by Heather Ross
I waited until I was five months pregnant to tell my mother that I was having a baby. “I’m calling with some news,” I said. “God, what?” she responded, sounding hopeful for something juicy and terrible. She could be counted on to be sober and in good spirits until late afternoon, and I timed my calls accordingly but always braced myself. The death of her parents and of her brother, my uncle Mike, who had been gone for almost five years now, and the sale of the land had left her in a raw and scattered state that I still hoped she would recover from, eventually. She seemed to want to talk only about tragedies and bad news and would complain to me that my sister never called her and that nobody ever told her anything, or included her in any of their lives.
I cut her off as she began to tell me something I did not want to hear. “I’m calling with good news,” I said, starting again as though she might not recognize it as such.
“What?” she said, her tone urgent, almost desperate.
“I’m going to have a baby,” I told her.
She let out an exhale, then, sounding exhausted from the three seconds of suspense and relieved but not happy, she said, “Well it’s nice to hear some good news, because I’ve been following this massacre? In Arizona? With the congresswoman who was shot in the head by that lunatic? It’s just god-awful.” I forced myself to give her a few details calmly, including the due date, then got off the phone as quickly as I could. She sent me an e-mail the next day that said, simply, “I don’t have any advice for you. Everything is different now than when I had you. I hope that you’ll let me see my grandchild sometime. Your sister won’t let me see her kids.”
I spent that whole day in bed, with a hand on my stomach, terrified.
The next day I called my father, who was genuinely thrilled for me. This gave me new hope and motivated me to get dressed and walk to the bookstore, where I bought a stack of books about pregnancy and newborns. They sat next to me, in a neat pile, on the table. Every few days I would try to pick one up and read through whatever chapter seemed relevant to me at that stage, but I would instantly feel such a bitter anxiety beginning to grow out of the pit of my stomach and into my chest that I would have to put the book down immediately and reach for the remote control. I watched episode after episode of 16 and Pregnant, each one filling me with a sense of competence that no book could provide.
Being prepared was not what I was good at. I had become an expert, though, at managing the chaos and crisis that came out of being unprepared. Perhaps that’s why I felt so out of place from the moment I walked into the Prepared Parenthood class, which was held in a large, low-ceilinged, windowless room. The air felt so still, so air-conditioned and artificial, that breathing it in felt wrong, especially for a pregnant woman. I’d like to think that what happened next was due to the lack of oxygen, but TC told me later that he had me pegged as a flight risk from the minute I sat down in the metal folding chair and began trying to look as though I were listening. I made it through the swaddling and bathing lessons, and I actually enjoyed the overviews of epidurals and other pain relief options. It was the movie that got me in the end. It was maybe a decade old, just dated enough to make the clothing the real-life moms wore distracting and to dim my confidence in it in general. The movie followed each of them through pregnancy and birth. There was a slight single mother for whom English was, at best, a second language, and a young married woman who had clearly planned every step of her adulthood and transition into parenthood exactly as it was now happening, down to the practical sports bra that she wore during her labor and the practiced breathing that she executed in a camera-friendly style. “I’m just so thrilled that this stage of my life is finally beginning,” she said, as though she had been moving toward nothing but this for her entire existence. A third couple clearly hadn’t done anything exciting enough to justify a lot of screen time, which was too bad since they seemed more interested in the epidural than the baby they would be having, and I had pegged them as the ones to watch.
As all three women moved simultaneously toward birth, I grew increasingly anxious. Then came the scene where the tiny single mother got helped into the bathtub during labor, smiling widely for the camera. Her own voiceover, recorded after the fact, gave us a step-by-step narration of what was happening on the screen. Her voice was tiny and odd. Her accent made it necessary for there also to be subtitles. She was using the word “contraction” over and over again, and each time she would pause before the word came, and then say it loudly and quickly, as though she had been practicing it, but every time she said it wrong. Every time, she said “constraction.” The first time, I giggled; the second time, I laughed out loud. The third time, I began to realize that I was losing control. The pregnant couples around me, all ten of them, began to look my way. The room was dark, but now my inability to stop laughing was apparent to everyone. I wanted to stand, to leave the room, but I was paralyzed. Every time I thought I was recovering, she would say the word again, and I would explode anew. TC looked at me with a puzzled, expectant grin, as if to say, OK, we get it, you think it’s ridiculous, now pull it together. But I couldn’t. It was the movie and the ridiculous pronunciation of this horrible, frightening word, and it was the lack of oxygen, the lack of a supportive mother, the lack of anything that felt like joy surrounding this inevitable event. It all came out, right there, in that dark, windowless cavern of a room. It was a full-blown anxiety attack, manifested as uncontrolled laughter that now was making it difficult for me to breathe. My teacher misunderstood and thought that I was crying. I heard her, from across the room, say, “Yes, it’s all very emotional for some people.” When I was finally able to move, I went to the ladies’ room and sat on a toilet, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine being somewhere else.
I had picked a name for a son but hadn’t given any thought to naming a daughter, and in my final months of pregnancy, I was barely able to make even the simplest of decisions. We found a name while sitting in the Irish pub around the corner from our apartment. TC had downloaded an app that listed, by region of origin, every known name that had ever been used. He was reading through the beginning of the list and came to Beatrix. I burst into tears, literally. “That’s it, that’s what we are naming our daughter, that’s the name,” I practically shouted. “It’s perfect! Nobody in Beatrix Potter’s family believed in her, and she loved nature and she played with small, dead animals, and also Kerry Canfield had a Beatrix Potter address book. Don’t you think it’s perfect?” I said.
“Well, when you look at all of these points that you are making,” he said, “how can I argue?” I knew that he wasn’t sold, but I wasn’t leaving much room for discussion. “Beatrix it is,” he said. “Beatrix it is.” I would say the name over and over in my mind and think of all the reasons that it was the most perfect one, and I would feel a little better, slightly more in control.
I was due on July 26, which would have been Mike’s birthday. On what would be my final appointment with Dr. Berm, on July 20, he examined me and said, “Don’t go too far from a cabby-friendly neighborhood.” Then there was nothing but waiting for ten days. The weather grew overly warm, in that muggy, slow way typical of New York summers. On the morning of July 30, I got an e-mail from my mother. “I’m tired of waiting around for you to call, so I’m unplugging my phone and I’m leaving my house for a while.” I turned off my computer and my phone and told TC that he was taking me out to lunch. I ate a spinach salad that could have filled a small wheelbarrow, crying as I chewed for reasons I could not explain. I was certain, now, that something inside of me was missing, some crucial part of me that should have been there, in that empty spot that, now, in these final days before I became a mother, should have held love for my own mother but instead was just a dark, empty, sad place.
Afterward, we couldn’t find a cab, so I walked the twenty-five blocks home, sweating all the way. I fell asleep early that night. The next day was my mother’s birthday, the only day on my calendar that was not an acceptable birthday for my da
ughter. My water broke at 10 A.M.
I took charge at the reception desk. “Hello, I’m checking in, Dr. Berm. This is Heather Ross. I cannot have this baby today. We need to delay this.”
The nurse was staring. “You’ve got somewhere else to be?” she said.
“No,” I explained, “I can stay here, that’s fine, but I can’t have this baby today. I can totally do it tomorrow, I just can’t do it today.” TC looked up from his clipboard, full of papers that we had already filled out online but now could not be found. His eyebrows were up but he was quiet. I realized that I was still talking, much faster now, and that I could not stop.
The nurse was no longer paying attention to what I was saying. “You’ve got a while yet, I’m sure,” she told me as she walked away.
“That’s fine,” I yelled after her, interrupting my own repeating loop, “because I’m totally excited about this baby and everything, but it can’t happen today!” An eerie silence followed.
I’m one of those people who responds very well to pharmaceutical drugs. They always do exactly what they are supposed to do, and I always experience side effects. The epidural that I was given (promptly, likely because somebody had put the “nut job” stamp on my chart) worked so well that I couldn’t feel a single contraction. Not one bit. At one point the nurse looked at the machine with the little needle that was wagging furiously and then at me, expecting me to scream. I was texting and eating half of TC’s granola bar. I had relaxed, certain that labor hadn’t really begun yet, that nothing would be happening until the next day, especially now that it was almost 8 P.M. So when Dr. Berm, motioned by the nurse to come quickly, sauntered into the room and examined me, he was surprised to find that I was much farther along than my snacking and lack of screaming would imply. “Did you bring me Thin Mints?” I asked, reminding him of his promise to make me Girl Scout cookies before he had a chance to tell me that I was in the process of having the baby, which I had clearly stated was not welcome for another four hours.
He looked at my granola bar. “How about you do us both a favor and stop eating now?” he said.
“But it’s not going to happen now, is it? I mean, not today, right? I can’t have this baby today, Dr. Berm, not today, please not today.”
Dr. Berm looked at the clock on the wall and then at me. “It’s going to be close,” he said.
“It cannot be today!” I repeated. “Today,” I said, leaning toward him, eyes locked, “is my mother’s birthday.” Dr. Berm pulled a chair up to my bed and looked at me, really carefully. “I understand,” he said, and then, “We’ll do our best,” nodding to the nurse. I looked at her, and she was nodding too, both of them with the most sympathetic, supportive expressions that this pregnancy had produced to date. I leaned back and handed over the granola bar, believing that I had just negotiated the situation successfully.
Beatrix was born just after 3 A.M. The nurse put her in my arms so her head rested against my chest, against my heartbeat. I had been so afraid that I would not love her enough, that I would not have the instinct to protect her, that we would not trust each other, that there was something missing in me. She looked up at me, her eyes wet and big, her tiny hands against my skin, and I realized that I had missed something so simple, so important. She loved me already, she trusted me completely, and she knew me innately. I didn’t know how I would possibly be able to build all of this between us, from scratch, with no instruction, no experience of my own in mothering, or in being mothered. It had never occurred to me that I would not have to, that the work that was ahead of me would be to protect and defend what we already were. I had been so afraid that becoming a mother would feel, from the instant it began, like a burden, and that it would tear me away from my own hard-won happiness, my precious independence. I did not know that the moment I became a mother, I would stop searching for a home, for a family, because I myself would have suddenly become both of those things.
I had been so afraid to pull this innocent little person into my family that I had not realized that it would be my daughter who pulled me into hers.
Were all of these things written down in those books, the ones that I had not read?
HOW TO
make a home
IT WAS IN APRIL AND MAY, when the snow was almost entirely gone, that the kittens would appear, the very best proof of spring. Once, when my sister and I were about six years old, they were born in the bottom drawer of a dresser to Fidget, a young mother who seemed not to think they belonged to her at all. Fidget crawled out of the drawer and peered over its edge at them, in that perfectly still way cats stare at things that they have not yet deemed to be either a danger or a snack, while her babies, their eyes just wet dashes, mewed and lifted their faces trying to find her, their heads swaying to and fro and their paws kneading at the wool beneath them. My sister and I lifted her up and put her back in, again and again, until her kittens had all latched on and pulled her down into the drawer, and then she began to purr.
Plum, on the other hand, was no longer a young mother the summer I turned ten. She’d probably had a litter of kittens every spring of her life, and while she seemed to be a fairly competent, patient parent, she also seemed, by then, to be pretty over it. I had spent days the year before watching her teach her kittens to hunt. There were lessons in stalking and crouching, pouncing and eviscerating, played out with wounded mice and grasshoppers, caught and expertly corralled by Plum with one or two of her babies at a time.
But that last summer, before we were sent to live with our father in Virginia and then California, Plum seemed, for the first time, to be an old cat. It was even hard to tell whether she was actually pregnant or if her walk had just slowed and her body settled the way an old woman’s would, with loose skin, rounded shoulders, a thick belly, and tired eyes. So when she did find a safe but dusty place—in a pile of mildewed hay that was meant for the garden—to have eight white kittens with black spots that looked like tiny, plump little cows, I almost missed it. When I did find her, there were already seven kittens next to her, six of them licked clean and beginning to nurse, one of them still in its little sac of water and membrane. She pulled on a bit of it with her teeth, where the kitten’s face seemed to be, and it broke open. Then she pushed it away from her baby’s mouth and nose and in one deft lick opened up its mouth, which is when I heard the gasp, the very first breath, tiny but strong, fill its little lungs. By the time she had finished cleaning this baby off, the next one had arrived. Plum was exhausted now, with her eyes closed and her mouth open, and was having a hard time keeping her head up for more than a few seconds at a time. I could see the newest kitten’s little face, and when I pressed against the sac that covered it, I could feel its hard little nose, so I pinched it until it opened and it began to pull apart slowly. Plum’s head had dropped again, and her eyes had closed, so I licked my thumb and brushed the kitten’s chin, up toward the nose, pulling open her little mouth, and heard, or perhaps felt against my hand, to my relief, that telling, quick gasp.
This particular kitten would be the first one that I held each afternoon when I went to visit Plum and her squirming, soft brood, still in their warm nest of musty hay. When I picked up my kitten I would hold my thumb toward her little face, with eyes still closed for so many days, so that she would recognize me. When I breathed in her and her sisters and brothers, I could smell other things too, like the mildew in their hay and the sourness of the milk on their chins, and even a bloody, mousey odor that must have come from their mother and her nights of hunting. And when I held them up to my throat and chest I could feel them start to purr like a little switch on a tiny, sturdy motor. To hold something this weightless, this delicate and soft, that responded to my touch with such an eager and powerful affection, made my small heart ache. I could not love them enough and I felt fully loved in return.
Back then, and even today, Vermont has a reputation for not being a welcoming place. There is even an old joke about it that goes like this: A man moves to Ve
rmont from Boston in his early twenties and raises his family in a small town. He depends on the village store for his gasoline and half gallons of milk and sees there, for twenty years, the same small group of retired old men gathered around the store’s woodstove, but they treat him, even after two decades, as an outsider, barely looking at him and never speaking to him. Finally, in frustration, he says to them: “I’ve been coming in here for twenty years, and you’ve never even bothered to learn my name or ask about me or my family. I realize now that I’ll never be considered, in your minds, a real Vermonter, and as much as that bothers me, I find solace in the fact that my children were born here, and they have lived here their whole lives, and you don’t get to decide whether or not they are actually real Vermonters. They are, and nothing you can do can take that away.” One of the old men leans back in his chair and gives him a long, pondering look, then says, “Well, sir, I don’t know about that. Now, if your cat crawled into my oven and had herself a batch of kittens, would you call them muffins?”
My sister and I were the children of newcomers to Vermont, and even though we were born in this place, and made of this place, we would never grow to feel as though we truly belonged—as someone always seemed to be around to remind us that we were different. As deep and as sure as my connection was with its fields and woods and rivers, as loved as I felt by its thick green grass under my bare feet and by those impossibly delicate kittens that appeared in my sweater drawer, or in the pile of hay, the people here let me know that I was an outsider. The lasting friends I did make came from families like my own—transplanted, usually broken, or at least broke—and when I became old enough, tall enough, to need more than kittens or a swimming hole or green grass under my bare feet, the smell of hay and mud, though imprinted into my senses, became something that I wanted to escape. When I left I had no idea where I would end up, but I would not have guessed Manhattan.