“Probably not,” she said.
On the nights Finn slept at his place, I sat awake in bed, pressing an ice pack to my throbbing wrists. Alone in my apartment, I felt panic sprout up like a time-lapsed tree in spring, popping open bud after bud. What if Finn wanted to be on his own forever? What if he dropped me and became merely a devoted weekend father? Or disappeared completely into another life, another family? I would be a single parent. I thought that I could handle being a single parent, but what had I done to prepare for such a formidable status? I used to babysit in high school. I’d watched a couple of TV shows that featured single parents and cheered them along. I raised money for an organization that helped children, but I didn’t actually spend time with them. I was like one of those idiots who run for political office on the platform of not being a politician.
Nectarine, mango, artichoke, papaya.
Quickening
Before the word pregnant came to mean with child, it meant full of meaning. Pregnant pause. Pregnant matter. Rich with implication and significance.
Before the word quick meant fast, it meant lively, alive. The quick or the dead. To be quick with child, to experience quickening: the first detectable fetal movements.
“What does it feel like?” Finn asked, his hand swirling my stomach.
“Like a swish. A darting minnow. My little tadpole.”
I’d had a standard ultrasound at nineteen weeks, but I asked the technician not to tell us boy or girl. It seemed more exciting that way: back to the days of blue and pink cigar bands, the dramatic reveal announced by the doctor holding the newborn aloft.
Finn pulled up my shirt and addressed the belly. “You’re gonna start hearing in there soon. Maybe you already can. Should I sing to you? A little Pete Seeger?” He sang the first verse of “If I Had a Hammer” in his sweet, rousing voice. “Can you hear me? Testing. I’m tricking you into thinking your dad is a famous folk singer.”
He sang the rest: hammer of justice, bell of freedom, song about love between brothers and sisters. I hadn’t heard him do this number before—a favorite from my childhood, though my parents wouldn’t have sung it to me in the womb or beyond. Not hippie bell-ringing types, my parents. Their wary approach to the world was the main thing they had in common, and they’d been married forty years. Finn and I were so much more compatible (I was just saying, to no one at all).
As a girl, I used to stick a pillow under my shirt to see how I’d look pregnant. It was all riches, all romance in that lexicon, to imagine being grown up and pretty, with a baby kicking in my belly, and so loved by my husband, and carrying none of my own mother’s flaws or disappointments.
Now I was grown up and looked like my mother and didn’t have a husband, and what was under my shirt was not pillow-soft but startlingly hard, an armored vehicle enclosing the precarious, shape-shifting being inside. If it were to stop now, the word stillbirth would be used. Quickening replaced by a permanent stillness. I didn’t see how I could become accidentally pregnant again.
Pregnancy, as I’d come to know it so far, was not quick at all, but ungainly and uncertain and weird and slow.
Baby Registry
Please give this child a strong stomach, an infectious laugh, an independent spirit.
A love of words, numbers, people, and solitude.
A fear of poisons, reckless driving, guns—and nothing else.
Make him or her contemplative but not to the point of fretfulness.
Make him or her generous but not to the point of self-effacement.
Let this child inherit Finn’s features, especially his eyes, nose, and mouth.
And his trim, athletic limbs.
His capable hands.
Will-taste-anything tongue.
Un-noteworthy feet.
Ability to not shower for several days and still smell okay, even good in an earthy way.
His musical talent—yes, especially that.
Even his resistance to being pinned down, because why settle for anything less than a life full of great adventure?
Let this child inherit an enduring faith in the power of secular humanism in a world full of racism, sexism, terrorism, and greed.
If you must, my teeth and/or earlobes would be fine.
Nesting
Seven months along, I stood in the office/guest room/fitness center in my apartment that was going to become the nursery, while Finn tested out paint on the walls. Like the rest of my apartment, the room had been cream-colored since I’d moved in. Cream was fine for me, but it didn’t seem good enough for the little one. The little one would want Peach Fuzz or Hearts of Palm or Waterscape or Optimistic Yellow.
“What’s your pleasure?” Finn asked.
I tried to picture each block of color expanded across the whole room and none of them seemed worthy.
“Could you do a mural? A flowering tree here, moon and stars there. Maybe a friendly monkey.”
“It would look like a little kid painted it. Worse, actually.”
“Well, what do you like?”
By which I meant not only what color paint did he prefer, but what would make him want to move permanently into my cream-colored bedroom down the hall. Or we could paint that something else too: Ancient Marble, Wishful Blue, Breathless, Contented. It would have been financially wise, at the very least, for Finn to move in with me, but he was still hanging on to the tiny apartment he had to shell out savings to pay for.
“The apricot,” Finn said. “It has a warm feel. And it’s striking without being too much.”
He was probably right, but still I picked up the Sherwin-Williams color fan deck I’d borrowed from a coworker whose husband was a contractor and sat down on my exercise bike. I fanned out the deck as far as it could go, a wheel of possibilities available for purchase. “Maybe I missed something,” I said.
“You know you’re never going to find the perfect color.”
“I’m not?”
“The more you stare at that thing, the more you’re not going to find it. Just choose something and go with it and it’ll be what it is.”
I wanted to read everything into that declaration: his change of heart, his marriage vow.
The following weekend I stationed myself at a coffee shop with a book while Finn painted the room. I’d bought zero-VOC latex paint, but he still sent me away. “Go inhale espresso instead. You can buy me dinner later.”
In the pages of the book I was reading on education reform in inner cities, I kept seeing him, shirtless, with a paintbrush in his hand, like it was a transcendent vision, a life commitment. As if the choice between Sunrise and Afterglow made all the difference in the world.
Birth Plan
The pregnancy books said childbirth doesn’t have to be scary, doesn’t have to be clinical, doesn’t even have to be painful (it’s a matter of redefining pain as at-one-with-the-universe woman strength). They said knowledge is power; and readiness is all; and you should trust your medical professionals; and you shouldn’t trust your medical professionals; and why not do Kegel exercises in your office chair; and it’s best to avoid caffeine; and there’s nothing wrong with a daily cup of coffee to keep you going, girlfriend; and if you find yourself craving charcoal, chalk, dirt, or other nonedible things, try gum, iron pills, or therapy instead; and animals go off on their own to give birth because they know what they need; and your partner may make a great birth coach or he may faint in the delivery room; and you might want to get a doula (from the ancient Greek, meaning female slave); and the day your baby is born will be the most momentous day of your life; and there are a number of things that might go wrong, just so you know.
I’d seen my share of birth scenes in movies, and they all seemed fake, even absurd. Jump cut from anguished bellowing woman to shining sweet baby. I didn’t buy the
tonal shift—horror flick, then sap fest. The new mother suddenly serene and blissful after what she’d just been through. Seeing the new dad cradle his infant, though, all loving and responsible—that’s what got me.
We took a tour of the birthing center at the hospital, visiting the waiting room with its massive windows and view of a manmade duck pond, and the hallways decorated with bad art, where I might stroll to move labor along. The tour guide showed off a triage room, a labor and delivery room, and a surgical suite, all sterile chic.
“We just finished our big renovation this past fall. So everything’s new and sparkling and our patients tell us it’s like staying in a nice hotel.”
One thing I liked about writing grants was that you could put your hyperbolic claims in writing rather than having to hear how suspicious they sounded in the air.
“Postpartum, you’ll be assigned a private or semi-private room, depending on space. So another mom might be in there with you. There’s a fold-out couch if partners want to stay, but they’re not to use the bathrooms in the room. Public restrooms are down the hall.” The tour guide looked pointedly at Finn.
“Mmhm,” he said.
“After delivery, mom and baby are kept safe with security bands both of you will wear. Should anyone attempt to take a baby out of the Birth Center, an alarm sounds and elevators and staircases lock automatically. If the baby needs to go to the nursery, mom and baby’s bands are matched to ensure the right baby is delivered back to the right mom.”
It had not occurred to me that anyone might try to steal my baby or that I might get the wrong baby. My concerns were of a more basic sort. How was I going to push this watermelon-sized creature out of me? And when it was out, would the three of us call ourselves a family?
“Any questions?” the tour guide asked suddenly.
We couldn’t think of any.
On our way back to the parking garage, Finn said, “What if you gave birth out in the woods?”
“Romantic,” I said.
“It’s like, hey, look at our fancy facilities. You better not mess them up.”
“Yeah. But you’ll stay over on that couch thing, right?”
“That seems to be my only option.”
Finn opened the car door and I maneuvered my unwieldy body into the passenger seat. He got in behind the steering wheel, buckled his seat belt, and began to back out of the spot.
Then I broke down in that embarrassingly female way, where the tears flood out with hiccupping sobs and your nose runs all over the place.
“Hey,” Finn said, putting his hand on my leg and then taking it back to negotiate a sharp turn down to the next level. “It’s not the Ritz, but I think they know what they’re doing here.”
“I’m scared,” I sniveled.
“Of course.”
“I mean I’m trying not to expect anything. I’m not asking you to get down on one knee, but I just can’t help wondering. Are we going to be together or not? Are you more than just the baby daddy?”
Finn handed the lot attendant some money and thanked him pleasantly. “Look, we’re together right now, aren’t we? Let’s focus on the most important thing. A healthy baby, right? And we’ll take it from there. This whole thing, it wasn’t supposed to happen. We’re figuring it out as we go.”
I pulled crumpled tissues out of the glove compartment and tried to get hold of myself. The plan was, the plan had always been, to stay cool and self-sufficient. There was only one thing I’d needed from him and I’d gotten it; it had flowed into me effortlessly. I wanted other things, yes—I wanted everything—but if you tried to get too much, you might end up with nothing at all.
We were unspooling out of the hospital loop, marked with signs in fire-engine red, past the Women’s and Children’s Center, the Cancer Center, Adult Emergency. I knew scores of babies were born in the hospital, and that people received lifesaving treatments and came back from the almost dead, but it did not seem to me at the moment that anything good could happen there.
Kick in the Ribs
At thirty-six weeks, inside the belly I carried around like it was an outpost of my body, was an actual baby, nearly fully formed. Aimed head down for sure, because a foot was lodged up under the ribs on my right side, digging into them. I kept pressing my carpal-tunneled hand into the area, trying to nudge the foot out, my first act of gentle but firm (and futile) parenting. The foot would not budge.
Instead of talking or reading or listening to music or having sex, Finn and I fell asleep while watching TV. The baby bump between us, kind of sexy when it was smaller, now just intruded, like a burly cop at a teen party. We watched political pundits argue; and sitcom families insult one another; and twenty-somethings evaluate their romantic partners, call them cutie hotties, and cheating bitches and sons of bitches. A commercial for an antidepressant came on: smiling people doing happy, energetic things, while the warnings running across the bottom of the screen about all the miserable potential side effects made it seem like only an idiot would buy what they were selling. After that commercial ended, we watched one for an anti-aging skin cream: the revolutionary treatment; the woman’s face, before and after.
And then, as if awakening to the world’s duplicity, Finn asked the question I’d almost convinced myself by now that he would never ask. “You were taking the pill, right?”
I kept staring at the TV as if it might suck me in.
Nine months of allowing myself to believe that a cosmic accident—being the more loving one—was some kind of justification for taking matters into my own hands. That the widespread prevalence of gender inequality excused it. That deceit had simply become fate, or restitution. The statistic I’d given, that nine out of a hundred women get pregnant on the pill, required some qualification. In truth, if taken correctly, the pill is ninety-nine percent effective. The ninety-one percent figure is for “typical use”—meaning women who skip pills, who get wrapped up in their daily lives and make a little mistake sometimes. Hardworking women, who rush out the door in the morning forgetting that itty-bitty necessity; exhausted women, who fall asleep with the lights on; romantically preoccupied women, who drink too many gin fizzes and stay over at their boyfriends’ houses, or leave their purses on the bus, or leave town while that flimsy packet of punch-out pills stays behind in the medicine cabinet. Dissembling women, who decide to stop taking the pill without a word to their lovers.
I couldn’t look at Finn, his starry eyes, his pensive lips.
“Well,” I said.
In the nearly two years I’d known him, I’d never seen him get really angry. I guess, up until then, he hadn’t had anything to get angry about.
* * *
—
I went to work and worked hard, stayed late, trying to wrap up loose ends before my maternity leave would begin. At home in the apricot nursery, I folded and refolded newborn clothes. I made sure my phone was always fully charged, in case it was time, in case there was anything from Finn. The night the truth came out, when he was sitting next to me in bed, the TV still spewing lies in its cheerful way, I’d said I was sorry a dozen times. I texted it now, cell to cell: I’m so sorry Finn. Just wanted you to know that again. He texted back: Still can’t talk to you right now. Lmk when it’s time to go to the hospital.
But what I was most sorry about was that I hadn’t said, “Yes, of course I was taking it,” and then recited the spiel about the nine out of a hundred women on the pill, the nearly half of all pregnancies in America that were unplanned. I was sorry that although he’d said he loved me, he hadn’t fallen in love with me, and that he was young enough and eligible enough that the distinction mattered. I was sorry I’d wanted a baby because I was thirty-six, and babies were cute, and pregnant women had seemed like magical beings, and I was afraid of being old and lonely and having no one who belonged to me. Sorry that, for al
l the inadequacies I saw in myself, I’d always thought I was an honest person, and I was no longer able to think of myself that way. And sorry that, right now, the final countdown to birth felt like the countdown to a rocket ship launch, and rockets could explode in the sky.
Thirty-seven weeks, thirty-eight, thirty-nine. The heartburn was so bad I didn’t want to eat much, but I forced something down for dinner every night and then lay in bed with stiff hands, swollen legs, fuzzy brain. As soon as my body assumed a state of semi-relaxation, the baby shuttled into motion, as if we were coworkers operating in tight shifts. One foot jabbed me in the side, and the other continued to dig into my ribs, like it had no intention of leaving. Or like I’d already taught this kid that to get what you want in life, you’d better come out kicking, no matter who you hurt.
Ten Warning Signs of
Postpartum Depression
1. Lack of Interest in Your Baby
The baby is a minute old, an hour old, a day, a week. His skin is blotchy and yellowish, his eyes a blurry blue. He’s like a woodpecker, bonking his head against your chest, drilling into your breasts, while you have to make like a tree and take it. He’s a pirate, with his guttural yawp, his fie-on-this expression, his wholesale seizure of your sleep. Like a disappointed old woman: pinched and furrowed, primed for complaint.
When he’s fifteen days old, you change out of one pair of yoga pants and into another, grab the diaper bag, and strap the baby into the car seat. Your mother has flown home to her board meetings, her step classes, and her book club. Your husband is at the office, his shirt unwrinkled, his tie pulled tight. “Be sure to leave the house today,” he told you, and so you are leaving, but there’s a long list of people and places you can’t face. Not your friends who are mothers. Not your friends who aren’t mothers. Not the grocery store, the library, the neighborhood.
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