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I used to think I had a lot
Of tiny murders on my hands
When I recalled the ease
With which I banished parts of me
That saw the pain too clear
But left no clue of what to do
To find a healing place.
I threw them overboard, the way
The sailors did in Jonah’s time,
To cast apart whatever drew the storms
That lashed my heart, and leave it,
If not warm, then unperturbed.
And so I stayed for years, while wondering
Why the world had come to seem so flat
And if the weather really had abated,
How could I make sure of that?
Once Nancy brought her isobars, I knew
If I could ride her gales and tow’ring seas,
My sails had nought to fear from inside me.
And once the tempests passed,
I saw survivors near my craft,
Some the very ones I’d jettisoned those years ago.
Since then, I’ve been engaged
In rescuing. No question but
They’re well and truly waterlogged
From decades’ pickling,
And yet, they breathe.
And since I’ve set myself to serve their case,
I’ve found, not just a hint
Of other voices, accented differently,
But how they bound from other memory,
Unknown annexes to my soul.
So that now this tiny murderer
Is on parole.
The test came back. It was abnormal. The baby had been flagged for Downs Syndrome.
I waited on the other end of the phone line. Breathing shallowly.
We hadn’t even planned on doing testing at all, but when my midwife drew a sample for anemia she mentioned this easy blood test. Very common. And wouldn’t I like to go ahead and do that too? It was covered.
“Sure,” I said with the casual tone I use when offered a free sample of cheese.
And now I suddenly felt very uncommon. It hadn’t occurred to me that my test wouldn’t come back normal. What-ifs began to throb in my ears.
I think you should have an amnioscentisis done.
I had elected to use a midwife to steer away from the invasive and over-reactionary. Now my hippie midwife with a lady mustache was telling me that I needed an amnio.
“How about a lip wax,” I wanted to yell at her. I told her I needed to think about it.
You should be aware that it’s a time sensitive issue,” she replied, “You’ll want to get the results while you still have time to make a decision.”
A decision. And then, as if I weren’t clever enough to read the glaring public service announcement between the moral lines, she oh so delicately slid the matter on my plate:
A decision about whether you wish to continue with your pregnancy.
If I wish…?
I wasn’t add-dropping at the registrar’s office here. We were talking about a baby. Images of a deranged gameshow flashed in my mind. “Now, Jan, before you give the wheel another spin you can decide whether you want to keep your winnings or put it all on the line for a bigger pot!”
Are you still there?
My breath was wedged in my throat, but my lungs continued to pump. Pump all that extra oxygen to move all that blood that was rushing its way to… to this person. This baby I had made so little effort to know.
For the first thirteen weeks of my pregnancy I had been clogged. All of my emotions were trapped beneath a thick layer of “look at me smile, I’m pregnant!” What I had really wanted to tell people was, “Turns out, I don’t want to do this…” Or, “I’ve been hijacked by another being who makes me sleep and pee and rage and personally, I think it may be an alien with intentions for world domination.” Or “Help me!” I had been pushing all of that back because I was a vessel of life. Because people were pleased. There was my husband, on the neighboring pillow, giddy with the notion of what was to be. There were tears of joy from family and friends. If I had allowed tears, I wasn’t sure they would come in a socially acceptable shape. So my tear ducts behaved. They were so well behaved that they had become constipated.
This call. It broke me. It opened up every clenched place and let the flood escape. My tears came in jagged waves of guilt. What had I been doing? I should have been enjoying this growing person. Was it somehow MY fault that the baby had been flagged for Downs? Was it because I wasn’t excited? Was it because I wasn’t worthy? Was this a clear message I wasn’t suited to this motherly line of work?
Before the anmio there was an ultrasound. Our first. Mike and I were nervous. Scared. And there he was. The baby. The person. With fingers and toes and face and spine and all the necessary parts to make up a human being. All right there for us to see.
The ultrasound tech, Candice was her name, printed out some pictures and turned on the light. “Now, are you sure you still want to do the amniocentesis?”
No, I’m not sure, I thought to myself. In fact, I’m filled with doubt and fear and thirty different shades of self-loathing and inadequacy. But, I’m here, so we’re doing it. Thanks for giving me an extra chance to torture myself though.
“You know,” she continued, “while the test will tell you if the baby has Downs Syndrome it can’t tell you how severe the condition is. Does that matter to you?”
What, did she think I was expecting a “retarded on a scale of one to ten” gauge? I’ll have this baby, but only if it’s mildly retarded. I mean, I can deal with a slow, sweet child who has a hope of moving into an assisted living facility by the time they’re 21, but if it’s super-dooper retarded, then…. Well, that just wouldn’t work for me. I’m planning on doing a lot of traveling.
Suddenly people who were supposed to lead me through this birthing process were pushing back against my fears, poking them in the chest and saying, “Yeah, this is going to be hard. Really hard.” So do you want to just avoid it? Maybe you could try again some other time and it’ll work out better. This is your chance to avoid a lot of pain. To preserve your marriage. To protect yourself. This is your out.
Did I want to take it? My brain seized the notion and ran a series of rapid test patterns. The simplicity of not having to worry about the challenges of an unhealthy child. The years of treatments and hospitals and facilities. The constant responsibility of guiding and protecting and teaching, extended well past twenty-one years, but to thirty or forty or fifty years. Never releasing my child’s hand. Never seeing him expand into the world as an independent individual.
After the doctor withdrew the amniotic fluid Mike took my hand and smiled conspiratorially. ”I was watching,” he whispered, ” and he backed away from that needle in a hurry. Our kids’ a genius.” I looked at my husband. The thought of the petit and powerful combination of our personalities suddenly filled me with a fierce confidence. There was a completely original chemical compound forming inside if me. In my gut. And it was my gut that reminded me of what would be missing if that compound of our “us-ness” did not come to fruition. The empty places that would expand between Mike and I where our child should be, making our lives porous and purposeless.
Well, the test came back. The baby was fine. Perfect they said.
Not that we cared what they had to say
1. Pre-School: My daughter Kai’s best friend says, “If you don’t give me your head band I won’t let you be my friend.” Kai confesses this at night. It’s o.k. to say, “No,” I tell her. “But if I do she says I’m not being nice.” Oh, fear of not being nice is a trap set early to catch sensitive girls from speaking up. The next day Mrs. Waters calls Kai from the rug, “Your Mom is here,” she says. I lean on the wooden doorframe and watch as my daughter puts her hand out, waiting for her headband to be placed into her palm before she runs to the door.
2. Adolescence: “I’d rather be murdered than raped,” another girl says not knowing my history. Incest is an egg boiled too long. Cracked, the shell covered with minute lines, leaves the jelly white yoke of soul surrounded by something flimsy and brittle. a covering which offers no protection and cannot be easily peeled. The thin fleshy membrane covering the egg is left exposed.
3. Grocery Store: Another mother lifts her chin towards my daughter, “Does she know her real mother?” “Excuse me?” I say. At the playgroup for families with children from China we adoptive moms practice our responses, “Are your breasts real?” we imagine asking, pointing to each one. I know she means does she know her birth-bio-first-genetic tummy mummy. But I am no understudy. No baby sitter. Real. Really the mother. Maybe, pointing to her toddler, I could say, “Did you make love or assume the position when you conceived? Was it c-section or a vaginal delivery?” But that would be mean.
4. Winter. I stand on the porch. It’s the second snow in three days and it’s not even Christmas. It’s the wet and heavy kind that requires a knee bend to lift. “Doesn’t your husband shovel?” Brenda says from across the street where she clears her car and her red-headed seven year old stands on the stairs watching. “Doesn’t your son’s father ever visit?” this fatherless girl wants to say because the only man I’ve seen turn tender towards her son is my husband who has played catch, baseball and Frisbee on the concrete street between our houses for the last three summers. “Actually,” I say, “I love to shovel. Shubie is inside making dinner and playing monopoly.” I breathe in the ocean mist, feel freezing ice pelts on my face. I am happy to exercise another muscle besides my patience. I’ve grown tired of glitter, gingerbread cookies and girly dress up. Kai is in a mommy phase so intense she says, “Even when we spend all day together I still miss you.” The best me is honored. The other part is thinking, “Why don’t you crawl into my bone marrow and eat what you need as I’m obviously unable to provide it.” I have trouble sometimes with being needed so openly, deeply and often. I swing at long sharp icicles crushing them with my shovel. They hang by the stairs and could injure if they fall or melt.. I get to shovel I want to say. And my husband, he fathers our daughter and sometimes your son when we, you and me, mothers on this same street, are too tired.
They were small and insignificant, one would think, attached to my body – unadorned and ignored. No one ever got to see them except maybe after a shower at summer camp before shoving into socks. My whole life I hid them. On the beach, in bed, on a warm June night when every other girl displayed them like jewels. “Your fingers. They are so long,” and Italian salesman once said to me in a shoe store, pointing out, in his broken English, that those toes were obviously on steroids. “You always wished for big feet,” my grandmother loves to say. “You wanted size 10.” That’s what I got, without long legs to match. And every night of my teen-aged life I stared down those toes in the bath, slowly killing them one by one with white hot wishes for short neat cute feet like the blondes at my school who wore kilts and small cleats and the promise of sex between toned lean thighs.
Fat and stubby like pink shrimp or big-bedded and squarish like my aunt Betty. Anything was better than my long skeletal toes. So I killed them. And they disappeared. Until one summer, the year I turned 24, I embraced them like long lost childhood friends. I breathed them to life with glossy paint and Korean massage and pummiced rubs until my heels were shiny and soft, nails perfectly trimmed.
At pedicures in the Village, I flipped through magazines, staring down celebrity toes. Meg Ryan had long ones. Sarah Jessica Parker too. Naked and unpolished, both knew, I’m certain, that bony could be beautiful, if you kept them neat and nude. I would go naked too. Streaking through summers forever more in barefooted bliss, thinking, if nothing else, I’ve got model feet.
I miss my kids. They are 13 and 10. They haven’t gone off to boarding school or run away from home. They haven’t been separated from me in an ugly, Brittany Spears-ish custody battle, nor are they athletic prodigy’s who must train in Bulgaria. They still live right here in their rooms, with posters of sports figures plastered on the walls and piles of clothes all over the floor. I see them everyday. But everyday they’re different. Every morning it seems like they grow another inch, use a new word, shoot me a sarcastic look, whose advanced subtlety I thought they couldn’t possibly be aware of. And I love them in the here and now– their changing pre-pubescent and adolescent bodies—their emerging personalities, their optimistic attitudes. But I miss the little people they used to be. I miss the feeling of sheer, mindless contentment that can only come from holding a sleeping baby wrapped in a furry blanket. I miss their squishy bodies, and open minds. I miss walking into their rooms in the morning and seeing a smile so big you’d think their faces might break apart. I miss the energetic toddlers they used to be, with their funny word pronunciations, amazed 100 times an hour by all the things the rest of us don’t even see anymore.
It’s like a tiny little murder occurs everyday. That’s how it feels watching these kids morph into bigger and bigger people. There are days I think those other smaller versions of my kid are wandering around somewhere in the world, and if I look hard enough, I might find them. I miss those little people with a ferocity I have only felt when missing the dead. It is a death of sorts, I guess. I mean, I will never see those two again, looking and acting the way they did when Mr. Rogers was their hero (not to mention alive). I will never again see those feet that looked like dinner rolls, or skin that felt like running your hand down a piece of silk. They are as gone as the dinosaurs, as lost as the Holy Grail. I know deep inside the disorganized cabinet in my living room they live, on glossy Polaroid 4x 5 photos and Sony DVD’s. But I wish I could glimpse the flesh and blood of them from back then. Sometimes I think I should put their little faces on the side of a milk carton. “Missing: little kids who just had to grow up. Please contact despondent mother.” But the truth is, those miniature people are as dead as Washington and Lincoln, as dead as the 3,927 American soldiers that have been killed in Iraq, as dead as any plant I’ve ever purchased and tried to take care of. It’s the order of things. It’s the yin and the yang. And as they head with lightening speed toward adulthood, there will be many versions of them lost, many versions of them floating through the world that exists only in my head. And I will miss all of them.
Tiny murders splattered across my first marriage, leaving me with stomach-wrenching cramps and a serious case of self-doubt.
Now, to tell the truth, no one else ever described what happened as murder. They called it by other names, casual phrases like “going with the flow,” and “taking it easy.”
But how else can I describe what happened to me? One minute I was a bubbly Southern Baptist girl who sang in the choir and wrote passionate essays in the diary I had kept since I was 11. Then suddenly I was smitten; dazzled by a smooth-talking guy I met while working on the Jimmy Carter campaign. Ted was smart and savvy, a political whiz kid. He was a visionary. He could toss ideas up like flapjacks over a hot griddle, sizzling when they landed and smelling like cake. We had long earnest discussions about my conservative upbringing. I felt crazy stirrings way down deep, a restlessness that made me want to toss my Pollyanna ways out the campaign headquarters door.
On the day of the Florida primary, I shocked myself and Ted by telling him that if we won that day, I was going to make wild passionate love to him. When I saw him later, in his brown suit and earth shoes, he told me that he had been to First Baptist, St. Anne’s Catholic, Bayview Episcopal, and Scenic Heights Presbyterian Church that day, praying for victory. Carter won the primary and the election, and I gladly kept my word. Ted and were engaged at the Inaugural Ball the following January, my brilliant diamond solitaire shooting prisms of color and hope out onto the dance floor.
But after being married only six weeks, I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. My handsome young husband urged me to let go of my insecurities and old-fashioned ways, so that I could enjoy an exciting “open marriage.” We had endless conversations about the women he wanted to sleep with, and how that wouldn’t affect his love for me one bit. Each day my romantic dreams died a little bit more, and the fiery cramps in my stomach became a little bit worse. I felt anxious and cried a lot. He felt tied down and was gone a lot.
I went to see my family doctor and told him about the constant pain. He laughed and said, “It’s just colitis, Terrie! Lots of young brides have it.”“What does that say about marriage, Dr. Pyle?” I responded, holding my stomach.
Just before our 10-month anniversary, Ted and I separated. I decided marriage was too painful, and resolved never to try it again. It took ten years and an extraordinary man to change my mind.
flea flea flea TICK flea flea flea TICK fleafleaflea TICK TICK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK SQUISH
