Bad Mother

by Ayelet Waldman

  In talking about sex with my girls (and my boys, too), I want to invest it with the appropriate meaning. I want them to understand how important sex is, but also how unimportant it is. It’s a part of life, a delightful part of being a grown-up. But having it or not having it shouldn’t define you. And in the end, if they make a mistake, if they have regrets, they can always look for meaning in the way their mother has—by telling stories, by talking it through.

  This is another one of those tightrope walks that make up so much of parenting. One misstep in either direction and you’re bouncing in the net (or lying on the ground in a crumpled heap of broken bones, depending on how bad you’ve blown it). So far, thank God, while Sophie looks like a sexy witch, she thinks like a cereal box. Her approach to boys has yet to shift beyond the most tentative of curiosity. Unlike some of her friends, she’s never “gone out” with any of the boys in her class, and she is only just willing to concede that there might be something appealing about that dude who played the lead in Atonement.

  But I’m ready for her, and for her little sister. And for the boys, too. A while ago I ordered some condoms for Michael and me from Condomania, and when the box arrived, it included a gift: a pack of fifty candy-colored condoms. A Ziploc full of stick-less lollipops. I was about to throw them away (tightfisted as I am and as expensive as those fancy ultrathin Japanese condoms are, there’s no way I’m letting anything Day-Glo near my lady parts) when I stopped. After a few moments of reflection—an internal debate that seemed at once to encompass every attitude, preconception, goal, and belief I have about parenting—I took the bag and put it on the very top shelf of the cupboard in the kids’ bathroom, almost but not quite out of sight.

  A few months later I heard a scream from the bathroom, as if someone had slipped on the tile and broken his neck. I ran in to find Zeke holding the bag of condoms, with his older sister standing next to him, her hands clamped over her mouth.

  “Are these what I think they are?” Zeke demanded.

  “That depends. Do you think they’re condoms?”

  “What are they doing in our bathroom?”

  “They’re here in case you need them, someday,” I replied. “I don’t want this stuff to be a big mystery to you. At some point in the very distant future you’ll be having sex. And you’ll need protection. Look,” I lifted up the Ziploc. “I even opened the bag so no one will even notice if you take one.” (I guess I should probably find out how long condoms last. Do they have expiration dates like cartons of milk?)

  “God, Mom,” Sophie said, turning her back and stalking out of the room and out of the cereal box world in which she will be living for such a very brief time to come, “that is so gross.”

  * My poor mother. At this point she has battered-mother-of-essayist syndrome. Over and over again I blame and abuse her, and over and over again, expressing nothing more than cheerful resignation, she buys dozens of copies of the offending volumes and gives them to all of her friends. Were she to finally snap and throttle me in my sleep, I doubt there’s a jury in the land that would convict her.

  † What a whiner. Really. Shouldn’t there be a moratorium on blaming your mother for your faults after your thirtieth birthday? I’m going to declare one. As soon as I’m finished writing this chapter.

  11. Rocketship

  I was four months pregnant with my third child, and we were heading to Hawaii on vacation. I stuffed our suitcases with swim diapers, sunscreen, and water wings, and bought a maternity bathing suit that managed to make me look at once pregnant and obese, a remarkable piece of structural engineering. I canceled the newspapers, put a vacation notice on my e-mail, and took the dog to the dog-sitter’s house. I bought the kids enough new little toys to guarantee that I would have sufficient time on the plane to read an entire People magazine, if not the issue of Harper’s I bought to camouflage my baser literary instincts. There was only one thing left to do.

  The week before the trip I had an amniocentesis, the first time I’d undergone that procedure. My first two babies were born before I achieved the magical age at which the risks of amnio are outweighed by the chances of finding a genetic abnormality. I was only twenty-nine when I gave birth to Sophie, and despite the purple stamp in my obstetrical record that read “Elderly Primigravida”—the medical term for anyone who has a baby after the age at which it can be popped out during a bathroom break at the senior prom—I was far too young to worry about the quality of my eggs. Two years later, when I was pregnant with Zeke, I was still well within the safe zone. Even this time it was something of a toss-up—I celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday in my first trimester. I could easily have forgone gone the test, but I have always been a pessimist and catastrophizer. I try to claim as an excuse for doomsaying that anticipating the worst makes a positive outcome all the sweeter, but this isn’t true. When things don’t happen as I fear, I feel only a moment of relief before going on to wonder if there isn’t another, more dreadful possibility lurking unseen in the shadows, ready to strike the moment I let my guard down.

  Thus, when my obstetrician suggested the amnio, I immediately agreed. I remember the experience vividly, not because of the massive needle plunging deep into my belly—all the more painful because I clenched every single muscle in my body in order to keep from jumping at the sensation and causing the doctor to pierce the baby rather than the amniotic sac—but because of the image on the ultrasound screen. The first thing we saw were the baby’s feet, two little pads with ten distinct pearl toes. Those tender, vulnerable baby feet brought us to tears. The doctor printed out a picture that would hang on our fridge for the next two weeks, and that now resides in a file, the most tragic of a pile of miserable documents.

  “There,” the doctor said a few moments later. “You see that? It’s a boy!” Just what I—a fanatic devotee of the Oedipus complex—had been hoping for.

  “Hey, little Rocketship!” I cooed. We had for the previous few weeks been calling the baby Rocketship, a place-holder name Zeke had come up with while we waited to find out the baby’s gender.

  When we came home from the OB’s office, we showed the children little Rocketship’s feet and told them that they would, in just a few months, have a new baby brother.

  The afternoon before we left for Hawaii, I decided to call the OB, to see if the results might be in early. “Just so that I have nothing on my mind while I’m floating in the ocean,” I told her.

  For a moment there was silence on the other end of the line. Then she said, “Are you sitting down?”

  In my memory I am hovering by the ceiling watching the scene unfold beneath me. I see myself collapse onto the floor. I hear myself scream, my voice hoarse, my wails so loud it seems the windows might shatter. I watch my husband kneel down beside me and pry the telephone from my rigid clasp. I watch him cry.

  And I think, “A person really does fall onto the ground screaming when she experiences a hideous, shocking pain. Remember that.” This, alas, is part of what it means to be a writer, someone whose job it is to observe closely enough to convincingly turn what she sees and feels into words. A writer stands at a distance and watches her heart break.

  We didn’t go to Hawaii. Instead, we spent the next three days trying to decide what to do.

  Rocketship suffered from a genetic defect known as a trisomy, a triple chromosome where there should have been only two. Down syndrome, on the twenty-first chromosome, is the most common of trisomies. Rocketship’s was more rare, and at the time there was little research on the subject. We began almost immediately to scour the Web for information about the diagnosis, and by the time we showed up for our appointment at the genetic counselor’s office, we knew more about it than she did. The one major study of the chromosomal defect evaluated the status of affected babies at birth, but not beyond. That study showed a good chance that Rocketship would be born without obvious defects, and a small chance that he would suffer growth retardation, hypotonia (extreme tension of the muscles), structural central n
ervous system abnormalities and seizures, facial malformations, failure to thrive, and developmental delay. There was no way, however, to know into which group he fell.

  It was a roll of the dice, our genetic counselor told us. What you decide to do depends on how lucky you feel.

  And there was the rub—one of the many agonies of this most tragic event of our hitherto over-fortunate lives. I, of course, never feel lucky. I had the test in the first place because I took the possibility of catastrophe seriously, even though my chances of having a baby with a genetic abnormality were, at thirty-five years old, only about 1 in 365. How could I risk another roll of the dice when I had already won the most miserable of lotteries, with chances far slimmer than Rocketship’s? Months later, a friend would say that after you go through this kind of experience, your chances of having a healthy baby never again feel any better than fifty-fifty. You see the two pink lines of the pregnancy test, and you think, “Maybe I’ll have a baby in nine months. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe he’ll be healthy. Or maybe he won’t.”

  When I scrolled through documents on the Internet about Rocketship’s abnormality, my eyes skipped past the reports of newborns with no apparent malformations and children of normal intelligence, to the ones describing predispositions to cancers of the kidneys and urinary tract or instances of psychomotor retardation. I looked up words like “dolichocephaly” (having a long, narrow head) and “kyphosis” (hunchback). I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate—physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet—I bet there are parents in the world who’d be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn’t go there.

  Michael, on the other hand, always feels lucky. He is an eternal optimist. The glass is not merely half-full; it is a crystal goblet, a chalice of the gods, and its nectar, ambrosia. Were he ever to take the Internet happiness survey on which I scored a dismal 30 percent, he would score in the 99th percentile; I know this because I took the test for him, and while I know the results are only really an accurate reflection of what I think of his mental state, I am confident that I answered the questions as he would have. When Michael heard the statistical possibility of Rocketship being unharmed by his genetic condition, he breathed a sigh of relief. “We’re safe,” he said.

  How could two people with such opposing reactions possibly reach an agreement on what to do?

  Michael and I clung to Sophie and Zeke. I remember sitting on the couch, the two of them draped over our laps. I could feel Rocketship kicking inside me, his perfect little toes prodding the belly that had, until that moment, sheltered him so well. I concentrated on Zeke’s silky skin beneath my fingers, on the smell of Sophie’s hair, at once sweet and musty, like a puppy’s. I pressed close to my husband and clutched my children and tried frantically to convince myself not to do what I knew, almost immediately, that I would.

  For the next few days I continued my research. I found a therapist who specialized in people considering genetic termination, and for a long and anguished hour she tried to help us decide. We sought counsel, spiritual and emotional, from our rabbi. I talked to my friends, to my mother, to my mother-in-law. I e-mailed with a man whose son was born with the condition and was now a perfectly normal, bright, and cheerful child. One of my sisters-in-law knew someone in Israel who had received this diagnosis, and early one morning I talked to her. Her doctors had supported her decision to terminate. Their research indicated a higher chance of abnormality than did the single published study.

  I found an Internet support group called A Heartbreaking Choice, and the founders, whose heroic generosity I will never forget, in spite of everything that followed, gave me the Pyrrhic but nonetheless tangible comfort of knowing that I was not the first mother in the world to contemplate ending her baby’s life.

  Finally, at dawn on the third day, after another sleepless night, I picked up the phone and dialed information in New York City, hoping that the research scientists who authored that single major study would live in the city where their university’s medical school was located, and that they would be listed in the phone book.

  Miraculously, I found one of them. I caught her at her breakfast table. This impossibly kind woman did not hang up on the stranger who disturbed her privacy. She seemed neither shocked nor angry when I asked, in a voice strangled with suppressed tears, what I should do. The doctor was kind, but she told me that she had no information beyond what had been published. She had not continued further in her research. She could not give me a medical key to unlock my terrible puzzle. But, she said, she could talk to me as a parent. She told me that she had a son, a teenager now, who was mentally retarded. “He’s the light of my life,” she said. “I love him desperately.”

  I listened, wondering if I could ever be such a self-abnegating mother. Such a Good Mother.

  “But if I had to do it all over again,” she continued, “I would have an abortion.”

  I remember holding the telephone in my hand, my breath caught in my throat. I remember the gray light of the kitchen, the sun not yet risen. I remember the sound of her voice, and of my crying. I thanked her—for her generosity but, more important, for her brutal honesty. I knew what I wanted to do.

  But as certain as I was that we should end the pregnancy, Michael was equally certain that we should not. For the next day we debated, never once with anger, but always holding each other’s hands, weeping, apologizing. And in the end, my beloved optimist of a husband said to me, “I think, really, that we have no choice. If we do what you want, if we have the abortion, and it turns out that Rocketship would have been healthy after all, I can live with your mistake. I can love you, no matter what. But if we do what I want, if we have the baby, and it turns out he’s not okay, it’s too massive of an error. The ramifications are too lasting, not just for us, but for Sophie and Zeke. My mistake would burden them for the rest of their lives with the care of their brother, and burden us so much our relationship might be in danger.”

  I have never loved my husband so much as at that moment, when he sacrificed himself and his happiness to me. When he decided to love me even though I was not strong enough to give birth to Rocketship. When he decided to make a choice that was to him not merely incomprehensible but horrible. When he proved how capacious and forgiving is his love.

  There was a single clinic that would perform the procedure, an hour’s drive away. There was also a doctor in my obstetrician’s practice who would consider doing it, but she was on vacation that week. And then there was a man, another hero of this least heroic of stories, a physician who had spent his career bringing babies into the world, and who had decided that what the world needed, what our community was sorely missing, was a doctor who would, with a sure hand, and a kind heart, ease them out. By the time we became his patients, he was exclusively performing abortions, one of those doctors whom pro-life advocates like to call mass murderers, and whose homes they stake out, whose windows they shatter with rocks and sometimes bullets.

  Sitting in his office, I couldn’t stop crying. Finally, he reached behind his desk and pulled a large stack of photographs off his shelf. The pictures were of babies. Babies of every color, shape, and size. For a moment, I wondered how he could be so cruel. Then he asked me, “Do you know what those are?”

  I shook my head.

  “Those are the babies born to women who were once my patients. Look at them.”

  I leafed through the stack. I wasn’t the first to have cried over these pictures. Many of them were already marked with stains from other people’s tears.

  “Every one of those babies is healthy. Every one is wanted. Every one is loved,” he said. “And you will have another baby. A healthy baby whom you will love.”

  “Do you promise?” I asked, as if he had the capacity to grant the wish. As if he were the one spinning the awful roulette wheel.

  “Yes,” he said.
“I promise.”

  On our way out, he took Michael aside, put his hands on his shoulders, looked him in the eye, and said, “I will take care of her for you.”

  That night I didn’t sleep. I lay in bed with my hands on my belly and felt the baby kick. I felt him wriggle inside me, rolling and flipping, like a little seal in the ocean of my body. I felt sad and guilty, but I was just so glad he was moving. It was the last I would feel of him. The last I would know him. Fully aware of the horrible irony, I tried to savor every one of his last hours.

  The next morning we went to the hospital’s outpatient surgical clinic. While they prepared me for surgery, Michael met our rabbi in the hospital’s chapel. They prayed, I think, but mostly Michael cried. He’d been trying so hard not to let me see him cry, as if only my tears were permissible. As if mine meant more than his. As if he was not suffering as much as—or more than—I was.

  They gave me general anesthesia, and before the lights in my brain dimmed, I asked the doctor to please, please make sure the baby would feel no pain, that Rocketship would be dead before it all began.

  The medical procedure my obstetrician chose to do was not dilation and extraction, the one that pro-life activists have managed to convince the country to refer to as partial-birth abortion. It was a dilation and evacuation, but the actual physical process is no less horrifying, and if horror is the justification for the partial birth abortion ban, then the legality of the dilation and evacuation will inevitably be called into question someday.

  When women of my mother’s generation fought for the right to choose, they did not need to confront the ugly physical reality. But women of my generation, women who hang strips of grainy ultrasound photographs on our fridges, women who watch on three-dimensional monitors first flickering heartbeats at six weeks, then babies who suck their thumbs and wiggle their toes at four months, cannot deny it. When we choose to have an abortion, we must do so understanding the full ramifications of what we are doing. Anything less feels to me to be hypocritical, a selfish abnegation of reality and responsibility.