The insertion of my daughter’s feeding tube was sold as a simple procedure- up the nose and down the throat, swallow, swallow, swallow, the nurse explained. Like threading a piece of spaghetti through your face!
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I glanced at my cell and saw a confusing text from Dad: Does Shoshana know? We have to tell her. My gut seized. Something was wrong. My parents split when I was an infant but kept in touch, long after I grew estranged from my mother and extended family. Dad occasionally provided updates on their recent calamities. Surely, this was one of them. I called him. Nothing. C'mon. I called again and this time he picked up. No hellos.
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I expected to like being a mother.
I expected to be good at being a mother.
I expected to raise children who would appreciate that I wasn’t an embarrassment, not obese or out of style, or driving an old beat up Buick.
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Before Thomas was born, I’d had two miscarriages. Both early according to the calendar, but both late enough to fill me with a deep, empty sorrow. When my first pregnancy had been confirmed, I felt euphoric. I had a miracle within me, a new soul the world had never known. And then it was suddenly gone, fading away in pools of blood until nothing of the wonder was left at all.
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The moment my son was placed in my arms, his 8 pounds, 6 ounces, and 21 inches of new life pressed into me—it was not just his weight but the pressure of my past and the gravity of the future colliding together in the sterile room filled with a faintly metallic smell clinging to the air, but beneath it, there was the unmistakable scent of newborn skin, sweet and raw, untouched by the world.
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On the first day of preschool, my son gripped my hand. He peered into the classroom, his eyes wide. “Go ahead,” I said, squeezing my fingers out of his and nudging him forward. The teacher approached and crouched to his level, saying his name with a smile.
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“Now I lay me down to sleep…” she said. I repeated her words, each consonant round in my four-year-old mouth, my high-pitched whisper barely audible as I mirrored my grandmother. I remember feeling that each utterance had weight, like what she was teaching me was important even if I was unsure of the words meaning. For me, it was nap time, and this ritual was part of the routine. After we finished our prayer lesson, my grandmother tucked me into the bed and as my eyes slowly closed, I gazed around at the small haven where I rested.
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The Sister hunkered down in my little brother’s sled, gathering her habit around her, the rubber soles of her nurses’ shoes squeaking against the plastic. She and the older Sister beside her were not dressed for the January cold, unlike my two siblings and me, cocooned in snow pants, puffy coats, mittens, and stocking hats.
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Busted.
We’d just finished brushing our teeth in Todd’s bathroom when he caught me in the mirror. Caught me sneering at the empty Yoo-hoo bottle near the sink, its cheerful yellow label a taunt.
“You don't like anything I like,” he accused me with his toothbrush. “Football. Battlestar Galactica. Yoo-hoo.”
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I don’t think Jordan started out with a battle plan. But, by the time we lived together, their troops were in action in a war I didn’t even know had been declared. I didn’t have time to grab a white handkerchief, or a tissue, or my Abercrombie & Fitch tank top tinged by age. I’m sure the red flags were all there in hindsight, but I try not to assign blame to myself for not seeing the signs—for not noticing that slowly, the person I once loved was abusing me. They attacked in a three-step plan, systematically stripping away the fundamental trust I had in myself I had clawed myself into having.
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The majority of my childhood family backpacking trips occurred in New England. My father’s deep love of the wilderness initiated these excursions, but the whole family came to love how trees and natural waterways calmed us. Making such a journey with four small children was a tall order. In exchange for the extra effort involved for such trips—my mom was already working her ass off at home—my parents negotiated for my dad to be in charge of planning, packing, and cooking. Summer after summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we set forth: to the Catskills, the White Mountains, and the Adirondacks—my dad’s pack piled higher than the top of his head and my mom’s not much shorter. If there were any tension around these trips, my parents kept it to themselves, and naturally I was eager to make similar forays once I reached adulthood myself.
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Would you feel differently about me if I wanted to have children?
His pause told me everything; before he could parse out, I think so? I knew. It was more telling than the way he’d wheezed, I'm excited to see you too, dread of my visit dripping from his voice. In less than a week, I was supposed to fly out for a long weekend together. We’d been dating long distance for six months and everything seemed to be going well. He mentioned via text the previous night that he’d call to explain his ‘situation’ in the morning. I’d understood his situation as ‘needing a ride to the dentist’ while I was in town; he’d just received the bad luck news of an impending root canal. I didn’t anticipate his ‘situation’ would entail phrases such as my love has plateaued and I just need to rip off the Band-Aid.
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On my study’s display shelf devoted to cherished objects stands a miniature porcelain Dutch clog from Delft. HOLLAND it proclaims above a hand-painted image of a windmill and house by a river, small waves brought to life by slashes of cobalt glaze applied by a skilled hand.
At first, I wonder if this is a memento from a trip to the Netherlands, homeland of my maternal grandfather. My cousin sends me photographs of other Delft blue and white porcelain brought from Zeeland by our great-grandmother and given to her mother, my aunt: a set of two canisters, a platter, a dairymaid statuette. I fantasize that this clog creates a connection between me and relatives I’ve never met. I want this heirloom to show me how I belong to this family, and it does, but not in the way I expect.
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While my oldest daughter was growing up we attended Little People of America functions, though only one person in our family was short. We went to city and regional gatherings in Portland and Seattle, and made a vacation of the annual convention.
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At this low altitude, there’s still phone reception. With an awkward lurch, the Cessna plane, scarcely bigger than my 2008 Toyota, begins a wild dance in the enveloping tropical fog. Gripping my phone tight, I concentrate on my text exchange. I must distract myself from what I cannot control.
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The afternoon following your miscarriage, you’ll resent the book on your nightstand. You lie in bed in your colonial-style house on the Chesapeake, the bay windows opening to the wide expanse of water. The vastness always evoked a sense of possibility, but you don’t see that now. You only see broken promises.
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There’s a moment sometimes when you’re trying to make a choice, the safe choice, you think, the right choice. But what you do instead is somehow put yourself—and your sleeping baby—in some crazy, unlikely danger. You don’t even realize this until the danger is upon you, sneaking up on fleet little feet and then announcing its presence. After, you think, if you can still think about it, “But it was so obvious. How did I not see that coming?”
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I knew I wasn’t a woman the first time I decided to try my vibrator a little bit farther back. Imagine my surprise, as at the time, I was four months pregnant.
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What was her name? I remembered her face. Clear blue eyes, blond hair cropped above her shoulders, that toothy smile. I couldn’t help but return that smile. Sitting at my computer, I tried all the keywords I could think of but could find only her supervisor who worked in the same museum, the man who had joined us on that expedition south. Her name was gone. Only the image of that broad smile remained in my mind.
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I walk into a bar to meet some friends and you’re sitting at a table with some work colleagues. You see me before I spot you, but when I do, the spark of recognition warms me to my core. You rise like the sun and walk toward me, your blue eyes scanning my face. “Darlin,” you whisper, “it’s so good to see you.” We embrace, holding on a beat longer than a casual hug. After we separate, we stay close enough to kiss, but we don’t, we can’t. Kissing is outside the boundary you set years ago, in another bar, on another night.
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