by Amy Seek
“Do you like our singing, Jon?” Jevn asked. Jonathan had stopped nursing and was looking at us. “I think he’s just tolerating it.”
“He has to like it,” I argued. “We’re his parents!”
“Let’s sing a John Denver song.”
“Good morning, America, how are ya? Don’t you know me; I’m your native son! I’m the car they call the Cutlass Ciera Gold—”
“He doesn’t want to know a car commercial song!” Jevn exclaimed. “Don’t you know songs?”
We returned Jonathan to his back on my futon as we both crouched over him, watching him closely. As we sang, I told myself that he was not the most beautiful child in the world, that I just saw it that way because I was chemically predisposed to. In the afternoon, Jevn fell asleep next to him, both of them resting their arms above their heads, like they were floating aimlessly among the clouds. Or like they’d lifted their feet to let the river carry them.
* * *
I welcomed the unnecessary pain in all its forms. Cradling my son, kissing him, putting my finger in his tiny mouth to touch his soft gums—I invited grief in. It did not feel unnecessary at all. In fact, I thought, the pain was invaluable. It was bound to arrive after I signed, and then it would tell me with certainty whether my signature was a mistake. Why not bring the grief closer, faster, fuller, sooner, to make that future sadness a single blow and invite it to strike now, to test my resilience like concrete or steel to see if I would break? Why not invite that augur grief to this side of the signature and give it power to change things?
I wanted to feel it all. I wanted to feel it all at once. I would hold my head underwater to see how I fared. There would be no second-guessing. And if I couldn’t bear the pain, I wouldn’t sign anything. If only I could get grief to operate in this way.
* * *
We decided to let Paula and Erik take Jonathan overnight. If I could spend one night without him, then maybe I could survive two. And then, possibly, three. And then, perhaps our lifetimes. They were hesitant to take him, but that made me remember how much I trusted them. When they arrived in Dayton, Paula called and asked whether I wanted her to bring him back. She was willing to turn around and make the trip again to return him to me; she wasn’t sure I could survive, either. But I wanted them to have him; I wanted his life to start.
I went into the world and looked for the place it had left off. I played darts in a bar. I tried to get better at balancing the tiny weight and casting it through the air. I tried to think about architecture, or milkshakes. The little things that comprise real happiness or the bigger things that make our individual lives seem small and light. I prayed for direction.
I tried to bridge back to myself: I knew exactly what it was like to not have a son. But I couldn’t make my son’s absence at that moment touch his absence for the twenty-three years prior. I couldn’t find that familiar old place, so very like this moment, when I didn’t have a son, and I wasn’t a mother. But then I felt a flush of excitement as I tried to own an amazing prospect, what must have appeared to be the case: I was just a twenty-three-year-old college student, without a care in the world.
When I got home, I pumped breast milk to keep it flowing and put it in the refrigerator to feed him when he returned. We met in the park across the street from my apartment the next day. They handed him to me, along with his things, and my heart raced with fear and excitement. I don’t remember that we said anything about the adoption, but maybe I mentioned the colostrum. Their daughter, Sarah, was angry and said Jonathan was her baby. My blood curdled; was I allowed to say that?
* * *
My son slept in bed with me because I hadn’t prepared anything like a nursery, with a ducks-and-rattles border. I had met so many hopeful couples, I knew well what a “forever home” should look like and exactly how ill-equipped I was. I had no crib to lay him in, but as deeply as my body devoured rest, still I slept lightly enough to temper my pressure against him. My body lay in wait for the moment I was needed, my place on earth validated by seven pounds and a beating heart. He fell asleep again as he nursed, and I was the sea, incubating its salty life, regulating the temperature of the world around him as we shared the tiny pocket of air between us.
* * *
Early one afternoon, more than a week after his birth, I was sitting on my futon, searching my son’s face and wondering what damage I was doing, dropping so many tears on his chest. There was a knock at the door and my mother came in as I’d never seen her, like a sudden summer storm, simultaneous lightning and thunder. She’d been talking to Jevn’s mother, and their worry and speculation and fear had worked to unhinge her. The next step was clear to everyone, and that I wasn’t taking it made her doubt all the details of the story she thought she knew. She began to question everything. She wanted to know whether Jevn was really the father. She’d heard about our fighting and wanted to know whether it was safe to leave Jonathan alone with me. She tested every possibility. Why would I turn against such a well-made plan—had I never intended to give up my son? When had the lies started? Did she know me at all? She stood stiffly before me, bracing herself, begging for reassurance that I was still the person she knew.
But I was unwilling to give it to her. As I sat watching her, my son watching me, I almost welcomed concerns so far from my own, from a land so foreign I remembered the comfort of other kinds of troubles, real problems, in other places. I knew I’d overstepped everyone’s tolerance for my indecision, but my mother’s doubt gave me confidence. I asked her to leave, and I didn’t explain, and I didn’t care about the consequence; I would have no family but my son, and I would have time with him that I wouldn’t apologize for.
And for the first moment, I was alone with Jonathan. My friend Andy came over at sunset with a backpack full of food; he ignored my swollen eyes and fried squash in the big iron skillet my mother had sent me off to college with, reminding me never to wash it with soap. He played guitar, and I sat my delicate bottom on the concrete stoop with my son in my lap. In my mind I considered my many friends who had become like family to me and had so much to give my son.
As I washed the dishes afterward, I put Jonathan in the other room and left him. It was the first time someone hadn’t been there to take him from me. I enjoyed the play between having him close and then having him just far enough away, over there in the bouncy seat someone had lent me, where, if I took a step back from the sink, I could see him. That moment felt like motherhood. For the rest of his life he would see things I wouldn’t see, love different things; we would explore the space between us. But we would be anchors for each other, perpetual reference points. I would peek around the threshold of the door, and when he spotted me, he would smile.
The natural thing was to keep him. I wanted a hundred more days like this. A thousand. I wished I hadn’t made such good plans, so perfectly.
* * *
But my son’s life needed to start. He was ten days old. He needed the alphabet and shots and things I couldn’t even think of. It was too late for me to figure those things out now. Paula and Erik took him for another night, and I moved faster than my fears; fresh hot water channeled down the salty surface of my face. My eyes were endless springs, my swollen lips like features of a sultry summer landscape. Thick streams bent at the corners of my mouth and leapt off my chin. I scrubbed myself hard, halting at the edges of new hollows and sensitivities; I was rashed and sunburned and still bleeding. I drove down to the agency alone.
Papers were assembled on the conference table; a tape recorder lay in the center. Proceedings began like a liturgy. People moved about the table and settled into chairs. Forms were pushed in front of me. People looked gravely into my eyes. Someone pressed a button and explained that what I said would be recorded. There was written a sequence of words I was meant to say. Everything happened with order and intention, as if it wasn’t against nature at all.
I looked at the page. I’d read those words on the Surrender before. Voluntary meant that it w
as my will, my unencumbered desire, but I could think of few things more malleable than desire. And still nothing I desired more resolutely than my son. The words were certain and concrete and cold. I agree and understand that under Ohio law, signing this document means that all my rights as parent to the above named child will end. I wanted to be able to say, on record, words that felt more precise. Words I wouldn’t mind my son someday hearing me say on tape.
Molly and the other social service workers waited.
“I feel like the only thing in the world I know anymore is that I’m my son’s mother.” There was no longer room within me for other knowledge, like knowing I want to give him up, or even knowing what being a mother means.
Molly sent me into the side room, to see if I could cry myself dry, to reach that barren desert in which I could use the cold, legal language the state required. Those infinitely deceptive words that would brush like sandstorms across all the complexities, wear them smooth and make a decision seem like one solid, eternal, changeless thing. How could I put on record that that was how things were? That the world does not turn and churn and change?
In the counseling rooms there were tissue boxes on every side table. Everything was staged for my performance. I cried for half an hour before I got back in my car and went home. But everyone was still perched in wait; Paula and Erik were still poised to take him home to North Carolina. Jevn wouldn’t sign until I did, because his signature would give me full custody of our son and the freedom to make my decision without him.
Adoption was not a real plan, it was just a resting place for the unthinkable: having a son, giving up a son; both had been unimaginable to me. I had thought that somewhere along the way it would become clear to me what I should do and that one path would come to a natural end. I didn’t dream that the one I abandoned would survive, powerfully and viscerally, in my imagination. Or that he would stretch, and smile, and yawn.
* * *
One afternoon, I got a call from my history professor. She was on vacation in Cape Cod, she had heard I was struggling, and she wanted to reiterate that she thought I should give my son up. I had a bright future ahead of me as an architect. The only certainties were other people’s desires: Paula and Erik and Sarah wanted to have him. My family, Jevn’s family, Jevn wanted me to give him up. Everyone I’d convinced about open adoption remained convinced. The agency was a mile away, ready to take my signature. I was a ripple in a swelling tide.
Paula called me to ask me what I did to get him to stop crying. I couldn’t tell her because I had never seen him cry. I had put him under cold water in the shower because I worried he didn’t cry enough. But even then he just looked at me incredulously.
She brought him back and sat in the wingback chair I leaned on during contractions. She was impressing me with games she had already taught him. The games tested his memory and challenged his ability to recognize patterns. I didn’t even know you could play games with a baby as young as my son. She counted to three and blew on his tummy. One, two, three, and blew on his tummy. If she stopped at three and didn’t blow, he still wrinkled his face and squeezed his fists anyway. I left the room to get a glass of water in the kitchen. Returning, I passed by her and said something. Jonathan’s head jerked toward me.
“He recognizes his mother’s voice,” she said, fearlessly.
Paula said she didn’t want to take my son away from me. One afternoon we sat together on my futon and cried, knowing we were crying for our own exclusive concerns, and out of compassion for each other. We were tragically enmeshed; each the source of the other’s pain, each the threshold of the other’s future. We stood like tired boxers, clinging to each other to stop the beating. I could end her suffering, some of it, but only at my own expense. She was the only one who could see the magnitude of what was happening. She wasn’t telling me it was somehow good for me. She knew what was at stake; she was weighing it every moment. We were two pieces in a puzzle that were negotiating the exact shape of the cut that would at once connect and divide us. We were pressing at each other through a curtain to establish the precise profile of our grief.
Returning to Dayton with Jonathan for the third time, Paula called to ask if I walked a lot while I was pregnant; she figured out if she walked with him, taking big strides, he sometimes stopped crying. My sister told me they may be good parents, but she couldn’t imagine anyone loved him the way I did. But did I love him? I couldn’t understand that. Love, or anything, standing between me and my son.
I needed to buy groceries, but I didn’t have anything to carry him in. I had to hold him in my arms. I set out gingerly, taking small, careful steps down the hill to the store. I was hypnotized by the cracks and irregularities in the sidewalk, determined not to fall. I held him tight, his head, his tiny bottom. He didn’t make a sound. He was still collapsing back into me, and I couldn’t rely on him to hold himself up. He took me for granted, and I felt dangerous; there was no one I would not destroy to keep him safe. In the aisles, I had to carry him because he was too small and floppy for the hard metal kid seat at the front of the grocery cart. I couldn’t believe anyone could be too small for those.
* * *
I needed one circumstance to be different. I needed one word of support from one person I could trust, and it would give me all I needed to know. I needed one of the barriers to give, just a little bit. Why hadn’t I thought about all this before? I called the University Child Care Center. They told me they charged $155 tuition per week for an infant and $135 per week for a toddler. With my discount as a university student, the rates would be $150 and $130 per week. They didn’t have any openings, but they could put me on a waiting list. There was a $30 charge for being added to the waiting list. They asked if I’d like them to mail me their brochure.
I don’t think I spoke to Jevn in those last days. He doubted my intentions and glared at me with suspicion, but I was angry that I’d let him have any say at all in what felt so entirely like my burden. And yet, seeing his distrust made me distrust myself. I was angry at myself for being indecisive, for indulging my motherhood. I wondered whether I’d been lying to everyone the whole time.
Paula proved herself again and again. She reminded me that the decision was mine, that it really was a decision, and that I would be a perfectly capable parent. She didn’t want me to feel obligated to her just because we had come this far. She said that either way she would be grateful for having gotten to know us. I am not sure I believed her. Was she not weighing the loss the way I was? Was she not waking in the night, breathless, imagining her own life without my son?
One day, two weeks after my son’s birth, she called to tell me that she, Erik, and Sarah were getting ready to return to North Carolina. She didn’t say that she had finally come to terms with what was at that point obvious.
But I couldn’t let them go.
* * *
Several days later, I called my midwife to find out how much I had to eat to continue producing breast milk. She told me it would take 450 calories a day. I’m sure now she meant 450 additional calories, a total of 2,450 calories in a day for a nursing mother, but then I wasn’t thinking straight. I held fast to that number. I could barely eat at all, but I made sure to consume 450 calories every day. I managed half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a bagel with cream cheese. Or two apples and a handful of nuts. I ate in a day what I thought I had to in order to produce breast milk. And several times a day, I plugged into a rolling machine that made noise like fast ocean waves, drawing milk from both sides at once. My friend Andy listened at the door before knocking; he would come back later if he heard my machine running, and he knew not to open my freezer, where the milk was stored. When the freezer was full, I put the milk in a special box, and I arranged for it to be shipped to my son in North Carolina.
SEVENTEEN
My breasts swelled over the Rockies. Across Nevada, they pushed against the limits of my fitted cotton dress. Boarding the plane for California, I abandoned the wasteland o
f my decision. I couldn’t read; I couldn’t think. I could barely remember signing the papers. I just looked hard out the windows of the plane and watched the ground get farther and farther away. But as we lifted off, there was nothing as heavy as my chest, weighted with milk. I wore the green checkered dress that had been tailored for my sister in China. She lent it to me in Nanchang when I had taken a detour from my European travels to visit her, along with the silver sapphire ring we exchanged once a year. I’d worn it in Italy, and then she wore it in China. It turned our skin green and itchy, but its promise was to guarantee we would see each other again, no matter where we had to travel to do it.
By the time I reached the hotel, I was swelling out of the straps. I pulled the dress halfway over my head and my sister tugged vigorously to get the tight waist over my chest, all the while exposing my postpartum belly and saggy underwear, stuffed with padding. She pulled and pulled. We laughed until I peed in my pants. When we finally got it off, I sat down with my little portable device, wincing at the first pump, till my breasts, hard as bricks, softened.
My sister had left Ohio for Los Angeles to take a class for her ESL degree. She’d be leaving L.A. in a few days to return to China, and so, a week after I signed the Surrender, my whole family decided to meet for a Seek Family Wave-Off. It used to mean getting off the couch and gathering in the driveway to watch my sister or brother pull out on their ways to college. Now we had to travel far and wide to be together, just to wave goodbye, and now we were waving away greater distances.
I changed my clothes and joined my family to see California for the first time in my life. The Third Street Promenade, Venice Beach, the hills near Malibu. We didn’t talk about my son or my summer; it was the same as every time I emerged from my room after being sent there as a child; they welcomed me back without mentioning what I’d done, happy that everything was back to normal.
