Having kids—what kids do to an adult life already in motion, what they do to romance, to your couch, your car, your time, your money, most of all your art—had been the constant bass line thrumming through our conversations in the months before I got pregnant. It was the issue that sent us, oddly early, into therapy together. It was the gun in the room. If he wanted to have kids with anyone, Brian kept saying, it would be with me. If.
But if is a wisp of a word. You could hardly hang your hat on that. Or build a life. Plus Brian already had a life, as a writer, a semi-happy bachelor of the Upper West Side, as a diffident, sexy Jewish intellectual. As the editor of a left-leaning magazine, a jazz detester, TV lover, kind friend, and surprising gossip. But first of all, last of all, most of all—as a writer. His entire adult existence had been organized around writing. If he had a creed, it would have been Nietzsche: “The essential thing in heaven and in earth … is a long obedience in the same direction.”
His obedience was to life at the desk, life as it shimmered onto the page. The unruly emissaries of real life—food and flowers, snow, slush, the Vermont night sky, sex, the Grand Canyon, the East Village, twisted ankles, soured wine, the Hudson River at close range—all these were fine, but were interlopers on his essential mission: animating a humane vision of the world.
Fine, OK, be a writer. Life of the mind, live for your art and all that. I could respect his calling, his need. But, then, what the hell had he been doing swinging around town with me? I’d never kept my wish to have kids secret, quite the opposite. I’d said emphatically, many times over, that I could not, would not, contemplate a life without children. Impossible. And he’d made his wish to avoid kids just as obvious. So, then, what the hell was I doing swinging around town with him?
After that initial declaration, My darling, my sweetheart, Brian remained shattered and unhappy on the phone, but I kept believing we’d work this out. If we could just see each other face to face, all the pieces would find a place: life, art, baby, love, writing—wasn’t there room for everyone on the couch? Pluralism, isn’t that what he believed in?
I’d remind him that we were the same two people who’d been made delirious by walking hip to hip; that he had been an eager partner in the (knowingly unprotected) act that produced this very dilemma.
Knowingly unprotected: Brian, by the age of forty-five, had never gotten a girlfriend pregnant; I, by the age of thirty-two, had never been pregnant. Luck or best practices, hard to say, but with each other we were bizarrely laissez-faire. Like naive dolts worldwide, we thought that since it had never happened before it couldn’t happen now. We’d been enacting a fantasy that turned into a vertigo-inducing reality.
Over the years, two different doctors told Brian he might encounter trouble conceiving; he’d chosen to believe them. He had room, he thought, to flirt with a possibility that a very submerged part of him wanted. When we’d made love without protection, I was discounting the things Brian said to me in therapy every week about not wanting kids. I was believing in some version of him that didn’t exist except in bed. But I was acting in alignment with my own deepest wishes.
I’d hoped he was too—that his willingness to be so cavalier about birth control was an unconscious wish to have the issue decided for him. For us. This interpretation now looked to be somewhere between wildly self-delusional and outright self-destructive.
* * *
The baby’s bird-sized rib cage rose and fell in a steady rhythm under the sunlight lamps. I sat beside her, in a rocking chair, watching her sleep. She had, I noticed, a preferred sleep pose, with her head tossed back, one ear angled upward as though waiting for the answer to a question. Occasionally, she emitted a high-pitched squeak, like a small wind instrument.
Once we were officially admitted and assigned a spot in the NICU, the nurses encouraged me to treat the baby like any newborn. “She’s not a china cup; she won’t shatter on ya,” a young Irish nurse said. She was my immediate favorite; she had a face of wide-spaced, pale freckles and red hair cut in a thick, exuberant bob. “Listen,” she told me, “the thing the babies like best is to be tucked into your clothes, naked. Skin-to-skin contact.”
“Won’t she get cold?” I asked.
“Not so long as you’re not dead,” the Irish nurse said, and winked.
In the wee hours of our first night there, with the baby tucked inside my shirt against my skin, I relaxed enough to notice the NICU rhythms. Someone had tried to soften the blow of this place with kitten posters and rocking chairs, to pretend it wasn’t a giant room of plastic boxes with very sick babies inside.
Sometime after midnight, the young mother of a baby boy beside us called home to Mexico. She told her own mother, in Spanish, a language I don’t speak but somehow understood, that she was scared. She suspected her son’s heart lacked confidence.
Beside this boy was an infant girl whose teenage parents had come by earlier in stained sweatshirts and stricken faces. They’d peered at their creation and quickly left. The little name card above the girl’s head remained blank. In her sleep, she held two fingers in the palm of her other hand, already practicing the art of self-comfort. My girl’s name card was also blank. In countries with high infant mortality rates people often delay naming their children. In Nepal it is customary to wait until “Janku,” or first rice, when the baby is about six months old. It had only been two days, but already my family and friends were pushing.
“Just decide,” Suzi said. “This is starting to get weird.”
3
On the final approach to JFK, not yet visibly pregnant, I tried to cry discreetly, so as not to alarm my fellow passengers. I was flying toward Brian, without any assurance that he wanted a future with me or the baby. I wasn’t even sure if he would be at the airport to pick me up. Outside the clouds were puffed into a layered, edible meringue of lilac and indigo. I knew I should be stunned by this much beauty; I should stop crying and say thank you. But I didn’t. Everyone in California, most especially Suzi, told me to stop crying, “You’re flooding the baby with stress hormones.” Sorry, baby.
At JFK, I trudged through the crowd, sticky, pudgy, sick at heart, looking for Brian’s blue shirt. He was there, amid the throngs, a cool spot of color, of calm. I wanted to run to him, but I stood still and waited for him to notice me.
We decided we’d drive straight out to the Hamptons to meet with our chic French therapist, who was at her summer house but willing to see us anyway.
She opened the door before we knocked. “Bon, you found us,” she said in the accent that made everything sound vaguely philosophical. “After such a long drive, you’d like a glass of wine?”
On the one hand, how very European and unuptight of her, red wine for the baby! Or maybe she did not acknowledge the existence of a baby at all, at such an early stage.
In her office she listened to us sum up our positions. Brian wanted to be with me but did not want to be a father. He felt fatherhood wasn’t something that should be forced onto another person. He wasn’t asking me to terminate the pregnancy, but he was clear that he would not, or could not, be the partner I hoped for. As much as I wanted to be with Brian, I was incredibly hurt that he would reject something (someone) he’d tacitly helped create. The therapist sat quietly for a while and then turned to me: “Heather, you are living in an illusion. You must wake up from your dream. Brian does not want what you want.” What I wanted most, at that moment, was to smash one of her tasteful ceramic objets d’art over her sleek French head.
I stood up. “Time to go,” I said. “Time’s up!” I wanted to add, Fuck off and go back to France. This is the land of opportunity! The land of figure-it-out!
Brian and the chic French therapist stared at me. Neither stood. I stayed standing. Finally, Brian wrote a check; maybe I did too? We were splitting everything. We made it out onto her groomed gravel driveway and into the car.
We drove to the ocean, sat together on a log.
“Do you think this is an illusion?�
�� I said.
“I think we’ve both seen what we wanted to,” Brian said, and pulled me down onto his lap.
Between us, inside me, was an apple seed of differentiating cells. It was amazing how someone so small could cause such colossal disruption.
“What should we do?” I said.
“I love you,” he said. “That is as much as I know.”
He began to cry. I had this shock; he felt as abandoned as I did. My choice was making it impossible, from his point of view, for us to continue to be together.
His choice, from my point of view, was the worst choice of all time. I understood his dilemma on a cognitive level, sort of, but on a gut level I just kept thinking, If two people are in love, and one of them is pregnant, show me the problem! Point to it! There is no problem.
We drove back to Manhattan in silence, each of us leaning into our wound. All the way up the West Side Highway, the river ran beside us, an unperturbed ribbon of greenish silver. The tension in the car was so thick I wanted to jump out and swim uptown. In Brian’s neighborhood we found a place and parked. It was dark; I was starving and nauseated. Brian looked haggard, bleary, and generally undone. I felt I could sleep for months, sleep through the whole pregnancy and just wake up to the baby. Maybe that would do it. If Brian could see the baby, he’d want the baby.
“Do you want to come up?” Brian said.
“What do you mean by that?” I said. It was an old joke of ours, answer a question with a question.
“Just come up,” he said.
I went up. We ordered food from our favorite Mexican place, took a shower together, and lay down on his futon, named the General for the way it dominated his tiny studio.
The next day we ate and walked and watched some TV. We did not talk about the baby. We avoided the future. All the while, the cells I housed continued multiplying. They were turning into things, tiny, barely visible things, but things.
For two weeks we walked this high wire. We were happy, almost. We had a present of breakfasts and afternoon strolls and writing in the same room. Every day was a clown act, starring us as clowns.
When we gathered enough courage to talk about the baby, Brian’s answer was always the same: he couldn’t see a way to live life as a father.
“You live it like this,” I said, patting a space between us on the General, “only with a baby next to you. It’s not like you have to become a whole new person. You just scoot over.”
But scooting wasn’t his strong suit. If a fellow diner knocked into his chair on the way to the bathroom, Brian would startle, scowl. Not out of annoyance with his fellow humans, but because his own borders were so porous that space was sacrosanct. I liked to compare him to Rilke, who couldn’t even live with a dog because the dog’s moods, its sorrows and triumphs, affected Rilke too radically. I had found this a charming image of Brian until I remembered how Rilke didn’t live with his wife or raise his children.
Maybe I’d been viewing his resistance too narrowly. Maybe Brian’s fear of being a father was not about losing his identity as a writer. Maybe he was afraid to love another human being as profoundly as one loves a child. He was empathic in the extreme; his child’s worries, his child’s trials, would be Brian’s, millisecond by millisecond. It would be as if they shared a central nervous system. Such a symbiotic existence sounded almost unbearable, even to me. Maybe he was accepting himself for who he was, someone with finite limits in the realm of human attachment.
Brian had once told me about a dream in which he’d dug a moat around his house in order to protect his “fallen self.” Good luck constructing a moat, I thought, big enough to protect you from this delicate, microscopic nervous system already under way.
* * *
After the 3 a.m. change of shift in the NICU, things got very, very quiet. Even the machines dozed. The baby made her high-pitched, barely audible squeaks. I believed I could recognize that singular sound from a million squeaks. As much as I enjoyed the more subdued hours in the NICU, it was also the time of night when the truth of the place grew loudest. Embedded in the soft purr of the distant generators, the muted thud of the nurses’ rubber soles against the floor, the doctors’ whispered instructions, the occasional blaring alarm, was this: your child could die.
Looking around that room, it was easy to list grievances with God: for-profit health care to the suffering of innocents, fluorescent light, the suffering of innocents, plastic footwear, the suffering of innocents, the suffering of innocents, the suffering of innocents.
When I could no longer hold my eyes open, I walked across the hall to the strange, skinny room I’d been assigned to sleep in. It was a cast-off room, oddly oblong, closet-sized, and off the grid; it wasn’t nearly big enough to be a lobby or a lounge. It held just one narrow plastic couch and a single chair. I suspected this was the room where they took parents to deliver bad news. The worst news. I resolved to spend as little time there as possible, so as not to tempt fate.
The next morning the residents rounded through, a flock of uncertain birds clad in white, peering at my girl as if she was a mathematical problem they were tasked with solving. But not one of them could figure out why her red cells wouldn’t hold together. This was “the Red Team,” the group of doctors in training assigned to us, for whom I felt an immediate and irrational allegiance. “Go Red Team!” I semi-shouted when I saw them later in the day. One of them gave me a what’s-with-you look; the rest kept on scribbling on their identical pads. No jokes in NICU. Write that down. Nothing is funny here.
* * *
Maybe if I’d been more patient, Brian would have figured things out. But pregnancy has a way of forcing the point, and I was getting more pregnant by the sliver of each second. One night after dinner I said, “I think I should go home.”
“You mean to California?” Brian said. He sounded half panicked, half relieved. I had only meant downtown, to Twelfth Street. But he had a point. Why was I still in New York if his mind wasn’t changing?
I would return to my apartment as a first step, a pause to give Brian a chance to turn this immense boat around in the water. And if he didn’t, then California.
On the subway back down to my apartment, I took stock of my resources: I could rent out my apartment for a lot more than the mortgage, plus my dad’s mom, bless her, had recently begun to gift money annually to each grandchild. Between grandmother money and Twelfth Street rent, I could patch things together in California without working for a time. Especially if my mom were willing to give me a deal on her studio. Which she would, of course she would. I’d be OK until the baby was born and Brian began to pay child support, if it came to that. I knew for certain that, no matter who we became to each other, he’d take full financial responsibility. So I could do it. I could go back to California. Only I didn’t want to.
When I arrived on Twelfth Street, I looked east toward Sixth Avenue and west toward Seventh, beautiful, marbly prewar architecture in both directions. Brian had once told me that after we met, every time he stepped onto this block he thought of the song “On the Street Where You Live.” For there’s nowhere else on earth that I’d rather be …
My apartment smelled empty and stale, a cardboard box thinning in hot attic air. It had sagged into a funk of neglect. I opened all the windows and lay down on my bed. The cover was white crinkly fabric, very slippery. I’d once thought this duvet made my entire apartment more stylish. Now I could see its total impracticality; a baby would slide right off. I turned my head into the soft gauze and cried over the stupidity of my former self for buying such an item, the stupidity of my present self for continuing to care what my apartment looked or smelled like, and the stupidity of my future self for the myriad fuckups she doubtless had in store.
I tried to reverse the tide. I was not just a pregnant person whose partner wanted no part of her; I was other things. I was the daughter of an uber-caring mother. Beloved friend of a handful of warm, funny people. Someone who, at twenty, had lived in a Nepali village for
three months, the only foreigner for fifty miles. I had two master’s degrees. Count them, two!
I was a performer who’d trained in physical theater and improvisation for ten years. I had stood up on an empty stage, many times, without a script or a plan and made theater out of my imagination and an agile body, presto. I wasn’t afraid to do that. In fact, it brought me joy.
But this—mothering alone—I was not made for this.
I cried until I ran out of energy, then got up and poured myself a glass of water. There was nothing in the fridge but a moldy lemon and a jug of apple juice with yellowish film on top.
I suppressed a wave of nausea and tried not to turn on the computer. If I didn’t check, there was a chance that an email from Brian was waiting, saying, I’m sorry, I’m in a cab, I’ll be there in five minutes. If I did check, the chance was nil.
My in-box held two notes from Suzi: One said, Eat fruit first, then an egg. The other, Try not to be sad, Heath. Think about the wiggler. The wiggler deserves to have a good day. There was a short note from my dad: Take good care of yourself, kiddo. And take good care of my kiddo’s kiddo. There was an offer from a local theater inviting me to perform in the spring. In the spring I would likely be the sole parent of an infant; could such a person perform?
I wrote Brian an email saying, I’m sorry we can’t seem to understand each other. And deleted it. I wrote him another: What an asshole you’ve turned out to be. And deleted it. I wrote him a third: Art and parenthood aren’t enemies. Duh. And deleted it. The fourth note said, Sonogram is scheduled for Wednesday, if you want to come. I sent it.
Happiness--A Memoir Page 3