Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  I also got the sense that giving birth was the worst hell imaginable. People say mothers “forget the pain,” but mine didn’t. It wasn’t that she told people about her excruciating thirty-six-hour labor with my older sister, who was born with Down syndrome and died two weeks later. But she would recount my birth as a comic monologue in contrast to it. In November 1955, feeling what she thought might be labor, she rang her OB-GYN, who scoffed that I wasn’t due for at least a month. Shortly thereafter, I plopped out on the kitchen linoleum. Our next-door neighbor ran to help. But at the sight of blood and amniotic fluid, the neighbor passed out. When the EMTs arrived, they found two women on the floor. “Which one do we take?” they asked. Nor did my mother convey that a child with developmental challenges—a child like my dead sister—was something to be sought out. My mother was not a social worker. “If the Lord sends you a trial,” she told me, “you rise to meet it.” But you’d have to be nuts to take on an unnecessary trial.

  After her first surgery for colon cancer, when she was forty-nine years old, she took me with her to six o’clock Mass every morning. If anyone deserved a miracle, she did. And at age twelve, I enjoyed the liturgical component of the Mass: so many idioms in common speech had their roots in the Old or New Testament. But three years and as many surgeries later, when her cancer proved fatal, I raged against God. This troubled her. To my amazement, she had not, apparently, lost her faith. On the day before she died, she told me to hold my ear close to her face. Her five-foot-ten-inch body now weighed about eighty pounds. She had tubes and bruises everywhere. She clutched a jade-green rosary in one gaunt hand and held mine with the other. “I love you,” she rasped, barely able to form words through the morphine. I fought back tears. “God gave you gifts. Use them. And remember”—her weak voice became even softer—“God showed you one great mercy. He took your sister from us before you were born.”

  * * *

  Because of my sister, I had no illusions about childbearing. It is a gamble, as is most of life. Money managers use the “Monte Carlo method” to evaluate portfolio risk—and to keep that risk within an investor’s comfort zone. NASA never expects a risk-free launch, but it tries to fire rockets when they are less likely to blow up.

  Similarly, when two healthy young adults conceive a baby, the baby may have problems—even if the mother shuns drugs, alcohol, and nicotine during pregnancy. But the odds favor a healthy baby.

  In contrast, I knew that the biological child of drug-addicted felons might be at a higher risk for problems. But given how badly my partner wanted a baby, any baby, I wanted to believe that nurture could defeat nature. If a child with no genetic advantages grew up in a loving, cultured home, the child would turn out well. This idea gave me comfort—until circumstances conspired to prove that it was not necessarily true.

  Sometimes coincidences are so strange and pointed that it’s hard to believe the universe is random. About a year after Helen began her quest to secure a baby, I agreed to be a judge for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. To do my job, I had to pore over stuff I otherwise would have avoided—books about recent breakthroughs in genomics and gestational biology, books that dwelled on the genetic determinants of behavior, books that examined the specific havoc drugs and alcohol can wreak on a fetus.

  These books alerted me to things that I never wanted to see and, worse, that I couldn’t put out of my mind. Cigarettes, I knew, were bad for pregnant women, but I’d had no idea how little nicotine was required to cause intellectual disabilities or aggressive behavior in kids. “If a mother smokes during pregnancy,” neuroscientist and criminologist Adrian Raine writes in The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, this “not only has negative consequences on brain development, but it also leads to increased rates of conduct disorder and aggression in her offspring.” (One has to wonder how many behavioral disorders were undiagnosed in, say, the 1960s, when smoking during pregnancy was less stigmatized than it is now.) He continues: “Studies have documented impairments in selective attention, memory, and speed in processing speech stimuli.” More startling, “secondhand exposure to cigarette smoke predicted conduct disorder even after controlling for antisocial behavior in the parents, poor parenting practices, and other biological and social confounds.”

  Studies of identical twins raised in different environments—a loving, advantaged home versus a home with domestic abuse—revealed that the twins turned out the same. Their genes dictated who they were, not their upbringing. One Northern European study showed that not only did the home make no difference, but also that the children of criminals tended to grow up to be criminals. Raine’s book and others like it gave me nightmares. In one recurring dream, I saw an illustration from The Anatomy of Violence that compared the MRI of a normal brain and the brain of a child with fetal alcohol syndrome. The normal brain had coils and whorls; the fetal-alcohol one looked like a cauliflower.

  * * *

  Still, I did not break up with my partner. I didn’t want to be this fearful person, saddled with inconvenient knowledge that I could not banish from my thoughts. I didn’t want to see the world as it was. I wanted to see it through a rosy, hopeful scrim. I loved having a partner; banal chores like cooking and shopping became adventures when done together. I loved watching great episodic TV with her—shows like The Wire and House—and analyzing how the TV writers had achieved what they did. I loved writing with her, in forms that were collaborative.

  If only I had been twenty-five years younger! A quarter century ago, when I was married to my ex-husband, I had tried without success to bring a baby to term. A biological child made sense to me then—wanting to continue my genes, even if those genes carried depression so intense it could steal color from vision. But at my present age, with not that many productive years left, the last thing I wanted was a child—especially, I am ashamed to admit, one who might have disabilities as severe as those of my sister.

  In the second decade of the twenty-first century, popular culture focused on nontraditional families—families with gay parents, or it-takes-a-village child-care arrangements with “families” of nonbiologically related adults. In response to my hesitation about adopting this baby—and the weekly migraines that accompanied it—my partner proposed that we devise such an arrangement. When the baby arrived, I could live in my “office” (a loft I owned) and escape baby duty from time to time. To defray the costs of a private adoption, she proposed teaming up with a close straight male friend who lived nearby and longed to be a dad.

  In retrospect, I should have left the relationship. I should have heard my body’s message. It knew who I was and how far I could travel from my core self without breaking. But my brain, or at least part of it, was intrigued to be part of a social experiment. My partner and the aspiring dad registered with an adoption lawyer and, after a few months, a birth mother on the west coast contacted them. The biological father of the potential baby was in prison, but we were prepared for this sort of news. My partner had warned me that it was not unusual in this situation for fathers to be incarcerated, or for mothers to be uncertain as to who the fathers were. In choosing my partner to raise her baby, this birth mother seemed both open-minded and admirable. Unlike many women in her situation, she had made it to her twenties without having had any babies and was enrolled in a community college. She was eager to take prenatal vitamins and to submit to drug and alcohol tests during her pregnancy. Because of her conscientiousness, I allowed myself the luxury of hope.

  What happened next is what often happens. The mother decided to keep her baby. Because she was not a drug addict, she was hit hard by the oxytocin that her body released when she held her infant daughter. (For active drug addicts, oxytocin can’t always compete with the pull of methamphetamine or heroin.) My partner was devastated—perhaps all three of us were. We had fleshed out a collective fantasy about making a “better” life for a kid, a life with love (from my partner) and financial advantages. We had to regroup.

  * * *

>   Call me monstrous—and I’m sure some will—but after the disappointment, I was relieved that the mother had kept the baby. In the months that followed, the three of us rescued a dachshund-beagle mix, which mostly lived with the potential dad. To my shame, I hoped that dog would satisfy Helen’s desire to nurture.

  Then the twenty-two-year-old pregnant woman from Florida entered the picture. Even my therapist, who tends to see good in all things, sensed danger. The woman had given birth to four kids since she had left school at age fourteen. And while she appeared to have kept one or two, some had been given up for adoption. In private adoptions, prospective parents agree to pay the mother’s nonrefundable medical costs. But sometimes an illegal transfer of money also occurs, usually when the mother relinquishes the infant. Many people, I learned, refer to this illegal exchange as the “final shakedown.” Although the woman was well along in her pregnancy, she had no prenatal records that might have revealed drug abuse. The lack of a paper trail can be a red flag for adopters. My partner paid for some basic medical tests. When the results came in, my partner texted me, “No HIV, no hep, no drugs”—at least at the time of the test. “Smokes, but main side effect of smoking is low birth weight and baby is normal.”

  The texts hit me like shots from an automatic weapon. I rolled into a fetal position on the bed. My partner knew well what I had discovered about nicotine and pregnancy. She knew everything that I (and science) knew about prenatal drug abuse. But she scoffed when I reminded her. She also knew what Hugh Laurie’s character had said in nearly every episode of House: “Everybody lies.” And addicts lie the most.

  Some people are energized by risk. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. But in a relationship, the risk tolerance of partners should match. To draw upon the wisdom of Aesop, ants should not marry grasshoppers. I am an unglamorous ant—deferring gratification, socking away money religiously and investing it prudently. My partner was a grasshopper—seeking what she wants when she wants it, unconcerned by the threat of a rainy day.

  I suspect that when she flew from Los Angeles to meet the pregnant woman, she was fueled as much by risk as by her urge to be a mother. Back home in my loft, I felt unheard and abandoned—because I was. I did not even log on to read e-mail. At dusk, I curled up on my bed, watching the light and color drain from my loft.

  In the morning, when the sun came up, the color did not return.

  * * *

  One monochromatic week became two. I had kept the jade rosary my mother grasped at the hour of her death. Sometimes I held it when I sat cross-legged to meditate. It was now dark gray.

  Strangely, I did not break up with my partner. I threw myself into work, spending most days with students or colleagues at the university where I teach. I told no one about the loss of color. But I couldn’t keep the migraines entirely to myself. I had to explain why I sometimes missed a meeting. Blessedly, I never had to miss a class.

  One night, after an evening class, I opened up to a colleague about what I was going through. We were sitting in a gastropub near campus. “I can’t do it,” I told him. “Not knowing what I now know from reading those books I never wanted to read.” The anxiety—the risk—was causing migraines. With the first prospective child, at least I’d had the comfort of the birth mother’s regular drug tests. That fetus, I knew, was not awash in bourbon and crystal meth. But this birth mother had no comprehensive medical records. The baby had no known father. The birth mother was herself the child of a woman who had died of a drug overdose. “I want to believe that nurture trumps nature,” I said with desperation.

  Instead of reassuring me, he told me a story—his story—that may not have been easy to tell. He is a brilliant gay man and an accomplished screenwriter who grew up in North Carolina. His childhood home was filled with books and music and art—all of which he devoured from a very young age. He has two older adopted siblings, however, who ignored these cultural resources. Nor were they good at or interested in school. Today they have both become members of a homophobic Christian cult. Because my colleague—their brother—is gay, they severed all emotional ties to him.

  This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. In real life, nature could be as powerful—and as harsh—as it appeared to be in scientific literature. I recognize now that every adoption story is different, that this was his family's experience. And I don't know more details than what he was generous enough to share with me. But it was, in a way, the confirmation of what I long suspected, and what I needed to hear then: that I could no longer continue to be in a relationship with someone who aggressively disregarded my informed opinion.

  I broke up with Helen. The headaches stopped. Again I saw in Technicolor.

  As it happened, my now ex-partner did not get the infant whose problematic provenance had caused our split. The mother decided to keep it, or perhaps ditched one prospective parent for another. Eventually, Helen adopted an infant from a different faraway state. I hope this child is healthy and happy. But my former relationship was beyond resurrection. I had escaped. God, as my mother might have observed, had spared me again.

  Sometimes clichés are true. It does, for example, take a village to raise a child, and my role is to be a mentor. My students tell me that I’m good at this. Nor do I just teach graduate students at a private university. Last summer, I volunteered as a writing coach with high-achieving financially disadvantaged high school students. If they can do well against all odds—in homes where no one went to college and where English may not be spoken—they deserve my help. I also think our planet needs responsible stewardship—or there will be no planet for the kids growing up today. So I donate time and money to a marine mammal rescue center. Neither tutoring nor rescuing is a huge thing, but they make me feel less powerless against economic injustice and environmental destruction.

  After I broke up with my partner, a friend told me something that was inadvertently cruel. “You would have been a great parent,” she said, “if all those tragedies in your childhood hadn’t happened.” But they did. They made me who I am—not a hypothetical perfect person but a flawed mess, who is trying, however inadequately, to leave behind a better world than the one through which I have had to make my way.

  THE HARDEST ART

  by

  Rosemary Mahoney

  ONE DAY IN 2008 I was hiking up a mountain path in Greece when I met a farmer descending the path on a mule. The brim of his handwoven straw hat was unusually wide; in the broiling midday sun all but his feet and his hands on the reins were sheltered within a bell jar of shadow cast by the hat. The farmer, likely in his sixties, had Windex-blue eyes and a plush mustache the white of crushed ice. At its tips, left and right, the mustache swung jauntily upward into two little points. He was riding sidesaddle. From the opposite side of the saddle hung a large white sack.

  The farmer looked surprised to see me there on this remote footpath. He stopped the mule and said good afternoon to me in the singular informal form. Because he was probably twenty years my senior, I said good afternoon in the formal plural form. He considered me for a second, then began asking me the standard questions elderly Greek farmers always ask: Where are you going?

  To the church of Agios Nikolaos of the Air, at the top of the mountain.

  Where are you from?

  The United States of America.

  Flies waltzed noisily in the mule’s left ear. Are you alone?

  Do you see anyone else here on this path with me?

  The farmer’s sudden burst of laughter made the cylinder of shadow jitter around him. Are you married?

  Yes.

  That was a lie, but in Greece, more than in any other country I’ve ever been to, marriage functions as a sanctified shroud and shield.

  Do you have children?

  Usually, to save time and trouble, I would lie about this one as well. But because I liked the farmer’s face, I told the truth: No, I do not have children.

  He shrugged, raised his chestnut-brown hands toward the overhanging sun, a
nd with a surprisingly tender blend of pity, sympathy, and resignation, he said, “Ότι θείλει Ο Θεός. Whatever God wants.”

  It would have been impossible for me to explain to him that my not having children had nothing to do with what God wanted and everything to do with what I wanted, for in Greece (I might as easily say “for in the entire universe”), a woman who doesn’t want children is anomalous, aberrant, and suspect. To choose not to have children is to stretch too far outside the inherited rule that procreation is both a biological and a civic requisite for full and proper membership in the human race. Conversations about this with elderly Greeks more often than not prove circuitous and fruitless, and so I lifted my own hands slightly to the sky and said, “Right. God’s will.” When I asked the farmer whether he had children, his answer was, surprisingly, no. His reason: I never found a wife.

  Before we parted, I asked the farmer what was in the sack.

  “Mizithra,” he said. Goat cheese.

  “Did you make it yourself?”

  He grinned and the points of his mustache pricked at the jutting cheekbones above them. He waved his hands at the wheat fields and olive trees. “Do you see anyone else here who might have made it?”

  We laughed and moved on.

  * * *

  My decision not to have children came at the end of a long, complicated, and sometimes fraught process of discovery that carried me as close to having children as a woman can possibly get. For most of my life I believed I would have children. When I was younger I used to imagine what my children would look like, and those pleasant imaginings made me love them so much that when I finally snapped to I would actually miss their faces. Even after embarking on a career as a writer, a job that consumed me with a lot of international travel followed by long bouts of work that left time for little else, I continued to think of my children as a certainty of my future. I never stopped to consider, though, how the certainty would become reality or how a person like me—solitary, oversensitive, impatient, obsessive, easily abraded, and extreme—would manage to be a mother. It would, I thought, just work itself out.