by Suzy Becker
Lorene and I had dinner at a deli in town afterward. I was hungry for, possibly craving, gefilte fish. I also ordered matzo ball soup and a pickle, an homage to craving.
“Well, did the tour make it seem more real?” Lorene asked. “Did it scare you?”
“It made the due date more real—it’s almost here and we still have a ton to do. I don’t think I’m scared. We did the class. You’re a doula. Even if my labor is twenty-four hours”—Lorene labored with David for forty-one hours—“it’s like Ride FAR. Okay, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, maybe it’s worse than Ride FAR, but there’s an end, and we get a baby.” And even if I was scared, admitting it would only scare us more. “Are you scared?”
“I’m not scared about the birth. You’re going to be wonderful. I’m scared about the next eighteen years. I just didn’t know how to help David through school. The public high school was wrong, but I don’t know that St. John’s was right . . . ”
“I feel pretty good about the school part. We’ll make sure she gets good teachers, and I’ll help out in her classroom.”
“Things that weren’t hard for me were hard for David, and I didn’t get it . . . You think your kids are going to be like you and it’s a big surprise, they’re not.”
“Well, I won’t know what to do if she’s popular. If it all goes to shit in high school, we can always send her to Steve, remember?” She smiled.
I gave birth to a small baby doll. We were all in the backyard for her naming ceremony, and partway through, her plastic head fell off. I quietly looked around, sure it couldn’t have gone very far, but then it was time to hold her up and I had to make an announcement. Everyone helped us look, but no one could find it. Someone suggested it wasn’t a big deal, any baby head would do, they’re very easy to replace, and I felt relieved because I realized it was true.
Lorene and I went back to Vermont for our birthday weekend. We wrote up our birth plan and we met with Julie, the officiant at our Vermont wedding, to put together some kind of a naming or welcoming ceremony in early November, the Sunday before Steve would head back to Melbourne.
Robin met us for a birthday dinner in Shelburne Falls. She had made us bracelets.
“I’m not going to make these for anybody else, not with the three kinds of metal.” There were tears in her eyes when we thanked her. “I’m sorry, I feel stupid. We’re celebrating your birthdays.”
“That’s fine, I’m trying to forget mine,” said Lorene. Her friends, plenty of whom were grandmothers, didn’t hesitate to tell her she was nuts for having a baby at fifty-three.
“I’m worried I’m going to feel left out. The only one without children. You and Meredith will bond even more, the kids will play together . . . ” She wiped at her eyes. “I really miss Meredith. We used to talk every night when we were making dinner, but at least I felt like I still had you two.”
It made me sad she didn’t have someone of her own. “You’ll still have us. It’s not like Meredith and Jonathan; we work for ourselves. We may not be able to get out this way as much, but you can always come see us. And Mommy still calls her guest room your room,” I joked.
“See? Stop it. The two of you will have your kids and I’ll be taking care of Mother.”
Our last morning in Vermont, I was squatting in front of the refrigerator naked, surveying the remains of our weekend provisions, and I sneezed. “These pelvic floor exercises aren’t working,” I yelled to Lorene. I had switched my weekly exercise outing from prenatal exercise to prenatal yoga at the end of the session, but I had kept up the daily “workout” at home.
“You should be doing Kegel exercises all the time—do them when you’re standing in line at the supermarket.” Lorene had the camera.
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”
“What? Your baby is going to want to see pictures of your belly.”
I never saw pictures of my mother’s belly. “My baby is not going to want to see pictures of her mother naked.”
“She won’t mind seeing you naked until she knows you are naked.” I cooperated for two pictures, and then we took the Sunday paper back to bed. After we finished the paper, we caught up on What to Expect, reading and napping most of the day.
“Look, it says people have sex to relax.” She peered at me over the tops of her glasses.
“I relax to relax.”
“That’s good, because I think we’re both coming down with something.”
I couldn’t get sick; I had to hand the artwork for Manny’s Cows over to the editor when she was in Boston in exactly two Saturdays.
We went over our birth plan with Dr. Bunnell at the thirty-six-week appointment. “So, we don’t want an anesthesiologist in the room,” I explained. “Much easier than refusing their offers,” our birth instructor had advised us. Lorene and I had an understanding: If I asked for pain medication three times, she would find the anesthesiologist.
Dr. Bunnell was on board with the plan. She reminded us to bring another copy, in case she wasn’t with us in the delivery room. Lorene asked if she could “pull” our baby out when the time came and Dr. Bunnell looked at her quizzically. “When I had my son, my doctor asked me if I wanted to, and I reached down under his arms and pulled him out. It was amazing.”
Dr. Bunnell smiled. “Let’s see how we’re doing, but I don’t see any reason why not.”
There was another delicate matter. I brought it up. “There’s kind of a complication with the birth certificate. We want both of our names on it and Steve is okay with that—”
“Steve’s the dad,” Dr. Bunnell confirmed.
“Yep, and he’s going to be around for the birth, but we’ve been told not to mention he’s the dad at the hospital—there’s some sort of professional obligation among the staff to report biological fathers because of deadbeat dads and everything.”
“The birth certificate will go through with both your names?”
“We hope so.” It wasn’t clear. The hospital would send the certificate over to the Department of Health, and according to our lawyer, they were eager to get it. The state hadn’t come up with a policy since they’d legalized gay marriage in the spring. The Department of Public Health would then forward the certificate to legal, and after that it was anyone’s guess. They could sit on it. They could send it straight through. They could attempt to identify a father and make us go through with an adoption. Lorene, Steve, and I found that eventuality depressing; Steve and I would have to sign over our rights so Lorene and I could coadopt her.
I never got a cold after Vermont, but Lorene ended up with pneumonia. I brought her lunch in bed. “What have you been eating?” she asked, brushing the crumbs off my shirt.
“Oh, prenatal deluxe grahams.” I liked to insert “prenatal” in front of any food I ate. “Listen, I’m going to the appointment alone today—you’re staying home—and I’m skipping yoga tonight.” We were now on the once-a-week plan, and this appointment was with the one colleague we had yet to meet. I knew Lorene was really sick when she didn’t object.
Dr. Middleton may have been last, and shortest, but not least. She measured my belly twice. “You are forty-two years old.” I nodded. “You do not look forty-two.” It wasn’t a compliment. “Your baby is small; three to four weeks small. You look so young, no one has been paying attention to your advanced maternal age.” Dr. Middleton was about to make up for it.
“I want you to go to the emergency room.” Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
“The emergency room?”
“Your baby may do better outside your womb. Once it’s out, we can take care of it . . . ”
“Can I call home?” She handed me the phone. After I finished explaining, Lorene asked me to put the doctor on. I handed the phone to Dr. Middleton. “Her name is Lorene and she is home with pneumonia.”
“How far away are you?” Dr. Middleton asked. “Well, even if they induce her right away, you should be here in time for the delivery.”
“I don’
t think she should drive,” I said. Not in rush hour, not with a fever, not when I was the one who did our Boston driving, but Dr. Middleton had hung up the phone.
I drove myself to the hospital a few blocks away and handed over my file. “Dr. Middleton was concerned about my baby.”
“How are you doing?”
I changed into a gown and they put me back on a monitor. No more hiccups.
A nurse came in after fifteen minutes to read the tape. “How does it look?” I asked.
“Perfect, but Dr. Middleton is very smart. If she’s concerned, it’s not without good reason. I’ll check again in fifteen minutes.”
Another nurse popped her head in. “The doctor wants an ultrasound, SGA. Someone will come take her down when they’re ready.”
I watched TV. And the clock. 6:15. 6:30. Lorene should be here soon. The monitor checker apologized, “They’re always backed up down there.”
“Could I get a snack?”
“I’m sorry, your doctor doesn’t want you—” Just then I saw Dr. Bunnell, my doctor, coming down the hall.
“C’mon, let’s get you out of here.” She started unhooking me from the monitor. “I don’t know exactly what triggered this—the baby may be a little small, but by the time you get an ultrasound and some resident reads it in the middle of the night . . . ”
“What’s SGA?”
“Somebody said something about SGA?”
SGA
Small for gestational age: constitutional or pathological
IGR
Internal growth retardation: physical growth slow, mental growth appropriate, risk for hypoxia, hypoglycemia
She shook her head, “I would be shocked if—” Lorene walked in. Dr. Bunnell put her arm around her. “No emergency, you can take her home. I’ll have the office schedule an ultrasound Monday—Monday’s a holiday—Tuesday.”
“I had to get our neighbor to drive me—” Lorene started to cry. “God, I am just so happy to see you,” she hugged me. “And you,” she patted my belly, “and you,” she squeezed Dr. Bunnell’s arm.
I drove us home. “You could still make it to yoga,” Lorene said. “The relaxation would be good for you.”
The irony of shoehorning yoga into the end of this day was irresistible. I don’t know that I would have had the self-discipline not to tell my toxic hospital tale in the sacred space, but I wasn’t given any opening. That night we were invited to share exactly one word. The word that best described the little being inside us; the word that would describe her forever since we, as mothers, had already come to know her spirit intimately.
Small. I tried to think of another word in between luminous, joyful, curious, wise, teacher, and the ten others that were taken in the turns before mine.
“Compact.” I’d said it. I couldn’t take it back. I couldn’t qualify or explain it. I could only hope that my baby was busy or sleeping and hadn’t heard it.
The Home Stretch
I met my editor and her husband in Concord and turned in the art for Manny’s Cows. She took the pieces out one by one and admired them on her picnic blanket. Turns out, she began apologetically, she would be seeing Manny into, but not through, production. Her husband had accepted a job in Chicago and they would be moving. She had plans to enroll in divinity school, and the two of them had begun the paperwork—they were going to adopt a baby.
How could I begrudge her? It was a glorious fall day, and at the conclusion of our picnic, I was officially on maternity leave!
I stopped in and poked around my favorite antique shop on the way to the car. A framed embroidery sampler caught my eye. Schmaltz city.
Lorene and I switched sides of the bed; I gave up the wall side so I wouldn’t wake her when I got up to go to the bathroom. And the Middleton affair had given me insomnia, so I also had to try not to wake her after I got back.
Our baby aced the Tuesday ultrasound. She scored eight out of eight on her “biophysical profile,” whatever that was. Her weight (five pounds, eleven ounces) was in the bottom tenth percentile, but we were on the charts. We had a very healthy baby with a low birth weight. Dr. Bunnell told us that one of her daughters weighed under six pounds at birth, and by age five, she was in the 95th percentile.
My uterus, however, was not off the hook. I would need another ultrasound in two weeks to make sure the baby was maintaining or gaining weight; if not, they would induce labor.
“Two weeks? That’s when you’re due anyway. Do we want to wait two weeks to see whether she’s gaining weight?” Lorene asked as we were leaving the building.
“Dr. Bunnell seemed fine with it.”
“You should’ve been having these ultrasounds all along; we were worried about your size—we would’ve had a baseline.”
Thank God, Jehovah, or whomever I hadn’t had all the ultrasounds! I would’ve spent the entire pregnancy living in fear from one to the next. “Do you want to call the birth instructor and see what she knows about low birth weights?”
We hadn’t spoken with her since the summer. She was happy to hear from us.
“Is that what they’re telling you?” she moaned. “They’ve got no research, no data to back up this claim that babies do better outside the uterus.”
Data or no, they certainly had more experience dealing with low-birth-weight babies than my uterus, but we decided to believe in the instructor. Worrying couldn’t possibly be good for the baby or the uterus.
We spent the last few nights before Steve arrived putting the finishing touches on the nursery, which was also his room. It bore no resemblance to the Pottery Barn baby sanctuary I’d envisioned—gleaming white furniture and me, on a sliding rocker in the corner where the guest bed now stood. But “when-since,” as Lorene would say-ask, is anything in our lives gleaming white? There were a half dozen Hefty bags full of hand-me-downs waiting to be put into the bureau, changing table, closet, and attic. The night-light spun orangey-yellow stars on the ceiling from where it sat on the bureau. This was our soon-to-be real baby’s real room.
Our last night alone, we packed our bags for the hospital and stowed them by the kitchen door. Mister sniffed the bags. “That’s right, your life is about to change!” Lorene told him. He sat looking expectantly at the biscuit door. She gave both dogs biscuits and we went to bed.
“Just so you know, if I wasn’t so tired, I’d consider, you know—it’s not that I don’t have desires. You look so beautiful, and I’m never going to get this body again,” Lorene said. She kissed me and turned out her light.
I didn’t have desires. And I loved her so much.
We had dinner out on our way to the airport. Our last romantic dinner for the foreseeable future. We ended up staying until closing time. Our waiter had kids and, like most strangers, he didn’t hesitate to warn us about the mess we were getting ourselves into. “It changes everything—there’s an understatement. Are you ready?”
“I think we are,” Lorene said, relatively confidently. After we change the wills, winterize the garden, freeze a bunch of dinners . . .
“Love the new car,” Steve said first thing, after the hugs were done. I laughed, recalling the one we’d picked him up in the last time.
“We’ve got two new, well, one used-new—” Lorene had opened my coat.
“WOW!” Steve stood, just looking. “Can I?” He placed his hand on top of my belly and let it rest there. I wonder whose hands she’ll get.
It was a clear night, just like the one we’d had three years ago. Less of a chill in the air. We took our same seats. Three years seemed like such a long time; then again, they were still working on Logan. Steve gripped the handle above the window, a crutch (not a comment on my driving) for someone who was used to gripping a steering wheel when he sat on that side. “I always knew,” he said, pivoting on the handle to face me. “I knew you’d get pregnant.”
I didn’t. I never knew. I wished. I hoped that planning and praying and saying it out loud would make my wish come true, but it was so easy to ima
gine Steve saying the exact opposite just then.
“She pulled it off,” Lorene chimed in from the backseat.
“You both did,” Steve said. “So, am I sleeping in the nursery?”
“Nursery–guest room. We kept the bed.”
“I was thinking I should probably stay somewhere else after the birth.”
“She won’t be sleeping in your room—”
“No, well, I was thinking more about you two needing time to sort things out . . . ”
“It’ll be we three,” I said. “That’s all the time you’ll have with her for a while, unless, you know, you decide to move next door. Well, next door’s not for sale, but . . . ”
Steve’s old routines came right back to him. The late-night wanders. Late-morning breakfasts, afternoon dog walks, and late-afternoon snacks. We made dinners together, and as long as there wasn’t a Red Sox game, we hung out in the kitchen until ten or so, then left Steve to his late nights. There seemed to be a newfound comfort, a familiarity (Lorene and I admitted we missed the shrieks; even the dogs didn’t seem to faze him). Or maybe edges had been softened now that we had all passed the pregnancy achievement test.
The Red Sox were in the American League championships. Lorene and I were “closers” (her term)—we could give a fat rat’s ass about the rest of the season, but we never missed a play-off game. I was sure we could get Steve hooked, from a gambling angle, but he couldn’t be bothered to try to understand baseball. He was channeling all of his betting energy into our presidential election, which he couldn’t get anybody else to bother with. On play-off nights he would shut us in the living room to work on his novel and talk on the phone at the kitchen table.
The morning after Game 5, there were two tea mugs in the sink. “Looks like Steve had a late night,” I said to Lorene. She was stacking up his note piles and setting them to the side of the kitchen table.