by Amy Seek
He smiled at me gently, but the fat folds of his face kept it slack, tinged with sadness, as though he could see something over the horizon I couldn’t. He had never hesitated to talk about his personal life, or God, or death, as a way of talking about architecture. Or maybe what I liked so much about him was that he talked about architecture only as a way of getting at those things.
Jevn returned in the afternoon, just before another professor stopped by with a gift, a toy that was black-and-white-striped with a few splashes of color, a product, he explained, of the latest research in newborn visual development. Jevn was very close to this professor, but I didn’t like him. He entered awkwardly, not suited to social visits, not scaled for intimacy, and then he sat on the edge of the bed and grinned as though it was all very amusing.
* * *
Paula and Erik didn’t arrive until later in the afternoon, and I recall only that Jevn and Erik went together to the solarium. It seemed they had more in common at that moment than Paula and I did. My motherhood was engulfing and absolute, while hers was contained and in question. But Erik and Jevn could perhaps share the same disbelief about fatherhood, that same tentative and abstract connection my theory professor had described. Jevn said they’d talked about something of the sort; Erik suggested that all fathers were, in a way, adoptive fathers.
When they left, Jevn told me he enjoyed conversation with Erik. It often seemed that the things Jevn felt most deeply, he expressed with the least elaboration. He would point to only the most self-evident reality, and you’d know that the entire, infinitely more complex truth was still hiding in the bushes; this was just its tail. I knew he was telling me he wanted them to have Jonathan. That he trusted them, and that even after so recently meeting his son and having enjoyed his fatherhood for so few hours, he was ready. The world may be reconfigured, but that feeling about them hadn’t changed. I didn’t respond.
But then, visiting hours were over, and we were alone. I walked around our room in only my hemorrhoid pad and panties. I’d been sponged clean, but I was still caked with spit and vomit and residual blood, my son’s and my own, the humble regalia of motherhood. I came out of the bathroom, breasts first, pelvis proven, and Jevn cringed and asked me please to put on clothes. I argued that both the nurses and my son needed constant access to my body. And my boundaries had been redrawn; I was inside out, my precious interiors could now be passed around the room. Any gesture of modesty would have to extend outward to enclose him. Jevn sighed. In clothes, I walked to and from the solarium to gauge my injuries and to try to move at the speed of real life. Sometimes I practiced carrying my son, like my turquoise lunchbox, to see if I could imagine carrying that weight forever, and to see if I could let it go.
* * *
Women are built to bear babies—that was what Nina told me to reassure me that the pains of labor would be bearable. Our bodies contain ancient wisdom and animal strength; when labor begins, she promised, I would know just what to do. But my next step had fewer precedents in nature. Were women built to give babies away? What ageless detachment, what primitive reserves of indifference, could I count on in a moment like this? What could I find in the pages of my workbook to persuade me it could be done—what so many people had told me, with certainty, they could never do? What did Molly, what did anyone, really know about that?
I wanted thunder to clap and the mouth of the world to devour me before I could sign papers if it wasn’t right. I wanted my own body, still bleeding, to tremble the pen out of my hand before it could renounce my motherhood. But there was no question what I would do. My mother was proud of how carefully I’d prepared. My father called it an unmitigated disaster, mitigated. Molly had never seen a couple work so hard to find the right family, and my professors were impressed that I did it all while keeping up with school. My boss didn’t mind that I hadn’t come in to work since Monday; he told me from his PalmPilot he knew this would take some time.
As I went to sleep that night, Jevn in the chair beside me, I tried to imagine the pain of giving up a child—a pain more mysterious than childbirth, one no one could reassure me about. I tried to feel it. The magnitudes and velocities and shapes and frequencies of the sorrow—as I’d experience it the next day, and then, years later, after the loss had weaved and wound its way through all the fibers of my life. But I could only imagine it as a lump sum. A single impact. A loss of oxygen. Falling off a cliff. Pushing my head through a windshield. Things that made me flinch at night as I fell asleep thinking that soon I would sign the papers. I woke up breathless, the air knocked out of me. In my mind I had taken one step too far toward an unimaginable future—and I fled back, waking with a start—to return myself to the fork in the road that was still accessible to me in the early light of morning.
Sometimes it wasn’t my imagination that woke me. Sometimes it was my son, shifting slightly. Aroused by the gentle first contractions of hunger, pressing his tongue lightly to the roof of his mouth in the tender beginnings of his strongest reflex. And I was like a tool calibrated to register the early tremors of an earthquake; I was ripping through the surface of my sleep before his still semiexploratory movements had organized themselves into want.
I understood the risks associated with the intimate bonding of breast-feeding and sleeping together. Lying there beside my son as he smacked his jaw in the darkness, I was reminded powerfully of the warnings detailed in my workbook. But what more reasonable first test of whether you should let go than whether you can? Natural childbirth, breast-feeding, “rooming in” were not, after all, responsible for creating the dangerous bond. The dangerous bond was already present.
* * *
Forty-eight hours in, the hospital began to prepare our discharge. It was the natural moment to give my son to his new parents. I could return to the only life I knew, and my son would never touch the things of my world and rearrange them. But while Jevn filled out paperwork, I found myself clinging to the letter of the law. I had seventy-two hours; that meant twenty-four left. I wandered the hallways while he worked, looking in at the other mothers. There were mothers eating Doritos and receiving cards and balloons and flowers. Motherhood was perhaps no less brand-new and mysterious for them, but they had their lifetimes to make sense of it. How could I make a decision when I’d had only a glimpse of motherhood? How could I know if it was a thing I could live without? What was the meaning of wanting such things—your own heart, your own cells? Are these desires we should have to defend?
I’d become another kind of creature, and for all I knew my child was some new and necessary subsistence. The smell of his head could comprise my new universe. My food was the way he blinked his eyes; my breath was when his elbows straightened. What we had was not yet even a relationship. I could see that he was a person outside me, but I was unable to experience for him those things we experience for other people: sympathy, concern, interest. He was a satellite creature of myself. His return gaze closed our systems. He folded easily into my new hollow. What was the meaning of giving him away? Who thought now was a good time to do that?
There was something I still needed to know. I couldn’t possibly know what. Giving him away wasn’t possible, it wasn’t possible, it wasn’t possible. But I couldn’t tell anyone this, that I was rethinking the whole plan. I would make enemies of everyone who had supported me; my entire scaffolding would be ripped away. I just wanted seventy-two hours, that was all.
* * *
We had to leave the hospital, but we couldn’t take him home because if we did, Molly and our workbook had warned us, it was unlikely we’d go through with an adoption. Instead, one of my friends arranged for us to stay overnight in the hotel where she worked. Jevn glanced angrily at me as he helped me pack our things, including a car seat lent to us by a crisis pregnancy center. He rolled me in the wheelchair, my son in my arms, to the discharge area. Someone admired Jonathan in passing and asked, inexplicably, if Jevn and I were siblings. We both smiled, confused. But I tried at that moment to imagin
e what it was we were, having had a baby we were going to give up. Our relationship cut short by the thing that is supposed to be binding. I could just see the light of actual day, through the vestibule and the automatic exit doors, admitting measured breaths of warm air into the refrigerated hospital lobby. It was sunset. I would become a real mother, and I would know what we were, when that light fell on us in the real world.
We were stopped before we passed the threshold. The discharge hadn’t been fully processed. We returned to our room, where the nurse told us, reprovingly, that we’d missed dinner. No one seemed to care about my insurance, which wouldn’t cover another night in the hospital without medical necessity. I sat back down on the bed, and Jevn took the chair beside me. Dusk fell, and trays of food were brought in. Nurses picked up where they had left off, each one teaching a different trade, touching me as though motherhood was a thing that was everyone’s to grab and adjust.
I’d been warned that once the staff knew about the adoption plan, they might not be willing to give me attention, but in my few days in the hospital, I’d experienced only the opposite. They’d given me a full introduction to my body’s new functions. Nurses showed me how to pull him onto my nipple when his jaw was relaxed to get a nice, open latch. One stuck her hand into my abdomen, all the way to my spine, to demonstrate that my muscles had split with pregnancy and I’d need exercise to restore them. They taught me how spraying myself with warm water out of a bottle would ease the initial pain of peeing. They showed me how to re-create with a blanket the tightness and comfort of the womb. When I had arrived two days ago, I didn’t know how to change a diaper, but everything I had to learn had been mastered already, and the nurses shared their secrets generously. They smiled at my son as though he were the only baby in the postpartum wing, and I the only mother.
A nurse arrived with my discharge just as we’d begun to think we’d have to stay another night in the hospital. She was joined by several other nurses carrying blankets and diapers, which they stuffed into Jevn’s blue duffel bag. They brought plastic bags for a few things that wouldn’t fit: a spray bottle, some extra nursing pads and diapers, a small manual breast pump. Then there was no more packing to do; they just stood there, lingering. Finally, one of them asked if she could say a prayer for us. They put their hands on my shoulders and asked God to give me the courage to keep my son.
When we pulled out of the hospital parking lot, I watched everything go past—things that had once been familiar. We passed the university and the park. The studio lights in the architecture building glowed brightly. The rich grain of the world I’d been so enmeshed in was smooth and small, like I was high above it, still in the upper levels of the hospital. Like my new world was bound by bigger and smaller things.
* * *
And soon I was sitting in a heavy chair nursing my son while Jevn stood, and sat, and paced. He was frustrated. In no version of the plans we’d so carefully made were we ever camped out at a hotel in the suburbs with Jonathan. I ignored him. I was entranced, watching Jonathan at my breast. It surprised me to find it so beautiful; breast-feeding had always seemed somehow vulgar or incestuous to me. But then none of my maternal instincts were speakable; I wanted to swallow him, to squish him, to kiss his mouth. My motherhood was so staggering and strong, it searched every avenue to express something superlative.
I asked Jevn to take a picture. If I could document that special angle, his tiny chin bending toward his sternum, his fingers curled in pause, I thought I would have all I wanted. And then we could move on with our plans. Jevn sighed forcefully but took out his camera.
“Can you hold him like you want him?” he asked as he aimed the lens. “Is it his profile you want? Just, like, the top of his head?”
“Yeah, the head, it doesn’t have to be perfect. Are you getting his nose?”
“Just his nose?”
“Sort of like his head, and his chin, and his nose.”
“Do you want his eyes?”
Jevn liked watching Jonathan, but he had closed a door. He did exactly what I asked; he clicked the camera, but he couldn’t capture it. It was something you could really only see from where I was sitting.
* * *
I don’t think he was surprised when, the next morning, seventy-two hours had passed, and I still wasn’t ready. My legal protections expired, I had only my own boundaries. I was accountable for every step. I leaned heavily on one excuse: that I wanted to nurse Jonathan through to the end of the colostrum. The colostrum, a fatty substance that precedes the arrival of breast milk and lasts for several days, carries antibodies, their exact balance naturally calibrated to the needs of the child. Nina told me that people who receive the whole colostrum as babies will have stronger immune systems throughout their lives.
I don’t know if anyone believed me. All I know is that I ended up in my apartment with my son. No crib, no rattles, no baby clothes, and no car seat.
SIXTEEN
My parents and Jevn’s mother had arrived. My sister, too, from China. They were all staying at the same hotel nearby. Paula and Erik were making short visits every day from Dayton, an hour’s drive away. I was in constant conversation with them, telling them, I think I will sign tomorrow. I spent most of my time sitting on my low futon, my son lying on his back on my thighs. I looked at him intently, searching for conviction. During one of these moments, my sister paused to admire me from a distance, leaning on the wall in my bedroom. She had knitted a hat for Jonathan in China. It made us laugh when she put it on his head—it was at least three sizes too big. It was amazing to see how small he was compared with the smallest head she could imagine from the other side of the world. She was still offering to move back to help raise him, but I didn’t take her seriously. She called him Lìu, even though his name was now official: Jonathan—followed by my last name, and then Jevn’s.
Jonathan looked blankly back at me, squirming lazily, squeezing his fists, marching slowly with his legs, and I dropped tears on his chest.
“This is such a good experience for you,” she said.
Jevn’s mother and my parents came over; our families filled my apartment, someone sat in my light blue wingback chair, people squatted on the edge of my futon. Nina joined us with photographs of the birth. One in which the three of us—Jevn cradling my head, my mouth fallen open to take a breath and my son bloody at my chest—look like we’ve fled a brutal battle and collapsed in the first safe place we could find.
Jevn’s mother wanted to hold Jonathan. She asked if she could take him away to spend time with him, maybe keep him for a night, just grandma and grandson; Jonathan was her first grandchild. I told her no. Every day I thought I would sign the papers. Every night I thought would be my last.
* * *
But for all the activity around us, the question hanging heavily over our heads, it was a period of strange pause. Jevn and I were parents, and our son was watching us. There were moments we forgot everything else.
“What time is it, Jon? What time is it?” Jevn asked Jonathan, who was lying on his back on my bed one afternoon, looking, vaguely curious, back at Jevn. “Is it time … for … kisses? Mwhamwahmwha!” Jevn attacked from above, and Jonathan wriggled. Then he turned to me. “Erik told me when Jonathan gets older, they’d feel comfortable enough to let us take him for the summer. That’d be really good. To show him Colorado.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. I was looking at Jonathan, worried about how little he cried. I thought babies were supposed to cry; it made you know they were working properly: breathing, and desiring, and responding to disappointment.
“I want to see if we can get him to cry,” I said, taking his bear away from him. He looked at me. “Are we being mean, boy? Aren’t you going to cry?” It was fun to tease him, to play as if there could be any reality other than my insatiable drive to protect him.
“I bet if we tickle you, you’ll do something!” Jevn said, wriggling a finger at the folds of Jonathan’s neck. “It’s sneeze time!
Sneeze for us!” Jonathan had a series of faces, and gestures, and stretches, and sneezes that we wanted, somehow, to capture. We put a tape recorder on the bed beside him, but most of the things weren’t audible, and he wouldn’t do any of them on command. He opened his mouth blankly like he might yawn or sneeze. His head fell side to side slowly, as he gained and lost control of his neck muscles.
“He’s just looking for something to eat,” I said, recognizing the particular slackness in his jaw. “Is that what you’d do if you were in the wild, boy? Just open your mouth and hope something you can eat goes in it?”
“Are we torturing him?” Jevn asked, but I didn’t know.
“Here you go, love, here you go…” I lifted him off his back, cradled him, and positioned him to nurse. Behind me the bamboo was waving in the window. It had grown overcast in that inviting summer way, when weather is a momentary drama and it leaves the whole world steaming and smelling like earth. Jon began to nurse. I felt a stream of water dripping down my arm. “Oh! I thought it was raining,” I said. “He’s just drooling on me!”
“What did you think was raining? Inside?” Jevn laughed.
“I thought the fan was somehow bringing rain in.”
“You didn’t think you had a drooling baby in your arms?”
* * *
We sang the “Tennessee Waltz,” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and “Wild Montana Skies,” and every song we could think of any words to. I sang “Rocky Top,” and Jevn would overlap me with “Rocky Mountain High”—the unending battle of our rival mountain homes.
