Estranged

by Jessica Berger Gross

  Two large boxes arrived in Neil’s office. Along with drama club playbills and posters and yearbooks dating from middle school to Vassar, here were my albums of photographs and the odd scrapbook memento from high school and college and Nepal and Israel. My drama class notebooks were there, too. As were my early attempts at writing, including my first short story. In another notebook were drafts of poems I’d written in high school. A blue three-ringed binder was filled with my college poetry.

  Mostly there were stacks of cards and letters from high school and college friends, including love letters from my college boyfriend Alex, and a few ambiguous notes from Ben that I once analyzed to death, along with the blue airmail letters my parents had written me when I was in Nepal and Israel, and from before that, even, during my high school summers away. Then I found my diaries. I’d kept a journal on and off since the eighth grade. The entries were sporadic and skipped some years entirely. In them I’d written about my father and the abuse, and I’d struggled with my complicated feelings for him. I’d also kept datebooks faithfully chronicling the activities of my day-to-day life from ninth grade on. The contents of the boxes added up to a surprisingly comprehensive archive. My parents, whether they realized it or not, had sent me the evidence I needed to understand my childhood and my decision.

  * * *

  I couldn’t get pregnant again. Not that year and not the next, either. I resisted fertility treatments and instead tried acupuncture and fertility yoga and tinkering with my already healthy diet. By then we’d moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Neil had been offered an assistant professor job at Harvard. I was editing an anthology I’d sold to a publisher in New York about miscarriage; writing for yoga magazines; and teaching a creative writing class at Harvard’s version of night school. We lived in a sunny apartment near Inman Square and adopted a dog, Salem, an eccentric and lovable beagle pointer we took to the Harvard Yard dog park before dinner. But all I thought about were babies. The one I’d lost and the one who wouldn’t come. We broke down and went to Brigham and Women’s Hospital to find out what was wrong. The doctors didn’t know. They gave me the fertility drug Clomid. All it did was fill me with an unaccustomed rage. Next up was IUI—intrauterine insemination. Neil walked his still-warm specimen cup of sperm to the hospital room where I lay in stirrups. When that didn’t work, we said we would adopt instead. We met with social workers, filled out applications, wrote essays, had our home study, sent the checks, and began the long wait for a toddler from an orphanage in India. Adoption made more sense to me than IVF; the process struck me as beautiful. Why make a new baby when already existing children needed homes? Why did I, of all people, need to share blood or DNA with my child? I suppose, too, I was scared that a biological child of mine would turn out like my father.

  And then, after a year and a half on the waiting list and an excruciating, heartbreaking struggle over whether or not to accept a referral for a perhaps profoundly developmentally delayed child we didn’t feel ourselves up to taking on, I changed my mind. I decided we had to try. By this time I was thirty-five and had been consumed by infertility for four years. I longed more desperately than ever to be pregnant, to breast-feed, to wrap a newborn in a cotton sling and carry her on my chest. I wanted to experience a mother-child relationship not marked by pain and loss. A clinic in Denver, one of the best in the country, would take our insurance. Neil and I went for workups and met the head doctor and the assigned fertility nurse who would guide us through the process. After the initial trip to Denver, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, for a writing residency, soaking up weeks of quiet mornings sitting at the desk in my cottage, working, and late afternoons hiking in the mountains or taking a yoga class before eating a vegetable burrito for dinner. When I returned to Cambridge, I began the shots and drugs and then Neil and I flew back to Colorado for a cycle of IVF.

  EIGHTEEN

  I REMEMBER BREATHING through labor surges as we drove past the Statue of Liberty on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The car service driver took the Brooklyn Bridge to FDR Drive, and the city was all lit up for Christmas. We were living in Brooklyn during Neil’s research sabbatical. Days past my due date and worried about having to be induced, I’d seen an acupuncturist to help start my labor, but nevertheless I was surprised by my water breaking and the mucus plug on the bathroom floor and the reality of even these early contractions. At the hospital, I moaned and breathed and changed positions and tried to let the contractions move through me, but I was bothered by the unwanted antibiotics and the IV drip in my arm and the iPod we forgot to charge and the shower that ran only lukewarm water. My scheduled midwife was away for the holidays, and I was completely overwhelmed by the ferociousness of the pain and wishing I could take it all back or have the baby at home in my bathtub. Neil wore a worried expression. My doula, Tara, massaged my lower back with oils and had Neil rub my shoulders. Because of my decision, I had no mother to hold my hand and no family huddled up in the waiting room to welcome our baby.

  As early morning approached, I’d hardly made any progress with my dilation, despite laboring through killer contractions. My body refused to open up. Wanting to keep things natural, I wouldn’t consider Pitocin to urge along my labor or accept the epidural that might have helped me relax. My labor officially stalled. I cried and threw up and cried some more. Eventually I ran a fever.

  Neil and Tara fortified themselves with muffins and tall cups of coffee. The nurse came in and checked me for the umpteenth time, charting my nonprogress on the log. Another hour had gone by with nothing to show for it. Neil sat in a blue hospital chair in the corner of the room and took his glasses off, rubbing his eyes and temples, willing himself to stay awake. Tara set her coffee down on the window ledge and gave a tentative suggestion: “Is there anything you need to let go of? Is there any reason you might be afraid to release, to let the baby come, to become a mother?”

  And then I was done. Done trying to hold on, done trying to be perfect. After that it was yes to the drugs, and hours later when the doctor said I needed it, yes to an emergency C-section. That night on the surgery table I shivered with fever. Neil held my hand and talked me through.

  My baby was here! My baby. I didn’t know he’d be so beautiful, I said when the doctor showed him to me before hurrying him off to the NICU for observation. (A necessary precaution, she said, because of my long labor and fever.)

  Neil wasn’t allowed to stay in my room and went home to Brooklyn for a few hours to sleep. Before dawn, after hours of my nonstop asking, the night nurse decided I was recovered enough from surgery to see my son. She pushed my wheelchair to the NICU and arranged me in a chair. Finally he was brought to me. He smelled like sunshine. I held him to my chest and offered him my breast. We rocked and nursed and I sang to him and knew I would never let go.

  I hadn’t been certain I would know how to mother. Yet somehow I knew just the way to hold him, how to nourish, how to caress, how to sing to him, how to rock and comfort. “Edelweiss” was our first lullaby, and there would be many more. Neil arrived back at the hospital, and as morning broke, we were together. We were a family.

  * * *

  We named him Lucien, light.

  After six weeks I could take the baby and the dog and make a slow loop around Prospect Park with the stroller, stopping in the frigid early-February air to undo my nursing bra and slip him beneath my coat or change his diaper on a park bench. I slept with Lucien, fed him, carried him on my chest, talked to him, and found I could usually make things better. When he wouldn’t stop crying, at least I could hold him.

  Sometimes, when taking care of Lucien, I thought about my mother. Growing up, I’d craved her touch but hadn’t known how to ask for it. Where Lucien’s skin felt like an extension of mine, my mother’s had always felt foreign to me. Hers was, if not a stranger’s skin, then a visitor’s. I regretted and grieved our lack of comfort with each other. But perhaps she once felt as close to her babies as I did to mine. Maybe I used to look at her the way Luci
en looked at me. I started thinking of her with a little less anger and a little more compassion. I allowed myself to miss her.

  * * *

  Back when we lived in Cambridge and attended Harvard faculty parties with bold-named professors, I tried not to break down when asked the normal questions about family, like where I grew up and where my parents lived. I tried not to be overcome by my guilt and shame. We’re estranged, I learned to say. It’s complicated. Once, after giving a reading where I touched on the abuse, a writer came up to me to tell me she was in my mother’s position. “I am your mother,” she said. Just that week she had gathered up her courage and her child and left her husband.

  My New York therapist referred me to a graduate school classmate of hers who had an office on Massachusetts Avenue. Each week I sat on my new psychologist’s couch, examining each painful pushed-down memory. The more I talked, the more I remembered. She taught me that my relationship with my parents continued on whether I spoke to them or not. She gave me wise counsel, and when I needed her to, she mothered me. Eventually, after over a decade of on-again, off-again sessions, I came to understand that I’d done nothing wrong. I began shedding the guilt and shame like a dead skin. The estrangement was my way of saving myself. When I made the decision to walk away from my parents, I made the decision to be happy.

  * * *

  Not long after Lucien was born, Neil received an offer with more money and tenure from the University of British Columbia, and on something of a sleep-deprived whim, we decided to move coasts and countries with our six-month-old baby. By the time Lucien turned one, we’d bought an old fixer-upper with a porch out front, a basement rental apartment to help us with the mortgage, and room for a vegetable garden in the backyard. I planted more kale and lettuce and tomatoes than we could eat. I grew peas and garlic and tall rows of corn. We painted Lucien’s bedroom gentle shades of green and yellow, and soon IKEA bins filled with wooden toys and used books and stuffed animals lined the floors. I took him to music and dance and drama and swim class at the community center. We became regulars at the playground a few blocks away with the soaring pine trees. As I pushed him on the swings under them, we sang together, “This Little Light of Mine,” “Itsy-Bitsy Spider,” “The Wheels on the Bus.” We visited the neighborhood libraries so often the librarians knew Lucien by name. We made friends with other young parents on our block, people we could call when we needed help with child or dog or garden, people who could ask the same of us. We shopped at a farmers’ market by a small lake and went for walks in a forest in the middle of the city where our dog, Salem, could run off-leash and Lucien could pretend we were in the Hundred Acre Wood. For several years I wrote a twice-weekly motherhood blog for a magazine, earning my first steady writing paycheck, and taught a class in the creative writing department at the university. Mostly I took care of Lucien. The more I mothered my child, the more my yearning for a mother of my own dimmed. It never disappeared, not completely. Still the desire resurfaced, taking me by surprise, at the big moments, for him and for me.

  * * *

  Here are the times when you wish you had a mother: When you can’t get pregnant and when you finally do; when you have your baby and are holding him for the first time. When you buy your first house and try to fix it up; at your first bookstore reading; when your husband’s research makes it into the newspapers; when he’s having a mass removed and you wait alone in the hospital of a brand-new city to hear that it’s not cancer; when your son has his first birthday and his fifth; on his first day of kindergarten. When the writing disappointments come; when marriage gets hard; when you and your toddler have the flu and your husband is in Finland or Sweden or Hong Kong. When friendships end. When you need someone to show you how.

  A mother, yes—what I wouldn’t do for one. But not mine. Despite my ambivalence about her, I was certain Lucien and Neil and I were better off on our own.

  * * *

  I was sitting in a café in Vancouver, writing, when my sister-in-law Rachel emailed and asked if she could phone me. We hadn’t spoken in seven years. Josh didn’t know she was calling, Rachel said, but she and my other sister-in-law, Tamara, were uncomfortable with the sometimes harsh and weirdly authoritarian way my parents acted around their children. They were worried about leaving the grandchildren alone with them, despite the assurances of my brothers. And Rachel and Tamara had a question for me. Had it been sexual? Or just physical?

  Just physical, I answered, briefly describing the violence and the name-calling we’d grown up with. She already knew about the arguments and manipulations. And then we hung up.

  I can’t know what my sister-in-law did with that information. But sitting in the café while my babysitter clock ticked, I was disgusted with myself for parroting her words—just physical. For minimizing the damage he’d done, as if somehow it was okay for children to be exposed to the threat of physical abuse as long as it wasn’t sexual. And yet I understood how impossible it must have felt to go up against my parents, even for a tough New York City lawyer. Maybe she did decide that just physical counted. Maybe she’d made certain to keep her children close. I hoped so.

  * * *

  We were on the back steps the first time Lucien asked me. He was eating raspberries I’d picked off the vines that ran along the fence separating our garden from the neighbor’s yard. His face was pink and sweet with the evidence of them. He was very young, very verbal. Perhaps two and a half? Stained fingers. Light brown curly hair left to grow wild. We’d been playing with the garden hose. He looked up at me.

  “Mommy, do you have a mommy?”

  My breath caught.

  “Yes, baby,” I said. “I do.”

  * * *

  A year passed. Two. Although Neil and I were already overwhelmed by the relentlessness of parenting a young child and the tricky finances of life as a college professor and a freelance writer in an incredibly expensive city, I convinced him that we should go back to Denver, where we had a frozen embryo from our first IVF cycle. Neil was ambivalent. “I loved being an only child,” he told me. “We can’t afford it,” he said, any of it. Not the procedure (which our Canadian health insurance wouldn’t cover) and not raising a second child. We couldn’t even afford to fix our roof, and the walls of our bedroom were mildewed with drips from the never-ending Vancouver rain. But I persisted. We could use the last of Neil’s parents’ house money. I could try to pick up more freelance assignments, and Neil could take on an extra summer school class.

  For a couple of years after having Lucien, I’d been unsure about trying again, too. Our baby was a bright, super-sweet, soulful, silly, and creative nonstop joy machine. Wasn’t that enough? Plus, Neil had his work, and now I had mine. With one child, Lucien had all my love and attention, and I could manage a sort of career without family help or a full-time nanny. We could even occasionally afford for Lucien and me to tag along on a research trip with Neil. We went to New York and took Lucien to the Museum of Natural History; we traveled with Lucien to Paris and stayed for a month. “See!” Neil said, though Lucien and I didn’t make it out of our arrondissement more than a half-dozen times. But we sipped hot chocolate at the top of the Pompidou on his third birthday, and shared a magical taxi ride home from a dinner party near the Eiffel Tower. One afternoon a dad in the metro gave Lucien his daughter’s balloon just because. At home in Vancouver, I wrote during the still of naptime. A friend from yoga class brought her girls over, and we went for a walk in the cemetery across the street. She said I was smart, that my life seemed sane; she envied me.

  But I tortured myself about what it would mean for Lucien to be an only child. Once, a neighbor friend mentioned a saying she’d heard that one kid was practice, two a family. The comment rattled around in my brain no matter how many times Neil or Kathy (mother to three children) tried to convince me of its stupidity.

  Oh, how I wanted that second baby, sane or not. In time, Neil did, too.

  One last try, we said. We would do everything right. We
took great care with every hormone patch and injection. We even ate the same veggie burgers at the same vegetarian restaurant in Denver. We allowed ourselves to be hopeful and think it would work.

  When it didn’t, when things went terribly wrong, a horrible night at an emergency room in Vancouver, and then a few days later a negative pregnancy blood test, I just wanted to go home.

  NINETEEN

  WE RETURNED TO Brooklyn after almost five years in Canada. Neil was on sabbatical, a leave he’d extended with the help of a visiting-professor position at Princeton. Though I was closer to my past in New York, and to my parents, I felt most at home in this city, the place that first gave me a glimpse of independence when I was a teenager and bought my train ticket away from Rockville Centre and smoked a cigarette on the platform, ascending the Penn Station escalator an hour later.

  We rented the second floor of a house in East Williamsburg with a small community garden down the street, across from a Catholic church and school, and another couple of blocks away, a park with a playground and small dog run. The L train stop was right around the corner. Flowers managed to thrive in gated boxes on the sidewalk; garbage gently blew with the breeze, like dandelion seeds.

  I began looking back at my childhood with a sense of remove, as if screening a Super 8 movie. Slightly out-of-focus sepia images flashed of birthday parties and car trips and watching my brothers’ baseball games from the bleachers, and the bad days, too, the angry voices and raised hands. That was my life then. I came to accept it, all of it. But accepting it didn’t mean I’d see them. The distance enabled me to reinvent myself, learn new ways of living, become the sort of mother I dreamed of being.

  * * *