Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  “A stomach tumor,” I finished.

  “So you’re not … you’re not not trying.”

  “Right.” I put glasses of iced tea on the table. “Come to think of it,” I said slowly. “Come to think of it, I’m actually a week late.” I waved my hand. “I don’t keep track of these things, I just can’t be bothered to write it on the calendar, you know? I just feel like …”

  Heather, holding a dripping pickle to place on my parents’ company tray, gawped at me. My mother stood motionless, her hand on the silverware drawer. For a moment, all was quiet.

  Then they both rocketed forward as I sprang out of the way like a startled frog. “We’re going to CVS for a pregnancy test!” Heather shouted to my mother, grabbing her car keys.

  Simultaneously my mother scooped up Heather’s youngest boy, who had been toddling contentedly on the floor. “I’ll take the kid,” she said. I saw her retreating back, my nephew’s head bobbling over her shoulder as she raced through the house, down the steps of the deck, and toward the sandbox in the backyard. It was all a weirdly choreographed effort, as if it had been rehearsed earlier that day.

  Heather drove me to CVS and back at a speed alarming even for a former gum-chewing, permed Jersey girl, then hustled me into the guest bathroom, threw the kit at me, and shut the door.

  I took the test and looked around idly while awaiting the results. This bathroom had the distinction of having the world’s most uncomfortable shower. It produced only the barest squirt of hot water, and my father had rigged the spigot with a water-saving device, so that you had to stand and wait for enough cold mist to condense onto your body before you could use the soap, an oversized bar the size of a loaf of pumpernickel. My mother had gotten it at a discount store a few years ago, and it never got any smaller. Using it was like rubbing a surfboard all over you, and woe to the bather who drops it on his foot, because …

  I glanced down at the test.

  It was positive.

  I gazed at the thing in a daze. Everything changes from this moment on, piped a little voice in my head.

  A few minutes later I opened the door. “It’s positive,” I faltered. “I can’t believe it.”

  Heather and my mother clutched each other, screaming and jumping up and down like The Price Is Right contestants who have just won the showcase of a trip to Puerto Vallarta, matching Jet Skis, and a years’ supply of Turtle Wax. Meanwhile, my reaction was more like the decorous Milwaukee senior who brings a garage-sale vase to Antiques Roadshow and is informed that it’s Tiffany and worth twenty grand. “Well,” these seniors inevitably say with baffling calm. “How about that.” It was all just a little too much to absorb.

  My mother ran to get the phone. “Call Dinah!” she hollered over her shoulder.

  “When are you going to tell Tom?” Heather said, bouncing on her heels. “He has no idea you even took the test!”

  “I guess right when he gets back from playing basketball,” I said. “Otherwise he’ll hear it on the streets. Let’s go in the backyard and I’ll tell him there.” I was still trying to process the news myself but caught their excitement at telling him. Hey, that’s a positive sign, I told myself. I’m not upset! I’m eager to tell Tom! That’s significant, right?

  Five minutes later Tom returned from the game with Rob, both of them covered in sweat. They were in the midst of laughing about something, but Tom’s smile died on his face as I ran over and pulled him to a little table and set of chairs by the pool.

  I sat down. “I have something to tell you,” I said gravely.

  He looked around suspiciously. “What?” he said uneasily. “What?”

  “Just have a seat.”

  His eyes darted to my family, who were clustered by the deck. They were peeking at him, none too discreetly, with big grins.

  “What?” Tom said, flapping his arms helplessly. “Do you have a Super Soaker? This is a prank, right?” All of the jokes I had played on my unsuspecting husband conspired to ruin my touching moment, and I had no one to blame but myself.

  “It’s not a prank,” I said soothingly, but he was spooked by the abnormal brightness of my eyes and the sound of Heather shushing my folks.

  “What is it?” he said, increasingly distressed. “What is it? Do you have a video camera? Are you filming me?” Suddenly he leapt up and raced blindly toward the house.

  I looked over at the group. My father was somberly patting my mother’s back. Rob was frowning at a far-off patch of lawn. Heather looked stricken.

  They thought I had broken the news and he had run off in terror. I got up and followed him into the house. “Tom,” I said quietly, approaching him gingerly, as if he was a bucking bronco. “Listen. I’m pregnant.”

  He stared at me in shock, then laughed delightedly and hugged me. “That’s wonderful,” he said, his eyes moistening with tears. I relaxed a little.

  As Tom and I drove home to Brooklyn that night, we discovered how incredibly freeing it was to have the pressure of a decision lifted from our shoulders. Cautiously, we began to explore the idea of a new baby and even batted around a few names. To my profound relief, I found that we were a tiny bit … could it be that we were a tiny bit excited? I was still plagued by trepidation, but the good thing about pregnancy is that it grants you almost a year to settle in with the idea.

  Two months later, after I passed the first round of screenings, Tom ordered up a pile of baby books and we spent one evening paging through them. I started off in a fairly lighthearted mood until I reached a chapter in one book on potential changes to your body.

  It seemed that nothing stayed the same on your entire body once a fetus took up residence. Everything morphed, or swelled, or oozed, or turned a different color. I read that I could probably look forward to painful, bleeding, itching hemorrhoids, which often enlarged even further if—no, when—the mother-to-be developed constipation. Other unlucky women found themselves with a condition called a “mask of pregnancy,” a yellowish or brownish butterfly-shaped area that could cover the face. Cover the face? I kept picturing the movie poster from The Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster’s mouth obscured by an enormous moth. I’ll help you catch him, Clarice. The litany of potential mishaps continued: skin tags, darkening moles, extra fluid pooling in the feet, which caused them to swell one or even two sizes. So one day you could wake up with a giant pair of new feet?

  I grew dizzy as the list of what sounded like semitropical diseases stretched for pages and pages. There was everything but three-foot worms bursting out of your eyes. A dark line that travels down the abdomen, called the linea nigra. Thick hairs in brand-new places. Gourd-shaped, swingy, blue-veined boobs. Increased oil-gland secretion followed closely by an explosion of zits. The leaching of calcium from your bones as the fetus helps itself to your limited supply. Vivid dreaming and nightmares. Softened ligaments (don’t make any sudden movements, the book warned, or something could slip or twist!). I pictured myself jerking awake one night from a nightmare and wrenching my softened, calcium-depleted back. Red, itchy palms. Depression.

  That last one was already upon me. I hastily phoned my friend Tracy, who had three girls. “When you were pregnant,” I asked her, “did you ever get a yellow mask of pregnancy on your face?”

  She laughed. “I can’t say I did.”

  “Did your feet go up two sizes?”

  “I did go up half a shoe size after my third one was born, yes. But then, think about the joy of having to buy new shoes.”

  “Skin tags?”

  “Okay, yes, I did develop one or two skin tags in strange places, but overall, my skin never looked better. I also have some stretch marks, but they’re white and faint at this point. They never really disappear. I call them life stripes.”

  “How about bulging, distended anal veins?”

  “No! Will you quit reading that stuff?”

  Yet I couldn’t help myself, despite the fact that two key elements of my personality did not exactly harmonize with the whole birth p
rocess. One is that I am deeply squeamish. Years ago I was channel flipping and chanced upon once of those “miracle of life” home-birth films. I think I moaned more than the mother-to-be as I watched with horrified fascination, unable to rip my eyes away from the screen. When the baby finally gushed forth, covered in what appeared to be tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and a liberal sprinkling of Parmesan, I gasped for air. As the doctor sawed through the ropy blue umbilical cord, I had to put my head between my legs while simultaneously scrambling to turn off the remote control.

  Being a fiction writer with a runaway imagination was perhaps an even bigger impediment to motherhood. At night I lay awake in my bed as dark visions bloomed in my head like stinking nightshade.

  Scenario one: As the nurse hands me the new baby, I clutch the newborn’s head a little too eagerly and my blundering fingers punch through the soft spot on its skull. I am grasping the baby’s head like a bowling ball. “Somebody help me!” I scream as the hospital staff backs away.

  Scenario two: “They found her,” Tom says in a voice hoarse from sleepless nights and worry “She’s been turning tricks in a bus station.”

  Scenario three: “I hate you, Mom and Dad!” screams our teenage son, his pupils spiraling from the drugs coursing through his system. He punches the air a few menacing inches from my head. (This scene was taken directly from a 1977 TV movie I once saw called The Death of Richie. Based on a true story that ran in Life magazine, it starred Ben Gazzara as a well-meaning parent whose son, played by Robby Benson, sank into harrowing drug addiction. At the end of the movie, Ben had to shoot his gibbering, violently out-of-control son in self-defense. That movie may have been single-handedly responsible for my fear of having kids.)

  “Don’t be weird,” Tom would plead when I relayed these scenes to him. And mostly I was able to tamp down my paranoia after I noted how eagerly Tom had plunged into the next phase of our lives, humming to himself around the house as he gathered research on the safest car seat and the best prenatal vitamins. He ordered a night-light shaped like an elephant. He treated me like a piece of fragile Dresden porcelain, even when I was barely showing.

  Best of all, he cooked me anything I wanted. I’ve always had the supreme luxury of having a husband who genuinely loves to cook. Tom is the sort of person who has always thought it was “fun,” not dreary and time-consuming, to make refried beans from scratch or tackle an obscure Korean dish with thirty ingredients. He has a library of cookbooks from every land, and for years I eagerly looked forward to the end of every afternoon when we discussed what was on the menu for dinner.

  But after I found out I was pregnant, I suddenly acquired a new power. “You know what I’d like?” I mentioned once as I leafed through a Mario Batali cookbook. “Green maltagliati with oven-dried tomatoes, basil, and black-pepper mascarpone.” I wasn’t even sure what maltagliati was, but it looked mighty tasty in the picture, and Tom had just purchased a pasta-making machine.

  He looked at the recipe, his eyebrows drawing together. “Hm,” he said. “It looks kind of elaborate.”

  “Okay,” I said, sighing—but quietly, because I knew better than to get peevish when someone was offering to cook me a meal.

  Tom looked at me anxiously. “Unless you’re having some sort of craving?”

  I had never been troubled by the slightest pregnancy craving. All of my friends told stories of uncontrollable urges for heretofore-ignored foods. My mother inhaled banana Popsicles while she was carrying me and then never touched another after I was born. Heather wolfed down crunchy Cheez Doodles and then buried the bags in the bottom of the trash. I never had a craving for anything specific.

  I smiled. “Funny you should say that. I’ve had such a hankering for”—I glanced down at the recipe—“mascarpone cheese. That’s why I stopped on this recipe. But I understand, it’s a little elaborate—”

  “No, no, no,” he said. “I’m happy to make it. Your body probably needs the calcium.”

  Soon enough, the fetus was ordering up elaborate, absurdly specific meals: sautéed chicken Chengdu-style (“I guess the poor little thing needs the protein,” I said), braised short ribs (“I must be short on iron, don’t you think?”), and Thai roasted-peanut noodles (“I was up half the night thinking about them, it’s the craziest thing, it’s just out of my control”).

  I was also able to get him to tidy up our apartment, which had always been a major source of marital wrangling. Tom has maintained that he is comforted by his many towering piles of books and periodicals and papers and letters and research. He feels they lend the place a scholarly feel and dreads tossing out anything—from a college term paper to a water-stained paperback bought from a street vendor—just in case he might “need it someday.” I, on the other hand, hail from a compulsively neat family and abhor even a shred of clutter. I race to recycle any paper product the moment I am finished with it. If I lived alone, my apartment would contain a bed, a plate, and a fork.

  For years, I begged Tom to declutter, especially after I read that silverfish love to burrow into old magazines and books. I was tormented by the idea of opening up an old novel and having a silverfish spring out into my lap. Not that I was sure silverfish even sprang, but that’s how I envisioned it. But the most I could get Tom to do was to toss magazines that were over five years old.

  That is, until I came across research on the nesting instinct that frequently kicked in among pregnant women, resulting in a frenzy of housecleaning. When Tom was able to assign my insane behavior to ancient biological forces rather than simply an annoying personality quirk, he was more apt to actually toss his dusty files of research for articles he had written during the Clinton administration. Harmony reigned in the household.

  Breaking the news to my friend Lou was not quite as harmonious. For years, we had commiserated when some of our friends had had children and promptly disappeared. Now I had crossed over. When I told him, he said, “Oh my God! That’s so great!” Then, deadpan: “Nice knowing you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He sighed. “Because you’re going to vanish. I feel like unless I get pregnant, too, you’ll forget me. There is not one woman in the history of pregnant chicks who does not become a different person after having a child.”

  “But maybe different isn’t all bad,” I pointed out. “Maybe they become kinder and more empathetic.”

  “It’s a gradual thing,” he continued gloomily, as if he hadn’t heard me. “As the belly gets bigger, the calls get fewer. And after the baby’s born, you’re never going to see that person alone. You’re not going to go to a movie with them, or to dinner, and you can only talk on the phone when the baby is in bed and the parent is already exhausted. And the only visit granted is if you come to them and look at the kid. They’re cute and it’s fun to hold them, but the entire visit is all about the child—what they do, what foods they spit up.”

  “I’ll still see you alone. Haven’t you heard of day care?”

  “You’ll get amnesia. The kids suck the previous personality out of the parent until they have no recollection—remember when Brooke Adams fell asleep in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the tendrils came out? The kids are like those pod things, with the tendrils.” He paused. “I really am happy for you, but it’s always like a little death when I hear the news. I just have to prepare myself.”

  I hung up, feeling morose. Surely I wouldn’t fade away. Well, not everyone was going to react the way my family did, or Julie. When I phoned her, she choked up immediately. “Oh, Jancee,” she said, her voice tight. “That is the most wonderful news. Wait until I tell Paul. Wait until I tell my mother. I know you’re probably a little scared, but I’m telling you that you are going to love it.” She sniffed. “I know you. Don’t I know you? You trust me, right?

  Oh! Just wait until the baby is six months. Six months to two years is the cutest age in the world. No, they all are. Some people say that the twos are difficult, or the threes, but I’ve loved every age. You will,
too. And just wait—everyone is so nice to you when you’re pregnant. Strangers smile at you and give you seats on the bus and the subway. Of course, when you actually have the baby, they make you stand from One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street to Coney Island. But that’s a long way off.”

  Julie was right. Being pregnant transformed the city into a small town. As I swelled, people beamed at me in the street. Strangers really did leap up to offer me their seats. Yet it was still somewhat of an abstract concept until I had my third ultrasound, when the baby was much bigger and I would learn the gender. Tom was at a meeting he couldn’t break, but I would see him at home in two hours and tell him the news.

  The sonogram technician had dealt with me before and knew I was a little strange. I didn’t ask her the standard questions, for one thing.

  “What’s with people sending mass emails of their sonogram pictures?” I said as she rubbed some goo on my stomach. “I have friends who send them to everyone at work.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s the thing to do now.”

  “But isn’t it jumping the gun a little? Plus those head-on shots have a sort of ‘grinning skull’ look that’s not exactly cute and cuddly. Am I right?” She nodded and told me about an artist, popular in New York City, who actually colored in the sonogram photos and made them more lifelike. Yeesh. I begged her to get me his name so I could write a story about it.

  “Don’t you have any questions about the baby?” she asked gently. “Look right here,” she said, pointing at a place on the monitor. “Do you see the baby’s eyes? Isn’t that exciting?”

  “You mean the sockets,” I said darkly. “I just see blackness. See? Sockets. I don’t think the baby has eyes. The baby is missing its eyes.”

  She looked at me with concern. “Of course the baby has eyes. Look there. Right there. These are the lenses.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Now I see.”

  She grinned. “Do you want to know the gender?”

  I did.

  “It’s a girl! Congratulations.”