by Amy Seek
“That was why I became a vegetarian, initially,” I added, and Paula said she was a vegetarian, too.
As I watched Sarah crouching at the edge of the sidewalk, I realized I wanted her for my son’s sister. And as Jevn pointed toward a cornice and told Erik something about the architecture here, I turned back to my conversation with Paula and realized I wasn’t waiting to be disappointed.
* * *
Driving back to Cincinnati, Jevn and I were silent. I think we both felt something big had happened. Finally he spoke.
“I had such a strong instinct to trust them, if they did something I doubted—I think I would question myself.”
I held still, as I sometimes did when Jevn spoke openly. Those moments felt precious and delicate. I wanted to preserve his fragile feeling and my own. It had been building slowly, as detail by detail we’d grown to trust them, and it happened fast, Erik’s arm in the air. It happened as magically as I have ever fallen in love. And that I knew, though I couldn’t know enough to know, was exactly what gave substance to my knowing. Erik’s hand reaching unself-consciously skyward, generous and firm, loosed my imagination. An honest gesture that split the sky and freed me from my own formless and uncertain desires.
Jevn dropped me off at my apartment. Before he left, he reminded me once again of the river, and for the first time I could imagine letting go.
THIRTEEN
When I was little, I kept a list of the things I loved. I rewrote it every night. It included my pets and my family, but knowing that even the loss of a creature as insignificant as an ant would cause the world to collapse, I always ended by writing that I loved everything else, too, even those things I hadn’t mentioned or didn’t know about. Sometimes I thought it was knowing I was an accident that made me love everything so much. Every single thing was something I almost never got to see. But by remembering everything, I hoped to preserve it. This began when the world was very small and my list very short, as it was when I was eight and got my first diary and used it for this purpose. It was given to me by an elderly German man from church who had written on some of its pages already, in letters that all had square corners. He smelled bad and spit when he spoke: “You. Not. Forget!” His words hinted at that idea that consumed me, the certainty of loss.
The eventual disappearance of everything began with our cats, twelve of them, one by one, over the course of my childhood. Then it was the hills, which were leveled to make Walmarts and Kmarts and Targets and telemarketing centers. My dad would tell me those developments were going to help pay for my college education; my mom would refuse to shop there. Then it was the snow, which would often start to fall right on Christmas Eve and linger in the hills through winter. Now it was almost hard to picture there.
Arriving home for spring break, I wanted to show my son all the things I’d loved. I took a bike out to ride my old loop through the hills, but my stomach got in the way. Instead, I drove the car with the windows down, inhaling every twist and turn. I wanted my son to taste them, to remember them deep in his cells. That night, I found the book I’d gotten in Italy, Oh!, and I packed it to take back with me.
School began again in April, and I put away the profiles. Nearing campus the first day, I braced myself. A whole new group of students would be back from their internships and surprised to see me like this. From a long distance away, I saw my friend Brian stop midstride and stare at me. I approached him, embarrassed. But this was only the beginning of the humiliation I would face, returning to school.
“You got your hair cut!” he said, not noticing my girth even as he hugged me. I’d chopped off my hair so I’d have less to think about. Bangs were, in fact, itchy and distracting, but I was glad they delayed the shock of my pregnancy, which came to Brian eventually.
Enormous as I felt, my stomach was the size of a small basketball, more like I was five, not seven, months along. Nina assured me I just carried differently. I gorged myself on raw tofu and raisins, along with eggs and milkshakes, and my midwives reminded me to keep eating more because now I was building his brain. Small as he was, I felt my rib cage was too narrow to contain him. Sometimes he braced himself against my spine and pushed my lower ribs outward or tried to raise them like a garage door. Sometimes, aggravated by his efforts, I tried to help, pulling at my ribs with my hands to stretch them open. Sometimes, when I saw Jevn talking to other girls, I wished my belly were bigger, so I could wield it like a weapon.
* * *
My environmental geography class was held on the other side of campus. I passed McMillan Lawn, where Sleepy Amy and I sometimes studied in the sun. It was where, in the moonlight as we walked, Jevn had asked, “Do you see the angels?” I had wanted to be game, so I said yes, but I searched the sky to pinpoint what he might mean. The glow around the streetlights, the fog at the surface of the asphalt from the rain, or the moon’s illumination of the clouds? I was satisfied that among the visible things, I was seeing something you might call an angel.
“Yeah?” He laughed. “Where?”
As I passed that lawn, I tried to imagine being a regular student just walking to class to do doable work and then relax in the sun, like you were supposed to do in college. I entered an old, normal building, with big, heavy windows you could lift open on a beautiful spring day like that one, straight hallways, rooms in a row, numbered sequentially so you could find them, right angles at every intersection of floor and wall, wall and ceiling.
The professor was a woman in her forties who was naturally beautiful. She read through the syllabus, and I got that beginning-of-school feeling of academic decadence: a whole new field of study would be laid out for me, chapter by chapter. Population dynamics, ozone loss, resource depletion, food webs and energy flow in ecosystems—high-level, philosophically fascinating, and urgent issues. We were talking about the end of energy, and topsoil, and life as we know it. After the adoption, maybe I would quit architecture and become a climate scientist.
When class was over, several students crowded around the professor at the front of the room. Another class was starting when she finally got to me, so we stepped into the hallway. I told her that I was pregnant, that I was doing adoption, and because I might miss some classes for appointments, I thought she should know. She waited for people to pass. Her eyes were big and beautiful, and she gazed at me sympathetically. When the coast was clear, she told me that she was adopted, too. She said she’d never met her birth mother, but she thought adoption was an amazing and selfless thing to do for a child. I stepped back at that. I wasn’t telling her to be congratulated, and it wasn’t about being amazing—it was just about making a reasonable plan and doing it. It was for everyone’s benefit. I explained that I wasn’t doing the old kind of adoption. It was a new and improved kind. I would get to see my son.
“Oh, that’s wonderful!” she said. “He will love you, Amy, believe me. He’ll be so grateful for what you’re doing for him.”
There were so many significant moments still ahead of me that I couldn’t imagine a time when that would be the reassurance I wanted. Right now I just hoped to have a healthy birth, to stay confident about Paula and Erik, and to get through school without incident.
* * *
I returned to the freezing-cold lecture auditorium of the architecture school. The professor showed us a documentary made in the 1970s about the simplest idea imaginable (and yet it had no bearing on the thermostat): people like to congregate in the sun. We watched black-and-white aerial time-lapse images of crowds of people in New York City plazas, moving at the pace of the earth on its axis within the irregular polygon of direct sunlight that inched across the plaza. The camera focused on two men talking. Every few seconds, one would step slightly, and the other would shift in response, and finally they anchored their conversation alongside a crack in the sidewalk. Subconsciously, they moored themselves against an almost imperceptible line and stayed.
Architecture was simply an elaboration of that impulse: to put yourself definitively in rel
ationship to something outside yourself, because even if it is mobile, it’s probably less fleeting than you are. These were the kinds of lessons that made me want to stay in architecture school; they felt as big and important as climate change.
I walked home from my first day back. I’d taken off my jacket and was wearing a bright red maternity shirt my professor had lent me. I felt a confidence I’d never had before, a joyful indigestion, and as I crossed the street, a car that had the right of way stepped on the brakes and waved me along, smiling. It was the same intersection where Sleepy Amy and I had once been hit by a car; it had been going at a slow speed, but we still ended up on the hood, hearts racing.
I began to notice it in other places. I felt I could have crossed a busy road, right in the middle, without looking, and everyone would have happily frozen in place to protect me. Somehow being two made everyone give way to me. People who bumped into me apologized profusely. My child had a ticket I’d never had. Somehow everyone knew this baby was meant to be here.
* * *
One evening, as I was working on my studio project from home, my father called to hear how school was going. “Amyseek! Fromtennessee!” he would always greet me. He didn’t ask about my pregnancy. He asked about Paula and Erik, and I said that, yes, we were still thinking they were the ones. Mom was on the other line. As we talked I looked at my model in progress. My building was a theater, with layers and layers of walls and thresholds guarding a deep interior space, the stage.
“Would you like to hear a silly story about your mother?” my dad asked after he was satisfied things were going well. “I was pulling out of the driveway, and she came running over to the car, waving and flailing her arms. Walterrrrrr! She was so excited. I stopped the car and she came up to the window, and do you know what your dear old mummy said?”
“… No?”
“She told me she’d just seen a robin.” He laughed. “That’s what she was so excited about! Flailing her arms!” He liked to tease her, but the way tiny, everyday things made her happy was not so secretly among his favorite things about her.
“It was two robins!” my mother exclaimed from the other line.
When I hung up the phone, my heart sank. I wanted my son to know my mother. I wanted my dad to take him for walks. I wanted my parents to want him.
* * *
I was thinking all the time about letting go. I only wanted to let go of my son in the way that all mothers eventually have to—with some certainty I’d provided everything he would need in my absence. It wasn’t enough to entrust him to Paula and Erik; I wanted somehow to give him a deeper equipment, something he would keep with him inside. I began taking walks to Mount Storm, lifting my shirt to let him feel the orange warmth of the sunset on his surface. I wanted to plant that warm light in him like the smallest seed of desire for simple things: light, and wind, and shadows. His hunger for those things would lead him to every place I would have shown him. And then, I thought, I could let him go, like Moses in the woven basket.
* * *
One evening I was walking down the grand staircase on my way home for the night, and I recognized two boys I hadn’t seen since fall coming from the other direction. As they got nearer, they saw my stomach.
“Whoa! You’re pregnant?” They studied me with the earnestness of animals. “Can I touch it?” They each aimed a single index finger at my abdomen and slowly made contact.
“It’s hard!?” one said gleefully to the other. And to me, as if I might make sense of the surprising firmness.
It was the kind of pure curiosity I wanted to find in Jevn, but he remained unmoved by my body and stoic in the face of my anger, which came in crashing waves he’d simply wait out, forgiving and forgetting. We’d done everything we could do to prepare for the adoption; there was nothing else I could demand from him. That loss of control left me unmoored, and I tried desperately to draw him back, picking fights to regain his attention, but he wouldn’t indulge me. He returned to his own life and became a fresh mystery to me. While I was trying only to find adequate alternatives for the most basic and necessary tasks—bending to tie my shoes, leaning over a drafting board to draw—I wondered constantly where he was; I imagined him happily relieved of his responsibilities and free to focus on someone new. I wrote to Paula about it. She didn’t mention Jevn in her response. She just said she thought I must be feeling alone in some very important ways.
Only sometimes Jevn would catch me off guard by reassuring me that the pain was real and that we were both feeling it. He called me from Colorado when he went for a weekend to visit his family and to collect some old photographs to give to our son.
“The sight of babies has sunk me,” he said. “I’m looking for stuff to bring back to give him, but I wish I could share memories with him most of all.”
* * *
Paula and Erik visited for Easter. We had a weekend of double dates, and when they dropped Jevn and me off at my apartment for the last time, it felt like something should happen. Every time we saw each other, our connection felt stronger. It called for some gesture, some expression of what was happening between us. But we just fumbled our goodbyes, as heartfelt and inadequate as a failed first goodnight kiss.
They sent frequent news from home. They’d started telling friends about the potential adoption, and the prospect had accelerated their decision to move to North Carolina, where Paula would begin her Ph.D.
The update on us is: we have bought a house! And, on the topic of trust … we bought it sight unseen!
She said she’d heard a story about a Native American tribe who remembered a child’s birthday as the day his mother first thought of him; on that day, the mother would begin to compose a song, which remained uniquely his throughout his life. I suppose I’m finding myself humming a little, she said. I liked the feeling that we were pregnant together.
They assured me they would allow their child to be an atheist—broad-mindedness was important to me. But they said that they would have a lot of conversations about it. They said they thought of their spiritual life as always evolving, always deepening and changing. We really want our home to be a place where questions are asked and answers aren’t given out quickly. I guess we’d like Sarah to think of her life with God as an adventure, not as a script for the right things to do or say.
Paula wrote that she’d learned from her agency in North Carolina that the baby must be given Jevn’s or my last name and not theirs at birth, because there can be no official indication that you and Jevn and Erik and I know each other! Isn’t that bizarre? It is an officially “anti–open adoption state”! Paula said that it felt right anyway, properly reflecting the reality of the situation. When he arrived, he would be ours, and only after his adoption would his last name change and he’d become theirs. She added that she didn’t mean to assume anything, speaking about the adoption as though it were a certainty.
In those early stages, liking them didn’t feel like losing my son. It felt nothing like building a house together, intimately and over months, that wouldn’t in the end have room for me. Our relationship had a beautiful lightness, but it didn’t feel like having my son lifted, gently, out of my arms.
* * *
The school term ended uneventfully; I got a C for the first time in studio. And for the first time, I had no feelings about my project. I returned to my internship downtown, just as we began another session of birth classes. Nina stood before the class, tugging at a piece of paper with both hands, making a harsh clapping sound.
“See this? I can’t pull it apart? Now…” She used scissors to make a tiny cut at one edge. She tugged once, and the paper ripped in half. “That’s an episiotomy, people! The doctor is going to say your perineum isn’t opening wide enough to allow the head to come out. He’s going to say you just need a little cut, but that is going to weaken the whole surface, and you’ll tear—I tore all the way to my anus! I was unrecognizable down there for weeks! But the line is nice and straight and clean, so your doctor
can sew it up easily and get back to his golf game.”
She showed us how we could press back on the head as it pushed at the perineum to allow the opening to work its way wider, stretching more gradually. Then you might not tear at all.
“You moms who have had babies vaginally before, you have what’s called a proven pelvis. Don’t let them tell you you need any of it—Cesarean, episiotomy, epidural. I’m telling you, they’re going to look for every opportunity.”
This class wasn’t held in a basement. Nina had invited us to sit in for free on a regular birth class for married women who had planned their pregnancies. There were windows and chairs, and we pulled the blinds to watch childbirth videos that were no longer shocking to me.
These mothers were having more problems with their pregnancies than the teenage moms in my other class had had. One had feet so swollen she could no longer wear regular shoes. Another had acne and rashes all over her skin.
“I want to make sure you guys understand all the positions you can try. You don’t have to lie down or stay in bed. Moms, let’s sit down on a birth ball, and dads, you stand behind the moms and we’ll practice lifting them as they have a contraction.”
Jevn stood behind me and lifted me, stiffly, as if I were a heavy bookcase.
“Your pelvis is not one solid bone; it can move and open. Does anyone know how snake jaws work?”
* * *
In mid-June, Paula and Erik returned to Ohio for a meeting at the adoption agency. We introduced them to Molly and talked about planning an entrustment ceremony. Molly suggested that we lay out, in detail, how we hoped our future contact might work, but because we agreed we wanted a very family-like relationship, one that would grow and change naturally, we also agreed not to put anything down on paper.
