And then our surrogate proceeded to go into labor for thirty-eight hours.
At first, it seemed like this was just the home stretch. We’d waited this long, right? But it went on so long that Kaavia James was in danger. There was some hemming and hawing about doing a C-section, but then the doctor had to do an emergency one because the umbilical cord had become tied around Kaav’s ankle. Now that I am Kaavia James’s mother, I know that she tied it herself because she was simply over it.
Dwyane and I gowned up in white scrubs with white masks and blue bonnets to take seats in the OR. “It’s time,” said Dwyane.
I definitely didn’t know how C-sections work. Turns out it’s all kinds of rough. But it was fast, and suddenly the doctor was just holding her up for us to our wide-eyed gaze. Our baby sat in the doctor’s left palm with her head supported by the right hand.
“Oh my God,” I said. The room was festive almost, people saying over and over, “Congratulations.” Just as quick, the doctor placed her on a little exam table and asked, “Do you have a name, you guys?”
“Kaavia,” I said, my voice a choke.
“Hunh?” she asked, not hearing.
I put my hand to my throat to stop it from seizing up. “Kaavia,” I said again.
“Kaavia,” everyone repeated in joy.
This baby, given a name written on a wish list for decades, then tattooed on her father’s shoulders. Given a name to summon her into existence—into being. She was loved even as an idea. Her very essence was loved and nurtured and supported even as a thought.
My body seized in a full release of every emotion. Relief, anxiety, terror, joy, resentment, disbelief, gratitude . . . and also, disconnection. I had hoped that the second I saw her, there would be a moment of locking in. I looked over at Natalie and her husband. There was a stillness to them. I had tied my balloon self to Natalie’s wrist. Wait, it’s over, I thought. Wait. I looked at Kaavia James on the table, and then back at them. It took all of us to create her, so I wanted us to share this time with them.
As Natalie went to the recovery room, Kaav was taken to the newborn nursery. Dwyane, my mom, and I all reassembled in a hospital room, waiting for them to weigh Kaav and clean her up. I put on a surgical gown for modesty so I could do skin-to-skin bonding with her. My mother and D were crying, our surrogate was crying, our baby nurses were crying, and I was a mess. We put on a mix, a playlist that Dwyane’s agent and father figure Hank had made us before he died. He used to make us playlists for every occasion, and we wanted him to be there with us in this moment. The room filled with the opening bass riff of Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day.” He sings about being troubled, beaten down, hopeless. “Then I look at you,” he sings. “And the world’s all right with me.” Just as he hit that line, the door opened and Kaavia James was brought into our lives.
Dwyane and I moved to a hospital bed, the same one we’d shared waiting for her arrival. My mother put a blanket over me and I pulled my gown down to hold Kaav to my chest.
“She has D’s mouth, and her nose looks just like D’s,” I said. I love my husband, so to see his beauty reflected in our child was a gift. My mother kissed my cheek, and put her arm around me.
Kaavia James opened her eyes to look at me. She already had this freakish neck strength, more than any infant I had seen.
“It’s us,” I said, excitement in my voice. “It’s us. It’s your people.”
“It’s your people!” Dwyane repeated.
My mom held her, and we were all so emotional in this perfect moment. She returned Kaav to my arms, and I sat up to hold her as my mom slipped into the bathroom. I had wondered what it would feel like, this bonding time. Would it kick in then? My main thought was, What is happening? They’re not going to let me leave here with this whole-ass baby, are they?
My mom came out, and I noticed she had a hand to the wall. “I just—” And she fell. Simply collapsed, and if D had not been standing right there to catch her, she would have hit the ground hard. She was drenched in sweat, and looked like she was having a heart attack. The nurse happened to come in just as she fell, and called for help. Within seconds, they were taking my mom away.
I was in shock. She was around the same age as my grandmother when she died of complications from diabetes, which my mom also has. In fact, I realized she was around the age of all my grandparents when they died.
I couldn’t speak, except to keep repeating, “Oh, God.” This can’t be how the story is written, I thought. If I wrote this, critics would be like, “Ennh, it’s a little on the nose. The miracle baby arrives and they finally have this full-circle, three-generation moment, annnnnd . . . she dies.”
I went from euphoria to terror. Holding my daughter, I started thinking about all the things I wished I had shared with my mom. All the questions I wanted to ask. If this was the last moment with my mother, could I be confident that she knew me? Who I am, in my soul? She did such a great job of raising an independent young woman that not only did I never need to rely on a man, I didn’t need to rely on my parents. What opportunities of connection had I squandered? How can I know my daughter if I never let my mom know me?
I was so grateful I’d had the impulse months before to want my mom there.
“She got on the first flight,” I said. She was there for me.
Dwyane looked down at his phone. He was obviously missing that night’s game in Miami, and the team announced he was out for “personal reasons.” It was the first game he’d missed in his final season, and anytime an athlete says “personal” it opens them up to a thousand more questions. Who’s dead? Is it a drug problem? Your problem or hers? Is it one of the kids?
There was an AP bulletin about him calling out, but there was always a press corps following him everywhere. Speculation started to go wild. People had paid a lot of money for what might be their last chance to see D. Wade play. And he was missing?!
I was thinking about how this would juice up that tabloid report about us splitting when a doctor came in. My mom hadn’t had a heart attack, it was her diabetes. Her numbers were so out of whack that she’d gotten overheated and passed out. They were bringing her levels back to a safe zone and would monitor her until the next day. So, Kaav and my mother spent the night in the hospital, while we worked on sneaking D out to the hotel without being seen. We didn’t want it to look like he was on some sort of weird vacation, or have the news of Kaav’s birth get out before we had a chance to get her safely home.
A little bit after I got back to the hotel, my sixteen-year-old stepson Zaire texted me. “I’m so excited for you,” he wrote. “You deserve this. To raise one of us from scratch.”
“You deserve this.” Zaire knew enough that he had to assure me I deserved this. As adults, we think we can shield kids from things. From conversations, from experiences, from reality. After that first loss, I thought I was protecting him and the other kids by not sharing with them. But they were witnesses. They knew.
In that moment, I saw them see all the red needle receptacles in the house when I was doing IVF. Red, with a skull and crossbones. All the different nurses who came to our different homes. All the hushed conversations and arguments we assumed they didn’t hear. The physical changes in my body, the attitude shifts. The energy shift that fell on the house after every loss. They may not have known specifics, but they felt the need, and the loss. And most of all, the feeling of brokenness. I didn’t articulate out loud that I felt that I was unworthy of a body that would not betray me, but they felt it and shared in it.
I didn’t want them to be part of my heartbreak, and the whole time they were experiencing their own. They were left to deal with those feelings alone. Now, even faced with whatever Zaire might be feeling about his place in the family—in my heart and D’s—with whatever shifts this new baby might bring, he still wanted me to know I was deserving of motherhood.
But was I? At discharge the next day, they handed me Kaavia James. They told me she had jaundice, which yellowed h
er skin. They were very casual about it, sending us home with a UV blanket. “Put her in a window and turn her like a rotisserie chicken and she’ll be fine,” I was told. “Good luck.” Oh, and here’s your mom, too. Try to be a better daughter.
As soon as we got back to the house, we made the announcement about Kaav, and also that D would be taking two weeks’ paternity leave. He did this partly in a show of solidarity with me, but also because he wanted to bond with Kaav. The mentality about professional athletes is “get right back in and play the sport,” and that’s if they even take off for the birth. But our journey was different. She had to learn both our heartbeats now.
We posted three photos of when we three met, sitting on the bed in that hospital room, along with the lyrics to Bill Withers’s “Lovely Day.” I said that she arrived the night before via surrogate. I got a lot of congratulations, and I got a lot of hate.
“Why does she have a gown on? She’s acting like she had the baby.”
“That’s what Hollywood people do. They pay someone to have your kid.”
“I thought this was her child?”
There were meaner ones, and they’re all still up. People with laugh-crying emojis accusing me of hiding my inability to, as one put it, “breed.” It fed into my feeling of not being worthy. You are a fraud, I was told over and over again. You are not who you say you are.
And I took it from there, damning myself for feeling overwhelmed by providing basic care for my child. And you damn near killed your mama, I thought. My mom, by the way, who had to go home to take care of her three other kids.
When she left, I felt all eyes on me in the house. I could tell my husband wanted to see me mothering our child. This had been his dream for so long. Visitors kept stepping back to get a wide angle on this mothering I had talked about wanting to do. The funny thing about an open-concept house is that there aren’t many places to be alone. There were so many people around that I was never once alone with Kaavia James, and then became afraid to because she seemed so fragile. It felt, moment to moment, like the stakes were life and death. Even when I had the intellectual knowledge, it wasn’t a natural instinct that kicked in. What was natural was a sense of responsibility. I could give you the A to Z of childcare, but was it instinctual? Hell, no.
For Dwyane, it was second nature. He’s been an involved parent half his life. When he had Zaire at age twenty, he was an athlete on scholarship. He and his ex-wife were on WIC and had to share parenting duties to survive, so there was no day care. School, practice, home. This was reliving that experience with resources. I found myself jealous that he’d been Teen Mom. And anything he did with Kaav was celebrated by onlookers—nannies, family members, and strangers alike—as if it were Fourth of July fireworks and Christmas morning presents all in one.
“How lucky you are,” someone said to me when Dwyane went to expertly change a diaper. When I held my baby, there was always someone around to comment. “Careful, hold her neck up.” Of course I did, as you would any baby, even one with Kaavia James’s neck strength from birth. But when I’d place my hand on her head to lock her in, Kaav would still fuss and cry. I felt awful, like I was doing it all wrong.
Dwyane went back to work after the two weeks, and I struggled. It felt like I was on a set, about to do a scene with Viola Davis. And the director says, “Okay, now let the tears fall and say the lines.” And my mind was a blank. The biggest job I’ve waited on my whole life, and as we get to take 110, we’re running out of film and I’ve lost the patience and confidence of the crew.
I was in the nursery with Kaavia James and a baby nurse one afternoon. We were getting ready to feed her when the nurse stepped out to get something. I sat in the chair, holding Kaav, when I realized that this was the very first time we had been alone. There had always been someone around.
“Hi,” I said.
Just then, Kaav, with her amazing neck strength, lifted her head from my chest and locked her eyes on mine. As much as she resembled my husband, the look she gave me was that of a mini-me.
“Girl, please,” the look said. “You know what? Stop stressing. I’mma give them nothing but unbothered side-eye. And I’mma take the pressure off you. Cause I’m a whole-ass character myself. Don’t worry. I got you.”
I felt it in my heart. I don’t pretend it was maternal instinct finally kicking in. It was my daughter telling me who I was by being who she is. Did I think I was number one on the call sheet? Kaavia James turned me into a character actress in her one-woman show.
The nurse came back, and I took a cloth from her. “We’re good,” I said. “Thank you.”
We settled in, just Kaavia James and me. Instead of me trying to be something for Kaav or anyone else, I let her tell me who she was. I listened to her, even before she had words. When she had fussed about me worrying over her neck, I now knew she was saying, “If you don’t get your hand from the back of my head . . . I don’t need you to do all that for me. I’m not like other babies.”
She was like me. My mother knew I was independent from birth, because she must have had a moment like this where she listened to me. Yes, Kaav needed care and parenting like any tiny human, just like I had. But we valued our independence, and the best mothering for that is to value it, too. If I chose to fuss over her, it was because I wanted to, not because I had to perform motherhood. She was not interested in that mom.
“I got you,” I said, holding her.
* * *
So much time has passed. So many firsts. Yet the question lingers in my mind: I will always wonder if Kaav would love me more if I had carried her. Would she kiss me quicker or hug me longer? Would our bond be even tighter? I will never know what it would have been like to carry this rock star inside me. To see my body change to accommodate her greatness as I felt her make a home within me.
When they say having a child is like having your heart outside your body, that’s all I know. Kaavia James was never in my body. I could not nourish her, and she could not find safety there. We met as strangers, the sound of my voice and my heartbeat foreign to her. It’s a pain that has dimmed but remains present in my fears that I was not, and never will be, enough.
And Dwyane leaves me with another riddle that has no answer. I can never know if my failure to carry a child put a ceiling on the love my husband has for me. Yes, I am Baby Mama number three, a label that is supposed to be an insult. But is the injury really the asterisk next to my name in the record? The asterisk denotes that the achievement is in question. “She didn’t really earn the title.”
If I am telling the fullness of our stories, of our three lives together, I must tell the truths I live with. I have learned that you can be honest and loving at the same time.
I’m writing this poolside, because to be with my daughter is to be at least water-adjacent. Kaav’s loved it from the beginning. Dwyane is in there with her, along with Zaire and Dada. No one is hovering over her in her water wings—they stay just close enough for her to feel the sureness of them. Zaya is sitting by me, taking it all in.
We’re listening to Kaav’s favorite, Luther Vandross. “Never Too Much” just came on, and Luther asks if the object of his adoration remembers a time when he was scared to show his love, fearing that he wouldn’t be worthy of love returned.
“You must have known that I had feelings deep enough to swim in / That’s when you opened up your heart and told me to come in.”
I catch Kaav’s eye, and she smiles back at me. And with that, dear reader, I have to get in the pool now.
2
Dream Team
I saw a ghost last night.
Dwyane and I were on the couch, halfway through the latest episode of The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan docuseries on ESPN. Five episodes in, the show had become my Sunday night obsession. As a lifelong sports fan, it was my heaven.
Kaavia James had other plans, however, and grabbed the remote. She somehow managed to push every button at once, and the screen blacked out.
“Ka
av,” I said, as she turned to try to climb onto the couch, unbothered. She was the show, as usual.
When I got the television working again, Jordan appeared on-screen at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, walking with Magic Johnson in their USA jerseys. Together, they were the official and unofficial leaders of the Dream Team, the greatest collection of basketball talent ever assembled.
At first sight of those jerseys, I had a vague feeling of being pulled back into something. I tried to ignore it, and turned to Dwyane. I talked, too loudly for our living room. “Of course you chose number nine, too,” I said. He’d picked Jordan’s Team USA number when he played in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Dwyane smiled, but the feeling didn’t leave me. I put my hand out for Kaav. To ground me.
As the episode went on and the Dream Team’s performance at the 1992 Olympics played out, I had an increasing feeling of—not quite déjà vu, but of being drawn into a room in the depth of my being. Like the beginning of an old movie, where the dust is blown off books, and sheets are pulled off furniture to reveal the life that once was there. The room in my mind became more familiar, and beneath one final shroud, there was a ghost.
It was me, a broken nineteen-year-old curled up on my parents’ couch that summer of 1992 in Pleasanton, California. I had been raped, and was so mentally destroyed that my only tether to the world outside our living room was the round-the-clock coverage of the Olympics.
I have told the story of my rape before, and have purposely done so since the beginning of my career. Rape is the most underreported crime worldwide, and it can also be the most isolating crime for a victim to endure. People needed to see someone they recognized who could still manage to function in the world, even pursue dreams. Besides doing interviews, I have spent years lobbying Congress and state legislatures about the treatment of people who have been raped. After doing this work for twenty-five years, speaking about my experience to shed light on what others go through, I am able to quickly and dispassionately rattle off the three pertinent facts of my case: In 1992, I was raped at gunpoint and severely beaten by a man robbing the Payless shoe store where I worked the summer before my sophomore year of college. I had the luxury of being raped by a stranger in an affluent neighborhood, so no one questioned my story and I received excellent care, which is not the case for the majority of Black survivors of rape. Once I was at school, I sought the help of the Rape Crisis Center at UCLA, and through the program’s group therapy I began to see a path from rape victim to survivor.
You Got Anything Stronger? Page 4