Baby Love Read online

  When I talked to Glen about it, we came up with the scenario of our great-great-grandkids’ deciding against vaccinating their kids against cancer because they hadn’t experienced people dying from the disease, and couldn’t imagine that there could be a resurgence.

  We talked about the risk of driving cars, flying in airplanes, swimming in the ocean. If there was a vaccine developed for HIV or cancer, would we get it, knowing there was a one-in-a-million risk of something going wrong? Probably. We talked about how much we travel. Just a few months before I got pregnant, we flew halfway around the world and passed through six different airports. Even if a disease was eradicated in our country, with so much international exposure, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to leave our child vulnerable to contracting it in another country?

  But what if our son died at two and a half, after a hepatitis B shot? Or of sudden infant death syndrome the night after being vaccinated? Or developed a learning disability that was later linked to a vaccine?

  We talked for hours and at the end of it, I was practically in tears. The magnitude of the decisions, my God, does it ever stop?

  August 18

  Picked my father up from the airport this afternoon and convinced him to rent a huge SUV to help me bring some things up to the house in Mendocino.

  It hit me on the line at Hertz: I am almost thirty-five years old and my father is still helping me move my stuff. I remembered the long drive to New Haven on the first day of college. The car was overflowing with clothes and posters and bedding. At the end of the year, he picked me up from an old, funky house I had moved into, fleeing the dorms. I had thrown everything I owned into black garbage bags that he dutifully slung into the back of the Volvo. I thought of him doing the same for my brother and sister, and how endless it must have seemed to him all those years.

  Parenting. Again, I have to wonder, does it ever stop?

  He told me that I look good, but tired. He said he wanted to come out to support me because he’s been worried and knows how difficult my pregnancy has been. I started to cry. It has been hard. My tendency is to think about how much worse other people have it, but the truth is, none of this has been easy.

  August 19

  A whole gang of us went out tonight to do a reading at Borders from What Makes a Man. The essayists who read were funny and moving. I did what I seem to do best these days: beamed and rubbed my big belly.

  My father’s presence is stirring up old feelings. When I lived in California as a young person, he came to visit only once, when I graduated from high school. I flubbed my valedictorian speech because I was so nervous about my parents being in the same space, breathing the same air. Having him here makes me realize how much I longed for him. We were so close and then suddenly, when my parents moved to opposite ends of the country after their divorce, we were far, and I felt disconnected and lost.

  Having him here, playing the father role, feels good and right, archetypally correct. He picked me up today, and we went for a walk around the lake in Tilden Park. On the way home, we stopped at the supermarket for preparatory diapers and baby food. He insisted on paying here, in California, the way he always does there, in New York, which made me smile. I don’t know if I can describe it, really. But to see him in the grocery store that I go to every few days, looking at the same checkout people under the same fluorescent lights made me feel more integrated, like my life is finally becoming seamless rather than patched together.

  It seems right that the baby is the catalyst for this healing. So far he’s been the catalyst for so much that is good in my life. Becoming more patient and less argumentative, learning to be a more accepting partner, even eating more salad!

  August 20

  I am huge. Just fucking ginormous. Whose body is this, anyway? How big can I actually get? Most days I feel like a sensual Amazon of fertility, but sometimes I am just not up to lugging it all around. Part of it is that my counts are still so low. The anemia is making normal activities downright Herculean. This morning it was all I could do to wash a load of clothes, scramble some eggs, and answer a few e-mails. Then I had to take a nap.

  My father picked me up in the afternoon in the big boat of a car that he hates driving, but which I love being driven in. It’s my size. We went to see The Manchurian Candidate, which was a fascinating look at contemporary masculinity. It was a good example of how mothers often participate in the making of a self-sacrificing, money-and-power-at-all-costs, man-a-tron. They shape the boy into a version of the powerful figure they wish they could be; they shape the boy into a version of the husband they wish they had; they shape the boy into someone who is, in ways barely perceptible to the untrained eye, utterly under their control.

  I don’t want to be like that.

  August 25

  My father and I had a long talk today about my determination to be happy. The truth is that I am happier now than I have ever been, and I am amazed by how much that has to do with falling in love with this baby inside of me.

  As a child of divorce, it has been hard for me to grasp the concept of a functional family dynamic. What does it look like? How does it make you feel? I’m so used to equating family with conflict and psychological wounding, unbridled jealousy and simmering rage, that I’ve been unknowingly re-creating it in every major relationship I’ve had.

  The pain of those relationships should have been motivation enough to change, but it has taken the desire for my baby to have a different experience to drive me to make different choices. In my role as fearless protector, I have become more decisive and self-aware, less prone to being yanked about by the needs and wants of others. I’m not sure how it happened, but it seems that in being able to love my child unconditionally, I am more able to love myself unconditionally, which means putting up with a lot less bullshit from others.

  It’s so cliché and remedial, but I think this pregnancy is teaching me that love is about listening to the people you love, and giving them not what you think they should have, but what they say they need. Love is not about endless negotiation, and recovering from blows landed in the throes of anger, but eliminating those fits completely. Family does not have to be a battleground.

  The further along I get in this pregnancy journey, the more I realize that my longing for a child was a longing for an opportunity to try it all again. It was a longing to do family better, to do it right. To create happiness not just for my babies, but for me.

  August 27

  Back from Mendocino, and my father and I are both exhausted from the drive. Productive visit, though.

  Before we left, I showed him all of the little changes and upgrades I’ve made to the place in preparation for the baby. He was underwhelmed by the two-and-a-half-hour drive, and not convinced I should keep pouring money into a house that my mother could, on a whim, ask me to leave.

  He’s got a point.

  August 29

  My father left this morning. I cried walking him to the car and made him promise to come back next year. He said of course, he’d have to come spend time with his grandson. It was hard to see him go, but a relief to have Glen’s arms to rest in after he was gone.

  Sonam came over in the afternoon. We did our usual Doppler and dipstick dance and then talked about doulas, birth assistants who reportedly ensure shorter labors with less of a chance of a C-section or episiotomy. Since I’m revising my birth plan to include Glen’s wishes in the scenario, the doula has emerged as a mutually agreeable possibility. She would massage me during labor, and bring me yummy things, and remind me to turn over or try a new position.

  Every time I bring up a postpartum doula, though, someone who can wash clothes and cook food for the first two weeks we’re home, Glen shakes his head. We’ll be fine, he says. Neither of us wants a stranger so deeply embedded in our intimacy, but I can’t imagine how I will feel after I give birth. What if I can’t get out of bed, or I am less than functional mentally? Glen pats my hand. You were made for this, he says, look how beautifully you’re c
arrying our baby.

  That’s easy for him to say, I think. But I do feel better after he says it.

  September 2

  Today I wandered around San Francisco in the neighborhood where I lived as a teenager. I walked up the hill to St. Mary’s Cathedral, down through the housing complex with fountains running through it, and past the concrete bench where I sat my first boyfriend down twenty years ago to tell him I was pregnant. I rubbed my belly and talked to the baby the whole way, showing him where I used to live, and where I used to roller-skate, and where I caught the 38 Geary bus to go to school.

  I was amazed by how little has changed. We are so used to thinking that everything revolves around us, that the objects in our world are there because we are, and that without us, they wouldn’t exist. I realized today how untrue that is, how thousands passed through the same set of buildings, streets, walkways.

  I had the sense of being outside of time. Of watching the world stand still while I moved through it. I was born, I live, and I will die, but the sky goes nowhere.

  The thoughts could have been disconcerting, but instead I felt liberated. I felt light walking those hills, watching the memories come up and fade away. I finally understand what people mean when they say that everything changes but everything also stays the same. Life happens where those two meet.

  September 8

  Glen did a teaching at a dharma center in Marin last night, so we drove across the bridge and took the windy road along the Pacific. The center was beautiful, with an organic farm and lovely Japanese-style buildings. I enjoyed the serenity of the place, and the quiet orderliness of the monastic setting. The food was amazing.

  I think I was a shock to some of the monastics, waddling around with my big belly. It amazes me that so many people in America think that in order to be Buddhist you must be a monk or nun. They don’t know about laypeople and householders; they don’t realize that the dharma can be inflected in just about any lifestyle.

  The ride home was long and dark. We listened to Carole King and Al Green, and the baby kicked up a storm and demanded that we stop and get a Mounds bar.

  This morning I got an e-mail from my mother. She received the invitation to the baby shower in New York and wants to throw me a tea at her house in Berkeley on my birthday in November. It sounds reasonable, but also not. Even though a part of me wants to believe that it isn’t a setup of some kind, the other part is hesitant.

  Against my better judgment, I wrote back that it sounds like a great idea, and I am happy she wants to welcome the baby into her community.

  Then I got a really bad headache.

  September 12

  Interviewed the first potential doula today, Ocean. I liked her until she asked why I’m not having the baby at home. I patiently explained that Glen isn’t comfortable with it, and we both want the reassurance of being in the hospital in case something goes wrong. She said that I shouldn’t let anyone keep me from the birth experience I want, and I had to explain to her that the birth of my child was not only my experience, but Glen’s and the baby’s, too. In order for me to have the experience I want, they have to be happy, not just me. Considering the hell I gave Glen on this point, I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. But there they were, and they were true.

  Then she asked if I am having the baby at the hospital because I am afraid. And I said, Look, hon, no offense, but I’ve thought about all of this quite a bit. My decisions are hard-won and I have no desire to have them questioned by someone I met ten minutes ago.

  Is it me, or the hormones?

  Needless to say, she’s not the right person. She may have meant well, but you simply cannot be an advocate for someone and at the same time think you know more about their wants and needs than they do. It’s impossible.

  I took a long shower after she left and then massaged my belly with magic anti-stretch mark potion number 59.

  My blood counts are creeping toward normal. Still low, but definitely getting better.

  September 14

  Today I ran into a tree. I have gotten so clumsy. This belly gets in the way of seeing more than two inches in front of me, and my sense of balance is completely shot. I went to go look at the hospital and parked around the corner from the emergency lot we would use on the big day. I got out of the car and walked around to the meter, and as I was scooping quarters from the bottom of my purse, bam! I smacked my head into a thick branch and almost passed out.

  The hospital was okay. The neighborhood is a bit sketchy compared to the hospital near the house, which is tucked away and surrounded by trees. This one is on a big city street with a lot of empty storefronts and homeless people wandering around. The patients are mostly Mexican, Ecuadoran, and Samoan, and the nursing staff, from what I could see, is largely Filipino.

  I met Sonam in the Labor and Delivery ward, and she showed me the birthing pool and the room where I will labor. It is very large, with hardwood floors and warm, nonfluorescent light. There are two big windows. It wasn’t my living room, but it was nicer than most hospital rooms I’ve seen. It didn’t feel institutional. There were no pale green or gray walls, no cold, polished concrete floors.

  I was talking to Sonam and the nurses at the nursing station when a woman in one of the rooms started sobbing and screaming, It hurts! It hurts! over and over again. It was the first time I have heard a woman in active labor, and all I could think was: Drugs! I want as natural a birth as possible, but I am no masochist. I want that epidural standing by. And that’s what I told Sonam in no uncertain terms as I clutched her arm while waiting for the elevator. Make sure we have an epidural close by. When she smiled, I was like, No, Sonam, you don’t understand, I am serious.

  She said okay.

  I said it again as the elevator doors were closing.

  Don’t forget the epidural!

  September 15

  I went to see the osteopath today. He’s been working on me for years, helping to manage a repetitive strain injury I have that makes writing difficult. He also tends to the aftereffects of a motorcycle accident I had as a teenager, when I thought I could drive a motorcycle around a semi-developed island in a bikini and flip-flops.

  He was excited about the baby and told me about all the pregnant women he’s treated. When I asked if he had children, he said that he and his first wife had been pregnant, but the baby died at birth from Listeria, a bacterium found in uncooked beef and poultry, and processed foods like hot dogs and deli meats that aren’t cooked properly before packaging.

  Uch! The heartache. To carry a baby to term and give birth only to have the baby die in the first minutes of life is unbearable to imagine, and yet this happens all over the world, every day. When I told him how sorry I was, he nodded and told me about his second wife and her daughter, with whom he is very close.

  My osteopath is such a gentle guy, such a healer. He’s so deserving of all kinds of love. He must have been devastated. I stayed cool and kept a good boundary, but really I wanted to get off the table and give him a big hug.

  Now that I’m listening, it seems everyone has a birth story, or an almost birth story.

  Six

  TO BE PUT under the heading “What on Earth Was I Thinking?”: I first tried to get pregnant while in a passionate relationship with a beautiful, brilliant, and ultimately unfaithful musician. On the road in Tokyo, Århus, Milan, Santa Fe, and other even more exotic climes, the two of us talked about making a baby. Inevitably, the discussion took place in hotel bathrooms—an elegant white marble cube in Bern, a humble ventilated box in North Carolina, a padded art deco creation in Chicago—and on the tour bus, especially after a gig at which a good-looking man had been spotted. A good-looking man who had the requisite physique and the even more requisite over-the-top adoration/ obsession for my rock-star girlfriend.

  We’d be sprawled on the filthy sofas at the back of the bus at three a.m., still riding the adrenaline from the show and trying not to inhale the exhaust seeping in from the back of t
he old Prevo. Undoubtedly she, the girlfriend, would have put a movie into the DVD player, something like Hair, Dumb and Dumber, or Amadeus. If the band hadn’t inhaled it all, we’d be munching on the remains of food listed on her craft-service rider: carrot sticks and hummus, a glass of soymilk. If the band had finished everything, I’d be trying to make a meal out of a bag of cashews scored the previous day at Whole Foods.

  During lulls in the action, I would say something like: M would be good. And she would say, Yeah, we should put him on the list. Or, I don’t know—he’s too goofy. Or, He’s not that smart. Or, He’s got a great body. Or, He’s got a girlfriend who would never, ever let him do it.

  We talked in terms of genetic preferences and of men who could be fathers but not intrude on our life. We talked of sperm banks and daddy donors and lifetime parenting partners and new family configurations. When our straight friends had kids, we oohed and aahed and declared ourselves godparents, and when our gay friends had kids, we mined them for details. Would the child be close to the other biological parent? Did the donor want involvement? Did it complicate the “primary” relationship?

  It was decided that because I wanted the baby most, and because she had already given birth to one child, I would be the one to conceive. She would be my coach, protector, cook. She would also be responsible for naming the baby because I am awful at naming. And because she was crazy for outrageous biblical names like Hezekiah and Ezekiel, and I didn’t have the energy to resist.

  Over a couple of years, we amassed quite a list of willing participants, though I am not completely sure why they were willing. Was it the prospect of being a father sans the daily work of parenthood? The promise of free concert tickets for life? Whatever the reason, when all was said and done, it came down to two men who weren’t on our list, two men we knew and loved, two men who were already like family. And so, acting as if our relationship was far more stable and full of fidelity than it actually—I found out later—was, my girlfriend and I masked our nervousness with jocular banter and popped the question.