by Michael Cart
You won’t remember the incident, of course. Funny the way small kids are all amnesiacs. (A cousin of mine had a martini too many after her son’s third birthday party and groaned to me, “All this effort, three entire years of games and songs and special moments, and he won’t remember a damn bit of it!”)
I thought of including a present this year, but the problem is, Lang, I’ve got no idea what you like. What you’re like. Do you spend all your free time online or shooting hoops or at the mall? There’s this high school I cycle by on my way to work, and I stare at the clusters of teenagers outside: supermodel wannabees and geeky kids, goths and stoned-looking ones—I don’t even know the current terms. I always wonder which group you’d be in. If any. I imagine you might be a loner, like I was when I was sixteen. (Well, not a sad loner like I was, writing poetry in the basement; I just mean, kind of a maverick, doing your own thing.) Unless, of course, you take after your mom, who was Miss Popularity. (Cheryl, if you’re vetting this, I’m not going to say a word against you. So how about you give me a break and hand the letter to Lang, who’s practically an adult now?)
When you were born, people said you were the dead spit of her, but then they always do when there’s no dad. Neighbors, especially—you could tell they were desperate not to put their foot in it—they’d rush to tell her, “Oh, Cheryl, the baby’s got your eyes, your chin, your coloring.” I didn’t see it myself. To me, your radiant moon face was like nothing I’d ever encountered.
The other day I thought of buying you a CD, an album your mom and I listened to so much when we were waiting for you to be born that it started getting scratchy: k.d. lang’s Ingénue. She must have told you that’s who you were named for? (Unless she’s completely rewritten history.) I hope you haven’t found it too burdensome a name. Do people who hear it assume you’re going to be Chinese, like that pianist who played at the Olympics? We thought it was more distinctive than k.d.’s others (Kathy and Dawn), anyway. We were crazy about that CD, though the first time I heard “Constant Craving” I misheard it and asked your mom what “God Save Gravy” meant; she never let me forget it. If one of us needed to make the other laugh, all we had to mutter was “God Save Gravy.”
Now I’ve got the song stuck in my head, though I haven’t heard it in years. (The Germans call that an ear worm; isn’t that a great phrase?) Of course, you mightn’t like it: when I was sixteen I hated any music an adult recommended, on principle. And you probably download all yours, anyway.
At the time I’m talking about, your mom was still just Cheryl, nobody’s mom. Once you’ve been one—a mother, I mean—it’s hard to remember that you were ever anything else. That’s a problem with having a kid with someone, actually. It can be hard to see see each other as anything but parents; hard to remember to talk about anything but the baby. How does Lang like the peas? and I found her tambourine down the back of the couch, and She did a huge squirty poo this morning. (Sorry, I know that’s embarrassing.) Your mom and I would sit in the kitchen having a sandwich, say, with you in your bouncy chair; we’d be talking to each other in a desultory way, but even if you were asleep we only had eyes for you. Especially if you were asleep, actually. For some reason, there’s nothing in the world more riveting than a baby’s sleeping face. But the point I’m trying to make, Lang, is that if you have a kid with someone you risk losing that someone. (Yeah, and maybe you’d lose them anyway, for other reasons, but a baby sure speeds things up.) I just thought I’d mention this rather depressing fact, in case at sixteen you’ve got any sentimental notions like I did, about how nice it would be to have a kid with someone you love.
Whoops, this letter’s headed kind of sideways, sorry. But it’s a bit like talking into the void, here. Like sitting in a recording studio and suspecting that the tech guys have turned the mic off and gone home. Hello, hello? Lang? You might not be reading this at all, of course. Odds are not, in fact. But if I let myself think that way, my hand freezes up, so let’s assume instead that you are reading it. I’m hoping you flick through the envelopes in the mailbox before your mom gets home; I’ve put LANG in big capital letters so it’ll jump out at you.
Have you any idea who I am? I suppose I should have introduced myself properly, because I think your mom probably didn’t show you those birthday letters I sent when you were two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine. At least, I never heard back from you. Two possibilities: Cheryl threw my letters in the trash—or she gave them to you, but you couldn’t be bothered to write back to the woman who was once your YaYa. You can see why I prefer to believe the first. So every year I’d try again, hoping she’d have mellowed enough to give you the letter this time. I had a sort of ritual: The week before your birthday, I’d take a day off work and open a bottle of wine. (Have you survived a hangover yet? I didn’t have my first till twenty, but your mom’s first was at thirteen. Go on, ask her, see if she denies it.) When I’d finished the letter, I always mailed one copy to this old address and a second to your grandmother with a note asking her to send it on—but the woman never did care for me and my mannish clothes. (I wish you knew your other grandma—my mom, I mean. You liked her; once in her garden she let you drink from the hose and soak your clothes even though it was April.) The third copy always went into the bottom of my filing cabinet.
Glancing at the first letter now, I see it starts rather hysterically: Happy Age Two my yum-yum from your YaYa, who misses her darling duck so much!!! When you were a bit older I used to try to say something in the birthday letters about what had happened, in child language, or rather, the kind of patronizing, vague language adults use to children: Sometimes it just happens that two people who love each other stop being able to live in the same house…. But it never worked, so I always took it out. I’d get so angry, I’d shake. What should I have said, Your mom, who loves you very much, thinks it’s best for you never to see me again?
I was only twenty-four when you were born: funny, that’s nearer sixteen than what I am now, forty. I wasn’t a complete idiot, in case you’re wondering. I knew the deal: Only a handful of states were starting to allow two mothers back then, and ours wasn’t one of them. If asked I would have said it was outrageous, but most days I didn’t give it a thought. I had no aspirations to same-sex marriage; they didn’t even use that phrase back then. When we did the pregnancy test, Cheryl and I were so exhilarated, so at one, it never crossed my mind that she’d try to take you away from me. Same thing when we filled out the birth cert the way the clinic advised us, with Mother: Cheryl Louise Weinstein, Father: Unknown. (If you look at your birth cert, Lang, that’s my scrunched-up handwriting.) Yeah, I knew that if it came to a fight, I wouldn’t have a hope in hell, but it really never occurred to me that she’d do such a thing: take you back, like a book or a ring. That’s how naive I was, at twenty-four. I liked being called your YaYa; it didn’t occur to me to get you to call me a mom-type name like they do nowadays, with their mummies and mommas and mama-janes, whatever. Not that it would have made any difference. I mean, I could have been called Second Chief Cherished and Equal Parent, and it wouldn’t have meant squat in the eyes of the law.
I didn’t see it coming, even after I moved out. I set up a nursery for you in my apartment, but then your mom started muttering about it being too confusing for Lang. Visits would only be distressing, apparently. I can forgive her those words. Even stalker (the time she told me to get off her doorstep or she’d call the police). The one I can’t forgive is roommate, from that last letter she wrote (dictated by a lawyer, I could tell), informing me that I was not related to her or her child, I was just someone who used to be her roommate.
Sorry, Lang, does this sound like I’m bad-mouthing your mom? I suppose I am. But she adores you, and she was only trying to keep you for herself; parents do it all the time. The last time I wrote to you, you were only nine, and I didn’t think you could begin to understand all this adult mess. (I hit a mental wall when you turned ten, I’m afraid; I did start a letter, that yea
r, but I kept visualizing a pinched, pubescent version of your face, with a curling lip and narrowed eyes. I couldn’t seem to think of anything to say that wasn’t kiddy but wasn’t inappropriate either.) Now you’re all grown up, pretty much, I want you to hear the truth from me, or I guess I mean, my side of the story. What I dread—one of the things that’s forcing me to try contacting you again after all these years—is that you might find out about me some other way. That you might decide, in that stern way teenagers think (at least that’s how I thought, at sixteen), that I let you go too easily.
I swear, I kept calling till your mom got an unlisted number. I asked friends to intervene, and some wouldn’t and were no longer friends of mine, and some tried and were no longer friends of your mom’s. If I was a stalker, it was because she forced me to be. I hung around the library during “Books ‘n’ Babes,” and caught a few glimpses of you through the window; at least I thought it was you, but toddlers change so fast. I lurked in parking lots, outside your daycare, in all the local playgrounds. I did go to a lawyer, but she persuaded me I hadn’t a chance. (It was 1993, after all: the year a judge had just taken a toddler from a lesbian and given him to his grandmother instead.)
Another worm’s stuck in my ear now: that old blues song about god bless the child that’s got its own. You probably don’t know it, unless there are any sixteen-year-olds who listen to Billie Holiday? I think the “it” the child’s got is money, but it could be anything, really. It’s a strange song, from what I can remember, because you think it’s going to be sappy, but it’s really pretty grim: Mama may have and Papa may have, but you’re much safer having your own.
I wonder if you call him Dad? Your stepfather, I mean. At least, I presume he hung around and became your stepfather. I can’t imagine anyone who met you at age one not wanting to hang around. I notice that whenever I see one of these cases in the paper (I don’t look for them, but the headlines jump out at me), the birth mother has usually gotten a man, gotten religion, rejected the “lifestyle.” Christian Mother Moves to Virginia to Escape Homosexual Ex, that’s my favorite, for its B-movie wording. Mom Wins Child from Former Lesbian Partner. (Confusing grammar, that one.) The papers sometimes call the other woman the “nonlegal parent” or the “social mother,” as if it’s all about throwing cocktail parties! (God help you, Lang, if you had to rely on me to teach you the social graces.) Or the “nonbiological mother,” which sounds like an ad for detergent.
Nonbiological: as if I’m made of silicon or something. A cyborg. As if I have no body, or at least not one that ever touched you, my baby Lang, ever stubbed a toe on your wooden blocks, ever got a crick in the neck with you asleep on my shoulder on the couch all night, ever registered that surge of warmth on my belly that felt like love but actually meant you’d just peed through both our clothes. I don’t tell people this, because they’d think I’m making it up—not lying, exactly, just kidding myself—but I swear it’s a fact: In the weeks after you were born my nipples dripped, and once I put your mouth against my left breast and you latched on for a good half a minute, till Cheryl came in and asked a little snottily what I thought I was doing. (Well, she hadn’t had much sleep.) That was one of the best moments in my life: feeling your serious tug on my left nipple, seeing your earlobe working, hearing the small, intent click of your jaw. I guess motherhood can happen in unexpected ways, like a storm moving in unscheduled or a moose suddenly standing there in the headlights.
Sorry, this letter is turning out quite a downer. I’m not like this most of the time, Lang, I’m really not. Jasmine claims I’m quite fun to live with, and she should know, having woken up beside me for more than four years now. When she and I had been together about six months, an old friend of mine got drunk and told me I’d no right to still be trailing around like one of the walking wounded when I was lucky enough to have found a woman like that. So I got my shit together: I went back to college, started swimming, went on anti-depressants. Most days, these days, I’m more or less okay, and that’s thanks to Jasmine. She’s a clown. I mean a professional one; she does the birthday-party circuit and never seems to get tired of it. I generally avoid kids, myself.
It’s odd: I realize all these years I’ve been thinking of you as lost, but you’ve got no reason to think of yourself that way. It’s me who lost you.
Reminds me of my cousin, the one I mentioned, with the three-year-old boy. He kept dashing off into crowds, so she got the bright idea of writing her cell number on his wrist before they went out. But the next time they were at a fair, sure enough he wandered off, and she had to have him paged three times over the course of half an hour before somebody brought him along to the Meeting Point (the booth that used to be called Lost Children till I guess they decided that was too emotive). Why didn’t you ask a lady to call the number? she roared at him. But I wasn’t lost, he said righteously, you were lost.
Fair point. For you, Lang, there’s nothing missing. Nothing you’re conscious of, at least. You aren’t lost, you’ve just lost me, and you don’t even know it. Though you must have wondered where your YaYa had disappeared to. Wondered is too intellectual for a fifteen-month-old; I mean something more primal. You must have cried for me, at least for a week or two. You must have wanted me back: riding high on my shoulders, the feel of my spikey hair when you grabbed it, the smells of me. A year and a quarter, that’s not nothing. The first year and a quarter. Maybe sometimes even now you feel like something’s missing, Lang, even if you don’t know what? (Then again, who doesn’t feel that?)
I once joined a support group for people who’d lost children, but I dropped out after a couple of months. (Weeks, even? The meetings made me squirm so much, I’m probably remembering it as lasting longer than it did.) The woman who ran it called herself the moderator, as if she had magical powers to make everything feel more moderate, but I just got more jealous and judgmental. On the one hand, I felt irritated by one woman who’d miscarried at four months and kept saying my son when the fact was—sorry and all that, but it was a fetus. The way I saw it, I’d had a real child, and she’d had a dashed hope of one, which wasn’t the same thing at all. Then, on the other hand, there was this quiet Guatemalan woman, and when the moderator finally got her to open her mouth in week three, it turned out her seventeen-year-old son had been picked up by the police one night and never came home. (They never even admitted they’d arrested him.) Hearing that woman’s story made me feel like I’d no right to complain, because after all, I had no reason to fear you were suffering: I knew Cheryl would raise you well and fight your corner. Maybe I’m just not a supportive enough person to be in a support group.
I talked about you all the time, Lang, the year I lost you. I had no shame: I made my lament to any neighbor, hairdresser, grocery clerk who’d listen. (I think I must have been hoping someone would say Why, that’s just terrible. Let me start a campaign to take it to the Supreme Court.) Then I got tired of that look of frozen pity. I didn’t “move on” (as the moderator of the support group was always urging us), I just shut up.
Nowadays, people assume I’m childless. I don’t blame them; if they don’t know me well enough to have heard the story (and it’s not one I tell at dinner parties), what else would they think? I look childless: the hair, the scarred leather jacket, the headphones, the air of having plenty of free time. Besides, moms talk about their kids, don’t they? (They bore the pants off their listeners; they flash sheaves of photos like magicians saying Pick a card, any card.) I keep you to myself.
These days, I really only mention you to Jasmine, and not often, because it makes me maudlin. Not that she stops me. She says you’re part of me, and she wouldn’t want you not to be. She pictures you as this tiny invisible angel sitting on my shoulder. (My left shoulder, for some reason.)
The only big fight I remember was on our second anniversary, when she—ever so tactfully—raised the issue. I’ve always wanted one, she said.
I literally barked at her: I’ve got one already, remember?
Then I left my steak untouched and I went out to sit in the car.
I know, I know. Childlessness brings out the child in me.
Something else I remember about that support group was that it gave me a warped view of the world. It seemed that the odds of holding on to a child were slim; kids were like feathers blown out of your hand no matter how you tried to clutch them. (One girl had had five in a row confiscated by Children’s Aid. No, what’s the word—apprehended. She never said why, but we all quietly assumed there were reasons. One week she announced to the group that she was pregnant again: She said she might be allowed to keep this one, and we all had to nod and grin as if we believed her.)
The moderator of the group was always at us to document our kids. Not as in putting together a file for the sake of proving to the newspapers that the police had indeed arrested your son. She meant a warm, fuzzy, scrapbook-type thing. A nice idea, I guess: it would make your child’s life with you seem like it really happened, even if one day they’d fallen on an escalator or been snatched by their dad who took them back to Pakistan or whatever. A scrapbook like that might be some comfort on crazy days when you thought you’d imagined the whole thing. It did seem useful for the parents whose child had died, because it gave the story some shape: babyhood, toddlerdom, pony rides, trick-or-treating, hospital, funeral, with Grandma up in heaven…. (In a café, a friend once asked me if I ever wished you were dead so I could do my mourning and get on with my life. Never, I’d roared, so loudly that everybody turned around and stared. But it was true. I’ve always been glad you’re in the world, Lang. Even if I don’t know where.)
I had a scrapbook already, so I didn’t do one in the group. I’d made two of them, actually; your mom laughed and said she didn’t know where I found the time. LANG: YEAR ONE, I wrote on the cover of the first, like you were the start of some utopia. It wasn’t a baby book like you could buy in the stores, because they all said mom and dad everywhere, obviously; it was a blank book made of bumpy handmade paper. I filled it with sketches of you and funny lists, like: date of first projectile vomiting, date first fell off sofa, first nursed for two hours twenty minutes straight, first grabbed my ears and wouldn’t let go…. I didn’t have a date for “first smile” because it seemed like you were born smiling, little flickers and twitches at least, and everybody says sternly, Those are only gas, and it’s hard to prove which is the first real one: They all looked real to me, they just got less newborn wise and more fat-baby smart. I taped in a blackened cent you swallowed that took eight days to come out the other end.