CHAPTER 2

July 1992

A year after I graduate from college with a degree in English, Dicken and I have decided to get married. And then what? I’m drawn to the idea of having children one day, but I’m young and don’t feel ready. Plus, Dicken plans to pursue a degree in naturopathic medicine, which means two years of premed sciences followed by four of full-time graduate school. I can’t see having a baby while he’s a student, so I’m looking at six years to focus on something while I prepare for parenthood. I need a path, a job or career of some kind, but I’m uncertain.

My family’s ethic of pursuing “unselfish” work opens up two broad career categories: service-oriented or creative. It also leaves plenty of room for youthful confusion. I’ve often thought about becoming a writer, but I don’t feel I have anything important to say. Since my teenage years, I’ve written a great deal, and I’m usually too terrified to share it with anyone. But listening to others is easy for me. Though I didn’t take any psych classes in college, I quietly begin to consider this field as a possibility. I like the idea of learning more about myself and using that knowledge to help others. And maybe I can write about psychology one day. Creativity is too wide-open. Psychology, in writing and in practice, offers parameters.

Studying child psychology will solve everything, I tell myself. I will learn to be the ideal mother, better than my own. I’ll have a fulfilling career, a way to earn income while I help others.

I won’t realize the deeper source of my attraction to this field until much later: I want to discover and heal the wounds of my own childhood, what I see as my parents’ failings. And if it’s too late to heal myself, at least I can ameliorate other childrens’ suffering.

* * *

Dicken and I celebrate our wedding in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. Both raised Catholic, we no longer attend church and find organized religion objectionable. We have a nontraditional ceremony on a mountaintop. After a joyful week with our families, we load a U-Haul and head out west so I can start graduate school and Dicken can begin premed courses.

Further and further from home and familiar faces, we pass miles of concrete and flat gray land, fast food restaurants and suburban sprawl. Each night we find somewhere inconspicuous to park and sleep in the windowless storage area in the back of the truck. The bleak landscape and monotonous hours of driving seem to be bringing out my dark side. Given that the week before was such a high, I’m struck by the force of the negative thoughts arising in my mind. Somewhere in Nebraska, I think, What a grim world we live in. I never want to bring a child into such a hellish place. I figure the only thing to do in light of this is to use my psych degree to help some of the more desperate denizens of the earth. This reflects some of the privileged guilt I was raised with: we have so much, we must give back to the less fortunate. Meanwhile, I feel nauseous. Must be carsickness, I tell myself, though I haven’t been carsick since I was a small child.

In a gritty motel in Daly City, the only place we can afford in the Bay Area while we search for a one-bedroom rental, I notice a small hole in my diaphragm.

“Oh my God, Dicken. Look at this.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe that’s why I feel sick.”

“It’s only a tiny hole.”

“You’re right, there’s no way . . .”

I can’t sleep. The itchy motel blanket chafes my skin like worry. With my super-sensitive sense of smell, I’m sure I can detect stale urine in the sheets.

A few days later, with my period now undeniably late, I take a test. I am pregnant.

I think of all the champagne I drank during the wedding week and imagine a deformed fetus growing in me. I think of the cramped apartments we’ve looked at so far, most above our budget. I hear again the clear thought I had on the drive out here, about not subjecting children to this world. Was I thinking that for a reason? Was it a sign? This is not the way I want to start a family. I am filled with gloom and fear, terrified to have a baby and terrified to end this pregnancy willfully.

Dicken’s face is dark with concern for me and our situation. The more I panic, the sicker I feel, and the more overwhelmed he becomes.

* * *

Our families can’t understand why we are leaning toward an abortion. “But you just got married. It’s all so perfect!”

Both of our mothers were once devoted Catholics, but they no longer attend church regularly. They’ve both become New Age enthusiasts, going on pilgrimages to sacred sites and meditating regularly. My mother is always looking for something new to explain or deepen her life. One minute it’s acupuncture, the next minute it’s numerology. I’m looking for answers too, but I don’t understand how such an intelligent, educated woman can be so credulous. I want a practice, a way of approaching life that’s rooted in an ancient culture. I just don’t know what it is yet.

My own religious and spiritual beliefs are mixed up and contradictory, with elements of rebellion against the formal church I was reared in as well as an obsession about my own morality. I view decisions as either right or wrong. In my nauseous, anxious, ungrounded state, every choice feels wrong right now. I tell myself I am bad, that somehow I must deserve this. I feel the weight of sin in the air.

As a child, I listened carefully in church and Sunday school. Desperately wanting to be good and lovable, I worked hard to be a dutiful child of God. I took the Ten Commandments literally and knew I’d broken some—I lied to my mother, I stole candy from my sister—yet I was too shy and shame-ridden to confess my sins to Father James. I could vividly picture the black spot on my soul.

Convinced I was doomed and beyond hope, I lay awake at night petrified by the thought of hell. By my mid-teens, I had stopped going to church, hoping to end my suffering and start afresh, but the guilt and dogma I’d been bathed in was already internalized.

And now, at age twenty-two, pregnant after a week of drinking, I still badly want God’s approval. I secretly believe I might be able to make up for the sin of getting pregnant at the wrong time if I can do what’s right. With no clear “good girl” path, I feel more doomed than ever. Though I won’t articulate this, I also feel angry. Angry that things are not going according to plan. This is not how it was supposed to be. My life, our first days of marriage, the course of the world. Everything feels wrong, and I will never find my way back to grace.

Dicken’s mother, Caroline, presses us to carry on with the pregnancy. “I’ll help you raise the baby.” I try to erase her words as I hear them. The kindness hurts too much.

My mother tells us to do what we want. “I hate to see you suffering with this,” she says. She will fly out and help us through this trial.

I can’t describe the desperation I feel. We are thousands of miles from home. We have no place to live, no friends, no community, no source of income other than a small monthly allowance from my father, and a trust fund I know about vaguely but have no access to yet.

Dicken, who was also raised Catholic, internalized a gentler God than mine. I’ve always been struck by how forgiving he is, with himself and others. His kindness is what drew me to him, his unconditional love a hearth fire that warms my colder nature. Dicken is mostly upset about this pregnancy because it’s causing me pain. He doesn’t see decisions in black-and-white, the way I do. His answer comes in colorful dreamscape—he dreams we catch a dolphin, my favorite animal. “We had to take it back out to sea,” he tells me, his eyes filling with tears. “It wasn’t our time to keep it, even though it was beautiful and we loved it.”

On the table at the doctor’s office, I can hear the machine whirring. I can’t feel the lower half of my body, and my mind is vast, white, numb. Dicken’s tears fall on me as he holds my hand. I tell myself to be happy the awful nausea will lift soon.

* * *

Two days later, I begin my graduate program in psychology and start an internship at a day treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. I love the children, I hate myself. Dicken gets a job scooping ice cream and begins a premed program on the weekends. Our sex life is dormant for months, because Dicken is afraid to get me pregnant again, and I am too numb to experience desire.