Waiting for Daisy

by Peggy Orenstein

  Things were much the same for the next two days. Kai would sleep cherubically in his sling while we roamed Hiroshima, then, come sunset, Baby Hyde would emerge. On the third night, Steven woke me at twelve. “I can’t do this anymore," he said, dumping the infant in my arms.

  I sat up, propping Kai against my knees so we could examine each other. “Poor sweetie,” I crooned. “You must be so confused.”

  Miraculously, he grew quiet at the sound of my voice. I snuggled him against my chest; he burrowed his face into my neck. I eased my body lower, until we were both lying down. As long as I held him close, he slept. “Poor sweetie,” I whispered again. Sometime over the next few hours as I listened to his freight train breathing, I felt something in my heart release. I didn’t know what was right anymore, didn’t know what we ought to do, but I knew that I could love this baby; I knew he could be my son.

  The next morning, we returned Kai to the Tanimotos. As we drove away, Koko’s nephew held the baby aloft like a flag. I looked back, waving vigorously through the cab window until we were out of sight, all the time wondering whether I would ever see him again.

  We spent our last afternoon in Hiroshima trying to find out whether we could file our forms directly with the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, bypassing San Francisco INS. Steven phoned his various connections with no luck. I, meanwhile, tried a fellow named Suzuki whom Koko had suggested. He turned out to be a lethal combination: Japanese and a functionary.

  “If you filed here," he told me, “we would have to send the forms to the regional office in Korea. It could take a long time.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Weeks? Months?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it is better to file where you live.”

  “I live in San Francisco," I said.

  “There have been problems in San Francisco," he observed. “Families that cannot bring a child into the country.”

  “I know," I said.

  “We are trying to address this matter.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “We are preparing a response.”

  “What kind of response?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you can resolve the matter?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So then maybe it’s better if we file in Tokyo?”

  “Yes, but we may still have to contact San Francisco INS if there is a problem.”

  “What kind of problem might there be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What could we do to avoid the problem? Are there papers we could have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So what would you advise we do?”

  “It is best to file where you live.”

  “But we live in San Francisco.”

  “There have been problems in San Francisco. Families that cannot bring a child into the country.”

  What is the sound of one hand slamming down the phone?

  The Gigo Arcade in central Hiroshima is four stories of wholesome family fun. The first floor features interactive games involving virtual sports cars and motorcycles. On the second floor, teenage girls pose in photo booths, holding up their fingers in peace signs. Middle-aged men chain-smoke on the top floor, gambling for tokens at video poker, blackjack, and horse racing. I favored the third floor, with its four-foot-high Tetris screens. For a hundred yen a pop, I could maneuver the falling blocks neatly into place. Two babies. One baby. No babies. They were so much more manageable than the pinballs caroming around in my head.

  “What if we struggle for nine months and the adoption is still denied?” I fretted to Steven as we wandered back to the hotel. "Or what if it comes through and I’m too pregnant to fly over here and get him?”

  Steven was quiet for a moment. “I think we have to consider stepping aside, Peg," he finally said. “There are too many variables. We need to tell Koko to look for a family outside of San Francisco.”

  My eyes swam. “Could we at least ask her to wait six weeks until we find out if the pregnancy is viable?” In January I was scheduled for a chorionic villus sampling (CVS), an early form of prenatal testing that rules out chromosomal abnormalities, such as Down syndrome, that are more common among children of older mothers. If the results were normal and I hadn’t yet miscarried, my chances of having a healthy baby were as good as anyone’s. Besides, by then the dispute with Bernice might be resolved.

  “Peggy," Steven said, softly. “It’s not fair to leave Kai in limbo. You know it’s not. We need to tell Koko to start looking now.”

  The words he’d spoken a few weeks before floated back to me. “I really am grateful to have had this opportunity," I said, sniffling. “It was nice to be his mom and dad, wasn’t it?”

  Steven nodded. “Yes, it was.”

  The hotel room seemed weirdly hushed without Kai. We undressed, not saying much, and lay in bed together feeling lost. Two babies. One baby. No babies.

  The next morning, we went home.

  A chart at the prenatal testing center showed a steep rise in fetal abnormalities as a woman ages. Only one in a thousand thirty-year-olds would have a baby with Down syndrome. At my age, eleven years older, three in a hundred would.

  “But think of it this way," the genetic counselor told us. “There’s a ninety-seven-percent chance the baby is fine.”

  Steven squinted at the chart again. “Ninety-seven percent?” he said. “Then why don’t we just assume it’s normal?” He was right, but by then I had no faith in luck, no truck with probabilities. What were the chances that I would have gotten cancer? That I’d have three miscarriages? What were the chances that I’d be sitting here pregnant in the first place?

  In CVS a doctor, guided by ultrasound, inserts a long, hollow needle through your abdomen (or sometimes your cervix) and withdraws cells from the developing placenta. It’s similar to amniocentesis, though less comprehensive—it doesn’t, for instance, show the presence of neural tube defects such as spina bifida. The test also causes a slightly higher rate of miscarriage than amnio—about three percent, equal to the odds of actually discovering an abnormality. The procedure doesn’t hurt. Or, more accurately, by the time I registered the pain, it had already passed, the needle was in. After that the discomfort was more psychological: I just prayed the doctor didn’t sneeze.

  We called Koko that night to tell her we’d get the results in a week. “That’s okay," she said, cheerily. “I’ve already found new parents for Kai. They’re in San Diego and their paperwork is all ready.”

  I caught my breath—I didn’t expect this so soon. Since no one else on Koko’s list had wanted a boy, I’d thought we might still have the chance to change our minds if the test went badly. One baby? No babies? Our safety net was gone; then again, a child shouldn’t be a safety net, should he? I mouthed a silent good-bye.

  “But guess what?” she added. “They liked the name Kai. They’ve decided to keep it.”

  We were still in bed when the phone rang. I was sure it was the doctor’s office with the CVS results.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Steven asked. I shook my head; I was too frightened to move. “I can’t," I whispered. “I just cant.

  He shoved his feet into his slippers and trudged down the hall. “Hello," he said, picking up the phone. “Yes, it is. Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm. Okay. Thank you.”

  Time stopped. I had the sensation of looking down from a great height, though I didn’t know at what. Motherhood? Childlessness? Where would the next plunge take me? Steven’s face, when he returned, gave away nothing. This is the second before I know how I’ll spend the rest of my life, I thought. I stared at him, wordlessly.

  He grinned. “Everything’s fine," he said. “And it’s a girl.”

  EPILOGUE: MEDITATIONS ON LUCK

  If she had been a boy, I would’ve called her Isaac, which in Hebrew means “he will laugh.” The biblical Sarah concocted that name for her son in response to Go
d’s first practical joke. She was ninety years old when the child was born, making me, at forty-one, feel a mere sprout. Instead, we chose something equally whimsical: Daisy Tomoko (the latter Japanese for “friend”). She is the joy of our lives.

  One morning about a week after her birth, as she and I strolled through our garden to fetch the day’s mail, my eyes fell on a small, stone Jizo statue partially veiled by ferns. I’d bought it from a monastery in Oregon almost two years before to mark my third miscarriage. Seeing it always startled me a little, like the prick of a pin. I wasn’t sure whether to bow my head before it or chuck it in the trash. That was pretty much how I felt about everything that had happened over the previous six years—torn between a need to remember and the desire to forget.

  A manila envelope nudged open the top of the mailbox. Its return address was marked “Immigration and Naturalization Service.” "IT HAS BEEN DETERMINED THAT YOU ARE ABLE TO FURNISH PROPER CARE TO AN ORPHAN,” read a letter inside. Although we’d abandoned our attempt to adopt, we’d paid our fees, filed our forms, so the bureaucracy had kept churning. It had taken until now—exactly nine months since Kai’s birth—to clear the first hurdle; we still would have had to get him past Bernice. I shuddered to think of what that time would’ve been like for us. I had thought about Kai often, particularly now that I held another infant in my arms. We had only spent a short time together, he and I, but I missed him. I still do. For months I couldn’t bear to develop the photos we’d shot in Hiroshima. When I did, I shuffled through them once, my throat constricting, then hid them away in the back of a drawer. What else was there to do? I couldn’t exactly frame them, but I’ll never throw them away.

  Walking back to the house, I recalled that Jizo is supposed to guide a mizuko toward another try at life, either with the same woman or with another. Maybe, then, I wasn’t meant to be Kai’s mother. Maybe he had tried three times to be born through my womb but failed, then tried once more through someone else’s. Maybe when he found his true mother in San Diego, my body was finally free to make Daisy.

  I floated that theory past Steven. He looked at me gravely. “Never repeat that to anyone,” he said. “You sound like one of those whackos.”

  “Aren’t you glad it all worked out?” I asked him another day. We were sitting on the couch taking turns holding Daisy, mesmerized by her cherry lips, her pearly toes.

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t go getting revisionist on me,” he said. “I don’t want you to forget what actually happened and start thinking it was all worth it.”

  “I’m not,” I protested. “I’d never do that.” But I knew I was busted: I’d been busily rewriting our history in my head so that the end justified the means. As much as I love our daughter, I don’t believe that’s the case. I can’t lie—the act of giving birth was surprisingly redemptive. Popping out a healthy baby at nearly forty-two (conceived with only one ovary!) not only restored my confidence in my unreliable body, it made me feel invincible. What’s more, as it turns out I adore being a mom, though I’m a little uneasy saying so. I resent that to prove we’re good mothers, professionally accomplished women are expected to claim that motherhood is our “most important job” or the “best thing I’ve ever done.” Still, sometimes, sitting at a miniature table, covered in Play-Doh and reading Where’s Spot for the thirty zillionth time, I don’t recognize myself—and that’s not a bad thing. Identity, I’ve learned, can be sliced many ways and there is gain with every loss. At least, under the right circumstances. Just as he expected, Steven is as involved and competent a parent as I am. It’s because of that fluidity, and the freedom it brings, that I don’t, as I feared, feel personally or professionally compromised by motherhood. Not that it’s effortless—simultaneously keeping a marriage vital, being a parent, and pursuing a demanding career is, as I anticipated, a complicated hat trick—but we do it together. For me, that’s made all the difference. And watching Steven chug through the house pretending to be Thomas the Tank Engine with our daughter bobbing around on his shoulders fills me with a delight I’ve never known.

  Even so. Becoming a parent can’t give me back the time—the entire second half of my thirties—obliterated by obsession. It doesn’t compensate for the inattention to my career, for my self-inflicted torment, for trashing my marriage. Although my relationship with Steven has, thankfully, proven resilient, hairline cracks remain. We may never reclaim the ease of our early years together; all we can do is move forward—tenderly, kindly, with mutual forgiveness. And with the knowledge that our love for each other has never, ever flagged.

  What if the deux ex machina of pregnancy hadn’t descended upon us? That question haunts me. Would I have pushed to adopt Kai despite the obstacles? Could I have made peace with childlessness? Would I have ultimately destroyed the most precious, sustaining thing in my life: my marriage? I’d hate to think that the only way I could have righted myself was to have a baby. I’ll never know whether that was the case.

  Nor, short of “move to Sweden,” would I know what I’d tell a young friend—say, Jess, who, as I once was, is now a twenty-five-year-old aspiring magazine writer in New York City. Do I wish we’d tried to conceive earlier? Sure, in a way, but then again, I’d hate to have missed all I did instead during those years: traveling the world, publishing books, enjoying the adventure of my marriage. And who’s to say the outcome would have been different? If life gave do-overs, I wouldn’t change my course, but I would choose to traverse it differently—with less craziness, more equanimity, more courage. I would tell myself, “This is your life, no matter what happens,” rather than, “This is your life, only if you can make this one thing happen.” Would that have made a difference? Could I have hung on to that thought once conception had become pathologized, once I was caught in the vortex of persuasive doctors and miracle cures? I don’t know. That’s the insidious thing about infertility treatments: the very fact of their existence, the potential, however slim, that the next round might get you pregnant creates an imperative that may not have otherwise existed. If you didn’t try it, you’d always have to wonder whether it would’ve worked. That’s how you lose sight of your real choices, because the ones you’re offered make you feel as if you have none.

  There were more than a million fertility-related medical appointments made within the last year, and it’s unclear how many of them are necessary. One recent large-scale study found that 90 percent—90 percent—of women in their late thirties will get pregnant within two years of trying (assuming their partners are also under forty). Yet infertility in this country is defined as failure to conceive after just one year, and many couples, as we did, storm the clinic doors after just a few months. So what’s a girl with a ticking biological clock to do? Until the workplace and family life better accommodate mothers, there’s no right answer. Nor can you count on the specialists to provide one; their doctor-patient relationship is too easily influenced, if only subtly so, by profit motive and the vagaries of self-regulation. As ever-newer “cures,” such as the recent hype over egg freezing, are dangled before us, it’s up to the consumer to be alert to their pitfalls, to the allure of perpetual hope. I wish I had understood that.

  Early on, a friend smiled at Daisy, lying milk-drunk in my arms. “Everything happens for a reason,” she observed.

  I bristled. That’s not something I believe, not when women I love die leaving babies behind, not when children are starving, when adults are tortured. Nor do I like its corollary: “God only gives you what you can handle.” If so, God is a sadist. I refuse to view life through such a simplistic, superstitious lens, whether it’s held up by religion or by New Age. I did not get cancer because I held in anger. My infertility was not a result of my ambivalence about motherhood. Nor did I ultimately get pregnant because I was trying to adopt. It’s a cruel myth that adoptive parents (presumably more relaxed once they’ve given up on a biological child) are subsequently more likely to conceive than other infertile couples: the rates for both are between 3 and 10 percen
t. In fact stress, that bogeyman of modern maladies, may be less relevant to both cancer and infertility than previously believed. A 2005 Swedish study examining stress before and during IVF treatment found that it had no negative impact whatsoever on success rates. The tightly wound conceived as readily as the calm. Meanwhile, a Danish study of more than six thousand women found those who were highly stressed were nearly 40 percent less likely than others to develop breast cancer.

  Adversity is a random, arbitrary thing, though one can still glean meaning from it, use its crucible to become a better, more compassionate person. My story, I’ve found, is not so unusual. Many women experience at least one of its twists—miscarriage, infertility, breast cancer—and fear, at dark moments, that they caused their affliction. Most women ask themselves at one time or another what it means to mother—what the cost might be to their careers or marriages, how it reshapes the self. And all of us, male and female, encounter pain and loss; all of us reckon with dreams unfilled, with the limits our younger choices have placed on our later lives. All of us have to figure out how to move beyond that regret.

  Nine years ago I considered myself a lucky person. But what I meant by that was that I was unmarred by fate, so mine was a callow good fortune. Even after cancer treatment, I resented the assumption that I ought to be more appreciative of life than my healthier friends. Since when was moral superiority a required outcome of illness? I was only thirty-five then, not ready to acknowledge life’s fragility. I still believed I could fly through it on my Palm Pilot, scheduling stops for marriage and childbirth on my own terms. But now I wake up every day—every day—feeling transcendently blessed. Don’t get me wrong. I still curse out drivers who leave their left turn signal on for three miles; I’m still irked by the grammatically inexplicable phrase “Can I help who’s next?”; but my pettiness is dwarfed by a sense of reverent, radiant gratitude that’s sweeter for having experienced its opposite, as love is sweeter for one’s scars. Mine is the luck of realizing that happiness may only be the respite between bouts of pain and so is to be savored, not taken as an entitlement. I suppose I’ve finally understood the concept of wabi-sabi. And although in many ways I’d give a lot not to have learned it, I’m grateful for the lesson.