I was concerned about what people would think. Lying there, with Ralph Lauren cream-colored sheets from my wedding registry pulled up high over my bulging belly, I’d failed to accomplish what most other women seemed to do naturally, and now I had to confess this to the world. Starting with my mother.
There is a pause before you reveal bad news. You know the other person is still spinning in their own oblivious universe and it’s all about to come crashing down. You think about that person, what they’re doing, how their life will change. I could envision my mother sitting cross-legged at her desk at the Board of Education, where she had worked as an administrative assistant since I was in the fifth grade, wearing one of those long floral skirts she donned daily, matched with a nice pale-yellow cotton pullover. I wanted to give her another few seconds to finish up her lunch, to enjoy the sun streaming through her office window before I ruined her day. My mother was a natural worrier; it was part of her DNA. This would only switch the anxiety lever into high gear.
“How am I going to tell her, Dad?” I said out loud. He had always been our go-between. I’d hide out in my bedroom and he’d sit her down and casually explain the situation, whether it was about my failing grade in math class or that I had just accidentally smashed her best china platter.
I listened in the stillness, waiting for his words.
“Kabeen, don’t panic.” It wasn’t mind-blowing advice, but it was enough.
I looked around the room. I was safe. My baby was still inside me. And somehow I had to convey that to my mother.
Telling her wasn’t going to be easy. Not only because she would fall apart, but because she embraced the Socratic method of acquiring knowledge by question and answer; however, it is rare that she actually hesitated long enough to hear the answer, so it’s more like question, answer, same question, same answer, a question that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about because she misunderstood the answer, and so forth. This usually continues until we both forget what we were discussing in the first place.
“Mom. Don’t panic,” I said as soon as she picked up the phone.
“What do you mean don’t panic? What’s happening?”
“They put me on bed rest,” I blurted out. So much for laying the groundwork and easing into the conversation. My father had been so much better at this.
“Whaaat?”
“Fibroids. I have fibroids.”
“So, what does this mean?” her pitch rising.
I related the doctor’s words.
“Oy, okay,” she said.
That was it? Oy, okay? This I did not expect.
“You know, you’ll do what the doctor says, you’ll stay in bed and you’ll be fine. I’ll call you later.”
Who was this woman? Last year I mentioned I had pulled a ligament on the treadmill, and she sent me a list of six doctors along with an article about the dangers of sexual assault while running. Now I have a serious medical issue endangering her grandchild’s life and she says I’ll be fine? I was still staring at the phone in my hand when it rang.
“I hear you’re on bed rest. Mom’s having a nervous breakdown.” It was my brother, Mark.
Now my mother’s unusually calm demeanor made sense. That crafty woman had enlisted an informant. “How much does she pay you for information?” I said.
“Tell me what happened.”
I hesitated. I wasn’t sure of his motives. Though my brother and I had professed to be mortal enemies, we could occasionally hold a truce long enough to have a civilized phone conversation, and once when I was in my early twenties, we even managed to take a trip to Italy together. My father was so skeptical, he took bets with his buddies at the bodega that only one of us would come home alive.
But with my father gone, my brother was one of the only people left that I could still count as family. I spilled the medical details to Mark, and he seemed genuinely concerned. Even so, I wasn’t ready to wholeheartedly confide in him. Considering his profession as a social worker, not to mention his proclivity for exploring ideas that made me feel bad about myself, I knew that any conversation regarding my feelings around bed rest would be deep; I wasn’t ready to explore my feelings just yet. Plus, there was always the threat that he would have me institutionalized as a way to torture me in our never-ending game of “I Got You Last.”
“Well that sucks,” he said when I finished.
“Yeah.”
“I promise to run interference with Mom. You just worry about yourself and that teeny-tiny baby.” I was both surprised and skeptical, but for now I accepted he meant well.
I made a mental list of close friends I wanted to call, and felt a sharp twinge remembering that Rachel and I no longer spoke. We had bonded on the first day of summer camp at eleven years old when no one would pick us for kickball, and we’d sat on the sidelines talking almost every day. In times like these she always had a comforting religious reference to help me remember that a higher power was in control.
I still couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that if my husband had a Jewish mother, Rachel and I would still be close. Shortly after I became engaged, I asked her to find out from her rabbi which days on the Jewish calendar were considered off limits for marriage ceremonies that year. Her response was, “You’re not marrying a Jew, so it doesn’t matter.” She’d told me she wouldn’t come to the wedding, but naively I thought she would still share in the joy of planning it. Orthodox Jews will say you can’t pick and choose the laws you follow, but all my life Rachel had understood and accepted that I was Conservative, not Orthodox, and this is what we did. She had accepted me eating treif, but for her, marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish went too far. One of the last things Rachel ever said to me was, “Aileen, I will always love you, but I can’t condone this.” Those words marked the end of our twenty-year friendship.
I dialed a few of my other friends from the city, repeating the same story over and over, until it became something that I could mold and shape and absorb. I never thought my uterus would be such an interesting topic of conversation, but after the first few calls, I had lost all internal filters. I gave anyone who would listen a tour of my reproductive system. I went on about Sherry and her magic wand, about Dr. Specialist and his grand entrance, even about the shade of red lip color Dr. Lipstick was wearing. But when people asked me why I was on bed rest, a nervous jolt shot through my chest. I hated the word fibroid—hated hearing it and hated saying it out loud. My Monsters were embarrassing. They were big and ugly and I had grown them. They were my shame. But there was no escaping. I couldn’t quit my fibroids like I’d quit Brownies.
I had saved the final call for my friend Watson. He wasn’t one to mince words, and I knew he wouldn’t sugarcoat my situation. “Hey, worst-case scenario, if you lose your baby, I’ll be there for you,” he said.
Lose your baby. A feeling of relief swept over me. He had said it and my world was still the same. I looked around to be sure there wasn’t a small mushroom cloud rising from the corner of the room.
“Just think of it as bed-rest purgatory. The fibroids are the demons you need to slay to save your baby and come back from the underworld.” Watson, a copywriter by day for an elite advertising company, was, by night, an aspiring horror writer.
He’d made me smile, but as we said goodbye, I could feel hot tears welling up in my eyes. I hung up and watched the sun making crystal prism rainbows on the wood floor.
When my father died, I cried on and off for a few days, but then I stopped. I could hear him saying, “Stop yer crying, will ya?” I’d heard it a million times throughout my childhood. When I was five, shooting hoops with him on family day at Brooklyn Day Camp (which inexplicably was in Queens), I lunged for a shot and forgot to let go of the ball, falling to the ground and splitting my knee open. The cut was deep. I probably needed stitches, but my father wasn’t about to ruin his weekend with a trip to the ER. As my mother tended to me, my father admonished me to stop crying. I didn’t understand it; I was physically bleeding and the man was yelling at me. He couldn’t stand my vulnerability. One day he wouldn’t be here to tend my wounds, and he needed to be certain that I could pull myself together without him.
After he died, I didn’t want to let him down, so I just decided that I was over his death, and I refused to mourn anymore. Yet, I couldn’t move forward. I began seeing a therapist who looked me in the eye and said, “Your father died. You have a right to be sad.”
“I do?” It had never occurred to me that it was my right to feel sad. He would think I was weak, and after his death I had to prove, more than ever, that he hadn’t wasted his time trying to mold me into a strong woman.
But what about now? Was I allowed to mourn this? And what exactly was I mourning? The possible death of my child or something else? If this child in my belly died, I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to try for another. I had wanted six kids, but maybe I’d never even have one.
“Then what, Dad?” I said out loud. “Then can I cry?”
“Worry about it when it’s time to worry,” I heard him say.
Was it a time to be strong and buck up, or was it a time to fall apart? Without my father there to yell at me, I fell apart.
Chris was at a loss as to how to help me, and I wasn’t ready to share my complicated web of emotions with him. What if he couldn’t handle it?
Three days into bed rest, he stood next to me while I lay sprawled across the bed, the back of my hand placed lightly on my forehead as though I were a young nineteenth-century debutante recovering from a fainting spell. If I was going to be forlorn, I might as well be dramatic.
“Can I get you anything?” he whispered, fluffing the pillows.
“No.” It was a barely audible squeak. I thought I’d lie down, take a few days, and see what happened. Instead, I was hit with a hormonal roller coaster of despair.
“I don’t know what to do for you. Work is crazier than I thought it would be. I can’t be here. Today I was trying to explain to this lady that her tractor wouldn’t be ready for at least ten days and she started yelling about . . .” He trailed off when he saw my face. “Well, never mind,” he said, his lips pressing together in a straight line. He sat down on the bed next to me, hand tentatively touching my leg, as if I might shatter. His eyes were dark and his movements stiff; he was nervous. Then he got up and walked into another room. I needed help. There was only one course of action left: it was time to call in the big guns.