Baby Love Read online

  I think she was shocked when I decided against the amnio, but she tried to appear nonjudgmental and supportive. I was a little shocked myself. Amnios are as common as breastfeeding. Even though I was on the fence, I never really thought I’d go through my pregnancy without having one. But what can I say? When she told me that she wasn’t sure, exactly, where the fluid was transferred after the test, I lost faith in the whole system. Was I sure I could handle a child with special needs? Absolutely not. Did I feel certain that my baby was going to be more than healthy? Absolutely. Was that anything other than magical thinking? Hard to say.

  I did go for the ultrasound, though. To make sure the baby has all ten fingers and toes and both legs and arms, and none of the early signs of other problems. There was also the issue of finding out the sex.

  As I lay naked from the waist down on the metal table with cold gel slathered across my belly, a woman who has been doing ultrasounds for thirty years zipped from one side of my baby’s face to the other, one hand to the other, one organ to the other. After a few clicks and a few anxious questions from me about whether or not everything looked normal, she asked if we wanted to know if our child was a girl or a boy. I looked at Glen and he said it was up to me. I’ve never been able to stand someone else knowing something I don’t, so I said yes. Well, the technician said, he’s definitely a boy. Without a doubt.

  A boy!

  I knew it.

  My boy!

  Then she showed us his face and butt and elbow, none of which were the least bit identifiable to me.

  As my son squirmed in response to her prodding and poking, at one point turning all the way around to avoid her probe, I wondered aloud if we might be disturbing him with all of our measuring. The woman looked at me with, what can I call it? Disdain? Condescension? I shook my head, trying to meet her halfway, after all, she had spent thirty years doing this. I’m just a newbie. That’s ridiculous, she said. You’re just projecting. And then she roughly wiped a fraction of the gunk off my stomach and told me to wait for the doctor.

  It is an understatement to say that I was ready to go home after all this. Maybe I am just hormonally challenged, but as we walked into the bright sun of the parking lot I thought about how fiercely protective I am of this being growing inside of me. That medical office might as well have been a lion on the prowl for fresh kill.

  I felt a sense of dread as I wondered about the hundreds of skirmishes before me, and the long and obstinate arm of the culture reaching into my boy’s mind and possibly into his very DNA. I clutched Glen’s arm more tightly, straining to imagine how I would negotiate it all without his stable presence and fierce intelligence.

  Together, we might be able to make it. Alone, I am not so sure.

  Five

  OH, that it were possible to write about having a baby in America without writing about not having a baby. I am talking about abortion of course, arguably one of the most controversial medical procedures of our time. As I write, teenagers are taking up collections to travel across state lines to “terminate,” and twenty-something women are giving birth to babies they don’t want and can’t take care of because they think abortion is murder. Right this second, medical students are protesting the ban on teaching them how to perform abortions, and doctors are being stalked and murdered for making abortions available.

  In our country, the issue of abortion is used as a litmus test for personal morality and political loyalty, which makes writing about having one dangerous. It doesn’t matter that more than one million women have abortions every year, or that you would be hard-pressed to find a family or group of friends in which no one had gone through the ordeal. The moment you talk about abortion publicly, you run the risk of being attacked. Or your story being co-opted and pressed into service.

  A few months ago, I was doing research for an article. Amid the 679,000 entries that flashed across my screen, I came across my name in the blog of someone claiming to be a former class-mate. He cited a piece I wrote a decade ago on using an abortion as an opportunity to reflect on what life would be like if women were forced to bear children they didn’t want. In an attempt to provide a counterpoint to the emotional trauma of abortion, I posited a way to think about the choice as an empowering option that was the result of many years of political struggle.

  But the blogger didn’t see the piece in this context, and accused me of being “defiantly proud” of having had an abortion, and of “coming close to suggesting that it would be a good thing if all women had abortions.” Both of these statements, in my view, were gross misinterpretations, and yet I suppose they were also understandable extrapolations in light of the author’s point of view.

  Continuing my search, I began to think about approaching actions in terms of their result rather than their “truth.” The question was not whether the blogger’s statements were “true”—they were not to me but were very much so to him. The question was about the result of his statements. What is the effect of saying that I am proud of having had an abortion, and that I think it would be a good thing for all women to have one?

  I ask because when I think about conceiving a child at thirty-four, carrying and giving birth to another human being, I have to revisit the experience of conceiving and not carrying, conceiving and not giving birth to another human being. I have to revisit this because the two are inextricably linked. I have to preface the discussion because it would be easy to distort what I write here and use the distortion as another log on the out-of-control bonfire that is the abortion debate in America.

  That is not my intention.

  I had an abortion at fourteen, in a little medical office on Geary Street in San Francisco, in what was then called the French Medical Building. It was a foggy San Francisco day and I was wearing pink Flashdance-y leg warmers over the calves of my faded jeans. The procedure itself was uneventful. I remember a hideously long needle and then the pain of it piercing my cervix, followed by the whirring of a machine. I remember the doctor, a severe, quiet, older woman with small hands and gray hair. I remember the assistant telling me what was happening, step by step. I remember it being over much more quickly than I anticipated and feeling relief as I walked out of the building and felt the cool San Francisco air against my face.

  For years I thought very little about the experience. It was behind me, a choice I made to save my life, a choice I made because there was no other choice. At the time, I lived with my mother in a small apartment in a modest neighborhood. I had just finished the ninth grade. I was headed to a private school that held much promise. I loved my boyfriend, but I was a child, and so was he. Though my boyfriend would second-guess our decision twenty years later, at the time I did not. I added it to the list of experiences that made me who I was at the time: a young woman who had been through a lot. A young woman who was beginning to expect that life would be difficult, complicated, painful.

  It wasn’t until college that I began to think about the abortion, to reflect on it as a series of moments—the needle, the doctor, the subsequent blocking out of any emotion connected to the event—that lurked in the crevices of my mind, powerfully shaping my self-image. But in college, political necessities took center stage. I was more invested in fighting for the right of women to have abortions than I was in fighting for my right to wade through the aftermath of having my own.

  But there was an aftermath, and when I decided I wanted to have a baby, it came flying up at me in the form of a mocking, conspiratorial inner voice. This voice attacked my self-esteem. It challenged the idea that having a baby was something my body could actually do. It said awful things. Things like, The doctor sterilized you, remember? And, Your womb is too damaged now to conceive, let alone carry something as beautiful and important as a baby!

  I tried to ignore the voice, to shake it off, but where it had been barely audible before, when I started trying to get pregnant it turned ruthless. In the beginning, I battled it alone, and acknowledged it only when talking to gynecologists. I insi
sted they convince me I wasn’t broken, that having had an abortion did not lower my chance of a successful pregnancy. The doctors looked at me strangely when I pressed them for reassurance. I think it shocked them that I, a “modern woman,” would have such fears.

  But I did have those fears. Before I became pregnant, they came in the form of the face I sometimes saw in my mind’s eye: the Being that hovered. She was a she, with large, dark eyes and an easy laugh. She looked at me, not with anger or blame, but with a quiet sadness. We missed our time, her face said to me. I made it to you but you weren’t ready.

  I do not regret having the abortion. I regret being lonely and having sex so young, that the Pill was not foolproof, that the permissive culture around me did nothing to prepare me for its consequences. But the abortion itself I do not regret. It is only that I have had to learn to manage the aftermath. First to acknowledge that it exists, and then to reroute it when it appears, to re-lay the cables in my mind so that A no longer connects to E.

  Because ultimately, I could not hurl myself into the future and keep a death grip on the past at the same time. I had to wade through the muck, to wake up to the poisonous thoughts I hoarded like jewels. I found that there was a time and a place where I lost faith in my body’s ability to sustain new life. There was a time and a place where doubt and shame took the space where hope and confidence should be.

  This work of looking, grieving, and reframing didn’t take place in a therapist’s office, but with Glen, the man I chose to be the father of my child. I told him all of my fears and he held every one, countering what needed to be countered, persevering against all odds to prove me wrong. He told me about abortions he supported women through, and we spoke of the scars that sometimes never heal because the nonpartisan language of healing cannot blossom in a field of polemic.

  In these conversations, the mocking voice began to face the inevitability of its defeat. It was silent at first only for a few moments, but then for longer and longer periods until I was pregnant.

  The miraculous event shattered its credibility forever.

  August 7

  Talked with Trajal last night until I couldn’t talk anymore. He’s going to throw me a baby shower. So sweet. We talked about who should host it with him, where it should be, and how I have to get the registry together. I love the idea of lots of people I like and love welcoming my baby into the world.

  Our talking marathon reminded me of college. We used to stay up all night talking about race, gender, art, sexuality, and the latest Madonna video. All while writing papers with titles like “Isolation and Redemption in the Novels of Edith Wharton,” “Man as Totem in Abstract Expressionism,” and “Sign and Signifier in the Hip-Hop Nation.”

  Now we’re weighing the pros and cons of co-sleepers.

  Is this what it means to grow up? I feel exactly the same, just focused on different feelings, images, products, and a little more tired.

  I went online this morning and started dealing with the registry. Setting one up means I have to pick some stuff, and that means making decisions. I am especially bananas over the stroller question. Should I get the “travel system” with the car seat that pops between the stroller and the car? The Euro bathtub? The Happiest Baby on the Block video?

  I was online only for a couple of hours, but I am already feeling overwhelmed by the pregnancy industry. Those marketers just reach right in and get us first-time moms because we don’t have a clue what we’ll really need. I know that I feel so much anxiety about being ill prepared emotionally and psychologically that I’ll buy anything and everything to soothe my jangled first-timer nerves.

  On that front, I have embarked upon the massage aspect of my pregnancy. I found a great massage therapist who does this out-of-control prenatal thing with pillows and heating pads and sandalwood oil. I just lie there like a beached whale being slathered and rubbed and relieved of aches and pains I didn’t even know I had. It was heaven to surrender to the dimly lit room, Japanese flute music, and tiny dendrobiums in porcelain vases. Of course I had to ask him if he had kids. He said, Oh yes, and my wife insisted I massage her like this every day when she was pregnant.

  Lucky, lucky, woman.

  August 8

  Got a call today from the “genetic counselor”! She thinks that perhaps I have G-6-pd deficiency, a genetic blood disorder that makes all sulfa antibiotics practically lethal, along with random foods like fava beans. She said that may be why I had the reaction in the hospital. It may also explain why I got so sick many years ago in Egypt: I was eating fava beans every single day.

  Go figure. The woman I thought was Satan may have just given me my genetic key. If she’s right, knowing that I have this disorder could save my life.

  Also got an interesting request from a magazine to interview Arthur Miller. I said yes, but after thinking about it, I think I’d rather interview Rebecca, his daughter. I remain interested in the children who manage to emerge from the shadow of well-known parentage. So few make it. Then there’s the sobering truth that no matter what you go through, it’s like being the poor little rich kid: People just think you’re whining. No one wants to hear that adults who grew up in a rarefied world have serious issues. They just don’t. You’re supposed to shut up and take your last name to the bank.

  There ought to be a how-to book for parents in the public eye on how to raise sane, happy kids. I hope one day to be able to write it.

  August 9

  I have started to look at thin women with something akin to envy. I feel so huge, so invisible in my unfashionableness. This morning I caught myself clocking the straight-leg jeans of a woman in front of me, the pointy little shoes, the body-fitting top. I had never noticed how thin these put-together young women are. How thin I guess I used to be, how young and unaffected.

  Now I am awkward and wide, puffy where I used to be angular. At my last appointment with Dr. Lowen, I weighed 165 pounds. That’s thirty-five pounds gained, and I’m only in the fifth month. When the nurse’s eyes widened, I said, Hey, what can I say, he’s healthy and robust, remember? He likes to eat.

  But it’s more than the weight gain, it’s the sense of not being able to turn back. I won’t ever be as young as that young woman again. I may be that thin, though I can’t quite imagine it, but I will never again be that pristine, totally willful young woman. This descent into powerlessness, and being at the whim of a force so much stronger than me, has changed me forever.

  I always thought I would appreciate not being the object of penetrating stares and appraisals, but somehow I don’t exactly. In our culture, sexuality is always the subtext, and it feels strange to be excluded from the conversation.

  August 10

  Have I documented how much this child inside of me likes salad? Oh my God! I could eat ten huge bowls a day and it wouldn’t be enough. He also likes black-cherry soda and huge beef hot dogs with sauerkraut and mustard that give me the most wicked heartburn.

  Glen introduced me to Tums last night at one a.m., when I couldn’t take it anymore and begged him to make it stop. I thought my esophagus was going to catch fire. Yet another gift from the little one: heartburn. I wake up in the middle of the night burping and gulping for air.

  Attractive.

  August 13

  I have officially entered into the heated immunization debate. My friend Chaya told me today that she believes that kids are “altered” after being vaccinated, and that I should do everything in my power to prevent the baby from getting his shots for at least the first year. She says before that, their immune systems are weakened because they haven’t had enough time to develop, and this creates all kinds of problems. Their emotional affect is often dampened, and, according to her, there is even a correlation between the vaccines and ADD.

  I intuitively agree that shooting a newborn up with a huge dose of a deadly disease (or five or six) seems a bit demented, and yet there are millions of people who have been immunized and are just fine. Heck, I was immunized. But still, I’d
prefer not to give him a shot of any kind at birth and for at least six months to a year after. And I don’t really see the need to give him a vaccine for a disease that’s been eradicated.

  There was just enough of the religious in Chaya’s voice to give me pause, however. When she gave me the name of a friend of hers who has researched the subject exhaustively, I put it in my book with all the other cards with people’s names that I’ve been given over the last five months. When I got home I started looking for guidance from what Glen calls my other husband, the Internet.

  I was a bit shocked to find this statement from Dr. Jane Orient of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons:

  Measles, mumps, rubella, hepatitis B, and a whole panoply of childhood diseases are a far less serious threat than having a fraction (say 10%) of a generation afflicted with learning disability and/or uncontrollable aggressive behavior because of an impassioned crusade for universal vaccination.

  On the other hand, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia posted this on its site:

  Vaccines are considered the best way to protect your child against diseases that could cause liver damage, liver cancer, suffocation, meningitis, pneumonia, paralysis, lockjaw, seizures, brain damage, deafness, blindness, mental retardation, learning disabilities, birth defects, encephalitis or death.

  Vaccines are considered by some to be a civic duty because they create “herd immunity.” This means that when most of the people in a community are immunized, there is less opportunity for a disease to enter the community and make people sick. Because there are members of our society that are too young, too weak, or otherwise unable to receive vaccines for medical reasons, they rely on “herd immunity” to keep them well.