A Journal for Jordan

by Dana Canedy

  “I’m not pregnant yet,” I said.

  “Yes, but when you put your mind to something, you usually do it,” she said.

  This was different. Charles’s preparations were intensifying and his deployment was just months away. We would have only three or four weekends to try to conceive. I had no idea whether my childbearing years had already passed, and Charles and I decided that if we could not conceive, we would not pursue infertility treatments. If we were meant to create a life together, it would happen naturally. If it did not, we would try again after his tour of duty.

  Charles was the only deeply religious man I had dated—a man so intoxicated with love for me that he compromised his traditional values to please me. I realized that he would have preferred that we get married before having a baby, but I also suspected that he somehow still thought asking for more of a commitment might frighten me away. He had grown accustomed to not knowing what to expect fromme, and he did not want to risk losing our relationship—I had become his confessor and “earth angel.” Imagine: an anxious, demanding earth angel. That is who I was, though, and Charles accepted it. He set aside his own desires to satisfy mine. So when he came to New York during a training break the last weekend in June, we clung to each other with an urgency I had never experienced, as though we were trying to will a baby into being.

  As I lay there listening to Charles breathe in the dark that first night, I wondered, guiltily, about my own motives. Somewhere, amid the certainty of our love, the faith in Charles’s commitment to fatherhood, and the desperate hope that a pregnancy would make it easier for us to endure our separation, there was a cold calculation: the odds were slim at my age of finding another man to father my child if he did not return alive from the war. Did Charles see that side of me, too?

  At dinner the following night, Charles told me he had prayed a long time for us to be a family, and I was suddenly petrified. “But what if I’m not good at being a mother?” I asked him. “I’ve been focused on myself for so long. What if we have a baby and it hates me?”

  Charles chuckled. Then he leaned back in his chair, folded his massive arms across his chest, and smiled.

  “It’s not funny,” I said.

  When he spoke again it was in as soft yet as steady a voice as I had ever heard from him. “You really have no idea how good you’re going to be at this, do you?” he said.

  Tears fell from my eyes. I realized then that I did not just want a baby— I wanted his baby. I leaned forward and kissed him.

  “Do you think we should become an official family?” Charles asked.

  “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  “Yes,” he said, lowering his head in anticipation, or maybe fear, of my answer.

  Whatever part of me was still protecting those old wounds fell away. I felt healed. I said yes, and meant it with all my heart.

  Charles got up and knelt beside me. He kissed my hands and pulled me into his arms. It was time to go home, he said. We had only two more days together and spent most of the time in bed.

  Four days later I suspected I was pregnant and went to my doctor to have the news confirmed. She asked how far along I thought I was.

  “About four days/’ I said.

  The doctor looked as though she felt sorry for me. I was clearly a desperate woman. But she went along with it and soon I was emptying my bladder into a plastic cup. I waited in an exam room while a nurse checked the results.

  “Negative/’ the young woman said and left I sat there for several minutes, agitated and in disbelief. I had been so sure.

  Slowly, I made my way out onto the chaotic midtown streets. I needed to get back to work but kept walking instead. Your father was in the desert and would be out of touch for weeks, so I called my sister Lynnette in her office in Los Angeles.

  “Hey, are you busy?” I asked, not waiting for a response. “I just left the doctor’s office. I took a pregnancy test and it came back negative. I think it’s wrong.”

  She reminded me that I was forty years old and had just started trying. “What are the chances you would get pregnant on the first try?” she said.

  “I was just so sure.”

  In the days that followed, the test result nagged at me. Three times in as many days I walked into a drugstore, picked up a home pregnancy kit, and put it back on the shelf. I called my sister again to tell her that I was still convinced I was pregnant.

  “Go ahead and spend the money on the test, so you’ll have some peace.”

  I took her advice and went out immediately to buy a kit. Twenty minutes later I poured myself a vodka tonic to steady my nerves and went into my bathroom. I sipped my drink, then took the stick out of the box with shaking hands. But when I was done I could not bring myself to look at the results. I called Lynnette back.

  “Go ahead,” she said, cheering me on.

  Two pink lines meant a positive result. And there were two— except the second line was very faint.

  “Oh my God!” my sister yelled. “Go get another test!”

  Two more kits and the same results, a clearly defined pink line and the hint of a second one. Lynnette told me to call the 800 number on the test box. Within minutes a recorded message gave me my answer.

  Even a faint pink line meant the test was positive.

  “Oh my God,” I screamed. “I’m pregnant!”

  Lynnette squealed and hung up to call my other sisters.

  I picked up my drink and put it to my lips, then stopped and poured it down the drain. No more alcohol.

  The doctor confirmed the results the next day. I was about two weeks pregnant. She congratulated me and said the first test had been taken too soon after I conceived to detect the pregnancy.

  It was official. Hard as it was to believe, Charles and I had conceived on our first attempt

  He got back from the field two weeks later and called me at once. The training had not gone particularly well, he said. The nights in the desert were frigid, the days scorching, and he couldn’t get the men to keep the heavy equipment on. “They were passing out and throwing up in the heat,” he said. “But it’s going to be even hotter in Iraq. I finally had to tell them that if I catch them without their gear when we getto Iraq, I’m going to dock their combat pay.”

  What he was saying was disturbing. Charles was in great shape, but it bothered me to think of him wearing hot, cumbersome equipment in Iraq. I reminded myself that he had been there before and survived.

  “I know that if anybody can get those soldiers ready to go, it’s you. You still have time,” I said. “And by the way, sweetie, we missed you.”

  Charles went on talking. I asked whether he had heard what I said.

  “No, what?”

  “I said, ‘We missed you.’“

  “Who missed me?” Charles asked, bewildered.

  “Both of us,” I said, “I’m pregnant”

  He laughed long and loud.

  “Honey, are you sure? How are you feeling?”

  “Yes, I’m sure, and I feel fine,” I said. “I saved one of the little test sticks as a souvenir for you.”

  He laughed again, then turned serious.

  “Dana, thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me, Charles. Just be there when this baby is born and come home to help me raise it.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  Eight

  Dear Jordan,

  Before he left for Iraq, your father was preparing for two lives. One week he would be drilling his soldiers in the rules of engagement for confronting a lethal enemy, the next clutching my hand and staring in amazement at ultrasound images of you. How he coped with such incongruity—the peril and the promise—I will never know. There was little I could do to help him maintain his balance.

  I tried to protect him any way I could, just as he tried to do the same for me. He said almost nothing about the missions he would lead. I never told him about those days in my first trimester when it looked as if your health might be in doubt.


  Charles and I had always lived disparate lives, but now the distance between us seemed immense. At Fort Hood, he spent his mornings sharpening his shooting skills and studying maps of Iraq. I spent mine behind a desk shaping coverage of that day’s news—when I was not bent over a toilet vomiting. It was only in the evenings that we had the chance to connect. In long phone conversations, we discussed baby names or the advice I had gleaned from my growing stack of prenatal books. I told Charles of my excitement the day the doctor calculated my due date, March 25, 2006, and about how I could not stop patting and rubbing my still relatively flat stomach. Charles asked how much weight I had gained, advised me to add more protein to my diet or to drink more water, and reminded me to take my prenatal vitamins. I had never answered to a man in my life, certainly not about my weight, but this intimacy felt right.

  Still, we did have secrets, and keeping them was easy from a distance. I didn’t mention the morning I became flushed and dizzy on the subway and ended up sitting against a filthy steel column in Grand Central Station, legs splayed out in front of me. Two police officers asked if I needed an ambulance. I managed to say that I was pregnant and just needed to rest a minute. I sucked on a few pieces of peppermint candy until I regained my energy and slowly made my way to the office. After a check of my blood pressure and a nap in the medical department, I had recovered enough to work the rest of the day.

  Charles called that evening, just as I was drifting off to sleep.

  “How are you feeling, Ma?” he asked, using the new nickname he had adopted when he found out I was expecting. (I secretly detested it, but he fell into it so easily, I didn’t have the heart to tell him.)

  “Fine, just tired. How was your day?”

  “All right. Just busy.”

  We were working so hard to shield each other that it sometimes didn’t leave much to say.

  We established a routine. He began his workday at 5 a.m. and usually did not make it home before 9 p.m., when he would call to check on me while he ironed his uniform or ate, usually a ready-made salad and a steak or canned tuna. On weekends and the rare occasions when he left work by 7 p.m., we ate dinner while we talked on the phone and called it “family meal time.” As my pregnancy progressed, I needed to eat earlier and it became more difficult to stay awake for our phone calls. At times, I fell asleep with Charles still talking. He would remain on the line listening to me breathe until he started to doze himself. The sound soothed him, he said, and was a nice end to his day.

  “Even when I snore?”

  “You purr,” he said.

  Except for the morning sickness and occasional dizziness, my first trimester went well until the evening in early August when I walked into my bedroom and doubled over with a pain so intense that it felt like my ovaries were on fire. I stumbled to the phone in a panic.

  “I want you to go to the emergency room,” my doctor said calmly. “I hope it’s not an ectopie pregnancy.”

  I called my best friend, Miriam, crying hysterically, and asked between sobs for her to meet me at the hospital. She wanted to come get me, but I said it would be quicker to meet there. I knew that was the right call, but I had never felt more alone than on that cab ride to the hospital.

  Miriam and I had birthdays only four days apart, and we joked that we were twins who were easy to distinguish because one was tall and black and the other short and white. She was the New York City bureau chief for the Philadelphia Inquirer, but we had met as interns and later cub reporters at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland and had been friends for almost twenty years. We knew most of each other’s secrets and had seen each other through boyfriend blues, career calamities, and dieting dramas. Since she was a fellow Clevelander, Charles called her “home girl,” and we chose her to be your godmother. I loved having her so close, especially with your father so far away. But I had not expected to need her so much so soon.

  When I lifted my head off the hospital pillow that night, still sobbing, and saw Miriam standing there, the fear on her face made me cry harder. She hugged me and asked what the doctors had said. I explained that they were giving me intravenous fluids because I was dehydrated but that they couldn’t tell me anything until I had a sonogram.

  “I can’t lose this baby. I can’t.”

  “Dana, don’t think that. I’m sure everything is fine.”

  A doctor wheeled in a machine and I held my breath when the image appeared on the screen. The pregnancy was definitely not ectopie and the fetus’s heartbeat was normal, the doctor said. He couldn’t explain the pain but said the dehydration might have contributed to it. Miriam and I hugged and sighed heavily.

  It was past i a.m. when I got home, and Charles had left several messages on my answering machine. I knew I would lie to him in the morning and say that I had turned off the ringer to get some sleep. I would not say how much that day had scared me or how alone I felt. His shoulders were plenty broad, but Charles already had a hundred men leaning on them, and I was determined not to further weigh him down.

  I would soon keep another, more difficult secret. It had to do with the tests that screen for fetal abnormalities.

  I have always believed that a woman has a right to decide whether to end a pregnancy, but I could not envision choosing to have an abortion myself, even to save my own life. My conviction was based on my faith, unconventional though it was. The God I worshiped understood my quirks and failings and allowed me to be human. He knew that I was trying to live a virtuous life, if not a perfect one. My commitment to my unborn child was part ofthat faith, and I knew I could never discard my baby because a test determined that he or she was not perfect.

  “How would you feel if, God forbid, we had a disabled baby?” I asked Charles one day.

  He did not have to think long.

  “I’m already praying that we have a healthy baby, but I’ll love it no matter what,” he said.

  “I’m glad you feel that way because I don’t want to have any of the prenatal tests doctors tell older mothers they’re supposed to have. Is that all right with you?”

  Charles said it was. He also believed in my right to make my own decisions about my body.

  The next part I did not tell him about.

  Early in the second trimester, my doctor recommended that I consult with a genetic counselor and schedule an amniocentesis. When I declined, she was first perplexed, then irritated. She urged me several times to reconsider, then asked if she could order a non-invasive blood test that would screen for Down syndrome but would not provide a definitive diagnosis. I relented simply to satisfy her and move on. The test results were normal, and that seemed the end of the matter. Then, during my next appointment, she sent me for what I assumed was more routine blood work. I was sitting at my desk at work when she called with the results.

  One of the tests had revealed a problem, she said: a high risk of Down syndrome.

  My heart sank. “What are you talking about? What test?”

  She said that she had ordered a more accurate test during my last appointment and the results were different from the previous one. “You need to see a genetic counselor immediately, and I want you to have an amniocentesis quickly.”

  What she meant was that time was ticking away for me to have an abortion if there was a fetal abnormality. I was furious.

  “Ms. Canedy, you’re an intelligent woman and I don’t understand why you don’t want to have all the information available to you,” she said. “You don’t have to act on it, but if the baby has Down syndrome, it will need specialists and you’ll need to prepare yourself.”

  I hesitated, searching for the right words.

  “I’m going on faith that God will give me whatever baby he wants me to have. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will be perfectly healthy, but I’ll love it regardless,” I said. “And if my baby needs specialists, then he or she will have them. This is exactly the path that I didn’t want to be on and now you’ve sent me down it anyway.”

  I hung up trembling an
d set about finding a new physician. When I told Charles a week later that I had switched doctors, he wanted to know why. It had to do with my health insurance, I said.

  One of my guiding principles is always to look people in the eye and speak the truth. Even so, telling your father those lies seemed like the loving thing to do. His training might determine his survival, and I was concerned that he might lose his concentration if he was anxious about my pregnancy.

  As I later found out, Charles was keeping secrets of his own. He had alluded to problems at work but refused to be specific. He also did not tell me until weeks after the fact that he had had laser eye surgery to correct his vision so as to avoid having to wear glasses in the heat in Iraq.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” I asked, exasperated. “I would have come to take care of you.”

  “Dana, you didn’t need to be flying here pregnant to look after me. I was fine, and it’s over with now.”

  I was upset even though I had no right to be. What else was he not saying?

  By the time summer faded into fall, I had a definite baby bulge, and the nausea and fatigue had passed. Charles found time late that October to take a break in his training, and I scheduled an ultrasound appointment for the week of his visit. It would be the first time he would see what I looked like carrying his child.

  When he walked into the apartment and saw me standing in front of him, he stared as if I were a rare and fragile flower that he longed to stroke but was too afraid to touch. I laughed and grabbed his hands and placed them on my stomach. He fell to his knees, kissed the spot just below my navel, and rested his head there.

  “You look beautiful, Ma,” he said when he rose to look into my eyes.

  Looking at the sonogram together was magical. I had been attending all my doctor appointments alone until that week and had tried to suppress my sadness at seeing so many other men accompanying their pregnant wives and partners. Now at last my man was beside me.

  The technician called us into an exam room, and I hoisted myself up onto the table and lifted my shirt so she could smear cold conduction gel on my stomach. She pulled a chair next to me for Charles and proceeded to maneuver a wand over my belly. Then, there it was, a head and a spine and tiny little fingers. I heard Charles gasp and then he rose to lean over me. He kissed me with such love in his eyes. Then he sat back down, mesmerized, as the technician pointed to a tiny heart and two little feet. She moved the wand around again, and the little life on the screen began to perform, gulping amniotic fluid and raising a hand near an ear.