Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  Research on the matter is mixed. Some say an only child risks narcissism and loneliness. Others say singletons are more mature and often become leaders. My neighbor Jessie is nine months pregnant now, and she is sure of her way: “I want my daughter to have family when we die.” So do I, oh, so do I! And yet this is what we decided: we are a family, a thorny, three-sided family that, like any business or organism, must know how far it can grow. What are the resources: internal, external? What are you willing to risk for the sake of growth? At what point do your gifts to your child become her liabilities as well, for, if we had a second who added so much stress that we weren’t able to be good parents, then what in the end was she gaining? A sibling to take care of her? A sibling to take care of? These were the things we started slowly to see.

  I had an abortion at eight weeks, and I am not proud to say that, god no, not at all. But I needed to protect what was definitely human, at the expense of that which was not. Soon after the abortion, the fatigue and depression ebbed as my hormones returned to normal, my hopefulness returned, and my self emerged again, hello. Good-bye. Today, two years later, I often wonder what that embryo would have been—boy or girl, brown or blue eyed, a cuddle bug or standoffish? Either way, I would have loved it, this I know to be true. But would my marriage and my mind have survived the strain of a second; would I be writing fiction as well as my more marketable magazine pieces; would Clara know how to read and write, skills she acquired early, because of the attention she has gotten? I don’t say these things to make it all sound okay. It’s not okay. Something serious was lost. And something serious would have been gained. An opportunity missed, but a space kept reasonably safe. We are a family that works the way we are.

  Yesterday, I was with my daughter at the zoo. The white lion had just given birth, and her nipples were prominent and pink. “Why does she have so many of those?” my daughter asked.

  “Because other animals have so many children, they all need a teat to drink from.”

  She looked down at her own chest, covered in a coat. “I have two little breasts,” she announced. “Does that mean I’ll have two kids?”

  “Do you want two kids when you grow up?” I asked.

  “I want four daughters,” she said.

  My heart felt heavy. “Do you wish I had more daughters for you?” I said. Leading the witness, I know. I do it all the time. How else to know what’s on her mind?

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I’d also like a video.”

  “You want to watch a video tonight?” I said. “A special treat?”

  She nodded, big grin.

  And so we did. We watched a video about how the earth began, the big bang, the silver scarf of our galaxy, my girl nestled close in the crook of my arm. I could feel her steady breath, I could see the stars. Downstairs came the smell of my husband’s cooking. On the screen, a planet was born in a milky swirl of blue. My girl said, “Mama, will my breasts make a sound when they grow?” I laughed and laughed. She’s three now, my one and only. Often she says things that make me feel so delighted, a swift swish of pure happiness, that we are the way we are, a triangle, a single sail, one half of a diamond, almost precious; this solid and difficult shape.

  8

  Squared Off

  In May of 2001, I wrote an essay for Elle magazine explaining why I would only have one child. In this essay I described my rather wrenching decision to abort my second pregnancy, a decision based on solid common sense: lack of finances, lack of time, lack of personal and emotional resources, a marriage already strained to its breaking point, a commitment to career. This second pregnancy occurred when my daughter was very young. I made a firm decision at that time to parent only one.

  Now, years later, from where I sit, high in my house’s attic, typing up these words, I can hear the caterwauling of my secondborn, produced from a third pregnancy. At six months old he has a head covered with the fine nap of blond fuzz and hands that look like a sage’s. His name is Lucas. He should not be here. He should be wherever it is the pre-birthed people live, in a sea of swarming atoms, or high, high up in the air, near Jupiter.

  Despite all the common sense, the careful thought, the agonizing decision, the definitiveness of the door closed on whether or not to have another child—despite it all, I went against my better judgment and, two years after the abortion, I did it. I did it just as I rounded the bend into my fortieth year. I did it as my periods started to lighten and the skin began to look crumpled around my eyes. I did it after I bit into an apple one summer morning and heard the sharp crack of a splitting tooth; I did it in decline. I did it because of decline. I did it holding close to myself the image of me and my husband as old, old people (if we are lucky enough to get that far) and the thought of who would be there for my daughter when we died. I did it as a strike against death, but more importantly than that, I did it because, in the very end, having one, for me, was just too risky.

  After forty-eight hours of grueling labor, Clara Eve was born in 1999. I don’t think I loved her right away. She was a truly beautiful baby, with interesting cheekbones and a mouth like a little red bow. She slept deeply. I kept thinking, She’s mine she’s mine she’s mine, but she didn’t feel like mine. She didn’t feel like someone else’s either. She felt otherworldly, as though she were surrounded by stars.

  I recalled, during those days of recovery in the hospital, reading that there had been a study, or maybe several studies, showing how mothers instinctively recognized their babies by smell. If you put a new mother in a roomful of babies, according to the study, her nose would take her lickety-split to her progeny, and vice versa for babies. If you gave a newborn baby milk-soaked rags from her mother and milk-soaked rags from another mother, the baby would always put her mouth right up to Mom’s, closing around the cloth, drawing in and down. These studies haunted me. While still recovering from my C-section, I would visit the hospital nursery, where troops of babies, all in blue-striped hats knotted at the top like gnomes, slept in plastic bassinets. I remember walking from crib to crib, trying to guess, or smell, which baby was mine. I purposely did not look at the nametags. All the babies seemed exactly the same to me. Maybe it was just my bad luck, but every one of them had the exact same color hair and hands that were indistinguishable from one another. All their mouths were adorable. All slept intensely, as though dreaming of the place they had left. My heart would quicken, there in that nursery, and I would peer and peer and, at last, pick a baby, the one I believed to be mine. I played this horrid little game many times. I picked my baby maybe one-quarter of the time, and the rest of the times I picked someone else’s baby, and it was with dismay that I would focus my eyes on the bassinet nametags: Jack, Mary Lou, Annabelle, Galileo. Where was my girl, Clara Eve? Oh, there she was! Two rows over. Either the nurses had washed her fragrance away, or there was something seriously wrong with my nose.

  And so the story goes. You know what happened with my firstborn. I took her home, and time passed, and clocks ticked, and days folded into nights spent rocking and feeding. Her cries were singular, the only ones I’d heard, and she started to smile, and she started to haul herself up by holding the edges of things, and I came to love her. I fell in love with my baby girl when she was just about eight months old. I fell hopelessly, horribly, dangerously in love. She was reaching up to grasp the rims of whatever she could find, pulling herself unsteadily to her tiny feet, and I saw, then, I saw with total clarity how from this point on her world would be full of sharp points and hard floors and so many dangerous angles. This sense, that my child is in danger, has not abated over the years. Perhaps this is what mother love is. Perhaps I have finally entered into instinct. The older my child gets (she is five now), the more ferociously I worry about her, and there are sharp shards everywhere. The one thing I absolutely could not bear would be to lose her or have her hurt. And precisely because this is so unimaginably horrible to me, I spend an obsessive amount of time trying to imagine it. The world is now a series of disti
nct, personal flesh threats. When the children were taken hostage, and then killed, in Beslan, Russia, in 2004, I spent as much time trying to imagine what it was like for the parents to suffer such a total loss as I did imagining the terror inside that gym, where bombs were put into basketball hoops.

  I attribute my decision to have a second child, in part, to terrorism. When I wrote “Isosceles,” when I had that first abortion, the planes had not been taken. We didn’t know what the world was. We were blind Americans. Then we saw our blindness. It’s not only that I’m afraid my child will be the victim of a terrorist act—though, of course, I worry about that—it’s more the sense that I now see the world stripped of its pretense. I see that we are all still primitives living on Pleistocene plains; I see that we are slaves to rage and greed. I see that we have weapons, that we are tool builders, that we hunt and are hunted, and that even sleeping in trees will not save you. While I’ve always “known” this, it became glaringly obvious to me on September 11, and its obviousness grew with time.

  Having a first child was not an instinctive act for me, just its opposite. But having a second? In the end, I had to do it. I did it out of raw, primitive terror and the age-old threat of loss. My own hypothesis—utterly untested—is this: the drive to have a first baby varies from person to person, but the drive to have a second, as a means of protecting yourself against loss and your child against loneliness, that is where pure biology begins to play its role. If you have a first, not having a second will always seem sad and dangerous. But if you never have a first to begin with, then you’re free and clear.

  When I got pregnant with Lucas, I tried to talk myself out of it at first. I tried to think it through rationally, although rationalism is not a strength of mine. I thought about overpopulation and dwindling food sources and global warming. I thought that this was not my second pregnancy; it was my third. The second one I had aborted, and what was different now? The truth is, everything was different. In between having the abortion and having Lucas, I had come, finally, to really know mother love and to understand that the world around me was gobbling up its citizens with ferocious speed. These two facts made my initial qualms seem almost irrelevant. We didn’t have the money? Never mind. My marriage was already stressed? Too bad. Let’s go. I tried to get pregnant; I did it on purpose, and it worked right away. We were blowing up Afghanistan and Iraq. While all over the globe bombs were falling and people were ripped up, I did what the human race does in such situations. I had sex. Two weeks later I began throwing up. My husband and my doctor said it was all in my head. No one gets nauseous so soon into a pregnancy. But I did. I didn’t even have to take a test. I knew I was having my second. I was sick for eighteen weeks, retching, dehydrated, anemic, and not once did I seriously think of aborting it. I ate only watermelon.

  This is not to say I wasn’t ambivalent. I was. It’s just that the ambivalence did not have the strength of the fear that propelled me forward. Nevertheless, especially during the eighteen weeks of vomiting, I thought, What have I done? What am I doing? One night my husband said to me, “We were happy with one. We don’t know if we’ll be happy with two. We don’t know if we’re strengthening or weakening our family.” He said this to me just as we were getting ready for bed. Our room is blue-violet in color. It has a single skylight cut in its sloped ceiling, and on clear nights you can see planes swimming like sharks across the sky and the javelin sharpness of stars. “We might not be happy with two,” I said while above me a jet glided in its ascent. “But,” I said, and then I couldn’t think of how to go on. We turned out the light. Happy happy happy, I thought. We live near an air force base. The fighter planes are trim and dart around. They lean in on one wing like a gymnast showing off skills. They occasionally nose down and then zoom up and then disappear, leaving behind only their echoing roar. Happy happy happy, I thought as the fighter planes went by. I couldn’t sleep. The baby was hanging off my heart. It hurt. I understood, then, that happiness was not a primary drive. Our Constitution got it wrong. We didn’t want to be happy. We wanted to extend.

  I grew enormous with my second child. I gained eighty-eight pounds. It was disgusting. It was unreasonable. I swear, for the first eighteen weeks I ate only watermelon. But it was as though my body knew to plow forward, to pack on protective fat; by the thirtieth week, even my face was huge. I looked nothing like myself. My husband and I went to see a lawyer. His name was Frank Grimaldi, which sounded grim, ominous to me. We went to set up wills. We hadn’t thought to do this with our first, but now it was as though we’d deepened into another level of parenthood; we couldn’t fake it anymore. With one, you can retain aspects of a child-free life. With two that becomes impossible. You are sucked into a stream of Gracos and Huggies and ant farms. So we set up wills.

  I was eight months pregnant, and the lawyer peered at me suspiciously from his desk chair. “Who will be the guardian?” he said. We thought and thought about that: My siblings—too crazy. Ben’s sibling—didn’t like kids. At last, we decided on our longtime, live-in babysitter.

  Two weeks later the wills came in the mail. I opened them up. It was a little like reading my own death certificate; I could smell death everywhere. The babysitter was thrilled. The night I received my will, I lay with my daughter on her bed, in her yellow room, my bulging belly pressed against her back. I am lying with my two babies, I thought, and then I fell asleep.

  On January 20, 2004, Lucas was born via C-section. They carved him out of me and held him up, blood speckled and snuffling. He was just about ten pounds, full of himself, secure in the knowledge that he belonged here—right from the start. We brought him home on the coldest day of the year, when the air was cracking and painful, the trees black and thin. My husband said as we were in the car, the two children in back, “Well, now we’re really a two-kid family,” and I could hear several things in his voice: happiness, hesitancy, fear. At every rut in the road, my wound sparkled with pain. I was high on Dilaudids and had that postpartum weepiness, a mood that amplifies the meaning of everything, so you are at once full of rapture—I have a son! I have a second child!—and also full of despair.

  Eventually, the vicissitudes of my mood evened out. Slowly, I got to know Lucas. My daughter displayed zero jealousy, which made me think she’d shoot up a playground someday. The winter eased and the air began to smell like spring. Walking with Lucas in his sling outside, stepping over the wet spots in the road, my cuffs splattered with mud from speeding cars, I thought of what people had said to me regarding my reason for wanting a second. “You won’t ease your worry,” they’d said. “You will only double it. With a second you’ll have two to possibly lose.”

  And in some ways these rational, thoughtful friends and family members were right. Lucas came down with a strange illness; his throat was full of white spots. He screamed and screamed. Worrier that I am, I immediately assumed the worst: Small pox. Measles. Death. These fears were in no way easier to bear because I had my girl. No. I took Lucas to the doctor, and they diagnosed him with hoof-and-mouth disease.

  He’s better now. At night I feed him and I can feel the fontanel hardening, the plates of bone growing together in his skull. Perhaps because my daughter primed me, I fell for him more quickly than I did for her, say around week three. I feed him and I press my lips to the fading soft spot, and I see the place in his head where his pulse bubbles up. My boy. I hold him close, and it is never close enough.

  Though in some ways I’ve doubled my worry, I feel I have also eased it in a way too primitive for words. Let me be clear: if I lost either one of my kids, especially if they were hurt in the process, it would be devastating. But now I know I would have to live through it, for the other one. And when I see Clara playing with her brother, I think it was worth it, because she truly is less alone in the world. Yes, we have less money. Yes, we cannot afford a house in a nicer neighborhood or a private school; yes, I have lost whatever remnants of the child-free life I once had. I have become exactly the kind of woman I
said I would never be.

  With two, in love with two, responsible for two, I have at long last set my beloved friends aside. I have no social life. Eating out almost always means the pizza place just down the road—Bertucci’s. But somehow the world feels a little bit more right to me. A gap has been closed. My girl has another. And we’re now four dots on some screen, the lines connecting them into a solid square. And as it turns out, my eggs are not in the same basket; I have two eggs, and they’re each in their own separate spots, hatching, growing up, all around them the dangerous, smoking world. I hold my children’s hands. I did not know it was possible to love so thickly. My life has in some ways been narrowed by sheer fear and flailing instinct. I have less and I have more. What matters most is this: I have absolutely no regrets.

  9

  The Other Mother

  Before my first child was born, I knew I would need help. Even with the sixty-forty or seventy-thirty split between my husband and me, I knew assistance would be required, especially because, as time went by, that split dissolved, not all at once, but slowly, like sugar corroding a tooth. Cavities opened up, empty spaces, requiring that someone step in. Work came back to claim my husband and love came forward to claim me. Love takes time and resources and tactics, and that’s why I knew I needed help.

  Given my precarious mental state, I already had help, a doctor with ink-black hair and a massive desk and a thick prescription pad he wrote on with a flourish. Though he had been enough before I had my first, I now saw that I needed a different sort of support, someone in-house, someone who knew how to sew, perhaps, or draw a warm bath or pat the baby on the back. I needed . . . I needed . . . a nanny. I hate the word “nanny,” smacking as it does of British privilege. I also hate the word “babysitter,” because it always conjures for me the image of a woman sitting on a baby. I could say I hired “help,” but that has an antebellum sound, snotty and antiquated. I hired another mother. Yes. This is exactly what I did. It was a decision based at once on total necessity—both my husband and I were back to working full-time—and also rooted in a deep sense of my own inadequacy. Though not quite admitting it to myself, I was pretty sure that whoever took the job would be so superior to me that I would step to the sidelines while she took center stage. In a sense, I would be the other mother, offering help, holding out tissues, while the real drama went on without me.