by Amy Seek
It was a city of self-determination, and, having finished school and found a home, I was finally in a position to make my life whatever I wanted it to be—but want had become so complicated. I wanted only everything or nothing. I was ambivalent about the finer details. The only thing that felt good was running. When I ran, I wasn’t settling on anything at all. I leapt between unknowns, one foot in one territory, the other in the next, in between hovering nowhere.
Nine miles was longer than I’d ever run. It was late morning by the time we got back to the marina and spread out to stretch on the lawn. Rachel invited me to join her in the park after lunch, and we drove straight up the face of Filmore home—windows down and the air comprised of distinct gusts of cold and hot. As we neared Pacific Avenue, it felt as if we would fall backward. Out the sunroof you could see Angel Island.
“I’ll try to stop by the park later,” I said, as Rachel pulled over to the curb in front of my apartment. “I’ve just got a rehearsal at one. And there’s this festival in Golden Gate Park, if you want to go. And I was going to meet up with Jen for dinner.” When I wasn’t working, my time was triple booked. I’d joined a mandolin orchestra in the winter, a gay clogging troupe and an art collective, started taking French lessons and volunteering on a farm south of the city. Besides that there were always bike rides, and sing-alongs, and scavenger hunts, and hikes in the Oakland hills—
“If it’s too much, don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’ll just be Jerry and me.” Rachel diagnosed my condition: FOMO. Fear of Missing Out. The irrational compulsion to do everything, out of fear of missing anything. It was worse in a city as small and social as San Francisco, where you were not only bound to be invited to too many things but sure to hear all about everything you missed. Rachel didn’t suffer from FOMO. She argued, “You’ll always be missing something, no matter what you do. You just have to decide that you are Where It’s At. Then you can never Miss Out.” But her self-assurance was impossible for me.
“No, I’ll be biking right past the park from Noe Valley after the rehearsal.”
“Okay, does that mean you’ll have your mandolin? Because Jerry was going to bring his guitar.”
I slammed the door behind me and leapt up the stairs to my apartment.
My adoption counselors had long ago told me I would need hobbies to fill the void—why not learn to play an instrument? Or paint your toenails fire engine red? I didn’t need this advice; I did these things reflexively. My grief was not simply a void but a vacuum. I said yes to everything and worked hard to fit it all in. It wasn’t that I was thinking about my son all the time, and doing fun things rarely felt like a manifestation of grief. But they were tied to my son all the same. I knew from experience, it isn’t a small matter, whether you decide to go hiking in Oakland or to a picnic in the park. A single no could throw your whole life off course.
* * *
My many yeses made for interesting reading for my grandmother, whom I regularly e-mailed scenes of the world of improbable things that happened in San Francisco. Like one night bumping into my high school prom date, who was wearing cowboy boots with spurs, reigniting our old affection and taking off to Reno by train. Or discovering that both my upstairs and downstairs neighbors played clarinet, unpacking my own, and starting a trio. There was always something colorful, something unlikely, and I was helplessly drawn to those things. The more unlikely, the more promising, because the weighty, obvious option was no longer accessible to me. My grandmother’s only concern was that I not forget about Thomas, who was thinking about leaving the East Coast to join me. I took off my running shoes and jumped in the shower.
I missed him. Sometimes I’d listen to Philadelphia radio, and, hearing about a snowstorm there, I’d feel FOMO for that city, remembering the time we trudged through the abandoned streets during a blizzard on my birthday. Sometimes the missing would give me a kind of certainty and I’d feel ready to decide something big—that everything I’d been through added up to Thomas, and me, and a life in California. I put my mandolin in its case and woke my computer. That certainty didn’t last. I opened my e-mail to get directions to the rehearsal, but Paula had sent a link to her blog—an intimate view of the life I was missing out on all the time.
For what seems like forever, I have been complaining about the kids leaving bowls of cereal uneaten. I decided I had to take matters into my own hands. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When life gives you uneaten bowls of cereal, redefine “frugal gourmet” by making Uneaten-Bowls-of-Cereal Cake!
I was lucky that what she wrote reassured me; there was no one else I could trust to raise my son. I felt pride in all directions, retelling her stories, and it meant a lot that so often they made me laugh. And yet, what was open adoption but a lifelong, epic-scale cultivation of FOMO? A perfect view of the world without you and proof that even in the role you were most meant to play, you were easily replaced. It left me detached from my own desires, devoted to happenstance, drawn to desire in other people, because there was no coming close to the thing I’d been most certain about. That night I told Thomas he shouldn’t move to California for me.
* * *
I rode a bike I’d bought off Craigslist to work most mornings. My commute was a sigh down Sixteenth from the Lower Haight to the base of Potrero Hill, where to-the-trade interior design sales floors collected like fallen boulders. It was 8:30 a.m., March 24, 2006, the kind of clear blue morning that makes too many days feel like spring break in California. Shadows fell crisp and cool. I was approaching a vast intersection, where two roads sized for industrial traffic crossed, and one of them, Harrison, forked as it headed south.
The tow truck was headed west from Potrero. I was riding east. The driver might have seen forever in the distance, down the hill, across the city, and all the way to Sutro Tower—there wasn’t another vehicle in sight. The light was green as we approached it. He turned left. I thought about my run and looked for his eyes, but twelve miles was all I could think to say to him as he hit me. The distance we were going to run in training that weekend. Twelve miles at the gray glass of the windshield. Twelve miles as the glitches of a universe self-adjusted, rendering me invisible even as my bike and I flew.
“That. Was not. Your fault.” Immediately there was a woman grasping my shoulders and several strangers’ faces hovering over me.
I felt myself detangling from my bike and rising to my feet. I saw the man step out, a young Mexican man, shorter than me, who began handing me things—identification, proof of insurance, saying he didn’t see me, he didn’t see me at all.
People gathered and collected the story, witnesses wrote their names and phone numbers on a piece of paper. They told me they were going to take me to the hospital. But I said I needed to go to work. Running over things is what you do to your neighbor’s dog or a raccoon. I wanted to forget it. I walked a few blocks to the office, my hand pressing hard on the back of my pelvis. The man who had hit me followed me in slow chase, asking to take me to the hospital. I opened the heavy metal gate of my building and let it slam behind me. But soon my coworker had put me in her car, and we traced, by chance, my running route past the shy bald hill and Buena Vista to the hospital on Parnassus. The doctor asked me to walk to the water fountain, fifteen feet away, but by that time the injury had set in and I couldn’t imagine lifting my legs from muscles in my pelvis. A nurse asked me if I was pregnant; I would need X-rays. They rolled me into a white room and began to assess the damage.
* * *
I had herniated discs, a cracked pelvis, a hip labral tear, and some other, more complicated-sounding things. My doctor thought I might ultimately need back surgery, but she prescribed painkillers and bed rest. She would reassess when I’d had some time to heal. I told her I didn’t want to take painkillers. I thought pain should be felt. It was a meaningful communication between me and my body and one of few things I could be sure about. Pain gave clear and decipherable boundaries, and if I didn’t let myself feel it, I’d ina
dvertently hurt myself more.
“Pain is complicated,” she argued. “Painkillers are not just about temporary relief—you need to take them to reteach your body how not to feel pain, so it will accept a pain-free condition when it has healed. If you let pain linger with an injury this significant, your body will remain in trauma, and it will invent pain to protect you, even after the injury is gone. Then you’ll be dealing with pain the rest of your life.”
She handed me a prescription but I never filled it.
“—you should also look into psychological treatment for PTSD. Do you have a therapist?”
“I don’t think it was really traumatic—I could see that that guy really didn’t mean to hit me.” I saw his face and how sorry he was, and then I felt bad for him.
“It doesn’t have to feel emotional to be traumatic. You’ve been injured, and you have a very active, physical life, which you aren’t going to be able to return to anytime soon.”
“Wait—what about the marathon? It’s four months from now.”
“No. No way. You need to be careful about this.” She pressed her thumb into the inside edge of my kneecap and made me suddenly suck in air. “If we’re lucky, we will have you running again. But for now let’s focus on getting you out of bed and walking.”
Days later, two oversized police officers surveyed my tiny apartment and loomed over my bedside taking an accident report, and friends and coworkers crowded in, bearing flowers and food. Among them were Paul, a boy I’d gone out with a few times, and Rachel. I couldn’t sit up to greet them. When they left, I wrote to the marathon organizers to cancel my registration, but I started looking for races seven or eight months away. I’ll give it two weeks. Maybe three, I thought. And then I’ll start running again.
I’d always healed. I wasn’t worried about long-term effects of the accident, and definitely not about PTSD. But I was shaken, and I couldn’t yet see straight. A small part of me was grateful for the sudden interruption of everything, the imperative of pain to give me space to think. I had so much to think about, things that made the accident seem small. Most of all, that just a few days before the tow truck hit me, I’d found out that I was pregnant.
“… I like you—I mean, I love you,” Paul had said, stumbling, when I informed him, though our time together had done nothing so much as prove how incompatible we were. I was simply saying yes to everything. Yes to dancing till three in the morning, yes to missing the morning light, yes to Paul, whom I’d met through work and who was nice enough. But I didn’t think I was saying yes to this, the one scenario a birth mother should know to avoid. And yet, my counselors had warned me it wasn’t unusual at all—probably because, as she’s casting hobbies into the chasm of her grief, a birth mother can be prone to thinking: What better thing with which to fill a child-shaped void?
But that wasn’t what I was thinking. I knew well that another child could never compensate for the loss of my son. And yet of the very little I knew about PTSD, something I understood was that it makes you want to re-create the crisis scenario to give yourself a second chance to do what you wish you’d done. And maybe that was why in the midst of my frenzy of activity before the tow truck, drawn by someone else’s desire, part of me really was saying yes to getting pregnant in circumstances no more stable than that winter when I was twenty-two.
Paul left with the others when they stood up from my bedside to go, and I wasn’t surprised. We had nothing to talk about; I’d told him before the accident what I was going to do. I hadn’t consulted anyone. I didn’t want advice from anyone who wouldn’t be with me bearing the cost afterward. I didn’t want him to drive me there, or flip through magazines in the waiting room, or cook me soup after, or read to me beside my bed, or anything that might let him persuade himself he was doing fifty percent. And as it turned out, he didn’t try to. Instead, I got hit by a tow truck, and when I got to the ER, they couldn’t treat me until I made a decision. I had to sign a statement agreeing to treatment despite my pregnancy, and I had an abortion a week later. My neighbor drove me there, wheeled me inside, and brought me home. She comforted me with her own story and left me in bed with a stack of Sex and the City DVDs.
It was, in fact, what I wished I had done when I was pregnant the first time. Consulted no one; considered Jevn but listened to myself. I might have kept him, or I might have given him up a few weeks later when I was really ready. It didn’t solve anything now, but lying in bed broken inside and out, I felt powerful, like I was beginning to make out a mysterious terrain, and I’d planted some kind of stake in it.
* * *
Beginning that March, I caught glimpses of San Francisco’s teeth as they snapped at me, blindly, through the cold haze that hovered about Sutro Tower, just visible through the high window above my bed where I lay, avoiding painkillers and swallowing turmeric on a jade pillow and an amber mat. The city and all its inhabitants were floating lightly on the back of an animal, living for the day. I turned thirty somewhere within the fog, celebrating with a twelve-piece mariachi, two old Iranians, and an Argentinean, each of whom took a bite out of a candle-punched Little Debbie they’d run out and bought at the gas station next door. It felt fitting that I didn’t know anyone present, that I was in a Mexican bar with Middle Eastern men, and that the weather was nothing like January. The deeper my affection for this strange place, the nearer I came to its underside. Amid all the weightlessness, the teeth were real. You couldn’t tie the city down and not feel it was looking for every opportunity to throw you, wild thing that it was, earthquake-prone and climatic lone wolf, lest you think you own it more than the next person basking in its wonder. Its special skill was to make you, and everyone else, feel like the only one.
* * *
The accident forced me to delay plans to go to the East Coast, and so by the time I got there, it had been eight months since I last saw Jonathan. When I arrived, still learning my body’s new limits, he was inhabiting his own body more fully. Cartwheels and forward rolls. And he’d grown closer to his siblings. They were always playing together in ways that made room for everyone’s interests and inclinations.
“Pretend I’m Black Beauty!” Sarah was a racehorse, preparing for a derby.
“Pretend I’m Jetfire!” Jonathan was a Transformer—part robot jet, part farmer boy. Andrew was a silent but concentrated threshing machine, pulling up grass with both hands, sometimes fistfuls together, sometimes one at a time. Or, not a threshing machine, but a helicopter, he corrected me. One that operates upside down to chop the grass, to feed to Black Beauty.
“Sarah, pretend that Black Beauty tells Jetfire—”
“Jonathan, Black Beauty is a horse, and horses can’t talk.”
“Well, Black Beauty is also a Disney character,” Jonathan reasoned, “and so is Garfield, and Garfield is an animal that can talk!” My son was always changing, and I was always learning him anew, but this was consistent: he was perpetually looking for loopholes. Sarah ignored him, preparing for her race. Tromping around on all fours in the grass, whinnying. Jonathan began to align himself with her.
“Transformers can’t fly in horse races, Jonathan! It’s not fair. It’s only for horses!”
Jonathan shrugged. Unfair advantages were easy come, easy go. Then that game dissolved, or evolved into another.
“Pretend I’m having a baby,” Sarah said.
“And pretend I’m flying a jet!” Jonathan elaborated.
And magically, they merged. Sarah was a woman giving birth to a baby. Jonathan was the pilot of the crashing plane on which she was delivering. Andrew was still, contentedly, a helicopter–threshing machine. The plane crashed and they rolled down the hill and piled on top of one another like real brothers and sisters. Elbows and ankles tangled and indistinguishable. Blissfully unaware that their bodies would not only isolate them from one another but would someday betray them altogether.
I helped weave the scenarios together, adding elements or story lines as needed. I was the race announcer, t
hen a flight attendant. I had to think fast. They were no longer satisfied by simply being turned upside down or chased. There had to be a story to connect things, and it had to be compelling to all of them. At some point, I became the woman on the plane who was giving birth. Sarah was still interested in what it looked like, and Jonathan still had no such interest. Childbirth for him served only to heighten the drama of a crashing plane.
“Attention!” he said. “Attention, ladies and gentlemen, the engine is on fire, and we are turning around because someone is in labor. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH crassshsshshshshshshshshshhhhhhh!!!!!”
* * *
When the story fell apart, we went inside and the kids scattered. Up the stairs or into the playroom, in all directions. Paula offered me a cup of coffee and I lingered in the kitchen with her.
“Isn’t he looking so much more like a little boy?” she said giddily, like it was a good secret. He didn’t like being talked about, so she told me quietly that the latest thing was, he’d just learned the concept of having something in common, and he was applying it all the time, like the whole world was a matching game—but we quit talking when we heard Jonathan leaping down the stairs. He stopped short at the kitchen door and looked at us silently for a moment, like he really didn’t want to know what we were talking about. He asked if I wanted to go for a walk. I put down my coffee and followed him.
My hip was burning and I was trying hard not to limp, but Jonathan strode, loose and comfortable, and I felt proud—not because I was his mother but because I had the sense I was being seen in the neighborhood with one of the cool kids. He looked around, scanning the terrain, like he’d know an opportunity if he saw one.
“How’s soccer going?” I asked him, nonchalant as he was, making conversation. But I was genuinely curious. Paula told me he didn’t like it, and I wanted to know what he’d say about something he didn’t like.
