenly asked to devote the rest of our lives to caring for a child who might never grow to independence? Or, with one of the conditions more serious than Down’s, an infant incapable of living past the first few days of life?
“If the baby has some kind of genetic disorder that would cause great suffering, would create great pain and an inability to survive much past birth, then, yes, probably I would need to face, to choose termination,” I told my shrink. “Although I think that’s unlikely, given that some physical evidence of this would have probably been visible on the nuchal scan.
“But Down’s?” I said, after another moment. “Down’s seems really different to me all of a sudden. Although who knows what I would think or choose if push comes to shove,” I added, trying my hardest to be accurate. Then I thought about Toru’s father, about losing him so close to when we might have to make a decision about losing the baby, and I felt my voice catch.
“Go on,” she said, after a brief silence.
I stared around the living room, wrapped the headset cord around my index finger, then tried to steady my voice.
“It’s just that . . . I think maybe a baby with Down’s could have a good life, a fulfilling life, despite the chromosomal abnormality.” I fell silent again for another minute, lifting my eyes to the ceiling while I tried to imagine a baby with half-Japanese, half-Western features and eyes slightly wider than average. I pictured walking down the sidewalk in our Osaka neighborhood with a little child toddling left and right, dark-haired and gentle. What would the neighbors notice first? Its Western traits or its slightly skewed expression?
Then I imagined reading everything I could about Down’s syndrome, learning about all its different variations, throwing myself into theories about guiding a child with this genetic trait through a life as full and joyful as possible. I wondered about which hidden joys I myself might find therein, how the experience would shape me, might both limit and grow me, how I would draw a community of similarly configured families around me. It was something I could start to picture.
I began speaking again. “And I think, maybe, that I could be a good mother to a child with Down’s syndrome.” My shrink was silent.
After a beat, she let out a soft “Wow.”
“What?”
“Wow,” she said again. “It’s just that I’ve never heard you say that. In all these years, Tracy, in all these years of trying, I’ve never heard you say that you thought you could be a good mother. To any kind of child. And now I hear that. I hear you, clear and sure.” She stopped speaking for a moment, then added, “And that’s huge.”
“Huh,” I said. I hadn’t thought about it before, but now I realized she was right. Something in me had changed, something about my faith in my ability not just to survive but to prize the all-consuming demands of love. Then I knew: this is what Otosan had given me.
After we hung up, I thought about all the challenges, the drudgery, really, of taking care of Otosan as he declined and trying to be there for Toru while it happened. The diaper changes. The late-night showers, the furtive carpet scrubbings, the anxious hours in the hospital (surrounded once again by people who didn’t speak my language). All of it made not just manageable but somehow, alongside the stress and the smells and the exhaustion, something precious, because it was a part of my bond with both of them.
It was only a year or so, I knew, of being bound to an illness bigger than us all. It was surely less demanding than the 24/7 commitment of motherhood. It had been thoroughly overwhelming. But when it ended, I’d wished we’d had more time. And in a flash, I’d choose to do it all again. Maybe that’s what makes love bearable, I thought. The bond, the closeness, the interdependence, the white-hot desire to soothe, to care for, to be together for as long as
possible. It wouldn’t make the outsized stress of caretaking, or of parenthood—with any child, I assumed—go away. It just made it worth it. Gave us a shot at being bigger than all the ways love could take us away from ourselves and then eventually deliver us back.
EPILOGUE: LANDING
Toru and I are lying in bed, almost twenty-four weeks into my pregnancy. Less than a month earlier, we’d gotten the baby’s test results, and I was bowled over that all were negative. As far as the doctors could tell, I would give birth to a healthy girl at the end of January. Toru nodded his head when we heard the news, my husband lightly confirming that, yes, once again, his immutable optimism had been proven correct.
I’m heading back to Boston in a few days to spend three weeks at home before I get too big to travel. I’m excited about being back in the U.S., about seeing my family and friends, eating all the American food I’ve been craving. I don’t know how much longer my own parents will remain healthy, and now I have some small sense of what it might mean to lose them.
But I’m nervous, too. I never guessed when I left Boston last time that I’d be coming back again in less than a year, likely for the last time ever without a child—or at least the last time in eighteen years. How will I sustain my connection to Boston now that our baby is on the way? Could Toru and I move to the U.S. more easily now, or at least eventually, without his father to take care of? Could we even afford to have a baby and a vital connection to two countries at once? Although I realize Japan will never exactly feel like home, I can’t deny it has become an eternal part of me: where my husband will always feel most grounded, where Otosan’s remains will rest forever, where my baby will be both born and from. In a sense, the country and culture have now become an irrevocable part of my body, the flesh of my flesh, deriving from a foreign world. How does one reconcile such paradoxes?
And how will a baby change my relationship with Toru? I don’t know anyone with an infant who doesn’t at one point or another hate her husband or partner. The stress of a newborn presents one of modern marriage’s greatest challenges. Toru and I may have been blessed up to this point with a dynamic of uncommon ease, but the flip side of not being fighters is that you never really learn how to fight well. I’m nervous now about how we’ll deal with this new trial. Have we developed the tools we need to manage a new gulf if one opens between us? (When I bring up this fear to Toru, he says with utter certainty, “It will be okay! Of course I can deal with your bad moods,” which makes me think perhaps he’s missed the point.)