Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  I’d like to write at great length about the birth—paragraphs upon paragraphs. I don’t want to leave “The Baby” behind on the page as I did at the adoption agency. As long as I’m writing, she’s still mine.

  But even before I have to stop, I don’t want to write about how she was born, how difficult the labor was, how afterward I looked at her and fed her and touched her. Writing about that means leaving it behind again, just as stopping writing does. The closer I come to the long labor, the delivery, the four days in the hospital, the harder it is to write. The closer I come to the birth, the less I remember. These are the cold spots where there are no memories. They turn from the air, from the light; they suck up energy in the form of darkness.

  Somehow I was at the hospital, in labor. In her book about pregnancy and birth, Geraldine Lux Flanagan quotes Dr. Samuel Reynolds, a biologist who has studied the mechanics of labor, as saying that there are three Ps in the process of laboring to give birth: the Passage, the Passenger, and the Power. Ms. Flanagan adds another: Psychology. “Certainly,” she writes, “attitudes are involved in the progress of birth. The length of labor, the welfare of the passenger and mother will depend on these three, and perhaps four, Ps.”

  The labor was a long one. Finally the doctor, one of the ones who’d bent over me and listened to the heartbeat and told me all was well, used forceps to pull the baby out, away from me, and into the world. The nurse said, “It’s as if your body doesn’t want to let the baby go. You’re working and working, but your body doesn’t seem to want to let the baby come out.”

  I asked the nurse whether the baby was a boy or a girl.

  “Your baby is a beautiful little girl,” she said.

  I began to cry.

  “Did you want a boy so badly?” she asked, sounding amused.

  “No,” I said. “I wanted a girl.” That’s why I was crying.

  There were four women—mothers—to a room. Because I was allowed to give my baby her bottle, the other women may not have known I wasn’t going to keep her. The nurses knew; it must have been on my chart. I remember being visited by a hospital social worker who discussed the adoption with me. She was concerned about me. I remember a nurse who told me to sleep on my stomach so my breasts wouldn’t hurt so much. I remember sympathy and kindness.

  The baby was perfect. Her face was beautiful, and she had a soft brown birthmark across the bridge of her nose. When I held her, I had the feeling that she was given to me first and taken away last, as if the nurses knew this was all I was going to have of her. I wanted to hold her all day, every day. I wanted to hold her forever.

  When we left the hospital, the social worker gave me a blanket to wrap the baby in; I think she bought it herself. Jake says that in the elevator, leaving the hospital, I told him I wanted to keep the baby. I don’t remember saying that then. I do remember telling him that at other times. But I recall exactly what his reply was whenever the subject came up: He would leave me immediately if I kept the baby.

  Everything else is blank. We must have taken a taxi from the hospital to the adoption agency, from the Upper East Side to the Upper West. I have an image of the foster mother waiting in a room on one side of a wide corridor, and our being taken into a room on the other side. I must have signed papers.

  I named the baby Jessica. I’d been told her adoptive parents lived in Westchester, that they were Jewish, that they were Democrats, and that her father was an engineer. They would change her name, but keep the initial J. She was their first baby. They hoped to adopt another.

  I want to remember more. I want to remember holding the baby in the taxi; I want to remember whom I gave her to; I want to remember what I felt. I want to remember how she looked. I want to remember everything. I want to remember being pregnant, and giving birth, and being in the hospital. But when I gave away The Baby, I lost the memories, too. I don’t think I would have survived otherwise.

  I look inside. I blank everything else out. I notice the tears forming in my eyes, without being aware of them until they’re there, but then I ignore them. I reassure myself—it’s safe now, I can bear it now, truly I can. I want to remember, I even need to remember. I focus on the glassy surface of my memory and I push, as if I were giving birth to memories.

  I wait.

  Nothing happens. Nothing comes.

  The next thing I remember is standing on the corner of Third Avenue and 23rd Street, unable to move.

  16. JIL

  BIRTH

  In the spring of 1981, a few weeks before my shrunken, changed brother came home from college, I awoke in the predawn darkness, a searing pain on the right side of my stomach. I couldn’t sit up, I couldn’t bend, I could barely breathe.

  “Len,” I whispered. I had trouble turning my head toward him. “There’s something wrong.”

  He helped me dress and took me to the emergency room in a taxi, where a sonogram revealed that I had a cyst in my right ovary.

  “The size of a peach,” my gynecologist said cheerfully when he showed up a couple of hours later. “It’s a dermoid,” he continued, while I tried to focus. I was light-headed from taking only shallow breaths for several hours.

  “What’s a dermoid?” I whispered.

  “It’s sort of an egg cell that begins to reproduce without fertilization. It’s fascinating, actually.” He tapped the sonogram. “It can develop hair, bones, nerve tissue. Look,” he said as he pointed to a small, white fuzz: “Here’s a tooth.”

  “Kind of like the immaculate conception,” I wheezed. He laughed.

  The next morning I had surgery to remove the cyst, which turned out to be more of a grapefruit than a peach. The operation went well, and when I awoke from the anesthesia a few hours later in my bright, sunny room, my mother was sitting next to my bed, a magazine in her lap.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up,” she said. “The doctor said everything went fine. Lenny went to get something to eat.”

  She looked as if she’d been sitting there for days, like a woman whose train has failed to come, but she has nowhere else to go.

  I wasn’t sorry to see my mother there. Since I was a little girl, I always liked my mother more when I was sick; it was the only time she was tender with me, the only time she touched me—to feel my forehead for a fever, to stroke my arms with watery rubbing alcohol, to smooth my sweaty hair or clean my face with a warm washcloth. Hospitals were her milieu. At home, there was always too much of her. But all that energy, all that pugnacity, made her the perfect person to have on your side in a crisis. If you needed a shield, a guard dog, you needed her. The best defense, I knew from experience, was my mother.

  When I was in fifth grade, I brought home a report card that contained, for the first time in my life, a B; in fact, several of them. My mother was horrified. I told her what my plump, prissy teacher had explained to the class: Miss Barr believed that giving straight As didn’t leave students with anything “to strive for.”

  The next morning, my mother drove me to school, a rare occurrence. We got there early, before any other kids arrived. In the empty classroom, I sat down at my desk nervously. My mother calmly explained to Miss Barr that there was something wrong with my grades. Miss Barr calmly explained her belief that children needed something to reach for.

  “My daughter reached for As,” my mother said. “And she got them.”

  I could see the veins on her neck tighten. I could tell that Miss Barr could see them, too.

  “Is there anything wrong with my daughter’s work?” She leveled a look at Miss Barr that resembled the gaze a cheetah directs at a downed antelope.

  “Is there anything wrong with my daughter’s work?” she repeated, louder this time. I held my breath.

  Miss Barr shook her head. “Her work is excellent,” she said.

  “Then you should give her the grades she deserves for excellent work,” my mother said. She stood up and put out her hand. “Thank you.”

  The following marking period I received str
aight As.

  That sunny morning in the hospital, I knew my painkillers would never be late, my hot meals would be hot, and my cold drinks would be cold. I knew the nurses would come when I buzzed and the doctors would be asked all the right questions. I would get excellent care, and, best of all, I would be spared her harsh words, prying questions, and punishing criticism. She would treat me gently and lovingly and direct her anger at someone else.

  I turned my head on the pillow to look at her. She was staring out the window onto East End Avenue. Her face looked pinched and pale.

  “I want to tell you something,” she said. For a moment I thought there was some bad news. But then I realized that my mother did not look sad. She looked scared and still, like someone who has made a terrible, painful decision.

  She didn’t look at me but began to speak to the pale green wall eight feet away.

  “I got my period for the first time when I was fourteen,” she said. “I was terrified; I didn’t know what it was. Nobody talked to me about it. Your grandmother could never talk about things like that.”

  Why was she telling me this now? I wanted to stop her, but the drugs in my system were powerful, and her voice was a monotone, lulling me.

  “My mother sent me to a nurse at the clinic in the neighborhood to tell me what it was. It wasn’t bad at first. But every month it got worse. When I was fifteen, I had to stay home from school for a week every month, sometimes more. The bleeding was awful, like a hemorrhage. I missed so much school I was falling behind, and I was a very good student until then. By the time I was sixteen, nothing could stop the pain. I would heat up an iron and put it on my skin with just a thin cloth in between. I still have the burn marks on my stomach.”

  She paused to draw a long breath. “Finally, my parents took me to some local doctor. I don’t even think he was a gynecologist. My mother could barely explain to him what was wrong, she was so embarrassed. He didn’t even examine me. He just put me in the hospital and operated. I wasn’t even sure what he was doing. No one told me anything.”

  She sighed, looked out the window again. “When I left the hospital two weeks later, I didn’t have the pain anymore—but I couldn’t have children. I don’t remember who told me that: I was sixteen, and I could never have children.”

  She turned, finally, toward me, looking drained, and drawn. “We wanted you so much,” she said. “We waited six years for you, four more for your brother—a very long time.”

  Then she turned away and stared out the window. The drugs were pulling me under and she was blurring, the sunny window was fading. I fell asleep and when I woke up the magazine was on the chair, but she was gone.

  My gynecologist said that the operation was a success. My right ovary was intact, and it should have no effect on my ability to have children. He was right. Less than a year later, just a few months after Kenny died, I was pregnant.

  At my first visit to the Maternity Center on the Upper East Side, the midwife asked me for my family history.

  “I don’t have one,” I said. “I’m adopted.” The midwife, a thin, warm, older woman, looked up.

  “No information at all?” she asked with a heavy Kentucky accent.

  “No.” I wondered if this was a problem.

  “So this will be your first blood relative,” she said, smiling.

  I was confused. I had so disconnected myself from the concept of blood that even becoming a mother didn’t make me think about the woman who had given birth to me for a minute.

  “You’ll have a blood connection to someone,” she said.

  I still didn’t seem to be getting it.

  “The baby—someone will look like you, and maybe have your talents or interests, or your health issues. A real relation.”

  It was like explaining God to an atheist: Why does it matter what God looks like or what his powers are, if you don’t believe in him?

  I nodded to please her, and tried to sound more enthusiastic. “Yeah… I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  I loved being pregnant. I was growing a new life! And I was good at it—the baby grew and grew without my doing a thing. I read every book I could find on pregnancy. I took a class on labor and delivery, breast-feeding, and child care. At my seven-month checkup, the midwife checked my vitals and told me I was made for childbearing and should consider a large family. I felt like an earth mother, huge and womanly. I felt, for once, that I was good at something important, that I understood the rules, that I was normal.

  It never occurred to me that the one thing I was good at was the one thing my mother could never do. Although I didn’t understand why, I knew she was treating me differently. Unlike every other event in my life, she now had no advice and no criticisms. Other than the infrequent secondhand suggestion (“Estelle says you shouldn’t eat garlic when you’re pregnant; it’s bad for the baby”), she didn’t have much to say, and she even occasionally asked my opinion (“I heard about these amnio-something tests—are you thinking of having one?”). It was a revelation. I felt more like her equal, more like an adult, than I ever had before.

  The arrival of a grandchild gave everyone something positive to focus on after the death of my brother. It pointed us toward the future. Although my mother never spoke of my brother, and removed every picture of him from the house, closing the door to his room the day he died and, as far as I knew, never opening it again, his death was a long, dark shadow. This baby lifted the darkness, and moved us away from the past.

  My marriage, which had seemed shaky for several years, was secured by the pregnancy. Although we hadn’t been trying, we also hadn’t been actively avoiding pregnancy, leaving it mostly to chance. We’d been married nine years, and seemed incapable of making a major decision: Stay married? Split up? Have a baby? When the accident happened, we were thrilled. Although a baby seemed absurd, it also seemed exciting and wonderful—a new reason to be a grown-up.

  On a cold day in February, my first son was born. Damien looked like a combination of Winston Churchill and Alfred Hitchcock, with blue eyes, pink skin, and a round, bald head to match his round, bald belly. From the first moment, he was strong-willed, stubborn, and extremely focused.

  I wish I could say I took to motherhood the way I took to pregnancy. I wish I could say how much I loved it, how much I loved mothering my baby. I wish it more than I have ever wished anything in my life.

  Damien was a cranky baby, not colicky, but demanding. He rarely slept, and getting him to fall asleep required lengthy, elaborate combinations of walking and rocking and nursing. He ate every two hours around the clock, and each nursing session took about forty-five minutes, which meant I spent about nine hours of every day with a baby hanging from my nipples. I never slept more than an hour and a half at a time, and rarely more than three or four hours a day.

  Most of my friends were working, and I missed work almost as much as I missed sleep. But most of all, I was terribly ashamed of how much I hated being trapped at home with this baby. I resented his intrusion into my life, his endless demands. I resented having to put his needs ahead of mine. And I felt embarrassed for feeling that way. I was lonely and sad and nearly crippled by a sense of failure.

  I had fantasies of giving him away to childless strangers who would be so much better at this than I was. I felt rage, fear, and tremendous, overwhelming shame.

  Years later, I read that many female adoptees get pregnant early, often as teens. Some experts think it’s an unconscious attempt to imitate their birth mothers. Like abused children who grow up to become abusers, the statistics for adoptees who abandon their children are higher than normal.

  I did not give my baby up for adoption. But there are other ways to abandon a child.

  In the mornings, my husband left for work and dread bloomed in my stomach like a dark flower. It was the end of a cold, wet winter that led into a cold, wet spring. We lived in a small apartment in an old brownstone. In the cold and the rain that never stopped, I rarely left those two rooms, rar
ely showered or dressed, and almost never saw other people.

  I remember standing over his crib while he writhed, awake and fussy, still in my nightgown in midafternoon, still unwashed, running on two hours’ sleep. I remember looking down at him in fury, fantasies running through my head of closing the door behind me and leaving him to cry while I walked away alone and in silence.

  I begged him. “Please be quiet. Please go to sleep. Please, please.” I was angry and afraid to tell anyone about my anger—afraid of the judgments, the condemnation, the recognition of my failure.

  I loved him fiercely, powerfully, and inadequately. Love was not something I doubted. I often thought of how much my mother loved me, how smotheringly, how wrongly. And now here I was, a child in emotional development if not in fact, a child with a child, with a love that sometimes knocked me off my feet, and only made me feel more ashamed of how poorly I showed that love.

  When spring finally took root, I put him in the stroller and walked through Central Park for miles, the only time he was quiet and peaceful. Sometimes I stopped in a playground or on a park bench. If another mother talked to me, I pretended. I acted the way I thought a new mother was supposed to act. Nervous and terrified that someone would see through me and realize what a failure I was, I pretended to be happy and confident.

  It took years for me to feel like a mother. It took years before I was comfortable with my child, before I found the joy, the wondrous intimacy and pleasure of motherhood.

  I wish I could say that I took myself to a good therapist and worked my way through my problems so that I could be a better mother to him. But I was not courageous. I judged myself and feared the judgment of others. I was terrified of someone else saying to me what I said to myself: I was not normal.

  If I could do anything over in my life it would be my first son’s early years, so I could love him and be with him in the way that he deserved. I think he has forgiven me for what he didn’t get, for what I was unable to give him. I often think he is a better son than I deserve. I am still working on forgiving myself.