Caravan of No Despair

by Mirabai Starr

  When the nurse came in at last, she was clearly in a rush. Busy day at the women’s clinic. She tossed the dark blue strip onto the counter beside me. “It’s positive,” she said. “Go ahead and get undressed from the waist down, and the doctor will be in shortly.”

  “Positive?” My world tilted on its axis and almost toppled. I had a couple of college degrees, but suddenly I couldn’t remember what positive meant, in the medical sense. When you tested positive for the AIDS virus, for instance, did that mean you had the disease? Shouldn’t it be negative, because your whole world was about to go up in flames? Wasn’t this bad news that I was pregnant and had a womb that had no room to grow a person? Or by “positive” did she mean that I should be happy I wasn’t actually pregnant and could get on with my plan to shed my diseased uterus once and for all?

  “You’re pregnant,” she snapped, one centimeter away from adding, “you idiot!”

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “I’m infertile.” It was ludicrous to argue with this busy person who was fully capable of telling the difference between positive and negative pregnancy results, but I couldn’t integrate the information. It felt like an immaculate conception, only they got the wrong girl.

  “The doctor will be in shortly,” she repeated and left the room.

  Dr. Heidi and I discussed my options. She explained that if I were to try and carry this baby, I would need to do so under the supervision of a high-risk pregnancy specialist, that I would have to spend the next eight months in bed, and that they would stockpile my blood in the likely event of a late-term miscarriage, which would endanger my life. Given my age and the ravaged condition of my uterus, she recommended terminating the pregnancy.

  “An abortion?”

  She nodded benevolently, although whether it was from compassion for my loss or pity for my lack of the most basic biological facts I could not tell.

  When I broke the news to Jeff, there was not much to discuss. He didn’t want to take any chances of my dying in childbirth, and I didn’t want to make him start all over raising a child when he had worked so hard for so many years to support the three he had. He held me while I cried, and told me that if only things had been different he would have loved to have a baby with me. Brave and resolute, we scheduled the abortion and planned to follow up with a hysterectomy as soon as I was recovered enough to undergo the surgery.

  There were only a couple of clinics in the state willing to “terminate pregnancies,” and they had waiting lists. So I had to spend two weeks incubating an embryo that would never become a child. I reckoned I had two choices. I could either distance myself from my condition until I could get it over with, or I could show up for the experience of carrying life inside my body for the first and last time. I opted to be as fully present to reality as I could manage. I called my friend Bobbi, who had been our family therapist before she retired, and she agreed to come over and help me come to grips with my impending loss.

  “Have you picked out a name?”

  “Bobbi!” Had she forgotten why I had asked her here? “I’m not having the baby.”

  “I know, but I think you need to make a relationship with this unborn being. It didn’t come into your life for nothing.” We were sitting side by side on my couch. “Talk to it. Tell it that you would have been thrilled to be its mommy, but that it isn’t going to work out this time around. Send it on its way with love. You’ll feel much better if you do.”

  I closed my eyes and reached out to the little soul hovering nearby. “Mo,” I said, opening my eyes to look at Bobbi. “I’ll call him Mo. After my father’s favorite uncle.” Mo. Short for Moishe, Yiddish for Moses, the baby whose mother sent him in a basket of reeds down the Nile to escape persecution. Moses, who God called from within a bush that burned and was not consumed, who took off his sandals because he was standing on holy ground. Moses, who received the Torah at the summit of Mount Sinai and led his people right to the edge of the Promised Land. But I was not thinking of the Bible when I named my unborn son. I was thinking of the legendary Uncle Mo. I was thinking of my father, who died before he had the chance to meet the father of my doomed baby. I was thinking five girls were enough and that we needed a boy, even if he would never become a real boy.

  Bobbi placed her hand on my cheek, and I came undone. I collapsed against her, and she stroked my hair. From the dark cavern of Bobbi’s lap, I spoke to little Mo and tried to make things right. Bobbi was correct: it helped. Guilt gave way to a kind of holy wonderment. I spent the next two weeks nauseous and exhausted, in awe of the miracle of life growing inside me, aware that it was fleeting, which made me cherish it all the more.

  Jeff was working out of town the day of the procedure, and so my mother accompanied me to the clinic in Santa Fe. The night before, she wrote a kind of love letter about my pregnancy and my choice to end it. She wrote with reverence and poetry, lifting the tragedy into the realm of the sublime without in any way minimizing my pain. She expressed gratitude that I had the opportunity to create new life with a man I love. She affirmed the importance of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her own body, and praised the doctors and nurses who take care of us when we conceive a child and elect not to bring it into this world. Jeff, a former yogi who did not believe in petitionary prayer and had long ago dismissed the notion of a personified deity, promised he would silently chant Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram throughout the day as he stripped old key locks from hotel room doors.

  Before the procedure I met with a counselor who gave me one more chance to change my mind. I did not waver. Then I had a blood test and an ultrasound to determine just how pregnant I was. More than I thought. When I glanced up at the screen, I saw a distinct black spot, about the size and shape of a kidney bean.

  “Is that the baby?” I asked.

  “That is the embryo, yes,” the technician told me.

  “It looks . . . fine,” I said.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  Someone led me into the operating room where someone else inserted a giant needle into my uterus, injected me with a local anesthetic, and left me alone to stare at the ceiling for a half an hour.

  “My little bean,” I murmured. “My sweet little Mo.”

  I granted myself permission to cry, but the numbness spreading through my loins seemed to have migrated to my heart. I felt nothing. I floated on the surf of my breath until the doctor came in and vacuumed little Mo from my womb.

  The following June I underwent what they call a partial hysterectomy. There was nothing partial about it. My uterus was severed from the fallopian tubes that fastened it inside me, and then it was pried through a slit at bikini line. They did leave my cervix and ovaries intact, so presumably my body would still follow the twenty-eight-day ovulation cycle, following the moon like a tide that ebbed but never flowed. I would not bleed. I was expected to be relieved about this. Yet I found myself mourning my period. I missed the earthy smell of the menstrual blood, the aching in my loins and the oozing between my legs as the walls that lined my uterus melted and shed, carried away each month like a Tibetan sand painting. A continuous rotation of crucifixion and resurrection enacted on the cross of my own body, devoid of tragedy or drama.

  In less than a year I had terminated the only pregnancy I would ever experience and then forfeited any possibility of becoming pregnant again. I sat with these facts as my body slowly healed around the void to which I had been compelled to assent.

  16

  SLIPPING

  My daughter was losing her mind.

  It wasn’t easy to spot her unraveling; Jenny had always been eccentric. As a child she would burst into storms of delight when we encountered twin baby boys in a double stroller at the park, or discovered that the peach seed she planted in an old teacup had sprouted a tiny peach tree, or realized that the human body is comprised of eighty percent water. After I had finished reading aloud from Bless Me, Ultima or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, my eight-year-old would exclaim, “I love adjec
tives!” Jenny was enthusiastic about random things and defiantly indifferent to what others held in esteem.

  Jenny’s adolescence seemed more tumultuous than most. I mean, I knew, from having been a teenage girl myself, that puberty could be brutal. And I didn’t think it was possible to raise a more difficult daughter than Daniela, who had been totally shut down when she was with me and totally out of control when she wasn’t. But Jenny had been perfecting her passive-aggressive attitude and seemed to relish every opportunity to let me know what an uncool fool I was. She seethed with quiet rage and built a wall between us that I could not seem to scale. When I did manage to clamber up and peek over the rim, she beat me back down. I felt like Sisyphus. I kept rolling my rock back up the hill.

  When Jenny started ninth grade, she received a full scholarship to Chamisa Mesa, the alternative high school I had founded with Randy Sanders ten years earlier. When I left Randy Sanders, I took a leave of absence from the school, and my colleagues there had flowed into the space I left behind so that there was no room for me to return. The University of New Mexico had opened a branch campus in Taos around the same time, so I applied for a position to teach philosophy and religious studies, and that was that. I graduated from being a high school teacher to being a college professor. Randy Sanders had left Chamisa Mesa a few months later and then left town forever. Soon it was as if we had never existed. The school flourished, and now my baby girl was going there.

  Among a circle of bright, iconoclastic, wildly creative teenagers, Jenny’s own radiance intensified. Always concerned for the well-being of Mother Earth, she quickly became an environmental activist. Temperamentally inclined toward anarchy, she turned into a human rights activist, too. Drawn toward altered states of consciousness, she embraced the role of a pot smoker. Where Jenny had spent her preadolescence hiding behind shapeless flannel shirts and baseball caps, now she was wearing tight camisoles and coloring her hair bright purple. Overnight, it seemed, my daughter had a new tribe, a new identity, and I was, by definition, an outsider, not to be trusted.

  She excelled in school, as she always had. And she still spent a lot of time at the Hanuman temple, where she began to cook for the large crowds of starving hippies that gathered on Sundays for a free meal. So I tried not to worry. But when she began to go to parties and not come home, I blamed her new school.

  I called the office manager and expressed my concerns.

  “You remember how it is at Chamisa Mesa, Mirabai,” she said. “These kids are like a family. They look after each other. And they adore Jenny. They will make sure she’s safe.” This made sense to me, and I relaxed.

  Meanwhile, Jenny discovered string theory and Spalding Gray. She turned fourteen. Osama bin Laden blew up the twin towers and the Pentagon, and Jenny protested U.S. plans to invade Afghanistan. Although only a couple of months apart in age, Jenny had started high school, while Kali was still in eighth grade. These two girls, who had spent the past four years as a single intertwined being, began to drift apart. Every once in a while, my old Jenny would come back to me. We would cook a meal together, or discuss the genocide of Native Americans, or hike up into the aspens, and the warmth of our love would thaw the hurt between us and all would be right with the world again. Same with Kali. They would hardly speak for days, and then Jenny would crawl into Kali’s bed, and they’d whisper and giggle in the dark until they fell asleep curled together like a wave enfolding the shore. That’s how powerful this child was. She could shut all the light out of a room with her gloom, or she could light up your heart and make you feel worthy and safe.

  It was March. Jenny was playing loud music in her room. Well, actually it wasn’t music; it was rap. It was mean and ugly. The noise throbbed through the wood door, oozed around the corner into the hallway, and infiltrated the kitchen where I was grading papers at the table. Kali was in her own room, drawing. Jeff was upstairs doing bookkeeping for his business.

  Primed for a fight, I took Jenny’s music as an act of aggression. I stalked over to her room and pounded on her door. “Jenny, please turn that down!”

  No response.

  “Jenny, turn down your music!”

  She turned it up.

  I don’t remember what happened next. I ranted. Jeff charged down the stairs and banged on Jenny’s door. “Jenny, listen to your mother and turn down the music!” He stomped back upstairs. This was the first time I had ever seen Jeff angry. I didn’t know whether to be grateful that he had come to my defense or worried that he might have hurt my daughter’s feelings.

  Jenny’s door flew open. She rushed into the kitchen, grabbed a knife from the drawer, pushed past me back into her room, and locked the door. “I’m going to kill myself!” she shrieked.

  I threw myself against the door. “Jenny, open up!” No response. I watched myself become hysterical.

  “Jeff!” He came back down. “She has a knife.”

  I ran outside and around the house to the door that led from Jenny’s room to the patio. It was open, and Jenny was gone.

  An early spring storm had dumped a foot of snow and the ground was covered in a frozen blanket, which draped over the sagebrush and glimmered in the light of a waxing moon. I rushed through the yard, crying her name. Jeff walked beside me, calling more gently.

  Silence. Footprints in the snow. Moon shadows.

  I called the police.

  When Jenny first came to me, she used to slip into catatonic states. If something threatened her—a new person to meet, someone criticizing her performance or behavior—Jenny’s eyes would glaze over, her mouth would grow slack, and she would not move or make a sound. After many unskillful attempts to reach her, I learned to hold a quiet space for these episodes and not try to snap her out of it. I figured some invisible scab had been accidentally torn from an old wound and she needed to bleed in peace. I would be waiting on the other side.

  Although the state police station was only a few blocks away from our house, the officers on duty the night Jenny threatened suicide could not find us. Jenny wandered back home on her own about an hour later. She was catatonic. I hadn’t seen her like that since she was a small child. Her bare feet were rigid from walking through the snow. Kali burst out of her room and tried to rush into Jenny’s arms, but Jenny’s arms hung limp at her sides. I guided my daughter over to the couch and gathered her against my body.

  Kali took the down comforter from her own bed and wrapped it around Jenny. She sat on the other side of the couch, pulled Jenny’s frozen feet into her lap and held them. Jeff made tea and wedged the cup into Jenny’s hand, then gently lifted it to her lips. I rocked her, cooed to her, whispered and wept.

  The next morning, Jenny behaved as if nothing unusual had occurred the night before. She wasn’t pretending. The spot where Jenny had scared us to death by threatening suicide seemed to have been covered over by an opaque film in Jenny’s mind. I saw no reason to peel it off, and we moved on.

  One morning I met Jenny at the Taos Diner, where she had been dropped off after a party up in the mountains. I had expected her to be home by 11:00 the night before, but she had called to tell me all the kids had been invited to sleep over so they wouldn’t be driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. I grappled with anger at being duped into letting her party all night and relief that she was trying to be responsible about it.

  As I walked into the diner, I decided to use my father’s technique. Instead of judging the morality of my daughter’s life choices—which would only make her defensive—I would simply and authentically inquire about her life, in hopes that she might open up. “So what’s in your head these days, Cookie?” Daddy would ask me when I called from some ashram in New York or a cabin in the redwoods. It validated my sense that my own experience mattered, and made me feel grown up and interesting.

  My little girl was sitting alone at a booth, pouring sugar into a cup of coffee. When did she turn into a caffeine fiend?

  “Hi, Honey.”

  “Hi, Mom.” Her e
yes were wary.

  I slid in beside her and hugged her.

  “So, Jenny.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I realize that you’ve been on a journey, and I’m wondering: what kinds of things are you discovering?”

  I knew it sounded hokey, but it worked. Jenny’s eyes widened with surprise and pleasure, and her words tumbled out. She told me about talking all night with a boy about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and how we could not perceive reality without impacting it with our observations. Their conversation had led deeper and deeper into the wilderness of abstract thought and opened at last into the realm of spirit, where all things took their rightful place and then dissolved into undifferentiated being. At that point, Jenny had experienced a merging with Ultimate Consciousness, and now this was all she wanted.

  “I feel like I understand everything, and I don’t need to be here anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” I tried not to sound shrill. “Like, you could die?”

  Jenny nodded. “But don’t worry, Mom. Not yet. My work here isn’t done.”

  Jeff had a contract to install locks at a resort hotel on Waikiki Beach in Oahu. He suggested that we use this as an opportunity to pull the girls out of school and take a family vacation in Hawaii. After a week, I would take the kids back home to the mainland, and Jeff would head to Kauai for his next gig.

  In the late sixties, Jeff had briefly gone AWOL when he was home on leave from Vietnam and hopped a stand-by flight to Honolulu to go surfing. Now, four decades later, he wanted to find the place where he had camped out in an abandoned chicken coop on the North Shore, and take our daughters bodysurfing in his favorite surf spots. We loaded up the boogie boards and headed across the island.