One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir

by Suzy Becker

  Three days later, 5:30 on a Friday, Dr. Bunnell called with the results of the genetic blood screen. “Negative for Down’s, neural tube defects and Trisomy 18; I wanted to let you know before the weekend. I should have the rest by next Friday or Monday, latest.”

  We were at the doctor’s. A very cheery nurse started to give us the amnio results and then she stopped abruptly. “I better get the doctor,” she said. Our doctor wasn’t in. A substitute doctor gave us the results in a hurry, and before they had a chance to sink in, she was interrupted—her daughter (it was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day) needed her. We were shuffled over to another doctor, a man whom I instantly liked. Just as we sat down, he got a phone call from another doctor and the two of them were going on, laughing about a woman who was dying, admitting they shouldn’t be. Lorene turned to me and said, “What don’t you understand about the results? The amniotic sac is held on by eighteen carpenter ants. One of your ants is facing the wrong way, which is straining the other seventeen, so they will eventually, sooner rather than later, let go. You need to terminate the pregnancy.”

  I kept myself busy during my waking hours. We had a wedding to go to, our own small second “legal” wedding to plan, and the deadline (my due date) for my first picture book Manny’s Cows was less than six months away.

  Dr. Bunnell called the house at 5:30 the next Friday with the three words I wanted to hear: “Everything is normal.” Lorene wasn’t home, not reachable by phone—she was helping a friend take prom pictures. I e-mailed Steve and thought about gifting myself a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s, now that I was officially eating for a healthy two, but I settled for chocolate.

  Chocolate Finding

  Snacking on chocolate can help prevent fetal complications of premature birth in women eating 3+ servings per week.

  Yale Center for Perinatal, Pediatric and Environmental Epidemiology

  Lots of chocolate. Then I filled out a maternity Advent calendar for Lorene. It had been fifteen years since I had made the very first one for my friend, hoping someday there’d be one for me.

  I couldn’t wait up for Lorene. My napping time had dried up once I got home from book tour, and I was usually spent by ten. I left the calendar on her pillow. She woke me with a kiss on the forehead, her hair brushing my face. I sat up next to her while she opened the little calendar windows. Then she took me to her closet, rummaged around, and presented me with a bag. A baby dress. I had completely forgotten we’d bought a little dress. Something we’d fallen in love with last spring—possibly for Meredith’s baby, possibly for ours. We hung its tiny satin hanger on the closet door of the guest baby’s room.

  The next week we began telling people we were going to have a baby. Circle the most common response:

  (a) Do you know whether it’s a boy or a girl?

  (b) Congratulations! I’m so happy for both of you.

  (c) When’s your due date?

  The sun went away Memorial Day weekend, and the weather was too iffy to consider a June 1st ceremony underneath the two 150-year-old maples in the backyard. We stood in front of our fireplace. I was barefoot and pregnant in my old wedding dress, standing opposite Lorene in her old wedding dress. There were just six guests, including Henry (in Meredith’s arms). We had had our real wedding two years earlier; this was our legal wedding.

  Jean Eldredge, a retired justice of the peace who’d known Lorene since she was one, had special dispensation to officiate. We repeated the vows we’d exchanged in Vermont, and then it was Jean’s turn: “I now pronounce you man—married—a couple!” One of our guests snorted, and we kissed. Then we all sat down to a dinner of poached salmon and Meredith’s coconut cake.

  The second trimester is supposedly a wonderful time to travel, which was a good thing, because back at Christmas, when we were planning our Other Life, we’d promised my mother a trip to Wimbledon. It was, in all likelihood, my mother’s last big trip, given her increasingly limited mobility. Her wheelchair was our ticket to the front of every airport security line. She was seated on an aisle in the row ahead of us; a British midwife was sharing our row.

  “She’s pregnant,” Lorene volunteered.

  “She?” The midwife was looking at me. “You’re pregnant? Don’t look it. Don’t look it at all.” That was the extent of our conversation, but I felt reassured by her proximity—in the unlikely event I started having contractions, or any other unlikely events.

  We put my mother back on a plane after Wimbledon and spent a rainy week on a sheep farm at the tip of a peninsula in southern Scotland. Lorene read Active Birth in bed with her coffee. She fell in love with the flavored “crisps”—lamb-and-mint or barbecued-chicken potato chips. I fell in love with British candy. And I advanced to the finals of the peninsula-wide Ping-Pong championships, the only woman entered in the annual summer tournament. Sparing my opponents further humiliation, we never mentioned I was with child.

  Later in the week, as we were on a bus barreling down a winding coastal road, I had a thought (over the shrieks of the school-age girls): We could be those foreigners who lose their lives in an obscure crash. Followed by another thought: I don’t want to die. But this time it wasn’t for the projects and places I wouldn’t get to—it was for the baby.

  We made our way back to London in our rental car, stopping for an overnight an hour or two from the airport. We’d continued past Stratford-on-Avon—too many tourists carrying too many plastic shopping bags—and found a small inn above a small bar-restaurant in a small village. The two of us watched an old couple take their seats at the table next to us. “Here you go, lovey,” he said as he pulled out her chair.

  I toasted, “To our next vacation!”

  “To true love,” Lorene said.

  “And happiness,” I replied. Our standard.

  The couple next to us raised their glasses, said, “Cheers, ole thing,” and clinked.

  We spent the last of our pounds in the airport buying a T-shirt for Lorene’s son, a double-decker bus for Henry. “You should get her something,” Lorene said. “A souvenir of her trip in your belly.”

  M’eternity

  The last-trimester clock ticked a lot louder than my biological clock ever had. It could’ve had to do with the fact that it was set to go off like an alarm and not peter out into nothingness. Nesting seemed far too cozy a word for my panicked motivation: if it didn’t get done now, we might be looking at never.

  I was intrigued by, but ultimately didn’t buy, the notion of “giving birth joyfully” while hypnotized. We chose a natural-birthing class that made a more modest promise to cover all forms of birth experience. I was up for Lorene’s natural birth plan as long as the baby and I were healthy, but I didn’t want to get too invested. If something happened and we needed a medical intervention, I didn’t want to feel like a failure on day one.

  HypnoBirthing® Class

  This method of childbirth is as much as a philosophy of birth as it is a technique for achieving a relaxing, comfortable, joyful birth. 6 sessions $225

  The birth educator at the maternity center affiliated with our hospital was a registered nurse and part-time yoga instructor with ten years of birth-education experience. Having become a better, stronger person as a result of giving birth naturally, she entered the profession to help others prepare for the transformational experience. In her introduction, she intimated that she was on the tail end of another transformational experience, and she and her naturally born child were estranged, but this didn’t tarnish the birth experience. It just made me feel a little protective of her.

  She put a lot of emphasis on the spiritual element of pregnancy and birthing in the first class. “Birthing opens your heart, it has to—your baby’s life depends on your heart, your ability to love.”

  We went over the course outline. In six classes we would learn the stages of labor and birth, and how to prepare for them using relaxation exercises, yoga, mindful breathing, guided imagery, and birth art.

  “Birth art?” I had t
o ask.

  She explained we would be drawing our feelings with crayons on paper. Lorene gave a sideways glance to see how I was doing so far. Fine. I had made up my mind to take what I could and leave the rest. Besides, we had already written our names in ink in the birth journal she gave us.

  My prenatal exercise class started a few nights later, the same night Lorene worked late. It had been months—ten?—since I’d had any exercise other than walking. I couldn’t wait to begin. I ate an early dinner and packed up the suggested water, snack, yoga mat (Lorene’s), and a pillow.

  The class was held in a meeting room at the local hospital. We set up our mats in a circle. All but two of us were returning students. The returning students (who were a few months further along) readily included us in their camaraderie. They swapped tales of hospital tours and breast-pump rentals, and the two of us newbies listened as though they were the big kids on the bus. I had to remind myself I was the oldest kid on the bus.

  After a lengthy series of stretches and warm-up exercises, the instructor asked us to place our pillows on our mats. The real exercise was about to begin: BUMP PUMP, bring it on! Then she had us lie down and she led a guided visualization. When we opened our eyes, the class was over.

  I kept going to the class and did the so-called exercises religiously in between, but I had to permanently resign myself to getting back in shape after the baby was born. How long does it take a forty-two-year-old body to get back in shape?

  At our second birthing class, our instructor cautioned us to be careful about our nesting. Rest is very important. At that stage, our bedroom ceiling was being repaired. Lorene and I had moved into the guest/baby room (next on the project list), which was crammed full of our bedroom’s belongings, the overflow lining the hallway.

  I was reading when Lorene crawled up next to me from the foot of the bed. “That was my cousin on the phone; her daughter had her baby!”

  “Everybody healthy?”

  “Amazing. She gave birth at home in front of the four kids.”

  “Wow.”

  “You know, I think I’m going to take a doula class.”

  “You should, you’d be great at it.” And we both said, “And then we wouldn’t need a midwife. Jinx!”

  Doula

  A woman who provides emotional and informational (not medical) support to a woman during labor

  “Would you do it to make money?” We tried not to worry about money, sticking with the belief there always had been and always would be enough—but the brain book wasn’t selling as well as anybody had hoped, and Lorene’s shop still hadn’t fully recovered from 9/11, almost three years earlier.

  “I don’t think I’d make a lot of money.” She opened her book. “I don’t know what to do about the shop. I can’t work for somebody else and be a stay-at-home mom half the time. I should have—”

  “I’M HAVING ONE!” That was birth-education speak for “Contraction, breathe!”

  She laughed. “Never mind. I don’t like to talk about money before we go to bed.” She rolled on her side and put her left hand on my belly. “Remember when you could barely feel the kicks? Oh, those are hiccups.”

  Lorene enrolled in a weekend doula workshop in the western part of the state. She had twenty-four hours of training over the two and a half days and came back exhilarated, not exhausted. I was glad she was the keeper of the information and all I had to do was follow orders.

  I know, it’s only like a muscle, and there aren’t any ligaments, but my brain definitely felt as if it was being stretched a lot of the time, too.

  It wasn’t the simple preoccupation with being pregnant: I actually felt like a dolt. I had also developed empathy for large-fronted folk who I may have generalized, in my less enlightened past, were sloppier than the rest of us.

  On days when I had someplace to go, I was in my second shirt by ten. Otherwise I was sporting a complete meal history, including the lunch I packed for Lorene, by bedtime.

  Jane flew in for a visit in late August so she could see me really pregnant. The afternoon we’d spent looking for her cat was life changing. (He came back after sixteen days.) Jane had been volunteering at the Berkeley Animal Rescue every Friday ever since. And whether it was related or not, she’d made up her mind to stay in my life.

  I was heading for the door of Terminal B at the same time, on the opposite trajectory, as another pregnant woman. “When are you due?” I asked.

  “End of November,” she answered, standing there, waiting for me to open the door. The fact that I was also pregnant was clearly lost on her.

  I hugged Jane hello, then the first thing I said was, “Do I look pregnant? At all?”

  “Definitely.” But she hadn’t seen the other woman for comparison. I told Lorene about the door incident when I got home. We had asked Dr. Bunnell about my size at our last appointment after I’d noted that the guys working in the cemetery down the road had bigger bellies than I did. Dr. Bunnell had assured us I was “all baby.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable parking in the expectant-mother spots in the supermarket. And just once,” I complained to Lorene, “I want someone, not you, to hold a door for me.”

  Jane suggested that if the opportunity ever re-presented itself, I should put more emphasis on the word you, as in, “When are you due?”

  Lorene shook her head. “It’s not your size, it’s the way you walk and everything else. You don’t look like you want help.”

  Jane and I had one last child-free weekend. On Saturday we went to Western Mass while Lorene worked. And we spent Sunday with Lorene, picnicking and sunning ourselves on conservation land south of Boston. Then on Monday, Jane hung out with Bruce while Lorene and I went to our birth-education class.

  It was our last class, and some of us were still referring to the people who would deliver our babies as “doctors.” Our instructor would chide, “health care providers,” since others of us had chosen alternative birth settings. Our instructor was still referring to us as moms and dads, and a dad corrected, “moms and partners.”

  We had achieved our learning objectives; we had done things Lorene claims I could only have done under the influence of pregnancy hormones.

  We were asked for one last round of sharing. “I’d like to know what you’ve come up with for birth rituals.”

  It was a hot August night and the maternity center’s air-conditioning wasn’t up to the task. Some of the big-bellied moms were clearly feeling the heat. Lorene finally raised her hand. “Cutting the cord.”

  “Lovely. You’re going to cut the cord.” The instructor made a full sentence out of Lorene’s answer.

  As Jane was getting ready to leave, she pointed to a spot in the backyard. “You have to plant a circle of sunflowers for her so she can stand in the middle. My mother did that for me.”

  “You will have to do it. No, I’ll do it, and you’ll come back when they’re six feet tall,” I said. She promised she would.

  Auntie Lorene and I had a full Sunday of nephew-sitting ahead of us while Meredith and Jonathan went on his company’s summer outing. We packed up to go over to their place; it was easier, especially when naps were involved. Dog barking made Henry cry, but he didn’t blink when Meredith raised her voice. Meredith said it’s all about what they get used to in the womb.

  “Our baby won’t blink at the sound of a dog barking, and she’ll cry at the sound of men,” I said to Lorene.

  “Now, why would you say that? For starters, our baby has spent every Saturday with your best friend Bruce.” Could be I’m worried about her being raised by two moms. We weren’t in San Francisco or Cambridge, which was fine for us. We could deal with being different. I just wanted everything to be okay for our kid.

  It turned out that the company outing was a decoy for our baby shower. Surprise! There were twenty-some guests, a game—guess the circumference of my belly—beautiful food, flowers, and a mountain of presents.

  We were completely worn out from being the center of attent
ion, opening presents, and subjecting other people to present-opening in the sun. Lorene begged me not to work when we got home, but if I inked and painted one page, I was on track to finish Manny’s Cows by our birthdays, which meant I’d have a full month of maternity leave. A few hours later, I was carrying the finished page down to show Lorene. I missed a step and took the flight of stairs on my back; the finished page never touched the ground. Lorene came running from the other side of the house. “Let me see.”

  There were welts all down my back. I was crying. “I didn’t hurt her, did I?” I whispered into Lorene’s neck. Eight and a half months, oh please, don’t let me lose her now.

  We saw one of Dr. Bunnell’s colleagues at our appointment that Thursday. We had gone from the every-four-weeks to the every-two-weeks plan. The black-and-blue marks on my back didn’t even warrant a note in my file. Our questions may have, though.

  Q: Should we be doing perineal massage?

  A: Will probably do more irritation than good.

  Q: How about breast-feeding classes? (Most of my yoga classmates were enrolled.)

  A: It’s like taking a bicycle class without a bicycle.

  Q: What do you know about expressing colostrum?

  Q/A: Where did we ever hear of such a thing? Nipple stimulation induces labor.

  Then Lorene asked the capper. “Do you think my milk will come back?”

  “Hmm. Maybe. When was your child born?”

  “Twenty-five years ago.”

  The doctor didn’t laugh in front of us. She kindly said, “We usually say five years is a long shot.”