When I was pregnant and baby names the topic of daily conversation, Chris was insistent that, if the baby were a girl, we would call her Grace. I preferred Ruby. I tried to convince Chris by using the name in scenarios that I knew she would like. “Okay, listen to this,” I would say, and then, in an enthusiastic yet failed impersonation of a sports announcer, I would call, “Shortstop Ruby Mae!” But Chris would not be swayed. In my heart I knew that Grace was a better name than Ruby; I knew that Ruby was cheekier and trendier than either of us. And Grace was a better match with Chris’s last name, which we had already decided to give the baby. “My genes, your name,” I had said early in the pregnancy, and while Chris had offered hyphenation, I wasn’t interested. I wanted to keep it simple. And I wanted the baby to have something that belonged entirely to Chris.
But I was having trouble letting go of Ruby. It was unusual, while Grace seemed to be everywhere. “Look,” I would say, pointing to the personalized towels in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, “Grace, Dylan, and Madison,” and I would slowly shake my head with the danger, the seriousness of it all. “Not great company.” But Chris didn’t care about towels. “Grace under pressure,” she always said. “She’s going to need it.”
We lived in different worlds during those months of pregnancy and naming babies. I lived in the world of the one child who swam in my belly and whose existence was original and private. Chris lived in the world of the thousands of children who were born each day, the vast majority of them to a mother and a father. So when she said that our daughter would need to be graceful under pressure, she meant that our daughter would be different from the children around her, and she would need grace to navigate those differences. Before we tried to conceive I might have agreed with her. But then I did conceive, and my claim on the child inside my body was utterly personal and my dominion over her was absolute. Hate and politics would not touch her; I would see to that.
My pregnancy, which was so desired and so long-anticipated, was much harder than I had expected. I had been terribly sick in the beginning, which Chris found distressing. In pregnancy I became a much more embodied person, which is to say that I talked about my sore hips, and I talked about my heartburn, and I needed four pillows when I slept. Before it had been her body that we talked about, her stiff shoulder, her cramps, her suspicious mole in need of inspection. This reversal, and, essentially, her displacement, was unsettling. Her response to my nausea, to my new sensitivities and endless need for sleep, reminded me of my high school boyfriend’s disappointed surprise when he took me mountain biking and I got so frustrated I threw my bike in a bush. “You’re the one girl I thought could handle this,” he said, riding on without me.
Chris was much more understanding than my boyfriend had been, but still I knew she had not expected my constant complaining about this pregnancy that I had wanted for so long. She thought I would be a tougher pregnant person, take it more in stride. To make matters worse, friends and acquaintances were often telling me how lucky I was to be married to a woman; surely she rubbed my swollen feet each night, listened attentively to my daily recital of discomfort and worry. “She’s probably about as attentive as your husband,” I told them.
Because I had an anterior placenta, which meant it was essentially a barrier between the baby and my belly, I could feel the baby move but Chris couldn’t. “He’s moving!” I would say, and then quickly grab Chris’s hand and put it on the spot where I felt the kick. Chris would keep her hand there for a little while, then shake her head. Nothing.
That spring when we were waiting for our baby we were also waiting for the Massachusetts Legislature’s response to the state supreme court ruling on gay marriage. In November 2003, when I was pregnant but did not yet know that I was, the court issued a decision stating that restrictions on gay marriage were unconstitutional, a ruling that would make Massachusetts the first state in the nation to legalize gay marriage. On the day the court decision was released, Chris called me from work. I was at home, getting ready for class. “We won!” she said. “I’ve got the decision, and we won! And you won’t believe this language. You just won’t believe it.” I could tell she had been crying. “Listen to this,” she said, reading from the court’s decision, “‘Limiting the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the basic premises of individual liberty and equality under law.’”
“Oh, that’s amazing!” I said. “I’m so happy!” I had to stop myself from adding “for you.” I felt like a bystander in the struggle for marriage equality, even though I stood to gain so much from it. When Chris read to me from the decision that day, and later when I read it myself in its entirety, there was a newsreel in my mind: the Stonewall riots, the AIDS quilt on the National Mall, women in Lavender Menace T-shirts. I thought of Minnie Bruce Pratt, and how she lost her children (her children!) because she loved women and loving women was a crime. I couldn’t stop thinking about how strange it was that I—who had marched in exactly two gay pride parades—would be among the very first lesbians to be legally married. It was a gain I didn’t deserve to celebrate. But more than that—and more troubling than that—it was a gain I didn’t want. Because if the state now said we could be married, then what had we been? Secretly I found the decision embarrassing—it forced me to admit that I wasn’t equal in the eyes of the government, or the culture, and that it would take a supreme court decision and a legislative act, not just a perfect wedding, to make me so.
“This will be big for us,” Chris often said in the months that followed the supreme court decision, when she read something about it in the paper, or talked it over with friends. “Even though no one really knows what it will mean,” she said, “it will be big. Especially for our kid.”
I would smile then and murmur my agreement, my shared anticipation. But in truth I didn’t agree. I didn’t like the idea of the state of Massachusetts having anything to do with my child’s life. Rights granted were rights that could be taken away, and I couldn’t bear the idea that the life of this leaping bean inside me—invisible and beloved and mine—would be subject to the whims of government, of strangers who believed their opinions were more essential than her, and her mothers’, humanity.
There was a reason, a real reason, I did not want to name our daughter Grace, and it had to do with Catholicism and with Hector, and with a God I no longer knew. When I got pregnant I stopped going to Mass entirely. I told myself I felt too vulnerable to the Catholic Church’s hostile politics, that I was disgusted by the active role the Church was playing in the fight against marriage equality. And I was vulnerable, although not only because of the church’s homophobia. I could still hear Hector’s voice inside my head, telling me that I simply could not have both God and Chris. And not only had I chosen Chris, but I had promised myself to her, and together we were going to have a child. I couldn’t keep myself from wondering what Hector would think of me now. He lingered as a presence of profound understanding but also disregard, and so it was impossible for me to discern which of our shared findings I could still claim as true. I knew that Hector didn’t have the definitive word on God; I knew that it would be possible—somehow—to untangle the thread of my belief from his, but I didn’t want to. It was easier, or so it seemed, to just turn away.
In those days I thought that Chris was engaged in a fight that was hers, and it was about being seen, about her life and love having equal value in this world, and I believed that it was not my fight. And maybe it wasn’t my fight. But I also believed that I didn’t have a fight at all, which wasn’t true. I had once put the entirety of my trust in someone and he had betrayed me; he told me that I could not have the life I wanted and the woman I loved. And because Hector explained me to myself in a way that no else had, before or since, I could not fully admit his betrayal.
I thought of homophobia then as something grievous and stark: I thought of men dying alone because their partners couldn’t keep vigil at their hospital bedsides, and of teenagers who lived on the streets because they were kicked out of their evangelical homes. I did not yet understand that homophobia can also be a small and pervasive anguish. It can be people we trust telling us we want the wrong things, that we are the wrong sort of people. And they tell us in particular and complex and intimate ways, ways that make it difficult to justify our affection for them, but just as difficult to relinquish it. We become the child who is set down again after being spun by her arms: we know there is a floor below us because we can see it, but it doesn’t feel the way it once did.
I had fulfilled Hector’s prophecy. I surrendered God, and the Church. Although it is not entirely accurate to say that I surrendered. I didn’t acknowledge then that I was in a losing battle. I wanted no part of battles; I had no interest in the fight.
Every night I crawled into bed with Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and a tube of Mustela stretch-mark cream. And every morning I woke early to practice yoga and drink smoothies and check the baby’s developmental progress on babycenter.com. I was no Dorothy Day and I no longer thought I should be. There was a baby growing in my body, and soon that baby would be in my arms. Soon that baby would have a name, a name that was, a friend reminded me when I told her I was partial to Ruby, the one lasting gift that was mine to give this child.
One weekend when we were visiting Chris’s family, her mother asked Chris why she didn’t want to be pregnant. “I never have,” Chris said, entirely unapologetically. “It doesn’t interest me.”
“But don’t you want to experience what Erin is experiencing? Don’t you want that connection to your baby?” I knew she was talking about a genetic connection, not the fleeting physical connection of pregnancy.
“Nope,” Chris said.
Later, when we were driving home, I told Chris I thought her mother really wanted her to be having this baby.
“You think?” she said, laughing.
“It must be strange for her,” I said, “that you’re about to become a mother but you’re not pregnant.” I thought of how pleased my own mother must have felt that I was the pregnant one.
“I don’t really think of myself as about to become a mother,” Chris said. “You’re going to be the mother, not me.”
“What are you going to be then?”
“A parent, but not exactly a mother. I’ve been thinking I want a name for myself that isn’t Mom.”
I settled back into the reclined car seat. “Okay,” I said. “I’m sure we can think of something.” I was happy, relieved even, that Chris didn’t think of herself as a mother. I did, and like the role of bride—only much more so—I was grateful to keep it for myself.
In the days and weeks after Chris and I had that conversation, people started asking Chris what the baby was going to call her.
“Ma’am,” she said.
One evening I asked Chris what she really wanted our child to call her. “Let’s see what mother is in Lithuanian,” I suggested, opening my computer. After a few minutes of searching I found it. “Motina,” I said, with as much composure as I could muster.
Chris laughed.
“It’s sort of a maternal version of Christina,” I said, “which is nice.”
She was still laughing.
“Okay, okay,” I said, closing the computer. “Not Motina.”
A few weeks later our friends Darius and Alisa were over and we asked them for suggestions. Darius had two moms, although they had gotten together when Darius was four years old, so he called his other mom Judy. “How about Mati?” Darius asked. “I knew some kids who called their mom that. I think it’s Thai for mother.”
“I like it,” Chris said. “Mati. It has a great sound.”
“We’ve never been to Thailand,” I pointed out.
“But we like Thai food,” Chris said.
“And that’s what we’ll tell our kid when she asks why she calls you Mati?”
Chris shrugged. “There are stranger reasons.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with her, but I didn’t say anything. It was her decision. And besides, I loved Mati. It was sweet and short, and it suited Chris perfectly. And it still left Mother and all its derivatives for me.
Many years later, when not one but two children called Chris Mati, we would learn that it was not Thai for mother. It was Croatian.
In the early spring, Chris boarded a bus to Boston to attend a day of protest at the legislature. The legislature had been given 180 days to make the supreme court’s marriage equality ruling a reality, and now a constitutional convention, the state’s first in a decade, was attempting to garner support for an amendment banning gay marriage.
“I don’t think I’ll go with you,” I told Chris when she said she was taking the day off to go to the convention.
“Probably smart,” she said. “It’s going to be intense.”
I was seven months pregnant then and I could not see the fundamentalists. I could not bear the yelling. I knew that if I saw the hate unfold in real time I would be terrified. I knew that I would also be annoyed. I listened to the protesting on the radio, I saw the newspaper photos of people who had come north on buses from as far away as Missouri and Tennessee, and I wanted to tell them all to fuck off. My feet hurt, I wanted to say, and I can’t figure out how to install this car seat. The end of civilization as we know it might be coming, but it won’t be because of me.
Chris was more resilient to the hate, and also more vulnerable to the possibility of elation. If there would be something to celebrate, then she wanted to be part of it. And so she went and she held her own sign, she held her ground as the hateful crowd tried to push her from her spot in the capitol rotunda. The next morning we lay together in bed and Chris told me stories about young children, no older than five or six, holding signs that said, “One Woman One Man God’s Plan,” and people praying fervently in English and Spanish.
As I listened I understood that Chris had gone to Boston for the baby. She did not care about prenatal vitamins or birthing center tours or cribs; she didn’t care how many grams of protein I had eaten that day. She believed in a different kind of vigilance and preparation. The trouble was I couldn’t admit that our child would need what Chris was fighting for. Her fight suggested that all three of us were vulnerable in a way I couldn’t bear. I pulled her hand further over my stomach, matching her palm to the baby’s floating rump, in yet another attempt at helping the two of them make a physical connection. “I’m glad you’re back,” I told her, and I turned to kiss her face. “I’m glad it’s over.”
In early May it was decided that the legislature’s proposed amendment and ballot measure were not enough to stay the court’s decision, and that marriage licenses would be available to gay and lesbian couples. Chris wanted to get our license right away; we needed to get married before the baby arrived. I agreed, but still I dragged my feet. We were already married. But the truth was, legally speaking, we weren’t, and we needed and wanted the legal benefits of marriage. And we wanted to be part of history. Even I had to admit I wanted that. So we went to the town hall and filed for a license. The clerk was cheerful and kind and, in her reserved New England way, genuinely pleased to give us what we needed. I called Steve, the minister at the country church where we occasionally attended services, and asked him if he would perform the ceremony.
“But you know,” I said after he told me it would be his pleasure, “we’re already married.”
“I know,” Steve said.
“So I don’t want another wedding,” I said.
“So we’ll make it something else.”
Steve came to our house in the early evening, sweetly dressed in a linen jacket and blue button-up shirt. Before we began the brief ceremony he drank a glass of water and told us a story about Dot Mason, the woman who had lived in our house for generations. We went into the living room, made a few jokes about my bare feet and pregnant belly, and began. Steve read a reworking of the first Psalm, changing “a tree planted near streams of water” to “two women resting near a river.” He asked us to make promises to each other, and as I repeated the words he slowly offered me, not the vows we had written and recited two years ago, but new vows, I was filled with an uncomplicated happiness. The room was bright in the summer evening. Chris said her new vows, holding my hand, reaching over to put her other hand on my belly. I rode the minutes of that brief ceremony the way my children would someday ride the small open-car train at the park—their hesitation and dread giving way to the joyful understanding that not only was this nothing to fear, it was something unexpectedly perfect, and over much too soon.
In truth I loved no name more than I loved Grace. In the week before my due date, when every part of me seemed to be softening under the heat of the August sun, when every anxiety—even the anxiety of labor—started to loosen its hold on me, I woke one morning and the name was the first thing that came into my mind, and it did not frighten me.
“I think the baby’s a boy,” I said to Chris that afternoon, “but if it’s a girl, I think we should name her Grace.”
Chris nodded, and I knew she was trying not to show her excitement. “Sounds good,” she said.
“But I think it’s a boy,” I said.
“I know you do.”
The baby was a girl.
And it was the nurse, clipboard in hand, who first asked for her name.
“Grace,” Chris said and looked at me. “Right?”
“Right,” I said in dreaming disbelief that we had a girl child to name, that the boy child I felt certain of was nothing but an idea.
After the nurse left I called my friend Karin to tell her that the baby had arrived. “It’s a girl and her name is Grace,” I said.
“Well,” Karin said, “the Grace of God.”
The Grace of God. Would such a thing ever again roll so easily off my tongue? I tilted my head and raised my shoulder to cradle the phone so that I could touch the baby’s birth-flushed face. “She is,” I said. “She absolutely is.”
We held Grace all that night in the hospital. Chris lay beside me on a cot the night nurse brought in, and we whispered to each other and passed the baby between us. Sometime before dawn, I fell asleep with Grace tucked beside me like a hot water bottle. When morning came exhaustion began to creep in, but suddenly there was so much to do: hearing tests, nursing consultations, heel pricks. As we were packing up, a gray-haired woman in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses came into the room with the paperwork for Grace’s birth certificate. Our attorney had told us that when Chris legally adopted Grace two months after her birth we would be given a final birth certificate, but a preliminary one still had to be filed, and it would have only my name on it. But then same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts and no one knew what the decision meant for children born into these marriages. Chris began filling out the form, and when she got to the line for father’s name, she said, “What should I write here?”
The woman took the clipboard from Chris and looked down at it over her glasses. “Well, look at that,” she said, smiling. “This is my first baby with two moms since the ruling, so”—she paused for a moment and looked over the form—“I think we should cross out father, and you should write your name.” She looked at Chris. “I’ll type in your name.” She nodded, tapping the clipboard emphatically. “That’s what we’ll do. We worked hard for this, we waited a long time, so let’s just do it!”
Chris and I looked at each other. We? Chris smiled at me, and then she took back the clipboard and finished filling out the form. Later, when I asked Chris if she thought that woman was a lesbian, she said she didn’t think so. “But how can you know?” I asked. Chris thought about it for a second. “She looked just like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cuppenheimer,” she said. “And Mrs. Cuppenheimer was not gay.”
My parents were with us in the hospital room that morning, and a few months later my father would tell everyone at the Christmas dinner table that our encounter with the birth certificate woman was the moment when he knew that his granddaughter was going to be fine. When I heard him say that, heard him tell the story with tears in his eyes, I was struck by how careful he had been to keep his worries to himself. I made the choice to marry Chris and have a child with her because my father—both my parents—had long insisted that this world was mine to live in without fear and, if necessary, in defiance of the social expectations that confined me. But while that might have been the world my parents offered to me and my siblings, it was not the world they were born into. My father’s world still had plenty of room for worry. Of course mine did too, despite how hard I tried to push it away. I was nursing Grace at the Christmas dinner table when he told that story; I was holding her socked foot to my mouth, kissing it again and again while she ate, while she reached for my glasses and my hair and my necklace. I was trying not to cry with my father. I was trying to be that girl who fell in love with Chris and wanted to marry her because she believed everything she once dreamed of was still hers to have, and to hold.