CAROLINE LEAVITT
The first thing you have to know is that because of my own crummy childhood, I never wanted kids, and I told everyone that fact from the time I was ten. “Don’t let anyone ever hear you say that, because they’ll think there’s something wrong with you,” my mother warns me. I laugh. I want a life of travel and adventure and lovers. I don’t want to be tied down by a child, to have to give up any of my life for his or hers. And then I fall in love and marry later in life and suddenly a baby is all I can think about, and I’m terrified it now might be too late. I’m in my early forties. I have fibroid tumors the size of grapefruits. My chances of having a healthy baby are slim as a swizzle stick. And I get pregnant immediately.
Being pregnant is bliss. My hair thickens. My skin shines. I love all of it! The morning sickness! The swelling of my ankles as well as my stomach! My obstetrician laughs at me. “Everyone else complains,” he tells me.
Jeff and I have names picked out. I can’t resist shopping for the baby, but then, nearly four months into the pregnancy, during an exam, the doctor stops smiling. “I’m so sorry,” he says.
I can’t quite hear what he’s saying, only snippets, each one like a thorn. The fetus was always struggling, he tells me. It’s nature’s way of making sure the fittest survive. Dead. He says the word. Dead. “You’ll have to have the fetus removed,” he tells me.
The good thing about hospitals is that no one pays attention if you are walking down the corridor sobbing. No one bothers to avert eyes or to stare. I go to the alcove where the pay phones are and call Jeff. As soon as he hears me sobbing, he says, “I’ll be right there.” It takes him half an hour with traffic, and I can’t get off the phone. I call everyone I know, as if someone will tell me, “This isn’t happening.” I keep one hand over my belly as if my yearning might keep the fetus alive.
When we get home, I take to bed, Jeff lying beside me. I am supposed to be at jury duty, but I can’t go. I am supposed to be at work and I call my boss, a memo-pusher in a bow tie, to tell him I’m taking a week off, and then I beg him not to tell anyone the reason why, because I need to be able to come back to work and not be reminded of what I’ve lost. I won’t be able to bear it. “Of course I won’t tell,” he says, deeply sympathetic, and I believe him.
An hour later, a friend calls. “They’re joking about you,” she tells me. “Bow-tie man is saying you are an old hen who shouldn’t have chicks.”
I shut my eyes. I hang up the phone. I pull the covers over my head and I can’t get up. I feel the baby, dead, inside of me, moving. Pain sweeps through me, a tsunami, and I am drowning.
They put me under the next day to remove the fetus. Groggy, I wake up and go home and go back to bed. I can’t move. I don’t eat. At night, I stare at the ceiling and mourn my baby. Friends call and come by and in well-meaning gestures bring me books about grief that are so stupid, I wait until my friends are gone and then hurl them across the room. My friend Jo tells me, “I know you will always think of that baby as your first,” and I love her for it. Others stumble and tell me it’s for the best, or maybe I’m too old to have a child. I’m upset until my friend Peter makes me a booklet of snappy answers to the stupid questions.
“We’ll try again,” Jeff tells me, and we do, and six months later, I’m pregnant.
We tell no one, though people at work tell me, “I know you’re pregnant. Why can’t you just tell us?” But I can’t risk making it real, so I keep silent.
My pregnancy this time is blissful. Delivery is easy, and there is only one frightening moment when they lift the baby up so I can see him, his starfish hands, his eyes as big as dinner plates, and Jeff begins to cry.
“What’s wrong with the baby?” I panic, but he holds my hand.
“Nothing. He’s perfect.”
Later, a friend of mine, a professional psychic, will tell me that every day I was pregnant she would think of me and see a huge sheet of black wall. She thought this baby would die, too, and sick with sorrow, she wouldn’t tell me. She wanted me to have the joy of pregnancy for as long as I could. “I was wrong,” she tells me. “That black wall was for you.”
Post Partum Factor VIII Inhibitor. A glitch in the immune system that makes your body generate a protein which stops all your blood from clotting. So rare, there are only one in six million cases. So rare, the hospital has no idea what is wrong with me, why my body is swelling up. There are five emergency operations, and one nurse later tells me, “The OR was like the elevator scene from The Shining. No one had ever seen so much blood from a patient.” They put me in a medical coma for two weeks. They glue some of my veins shut. They put me on memory blockers so I won’t remember anything, and there is even a morphine drip for the pain, which gives all the doctors and nurses jaunty animal heads. I float, thinking I am in a TV comedy, imagining I am in a sex clinic, and I cry to the doctors, “I can’t have sex now! I’m sick!” There is always a ring of doctors around my bed peering at me, talking as if I can’t hear.
They call in my family because no one in the hospital thinks I am going to survive. And then a German hematologist who is about to retire says, “I know what this is and how to treat it.” And she does. Two hundred transfusions. Factor VIII Blocking Agents. Keeping still because to move could cause a fatal hemorrhage.
But the thing is, they won’t let me see Max. Jeff has put up a big poster of Max on the wall, with the words “I miss you, Mommy. Please get better!” He’s brought in a video of Max’s first few weeks, and the nurses—the kind, wonderful nurses—give up their break room so I can watch it, weeping.
I’m in my second month in the hospital when I tell the doctors that I am going insane. “You have to let me see my baby!” I shout. “I’ll jump out the window if you don’t.” They argue with me, but I get hysterical, and then there is a discussion, and finally they tell me I can see my baby, but just for an hour, and just for once.
I’m so nervous, I beg my friends Nancy and Lindy to go and buy me mascara and brown eyeshadow, a lipstick that is soft rose. I have Jeff buy me a new hairbrush. I stumble to the bedroom, dragging my IV, and put on makeup. By the time I get back to bed, my heart is hammering. A nurse walks in and studies me critically. “You look good,” she says.
“It’s Maybelline,” I say.
When I see my baby, my Max, he looks like a stranger. He’s bigger, and when he’s set in my lap, he blinks at me. The hospital is worried about me tiring myself out, so they make everyone leave after an hour. Wait! I want to call. Wait. Wait. It’s not enough time. When I get back to my hospital bed, I remember how Max smelled, how he had a dimple, how his eyes were so blue. I fall asleep for fifteen hours. Two weeks later, I’m allowed to go home.
I have to stay in bed for six months. I can’t lift Max, I can’t feed him, so he’s brought into the bedroom so I can see him. He shies away from me. When he’s set down beside me, he cries. I cry, too. “We’re supposed to be bonding!” I weep. Friends tell me about their baby who was in intensive care for three months and now is fine. Babies don’t remember, I’m told. But I do. And from the way Max looks at me, I can’t help but think that he remembers, too. That surely, he must feel betrayed.
I think of all I could have done for him. I was going to breast feed. I was going to have him sleep in the bed with us. I had planned to puree all his food, to take him to the park, and spend hours on the floor playing with him, and I can’t move out of bed.
He doesn’t know who I am, and now, every time I try to parent him, he screams.
“Give yourself time,” Jeff assures me. “Give Max time.” He gives us lots of time alone, but it never turns out well. One time, I am tickling Max and he looks up at me, alarmed. I’m losing my hair from the meds I have to take, and a hank slides down onto him, making him scream. Jeff rushes up and gets him. I take to our bed, clutching the hank of hair in my hand. I can hear my husband and son downstairs. The baby is laughing.
Of course, it happens. Slowly, gradually. Max tolerates me more and more, and I’m calmer with him. But it isn’t until I can get out of bed and walk around and take him places—a year after I get sick—that we fall in love with each other, and then it’s so dazzling, I am astonished. When he begins to walk, he walks toward me! When he starts talking, he calls, “Mommy! Mommy!”
No one understands why I don’t want to leave him to go anywhere, why we take him everywhere with us. I breathe in his hair. I kiss him constantly. I can’t imagine love could expand this big. That it could take over our lives like this, and we want it too. Jeff and I know it’s because we’ve lost so much already.
And then of course, the years begin speeding by. He turns five and then twelve and then fifteen, and then suddenly he’s behind a closed door in his room. He’s secretive, or always on the phone. But at least he’s here, and sometimes, when we go out together, he talks to me. Then my baby is eighteen. He is an actor, a boy of a thousand voices and roles, though he shines in the funny ones, the quirky roles, the soulful moments. He auditions and gets into Pace Performing Arts/The Actors Studio/The Honors College, one of fifteen boys admitted. He’s ten minutes away in the heart of Manhattan, and I am stunned at how much I miss him the moment he’s accepted. I know this is what he wants. I know this is what we want, but part of me, that hidden part, thinks, Something else is about to be lost. Something I can’t grab on to.
This fear, the fear of the unknown. And always the refrain: I didn’t know you long enough.
To comfort myself, I say, I will still know you, but in a very different way.
At the end of August, it is the day I’ve been dreading. We drive him to his college. We help him set up his dorm room, and then outside, we say goodbye. I kiss his face. I deep breathe so I won’t dare cry and ruin his absolute wonder and joy at being here. I know that all the things I want for him, a successful career as an actor, a wife, children, will chip me away from him even more, moving me further from his center, and that is as it should be. I reach for my husband’s hand, and we watch our son, his whole body humming with joy and wonder, vanish into his new life. As soon as we are back in the car, I start to cry.
I know people joke about the Empty Nest. I join a forum on Facebook, but some of the women are weeping all day and can’t get out of bed, which makes me want to weep all day and not get out of bed, either, so I quickly get off. The grief is a dull ache. One friend of mine tells me that after her daughter left for college, she began wearing the same dress over and over until she realized it was the dress she wore for funerals. But it gets better. Max texts. We have reason to see him every other week. There’s a Broadway show he wants to see and would we like to see it with him? His computer is acting up, can we go to the Apple Store with him and then to dinner? And when we see him, we really see him. He’s not on his phone. He’s not glued to some game on his X-box. He’s with us.
And then he’s gone again.
The sorrow rides under the joy, like a burr stuck to us, or a rudder propelling us forward. Life without Max. I miss him in all his stages. I miss him when he was baby. I miss him as a toddler. I miss him at twelve, when he wanted to go on American Idol and sing. I miss the last five minutes I had with him, when we had an animated discussion about Insomnia cookies. I miss it all because I know I will never have those moments again.
Quantum physics says that there is no time, that it’s man-made, and that everything is happening all at once. I love hearing that. It means in a parallel universe, I can cradle my baby boy, I can kiss my toddler, and hug my grown-up college student. I can bring back those shining moments, and just for a little while, stay in them again.