A few days after I wrote to the owner, she wrote back, telling me she had decided to sell the house. It turned out Chris, despite not being a real estate lawyer, was right. Once I raised the issue of lead paint, the owner was obligated by law to abate, but she was going to sell instead. “You can either buy the house, or you can move,” she wrote.
There was no way we were going to buy the house. It was charming and grand, but there was a spring below the foundation and who knows how many other hidden and expensive quirks. We started looking for a new house and the question of where we would live quickly became the question of how we would live: Would we buy a more expensive house in town with the assumption that I would work after the baby was born and help pay the mortgage? Or would we move further into the country—the hilltowns, as they were called in western Massachusetts—so that we could buy a less expensive house and live closer to Chris’s job if she would be working and I wouldn’t?
I had a both ardent and vague assumption that I would stay home with our baby (ardent in that I couldn’t imagine not staying home, vague in that I had no real idea of what staying home would be like). Chris wanted to work after we had a baby, but said she would rather not hire a nanny or put our baby in full-time childcare. “I want our kid to be with you,” she said, “if you want to stay home.” She was always careful then to be diplomatic about our parenting future, careful to let me know that it was fine if I worked and fine if I didn’t, but that she herself would be working. Full-time.
And so we decided to begin looking for a house in the hills, although I did not seriously consider what it meant to move so far away from the university where I worked and could work again, should I decide I wanted to. I didn’t consider the distance to grocery stores and the bank, to the houses of my friends. I didn’t consider much: I was a woman in search of a nest.
In the weeks after I received that letter from our landlord, I woke early to work on my thesis, then spent the afternoons driving through the green hills in search of real estate. I often stopped at small farms to pick fruit, or at unmarked turnoffs where I scrambled down rocks to cold and shaded swimming holes. That summer I also began to swim long distances across a lake I had found on the way to one of my many disappointing house tours. The lake had a small and nearly always empty beach from which I could swim, without a swimming suit, the rhythmic and even strokes that had comforted me since I was a girl.
I never bathed a baby in that claw-foot bathtub. In the fall we bought a house next to a different river. Now our street was a dirt road, and I looked out on a small herd of cows instead of a library. When we had lived there for two weeks a miracle took place inside my body. Two weeks later the miracle revealed itself to me in the form of a faint pink line. So faint, in fact, that I called the pregnancy test consumer help line to ask if it counted as a positive. It did. As I moved through the maddeningly slow and sick weeks of early pregnancy, I no longer needed my mantra. The baby was no bigger than—what was it the books told me?—a comma, a peanut, a kidney bean, but she had a heart and its racing beat became all the mantra I needed. Thanks so much, I might have said to Jesus if I weren’t so distracted by prenatal vitamin prescriptions and antinausea lollipops, if the vision of him holding my baby hadn’t faded like last week’s dream. I can take it from here.
10
Grace
When I was pregnant and baby names the topic of daily conversation, Chris was insistent that, if the baby were a girl, we would call her Grace. I preferred Ruby. I tried to convince Chris by using the name in scenarios that I knew she would like. “Okay, listen to this,” I would say, and then, in an enthusiastic yet failed impersonation of a sports announcer, I would call, “Shortstop Ruby Mae!” But Chris would not be swayed. In my heart I knew that Grace was a better name than Ruby; I knew that Ruby was cheekier and trendier than either of us. And Grace was a better match with Chris’s last name, which we had already decided to give the baby. “My genes, your name,” I had said early in the pregnancy, and while Chris had offered hyphenation, I wasn’t interested. I wanted to keep it simple. And I wanted the baby to have something that belonged entirely to Chris.
But I was having trouble letting go of Ruby. It was unusual, while Grace seemed to be everywhere. “Look,” I would say, pointing to the personalized towels in the Pottery Barn Kids catalog, “Grace, Dylan, and Madison,” and I would slowly shake my head with the danger, the seriousness of it all. “Not great company.” But Chris didn’t care about towels. “Grace under pressure,” she always said. “She’s going to need it.”
We lived in different worlds during those months of pregnancy and naming babies. I lived in the world of the one child who swam in my belly and whose existence was original and private. Chris lived in the world of the thousands of children who were born each day, the vast majority of them to a mother and a father. So when she said that our daughter would need to be graceful under pressure, she meant that our daughter would be different from the children around her, and she would need grace to navigate those differences. Before we tried to conceive I might have agreed with her. But then I did conceive, and my claim on the child inside my body was utterly personal and my dominion over her was absolute. Hate and politics would not touch her; I would see to that.
My pregnancy, which was so desired and so long-anticipated, was much harder than I had expected. I had been terribly sick in the beginning, which Chris found distressing. In pregnancy I became a much more embodied person, which is to say that I talked about my sore hips, and I talked about my heartburn, and I needed four pillows when I slept. Before it had been her body that we talked about, her stiff shoulder, her cramps, her suspicious mole in need of inspection. This reversal, and, essentially, her displacement, was unsettling. Her response to my nausea, to my new sensitivities and endless need for sleep, reminded me of my high school boyfriend’s disappointed surprise when he took me mountain biking and I got so frustrated I threw my bike in a bush. “You’re the one girl I thought could handle this,” he said, riding on without me.
Chris was much more understanding than my boyfriend had been, but still I knew she had not expected my constant complaining about this pregnancy that I had wanted for so long. She thought I would be a tougher pregnant person, take it more in stride. To make matters worse, friends and acquaintances were often telling me how lucky I was to be married to a woman; surely she rubbed my swollen feet each night, listened attentively to my daily recital of discomfort and worry. “She’s probably about as attentive as your husband,” I told them.
Because I had an anterior placenta, which meant it was essentially a barrier between the baby and my belly, I could feel the baby move but Chris couldn’t. “He’s moving!” I would say, and then quickly grab Chris’s hand and put it on the spot where I felt the kick. Chris would keep her hand there for a little while, then shake her head. Nothing.
That spring when we were waiting for our baby we were also waiting for the Massachusetts Legislature’s response to the state supreme court ruling on gay marriage. In November 2003, when I was pregnant but did not yet know that I was, the court issued a decision stating that restrictions on gay marriage were unconstitutional, a ruling that would make Massachusetts the first state in the nation to legalize gay marriage. On the day the court decision was released, Chris called me from work. I was at home, getting ready for class. “We won!” she said. “I’ve got the decision, and we won! And you won’t believe this language. You just won’t believe it.” I could tell she had been crying. “Listen to this,” she said, reading from the court’s decision, “‘Limiting the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage to opposite-sex couples violates the basic premises of individual liberty and equality under law.’”
“Oh, that’s amazing!” I said. “I’m so happy!” I had to stop myself from adding “for you.” I felt like a bystander in the struggle for marriage equality, even though I stood to gain so much from it. When Chris read to me from the decision that day, and later when I rea
d it myself in its entirety, there was a newsreel in my mind: the Stonewall riots, the AIDS quilt on the National Mall, women in Lavender Menace T-shirts. I thought of Minnie Bruce Pratt, and how she lost her children (her children!) because she loved women and loving women was a crime. I couldn’t stop thinking about how strange it was that I—who had marched in exactly two gay pride parades—would be among the very first lesbians to be legally married. It was a gain I didn’t deserve to celebrate. But more than that—and more troubling than that—it was a gain I didn’t want. Because if the state now said we could be married, then what had we been? Secretly I found the decision embarrassing—it forced me to admit that I wasn’t equal in the eyes of the government, or the culture, and that it would take a supreme court decision and a legislative act, not just a perfect wedding, to make me so.
“This will be big for us,” Chris often said in the months that followed the supreme court decision, when she read something about it in the paper, or talked it over with friends. “Even though no one really knows what it will mean,” she said, “it will be big. Especially for our kid.”
I would smile then and murmur my agreement, my shared anticipation. But in truth I didn’t agree. I didn’t like the idea of the state of Massachusetts having anything to do with my child’s life. Rights granted were rights that could be taken away, and I couldn’t bear the idea that the life of this leaping bean inside me—invisible and beloved and mine—would be subject to the whims of government, of strangers who believed their opinions were more essential than her, and her mothers’, humanity.
There was a reason, a real reason, I did not want to name our daughter Grace, and it had to do with Catholicism and with Hector, and with a God I no longer knew. When I got pregnant I stopped going to Mass entirely. I told myself I felt too vulnerable to the Catholic Church’s hostile politics, that I was disgusted by the active role the Church was playing in the fight against marriage equality. And I was vulnerable, although not only because of the church’s homophobia. I could still hear Hector’s voice inside my head, telling me that I simply could not have both God and Chris. And not only had I chosen Chris, but I had promised myself to her, and together we were going to have a child. I couldn’t keep myself from wondering what Hector would think of me now. He lingered as a presence of profound understanding but also disregard, and so it was impossible for me to discern which of our shared findings I could still claim as true. I knew that Hector didn’t have the definitive word on God; I knew that it would be possible—somehow—to untangle the thread of my belief from his, but I didn’t want to. It was easier, or so it seemed, to just turn away.
In those days I thought that Chris was engaged in a fight that was hers, and it was about being seen, about her life and love having equal value in this world, and I believed that it was not my fight. And maybe it wasn’t my fight. But I also believed that I didn’t have a fight at all, which wasn’t true. I had once put the entirety of my trust in someone and he had betrayed me; he told me that I could not have the life I wanted and the woman I loved. And because Hector explained me to myself in a way that no else had, before or since, I could not fully admit his betrayal.
I thought of homophobia then as something grievous and stark: I thought of men dying alone because their partners couldn’t keep vigil at their hospital bedsides, and of teenagers who lived on the streets because they were kicked out of their evangelical homes. I did not yet understand that homophobia can also be a small and pervasive anguish. It can be people we trust telling us we want the wrong things, that we are the wrong sort of people. And they tell us in particular and complex and intimate ways, ways that make it difficult to justify our affection for them, but just as difficult to relinquish it. We become the child who is set down again after being spun by her arms: we know there is a floor below us because we can see it, but it doesn’t feel the way it once did.
I had fulfilled Hector’s prophecy. I surrendered God, and the Church. Although it is not entirely accurate to say that I surrendered. I didn’t acknowledge then that I was in a losing battle. I wanted no part of battles; I had no interest in the fight.
Every night I crawled into bed with Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and a tube of Mustela stretch-mark cream. And every morning I woke early to practice yoga and drink smoothies and check the baby’s developmental progress on babycenter.com. I was no Dorothy Day and I no longer thought I should be. There was a baby growing in my body, and soon that baby would be in my arms. Soon that baby would have a name, a name that was, a friend reminded me when I told her I was partial to Ruby, the one lasting gift that was mine to give this child.
One weekend when we were visiting Chris’s family, her mother asked Chris why she didn’t want to be pregnant. “I never have,” Chris said, entirely unapologetically. “It doesn’t interest me.”
“But don’t you want to experience what Erin is experiencing? Don’t you want that connection to your baby?” I knew she was talking about a genetic connection, not the fleeting physical connection of pregnancy.
“Nope,” Chris said.
Later, when we were driving home, I told Chris I thought her mother really wanted her to be having this baby.
“You think?” she said, laughing.
“It must be strange for her,” I said, “that you’re about to become a mother but you’re not pregnant.” I thought of how pleased my own mother must have felt that I was the pregnant one.
“I don’t really think of myself as about to become a mother,” Chris said. “You’re going to be the mother, not me.”
“What are you going to be then?”
“A parent, but not exactly a mother. I’ve been thinking I want a name for myself that isn’t Mom.”
I settled back into the reclined car seat. “Okay,” I said. “I’m sure we can think of something.” I was happy, relieved even, that Chris didn’t think of herself as a mother. I did, and like the role of bride—only much more so—I was grateful to keep it for myself.
In the days and weeks after Chris and I had that conversation, people started asking Chris what the baby was going to call her.
“Ma’am,” she said.
One evening I asked Chris what she really wanted our child to call her. “Let’s see what mother is in Lithuanian,” I suggested, opening my computer. After a few minutes of searching I found it. “Motina,” I said, with as much composure as I could muster.
Chris laughed.
“It’s sort of a maternal version of Christina,” I said, “which is nice.”
She was still laughing.
“Okay, okay,” I said, closing the computer. “Not Motina.”
A few weeks later our friends Darius and Alisa were over and we asked them for suggestions. Darius had two moms, although they had gotten together when Darius was four years old, so he called his other mom Judy. “How about Mati?” Darius asked. “I knew some kids who called their mom that. I think it’s Thai for mother.”
“I like it,” Chris said. “Mati. It has a great sound.”
“We’ve never been to Thailand,” I pointed out.
“But we like Thai food,” Chris said.
“And that’s what we’ll tell our kid when she asks why she calls you Mati?”
Chris shrugged. “There are stranger reasons.”
I wasn’t sure I agreed with her, but I didn’t say anything. It was her decision. And besides, I loved Mati. It was sweet and short, and it suited Chris perfectly. And it still left Mother and all its derivatives for me.
Many years later, when not one but two children called Chris Mati, we would learn that it was not Thai for mother. It was Croatian.
In the early spring, Chris boarded a bus to Boston to attend a day of protest at the legislature. The legislature had been given 180 days to make the supreme court’s marriage equality ruling a reality, and now a constitutional convention, the state’s first in a decade, was attempting to garner support for an amendment banning gay marriage.
“I don’t think I’
ll go with you,” I told Chris when she said she was taking the day off to go to the convention.
“Probably smart,” she said. “It’s going to be intense.”
I was seven months pregnant then and I could not see the fundamentalists. I could not bear the yelling. I knew that if I saw the hate unfold in real time I would be terrified. I knew that I would also be annoyed. I listened to the protesting on the radio, I saw the newspaper photos of people who had come north on buses from as far away as Missouri and Tennessee, and I wanted to tell them all to fuck off. My feet hurt, I wanted to say, and I can’t figure out how to install this car seat. The end of civilization as we know it might be coming, but it won’t be because of me.
Chris was more resilient to the hate, and also more vulnerable to the possibility of elation. If there would be something to celebrate, then she wanted to be part of it. And so she went and she held her own sign, she held her ground as the hateful crowd tried to push her from her spot in the capitol rotunda. The next morning we lay together in bed and Chris told me stories about young children, no older than five or six, holding signs that said, “One Woman One Man God’s Plan,” and people praying fervently in English and Spanish.
As I listened I understood that Chris had gone to Boston for the baby. She did not care about prenatal vitamins or birthing center tours or cribs; she didn’t care how many grams of protein I had eaten that day. She believed in a different kind of vigilance and preparation. The trouble was I couldn’t admit that our child would need what Chris was fighting for. Her fight suggested that all three of us were vulnerable in a way I couldn’t bear. I pulled her hand further over my stomach, matching her palm to the baby’s floating rump, in yet another attempt at helping the two of them make a physical connection. “I’m glad you’re back,” I told her, and I turned to kiss her face. “I’m glad it’s over.”
Given Up for You Page 8
