Baby Love (8 page)

In a country, a world, as rich as ours, this is unacceptable. Reflecting on what this process has meant to me already, in terms of experiencing what it means to be human, I can’t help but feel that having children should be a right, not a privilege.

I met with my midwife Sonam again today. She tested my urine by having me pee on a stick that changed colors, took my temperature, measured my uterus, and listened to the baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler, talking to me about baby stuff the whole time. She suggested I start doing prenatal yoga, gave me the names of a couple of teachers she likes, and told me to eat wild salmon and leafy greens. I told her that all I want to do is wander from room to room, have sex, eat, and sleep, and she laughed. That’s okay, she said, but remember, labor is a marathon: You have to train. Shoot. You mean I can’t just lounge around my boudoir for nine months?

We talked a little business, like what I think about the hospital where she has privileges being public and twenty to thirty minutes away. When I asked what she meant, exactly, by the public part, she said that the hospital is well equipped and has a great neonatal intensive care unit, but serves a very different population than the hospital I usually go to.

She said it’s not one-thousand-percent spotless, either. It’s an older building and hasn’t been renovated. For the most part, the nurses are excellent and she loves her supervising doctor, but the best thing about the place is that she has full privileges there, which means she would be in charge of the birth unless something goes wrong.

What can I say? I wish the public and private hospitals weren’t so different. I wish I didn’t have to negotiate race and class just to have my baby. I’m going to visit and see how it feels, but I’m pretty sure I’d rather have Sonam deliver this baby in a lean-to than risk having an unnecessary C-section in some spotless shrine to the medical establishment.

At least I think I would.

Today I met June for lunch. We talked about our new creations: hers, a new publishing venture; mine, the little one growing in my belly. She told me she long ago decided not to have children. She said that several of her friends had children because they thought they should, only to realize too late that they didn’t make the decision consciously. Where are they with it now? I wanted to know. They’ve got kids they don’t want, she said, shaking her head.

Yikes.

When I asked more about her decision, she said she didn’t feel emotionally able to take care of herself, let alone a defenseless child. Her body was too weak, having weathered a few major illnesses, and her energy too elusive. Her husband wanted kids, but when she asked if it was him or the culture that wanted them he conceded it was the culture. Then she brought her sister’s kids home to prove her point. The kids exhausted both her and her husband.

I tried not to get judgmental about her choice. I tried to minimize the whole baby thing and just talk about work stuff, creative stuff, and the machinations of the publishing world. I tried not to gush about how long I have wanted a baby, and how miraculous it is to have another human being growing inside of me.

But it was damn near impossible.

Am I turning into a baby supremacist? One of those people who thinks a woman without a baby is like a fish without an ocean? Who thinks a woman without a baby may be stuck developmentally just shy of true adulthood forever? As June talked about her new office and staff, I thought about how much she’s missing and how appalling it is that I can’t tell her because the whole thing is so unbelievably primal and indescribable. I thought about how hooked human beings can get on external accomplishment, but how at the moment, the most dramatic and exciting changes of my life are happening inside and I have no desire to go back.

I know I’m setting myself up for some serious refutation, and it’s all valid. My thoughts aren’t rational. They’re hormonal, irrational, psychopharmacological.

And so incredibly real.

IT’S NOT THE SAME. No matter how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your nonbiological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood.

It’s different.

I met Solomon when he was seven and I was twenty-six. It was a sunny Los Angeles afternoon, and his mom, whom I had been dating for several weeks, was taking us to the beach. Solomon was wearing blue pants and carried three small action figures. He was quiet and cautious, with intermittent bursts of chattiness. His parents were in the middle of a nasty divorce, and he reminded me of myself at his age, trying to figure out who to be after my parents sat me down and told me their marriage was over.

Within hours of meeting Solomon, I had projected a lifetime of alienation onto him, ascribing to him all the pain and confusion I felt after my parents ended their marriage. Within weeks I had fallen for him. I loved the way he took my hand when we were out in the city. The way he asked deep and seemingly bizarre questions like, When people die, do they remember who they’ve been? I loved that he thought he remembered being in his mother’s womb and described it as warm, red, and mushy.

Before I even remotely knew whether a relationship with his mother was something I wanted, I dove into Solomon’s life and began trying to create the positive post-divorce family I never had. Without thinking it through. Because I thought he needed me. Because I knew my inner seven-year-old needed me. And I had to save her. By saving him.

And so it began. The trips to the orthodontist and ophthalmologist, the monthly talks about schoolwork and conduct with the teachers of third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and then, finally, ninth grades. We had the obligatory struggles over homework, diet, and violent video games. I suffered the endless negotiation of the politics, socioeconomic and otherwise, of play dates. I hired helpers, bought and read books on teen sexuality, coalesced and counseled members of the extended family.

I did so much that friends wondered if I wasn’t doing too much. I wasn’t his
actual
mother, after all. And wasn’t it true that if I did too much, I would enable her to do too little? What would happen if his mother and I should break up? Shouldn’t I legally adopt him to protect my investment in our relationship? I understood their concerns, but my inner seven-year-old was undaunted. She wanted—no,
needed—
me to keep going.

I wasn’t just reparenting myself, though. I was securing my position in the relationship. Love me, love my kid. That’s what single parents say to potential lovers, partners, and spouses. Even when they don’t utter the words, it’s a running subtext. And don’t we potential stepparents respond, if we believe we can make a genuine go of it, with our own subtext? We make dinner for three and watch
Princess Mononoke.
To the exciting new adult in our life we say: Your child is my child. To the adorable child before us we say: I think of you as my own. When we are in deep, and can see that the well-being of another human being is at stake and his ability to trust us
actually matters,
we look straight into his eyes and say: No matter what, I will never leave you.

At least that’s what I said. It didn’t occur to me that some people would predict a messy endgame and keep their distance. These people would have gone down the “Your child is my child” road with other lovers and friends, only to devastate some unsuspecting kid and get wiped out in the process. But I hadn’t yet lost a child, and so I said all of the things I said because I meant them, and because I did not see a way to proceed in the relationship without meaning them. I said them because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I said them because I was in love and didn’t yet know how to think with any organ other than the one in my chest.

In the end I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t save me and I couldn’t save him and I couldn’t save her and I couldn’t save us. It was an untenable situation and none of us had the skills to make it otherwise. The only thing I can say on our behalf is that we were in our twenties and early thirties and the relationship epitomized our developmental limitations. It was passionate and histrionic, fun and tragic, romantic and stupid.

Being young and coming from families that didn’t stay together, we thought if we just loved long and hard enough we could destroy everything a thousand times and put it back together a thousand times, and then one day everything would fall into place. We thought it was like taking the train from the city to the beach. Concrete, traffic, pollution, and then a little less concrete and then a little less traffic and then a little less pollution and then voilà: the vast, undulating blue-green sea.

That was how I tried to hold my first child. As if one day all the arguing and moving about would be over and we would look at each other with the knowledge of all that came before and a deep appreciation for the peace we managed to create. After my separation from his mother, I still hold him that way. As if the cloudy day will pass. As if the distance and lost time will be eclipsed by a newfound togetherness. And it may. But it also may not, and there is very little I can do about it.

Already, months before his birth, I do not hold my second child this way. For starters, I no longer believe in the redemptive power of the calm after the storm. The wreckage on the shore does not disappear because the winds have moved on. When I think of my baby’s soon-to-be-born face, full of wonder and unmarred by proximity to rage, I register the value of circumnavigating the storm, of moving inland where it is safe. Even though in the moment it may be more difficult, I now prefer to face the challenge rather than be left with the heartbreaking reality of irreparable damage.

There is also the simple fact that my second child can never be taken from me. We are bound through space and time in the beginningless beginning, that place of infinite mystery. We have met there, on that ground, in a meeting impossible to erase. Even when we are far from each other, we will each possess a fragment of that encounter, buried in the loamy dirt we call our separate selves. I am no longer inexperienced enough to diminish this connection.

There are other things. My stepmother told me a few days ago, again, that she feels I am one of her children, that she raised me as her own. I love her, and yes, in some ways I am one of her children, but in some ways I am not. It may be difficult to ascertain exactly where the line is between the two, but it is beyond question that the line exists. I can decide to care for my stepmother, for instance, but feeling something for my mother, no matter the state of our relationship, is not something about which I have a choice.

I find myself nodding as I read about a study that finds that children living with a stepmother receive a good deal less food, health care, and education than they would if they lived with their biological mother. We’re not proud of the way we often preference our biological children, but if we ever want to close the gap, I do think it is something we need to be honest about. I left the conversation with my stepmother thinking, Yes, I would do anything for my first son, within reason. But I would do anything at all for my second child, without reason, without a doubt.

What does that mean for Solomon and me? Is our relationship stained by my confession that our bond isn’t the same as the one I have with my biological child? Is it damaged if I say out loud that I love him differently?

I hope not. Solomon will always be my first child. He will forever be the one who inspired me to give endlessly and love selflessly, who showed me that I could become a parent after all. We, too, have a mysterious connection. We appeared in each other’s lives when we needed each other the most.

In some ways I saved Solomon’s life, and in some ways he saved mine. Without him, my first child, my second child may never have been conceived.

Jesus.

All I can say is thank goodness I am taking the extra dose of meds. Two days ago I checked my e-mail to find a note from my mother threatening to send an attached statement to the editors of
Salon.com
in response to an interview I did a couple of weeks ago.

In a nutshell, she took offense to a section of my 2001 memoir,
Black, White, and Jewish,
that the interviewer reprinted, in which I wrote that my parents didn’t protect or look out for me, but fed, watered, and encouraged me to grow. In the statement, she called me a liar, a thief (because when I was eight years old I took quarters from her purse during my parents’ divorce), and a few other completely discrediting unmentionables. After posting back that unless she wanted out-and-out war, she should rethink her decision to send the letter, I went over to her house to find out what the hell was going on.

Never have I been so frightened by my own mother. She sat me down and called me, in addition to a liar and a thief, “someone who thinks she is a good person but really isn’t.” She told me that because I wasn’t from the South and didn’t have the full memory of slavery (read: I am half white), that I don’t know what it feels like to be sold down the river, but that’s how she felt after reading my book.

For the twenty-five-thousandth time, I apologized for telling my truth in a way that hurt her, and told her that I tried to protect her the best way I knew how. Then I asked whether she thought it was a little strange that I wrote about my struggle in an attempt to get her to take care of me, but here we were talking about how I should be taking care of her. Again.

She grew quite vicious. I told her repeatedly that I didn’t think that what she was saying was very maternal. After two hours trying to convince her of the merits of my existence, I left the house shaking.