I hit some traffic. I yelled and cursed. The hospital was only five miles away, and I freaked out for every one of them. What if I missed it? What if, after all of this, the baby was already there when I got there, already born, already a person? What if Jill thought I’d deserted her in her moment of greatest need? You would think people in Seattle would be good at driving in the rain. But you would be wrong. It is one of life’s stupidest mysteries. When I finally got to the hospital and finally finally found Jill’s room, nothing, and I mean nothing at all, was happening. Jill was lying on top of the covers in jeans and a sweatshirt. Katie was sitting in a chair next to the bed in the “genius outfit” she’d shopped for specially to take her orals in. They were talking about the exam. I couldn’t believe it.
“Did they ask you about Elizabeth Barrett Browning?” Katie was saying. “They asked me about Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Who even reads her anymore?”
“No, but they asked me about Julia Kristeva,” said Jill. “And I know none of them has ever read a word of hers. They’re delusional.”
“They asked me about David Mamet, and all I could think of was that horrible movie we rented whenever that was with all the gold and the guns and everybody was trying to trick everybody else. Like I needed to go to graduate school for that.”
“I cannot believe you guys are talking about orals,” I said, coming in and wavering somewhere between relief that I hadn’t missed anything and alarm that I was the only one who realized that the appropriate reaction to all this was: holy shit. “They’re over. Who cares? You’re in labor! Did you even pass by the way?” I asked Jill.
She nodded, opened her mouth to add something, then stopped mid-breath and held up a finger. “Hold on one sec.” Then her face scrunched up, and her body got all rigid. I held my breath. Katie looked bored. Then Jill relaxed. “Anyway, yeah, I passed. But they asked some really stupid stuff. Did they ask you about Kristeva?”
“Was that it? Are you contracting?” I was almost yelling.
“I think contracting is when you’re not a permanent employee,” Jill said languidly, “but that’s it. It’s not bad so far.”
“No one is alarmed,” Katie reported. “They don’t even want her to get undressed or anything yet. They said early labor could last hours, but they want us to stay here because her water already broke. Something about infection. They said we should both take a nap. They haven’t even looked in on us in forty-five minutes.”
“So we’re bitching about the exams,” said Jill.
Silence.
“What’s new with you?” Katie asked brightly.
“I am freaking out,” I shouted and paced the perimeter of the room. “Why are you so calm? Does it hurt?” I asked Jill. “Does it hurt her?” I pressed Katie, not waiting for an answer from either. “Are you okay? Are you scared? Can I get you something? Did you call your mom? Are you hungry? Should you eat? What are we going to do? Shit,” I finished. No one was even trying to answer me.
“We’re just hanging out,” said Jill calmly.
“Want to watch TV?” offered Katie.
I looked from one to the other as if they were insane. I checked the hallway in a vain effort to locate the team of nurses and doctors I was sure should be there. I searched my brain for information about what we should have been doing because I was pretty sure it wasn’t watching TV. But there was nothing.
“I think we’ve earned TV,” said Jill. It was true. Along with everything else, we’d put a moratorium on the television while we studied. So we sat and watched reruns of Friends, and every five minutes or so Jill scrunched up her face with a contraction, and we waited. We waited through four different Friends reruns, two Simpsons, and two incredibly bad reality shows Katie explained as we watched (“Okay, so that’s Sophie. She’s the mean one from New Jersey. She used to be blond, but Rob said he had a thing for redheads, so she dyed her hair. She’s a hairdresser and aspiring model. He’s not going to pick her.” Et cetera.) We watched one Law & Order and one CSI-I-forget-where. We watched an old West Wing and another Law & Order. Jill’s contractions got closer together but not a lot. The nurses came more often but mostly just offered not especially encouraging encouragement. “You’re doing fine,” and, “Keep hanging in there.”
“Like I was going to quit and go home,” Jill fumed. “I’ve decided to keep it inside actually. Thanks. Maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks.” She was getting cranky. Understandable. Katie and I, meanwhile, were getting bored and tired and cramped in the small hospital room. I was having fantasies about my very own bed, about going home and closing the windows, dumping the food, cleaning up a little, and getting a decent night’s sleep. I hadn’t had one in weeks because of the studying. I figured once this baby was born, I wouldn’t sleep ever again. So this seemed like a good night for it. Jill was not at the moment in need of hand-holding anyway. She was dozing. The whole thing had gone from holy shit to feeling as mundane as waiting for your life to change forever possibly can. Katie and I flipped a coin to see who got to go home and who got to stay. I won.
I put my hand on Jill’s forehead. She opened her eyes sleepily. “I’m thinking of going home and getting some sleep for a couple hours, get some things ready. I’m ten minutes away if things change.”
“You’re leaving?” Jill, panicked, propped herself up on her elbows. Looked desperate, positively desperate, to come home with me.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said. “I thought I’d go home, clean up, come back in a little bit.”
“Don’t leave me here,” she whispered. “Please? I don’t want to stay here waiting either, but you don’t see me leaving.” Katie rolled her eyes at me, but we both stayed. Katie climbed in bed beside Jill. I curled up across two folding chairs. None of us really slept. It was good practice I guess. By about four A.M., the contractions were three minutes apart, and Jill wasn’t sleeping through or even around them anymore. She was eight centimeters dilated when the nurse came in to check at 4:45. By quarter to six, they had decided it was time to start pushing.
You have seen this part. Maybe you’ve given birth yourself or witnessed someone you love doing so. But even if not, you’ve seen this part like I had, on TV, in movies. Usually, real life is nothing like TV, but in this case, it was exactly like what they show there. Jill grunted and screamed and sweat and cried a lot, squeezed my hand and Katie’s, complained of thirst, pain, and exhaustion. She was very brave. She was beautiful and also, you know, not. The baby crowned slowly, emerged sticky and red and covered in white, clumpy wet. It was just as you imagine.
The story they don’t tell on TV is the one of the hand-holder, and it’s because it’s almost as scary but far less gallant. I was terrified. I was worried all that predawn morning and all the night before, but when they finally started, when we braced against her and pushed her knees back by her shoulders and the doctors and nurses came with all the lights and tools and just-in-case equipment, it was fear like I had never known. I was not excited. I was not in awe. I was simply terrified. My heart was beating so fast, so hard, it was difficult to think, hard to keep standing. I was afraid without words, and I am never without words. Jill squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, just as hard. The baby came out and cried; Jill lay back and cried; I stood there still holding on to her and sobbed, not from miracle, not from relief, but because the fear still did not abate. I can’t explain it, or maybe it’s just that I won’t. I won’t look at what so terrified me or why. I have a family to take care of after all.
Far, far away, there were smiles all around.
“It’s a boy,” the doctor said.
“A little cliché,” I sniffed with my racing heart.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” Katie was shouting and shouting, dancing almost, yelling at me as if I couldn’t hear her. I nearly couldn’t. Jill was steadying him against her chest with both hands, not so much holding him as pressing him there, face up, as if to keep him from sliding off.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” shouted Katie.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” whispered Jill, otherworldly, and as I swam up up up from someplace very far away and back into the room, my first coherent thought was: holy shit. Followed by: what are we going to do with a boy?
We had called Jill’s mom, Diane, just before her daughter started pushing. Jill did not think it would be fun for her mom to be sitting and waiting through hours and hours and maybe days of early labor. Jill and her mother were very close but in that way where they sometimes wanted to kill each other. Jill’s father left for good before Jill learned to walk; she has no memories of him whatsoever and only the dimmest of impressions. Diane had nothing nice to say to her baby girl about her father, so she said nothing at all. And so until she went away to college, for Jill, it was always just the two of them. She admired her mother when she thought about it, was glad her mom was home for dinner many nights. But also it was something she grew up with and so considered normal. As a kid, she thought her friends’ families were strange, overly large and overly present, crammed into crowded houses with too many rooms and too many people. Then she went to college and took gender studies and learned with academic remove the struggles of single parents, the rigging of the system, and it was a familiar revelation. She recognized her mom and herself but as if in a clouded mirror or through something gauzy. Statistics never quite fit. Someone else’s story is always worse. Still, Jill felt guilty about how hard her mom had worked and struggled, how much she’d given up, while Jill, her nascent-feminist only daughter, had failed to notice. When she called her mother from school in tears near the end of her first year to apologize, insofar as that was even possible, for taking all her mother’s efforts so for granted, her mother, silent and incredulous, finally squeaked out, “You mean you didn’t notice? All those years?”
“No,” Jill whispered, mortified, sorry to the tips of her toes.
“Everything we did without? Everything we did alone? How much I had to work? How close we came to not making it? You weren’t thinking about that all the time?” Diane asked.
“I wasn’t, Mom. I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Jill sobbed.
And there was silence on the other end until her mother finally burst out, “Oh thank God!” Jill was speechless. Later, when she’d recovered, Diane added, “I wasn’t so sad about what I had to do without. Who needs new clothes when you come home to such a beautiful daughter? But I was so worried about you feeling hungry or alone or sad about what other girls had that you didn’t. When you said you didn’t notice? Shit, that was the best news I ever heard.”
Jill knew that there was more to this story, that her mother must have given up her own dreams, that with the money Diane saved so her daughter could go to college, she could have gone to college herself. So Jill made sure to make it worth it—two majors, two minors, and no plans to be done with academia anytime soon. When she finished school, she decided she wasn’t going to graduation. She thought the cap and gown ugly and extravagant, the ceremony beside the point. She told her mother she’d hang out with friends until the end of graduation weekend then pack up and come home. They could celebrate quietly, just the two of them. It took Diane a while to understand. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t think you’re going to your graduation?” she finally asked.
“Exactly,” said Jill. “It’s stupid. It’s not important to me.”
“Do not even for a moment think,” her mother said quietly, “that this degree is yours alone. We are going to graduation. Both of us.” Jill keeps the pictures from that day on her nightstand, requisite photos of a begowned graduate, Diane wearing the mortarboard and holding the scroll, arms around each other. Diane smiles for the camera, but also she looks like a soldier returning from war—shell-shocked, scarred by the horrors she’s suffered, but proud beyond articulation of all she’s done, of what she’s saved.
Jill and Diane were both hyperaware of the statistics which say that children of single parents are much more likely to be single parents themselves than children raised by two. When Jill made it through high school without getting knocked up, when she made it through college too, Diane breathed easy for the first time since Jill started her period. She had raised a strong, proud, smart young woman who had escaped unscathed. She figured any babies born now would be wanted and planned. But when it didn’t work out that way, when she heard our plan, she was also more sure than any of us that this arrangement could work. We weren’t going to destroy all our lives; together we could do this. Three, after all, is even more than two.
I went outside to throw some water on my face and found Diane lost at the nurses’ station. She turned and hugged me full-on and long as if she had nothing on her mind at all except how nice it was to see me.
“How are you, baby?” she asked me. “You look a little pale.”
“I’m good,” I replied, shaky, wondering if I should tell her or bring her to see for herself. She could tell though.
“I missed it, huh?” Diane looked at me closely, decided my paleness was due to an overly delicate constitution rather than something being wrong. Having assured herself of this, she asked nothing, preferring, I guess, to see for herself.
“You hardly missed anything,” I assured her. “Nothing good anyway.”
“A little squeamish?” she guessed, offhanded, but gripping my upper arm, guiding me to guide her to her daughter. “I remember. It wasn’t pleasant,” she said, laughing. “That’s the one good thing about doing it alone. No one has to watch.”
“Look who I found,” I announced as we walked into the room. A miracle had occurred. The horde of doctors and nurses had been replaced by one clean, kind-looking woman in street clothes. The metal instruments and beeping monitors and just-in-case equipment had been swept away, replaced by a tiny bassinet. The blood, the white clumpy stuff, was gone. The sheets stained brown and yellow and red were now miraculously neat, clean, and white. The glaring lights were off, the shades thrown open, the windows cracked and leaking fresh air and what passes for sunshine in December in the Pacific Northwest. A screaming, sweating, hurting Jill had been replaced by a calm, dry one clad in a green nightgown (god knows where she got it; certainly it wasn’t hers) and clutching to her chest a tiny, tiny baby, blue eyes wide open, also dry and clean and in new, soft clothes. Katie was madly taking pictures. Jill was oblivious, glowing, smiling blissfully at the new world outside. I stopped dead in the doorway. I thought of all those paintings of Madonna and Child. I thought of doves and larks, of church choirs and Benedictine monks, of puppies and spring and my breaking heart. I thought: what need we of baptism when we have whatever has happened here? I thought: the miracle of birth is nothing compared to the miracle that happened while I was in the lobby.
Diane was on the bed with her daughter instantly, both crying and crying. Into Jill’s hair, she was whispering, “Oh my babies, my beautiful beautiful babies.” Katie took like forty pictures of the three of them then exchanged glances with me, and we slid out into the hallway. It seemed the right thing to do. Plus, I suddenly realized, remarkably, I was starved.
“That was amazing,” Katie enthused.
“That was disgusting,” I tempered.
We went down down down to the cafeteria and sat under buzzing fluorescent lights drinking cocoa and eating rock-hard scones for breakfast (or dinner or lunch or whatever). All around us, everyone looked as tired and dazed as I felt except most of them were probably here with loved ones sick or dying, eating their eleventh meal of the week in the hospital, choking down oily, lukewarm soup with bad news and desperation. We ate quickly, said silent prayers of thanks, and went back upstairs to our bright day and our new baby.
When we got to Jill’s room, Diane was sitting on a chair in the hallway. “They kicked me out to have a chat about breastfeeding. When I did this, nobody told me anything about anything let alone reached in, took out my breast, and helped me nurse.” She gratefully accepted the coffee and muffin we’d brought her. “So how are you two doing?”
“Oh, we’re so great,” said Katie, clearly high on bliss or adrenaline or something. “Janey’s freaking out”—I hadn’t realized she’d noticed—“but it’s just so amazing.”
“I have a grandson,” said Diane, as if this clearly followed, starting to look a little freaked out herself. “What are we going to do with a boy?”
“That’s exactly what I said.” I nodded.
“Don’t know nothin’ about boys,” mused Diane.
“Oh, they’re just the same,” said Katie, who had four brothers as well as three sisters and so should have been a good source of information on this point, but Diane and I were skeptical.
“What if he’s one of those unenlightened ones who can’t think of anything but breasts?” Diane wondered.
“What if he takes full advantage of the hegemony,” I said, “and screws us.”
“What if he thinks he’s better just because he has a penis?” added Diane.
“What if he just thinks with his penis?” I countered.
“How do you even clean a penis?” wondered Diane to the amusement of everyone in the crowded hallway. “What if you all raise the girliest boy there ever was?” said Diane, and we were quiet, thinking about that one, wondering what sort of a boy we’d raise and how he’d get along in the world having grown up with three crazy academic moms.
“You all need a name,” said Diane finally. And suddenly we had a surmountable task. We didn’t have to raise him yet or nurture his maleness today or introduce him to the world this minute. We didn’t have to start teaching him all he would need to know or immediately give ourselves over to his every need or protect him from the world or protect him from ourselves. All we needed to do was give him a name. For all the thinking we’d done already, we had all been pretty certain deep down that this baby would be a girl. We were all girls, weren’t we?
The lactation consultant came out into the hallway and gave us a kind smile. “That boy is something, but he needs a name. You all had better get on it. By the way, we can order an extra cot tonight if you need it.” No one seemed at all fazed about the four of us, totally manless, obviously not coupled up, all clearly parenting this child. No one asked about a father; no one looked at us strangely. I guess it’s a new millennium and all that. Single parenting’s not new and never was, and besides, it can’t carry its persistent sense of shame into sterile hallways where it happens every day. But even beyond that, no one jumped to the obvious conclusion that we were all just friends, come to be supportive. It was more than that, and everyone seemed to sense and accept that. We all had to name this baby. We all might stay the night. We were family already, on sight, obvious to anyone who took any time to look at all.
“The lactation consultant says he’s going to be a great breast-feeder,” Jill reported happily when we came in.
“Who?” asked Diane.
Jill looked at her mother like she might be crazy and gestured at the baby with her head.
“I’m not sure who you mean,” said Diane.
“My son,” Jill laughed, but she got it. “We had a whole list of boys’ names, but I never really liked any of them. I never thought we’d have to use one,” she admitted.
“Jews name babies after dead loved ones,” I offered.
“Bit morbid,” Katie objected.
“I don’t know any dead people,” said Jill.
“We should name him something literary,” said Katie. “An author? A character? A theorist maybe?” We mentally scanned our reading lists, wondering in silent horror about naming our kid Derrida.
“All the authors I work with are women,” said Jill.
“All the books you read end badly,” said Diane. “Wouldn’t bode well. Probably why you don’t meet lots of little boys named Hamlet.”
“We cannot name him after tragedy,” Jill said emphatically.
“Something with a happy ending?” Katie suggested.
“I don’t want anything with an ending at all. No endings for him.”
“Everything has endings,” said Diane.
“Not Greek gods,” said Katie. “How about Zeus?”
“Zeus is a whore,” said Jill. “We need a name without tragedy, ending, or debauchery. Something big. Something titanic.”
“Like Atlas?” said Diane, half joking, half not.
“Like Atlas,” Jill echoed, under her breath.
“It’s beautiful,” said Katie.
“It’s wide,” said Diane.
“Other kids will make fun of him,” I said.
“It’s okay,” said Jill. “With a name like Atlas, he’ll be strong. He’ll kick their asses. We’ll give him a normal middle name. We can name him after his sister.”
And so Atlas Claude Mattison came officially into—and into possession of—his namesake, the world.