by Tina Traster
Thirteen
It is 9:00 PM on Thursday, November 27. It is Thanksgiving Day, or at least it was when we left New York. We’ve come to London to spend four days with Leah and Brian and their two children, Maddy and Josh. At first it seemed sacrilegious when Ricky suggested Thanksgiving away from home and family, but I thought about it and it made sense. I’m barely speaking with my parents. They have not formed a bond with Julia. The same can be said about Ricky’s family. So here we are, on a whim, at Heathrow Airport.
“There he is,” I yell, squinting to see the name on the placard.
We hasten our step. Ricky is holding Julia in one arm and pulling our luggage with the other. I’m carrying lighter bags and clutching Julia’s jacket. Her eyes are big round saucers, drinking in the commotion of humanity. I wave at the skinny man in the ill-fitting suit and floppy driver’s cap.
“Hi, we’re the Tannenbaums. Leah sent you, yes?”
“That’s right,” he says. “Can I give you a hand with your baggage, sir?” he asks, bending down before Ricky has a chance to answer.
He lifts the small suitcase with a grunt and says, “Wait o’er ’ere, love. I’ll bring the car around.”
Leah and I met when I lived in London from 1981 through 1987. Even now with an ocean between us, I think of her as the friend who understands me best.
Leah is waiting outside in a misty drizzle when we drive up along the shiny curb next to her house. Her blonde hair is blonder, cropped. She’s wrapped in a gray wool cape, hunched slightly forward to shield the damp. She walks to the driver’s window and leans in.
“Go ahead and put that on my account.”
She straightens up and hugs Ricky as he exits the car.
“You’ve made it,” she says, air kissing.
“Good to see you.”
She pokes her head into the car.
“Hello, gorgeous,” she says to me.
I want to hug her, but I’ve got Julia on my lap.
“Shall I take her from you?” she asks.
“Please do.”
Julia hasn’t slept since we left New York ten hours ago. She could not settle down on the plane. Up and down she went in her seat, manically playing I spy with the people in the row behind us.
Leah tugs Julia sideways from my lap. She holds her with one arm, like a Frenchman clasping a baguette, and then extends her other hand to fish me out of the car.
“Out you git, old girl,” she says. We hug.
We walk through a gate inside a high stone wall and snake through a warren of rooms. Ricky tramps behind like an agreeable mule.
“Brian’s back tomorrow night,” Leah says. “The kids are already asleep. Why don’t you settle in and we’ll have a nosh. Dirty diapers go there. I’ve left some things in the fridge. Yogurts and such. Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Let me change Julia,” Ricky says, while she wriggles fiercely to get out of his arms. “I’ll get her in pajamas. Maybe she’ll go down after that.”
“God, I hope so,” I say.
I flop onto a bed with a fluffy white down comforter and curl into a fetal position. My lids are heavy, and my throat is dry from the stale plane air. I faintly hear Ricky puttering about with Julia. I know how lucky I am to have a husband who is so involved in raising our child, though sometimes I wonder if he’s like that because I fall short.
I’m startled when Ricky nudges me.
“Do you want me to let you sleep?” he says softly.
“No, no, sorry, I’ll get up. Leah’s waiting for us. How long was I sleeping?”
“About twenty minutes. Julia’s down in the crib. Went to sleep right away.”
The blue sky is rinsed with streaky white clouds, nice for a London morning in November. Leah’s house is a beehive of activity. Maddy, Leah’s six-year-old, watches television. Josh, a cherubic boy with coiled blond curls trailing to his bare shoulders, zips around the living room in his diaper on a plastic truck, making vroom vroom noises. Ricky feeds Julia in a high chair at the dining room table. Leah gives instructions to a tanned young women who’s nodding dutifully. The table is filled with juice, jam, breads, muesli, and empty teacups.
“Hello, sleeping beauty. Help yourself,” Leah says. “Maddy, you have to eat before school.”
“I don’t want to,” she hisses.
“I know, darling, but you must. Come have a piece of toast. Make Mummy happy.”
“I don’t want to,” she whines louder.
“Tina, this is Katya,” Leah says. “She’s our nanny.”
Katya holds out a hand to shake mine.
“Lovely to meet you,” she says.
“And you,” I say.
“I’m taking Maddy to school in twenty minutes. We’ll leave for Kenwood around 11:00 AM.”
The morning chill is refreshing. North London splays before us from Kenwood, a historic hillside estate with a grand house and manicured grounds. Ricky pushes Julia in a borrowed stroller, Leah pushes Josh, and I walk in the middle of my two favorite people. We cover all the familiar topics: my relationship with my parents, Leah’s family, my work, the rock bands Brian manages, updates on people we both know.
We park Ricky at a table with the two strollers and the babies.
“Be right back. We’ll get some sandwiches.” Leah loops her arm through mine. We are alone for the first time. “How’s motherhood?”
“Not exactly what I was expecting.”
Leah nods in a way that tells me I don’t have to say any more. I also know I can say what I think without feeling judged.
“You look tired, thin,” she says. “Is Julia a bad sleeper?”
“No, not at all. It’s not that. I’m just, I don’t know, overwhelmed. I’m not, how can I say this, feeling the joy. Does that make sense? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love Julia and I realize how blessed we are, but I am exhausted and I have stomachaches all the time.”
“Why don’t you think about getting a part-time nanny, someone reliable, so you’ll have separate time to work and you’ll feel more present when you’re with Julia?” she suggests. “I know how it is. It’s very hard to plunge into motherhood after forty. I mean, come on, you had a whole life before, and then suddenly, it’s hijacked.”
“You’re right. It has been a really difficult transition, but it’s more than just how different things were before Julia got here. The whole experience feels, I don’t know, like I’m not in my own skin. It feels like the most unnatural thing I’ve ever done, which is the last thing I expected to feel about motherhood, you know?”
“I think you need to balance things up. I know how hard you work, and you need to delineate your time. Think about it. I couldn’t live without Katya. She’s a lifesaver.”
I nod but say nothing. I fantasize what a day might look like if I had a nanny like Katya, and it sends an exhilarating tingle up my spine. Then I see myself handing Julia off to a stranger and I feel guilty.
Since becoming a mother, I have been caught in a revolving-door conversation with myself. Would everything be different if Julia had been a birth child? Of course it would. Would I have had a nanny lined up from the start, knowing I had to work? Probably. The idea of bonding with my child would have been a given or at least a strong assumption. Do I owe it to Julia to be her full-time caretaker? Do I owe her this because of what she’s lost? I’m in a surreal corn maze with no sense of direction.
We carry sandwiches back to the table. I pull out a yogurt for Julia, and she gobbles it down. I cut strawberries and hand her tiny pieces.
Leah hovers over Josh waving a piece of cheese. The baby thrashes, volleying his pinched-up face from side to side, spitting.
“C’mon Joshy,” Leah says. “C’mon, be a good boy.”
“Does he want a yogurt?” Ricky says. “We have an extra in the bag.”
“No,” Leah says, furrowing her brow. “It’s not that. He won’t let me feed him. He wants Katya. He thinks she’s his mother.”
“
What?” I say, surprised.
“It’s true. He spends most of his time with her. We haven’t formed a true bond yet.”
Her words nearly knock me off my seat. I rest my sandwich. “What? What did you just say?”
“I don’t think we’re really bonded yet. He doesn’t seem to think I’m his mum.”
Leah says this without any kind of pained expression on her face.
In that moment, I feel an odd feeling of satisfaction. One of the women I admire most in the world has not bonded with her baby, and she’s not drowning in despair. She simply accepts that her eleven-month-old son, at least for now, is more attached to his nanny, but that over time, he’ll love her. Her confidence is not in shambles. She’s not beating herself up.
Leah makes one more attempt to feed the baby.
“Okay, Josh, suit yourself,” Leah says, taking the food away from the baby and putting it back in her large bag.
The next three days, Ricky and I are treated to a whirlwind of pleasure: a film screening, theater, restaurants. Katya minds the three children.
On Sunday morning I squeeze Leah tightly, wishing we could stay longer.
“Thanks so much for everything.”
“You’d better go. You might hit traffic on the M4.”
Ricky and Julia are in the backseat. I slide in. Ricky hands me a tissue.
“It was a good trip,” he says.
On the plane, I take out my diary and jot notes.
I write, “Hire full-time nanny,” and I run a circle around the phrase three times.
Julia is sitting in the seat between Ricky and me. I lean over her and show Ricky the notation.
I search his eyes for approval.
Ricky reads the words and nods.
“Yes?” I say.
“Absolutely.”
Fourteen
“I almost forgot,” Anna says, slipping back into the apartment. “I made a set of these for you.” She fishes for an envelope in her bulging faux leather bag and hands it to me with a beam of pride splashed across her young, fresh face. Inside is a batch of photos from the mommy-and-me ballet class Anna takes Julia to. I shuffle slowly through the stack, gazing at the images of tiny, tippy-toed ballerinas twirling, spinning, leaping in their pink bodysuits, tutus, and soft slippers. I see a little girl I don’t know in these pictures. Julia participating in a group. She’s part of something. One of. That’s how it seems, anyway. She’s not off in a corner or outside the circle. I draw one of the pictures closer to my eyes. Julia sits snugly against Anna looking relaxed. Anna has tied back her thin blonde strands with a pink ribbon. With Anna’s blonde hair, blue eyes, and broad Polish face, she and Julia look more like mother and child than Julia and I do. I teeter on that thin line between horror and delight. The thought of Julia being in sync with another woman is heartening, even though that woman is not me.
“These are wonderful,” I say, rearranging my taut face into a smile. “Thank you so much.”
I hug her briefly.
“I’m glad you like them,” she says, gingerly reopening the front door. “I better go. See you tomorrow.”
Her footsteps fade as she walks to the elevator. I reopen the door quickly and call out her name, but it’s too late. The elevator doors groan shut.
“Never mind,” I say to myself. “Another time.”
I wanted to ask Anna what it’s like when she’s with Julia. How she feels. Is it satisfying? Has she enjoyed being her nanny these past three months? When Anna came for the interview in late December, she glowed when she talked about two children she had taken care of for three years. She carried a picture of them. “These are my children,” she had said, showing me the frayed photograph she kept in her wallet. Ricky thought it was slick salesmanship. I believed it was genuine love. When I called the mother of those children as a reference before hiring Anna, the woman gushed about Anna’s dedication to her babies.
Having Anna take care of Julia five days a week from nine to five while I work has released me from a suffocating inert existence. I can eat without constriction in my throat. I can go to the bathroom without straining. I can think. I had no idea caring for a baby all day long would leave me unable to care for myself, but it did. I wasn’t able to coalesce with my child, to find a rhythm where neither of us was sacrificed. Constant preoccupation with her needs and mine wiped out moments that should have filled me, her, us, with joy. Ultimately I felt like an interloper in the mommy-and-me group I founded, and we stopped going. Never have I failed at anything so spectacularly.
Anna is reliable, cheerful, and tender with Julia. She arrives every morning on time, carefully coiffed, a vision of loveliness. No matter how cold it is outside, she doesn’t complain. She has found ways for her and Julia to fill long days outside the apartment so I can work. In addition to mommy-and-me classes, she does what I used to do: she strolls the avenues, ducking into Barnes & Noble and other shops to pass the time. She also has nanny friends with young charges. She tells me they congregate in apartments where the babies play. I’ve gone from being completely frightened of having a stranger handle Julia to being ecstatically happy to have regained some of my freedom. When I spoke to Leah the other day, she said, “You did the right thing. There’s no shame in having help.” The first few weeks were a little nerve-racking. I’d check in with Anna every few hours on her cell, but I quickly felt I could trust her. Now I don’t talk to her until she brings Julia back at the end of the day.
I imagine a conversation in which I look into Anna’s blue eyes and ask her: Do you love her? Does she love you? Do you love her the way you loved the two children you used to care for? I need to know this, because I want to know if Julia can attach.
Anna is stoic, professional, and practical, and if she’s having issues with Julia, she doesn’t let on. But I have noticed that when she arrives in the morning, Julia doesn’t run and greet her. At the same time Julia doesn’t put up a fuss when Anna puts on her jacket and hat and wheels her out of the apartment. She shows no distress at leaving me. At day’s end, Julia tumbles into the apartment. She’s not affectionate or clingy with Anna. Did Anna need to hold Julia tight when someone snapped that loving photo? When Anna calls out to Julia and says “good-bye,” Julia doesn’t respond. She doesn’t even look up.
I’m afraid that asking Anna these questions would cause her cheeks to puff up, her face to redden. Of course I do, she’d say, emphasizing each word with staccato crispness. I don’t want to put her on the spot. I don’t want her to tell me she loves Julia to protect her job. Or to protect me.
I run through the photos one more time. In one Julia is sitting on the wooden floor, her chubby legs and arms outstretched. She looks like a porcelain figure. Her dark eyes are bottomless. She seems lost in thought. She is a puzzle.
I feel a warm kiss on the back of my neck as I make eggs in the kitchen.
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Ricky coos.
“I thought I’d let you sleep late. Want eggs?”
“I needed the sleep,” he says, pouring himself a cup of tea. “She’s eaten?” he asks, gazing over at Julia, who is in her room, fifteen feet from the dining room table, toppling anything that stands vertically.
“Yep. Eggs?”
“Sure, eggs would be dandy. What do you want to do today?”
“Do you know what today is?” Ricky looks perplexed.
“It’s … ” he looks over at the calendar. “It’s Valentine’s Day. I knew that. Did you want flowers?”
“No, not Valentine’s Day, I mean yes, it’s Valentine’s Day, but why is this day special?”
Ricky’s eyes narrow. He’s beseeching me to tell him.
“It is exactly one year since we became Julia’s parents. A year ago today we woke up in the Moscow Marriott with a baby in a laundry basket in our hotel room.”
“Hard to believe. Mmm. Those eggs look good.”
“Yeah, it’s a funny thing, to associate her with Valentine’s Day, no?”
�
��Better than all that forced flowers and chocolate stuff. She’s our little Valentine.”
I gaze at Ricky’s sweet face. I often wonder what a biological child of ours would have looked like. I see her. A girl with high cheekbones, chestnut brown hair, and the green eyes we both have.
For a change, the apartment feels calm and peaceful. It’s cold outside, and there’s nowhere we have to be. I look at Julia, who is now climbing on and off the couch, and wonder if there will ever be a day when I temporarily forget that she is not my flesh and blood. Today, a year behind us, carries weight. It puts a marker in time. It’s like an anniversary and birth rolled into one. We’ve been together for a year, but that day, to me, felt like her “birth.” I drift back to last June 28, her first birthday, and recall how sad I was because I hardly felt anything except some vague pang of guilt for having become this child’s mother. I thought about the young Russian girl who gave birth in the grim gunmetal gray hospital Olga showed us. Did she hold her? Did she cry when she handed her back to a nurse for the last time? Does she think about her long-lost baby on June 28, and does she regret her choices?
It’s funny—we chose an international adoption because we wanted it to be clean and final and without interference. But sometimes I wish I could just steal a few secret moments to ask her questions that dog me.
Three days later I arrive at Dr. Traister’s office. I gave Anna the morning off so I could take Julia for her third well-visit. So far the doctor’s been pleased with her progress. Dr. Michael Traister specializes in treating foreign-adopted children. He recommends a second round of vaccines when they come home because he doesn’t trust the ones they’ve received in Russia. He knows to look for low muscle tone and aberrant neurological symptoms that might have gone undetected. He knows children with fetal alcohol syndrome don’t always show signs of mental disorder right away. He’s been very enthusiastic about Julia’s progress. She walked at a year, started forming words a month later, is solid and strong.