Baby Love Page 13

  The more I learn about partnership, the more certain I am that the male partners of the women on television already put up with a tremendous amount of stress and strain just being the husbands of two very powerful, very visible women. Do you think they want to be more or less present, more or less intimate with their wives, after hearing that they aren’t really necessary? I know how I would feel if the person I devoted my life to told millions of people he didn’t need me.

  Wrecked.

  Because the fact is that we do need each other, and we are locked into this dance with the whole frickin’ world whether we like it or not. This lack of separateness is awful and terrifying, amazing and exhilarating, and just plain true. It seems to me that men and women both need to come up to speed on this, instead of competing for the prize of who can do without whom for longer. There is power in partnership, otherwise the modern, government-sanctioned version of it, marriage, wouldn’t be able to hold.

  But I began this mini-manifesto simply because I have never felt as much dependence on another person, male or female, as I do now that I am pregnant. Granted, I do feel a tremendous power, a sort of Yes, I’ve got the fetus now, no one can stop me, but then when that necessarily subsides and I think about the thousands of decisions that are going to come up, the millions of moments where it will inevitably take two heads screwed on right to muddle through, I feel a tremendous need. To be a single mother, while I feel I could do it, at the moment seems an impossible task.

  What I need is a partner: someone who will show up. And what I need to become is a partner: someone who will open the door. I have no idea if I can sustain it as long as I want, which is forever, but I’ve never felt so motivated to try.

  October 24

  Blessed be the editors, for they giveth work!

  I spoke today with the editor of a high school English textbook I am writing an essay and teaching section for, and he put me on task. I have several subsections to write, answering questions like: What is the difference between an article and an essay? and What is my writing process like?

  I decided to write the main essay for the textbook on hip-hop culture and what it was like before it became a global commodity. It’s a personal piece about living in the Bronx in the eighties when it all began. And how, as a youth movement, hip-hop was about kids being free and expressive and having a good time. Most important, it was about kids from different cultures finding a common language.

  Anyway. It’s not like I don’t have a whole other book to write, but it is nice to have a few short pieces to focus on. Otherwise,

  I watch way too much TV. It’s just so nice to lie about, clicking the remote. Right now I am in love with Girlfriends and The King of Queens. I’m convinced these shows are helping me bridge the chasm between single urban professional and suburban nuclear. My life at the moment is two parts Girlfriends, two parts The King of Queens, one part Discovery Channel.

  Good news: I read on the Internet that mothers who eat a lot of chocolate when they are pregnant have happier babies.

  November 4

  The baby is super-awake today. I sense his awareness more than ever, that he’s waking up and taking things in. I’ve started talking to him, out loud instead of just in my head. I tell him all of the things we’re doing, like getting the car washed and driving to the chiropractor, buying laundry detergent and calling Grandpa on the phone. This morning I told him about Sonam and that she’s going to be with us in the hospital. I told him not to be afraid because she has delivered hundreds of babies and she loves us.

  It’s all so exciting, but between interviewing doulas, training for the labor marathon, making sure I’ve got the right breast pump, and eating everything in sight, I’m totally exhausted. I get why people have their babies in the hospital. It’s the planning, stupid! I feel like I’m making a Hollywood film with a two-person crew. If I were to have this baby at home, I would have to do all of what I am already doing, plus shop for plastic sheets and a fifty-foot hose for the water tank.

  I’m finally convinced I’ve made the right decision. I just want to go to the hospital, have this baby, and then come home to a sane, stable environment. I know it sounds rough, but I have a hunch that giving birth is going to be hard enough. I don’t also have to transform my apartment into a birthing center.

  November 7

  Since I haven’t heard from my mother about the birthday tea since she brought it up two months ago, and since I’ve been feeling a bit sketchy about the whole thing anyway, I wrote her a note telling her that I don’t feel comfortable moving forward with what I could only imagine wasn’t really going to happen anyway, seeing as how my birthday is in ten days. I wrote that I am still having reverberations from all of the horrible things she said to me, and just don’t feel safe. I apologized again for anything and everything I have done that has ever hurt her, and I thanked her for the offer, and I did all of the other nice things a daughter is supposed to do.

  She wrote back: “Walk free, with my blessing.”

  November 8

  I feel the inward turn today. I have no desire to do anything at all, other than eat, sleep, and dream. I have work to do and yet my brain does not cooperate. It wants only to lie here and contemplate the sky and the trees, to feel my baby move from side to side, to wonder about his face, his future.

  November 10

  Insomnia. My new bedtime is five a.m. I watch TV, read, scour the Internet for information about what the hell I am supposed to be doing and feeling this week. I worry. Can I really do this? What will become of me? Will I be trapped and miserable? I organize. I throw papers away, I order what I call “organizational principles” from the Container Store and make pretty, chronologically ordered file folders full of contracts, notes, articles, bills. I shred documents that I wouldn’t want anyone else to see: medical records, first drafts, copies of tax returns.

  I am up so much at night that it is starting to feel like day to me. Like I have collapsed the artificial line between day and night and I am living one long, seamless stream of life.

  Another gift from Tenzin.

  November 12

  We nixed the postpartum-doula idea. We just don’t want to have to deal with another person. I wish I could judge how incapacitated I will be. Some women I’ve talked to can’t function for weeks and others get up after two days and do the grocery shopping. Where will I be on the spectrum? I have no idea. It all depends on the kind of birth I have.

  In lieu of a doula, I figure I can get services lined up now so I won’t worry about certain things. Like bottles of water. Fresh produce. Housecleaning.

  Mr. T is moving around a lot today, kicking and elbowing me, his knees and tush sticking out from my belly. I started rubbing the parts that I can feel, massaging them and talking to him while I rubbed. He loved it.

  November 19

  We went to meet Sonam’s backup doctor today, as required. When we arrived at her office in the Women’s Center of the hospital, the small waiting room was packed with pregnant women about to pop. The doctors were running forty-five minutes to an hour late. There were no windows in the office, and the room was hot and stuffy.

  To my left was a young woman ten days past her due date who kept shrieking, to no one in particular, It won’t come out, it won’t come out. She was accompanied by her mother, who looked stonily at the ground as her daughter screamed. At one point, this young woman asked another woman if her placenta was going to get stuck, and what she should do to make sure it comes out. The other woman very nicely told her not to worry, it would come out right after the baby.

  There was a woman with a huge attitude talking on her cell phone to the father of her child. She told him that he needed to buy the baby some clothes or some formula since he hadn’t done anything else for her the whole time she was pregnant. He said something and she said she didn’t care about all that, all she knew was that he better buy something for this baby. Then she clicked her phone shut and went back to reading her magazine.<
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  A young couple sat down next to us. They could have been in high school. The guy kept his arm around the girl the whole time we waited. She flipped through a magazine and they read it together, laughing sometimes, reading parts out loud to each other. Besides Glen, the guy was the only other man in a room full of hugely pregnant women.

  About fifteen minutes before we were called in, a woman came in with her baby in a portable car seat. Turned out she was one of Sonam’s patients. She said her birth went great, “You’re gonna have a blast,” which was the first time I had heard it put exactly like that. She also told me that it was all about the traveling car seat and that no, it wasn’t too heavy.

  I asked her how she was doing, and she said good. She tore a little bit, but it was all healed, and her energy was starting to come back. She said she was sweating all the time because her hormones were all over the place, and that nursing was harder than she thought it would be, but other than that she was loving being with her baby and it was all so much more normal and natural than she thought it would be.

  Which was a relief.

  Then the “It won’t come out” woman asked her whether her placenta had come out on its own, or if she had to do something special to get it to come out, and the car-seat woman very patiently explained that no, you don’t have to do anything special, it just comes out on its own after the baby. And the “It won’t come out” woman nodded her head.

  We were finally called in to meet with the doctor, who looked me over and said that for the most part everything looks fine and perfect and right on track, including the fact that I weigh 184 pounds. She said the low iron is still a problem. She’s going to look into iron shots as a possibility but in the meantime told me to keep eating the beef, which I assured her I am, in copious amounts, thanks to Glen.

  When she left the room, I started crying. It was just so intense in there. All those women. That young girl, probably developmentally disabled, not knowing what’s going on. The tiny, airless office. Glen reminded me that we could be having the baby in the very nice, very airy hospital near our house. Which made me cry even harder.

  November 24

  I’ve started reading children’s books. The Berenstain Bears, Richard Scarry, Goodnight Moon. The books take me back to purity, simplicity, ease. I remember why these books were my best friends when I was a little girl. Everything gets worked out, people love each other, the world is good.

  I am reading these to counterbalance the e-mails that have been flying back and forth between me and my mother. I ask her to apologize for the dreaded afternoon and the statement she threatened to send to Salon, and to acknowledge the ways she has hurt me over the years with neglect, withholding, and the ambivalence she seems to have about my race, relative privilege, and birth itself.

  She writes back that she has apologized enough and that children should forgive their parents and move on. She tells me that she and all of her friends think that because I have asked for this apology, I have lost my mind. I write her that asking people, even one’s parents, to be accountable for their actions is the epitome of sanity, and that I am sorry that her friends, all of whom I know and love, don’t have the courage to stand up to her.

  When I write that if she can’t apologize, I don’t want contact because I feel she is too emotionally dangerous to me and my unborn son, she writes that she won’t miss what we don’t have and that to her our relationship has been inconsequential for years. She writes that she has been my mother for thirty years and is no longer interested in the job. Instead of signing “your mother” at the end of the letter, she signs her first name.

  After that e-mail, I lie in bed trying to imagine some circumstance that could cause me to tell my child that I no longer want the job of being his mother. I think about Michael Jackson’s mother, standing by his side in court as he responds to charges that he sexually molested children. I think about Scott Peterson’s mother, who maintains that her son is a good boy even after he’s been convicted of murdering his wife and child. Am I that awful, that I should no longer have a mother? Does telling my story the way I remember it make me a devil?

  I try to imagine a circumstance that would lead me to tell my mother that I no longer want to be her daughter, that the job is just too draining, and I’ve found someone more suitable to take her place. When Glen walks in, I ask him to help me think, because, frankly, I am at a loss. I haven’t even seen my baby and I feel I would die for him, kill for him if I had to. If I hurt him in some way, I imagine I would apologize to him over and over again until he could hear me, because that’s what parents must do.

  Glen sighs. It’s not rational, honey, he says gently. An irrational person can find an endless number of reasons to justify ending a parent-child relationship, but a rational person knows that nothing can break that bond and it’s madness to even try.

  November 29

  I am starting to think that giving the baby a Tibetan name isn’t a betrayal of family as much as it is a sign of maturity.

  Glen and I were flipping through a magazine, talking about how many people are stunted in their development, hovering in an adolescent state well into their fifties and sixties, even until death. He defined adolescence as being overly concerned with the acceptance of peers, and fearful of rejection or confrontation with the adult world.

  Which made me think of how few people break away from the expectations of their parents to live their own, authentic lives. Guilt and fear keep so many of us ensnared. Who can stand the emotional blowback that comes from choosing a different path?

  If guilt and fear keep us from acting on our own beliefs and aspirations, and not acting on our own beliefs and aspirations keeps us in a state of arrested development, there are bound to be some serious problems. If we aren’t diligent in our efforts to mature, at some point cutting the cord of familial expectation, we become infantilized by it.

  Sobering, but inescapable.

  December 1

  For research and recreation, I’ve been watching births on the Discovery Channel. It’s amazing how many of these programs there are.

  So far they fall into two categories:

  The first is the normal birth. The mom lies calmly with her feet in the stirrups. She’s completely epiduraled and everyone is just waiting, waiting, waiting until she’s dilated. She looks content, and people come in and kiss her head and whisper in her ear. When it’s showtime, the doctor comes in and peels back the sheet. He tells her to push. And push some more. Then we cut to commercial. Then we come back, and she’s almost done. One more push, one more, there it is, yes! Congratulations, Samantha, you have a boy, a girl, a healthy baby. And everyone starts crying. If it’s the home makeover show, this is when we cut to the almost-finished nursery, complete with gender-appropriate theme.

  The second version is the complicated birth. In this segment, the mom does not look relaxed. She is on a gurney instead of a hospital bed. She looks panicked, in pain. She’s practically crawling out of her skin. Doctors surround her and shout orders to nurses. Friends and family are remote. Then the decision to cut, to deliver by C-section. Mom is rushed to the OR, where a sheet is thrown over her legs so she can’t see what’s about to happen. Seconds later a bloody infant is held up, followed by applause, relief, exhaustion. Mom gets to rest her cheek on the baby for a few seconds and then, before we can wonder about the gash in her belly, we go to commercial.

  Glen says I shouldn’t watch, that it’s like watching movies about plane crashes before taking a trip. But I am compelled.

  He doesn’t understand that I am measuring myself against the women I’m watching, trying to convince myself that giving birth is something I can actually do. When I watch the normal births, I say things to myself like, If she can do it, I can do it. I am tougher than she is. Oh, for God’s sake, that’s a piece of cake. When I watch the births with complications, I think: Oh my God, I am never going to make it.

  I want to see a home birth, a natural birth. I want to see wh
at it looks like with no anesthesia and no emergency C-section. What channel is that on?

  December 2

  It finally hit me that all of this nesting, this obsession with the right bed, the right stroller, the right house, the right amount of money, is about trying to control an absolutely uncontrollable situation.

  It’s about fear.

  It is all in lieu of the actual work, which is to prepare to give birth the way I must prepare to die: alone. This morning at four forty-nine I realized that I alone am having this baby. Glen and the midwife will be in the room, but no one can come and do this for me, no one can make it not be hard, no one can make it not hurt. No one can bear the pain so that I don’t have to.

  The notion of waiting for someone else to bear your burdens, to save you—pregnancy is a lesson in the futility of all of that.

  I feel relief, as if a huge burden has been lifted and I can let go of the superficial aspects of this pregnancy.

  I feel like an adult.

  December 4

  Woke up this morning after the long, detailed meeting with Sonam, Glen, and Natasha, the masseuse and birth assistant I chose to be my doula, full of energy. I made a big breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, worked on the textbook piece, drove Glen to a doctor’s appointment, went out to lunch, and kept going until five. I didn’t realize I was in an altered state until later, when it dawned on me that the odd tightening across my big belly was my first set of contractions.

  At six, I had a primal urge to be as close to Glen as possible, preferably with my face buried in his armpit, but not before eating an entire chicken, a loaf of bread, and two bottles of mineral water. I know it seems like I am exaggerating, and when I read this in a year I’ll be like, Yeah right. I am not exaggerating. I really did eat that much. Tenzin, you have always been a healthy, strong, strapping boy.