Baby Love (18 page)

What if it is true that when you believe in abundance, what you have multiplies magically?

Tomorrow is D-day and I don’t feel any different than I have felt for the last couple of weeks: huge, heavy, and hungry. I thought I would have a premonition, or a sense of imminent arrival, but I just feel like, la-di-da, I am a pregnant woman waiting for my baby, who may or may not arrive at any moment.

In the meantime, I continue to prepare. I called the hospital today and pre-registered. I washed, folded, and put away all of the baby clothes, including six receiving blankets, twenty white onesies, three of the cutest little shirts with giraffes and monkeys on them, two little cotton hats, and a rainbow of the teeniest socks.

In packing the bag for the hospital I realized I haven’t handled the nursing-bra situation, so Glen and I went to the mall and let the very nice saleswoman sell us a few. I even got one to wear at night while I sleep, which I cannot imagine doing, but the saleswoman was so certain I will need it that I couldn’t leave it behind.

When we got home, I continued packing, and watched
The King of Queens
as I worked. Carrie finds out she is pregnant and is terrified they don’t have enough money or maturity to have a baby. Doug gets really excited and vows to carry the financial burden by taking a second job. Carrie shops for baby furniture, and encounters a salesperson who convinces her that she absolutely needs, must have, a seven-hundred-dollar changing table with a safety lip. Doug takes a job driving a limo and gets as his first passenger the owner of CBS, who he thinks is the owner of CVS, the pharmacy. He passes out at the gynecologist’s office because Carrie’s no longer his sexy wife Carrie, she’s more like the model of the impregnated uterus. They talk, convince each other it’s going to be great. Doug buys a receiving blanket and comes home to find Carrie in the would-be baby’s room, depressed. She lost the baby.

Even though I knew it was going to happen because I’ve seen the whole next two seasons and they don’t have a baby, I was still hit pretty hard. Glen came in to find me on the edge of the bed, crying. Again.

If something happens to this baby I don’t think I will make it. No, really. I don’t.

No sign of
el muchacho.
Sonam came over to check me. When she walked in she said, You look like a mother today. And I grinned, because today I feel like a mother. I don’t know when or how it happened, but I definitely have crossed over into mommy-hood.

We talked about inducing. Whether we should, when we should, how we should. I don’t want to rush him. I feel confident that he’ll be right on time. On the other hand, I don’t want to wait so long that it creates a problem. We came up with a plan: If he doesn’t come by the twenty-second, we’ll induce. He’ll be a week late, which is still in the realm of healthy. In the meantime, Sonam gave me a list of natural ways to induce, including sex, crying, and eating black licorice. I pinned it on the wall next to all the other lists I’ve made in the last eight months: Iron-rich Foods, Things For the Hospital, Five Best Things Your Partner Can Tell You When You’re Pregnant.

Sonam also said that I must get more sleep. It’s hard, though, because the baby wakes up at night and I’m right there with him. His body isn’t moving, but I can feel his mind. He’s waiting, listening, being.

I assembled the co-sleeper today. And then I stared at it for an hour, unable to imagine what it will feel like to have a real, live baby lying next to me at night.

I can see him now, not the details, but the blur of his face. And we’ve been talking to each other. Ready? Ready. Ready? Ready.

Today I caught myself singing to him. At first it was “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” and then it was both of the Color War alma maters that I can remember from summer camp, and then, I am embarrassed to even write this: “Kumbaya.” But I sang that one only because I couldn’t think of any other songs besides “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Isn’t She Lovely,” and “Let’s Stay Together.”

How is it possible that I don’t know any lullabies? My father’s friend George gave me ten CDs of lullabies from all over the world. Obviously, every other woman on the planet has lullabies welling up naturally from the depths of her soul. Why don’t I have a whole repertoire, in multiple languages? When I asked Glen he said, I don’t recall the baby asking you to sing him a medley of lullabies from around the world.

Which is true, and made me laugh.

People have been calling every day now that I am past the due date. Is he here? How are you doing? Sweet to feel them in the space with me: waiting, waiting, waiting.

I MET GLEN at a meditation retreat. I was tearing through a plate of organic greens and tofu lasagna in the dining room of the retreat center when I turned my head slightly and caught sight of him. He was three empty chairs away, and wore the burgundy robes of a Buddhist tradition I didn’t recognize. He had a full beard, large hands, and soft brown eyes.

Ordinarily I would have turned away, but because we were up in the mountains with only each other and sixty or so others for company, I did not. I smiled when our eyes met and paused, taking him in. He too was quiet, not rushing to fill the space. Then in the least intrusive but most penetrating voice I’ve ever heard, he said hello. I gave a slight bow. Hello. And then we didn’t speak for the rest of the meal.

I saw him next the following morning, at the early teaching. I was groggy from lack of sleep, but I noticed Glen right away when I walked into the meditation hall. He was sitting off to the side, looking at and seemingly through the entire group of assembled students. He was purposefully threading a thick, rose-colored
mala
through his fingers. He was so still he was practically invisible.

That morning, I listened respectfully to the teaching, but really I was already attuned to Glen, and found myself glancing over at him several times during the two-hour session. When it was finally his turn to teach, I felt a curious mixture of excitement and readiness. This is a cliché, but when he began to speak, I really did feel as though he was speaking only to me. When he sang a
doha,
an ancient song calling all beings to enlightenment, I wept.

A year later we sat in a Japanese restaurant. We had not been out of contact for more than a day since the afternoon in the dining room. As is customary in the teacher-student relationship in the Vajrayana tradition, Glen had committed himself to transmitting to me some of the most esoteric of Buddhist teachings, and I had committed to deepening my devotion to him in order to receive them. As is customary in the romantic tradition of modernity, as my lover Glen had committed himself to making me happy and I had almost committed to letting him.

I was open but a bit unsure. I had heard horrible stories about teachers and students who became involved. There were messy, public lawsuits, and whole websites devoted to documenting incidents of “sexual misconduct.” Family members expressed concern. I listened, but ultimately had to acknowledge that in the midst of so much doubt, no one could deny that I was happier than I had ever been. In one year, I had healed relationships that had been broken for decades, and jettisoned relationships that had no possibility of coming around. My work was more satisfying. I fired my therapist. I smiled more in one day after meeting Glen than I had in a whole year before.

And he wanted to have a baby.

I had told him shortly after our meeting just like I had told everybody else:
I want to have a baby.
But unlike everyone else, he responded decisively. Of course you want to have a baby, he said, and you should. There are things you learn when you have a baby that you cannot learn any other way. You find out what life is about when you carry another human being in your womb. You find out what really matters when you straddle life and death to push your child through the birth canal.

I told him about my list of potential daddy donors, about Ade. I told him about the abortion I had when I was fourteen and my fear that I would not be able to conceive. I told him about Solomon. We talked about the years I had spent running from potential mates and devoting my life to people completely unsuited.

We talked for hours every day, and it was as if the years slid off me with each conversation. Self-concepts were reevaluated. The constant loop of self-deprecation that had been running in my head for decades grew less and less audible. When Glen wondered why I didn’t listen more attentively to my ten-year longing, I asked myself the same question. What would it mean for me to have a baby? What would the experience reveal? Why did I crave it so profoundly? After several months, I began to wake up in the morning believing that having a child was not only possible, but necessary.

One day in my icebox of a writing studio by the sea, I told Glen of a dream I had been having for several years. There was a little boy, sleeping in a cave, and there was an angry woman, stabbing at my heart. The boy was waiting patiently for me to come, and the woman was trying to prevent me from getting there.

Glen stood in front of a huge panel of my printed pages thumbtacked to the wall in a neat row of white rectangles, nodding as I described the colors in the dream, the sound of the knife slicing through the air. When he finally did say something, he didn’t so much decipher the dream as join me in the labyrinth of it.

He wondered if my happiness was dangling in the space between the boy and the woman trying to keep me from him. Who was she and how could I get past her? Who was he? On reflection, it occurred to me that this boy curled up in the invisible space around my body could be
my
boy. He slept peacefully, patiently, as if he knew for certain that I would come. As if he knew that I would slay the dragon and vanquish the enemy, that the fight would end and we, he and I, would win.

This little boy knew what I was only just beginning to suspect. That with Glen I was healing something that had been broken for a very long time: my ability to trust, my right to dream. I was repairing my broken faith, but it was still far from restored. Which is why I laughed nervously into my tempura udon when Glen told me that I had found the father of my child and could stop looking.

I was thirty-three. I had been considering having a baby for more than ten years. I had finally met someone who was willing and able to give me the partnership I craved, and I was scared to death. Scared of closing an unseen, imaginary door by walking through the very real, open one in front of me. Terrified of following a vision that had beckoned for more than a decade.

Could I even take care of a child? When I looked back, there were so many broken relationships, stories that started out shiny and happy just like this one. But now there would be a vulnerable child in the balance.

As if reading my mind, Glen suggested that the healing would come through my not doing to my child what was done to me. Not succumbing to divorce. Not forcing my child to adapt to wildly divergent circumstances to suit my lifestyle. Not arguing. Not making him hold the unresolved issues of the generations that preceded him. Not forcing him to choose which parent to believe, to trust, to become.

If I could do this on behalf of my actual child and the neglected child inside of myself, the demon would have no choice but to put down her knife. My child would awaken and live. I would know how to protect myself. The cutter, the mutilator, would not be allowed inside.

I knew Glen was right, but I was also frightened of making a conscious decision, a reasoned choice. I had lived my life tumbling headlong into scenarios, captivated by ideas like fate and romantic love. What did it mean to decide, after extensive evaluation and discussion, to move forward together, instead of waking up one morning to realize that yet another boundary had been crossed and I was now deeper into a relationship that I really did not fully understand?

I loved Glen deeply. But because I was with him engaged in the project of giving up drama forever, our relationship was disturbingly stable, calm, rational. When I told my father about Glen, he said that our relationship sounded good but that something was missing. We were walking arm in arm around the lake in Central Park. It’s clear that you love this person, he said, stopping by one of the benches. But Rebecca, tell me, are you in love with him?

At the time, I brushed it off. In love? I’ve been in love, and where has that gotten me? We laughed, but my mind seized on the question as we navigated the throngs on Fifth Avenue. I’ve met a man who has brought me more happiness than I imagined possible, who has offered to give me the one experience I’ve craved my whole life, who has stood by my side through depths of despair so profound I was afraid to mention them for fear of shattering your faith in yourself as a parent, and you ask if I am in love with him?

Loving, being in love. The whole idea of a difference between the two suddenly struck me as preposterous. And yet, if I wasn’t intoxicated, swept off my feet, was I settling? Was I like other women who had reached a certain age—in my case, thirty-three—and found themselves in need of a certain sperm donor daddy type? Was Glen just a prudent and convenient choice?

This was the voice of the woman with the machete. Always slashing to bits whatever piece of happiness I managed to find. Was she my mother? This was the voice of my father’s pervasive ambivalence, transmitted from one generation to the next through innocent conversations like the one in the park.

I slurped my noodles.

I put the woman’s own knife to her neck and bade her farewell.

I leapt with certainty into the void.

Nine months later, I was pregnant.

 

 

LIKE ALL COUPLES, Glen and I have gone over that first hello a thousand times. We’ve marveled at how, of all the people present, we ended up next to each other, with empty seats and not obscuring human bodies in between. We’ve excavated the back story: Glen hadn’t planned to go to lunch at all that day, but changed his mind and turned into the dining room instead. I hadn’t planned to go to the retreat at all, but changed my mind and drove myself the seventy-five miles from the city.