White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  That now that I wanted to be pregnant, I couldn’t be, and might never be again.

  Tears welled up in my eyes. “Thank you,” I repeated. In all the weeks of hospitalizations, I hadn’t had a chance to think. To feel. It was so unfair. “Thank you.”

  “It’s horrible, Judy, just horrible, horrible.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, really horrible. Really, truly, horribly, horrible.”

  “Th—” But I stopped. I turned on my back, and out of the corner of my eye, glimpsed my current bedfellow: Mom’s one hundred–pound suitcase of files that she’d hid under Jon’s pillow. I’d always made room for her in each and every one of my beds, and yet hers had always been full, covered in clothes and papers, no room for me. I couldn’t watch TV with her. I couldn’t crawl in when I had a nightmare.

  “Horrible,” my mother repeated, her voice growing thin, distant. Internal.

  “No,” I said, seeing the clean life around me and the successes I’d created. I’d been so lucky to survive this ectopic pregnancy intact. “It’s really not that horrible. But you’re right, it is very, very unfair.” There it was, the word I’d never felt comfortable with. “Unfair” meant random, it meant it wasn’t my fault, or anyone’s fault, no excuses, no blame; it meant it was out of my control. So much was out of my control. The bad—I touched my stomach; then glanced at Zelda’s grainy image on the monitor—the good too.

  I clutched my mother’s fingers, still slender, still firm against their underlying bone. Still alive. Still there.

  • TWENTY-SEVEN •

  EMOTIONAL EDUCATION

  New York City, 2014

  “We’re leaving in ten minutes,” I called out, giddy. Sure, it was seven forty-five a.m. and school started at nine o’clock, but that was just it. School was starting! In the previous week, I’d reread all the parent handbooks and notices, labeled Zelda’s clothes, and pored over calendars. I barely slept the night before and that morning, I’d been up with her since six, preparing her backpack with a small favorite oinking pig toy, two outfit changes, and snacks for the road. I’d gotten Zelda dressed (only an all-pink ensemble would do), fed her breakfast, put her hair in a ponytail for maximum visual clarity, and hummed tunes about teddy bears touching their toes and going off to the academy.

  Any more gusto, and Zelda, though only two and a half, would likely have murdered me.

  Fortunately, she remained as excited as I was. “I’m going to school today,” she said to Denise, “like a big girl.” Well, maybe not as excited, but still.

  Denise now corralled my daughter into a sweatshirt and prepared the stroller. She still helped care for Zelda, but I’d decided that I was going to be the one to take my daughter to preschool—not just today, but for the entire “separation” process, if not forever. This was the beginning of my daughter’s independent existence. I wanted to be the entity against which she divided, and unlike my mom, who worked full-time, I had the flexibility to be the bow that had to bend for Zelda’s launching into the world to occur.

  I was also worried. Was I a solid enough presence for her to separate from?

  “Take a photo, Daddy,” I requested, putting a cup of cold coffee in Zelda’s hand. “The beginning of education.” Jon, still in his bathrobe, nabbed a shot.

  Zelda was not impressed. “Let’s go, Mama,” she said, a little bit rolling her eyes.

  I cruised down the street, my feet bouncing as I pushed the Bugaboo. I checked the time repeatedly. At the parents’ meeting a few nights earlier, they’d warned that bringing children to school late might make them feel like the last one to enter a cocktail party, insecure about where to go or who to mingle with. Preaching to the overly converted, I’d thought. But that flame of warning only got my early tendencies warmed up. It was eight a.m. The preschool was twenty minutes away, max.

  “Mama, snack,” Zelda said. I reached into my specially prepared snack pocket and whipped out several Cheerio-based options. I double-checked that I’d brought along everything, including Zelda’s summer “homework.” Back in July, each preschooler had been sent a beautiful, pristine white notebook that they were to fill with specific information about themselves: my favorite books, songs, foods. My imagination had gone wild, planning meticulously arranged collages, sticker work, and a sparkling pink “Zelda” scrawled minimalistically across the blank canvaslike cover. “Um, her homework,” Jon had reminded me.

  “But with our guidance,” I had argued. (The legacy conflict struck again, generations perched on those white pages: Jon’s mother had supervised all his homework; my parents never even knew what homework was.) Then, I braced myself, and let her explore “the marker” by making red streaks across the entire middle page range.

  Though the creative collaboration was successfully adorned with a shimmering “Zelda” on the front, inside, the blank slate was filled with shades and doodles, bright yellows and purples, prints and finger traces. It also resulted in a lot of leftovers: spare photos of Zelda, bits of drawings, tracings of her hands. It was terrifically difficult for me to throw out these scraps of her creativity and growth, these markers of our togetherness and happiness, even though I knew there would be thousands more. For the first time, pausing over the recycling bin, I understood how hoarding could be a form of love and connection: even more than photos, a way to capture the good times.

  “Mommy, will you come to school with me or will you wait outside?” Zelda asked between mouthfuls. I’d been explaining the separation process over the past few weeks.

  “I’ll probably come in for a bit, and then I’ll wait right outside when the teacher tells me to,” I said. “But I’ll be right there in case you need me.” I brushed her cheek with the side of my hand.

  “Don’t worry, Mama,” she said, her new favorite expression. “I’ll be OK.”

  Heart. Broken. “I know you will, sweetie.”

  This preschool, like most in our neighborhood, had its own “separation philosophy,” though unlike other schools, this school did not publish booklets about their ethos. Selecting a preschool for Zelda had been a high-end Manhattan nightmare, taking up the better part of the preceding year. Rounds of tours, open houses (if you could even get in), cross-fire interviews (“What’s your parenting philosophy?” Um, Stoicism? Pragmatism? Absurdism!), elevator pitches (“Quick: describe your child in one word”), essay applications (“She aced the APGARs”), reference letters, schmoozing at Zelda’s movement classes so I could collect names to drop, two-hour PowerPoint sessions on the ideology behind the running of a crafts corner, and serious parents armed with lists of prepared questions who seemed like they’d just come from Mommy-and-Me physics. At some schools you had to apply in order to be put into a lottery in order to apply. It was both ridiculous and fascinating, insane and interesting in how conscious it made Jon and me about selecting a pedagogical approach for our particular child. We had to really think about what was important to us, and for her (even though she was still one).

  I didn’t take it lightly. School—albeit less fancy school—had been my savior. There I had ownership, control over my little gray desk, which I kept meticulously neat. I’d needed the rigor of schedules and bells, clean tiles and grades, clear systems with straightforward rewards and punishments. I felt in control of my achievements, and had gotten attention for them.

  As such, I’d been somewhat shocked by the alternative, deskless, Continental-influenced philosophies of many New York schools that prided themselves on teaching fruit cultivation, yogic collaboration, and emotional buoyancy. (More taboo than feeding your child juice was asking about literacy or numeracy.) But of course, as I saw Zelda convulse with joy in the large doll corners during the “playdate” assessments, I reminded myself that she did not come from the same house I had. She did not have the same need for order, and I wanted her ambition to emerge, not from pathology, but from internal curiosities, as these school
s claimed to develop. Plus, couldn’t I have done with some emotional buoyancy classes myself? (“Do you offer courses for thirtysomethings?” I asked on one tour. “How can an insecure parent raise a secure child?” I’d wanted to ask on all the others.)

  To top it off, through this process I’d been through another depressing one: secondary infertility. After the chemo treatment, I suffered from shortness of breath, which led to CAT scans, which led to severe allergic reactions, then worse shortness of breath—a new cycle of emergency hospitalizations. I’d been treated for odd asthmas, afraid to leave my house by myself for weeks on end, terrified to care for Zelda alone lest I stop breathing. When Jon traveled for work, I had a roster of friends stay over. In the end, a specialist pulmonologist showed me that nothing was wrong but my brain mechanism; I was breathing fine even though I perceived myself not to be. I had to consciously talk myself out of, basically, panic. The unexpectedness and lawlessness of the ectopic pregnancy, the fragility of my life, the way that an implantation that was just a few millimeters off had caused such vast repercussions, had taken its toll. Many months later, I was still exhibiting symptoms and being followed, sometimes daily, at a fertility clinic uptown, taking hormones, trying to rebalance my damaged system that had never returned to normal so I could conceive again. I was frantic to make a family. I’d become desperate to give Zelda a sibling, feeling terrible that my body was failing her and might not provide her with this fundamental companionship, a fellow in the face of her parents with whom she could negotiate love and hate and learn to couple—the longest relationship of her life. Plus, making a choice about Zelda’s preschool seemed even more urgent: it was looking increasingly likely that she’d be my only child. My only chance to get it right.

  “We’re almost at school,” I announced to Zelda, slowing down.

  “Is it there?” Zelda asked, pointing to the leafy courtyard in the distance.

  “Yes, you remembered!”

  In the end, we’d chosen the synagogue preschool. Jon had been taken, not by the Israeli classics, but by the down-to-earth tone of the director who’d welcomed us by saying how insane the preschool admission process was, and how she never even told parents when elementary school pretesting was going on so as not to worry them. We’d both been drawn to the small class sizes (especially if Zelda’s classmates were going to be her “sibling substitutes”) and the community focus. The school did not offer a toddler ceramics atelier, science lab, or organic sustainable rooftop garden like several of the others, but an in-house therapist was available to chat with parents every Friday (only in New York).

  I looked at my clock. Eight thirty-five.

  The first ones in her class to arrive.

  “Let’s read a book in the library,” I suggested, embarrassed by my overcompensating tendencies. No one wanted to be the first guest at a cocktail party either.

  “Yay!” Zelda replied, and I felt a bit better. At least my insanity could make her happy, I reasoned, but reminded myself that too-early might be just as pathological as too-late.

  I had Zelda get out of her stroller and cross the gate into the yard by herself, as the teachers had instructed, and made sure Zelda walked down the stairs to the school independently. I was still the ambitious student, following all the rules.

  Zelda picked a book in the library and we read it as I checked the time and watched to make sure that the door to her class hadn’t opened yet. Other children and their moms (it was all moms today) began to arrive. I’d met most of them before at parent events; two of them had even gone to the same school as me in Montreal (talk about a return to the shtetl). I tried to exchange smiles, but couldn’t quite make the right eye contact from my seat. “Oh my God,” I heard one mom say to another. “Did you get those yoga pants in Southampton?”

  Another was carrying a Balenciaga diaper bag. A third wore heels. And she was nine months pregnant!

  These women were so put together.

  Suddenly, I felt like I was back in time, on the first day of high school, the girl who wore puffy, bright blue polka-dot shorts that the night before had seemed so cool. I thought of Mom, and how she didn’t wear Roots aerobics gear. I remembered Bubbie, arriving with her orange and brown headscarves, her plastic bags of produce. Oh God. Was I, in my Gap leggings and tattered sweatshirt, without makeup, that person?

  Fortunately, the class doors opened and I snapped back into taking Zelda into her new life. Parents had been instructed to sit in the chairs at the edges of the room, and to interact with one another, and their kids, as little as possible. I found a seat alone (unlike some other moms, who knew one another already and pulled their chairs together) and watched, reminding myself not to feel left out, that I was there for Zelda.

  Zelda immediately went to the Play-Doh station and began to create a multicolored mountain. I wasn’t sure how she would react in class—she was older and more verbal than many of the children, and Jon and I had been worried she would boss them around or act out in frustration. She could be feisty, demanding. But instead, I saw a girl who concentrated on her activities, who was quiet and obedient, who looked up to observe everything that was going on around her. When any of the teachers spoke, she froze and gave them her full attention, doing exactly what they ordered. If they asked her a question, she replied. I saw someone who put her colored pencils away. I saw a real student. I saw—lord almighty—a mini-me.

  Sure, Zelda and I shared the same large eyes and lips, even the same current wardrobe—she was wearing Gap leggings, an oversize shirt, and purple sneakers like me. But used to her social confidence, her delight and ease introducing herself to older children in the playground, her tendency to chase and tackle boys, I’d always pegged her as a mini-Jon. I’d never before seen her act so much like I recalled myself acting.

  But even more surprising was what I saw next. Zelda moved across the space to pick up another child’s doll-accoutrement mess. My daughter likes to clean up. Then she put each bottle in its right place. My daughter is a neat freak!

  She’d always been big on classifications (shouting “dog,” “cat,” or “girl,” “boy” at passersby on the street) and went crazy if her sippy cup rested on the windowsill instead of the side table. I’d put those tendencies down to toddlerhood, but maybe they ran deeper.

  For years, I’d blamed my own order obsession on my parents. It was their disarray that pushed me to array, self-consciously, madly. But perhaps my organizational tendencies had not been in reaction to them, but simply ingrained. Instinctive. Perhaps I just wasn’t brought up in the ideal context for me (and why Jon was so much less affected by the hoard of his home). As a child—and especially one raised in a psychoanalytic age—I blamed everything on nurture. But as a parent, I was starting to think that a lot was due to nature.

  “Adults,” the head teacher said. “It’s time to say ’bye. You can wait outside for the rest of the session.”

  I kissed Zelda, assured her I’d be outside in the coffee corner that I’d pointed out to her on our way in, and left. She waved.

  “So you’re a writer,” one mom said as we walked to the sofas. “That’s great. What do you work on?” She was interested, talking to me. I breathed in relief.

  Conversation turned to career changes, summer camps, and the best places to get rapid strep throat tests. Though these moms did not at first seem like my natural social crowd, and I had no idea what parental demons they might be combating, they were warm and welcoming. And, we had our children in common. And, I reminded myself, Jon hadn’t even seemed like my social crowd. The truth was, like Mom, like Bubbie, there was no way I would wear mascara in the mornings or carry handbags and designer juices. I’d wear outfits that were comfortable and carry my laptop and triple espressos. I could still be friendly, and be an overinvolved-but-trying-not-to-be school mom in my own particular way. By maintaining my differences, I told myself, I also hoped to teach Zelda a bit of “outsider
vision,” as my parents had taught me through their odd, critical, humorous perspectives. I wanted to raise a daughter who felt belonging and passion but was still quirky. Let’s say, productively off-kilter.

  Besides, I may not have looked like a typical school mom, but I looked like the mother I’d always fantasized having.

  “Judy.” The school director approached, grinning. “I was just in the classroom. One of the boys was crying and Zelda went up to him, gave him a hug, and told him that there was no reason to cry because his mommy was sitting outside having coffee.”

  I laughed, my heart aching from her maturity, her instinctive gentleness.

  “She was probably saying it to soothe herself,” the director said. “Probably to soothe them both.”

  “Either way,” I said, secretly exploding with naches and gratitude.

  Then, as if no time had passed at all, it was done. We were being called back to pick up our children. I waited in the line and when it was my turn, the teacher called for Zelda. My baby had been sitting on the floor cross-legged, clutching her backpack. Now she bounced up, sprinted across the room and straight for my arms, laughing, grabbing at my neck, hugging me harder than she’d ever hugged me before, kissing my cheeks and lips. “You came back, Mommy,” she exclaimed as other kids started to trample over us.

  “Of course I came back.” I kissed her forehead and squeezed her back. “I told you I would, and I did.”

  Then she wiped her nose all over my shoulder.

  I breathed, and let the wet lie. I’d passed separation.

  “Mama, Mama,” she chanted as we walked out.

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  • EPILOGUE •

  MOTHER OF ANOTHER

  New York City, 2014

  The doctor’s office almost never called me, and when they did, it was important. My heart fluttered as I answered. I knew they had the test results.