God and Jetfire

by Amy Seek

  I could tell she meant something other than the most important difference, which I already knew about: that the baby would come out of me.

  * * *

  Not that that lesson was easy. Jevn and I had just signed up for the free childbirth classes Molly had told us about, and in our first session, the teacher showed us that difference in graphic detail. We sat in front of the television on the carpeted floor of a windowless basement at a crisis pregnancy center. Besides Jevn and me, there were ten unwed girls and about half as many boyfriends. They were not in college or college-bound. They were definitely not studying architecture. But they were mostly unlike us because they planned to keep their babies.

  The scene in the video wasn’t at all like what I’d seen in movies or on television, where women in labor were always screaming at and hitting their husbands, or squeezing their hands until they flinched. Childbirth on TV made you understand it was the worst pain you could ever imagine, and it was always the time when women got back at men for that difference. And for some reason that moment—when the wife reaches out across the divide to strangle her husband—was always accompanied by a laugh track.

  But the birth we watched that evening in class wasn’t a hilarious, bungled race to the hospital. The couple reclined comfortably in bed at home. There weren’t any doctors or nurses. When a contraction came, the mother moaned a little and her husband cradled her head until she fell silent. But in the end, and what left me speechless, was the last sound she made; it was arresting and sincere: the outraged bellow of a large animal, betrayed by its body. A massive head, a horror you never see on television, a bulging perineum, some feces, blood, and other liquids.

  A person came out of a person! It spontaneously erupted from someone’s insides, starting with its black hair, which bobbled in and out for a couple of contractions, and then its face and slick shoulders. It abandoned its container violently, like a parasite discharged from its host, leaving the mother a quiet, crumpled mass, her head tilted back on the pillow.

  I scanned the room; we could all refuse to do this together.

  “Did you see that?” The teacher rewound the video. “Okay, right—there, you guys, that squeeze? That’s called the fetal Heimlich.”

  She pulled her hair to the side with one hand as she picked up a posterboard diagram of a baby, emerging through the mother’s pelvis. “This is when Mom’s perineum presses the baby’s rib cage and forces mucus and amniotic fluid out of its mouth and nose, so it’s ready to breathe. No suctioning required!” she said emphatically. “This doesn’t happen in medicated labors, guys. You have to have a mom whose uterine muscles are awake and alert!”

  After class, I introduced myself to the teacher, who reminded me her name was Nina. I told her I didn’t want it coming out of me, I didn’t want blood, I didn’t want to be naked. I didn’t want candles. There had to be another way. A new and improved, in-between, hybrid way.

  “Listen to you!” She put her hand solidly on my upper arm and held it there. “Believe me, you’re gonna be fine.”

  It wasn’t hard like architecture school, or hard like a piano audition. It wasn’t even hard like carefully crafting an open adoption with your ex-boyfriend. It was impossible—like having a large and living creature burst out of you through your uterus.

  Nina invited me to come to her house that Saturday, where she had me sit on her sofa and watch fifty births on video, Clockwork Orange–style, one immediately after the other. The films spanned the spectrum of geography and culture: African squatting births, births in the rice paddies of China during which farmer-mothers momentarily interrupt their rhythmic threshing to retrieve the newborn from between their legs, New Age water births in places like Vermont and California. Across the world, women were having babies; perineums on every continent deployed the fetal Heimlich; babies from Vancouver to Indonesia sought the breast; moms everywhere were casting off their clothes and letting babies spill out of them.

  When the videos were finished, Nina put her laundry basket on the floor and sat down beside me. “Well…?” she said, smiling and then laughing. I told her that I thought I might let the baby come out that way, but I still refused to be naked when I did. No maternal stupor could make me forget that civilized people wear clothes. She took me under her wing; she said she’d make sure of it.

  Nina told me stories from her own single motherhood that gave me confidence about adoption. She’d gotten pregnant when she was sixteen. Her parents kicked her out of the house, so she lived in a car and then a domestic violence shelter, and then she moved in with a motorcycle gang. One day she called 911 after one of the gang’s children fell down the stairs and cracked its skull. The authorities discovered illegal ID–making equipment, and after that, the gang started threatening her, so she changed her identity and hid for several years. Eventually, she began dating a pastor and thought she was finally safe, but she discovered he was molesting her daughter. Twenty years later, she was still running from the gang, still holding multiple jobs and struggling to support herself and three daughters. She had long blond hair and crisp bangs, like a second-grade school picture, but underneath them she was worn.

  She started teaching free childbirth classes to single moms because she thought she could at least help them get a healthy start. She said pregnancy and birth were as much a part of a mother’s relationship with her child as the lifetime to follow, and if I really was going to go through with an adoption, I had all the more reason to make the most of my short time with my child.

  “Your baby’s going to be beautiful,” she said. She seemed to have limitless energy for other people. “And you’re going to find the right family. You will. I’m praying for you.” She rubbed my knee hard, like someone whose job it is to touch people’s bodies. “Here, eat some grapes.”

  * * *

  A few days later, my structures professor’s wife invited me to dinner, and a studio professor offered me her old maternity clothes. I started being approached by mothers in the grocery store and on the street. They told me swimming would relieve the pressure on my back. That primrose oil would prevent stretch marks. Mothers everywhere were emerging to advise me. It was as if I was a newcomer who’d wandered haplessly into a hidden world, and all its inhabitants, alerted to my arrival, fell in line to initiate me. It was as though there was a secret that only mothers and infertile people knew: that all we are is our bodies, and what we are most meant to do is reproduce them. Our particular choices and interests and talents are incidental; all that matters is the thing that makes every woman exactly the same as every other. And completely different from men.

  An invisible curtain had been drawn, and I was pulled in gently by my elbow. Here was where the gears of the world were turned; here was who, without anyone’s taking note, were turning the gears: not just the women of the world, but the childbearing women, the women whose roundness hinted at their special affiliation.

  One morning on my bike ride to work, I noticed that with every pedal, my thighs had begun to tap the hardness in my abdomen. That fullness felt good. Passing the flat-bellied students on their way to class, I felt physical and fully realized. Pregnancy was pure creative force; it put the late-night efforts of my fellow design students to shame. What was an architect’s aspiration except to mimic that inventive mastery, to replicate the miraculous form? I was building something singularly amazing and I didn’t even have to think about it.

  When I arrived at work, my boss had left a message that he wouldn’t be coming in until the afternoon. We were accustomed to his absence; he always had meetings, but he also seemed to be going through some kind of crisis, all his friends peaking in their careers while he worked for the poor and drove a station wagon. His single indulgence was having the very latest smartphone, and when he’d describe its brand-new features, I would roll my eyes and take comfort in my certainty that I would never own a PalmPilot.

  That day, Zhang Ying was the only other person in the office, so at lunch I asked if she mi
nded my eating an egg out in the open. I peeled it and held my nose, suppressing my gag reflex.

  “That egg smells funny!” Zhang Ying said as she stood up.

  “I know; that’s why I asked. I’m sorry!”

  She came over and inspected it. Having been a vegan my entire adult life, I didn’t know that eggs were not perfectly sealed natural packages. That you could not boil two dozen at once and eat them, day by day, over the course of a month. The flavor was so repulsive from day one that I hadn’t noticed them getting incrementally more repulsive, a bit more blue, a tad more slimy.

  “Amy, it’s rotten!” she said as she nearly slapped it out of my hand, the girl from the land of the thousand-year egg.

  TEN

  It felt like we were getting close to finding a family. Our 111 questions had generated thousands and thousands of answers. It was still February, still a month to decide, but we were focusing our attention on two couples. Jevn liked Jeff and Cindy best. They had, by far, the best profile cover photo. Three pairs of muddy boots lined up on a doorstep. Papa-, mama-, and baby-sized boots. They were a family who explored the dirty world and arrived happily home together.

  “Robert and Deb are good, too,” Jevn said. They lived in Colorado, where Robert was an architect and Deb was a banker. I wouldn’t have liked the banker thing, except that she said she saw her career as a way to help people.

  “Yeah, I really like them,” I said. It turned out that Robert worked for an architecture firm where Jevn had been an intern for several years. They knew some of the same people, people who had directly influenced Jevn’s decision to become an architect. But there was something I didn’t like. In an e-mail referring to all the things we had in common, Robert said that the Japanese character for crisis was a combination of one character meaning danger and another meaning opportunity. Both pregnancy and infertility were, perhaps in our cases, crises, I thought, but the opportunity he was referring to was certainly his own. I ignored this, because we had so many significant things in common.

  “What do you think of that Indiana couple?” Jevn asked. Paula and Erik were theologians who had a two-year-old adopted daughter. We had liked their letter because it was straightforward, without zany captions or margin art, but I had already put them in the no pile.

  “They have the other birth mother they’re talking to, and they said they’re probably moving right around the time I’m due. And, remember? They wouldn’t tell us what names they like.” We’d sent them the 111 questions, but Paula didn’t answer that one. If she withheld simple information from me, I thought, she couldn’t really expect me to be forthcoming with my child.

  But as rigorously as I was scrutinizing everyone, I had a pit in my stomach that made me wary I was in no state to make any judgment at all. The physical reality of pregnancy had finally taken hold; I was distracted and unfocused, exhausted and ambivalent—the last person who should be in charge of someone else’s entire future.

  * * *

  We slid through the door and into class. As we settled onto the carpet, Nina turned and smiled at us. “Hi!” she whispered loudly, lifting her shoulders and waving fast. She was holding a diagram showing a happy cartoon face. “Don’t go to the hospital as soon as you feel your first contractions. If you can smile, that’s how you know you’re not dilated enough; you’ll be waiting there for hours, and they’ll try to medicate you. If you’re nervous and excited and you gotta go somewhere, go to the grocery store and stock up.”

  Emotional Signposts, she explained, were the predictable sequences of feelings and attitudes that mark a certain sequence of physical progressions in labor. The happy face becomes a serious face, and then a very unhappy face as a mother approaches pushing. You can read slight changes in your feelings, instead of fetal monitoring or exams, to know exactly where you are in the progress of labor.

  “Dads, you know you’re about to have a baby when she loses confidence and starts saying, ‘I can’t do it!’” That was when we wouldn’t need confidence anymore, she told us, because the automatic processes within our bodies would have already taken over, and pushing would begin, with or without us.

  Nina had us lie down and pretend we were getting ready to deliver a baby. She told the birth partners to make sure the mothers were breathing by repeating the words Breathe, breathe, breathe, interspersed with encouraging words like You’re doing great.

  “Breathe…,” Jevn whispered awkwardly above me. This was no special breathing, like the panting of Lamaze; it was a steady inhaling and exhaling at the frequency I accomplished involuntarily all the time. I closed my eyes, but I was concentrating on the mind game. What would it feel like to have a person inside me, and then what would it feel like for that person to come out all of a sudden?

  “Are you breathing?” I felt Jevn above me, examining me from different angles. It was strange to be together in this context, to be asked to touch each other, or to simulate such intimate support, when we no longer had any physical contact in the real world. But we couldn’t think about it. I kept my eyes closed. I felt him pause. He pressed his fingers to my wrist. He leaned in and put his ear to my mouth.

  “What are you doing? That’s not how you check my breathing!” I said.

  “Oh!” he whispered. “You didn’t look like you were breathing, so I thought you might be dead.”

  * * *

  Of the many women who reached out to me after learning of my pregnancy, I was most surprised to hear from my history professor, who invited me over early one morning for breakfast. In class, she would stand at the front of the darkened auditorium beside images of Rome projected to twenty feet tall and make you feel like architecture was a worthwhile thing to study.

  I stepped nervously onto her porch and knocked.

  “Amy, hey!” She opened the door and stepped back to invite me in. We didn’t hug. She guided me into the living room, and we sat down at a small table. And then she began to speak in that somber way that had become familiar to me. One mother speaking to another about the burden we by nature bear. She was ready for kids when she had them, and yet, ready as she was, she said she hadn’t anticipated how radically her life would change, while her husband’s life remained largely intact. She said she was the one who wasn’t allowed to forget the kids needed to be picked up from school, she who always made sure they were fed, who left work immediately when they were sick. She’d hoped to share some kind of enlightened partnership, but the asymmetry was ingrained and inescapable. “And, all the more in your situation,” she said, “it will probably appear that Jevn isn’t an equal partner, and he can’t be. You will just have to come to terms with that.”

  There it was again, I thought: the difference between men and women. The most self-evident thing, the least of my concerns, and yet women everywhere kept slipping me notes in secret, ones that said, In the end it is all about that difference, and in the end you are alone. But little did anyone know Jevn. I was always having to tell people that, no, I had not been abandoned by my boyfriend. Yes, astonishingly, he stuck around to help me with the adoption. I was offended for Jevn and myself that people were impressed with his behavior. He was doing exactly what a man should do. And I didn’t see what I would gain by fixating on the difference.

  My professor wasn’t wearing her glasses, and without them I could make out the young person she’d once been, the one who traipsed around Rome and Greece taking the black-and-white photos I loved so much. She said that as happy as she was to be a mother, she felt her child’s birth was an ending, the last day her husband really knew her. And what made it even harder: from his perspective, they’d only that day begun.

  We hadn’t touched the bagels, but I had to get to work. She led me to the door.

  “You’re going to have to keep in mind, you might be an A student under other circumstances, but you can’t expect that of yourself next quarter.”

  I nodded, but I hoped being pregnant would in fact make me more intuitive, more decisive, extra creative, and
that compared with everything else I was going through, school would seem simple.

  “I’m teaching a studio; maybe you should think about taking it. Architecture and the Body. I’ll keep in mind everything that’s going on with you, you know? It might make things a little easier.”

  * * *

  On my way home from work that night, I passed the architecture building, buzzing with fluorescent lights, perpetuating buildings illuminated by fluorescent lights. When I fell asleep, I dreamed that the baby was a cat. It came out of me slippery and wet and licked its paws and cleaned itself. I swaddled it carefully and loved it instantly. And I was relieved; I knew from experience that I could manage a cat. But I felt confident that in the end it would be a girl. If men were so deeply different from women, I couldn’t imagine I’d be creating one in my sleep.

  ELEVEN

  A yellow rubber ducky teetered on the edge of the bathtub. A child’s footstool stood by the sink, a bucketful of bath toys beside the toilet. The walls of the tub were decorated with colorful foam letters, and the shower curtain was a vibrant display of deep ocean life. It looked as though someone had just that morning lifted the baby out of the bath and, token of a life lived fully, neglected to put one last toy back in the bucket. When I went to use the bathroom, I felt I’d entered a secret chamber of their marriage. Sitting on the toilet, you would never believe that a baby didn’t live there or hadn’t disappeared that morning, moments before you arrived.

  The nursery was painted light green, for a girl or a boy. The white slat crib was full of pillows, the shelves a clean display of classic infant toys, wooden blocks, a teddy bear, a pyramid of colored doughnuts. Between them, generous intervals of white space. Everything perfectly positioned, untouched. Books beautifully bound but unbroken. Was it a child’s bedroom or a gallery, exhibiting precious artifacts of infancy, commemorating the fleetingness of childhood? It echoed with a deep stillness. I walked past it back to the kitchen, where Jevn was talking with Bob and Tami.