Toru and I are lying in bed, almost twenty-four weeks into my pregnancy. Less than a month earlier, we’d gotten the baby’s test results, and I was bowled over that all were negative. As far as the doctors could tell, I would give birth to a healthy girl at the end of January. Toru nodded his head when we heard the news, my husband lightly confirming that, yes, once again, his immutable optimism had been proven correct.
I’m heading back to Boston in a few days to spend three weeks at home before I get too big to travel. I’m excited about being back in the U.S., about seeing my family and friends, eating all the American food I’ve been craving. I don’t know how much longer my own parents will remain healthy, and now I have some small sense of what it might mean to lose them.
But I’m nervous, too. I never guessed when I left Boston last time that I’d be coming back again in less than a year, likely for the last time ever without a child—or at least the last time in eighteen years. How will I sustain my connection to Boston now that our baby is on the way? Could Toru and I move to the U.S. more easily now, or at least eventually, without his father to take care of? Could we even afford to have a baby and a vital connection to two countries at once? Although I realize Japan will never exactly feel like home, I can’t deny it has become an eternal part of me: where my husband will always feel most grounded, where Otosan’s remains will rest forever, where my baby will be both born and from. In a sense, the country and culture have now become an irrevocable part of my body, the flesh of my flesh, deriving from a foreign world. How does one reconcile such paradoxes?
And how will a baby change my relationship with Toru? I don’t know anyone with an infant who doesn’t at one point or another hate her husband or partner. The stress of a newborn presents one of modern marriage’s greatest challenges. Toru and I may have been blessed up to this point with a dynamic of uncommon ease, but the flip side of not being fighters is that you never really learn how to fight well. I’m nervous now about how we’ll deal with this new trial. Have we developed the tools we need to manage a new gulf if one opens between us? (When I bring up this fear to Toru, he says with utter certainty, “It will be okay! Of course I can deal with your bad moods,” which makes me think perhaps he’s missed the point.)
I have no fixed answers, nor any firm plot beyond hopefully getting through my pregnancy, meeting our baby, and surviving childbirth without the epidural the Japanese prenatal nurse assures me they don’t use. “Ja, ganbatte, ne!” “So, just buck up, okay!” she tells me with a cheerful smile before she settles down to chastise me for all the weight I’ve gained. I don’t tell her that, according to my American pregnancy books, my size is right on track. Since my first appointment over the summer at the hospital where I’m to give birth, she has been fretting about my “fat.”
“Americans, you like juice! But you must stop drinking juice!” she’d commanded, even though Toru assured her that despite my nationality I wasn’t partial to the beverage. I was frequently too nauseated for anything but ice cubes. By August, the nurse had started reminding me of December’s culinary dangers. She looked at me with a mix of sternness and pleasure on her face when she enthused, “The holidays are coming up. So please don’t enjoy!” Although she speaks some English, Toru had to translate my explanation that I’m Jewish, so I don’t celebrate Christmas, nor do I tend to eat more in December. She’d stopped a moment when Toru tried to clarify this, asked some questions in Japanese about what Jewish meant and what our winter holiday was called. Toru attempted to explain Chanukah, though I added that, really, Chanukah was a holiday for children, and as an adult, I didn’t celebrate it anyway. Taking in this strange new information, the prenatal nurse paused a moment longer, tipping her round face in contemplation. Finally, she straightened and smiled brightly, eyeing me directly once more. “Well,” she said, “you’ll still probably be too fat in December!” Then she turned back to Toru with more admonishments for him to translate. He told me she suggested I weigh myself “one time every morning and one time every night,” so I don’t forget how fat I’m getting, and then, despite ourselves, he and I both burst into laughter.
Soon, although I’m at the doorstep of my sixth month, my neighbors begin to ask excitedly if it’s twins. One points to my belly, holding up two fingers, and I laugh and say no, lifting up just one. When the same neighbor, a mother with three children of her own, repeats this same question every time she sees me, I smile a little tighter. Does she think they’re going to suddenly discover a second fetus growing at twenty-four weeks into my pregnancy?
Another neighbor stops me at a little place around the corner from our apartment where I buy smoothies. She has an answer for my conundrum about my baby being simultaneously like I am—American—and from a foreign country. Instead of both, the child is apparently “hafu,” meaning “half.” Not both anything, not double, not even a whole, apparently, but half Japanese, as if no other half exists or needs be named. She points excitedly to my belly and tells the two cashiers that she is my neighbor, that my husband is Nihonjin, Japanese, and that the baby inside is hafu. The three of them coo and smile and chatter about how cute hafus are, reminding me I must bring the baby in after she’s born so they can see her. Meanwhile, at another café down the street, the cashier looks happily at my stomach and asks “Sugu?” “Isn’t the baby coming soon?”
But as long as the little one and I are healthy, I remain unconcerned about my weight gain. Beyond the birth itself, I’m still terrified of motherhood, even while I feel something miraculous is happening to me. It’s uncomfortable, scary sometimes—a lot of times—but I know now that this discomfort, this disorientation, this is life. Not a failure to plan. Not a mistake in decisions made or destinations chosen. Just the inevitable arrival hall where reality continually delivers us, again and again. If we’re lucky.
I spent so much of my early adulthood terrified of losing myself, grasping on to some illusion of having firm control over life, an unshakable plot. But I’m starting to realize—after having immersed myself so deeply in the quagmire of Japan, of Otosan’s illness and death, and of modern marriage—that you can’t properly find yourself if you haven’t let yourself get lost in the first place.
• • •
IN BED, I cup my bulging belly, shifting from my back, where I know I’m not supposed to rest for long (something about the fetus’s growth and the blood supply to the placenta, I’ve read). I stretch out beside Toru. He leans over to talk to the baby, whispering as he does every night in Japanese, saying who knows what. (Probably “Don’t listen to the foreigner,” I joke to my friends.) He puts his lips to my belly button and converses, as if it were a phone line to my uterus, some intergenerational portal connecting past to present to future. Then he lays his face against my abdomen and I feel the scratchy stubble of his chin on the surface of my skin, and then the baby kicks from inside, and he lifts his head up and smiles.
“Is it lovely?” he asks me, and the word sounds a little like “rubbery” from his accent, and it takes me a moment to understand what he means. “To feel the baby inside?” he says.
“Well, it’s actually a little odd,” I say. “But, yes, it’s very lovely.”
I think back to a night years earlier, when we’d lain together in bed just after we’d been married, before either birth or death had become such loaded or real topics to us. That night, Toru had been tipsy, tossing about in an uncharacteristic attempt to get comfortable. He’d just come home from an afterwork nomikai, a drinking party, a ubiquitous part of Japanese corporate culture that neither wives nor partners are invited to join.
Suddenly, he paused his quest for sleep’s perfect pose, raised his head to look at me, narrowed his eyes. Then he broached a grave issue: if I’d gargled that evening with antiseptic, another of Japan’s beloved health obsessions alongside keeping one’s belly warm.
“You must keep safe,” he told me, throwing his head back on the pillow when I’d admitted that, no, once again I hadn’t been able to toss the Betadine-like substance down my throat. “Then you’ll live to be a hundred and twenty,” he said, “like really old people in Okinawa.” He thought for a minute, started to hover toward sleep. “I’m younger than you,” he eventually mumbled, “and I’m Japanese, so I’ll live longer.”
“But I’m a woman, and women live longer than men.”
“But if we both live to be a hundred and twenty,” he’d said, his voice fading, “then I’ll still live longer than you, because you’ll be reaching a hundred and twenty before me.
“But that’s okay, that’s good,” he’d said, his voice a dream-filled mutter. “Because then, then I can send you,” he’d murmured softly, and fell fully into sleep.
Now, in bed and forty-six and pregnant, I remember this night while I stare at him, resting heavily on my elbow. He turns to lie peacefully on his back, his hand lingering on my stomach before he pulls it away and allows sleep to pull him gently under. This is a man who plans, without one doubt, to stay beside me always, I think, until he can help me through the hardest and most terrifying journey of all—the last arc into death. Then I know I really am home, at least in one of life’s most fundamental ways, even if I still don’t know exactly where I am or how to guarantee a home’s fixed location.
For just a second, I sense a faint, residual reluctance to admit I’ve proven both so dependent and such a cliché: a woman who has realized that “home” and “life” and “love” and “husband,” and now maybe “child,” too, all comprise each other; a woman who once gave up her own plans and world for a man. But in doing so, I grew a greater sense of rootedness, a new kind of faith in some fixed strength within my skin, an internal place of permanence even more personal, more mine, than any cartographic coordinate. Knowing this, a deeper truth dawns on me: of my incredible good fortune, despite all my foiled plans, to have spread my singular little arms across the globe, let go, and ended up holding such a cliché as my own.