Baby Love (12 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

When I talked to Glen about it, we came up with the scenario of our great-great-grandkids’ deciding against vaccinating their kids against cancer because they hadn’t experienced people dying from the disease, and couldn’t imagine that there could be a resurgence.

We talked about the risk of driving cars, flying in airplanes, swimming in the ocean. If there was a vaccine developed for HIV or cancer, would we get it, knowing there was a one-in-a-million risk of something going wrong? Probably. We talked about how much we travel. Just a few months before I got pregnant, we flew halfway around the world and passed through six different airports. Even if a disease was eradicated in our country, with so much international exposure, wouldn’t it be irresponsible to leave our child vulnerable to contracting it in another country?

But what if our son died at two and a half, after a hepatitis B shot? Or of sudden infant death syndrome the night after being vaccinated? Or developed a learning disability that was later linked to a vaccine?

We talked for hours and at the end of it, I was practically in tears. The magnitude of the decisions, my God, does it ever stop?

Picked my father up from the airport this afternoon and convinced him to rent a huge SUV to help me bring some things up to the house in Mendocino.

It hit me on the line at Hertz: I am almost thirty-five years old and my father is still helping me move my stuff. I remembered the long drive to New Haven on the first day of college. The car was overflowing with clothes and posters and bedding. At the end of the year, he picked me up from an old, funky house I had moved into, fleeing the dorms. I had thrown everything I owned into black garbage bags that he dutifully slung into the back of the Volvo. I thought of him doing the same for my brother and sister, and how endless it must have seemed to him all those years.

Parenting. Again, I have to wonder, does it ever stop?

He told me that I look good, but tired. He said he wanted to come out to support me because he’s been worried and knows how difficult my pregnancy has been. I started to cry. It
has
been hard. My tendency is to think about how much worse other people have it, but the truth is, none of this has been easy.

A whole gang of us went out tonight to do a reading at Borders from
What Makes a Man.
The essayists who read were funny and moving. I did what I seem to do best these days: beamed and rubbed my big belly.

My father’s presence is stirring up old feelings. When I lived in California as a young person, he came to visit only once, when I graduated from high school. I flubbed my valedictorian speech because I was so nervous about my parents being in the same space, breathing the same air. Having him here makes me realize how much I longed for him. We were so close and then suddenly, when my parents moved to opposite ends of the country after their divorce, we were far, and I felt disconnected and lost.

Having him here, playing the father role, feels good and right, archetypally correct. He picked me up today, and we went for a walk around the lake in Tilden Park. On the way home, we stopped at the supermarket for preparatory diapers and baby food. He insisted on paying here, in California, the way he always does there, in New York, which made me smile. I don’t know if I can describe it, really. But to see him in the grocery store that I go to every few days, looking at the same checkout people under the same fluorescent lights made me feel more integrated, like my life is finally becoming seamless rather than patched together.

It seems right that the baby is the catalyst for this healing. So far he’s been the catalyst for so much that is good in my life. Becoming more patient and less argumentative, learning to be a more accepting partner, even eating more salad!

 

 

 

I am huge. Just fucking ginormous. Whose body is this, anyway? How big can I actually get? Most days I feel like a sensual Amazon of fertility, but sometimes I am just not up to lugging it all around. Part of it is that my counts are still so low. The anemia is making normal activities downright Herculean. This morning it was all I could do to wash a load of clothes, scramble some eggs, and answer a few e-mails. Then I had to take a nap.

My father picked me up in the afternoon in the big boat of a car that he hates driving, but which I love being driven in. It’s my size. We went to see
The Manchurian Candidate,
which was a fascinating look at contemporary masculinity. It was a good example of how mothers often participate in the making of a self-sacrificing, money-and-power-at-all-costs, man-a-tron. They shape the boy into a version of the powerful figure they wish they could be; they shape the boy into a version of the husband they wish they had; they shape the boy into someone who is, in ways barely perceptible to the untrained eye, utterly under their control.

I don’t want to be like that.

My father and I had a long talk today about my determination to be happy. The truth is that I am happier now than I have ever been, and I am amazed by how much that has to do with falling in love with this baby inside of me.

As a child of divorce, it has been hard for me to grasp the concept of a functional family dynamic. What does it look like? How does it make you feel? I’m so used to equating family with conflict and psychological wounding, unbridled jealousy and simmering rage, that I’ve been unknowingly re-creating it in every major relationship I’ve had.