The Color of Family

by Patricia Jones

  “I tend to doubt that,” Mrs. Simms countered with an edge to her voice. “And what about his comfort? His nurturing? He needs me for that, and even if he’s not getting anything nutritionally from me, at least he gets that. That counts for his health too, you know.”

  Ellen lowered her head with nothing to say in that moment, because she knew she could easily get into that slippery area where she just might cross over that hallowed line of telling this woman how to be a mother. So she took in a considerable breath, blew it out, then replied, “Mrs. Simms, I’m certainly not saying to you that you’re wrong for having nursed your son for so long, but truthfully, you should be thinking about what this baby’s going to need when he or she gets here, because you have to start thinking about the baby’s needs now. Even women who give birth to twins more often than not end up having to supplement with formula just because there is not enough breast milk to keep two babies sated and thriving. If you’re nursing this baby and a six-year-old boy as well, chances are you’re not going to be able to produce enough milk for both. Is any of this making sense to you?”

  Mrs. Simms’s eyes filled with the fluid of sadness. And just as the first tear fell, she asked Ellen through a quivering voice, “Dr. Barrett, did your mother nurse you?”

  Ellen looked shockingly at the woman at first, having been taken completely off her guard, then answered tentatively, “I honestly don’t know, Mrs. Simms. That’s something that has simply never come up.” And then that got Ellen to a place she had not readied herself to go. Did her mother nurse her? She wondered why she didn’t know that answer. And would that answer also satisfy so many other questions. “Why do you ask?”

  “I ask because my mother didn’t nurse me, Dr. Barrett, and I felt that void in every part of our relationship all through my life. I’m determined it’s not going to be that way for me and my kids. They are going to be nurtured by me, connected to me; they are going to know I love them.” And the woman let her emotions loose so fast they filled the room so that there was scarcely enough space for any other.

  This is why Ellen pushed, with everything in her, the question she didn’t even know she had in her, back to the place where it lived in ignorance. She had to believe that it couldn’t matter, because if it did matter, it would only devilishly taunt her as it played side by side with the shadow of the man who had kept her mother disconnected from the nurturing instincts living inside of every mother’s nature. Clayton Cannon. Had her mother nursed the need for Clayton Cannon to be a part of her at the expense of nursing the needs of her only daughter, her only child at the time? She knew that void of which Mrs. Simms spoke. It was vast enough, particularly in the quieter moments of her own pregnancy, to swallow her whole. So in that moment, Ellen had to stop the questions, because one would lead to another and to another until she’d be one more undependable woman in Mrs. Simms’s life.

  “Mrs. Simms,” Ellen said quietly, yet with professional crispness as she listened to the woman sniffle to the end of her tears. “I don’t know what happened between you and your mother, but it sounds like something you should work through with her. That’s going to be important for you, I think. Right now, though, I’m concerned about this baby you’re carrying. You’re due in four months, and you want to give this baby as good a start as you can. I’m just asking you, for the sake of the baby you’re carrying, to cut out the herbal supplements and perhaps find other ways to nurture D.J. Cuddle him. Maybe snuggle with him at night.” She paused and looked down at her own generous belly and rubbed it, then continued, “I don’t know, Mrs. Simms. I’ve never been a mother before, so I can’t tell you how to do it. I just know that from the standpoint of your health and the health of your unborn baby, you have to stop the supplements. You have to think about the true needs of the baby.”

  Then Mrs. Simms said pleadingly, “But Dr. Barrett, Third World women living in villages all over the planet only have what grows from the ground to cure themselves or keep themselves healthy during pregnancy. And they nurse their children while they have babies growing in their womb. And some of those children they nurse are as old, sometimes older than D.J. It’s natural. It’s the reason we have breasts. And it’s the reason why nature put herbs on this earth for us.”

  Ellen’s frustration had wrestled her into a corner where patience had been sucked dry. So she said sharply, “Mrs. Simms, you are talking about women living in abject poverty who have no other choice and no other means of taking care of themselves, or, for that matter, feeding their children if you want to add breast-feeding to this mix. And quite honestly, I find it offensive that you would sit here with the privilege of prenatal care living in a wealthy country with access to the Western medicine that is desperately needed in Third World countries, and, I might add, a healthy, well-fed child in the waiting room and dare to equate your reasons for choosing herbal supplements and choosing to nurse your six-year-old son with the desperate choices those women have to make on a daily basis just to exist. You’ve got to get some perspective here, Mrs. Simms, and you also must question if the needs you’re actually trying to comfort are your own.”

  Ellen got herself up and went over to the stack of fresh hospital gowns and snatched one off the top of the pile. She stood for several seconds just holding the gown and looking down at the floor, because she had to make certain if what she would say next to the woman was coming from a deep place of professional frustration, or if it was coming from that place of equal depth that was lined with the hormones of pregnancy. But by the time the ultimatum was spilling from her lips, she’d decided that it didn’t matter. As she walked back toward Mrs. Simms to hand her the hospital gown, she said, “Mrs. Simms, you have a choice to make here today. You either need to stop taking the herbal supplements or you need to find yourself another obstetrician to follow you through the rest of your pregnancy and delivery. What you are doing could eventually put too much stress on the health of your unborn baby, and I simply will not, I cannot be responsible for that.” She let go of the gown once the woman had it in her grip. Ellen went to the door and put her hand on the handle, and just before she pulled it open, she turned and said, “It’s your choice. You can let me know when I come back in. If you decide you want to see another obstetrician, I can give you the names of several here at the hospital who are specialists in high-risk pregnancies, because in my professional opinion, that’s exactly the category you’re putting yourself in as a borderline older mother taking these supplements.”

  Ellen left the room, pulling the door closed tightly behind her. She stood, not wanting to move, holding the door handle with second thoughts. Then she let her hand drop and walked slowly to her office. Once she’d sat at her desk, it sat right there alongside her with no need for a chair, but there it was, the question of whether or not her mother nursed her. She searched her mind to look for some hazy splinter of a memory that might hold the warm comfort at her mother’s breast, but there was nothing. So she went off again in a day-haze of recollection to find a time when it might have come up. When her mother might have discussed the beauty of it all, and the bonding, and the nurturing, and the moment her mother watched her baby grow heavy with the tranquility of warm, sweet mother’s milk. Then again, she thought, her mother had never, in any moment she could recall, rhapsodized about anything, with the possible exception being the fantasy where she’d bring her dead brother’s son into her bosom to claim him rightfully as her nephew. And even then, Ellen recalled, though spoken aloud, those fantasies were restricted by the way in which they didn’t allow anyone else in or around them, and permitted only one man to enter—Clayton Cannon.

  Ellen had had quite enough of that thought’s devilment. So she picked up her phone and dialed her mother’s number. But after only one ring, she slammed it down with the force of her fear, her discomfiture. What would I say? she thought. How do I call up my mother and ask her if she breast-fed me? And the most devilish question of them all, she thought, was what she would say if her mother we
re to confirm that, no, indeed she had not breast-fed her? Would she then, in protest of her mother’s disregard, join Mrs. Simms in swallowing handfuls of herbs and breast-feeding her baby boy from the time he slips from the womb until he leaves her breast for college?

  She put her elbows solidly on the desk and cradled her head in the palms of her hands. Fretful thoughts about her mother as a mother swam round in her head. But there were moments, Ellen could recall, when her mother was fully present. She particularly remembered the way her mother gushed over the start of Ellen’s menses. And Ellen could even see it in her mother’s eyes, soaked with a misty melancholy, as she handed Ellen her first sanitary pad. Her gaze was filled with a longing to get back the years that had gone by. They were the eyes that showed the deepest part of a mother. As Ellen looked back to that day with a clear vision that put a reverence in her heart for the word Mother and all its derivatives—Mommy, Ma, Momma, Mummy—she recalled how she stepped from the bathroom and into her mother’s waiting arms. She remembered her mother taking her to Security Mall to shop for bell-bottomed jeans and clogs, and lunch at Friendly’s, all because her body had changed.

  And so now she felt shame. Shame for all those times, past and present, when she’d accused her mother of not completely living up to the integrity of that word because of Clayton. But Clayton was still a force, and his presence had, indeed, stolen something from her. What he’d stolen, though, she wasn’t certain of because on that day, when her menses began, her mother was conscious of her in every way.

  And there were other times too. Like the night of her ballet recital, Ellen recalled as she took her mind back to her seven-year-old self. It was the night when she, nervous and having completely forgotten the steps to her dance, fell flat on her bottom in the middle of the stage and then did not get up. While some applauded politely to assuage her humiliation and others gasped with the shock of it all, her mother leapt to her feet to give her daughter a standing ovation complete with cheers of “Wonderful! Beautiful! Bravo!” and then got nearly everyone else in the auditorium on their feet with the contagion of, or maybe the sheer sympathy for, her devotion. If this wasn’t a mother’s love, Ellen thought, she would never know the meaning of it. So it was then that Ellen could see, with a distant vision, that her mother had been more than a woman with some part of her emotional life separated, hidden from her only daughter by the distraction of Clayton, a boy and then a man who was as real to Ellen as he was unreal. Even if she had never suckled at her mother’s breast, Ellen now had to believe, she would still not end up like Mrs. Simms.

  Suddenly, Nancy appeared in the doorway. “Sharon’s back. Are you ready for Mrs. Simms’s exam?”

  Gathering herself with a quick and small shake of her head, Ellen said, “Yes, of course. Let’s go.” And she got herself up from the chair with the one big thrust she’d come to perfect.

  Ellen followed Nancy into the exam room to find Mrs. Simms in a crying heap on the examination table. At first Ellen simply stood and stared with terrified eyes, knowing it had everything to do with the ultimatum she’d so brusquely thrown at a woman who, like herself, was living moment to moment at the mercy of some extreme hormone-induced emotion. And hormonal shifts might even be more extreme for Mrs. Simms, Ellen thought, because of all those herbs. So Ellen went to the woman, touched her on the shoulder and said softly, with the compassion of guilt, “Mrs. Simms, what’s the matter?”

  “What the matter is, Dr. Barrett, is that you don’t want me to be your patient anymore, and you’re the best doctor I’ve ever had.”

  “Mrs. Simms, what I said is that if you insist on continuing to follow the advice of an herbalist over my medical advice, then you should find another doctor. The risk of something going terribly wrong during delivery with all these different herbs you’re taking gets greater and greater. I’m afraid for you if you continue doing that, Mrs. Simms, and I can’t treat you properly if you don’t follow my advice.” Ellen paused, then went to the stool and sat. “Mrs. Simms, are you trying to tell me that you’ve decided that you don’t want to give up the herbalist and the herbal supplements?”

  “I don’t know, Dr. Barrett,” she said as she sniffled, then blew her nose into a tissue Nancy handed her. “All I know is that I’m trying to do the best I can possibly do for this baby. I’m trying to give it the most perfect place to live while it’s in my body. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

  “But, Mrs. Simms, don’t you see? When I followed you through your pregnancy with D.J., you didn’t take these herbal supplements, and he was a healthy baby, and now he’s a healthy boy. You ate right and got good prenatal care, and that was it. What I’m trying to say is that you don’t need this stuff this herbalist has convinced you to take.”

  Mrs. Simms brightened with the light of sudden insight. “You know, you’re right. D.J. was so healthy he never even had one ear infection. And he never even got a cold until he went to nursery school when he was three. And you remember, don’t you, how he scored a nine on his Apgar, right?”

  “Yes, of course I remember that,” Ellen said with a proud smile that she’d clarified her point. “And so you see, just let your body naturally do its job. You don’t need all that stuff to produce a healthy baby.”

  “What about the ginseng tea?” Mrs. Simms said almost pleadingly.

  Nancy wheeled the Doptone across the room and set it up next to Mrs. Simms for Ellen to check the baby’s heart. As Ellen got up from the stool and went to where Nancy stood to prepare to listen to the baby’s heart, she said, “I particularly want you to cut out the ginseng tea because there’s just not enough known about what it can do to a developing fetus. It may do absolutely nothing, but it just may be strong enough to do some damage.”

  “Okay, well, when I go home, Dr. Barrett, I promise that I’ll throw it all out, and I won’t go back to see the herbalist until after I’ve delivered.”

  “And even then, you’ve got to be careful because of your breast milk, okay? But by then, that will be the baby’s pediatrician’s problem to deal with and you’ll have to discuss it with him.”

  Ellen placed the Doptone on Mrs. Simms’s belly, then turned it on. Immediately the room was filled with the sturdy beating of the baby’s tiny heart. This was the part of pregnancy that always made Ellen feel as if she played a small part in a miracle. As she stood there listening, smiling into Mrs. Simms’s face, which was doing the same, she thought of how she’d listened to this astounding sound of life in so many wombs over the years, and each and every one could still put awe in her own heart. That from nothing but a seed and an egg, both unseen by the eye, could grow this beat of life convinced her that the world was full of miracles. Yet why was it, she wondered, that she could never believe strongly enough in her mother’s believed miracle, Clayton? And as she stood there reading the baby’s heartbeats as they were spat out on a strip of paper from the Doptone, she knew why she couldn’t believe. Because two miracles in her mother’s life that she’d come to name Ellen and Aaron should have been quite enough. More than enough.

  Aaron didn’t so much hear the whispers as feel them, along with the stares, when he went into the waiting room of Ellen’s office and sat down. One, two, three women, he counted. What he needed, more than anything, was a moment to prepare himself for the eye contact he would not be able to avoid. When he did finally look up, his gaze met the smiling face of a woman not quite as pregnant as his sister, but full enough with child to be obvious that it was more than a beer gut. It was moments just like this one, when he found himself cornered with his fame in a room full of women, that made him aware of the reality that once he stepped from his home, his life was not his own. Most days it was fine. Most days it was something he clearly understood as a part of his job. But then there were days like today when he simply didn’t feel like smiling, didn’t feel like speaking, didn’t feel like being charming or elegant or gracious. So now he was eye to eye with this woman whose grinning glare was as imposing as her
red hair that hung right on the edge of nearly being orange. He could see that she was not going to stop until she got something from him—at the least a return smile.

  And that’s when she said, “Hi, you’re Aaron Jackson from Channel Eleven, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am. How are you?” Aaron said with a smile that had miles to go before it would become true.

  “I’m fine. And I just love you. I watch you every evening. Of all the places you could be, I can’t believe that I’m seeing you here in my obstetrician’s office.”

  “Ah, well, Dr. Barrett is my sister. I’m here to take her to lunch.”

  “Oh my!” all three of the waiting women said at once.

  “I had no idea,” the red-haired woman said. “She’s just terrific, your sister.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” said the woman sitting next to him, who may have been at the beginning of a pregnancy, or may have just finished with one.

  Aaron turned to her, and for no particular reason he could think of, said, “Oh thanks.” But then he turned away, because he didn’t want to be caught staring at her stomach, particularly if she wasn’t pregnant but merely plump.

  “Say,” the woman sitting next to the smiling redhead said, as if she’d had a sudden thought. “You and your co-anchor Maggie Poole are an item, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess you can say that we’re ‘an item.’”

  “So are you headed toward marriage?” the red-haired woman asked.

  Aaron considered the question at first, rather bold and prying though it was, then said, “Well, aren’t we all headed toward marriage?”

  And his audience giggled politely, until the woman next to him said, “Well, that was evasive enough.”