Baby Jesus

By Jenny Hatchadorian

As we drove back from our daughter’s two-month check-up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, my husband Aaron and I were primed for an argument. Once again, the pediatrician’s message was that we were bungling things, especially in regard to our daughter’s constipation. “Pear juice hasn’t worked. She won’t drink it,” Aaron said in clipped speech.

“What if we make the bottles with more water?” I offered.

“When it seems like she has to poop, we need to hold her knees up to her belly. It will help, ergonomically. That’s how Baby Jesus designed us.”

Up until this moment, the utterance of Baby Jesus was accompanied by sarcasm, but I could tell by the coldness of his words that he wasn’t joking. Just in case, I clocked him for a smirk, but it only arrived after my second glance.

Baby Jesus first entered my lexicon when I met Aaron’s parents nine years earlier in North Carolina. In advance of the visit, Aaron mentioned his parents had become more conservative since they’d moved from Cleveland, but this didn’t concern me. I was raised by Republicans.

Compared to my fiscally conservative and socially still quite conservative parents, I found Aaron’s parents hopeful, adventurous, and open-minded. They were religious, some would say very, especially his mother who possessed the zeal of a converted Catholic, but as long Aaron and I were on the same page, their beliefs were less relevant to me.

After dinner, I grabbed my suitcase and followed Aaron upstairs. Exhausted from teaching, LaGuardia, and smiling so much my cheeks hurt, I half listened as I rolled my suitcase on the ivory carpet. “This is the frog. It stands for ‘finished room over the garage.’ It’s the only guest bedroom with a bathroom,” Aaron pointed to a large, sunken room. He walked further down the hallway and gestured to a bedroom with a twin bed and ceiling fan. “This is Denver Broncos. When we moved in, it had Bronco’s trim.”

Then he stopped at a guest bedroom next to a bathroom. “Here’s your room.” He gestured inside. “Jeanene Horses.”

For the moment, I put aside Jeanene and her horses. “My room?”

“Yeah, I’m in Broncos.” He rolled his eyes.

“But we live together.” We shared an apartment in Brooklyn, as we had in Los Angeles.

“It’s just because of Baby Jesus.”

Like Jeanene Horses, he seemed to think the phrase “Baby Jesus” communicated something to me, but it didn’t. “What does that mean?”

Aaron pulled his arms close like a T-rex, made his lips loose and gurgled like a baby. Then he stood on his toes, glared down at me, and said in a high-pitched voice, “You’re not married.” For effect, he twirled his arms and let out a high-pitched, maniacal giggle.

I pursed my lips.

“We’re not married,” he said in his normal voice and wiped drool from his lips.

“I see,” I said. As I wheeled my suitcase into Jeanene Horses, the ivory carpet muffled the sound.

On the last night of my visit, I sat next to Aaron’s mother at dinner. I knew not to discuss politics, but on a personal level she was sweet and curious. Unlike many religious people I’d met, she was open-minded and kind. Against type, she was knowledgeable and well-spoken. Even her obstinance was charming because she wore it with such confidence. Until, like any good heathen, I curled away when she let loose some disparaging comments about gay people and the doozy “I don’t think young people today feel enough shame.”

It was 2011. Shame was everywhere. There were more abortion restrictions than in the previous three decades and several states enacted the strictest voting laws since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I swallowed my rebuttal with my Brussel sprouts, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her comment.

As I ate, I weighed her comment against other family intel. Aaron’s cousin once told me a lengthy story about how she’d briefly joined the Church of Scientology. While she spoke, I tried to focus on her ability to feel a level of rapture and rhapsody I would never feel and not on the fact that Scientology rejected psychiatry, demanded a large amount of its followers’ income, and pushed an expensive list of courses called The Bridge to Total Freedom. In fact, several of Aaron’s family members were prone to spirited, irrational assumptions, but when I brought up his cousin’s involvement with Scientology, Aaron assured me he too was alarmed.

I was an atheist, raised by atheists who were overtly skeptical of organized religion. My family could be impulsive, demanding and capitalist, but we were logical. There were many lawyers among us, and we could distill any argument to a rational motivation. Throughout my life, I’d been repelled by organized religion not only because of everyone the church left out—women, gays, trans people—but also because I couldn’t bear irrational people.

In the 1990s, I grew up as the rare child of divorced parents in a heavily Catholic Cleveland suburb. In middle school, my boyfriend broke up with me because I did not attend Parish School of Religion classes. PSR classes were taught at several local churches and provided catechetical education to kids in public school, but because it was a loosely disciplined after-school activity for thirteen-year-olds, it was also a meat market. Even as a teenager, I knew it was nonsense that I was dumped over PSR. I knew religion was nonsense. Now as a filmmaker and adjunct professor in New York, my distrust of religion had grown. Essentially, I didn’t think I could spend my life with a religious person.

“That sucked what your mom said about gay people,” I whispered to Aaron during a clandestine visit to Denver Broncos.

“Oh, she just thinks they’re defying Baby Jesus,” Aaron said and dismissed my concern with a swipe of the hand.

I’d always cherished the fact that he was the black sheep of the family, but this was the second time he’d mentioned Baby Jesus. I looked at him. Were beliefs and personality innate? Even if buried during his rebellious twenties, later in life would his upbringing rear its ugly head?

He smirked at me. “You know I’m not religious at all, right?”

I dug my toe in the ivory carpet. “Were you ever?”

He shook his head like he was annoyed to answer. “Even in eighth grade, I refused Confirmation. I knew it wasn’t for me.”

In that moment as the two of us stood in Denver Broncos against the wishes of Baby Jesus, his comment was enough. We wrapped up the trip sure we were on the same side of the divide.

•••

Little changed in the next nine years of our relationship. Looking back, those were blissful years where we flouted God-fearing values, had sex for pleasure, teased heteronormative expectations, and bashed the church with abandon.

Occasionally, there were inklings of Aaron’s religious upbringing. When a performance class at our Los Angeles film school planned a visit to a Baptist church in South Central LA, Aaron refused to go. The professor thought the vocal stylings of this particular Baptist preacher were affecting, winsome, and authentic, but Aaron wouldn’t bite. “I’m not comfortable laughing at people in church,” he said.

“That’s not what the field trip is about,” I said with a half smile. I was excited to use the word “field trip” at the age of twenty-five, while at the same time I related a genuine sentiment. If anyone laughed, the alternative but deadly serious professor would have reprimanded them, but the notion of attending church for anything other than worship pulled at Aaron’s heart strings.

Concerned, I turned to my trusty astrology book. I preferred this book because it listed horoscopes not by month, but by day, and it grounded its descriptions in personality traits. As I turned to Aaron’s page, I knew this route wasn’t entirely logical, but I needed guidance and I’d rather have it from the occult than white men in robes who stood behind podiums. Unfortunately for me, spirituality was all over Aaron’s page. The meditation for his birthday, The Day of Inner Fervor, was See God in everything. Notable passages of his horoscope included Belief is an important theme in the lives of December 10 people. Devotional types, they pray at the altar of character, wisdom, morality. The final sentence was the kicker: They may put their faith in God, the Universe, scientific laws or in a moving Spirit behind all things, but they generally put their faith somewhere.

To calm myself, I chose to believe Aaron put his faith in art. He had a BFA in photography, nearly an MFA in filmmaking, and he worked as a producer on film sets and as an artistic director for a record label. He had such a blind devotion to artmaking that he put up with many things I would not. On set, he spent fourteen hours a day on the Canadian border in below-zero temperatures and bathed in an outdoor shower in November. He wrote emails at 4 a.m., and he drove three hours to buy an actor a Peloton, all in the name of art.

I, too, worked in the arts, although sometimes begrudgingly. I occasionally fantasized about having a more stable or lucrative career, but Aaron couldn’t fathom it. He didn’t see the point, even when we were so broke. After years of supporting us in reality TV, he’d pulled the plug on his stable job when we’d saved enough for a sandwich. Aaron and I also diverged in how we categorized artists. I thought an artist was someone who exhibited work, while Aaron thought an artist was someone who saw the world through an aesthetic lens … which sounded awfully … spiritual. So, he was spiritual, that wasn’t bad. His faith was in art, I told myself as I settled under the sheets at night.

•••

Suddenly, when Aaron became a dad, Baby Jesus was uttered not with sarcasm, but as a salve during intimate moments and a solution in times of stress.

As new parents, our anxiety was completely intertwined with the frequency and texture of our daughter’s excrement. We had graduate degrees, we were award-winning filmmakers and writers. We had slowly, steadfastly crafted the lives we wanted—but everything we held dear was at the whim of our daughter’s poop. When she was backed up, she wouldn’t play, sleep, or sit. She screamed, fussed, and was inconsolable, and our lives came to a screeching halt.

Generally, after a day and a half without a poop, we began to troubleshoot. At our disposal, we had a variety of strategies our pediatrician encouraged, and some he allowed with reservation. Judging when to utilize the emergency measures was obviously a fraught decision. When the lack of shit hit the fan, it was no surprise that Aaron tended toward abstinence, or divine intervention. As the vessel who carried our daughter, her screams pierced not only my ears, but my uterus and soul, or maybe I was just a wimp. I preferred to use everything in the medicine bag until the turd left the building.

During a particularly long bout without a poop where we followed Aaron’s method of doing nothing, our daughter clung to us and whimpered for the better part of three days. When the moment finally presented itself and our daughter passed a boulder so well-packed, she screamed in pain, I shouted over her cries, “I told you we should have used the mineral oil.”

“That’s not how Baby Jesus made assholes!” Aaron screamed. There was not a smirk before, after, or anywhere in the vicinity of his comment.

Our warring perspectives were probably not helped by the fact that our daughter was born in February 2020, a few weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown. We suffered not only the isolation of new parents, but the seclusion of the pandemic.

At night, we were relegated to our movie projector. Like any two people, our tastes diverged, and we were both filmmakers, so obviously we argued about movies. I was a film professor who could handle more academic material, while Aaron’s taste drifted commercial. In the past, we’d disagreed over Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which he considered romantic, while I found it depressing that the hero only loved the heroine when she was disguised as another woman. I’d put off watching It’s a Wonderful Life until my mid-thirties because I sensed it was… well… Catholic. When I finally saw it per Aaron’s suggestion, he cried at the movie’s sense of love and sacrifice, while I thought it was blaringly disheartening that Jimmy Stewart never left his dying small town and instead lapsed into depression and alcoholism.

Once Aaron became a father, his taste skewed in a direction I could not grasp. Over his former preference for stand-up, horror, and boundary-pushing foreign films, he chose family movies. Weeks after our daughter was born, we streamed the TV show Virgin River about a woman who finds love in a small town, followed by both the original and remake of the maternal suburban The Stepford Wives, before landing firmly in the 1950s with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This riveting piece of cinema culminated with Elizabeth Taylor lying that she was pregnant to please her extended family. This was not the impetus to the story; it was the end. In the final frame, Director Richard Brooks winked at the audience with a kaleidoscopic fade on a long kiss between Elizabeth Taylor and her husband suggesting that maybe, finally, she’d just do what everyone wanted and get pregnant. After that hot mess, Aaron and I settled for less confrontational content, but, even ironically, there are only so many times a film professor can watch the Hallmark Channel.

A chilly spell at the end of April caused me to bring out our daughter’s stroller sleeping bag. With her zipped in the bassinet, I walked laps in Prospect Park amongst socially distanced crowds. After the genius move of not discussing whether we should have a child before I became pregnant, Aaron and I followed that up with the winning decision of not reviewing how we would raise our daughter. In forty-degree rain, I was desperate to talk to other urbanites. All I needed was a quick jab or poke at religion, but even with a mask on, no one would come near me.

As I pushed the stroller back toward our apartment, I was sympathetic toward my husband, to a point. For me, everything changed a year ago when I became pregnant. For him, things didn’t really shift until two months ago when our daughter was born. The entire time my body ached and ballooned, I mourned the loss of my childless life, but I also promised myself that not everything would change.

When I returned home, Aaron stood in the kitchen and unwrapped a cardboard box that had arrived in the mail. On my walk, I’d concluded that a pandemic not only prompted isolation, but fostered beliefs of the less sound mind. Maybe my logical husband had fallen victim to the mental toll of the pandemic. As I set our sleeping daughter in her crib, I approached him with extra compassion.

He pulled the last piece of bubble tape off what was clearly his childhood advent calendar. The calendar that hung in my childhood home was fluffy and bright with candy canes, mittens, and snowflakes. This austere, biblical calendar featured a wooden baby cradle, an ornate urn, and a goblet to drink Baby Jesus’s blood. I was mortified. Also, it was April. I took a deep breath and remembered my sentiment of compassion, but my gaze narrowed on the urn. “What’s with the urn? Whose ashes are in it?”

He shot me a glance.

I smiled, willing warmth into my face, if not my words.

“It’s not an urn. It’s a jar of frankincense, or perhaps myrrh. It’s one of the wise men’s gifts. See?” He pointed to the nativity scene at the top of the calendar.

“It’s April.”

“It’s homey.” He walked to the sink. As he fetched a glass of water, he added, “It’s good for her to become familiar with the iconography.”

“The iconography?” I blurted out.

He nodded as he drank. My compassion left the room, so I did, too.

The next day, I woke from a nap in our railroad apartment to hear Aaron bouncing our daughter on his knee in the next room. “Baby Jesus made these toes, these legs, this belly,” he sang. He kissed each body part after he named it. It was cute. Cute, and troubling. I rolled over, acquiescing that Jesus was in the house.

•••

Two months later we were forced out of New York. Moving during the pandemic was no treat, magnified by the fact that Aaron found work well off the beaten path in Bozeman, Montana. Days before our car transport service arrived, the company tripled the price, so we decided Aaron would drive, and I would fly cross-country with an infant and a cat.

Alone in the apartment, I took care of our daughter and cleared the wreckage of our presence. The day before our flight, Aaron called.

“Hey!” I said, sidetracked with the list of things I had to do before I turned in our keys.

He merely breathed into the phone.

“Honey? Hello? Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“South Dakota.”

“Good, you’re almost there.”

“I think I should turn around.”

“What? No. Why?”

“I don’t know about you flying alone.”

“I can do it. It’s fine.” Four months postpartum, taking two flights with an infant and a cat was not a walk in the park, but I could do it.

“What if they take the baby?” he asked in short speech.

“Who?”

“TSA.”

My glance darted around our empty apartment and landed on a wall mirror—here on the heels of Baby Jesus was the spirited irrationality. I looked at myself in the mirror. “TSA is not going to steal our daughter.”

“You don’t have her birth certificate,” he said.

This was true. His family had planned a trip to Ireland, so we’d sent away for her passport. Still, TSA was not going to take the baby. “I have other documents. You just miss her, but she’s doing great. She pooped today. Actually, she pooped twice. Soft and large.”

There was a time when news of our daughter’s silky excrement was enough to elevate Aaron to a state of euphoria. This was not one of those times.

He sighed into the phone.

“Stay the course, honey. It would take longer to get back here. You wouldn’t make it before our flight,” I said as the tires of our basement-level Prius C hummed into the phone. It was his third day on the road, and my heart went out to him. “It’s crazy to drive alone for that long. It messes with your head. You’re almost there. We’ll be there tomorrow, and we’ll meet you.”

“Not if it’s up to TSA…” he muttered.

“Remember, she has my name. That’s why I’m flying with her. It’s cleaner, logistically. Plus, we didn’t steal her, so it’s all good.”

“They don’t know that.”

“Honey.” I bit my lip. “TSA is not going to take the baby. It’s a domestic flight. They’re not even going to check for identification.”

He seemed to mull over my words. As I counted the dust bunnies on the adjacent wall, I prayed that I got through to him. If I put my faith anywhere, it was in my husband.

Right now, he was probably cruising on a desolate stretch of I-90. Sioux Falls was at one end of the state, but it was a long six hours until The Badlands, Black Hills National Forest, and Rapid City at the other end. In between, there wasn’t much more than a raw sun and an occasional shopping center, or maybe a field of sunflowers. After three days of fast food, lumpy motel beds or—if I knew Aaron correctly, reclining in the driver’s seat at a truck stop—he was wan, uninspired, and sprouting acne. Alone in the car, he went without A/C in late June to save gas. With his t-shirt and the driver’s seat coated in back sweat, he drove, feeling the strain and uncertainty of another move while missing his wife and daughter.

I could handle a spiritual man but not an irrational one. Aaron was logical; he was under the stress of becoming a new parent and moving across the country during a pandemic. He was living proof that personality was not innate. Nurture triumphed over nature. Aaron knew the TSA did not steal babies; he was rational. In his long, slow breaths that permeated the line, I could hear his brain working it out this very moment.

Then his breath quickened right before he wailed, “But … what if they take the baby?!”

•••

JENNY HATCHADORIAN has been published by Story Club Magazine, Role Reboot, and Little Old Lady. Her comedic essay New Family won Story Club Cleveland’s Audience Award. She is working on a book of comedic essays titled Midwestern Witch. Follow her on Instagram @hatchadorianhere or Twitter @hatchadorian

Wonderstruck

Photo by William Brawley/Flickr

By Andrew Forrester

I’m staring at this fleshy alien, wrapped straightjacket-tight in a swaddling blanket. He’s sort of quietly writhing in a clear plastic box, and I’ve thought about a dozen times that, even for a hospital, this all seems overly clinical. A plastic box? It looks like something from the Container Store, something much more suited to storing winter clothes or high school yearbooks, or maybe small reptiles. But instead, it’s holding my newborn son, and I’m having one of those dad moments that can come off as trite but which are really quite profound: my newborn son, sleeping. My son.

For some reason, when I think of a typical dad on the day of his first child’s birth, I think of Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. I don’t actually know the movie that well, but Jimmy Stewart’s husband-cum-dad persona—businesslike and anxious all at once—seems about right for a day like today. But whereas Jimmy would be rushing in and out of the hospital room for work and occasionally haranguing nurses about his concerns while never quite connecting with his actual child, I am trapped in something that feels more like a thriller than whatever genre It’s a Wonderful Life falls into. I’m frozen, heart pounding, anxious without anything resembling businesslikeness. That’s my baby. James. If I take my eyes off him for a second, what will go wrong? Suddenly, we’re in the movie Speed, but the bus is my child, and I’m Keanu, and the point is that something disastrous could happen if I fail to—what?

I don’t know. But I am a dad now, and my child is sitting in a plastic tub, and his head has turned to the side, and if I know anything about babies, it’s that they can’t control their heads, and I wonder if I should get someone, because what if he can’t breathe in that position? He’s so tiny and vulnerable, and no one in this hospital, not even my wife Megan, seems to care. But I’m also so tired, and I’m not even the one who did the actual having of the baby, so my tiredness seems selfish. But I’m still so tired. And it seems like the best thing would be to pick him up, so that I can control his head for him, but I also want to lie down. I want to lie down so badly, but this couch I’m sitting on is an affront to dads, moms, birth partners everywhere. It’s manufactured to fit maybe a ten-year-old comfortably, and honestly, I should probably have a word with someone in charge, because this is unacceptable—how do they expect fathers of newborn children who have no head control to be able to sleep on this nightmare bench? How do they expect us to sleep at all?

The hospital has a policy of encouraging “sleeping in,” which just means that they want mothers and babies to spend their nights together, I guess because that way they’ll get used to each other. I am a rule follower, so of course I’m determined to align my thinking with the hospital’s. They are the experts. I’m a twenty-eight-year-old grad student, and it’s not like I’m even studying something useful. My qualifying exams on Victorian literature have not prepared me for this moment, except that I can now amuse myself by talking about how Megan’s period of “lying in” is over. No, I don’t know anything about biology or child development, so if this very domineering nurse says James should sleep in the room with us, then the very domineering nurse must be right.

I decide to take a chance and pull my eyes away from James for a moment, because that’s what you have to do. Like watchers on some ancient city wall guarding something precious, fathers throughout history have had to take breaks to eat, to sleep, to use the chamber pot or whatever. I turn to Megan. The clichéd thing to say is that she looks beautiful, lying there in her hospital bed, a soft, angelic glow somehow coalescing through the commingling of the fluorescent hospital lights. (I know nothing of physics, either).

But, while Megan is very beautiful, the truth is that she looks tired. Tired with an edge. Tired like an old person, which is to say, tired with a kind of wisdom, and a kind of impatience. Leading up to the birth, Megan has been understandably emotional and a little fearful about the realities of labor, while I have tried my best to be everything Steve Martin isn’t in the Father of the Bride movies. I am loving. I am supportive. I am calm. I am rational. I am not going to rip hot dog buns out of their packaging in the grocery store or sell my family home to a ruthless developer, only to buy it back at a higher price. But something strange has happened now, and our roles have switched, and I have upped the ante. I am far more emotional than Megan ever was. I’m a quivering mess, and even in these few seconds, even as my head has rotated on my spine to look at Megan, I’ve thought, “I wonder if he’s dying back there.”

Megan can tell. Not that I think James might somehow be dead. But that I am terrified.

“You should go,” she says. Not lovingly. Not angrily. Just a curt statement of fact, stating the obvious. “Murder is bad.” “Two plus two is four.” “You are about to explode into a thousand anxious pieces, so you really should leave this hospital.”

“What?” I say, and suddenly I do sound like Jimmy Stewart, with that steel guitar shock in his voice. What? Mary! You want the moon?

“You should go. You need a break.”

“I need a break?”

If I need a break, then I am an absolute disgrace. This woman has just given birth. Strike that. She hasn’t “just” done anything. This has taken nine months. There has been vomit. There has been vertigo. Uncomfortable below-the-waist exams. A preeclampsia scare. And she still went to work every morning at six-thirty. Then she did this.

I look back at the baby. He’s alive, but now he has hiccups, and they seem far too powerful for someone who is only seven hours old. I make a mental note to check with a nurse when Megan and I are finished talking.

I’m trapped again. I can’t take my eyes off him.

“Yes,” she continues from behind me, “you need a break. You’re tired. You should go home and take a shower.”

“I—what?”

I can’t even argue.

It sounds so good. I want to do it. I need to do it. I—

I’m crying. Not hard crying. Sad movie moment crying. The kind of crying you can hide from your boss or people on the street, but not from your wife.

I chance a look back at Megan, who assesses me. I am a suspect, and she is the detective behind the two-way mirror.

“Yeah, honestly, you should probably just go and sleep there. Go home and come back refreshed. I’ll send him to the nursery. People do it all the time.”

Who is this woman?

I cannot send my newborn child to the nursery like some sort of cigar-smoking father from the 1940s. I cannot Jimmy Stewart my baby.

But it sounds so good, too. It sounds so, so good. We have been at the hospital for over twenty-four hours. I spent the night on a different nightmare bench in a different room, while they induced Megan, thanks to the preeclampsia scare.

“Okay,” I say, no longer crying, watching James once more. “I’ll go home and shower. Then I’ll let you know. I’ll probably come back, but I’ll let you know.”

“You should just sleep there,” she says again. Her eyes are narrow, and she has not so much as nodded reassuringly.

“I’ll let you know.”

I drive home in a daze. The hospital is not close, but somehow, I’m already in my driveway. Linda, my mother-in-law, is inside, watching TV on the couch. I give her a quick update and head straight for the shower.

You know how, in movies, when characters are sad, and it’s raining, you feel like, okay, maybe you guys are laying it on a little thick here? And you think back to your high school English class, and remember how your teacher talked kind of patronizingly about “pathetic fallacy,” and convinced you that reflecting a character’s mood in the weather is a little bit lazy, don’t you think? Well, crying in the shower isn’t an example of pathetic fallacy, but it’s in the same vein. It’s bad writing.

It’s still what happens to me.

I turn on the water, strip down, step in, and weep. I mean, weep.

And I talk. It’s kind of like praying, kind of like pleading.

What have we done?

We shouldn’t have done this.

Why did we do this?

I’m not cut out for this.

In the back of my mind, I know that these thoughts, like the glowing postnatal woman and my current state of crying in the shower, are clichés. Every dad thinks these things. But there’s also a part of me that thinks, no, really, I am specifically not cut out for this. Other people can do this. I cannot. I cannot shepherd this tiny perfect human into adulthood. I cannot shoulder that responsibility. I am sure to break him, physically and emotionally and all the other –allys. Megan is so strong and I am so weak, so out-of-control, so ready to lie down and sleep in an actual bed with sheets and a mattress that extends beyond the length of your average park bench.

I want to do it. I want to stay home, and sleep, and go back refreshed, like Megan said.

I dry off and get dressed and decide to run the idea past Linda.

People talk about bad mothers-in-law like it’s a given thing. Like you’re as likely to have an overbearing, judgmental mother-in-law as you are to have an overbearing, judgmental barista at one of those artisanal coffee shops where they expect you to have an espresso preference. But I have a very good mother-in-law. She’s kind and supportive and would rather die—seriously, die—than put her opinions where they don’t belong. She is a good person to run this question by.

“Megan says I should sleep here, but do you think that’s okay, because I feel like I’m failing her in some way if I do that, and if I’m failing her then I’m also failing as a dad, and I just feel really bad for leaving her and bad that she’s sending him to the nursery and I—”

Obviously, I am crying again. Weeping, again, actually, and to my mother-in-law.

There is often shame in weeping. We look at the exaggerated mourning rituals of other cultures, and we judge them. Or at the very least, we wish they would show some dignity. Weeping in the shower is embarrassing, but in a contained way, an I-can’t-believe-I-did-that way. Weeping to a mother-in-law, even a very good mother-in-law, is horrific. I wish I could show some dignity.

Linda jumps to her feet, which are wrapped up in fuzzy white slippers, and pulls me into a hug, and I don’t exactly realize it, but this is what I need. A second strange shifting of roles, for me at least. From father to child. She holds me, only for a few seconds, and she lets me cry, and she doesn’t try to tell me what to do or think, though she does answer my question.

“I think it’s totally fine if you stay here,” she says. “You don’t need to feel guilty.” And it’s like she’s given me permission. No one has given me permission for a long time. I’m a dad now. I’m a permission-giver, but for the last hour, I’ve been silently begging for someone to take authority from me, to take decision-making power from me, to relinquish me of my choices and my worries and the weight of fatherhood, and here, Linda is doing it, and Megan has already done it, and I just have to accept it.

I do.

I stop crying, and we laugh a little, and then I go to our bedroom—the room that Megan and James and I will share for the next six or so months—and I get in bed. I take a break. I read a bit. I check my phone and text Megan. I’m comfortable, and there is no baby to watch, and if, for a second, I am fearful of the night after next, when James is here in this room with us and I can’t take my eyes off him, and no nurses roam the halls outside, waiting to be accosted with questions about the hiccups that shake their patients’ miniature bodies, then it’s only for a second, and soon, I’m sleeping. Hard.

The next day, I arrive at the hospital room before James does. I sit on the nightmare bench, and I tell Megan about the night before. About weeping in the shower and crying to her mom, about realizing that I was overwhelmed and guilty and terrified of failure, and that, even if I’m still all of those things, the break was nice. I’m grateful for it.

Megan is warm again. “Of course,” she smiles. “We were totally fine.”

And then the nurses wheel in James, in his little plastic box. And he is totally fine. He’s tiny and helpless. All he really wants is milk, and even that is a struggle. The nurse has to help him latch, which, if I let it, will worry me, too, because what if he’s not getting the nutrition he needs, and what do we do when we get home and the domineering nurse is gone, and and and.

The nurse lifts him from his Tupperware container and brings him to me, so that I can hold him for a moment before I give him to Megan to nurse. The very moment he came into the world, our doctor said, “I think he looks like you,” and she was right. Even I could see it. I see it now. He’s my son, and I don’t know what all that means, but I know that I love him, and I’m afraid of him. I know that I will hurt him, and he will hurt me. I know that I’m proud of him.

He is wonderful, and I am wonderstruck. And I can’t take my eyes off him.

•••

ANDREW FORRESTER is a writer and teacher who recently received his PhD in English literature. His work has appeared in academic journals, Full Grown People, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son.

Escape

Photo by Gina Easley

By Reyna Eisenstark

The birth of my first child was the most traumatic event of my life. Nothing has come close. I’m talking about trauma in the physical sense, but also in the emotional sense, and truly in any other sense that you might use to describe trauma. What I’m supposed to add right here is that at the end of it I had this beautiful child, who is now a remarkable young woman, seventeen years old. This is true, of course, but she had nothing to do with it. This is about me.

The very same day my daughter was born, seven convicts broke out of a maximum-security prison in Texas. They stole guns and a getaway car and spent six weeks on the run, stealing money and weapons and additional vehicles and murdering a police officer before they were finally captured. Just before they escaped, the men had left a note in the prison that said, “You haven’t heard the last of us yet.”

•••

I don’t know what would have happened had I not overheard a nurse, at some point early in my labor, say that when she was in labor, she just sat in a rocking chair and rocked and rocked. It was the last thing the functional part of my brain picked up and latched onto right before it abandoned me. Picture me, a hugely pregnant woman rocking and rocking in a chair, her eyes wild and clearly no longer connecting to this world. If she could have spoken, she would have said, “Help me, please, help me.”

There’s no point in describing the pain because if you’ve gone through it you know exactly what it feels like, and if you haven’t there’s nothing I can do. However. The second time I gave birth, I discovered that contractions do not last for hours. I finally knew what people meant by a “break” between contractions. I understood that there really was time to catch your breath. But the first time around, this was not true. The steady wrenching pain across my back was simply punctuated by bursts of even sharper wrenching pain. The term for this is “back labor” which, like so many other birth-related terms, is a euphemism.

And yet, we had learned so much at our birthing technique class! For example: why would you avoid drugs throughout your pregnancy only to take them right at the end? And so, contrary to my natural predilections, I avoided drugs. Instead, with my desperate wild eyes, I rocked and rocked in a chair like the mental patient I had become, and, just as they tell you never to do, I held my breath with each contraction. The midwife on call and a nurse stared at me in my crazy chair. Stared and watched me rock and rock and hold my breath through a contraction. “She’s doing great,” said one of them. “Yes, she is,” said the other. And they left.

My then-husband, also in the room, by the way, happened to be the kind of person who waited to see how long he could go, how cold it would get outside, before turning the heat on. Let’s wait until November first! he’d say every year with a delighted grin. And later, when we had a wood stove in the living room, he insisted we heat the entire house with it except for a few hours very early in the morning. I had grown up with a mother who turned the heat down at night to 68 degrees. She was a desperately needy person, needy for attention and for luxury. I was not going to be like her, I’d decided. Instead, I spent my winters huddled around a wood stove.

One thing I didn’t know about giving birth was that the midwives, nurses, and etc. check in on you from time to time, but if nothing’s happening, they don’t stick around. Mostly, it was just me and my ex-husband, who tried to be encouraging. Really, though, I didn’t even want him to look at me. I could not bear to be in that kind of pain and have anyone’s eyes on me. It had been probably twelve hours by now.

At some point, the midwife and my ex-husband got into a verbal disagreement. He was probably refusing some kind of test that we were supposed to refuse according to our birthing technique class. But the midwife was nasty, something you might find surprising. The male doctors in that practice turned out to be patient and gentle. The midwife snapped at both of us. She threatened to leave if he kept disagreeing with her.

I had no energy to intervene.

This same midwife, after even more unhelpful hours had passed, offered me something that was too good to refuse. What if we gave you, she said, something to take the edge off? What she meant was Demerol. I had a thought that I might be able to climb back to myself, if only briefly, and I agreed. This was when my ex-husband got angry. At me. Hadn’t we decided that I wouldn’t take any drugs? We had decided that, yes.

I don’t really want to say this, but what happened next was that he turned away from me, picked up his Economist, and started reading. He was done with me.

Unfortunately, the Demerol’s effects only lasted a short time. But in that short dreamy time I could collect my thoughts. The pain was no longer me. It was a little separate from me, and I felt something like relief. But my ex-husband, the man I had come to the hospital with, the man who had stayed with me for all these hours, was angry. Somehow he connected the pain that was wracking my body with the child we were going to have. I did not. I never had.

Time passed. Twenty hours in, I said to a nurse, I feel like I have to push! I didn’t really. But I knew that pushing was supposed to happen eventually. My words were like magic. Suddenly, there was action, people coming into the room and not walking out again; they were wheeling in trays with equipment, acting busy, like I was finally, after twenty fucking hours, doing what I was supposed to be doing. Well, now I couldn’t let them down. And so, I pushed. I pushed as fiercely as I possibly could, the way someone who isn’t pregnant at all might push, just thinking that by sheer force, but with no help at all from my own body, I would push this baby out. It turned out that I strained my pelvis muscles so badly that over the next few days I could barely sit up from the pain. But at that point, I was fierce. I tried, I really tried. But nothing happened.

At nine p.m., after twenty-four hours of labor, I was wheeled into the operating room. If the past twenty-four hours had been my greatest trauma, my greatest moment of relief was the next one, when the anesthesiologist stuck a ridiculously long needle into my spine and I felt the absence of pain, which is sweeter than anything you can imagine. This is what I’d been waiting for, wanting, for twenty-four hours. Someone, this beloved stranger, had simply known.

•••

Not long after my daughter was born, I would be told that the midwife at my practice had stopped attending births. “She was burned out,” someone would explain to me. Ten years later, I would tell my husband, the man who had turned away from me, that I could no longer be married to him.

As for the Texas Seven, as the men who broke out of the high-security prison came to be called, I need to point out that during those same hours that I spent rocking and rocking, trapped in pain, the men made their escape. It was midday, a time when surveillance of certain areas in the prison was a little more lax. The men had worked out a plan beforehand, which seems improbably simplistic but ended up working out perfectly, according to news reports: one of the men would call someone over, while another would hit this man on the head from behind and then throw him into a maintenance closet (just like a movie about men breaking out of prison). After the men had stolen the clothing and credit cards from their victims in the maintenance closet, they made their way to the back of the prison. There, the rest of the group was waiting with a stolen prison pickup truck. Finally they drove off. They were free.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a freelance writer and editor living in Chatham, New York. She is a regular contributor to Full Grown People. You can read more of her writing at reynaeisenstark.wordpress.com.

Titanic

Photo by cea+/Flickr

By Susan Goldberg

Rachel and I told the kids that we were separating on a Saturday night—also known in our then-household as Family Movie Night. Family Movie Night was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: we each took turns picking a film, and then the four of us hunkered down with pizza and popcorn in the basement and watched it together.

Family Movie Night was about as democratic as it gets, which means that if I had to sit through Soccer Dog: European Cup and suffer the unrelenting vulgarity (and grudging hilarity) of Dumb and Dumber, then in turn my sons had to put up with my fondness for classics like Annie, School of Rock, and Beetlejuice, and with Rachel’s fascinating but maybe slightly off-base pick of Beasts of the Southern Wild.

We’d decided to separate a couple of months earlier, in an eerily calm conversation, one of us at either end of the living room couch, an afghan covering our feet in the middle. “Decided,” perhaps, isn’t entirely accurate; I, at least, had decided weeks earlier that I was done, that there would be no more couples counseling, no more trying to fix what was irreparably damaged. More precisely, then, we acknowledged that the marriage was over. If I’d had any lingering doubts, they were dispelled when Rachel excused herself from the conversation to use the bathroom. As she walked up the stairs, the thought that rose, gleeful and unbidden, in my head was, “Now I can renovate bathroom exactly how I want it.”

Since that day, we’d been white-knuckling it to get through the winter school break, through Christmas (and an accompanying, weeklong visit from my mother-in-law), through the regular school/music lessons/soccer/swimming/meals/homework routine.

It was a surreal, slightly desperate time, punctuated by the confusing beauty of occasionally lovely family dinners and moments of pure joy with the boys, moments when Rachel and I looked at each other across the dining room table and shook our heads in disbelief that we were undoing this, even as we both knew exactly why. Ending the marriage was the right decision, and the much more frequent moments where we seethed silently, argued in whispers, retreated to our various corners of the house—or left it altogether, shaking in anger and grief—confirmed that.

Before we told the kids, we had needed time to figure out some basic facts — who would move out (her), how we would divide our time with the kids (50/50), how much the house was worth (I called an appraiser), how we would create a separation agreement and what it might look like (we hired a mediator, engaged our lawyers), how we’d handle living arrangements until she found a new place (we’d alternate spending time in the house with the children and staying with friends).

In focusing on those details, we were also making space to let the enormity of our decision sink in, to shift from envisioning a future together to a future apart, its unknown possibilities both exciting (bathroom!) and terrifying (money, loneliness). In figuring out schedules and valuations, we began the process what it would mean to let go, to be able to stop trying to work things out as a couple. In my better moments, it occurred to me that at least the problems we were dealing with now with had solutions.

And now, we had to figure out how to tell the boys.

On this particular Saturday evening, our seven-year-old son got to choose what we’d be watching for Family Movie Night.

“He wants Titanic,” Rachel texted me that morning. “It’s a metaphor.”

“I’ll miss your gallows sense of humor,” I wrote back. It was true.

Is there any good way to tell your children that their parents are splitting up? We’d been putting off the conversation until we could give them some credible information about why and how and where and with whom they’d be living, at least in the shorter term. We’d rehearsed the basics of what we needed to say — that it wasn’t their fault, that we loved them both deeply, that we’d tried really hard for a long time, that no one hated each other, that we’d still see lots of each other even on the days we weren’t all together.

Still, I felt entirely unprepared for the conversation, my dread mounting as the day (soccer practice, diving lessons, Pokémon club, playdates) wore on. I will admit that I dropped by a friend’s house in the late afternoon and took her up on her offer to share some of her clonazepam stash. In the end, I didn’t take any of the tiny pink pills that she’d carefully cut in half, but their very presence, in a baggie in my jeans pocket, felt like a talisman, warding off the worst.

Plus, we had a three-hour, sinking ship of a movie to watch. Subject matter aside, the sheer length of Titanic meant that we had to get the conversation over with quickly if we had any hope of actually watching the movie and getting to bed at a reasonable hour, putting the day and its challenges behind us.

Looking back, my focus on the logistics of the evening seems misplaced, a minor technicality in the grand scheme of what we were about to unleash on our kids. But so much—perhaps most—of parenting is about seemingly minor technicalities, details around snacks and screen time and who sits where and the right socks. In the midst of chaos, these details took on, at least momentarily, as much weight as housing appraisals and custody schedules. Or maybe it was simply that I had some control over them, could use them as a roadmap for the conversation, for the evening that would follow it.

We called, as planned, a family meeting. What we didn’t plan was our younger son insisting on having a tickle fight with Rachel immediately beforehand. On, of all places, our bed, the bed that we both, often, still slept in together, if awkwardly and chastely. (We didn’t have a spare room; the couch was uncomfortable; many nights we were simply too exhausted to bother contemplating other arrangements.) Eventually our ten-year-old joined in, as did I—because things were already strange enough, because who knew how many more moments like this we’d ever have, this family, together?

So there we were, the four of us, wrestling and giggling, the two of us with a secret and the two of them with no idea that their mothers’ marriage had hit its own iceberg.

Finally, I looked at my watch, and then at my ex. “We have something we need to talk to you about,” Rachel said, cutting short the tragic, gleeful puppy pile.

“What?” asked our firstborn.

“About a decision that Susan and I have made about our partnership,” she said, carefully.

“What about it?” asked his younger brother, utterly jovially. “Are you gonna get a divorce?”

Rachel and I looked at each other, and then back at them. “Well,” she said, “yes.”

I watched the expressions on their faces change slowly, identically: from open, tired delight to cloudy confusion, to fear, and then shock, then disbelief. “Really?”

“Really.”

Both kids looked from each of our faces to the other’s, scanning our expressions for some sign that we were joking, that this was just some warped continuation of our previous frolicking.

We launched into our prepared talk. There were tears, and hugs, and, eventually—because my children are children—talk of new kittens at the new house, “and maybe an Xbox!”

And then we ate pizza and watched Titanic, the hockey game dialed up on the iPad as well.

For days afterward, our younger son would repeat, “That was weird, the way that you told us.”

“Yeah,” I would say back. “It really was.”

“I wish you could’ve told us slower,” he’d say. I didn’t know how to answer. How could I explain that I’d been carrying around the news for so long that the weight of it was almost unbearable? That the months of that secret felt like the longest, slowest ones of my life?

“I was having a really good day until you told us that,” our older boy kept saying. “I won my soccer game, I won at Pokémon, the Blackhawks beat the Canadiens the night before, and then you told us you were getting divorced.”

“Yeah,” I finally answered. “It wasn’t a very good way to end the day. But, what if you had a really terrible day, and this was just the icing on the cake? And then you’d be all like, First we lost at soccer, and then I lost Pokémon, and the Habs won, and to top it all off, my parents told me that they were separating.” I managed to get a smile out of him.

“Maybe one day,” I said to him, “maybe one day, the way we told you will be one more story that we can tell about our family. Maybe one day, we’ll be able to look back on this and laugh and say, Remember when Rachel and Susan told us in the middle of a tickle fight that they were getting separated, and then we all watched Titanic together? And it will be strange and a little bit sad, but it will also be funny, and it will still be our story. All of ours.”

As we watched Titanic on that final Family Movie Night, Rachel and I looked at each other, often, over the heads of our sons. Once, we touched hands, nodding to each other silently: We got through this. We’re going to get through this.

Our younger son loved the film. His older brother was indifferent.

And Rachel and I?

We agreed, wholeheartedly, that it was a disaster.

•••

SUSAN GOLDBERG is a writer, editor and essayist, and coeditor of the award-winning anthology And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Ms., Toronto Life, Lilith, Today’s Parent and Stealing Time magazines, and several anthologies, including Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender-Fluid Parenting Practices and Here Come the Brides! Reflections on Lesbian Love and Marriage. She is a regular contributor to several websites, including CBC Parents. Susan lives with her sons in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she is one of approximately thirty-odd Jews.

Spectator

Photo by Gina Easley. www.GinaEasley.com

By Kristin Wagner

I can see life outside through a rectangle.

The sliding glass door to the back of our house is large and unobstructed and like a huge movie screen, a world happening within four sides.

I am a spectator, observing the sway of branches in a wind that would snatch my breath away, the fury of rainstorms that tinge the sky green with a sudden drop in barometric pressure that I could feel squeezing and pulling my body, the gentleness of sunlight sparkling on snow that would have twisted my muscles too tight in the cold. I stayed inside because I had to. I watched the world outside through this frame because it was all I could do to be a part of the outside world.

Summer is so unforgiving in its beauty and its heat. I wish ugliness and boredom. I wish heat came automatically with a barren dry hellscape, a vision I could feel justified in closing the drapes against, scenery no one would blame me for hating. I wish 100 degrees came without sprinklers and snow cones and dusk and lightening bugs and the smell of tomato plants growing so that I didn’t sit inside filled with envy and lost opportunities. The rectangle of outside life I can see is gorgeously blue and peony pink and sunflower yellow and vibrant green. Each time I pass into that world, though, I can only stay a little while before I seem to collapse in on myself, the cell walls that keep my body upright softening like ice cream and falling inward into an inevitable puddle.

Winter is unforgiving in its beauty and its cold. When it’s ugly and slush-gray on the ground and slate-gray in the sky, I can convince myself that there is nothing more to want than coziness and movies and warm food. But often enough the rectangle I can see is dazzling with diamonds, the sharp outlines of black branches tangled in the most lovely way, dashes of red as cardinals flit in and out of our hedges and the sun in winter comes at a clean-edged new angle. I remember that the air in winter feels cleaner, the cold coming through your lungs seems to purify the world and I want to be outside to feel that. But to feel the cold means that my muscles will react like starved and beaten dogs flinching and retracting away from a threat, and I can’t risk that, not today.

Sometimes the rectangle is a movie screen, showing reels of action that I may watch but not participate in. Snowball fights where the hit and explosion of powder occur just off stage right, the cinematographer giving just the edge of a child bending and scooping snow. The director that allows me glimpses into my children’s outdoor lives makes sure not to give away too much. I’m allowed a quick impish glance at the camera before the characters run off again—where they’re going and what they’ll do next a mystery. The rule for playing in the snow without me is that I have to be able to still see them through the rectangle without much effort. Within earshot is too far away. Within my line of vision is the right distance, where I can bring them back too soon because if I don’t, if I wait too long, I will not have enough energy for pulling off boots and making hot chocolate.

Life as a spectator is not bereft of joy, but it is not a participatory kind of joy. It is observational and it requires that you truly love the subjects of your observation; you must not be consumed with envy at their joy. There are certain people I do not love enough to merely watch them being happy without me. Children are different though, because I would gladly walk through broken glass for them. This is nothing so dramatic—I simply have to find contentment in looking through unbroken glass instead of being on the other side of it.

•••

Sometimes I determine that I have to be a participant, that I have to be active. Sometimes it may be a function of time, a calculation of how long it has been since I joined in. Sometimes my calculations encompass the savvy of a Las Vegas odds-maker and determine that the risk is outweighed by reward. Sometimes I find that I cannot abide simply watching another minute longer.

One winter day, strep had overtaken my usual illness, the sharp rasping swallow punctuating normal exhaustion. My oldest was finishing his basketball season, and at the last practice the parents were invited to join in games. Despite being practically bed-ridden for months, I did. I put on sneakers and threw a headband over my hair and tried to coordinate my body in ways I had never tried before for relays, and I called plays I didn’t understand, and I ran all-out sprints. It felt silly but I wanted him to remember this effort, this effort to overcome my embarrassment and illness for him at least for a bit. I dropped every ball thrown my way, and it would hit my foot and skitter off and I was trying to show him that these things can be laughed off, that trying new things will mean mistakes that are survivable. Lessons I felt like my boys weren’t hearing often enough—that they were worth my effort, and embarrassment is temporary, and joy can happen in the midst of epic failures of skill. Sometimes I understand that showing them what that can look like means more than telling them.

We got to a game where only three players were on the court at a time. My kid and I and a teenage boy were to take over a few roles. The older boy and I would play offense and my guy would play defense and the only goal was for offense to get the ball through the hoop. Every other parent got the ball to the teenager, and the teenager took a shot. This time the teenager threw the ball to me, and I actually caught it without a fumble or bobble. Stunned, I realized I was near enough the hoop that even with my stubby, weak, and unpracticed arms, I might have a shot. I pivoted to the hoop and, as I lifted my eyes, brought the ball up, and it began to leave my fingertips, it was smacked out of the sky inches from my nose. I was dumbfounded and all I saw was the line of other parents, children, and coaches with huge eyes and even bigger surprised smiles having witnessed my son fly through the air higher than ever before to knock that ball out of the sky. Epic. It was epic. We all laughed helplessly for minutes on end, kids recreating his block and other kids recreating my stunned expression.

My guy was so pleased with himself, but then the light for him went out for just a moment as he whispered to me, “You could have really made it in—I am so sorry.” He realized that he would have been devastated to be robbed of a moment of triumph that no one expected to see.

But how can I explain to him, that for my effort I got to be a player on the movie screen, a key foil needed to create an amazing unrepeatable moment? That I got to be in the scene instead of the audience for once? That I was within the frame of the rectangle, on the other side of the glass and be there to assist in something great? He would be given an award for the best defensive play of the season, against his own mother, when we got the end-of-the-season ice cream.

And how can I explain to him that the spectators to the scene mattered as much as the actors? That their smiles and laughter meant as much to the moment? That the people watching and the people doing are inextricably bound together and one is just as important as the other, that the rectangle I sometimes have to view life through is not a movie screen with the actors unaware that the movie-goers even exist?

How can I explain the joy of knowing that when I am only able to watch, I matter as much as when I am able to act?

•••

KRISTIN WAGNER is a creative non-fiction writer, a former teacher, a mother to two school-aged boys, a wife, and a person with a collection of chronic illnesses. When those illnesses allow, she posts at kristindemarcowagner.com on topics ranging from disability advocacy to making cupcakes with her kids. Other publishing credits include essays at The Manifest-Station (on illness and parenting), and The Rumpus (on teaching and caring for students), and right here at Full Grown People (on teaching and caring for students and parenting).

Spectrum

By Fiona Tinwei Lam

RED (life)

My partner was brewing a pungent, murky brown concoction on the stove. The label on the box beside the stove listed burdock root, slippery elm bark, sheep sorrel, and turkey rhubarb root, but it gave me no clue as to the purpose of the ingredients.

“What’s it for?” I asked, sniffing the pot.

Ted mumbled something unintelligible.

“Is it a laxative?” I asked.

“Not exactly.”

“For digestive problems?”

He paused. “Nope.”

Puzzled, I tried again. As a custom cabinet-maker, he had been working long hours and weekends but seemed energetic and healthy. “Is it for your anemia?” Several months before, he had been diagnosed with a severe iron deficiency, but he’d been taking a supplement.

“Kind of.”

I made a few more failed guesses. Finally, he said flatly and quietly, “It’s for cancer.”

I stared at him. “Why on earth do you think you have cancer?”

He kept stirring the pot. “I’ve been passing blood.”

When I urged him emphatically to see the doctor for more tests, he shrugged. He carefully poured the steaming brew through a sieve into a couple of large jars, not spilling a single drop. “I guess I should.”

•••

Several weeks later, we sat with the gastroenterologist in a small examining room, looking at a color print-out of the images taken during an internal scan of Ted’s intestines. One image revealed subtle polyps that looked hardly more sinister than crimson crayon scrawls. Another image showed the slight bulge of a small polyp that resembled a small fleshy boil or pimple. But then there was the final image: it looked like a blob of gummy red gelatin encasing curled-up maggots. It filled a third of the intestinal tunnel and resembled a fetal mouse or fetal frog. I repressed an instinctive shudder.

“It’s cancer,” the doctor said without drama. “I took a biopsy, but I’m fairly certain.”

So this was what cancer looked like from the inside. Ted’s father had died over two decades earlier of complications following stomach cancer surgery. A decade earlier, Ted`s eldest sister had died of colorectal cancer at the age of fifty-seven. Years of gruelling chemotherapy, radiation and experimental therapies had failed to stop its spread. We were informed that people with a first-degree relative with colorectal cancer are at a higher risk of developing it. Being the most commonly diagnosed type of cancer after prostate cancer for men, it is the second leading cause of death from cancer overall, although if detected early, it is over ninety percent curable.

The doctor matter-of-factly went through the process that we’d be going through: staging to determine how far the cancer had spread, an ultrasound and CT scan, analysis of the biopsy results, a referral to a surgeon. He drew a diagram of the kind of bowel resection surgery that Ted could expect to undergo—it looked deceptively simple, a cross between plumbing repair and alterations at a tailor’s.

Strangely, neither Ted nor I was alarmed. Perhaps we’d used up our storehouse of apprehension during the weeks leading up to the colonoscopy From this moment on, he would go through the necessary tests and procedures with all the hoops and steps laid out for him. It was as if we were both buckled into the seat of a medical amusement park ride called “the oncological flow chart.” A positive result on one test might lead to a diversion down a more complex chain of procedures; a negative result might lead to a positive destination reached in a shorter time. None of the flow charts in the cancer brochures led to the word “death.” But it existed, unwritten, just over the edge.

•••

We arrived for Ted’s surgery at Vancouver’s historic St. Paul’s hospital on the first day of August. As we dutifully followed the painted red line on the floor through the body of the older buildings into the newer sections, we passed commemorative plaques about the nuns who had fundraised on horseback at mining and logging camps to raise funds to found the hospital at a time when the current downtown site was located on the outskirts of wilderness.

Little did we know how familiar we would become with that brick edifice with its threading red line. Advised initially that he might expect a stay of five days, Ted would remain there for over four weeks. I would be taking the bus there daily, sometimes twice daily, for the remainder of the summer.

VIOLET (spirit)

We’d prepared for weeks before the surgery, going in for Ted’s appointments with the surgeon and for scans, as well as to the pre-admission clinic to review hospital checklists, instructions, and test results which I gathered in a purple file folder on the kitchen counter near the phone. That file became both compass and hub through the summer and fall.

On the morning of the operation, we were the first to arrive at the day surgery department at what seemed like any typical waiting room—institutional chairs arranged against the pastel walls, a coffee table with outdated magazines. After he checked in at the reception desk, Ted changed into a hospital gown and we sat together until he was called. It didn’t seem to be a place of sufficient gravitas, of momentous, radical change, where your guts would be sliced open, dismantled, rearranged or removed—or where you could die.

Because the surgery was supposed to last three hours, I took the bus home while Ted got his abdomen shaved and epidural and intravenous lines inserted. Too restless, I returned downtown. There were booths and kiosks set up along Davie Street as part of a block party in advance of the Pride Parade the next day. At Bute and Davie I walked by the celebrated rainbow crosswalk, Canada’s first permanent rainbow-painted crosswalk added to the West End in 2013 to celebrate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the local Pride Parade. I went into a dollar store to buy a small rainbow flag to mark the festivities. Inspired by Judy Garland’s song, “Over the Rainbow,” the flag had been designed for the 1978 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco to represent the diversity of the LGBTQ movement, with special symbolic significance assigned to each colour.

Back at the hospital, I headed upstairs to Ward 10B to look for Ted. He was a bit groggy but conscious and smiling, and looked surprisingly normal except for the various tubes emerging from underneath his sheets that were connected to a catheter, an IV, and a patient-controlled hydromorphone dispensing machine known as a PCA that he could press whenever he was in pain. I pinned the rainbow flag next to the “Nothing by Mouth” sign that was turned face down on the bulletin board behind his hospital bed, wondering why each of the six beds in the room had bulletin boards with those signs and no artwork or photos.

As there didn’t seem to be any kind of bulging from his abdomen, I asked Ted if the surgeon had given him an ostomy. He wasn’t sure and hadn’t had a chance to ask. The whole idea of having your intestine protrude out from your body to expel feces into an external bag had made us both queasy and anxious, despite our having watched the obligatory DVD at the pre-admission clinic that showed gorgeous athletic men and women blithely unaffected by their ostomies.

With his permission, I gingerly lifted the sheets and then his hospital gown, bracing myself for the worst. We both peered down at his belly. There was a narrow tube leading from a dressing a few inches beneath his rib cage to a small disc-like Hemovac drain to remove the build-up of excess blood and fluids after surgery. On different parts of his belly were five neat sets of black staples along puckered, deep red incisions, with the longest row near the pubic area. Over the weeks ahead, the redness would soon fade to purple, and then eventually light brown, until the scars from the incisions were barely perceptible.

I put his gown and the sheets and blankets back in place. I felt like celebrating and considered heading out to watch the parade the next day to wave our little Pride flag. Ted had made it through surgery successfully. He was in good spirits. The cancerous tumor had been removed, with no need for an ostomy. Maybe this whole ordeal wasn’t so terrible after all?

BLUE (serenity)

Ted found it difficult to sleep on the ward. The blue PCA machine dispensing the hydromorphone and IV fluids ticked and clucked day and night without a break except when the IV or the medication needed to be refreshed. We pretended there were miniature robotic chickens trapped inside it, even tried to imitate the sounds. He had to take it with him to the bathroom, the IV pole draped with tubes and with electrical cords that had to be pulled out each time. But the PCA alleviated the discomfort, at least during those first few days. I fretted about the possibility of addiction, but he waved my concerns away and kept clicking the button to bliss.

When he’d been first diagnosed with colorectal cancer, I had wondered how I’d feel about the hospitalization, bed pans, diapers, catheters, the physical changes to his body, the possible ostomy. Although we had lived together and become more interdependent over the past four years, he knew that I still had some doubts about our relationship. He was concerned that his care would become a burden that I would resent.

“You don’t have to come every day,” he told me.

I looked at him in disbelief. “Of course I do!”

And I did. The day after the operation, I ventured out to drift among the crowds in the intense August heat to get a glimpse of the parade. The noise and hoopla were fun, but ultimately it felt jarring to be surrounded by the teeming exuberance and staged goodwill. I rushed back to the hospital where it was quiet and cool and where I really wanted to be—with Ted.

Most of the time, after arranging plants and flowers and cards on the sill and getting him fresh ice chips, I’d gaze out the window by his bed. I’d look down at the shifting rhythm of traffic on Burrard Street and out at the glass towers that reflected both each other and a faceted sky. After drawing the curtains between us and the other patients so we could at least have the illusion of privacy, I would sometimes sit facing him on the bed, my back against the footboard, my legs alongside his, so we could hold or rub each other’s feet, which felt more intimate than holding hands.

Sometimes after the visitors had gone and if my twelve-year-old son was staying at his father’s, I’d remain to watch dusk fall across the city. I didn’t have to be social or chase down Ted’s frustratingly elusive leprechaun-like surgeon and his wandering medical team. The fluorescent lights would be turned off and everything would slowly become bathed in blue. I’d watch a DVD with him on the old portable player I’d brought, the light from the screen flickering across his face.

Other days seemed very long. I wouldn’t realize it until I returned home. Saturated from the hospital, I would want to collapse in bed, but I’d face a backlog of texts, voicemail, and email messages. My work, household chores, and tasks accumulated, undone. I had just enough energy to deal with Ted at the hospital and my son at home and not much left for anything else. But it seemed impossible for it to be any other way. Whether I was examining Ted’s stitches and dressings, helping out the nurses by changing his hospital gown or diapers, giving him sponge baths, massaging his feet, taking him for walks, or just sitting with him, it was important for me to be there. Our lives were entwined. Until then, I hadn’t been aware of how much. What bound us together wasn’t a yoke, leash or chain—it was a root.

ORANGE (healing)

Very soon after his surgery, Ted started receiving clear fluids. The little four ounce chilled plastic juice containers started to pile up: mostly orange, but grape and apple too. The inevitable hospital jello came also— yellow, orange, and red, laden with sugar, artificial flavours and colours, and probably made from gelatin extracted from the bones of factory farmed animals. Dishwater-like broths of questionable origin arrived as well. He downed them all willingly.

As his incisions seemed to be healing well, the type and level of foods swiftly advanced from meal to meal as the dieticians tried to speed his progress and ready his digestive system for his possible discharge from hospital in a few days’ time. He started receiving cream soups—broccoli, carrot, mushroom. When he started getting little cups of orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream, Ted’s eyes lit up as he devoured each one. His abdomen became increasingly bloated, however. We started joking that he was growing twins. Then rice with green beans and fish arrived, followed by a chicken sandwich, puddings. The stack of unopened juices grew taller. His belly ballooned out, painfully distended. The traffic jam inside his digestive tract became untenable. Intense, continuous nausea overcame him. He stopped smiling, his gaze turned downward and inward. The food was left untouched.

GREEN (nature)

Ted rejected the insertion of a nasogastric tube for two long days. But soon, it was impossible for him to think or sleep.

“Could I get more medication for the nausea?” he pleaded with the long-suffering nurse on the ward that day.

“You’re already on the highest dose,” she said shaking her head, disapprovingly. Her tone of voice shifted into persuasive mode. “Why not try the NG tube? You’ll feel better.”

Ted was fighting his body’s natural urge to reject the food. A scan showed that a gas pocket near his duodenum was causing the blockage. He finally agreed. It took five painstaking, arduous attempts by the nurses to feed the NG tubing down his nose into his stomach while he gagged and vomited on the floor. One attempt stopped him from being able to speak. He had to yank out the tube in order communicate to them that they’d threaded it in the wrong direction, toward his trachea instead of his esophagus.

When I returned later, he was sitting with his eyes downcast with concentration and discomfort. He seemed demoralized and exhausted. Green fluid was being suctioned out through his left nostril via a long tube attached to his nose that snaked into a large plastic canister attached to a wall unit. The canister was already half full. Canister after canister was filled and emptied that day. Ted’s nausea started to subside, but talking was kept to a minimum. I fended off friends from visiting.

“I’ll never look at a green smoothie the same way again,” I told him.

Over the course of the weeks ahead, it seemed almost everyone else in the gastrointestinal ward would be “producing” the exact same green fluid irrespective of what they were ingesting, as if the ward were some bizarre factory. The sound of vomiting was common. The cleaners were regularly called in to mop the floor of spilled bodily fluids of every type.

A number of patients came and went, part of the shifting social microcosm of the ward. We joked about pitching a reality TV show called Ward 10B. There was an elderly Danish man with dementia who was scheduled for a reverse ileostomy but kept pulling out his IV and trying to flee. Beside him was an outdoorsy young man who’d been airlifted to the hospital as a result of tearing his spleen after a dive gone wrong. After a few days, he was replaced by a wiry, grizzled fellow with keen, bright eyes, who swore and complained vociferously about the food. “What’s this shit?” The patient who had a bed next to Ted’s appeared to be a new immigrant. His chador-clad wife had her hands full trying to shush two young, precocious children. He was soon replaced by another patient whom we nicknamed “The Prince.” He conversed frequently and loudly on his cell phone in Farsi while his mother fussed over him. “More ice!” he commanded the nurses repeatedly.

The insertion of the NG tube did not end Ted’s problems. Just after his surgeon left for summer vacation, Ted’s temperature began to rise dangerously. His distended belly became tender and painful. The fluid in his Hemovac tube became pus-like and fetid, as if something were rotting inside him. A CT scan showed that there were air bubbles leaking from the re-sectioned area—infection had set in. He was put on an intensive course of antibiotics via IV and his vital signs were monitored every hour.

A peculiar foggy terror filled my throat and chest. My every movement seemed sluggish as if I were trudging through swampland, but certain thoughts flitted around in obsessive loops. I questioned the doctors, sent detailed emails and texts to his family members. I peppered the night nurses with questions when I’d get home late at night. Some would brush me off; a few would update me. If he deteriorated further, he would have to be admitted to the Acute Care ward for continual monitoring and more drastic medical interventions. A second operation could be risky, and if it occurred, even more of his colon might need to be removed with the likelihood of an ostomy, probably a permanent one. He might get another infection. Recovery would be longer, slower and more complicated.

Because his system had rejected most of the food and drink they’d given him, and because of the need for the re-sectioned bowel to heal properly, the doctor prescribed daily liquid nutrients, called total parenteral nutrition (TPN). A nurse told us that each bag cost $1000 to make fresh daily and had to be specially transported to St. Paul’s from another hospital laboratory. We named it the Crisco milkshake but it seemed more akin to breast milk. Chock-full of lipids, sugars, vitamins, trace minerals, and amino acids, it was a creamy white substance that was administered by an extremely narrow catheter threaded into a central vein in his chest. A nurse told me that the leftover TPN discarded at the end of each day supposedly worked well as plant fertilizer. (I took some home for the garden—our apple tree had a bumper crop the next year.) The TPN would sustain Ted for the next three weeks while he ingested nothing but ice chips. The orderlies with the food trays would stay away: the sign on the bulletin board was now turned face-up.

•••

The lounge in the ward had a small bookshelf with a few outdated magazines, several hospital foundation publications, and a number of dog-eared paperbacks. I noticed the cover of a single National Geographic magazine in the stack. The pristine copy was dated 1968 and its feature article described the plans for the first lunar landing. During those weeks in hospital, I sometimes felt like we’d landed on an artificial planet, a desolate sterile landscape with little vegetation, shifting inhabitants, its own unique language, hierarchies, protocols, and undeviating routines.

The whole ward seemed utterly divorced from nature: its windows wouldn’t open; the sliding glass door to the balcony off the lounge was locked; the concrete balcony itself was dirty and uninviting; there was no fresh air and little greenery other than a few limp, discarded bouquets and dehydrated plants left behind by discharged patients. I placed a hydrangea plant in the corner of Ted’s room so that he would awaken to their large blue clustered heads and rich green leaves every morning. As soon as they entered his room, the nurses and visitors would see something alive and beautiful and thriving.

YELLOW (sunlight)

Ted was supposed to have regular, short walks to maintain his circulation, increase his strength, and speed his healing. At first, it took immense effort just to get to the bathroom. He’d prepare himself with a shot of hydromorphone from the PCA, put on his special rubber-soled hospital socks, put on another hospital robe to cover his back, disconnect the NG tube during the days it was in place, clip the Hemovac to his gown, unplug the two electrical cords from the wall, drape the cords on the pole, pull himself up, and then try to walk step by shaky step without losing his balance. Getting back to bed meant going through the whole routine in reverse.

Eventually, he was able to get past the doors of the ward to reach the service elevators, next to windows that looked out onto the expanse of English Bay. He would pause there for several minutes, gripping a railing for support, before enduring the arduous fifty meter journey back to his bed.

“I was in better shape before the cancer operation,” he noted.

Right up to the day before the operation, he had been working full-time. He’d been full of vigor, tanned from a recent trek around ancient Haida villages up north, and ready to hop on his Yamaha motorcycle at any opportunity. Now he couldn‘t walk across a room without effort.

I thought of all those expressions—“gutsy,” “gut instincts,” “gut reaction,” “gut-wrenching,” “gutted,” “it takes guts,” “spill one’s guts,” “bust a gut,” and “no guts”—based on the word “guts” derived from the Old English word guttas for bowels or entrails. The adjective “visceral” comes from the Latin word viscera for inner organs also. It suddenly all made sense: the guts are located in our core, the elemental source of instinct, courage, determination, stamina, will, and strong emotion. The operation had hit Ted literally “right in the gut,” the stronghold of his vitality.

But as the days passed, his stamina gradually increased. We could extend his usual walk from the service elevators and back to include the ward down the hall. Finally, he was ready to try to take one of the notoriously slow elevators down to the fourth floor cafeteria and patio. As we waited, I could see how taxing it was for him just to stand.

The elevator finally arrived. Ted winced at every bump and jolt as we descended. The long imposed fast had eroded his body’s insulation. We made our way toward the almost vacant cafeteria. He steadily exited the open glass doors and was outside for the first time since his admission over three weeks before. As the late afternoon sunlight touched his skin, tears sprung to his eyes.

“It must be the medication,” he said.

My sister pulled up a plastic chair and helped him sit down. The plants in the concrete planters around us clearly needed watering. There were food wrappers and a few empty cups lying around, and some of the tables needed a good wipe. But it didn’t matter. We sat quietly while he closed his eyes and drank in the sunshine and the fresh air with an intense wordless gratitude.

“This is amazing,” he said at last, opening his eyes and smiling.

We talked about his progress to date. Ted had lost most of his muscle mass: his already slim 5’11 frame had been whittled down to 145 pounds. He would soon start a very cautious clear fluid diet. We stayed outside for about twenty minutes before Ted asked to return. This was the longest walk he’d taken since his admission and it had sapped his diminished reserves.

We would visit the patio again only once or twice more before his discharge; it was easier for him to take short unaccompanied walks on his floor. During the end of his stay, the monitoring of his vital signs grew less frequent, tubes were removed one by one, fewer and different medications were administered. He was even able to take his first shower. He was being released in more ways than one.

•••

Discharge day. Ted had filled out the necessary papers and questionnaires, been briefed on his diet and pain medication. He also was entirely tube-free at last. As he put on the jeans and shirt he’d arrived in thirty days before (much looser now), I removed my son’s school watercolours from the wall and the cards from the window sill and bulletin board, erased my daily list of questions for the doctors from the whiteboard, packed up the magazines, DVDs, and the rainbow flag. The room soon looked as blank and anonymous as it had been before our arrival.

“Good luck,” said the nurse who had dexterously changed Ted’s dressings, given him injections, and adjusted the IV over the course of the month, all with an artificial arm and hand.

We gave him the still healthy blue hydrangea for the staff room, and waved at the head nurse who was engrossed with paperwork. There was no one else to say goodbye to. Almost all the patients that we’d met in the beginning of Ted’s stay had been discharged earlier. Everyone was going about their business as if this were an unremarkable day.

As we walked toward the elevators, I wondered how many patients had stayed in that ward. How many had lived and how many had died as a result of their operations? Every bodily fluid imaginable had touched those floors. Every kind of person had lain in its beds, and every kind of emotion had been felt—boredom, irritation, anger, fear, despair, agony, exhaustion, relief, even joy—the full spectrum of human emotion and humanity.

The threat of a possible cancer recurrence would linger on the horizon for the foreseeable future, but it didn’t matter. Exactly one year and one week after his surgery, we would finally get married at a private family ceremony in our backyard. As my brother drove us out of the hospital parkade onto Burrard Street into the late summer sunlight, Ted teared up again. “It’s the medication,” he said. “Makes you emotional.”

•••

FIONA TINWEI LAM has authored two poetry books, Intimate Distances and Enter the Chrysanthemum, and a children’s book, The Rainbow Rocket, about a child witnessing his grandparent’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. Her prose and poetry appear in over thirty anthologies. Her past work has been shortlisted for the Event creative nonfiction prize and City of Vancouver Book Award, and she recently won The New Quarterly’s Nick Blatchford poetry prize. Her video poems have screened at festivals internationally. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poetry about Facing Cancer and co-edited the creative nonfiction anthology Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood. She is the co-editor of a forthcoming anthology of creative nonfiction and poetry about marriage, Love Me True: Writers on the Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs of Marriage. Born in Scotland, she immigrated to Canada at a young age with her family. She practiced law briefly before becoming a writer and teacher at Simon Fraser University. www.fionalam.net

Life and Death and Dark

By Carly Bergey

Is it weird to anyone else that so many of the processes of our body occur in the dark? In my mind’s eye, I’m watching things happen the way they would in an educational film in high school science. Everything: digestion, oxygen exchange, salivation, ejaculation, menstruation.

I mean picture it: a woman releases an egg, it travels down the fallopian tube, if no sperm find it, it dies and passes through the body with the rest of the uterine lining. If it’s fertilized, that egg changes, grows, and moves into the uterus and usually embeds in the right spot. Now imagine that in the dark. How the hell does this happen?

Hormones. Temperature. Luck. All regulated by biochemistry and stuff I can’t see at all. Why do I care? Is it because I’m logical and scientific? Is it because I run a little anxious?

The corpus lutem is a little watchmen that waits for any sign of a fertilized egg implanted in your body. It’s the part of the ovary that the egg bursts out of. It waits in the dark for a wave of heat—estrogen—to signal that the uterus should hold on to its lining if you are pregnant. You know the rest: the mystery of life and really if you think about it, death. Something happens and cells thrive or something happens and cells die and it all happens inside us.

It’s embarrassing how hard I tried to have a baby. How badly I waited. I thought I would be laid back and spontaneous. Finally, we can just have sex and not worry. Like Sally Albright, I thought we’d bang on the kitchen floor whenever we wanted but the truth is, it really is a cold, hard, Mexican ceramic tile and super uncomfortable. I really did take the fun out of it.

In every month, you spend three weeks waiting to find out. Waiting to ovulate, waiting to find out if you are pregnant and waiting to start again.

I had months and months of starting over. I wasn’t medically outside of normal limits. We were told that getting pregnant within a year of trying is normal. I absolutely break for people who endure this for years.

After six months and eight cycles, I woke up in the middle of the night. I felt like I was riding the tiniest tidal wave of heat. I felt a vibration—like a buzzing, happening in me. I sat wide awake in the dark and smiled. This was unusual enough, chemical enough, that I absolutely knew I was pregnant.

I was right. The next day, a few days before my period was due, I took a pregnancy test and yep, two lines, that little heat wave was the start of a baby.

I rode other waves too. Like the nausea wave. That is no joke. I texted my Dad who had recently stopped chemotherapy for what we had just learned was terminal throat cancer. We joked about puking first thing in the morning, how much we puked, how gross it is, all the different weird words for it: Puke, barf, vomit and his favorite an onomatopoeic RAAAAAALPH.

But at my first OB appointment I found out, I would be starting over again. My baby had no heartbeat.

It’s a thousand tiny deaths … all those steps from there to here. Cell death. Death of what you thought would happen. The death of your father.

When they showed me the tiny form on the screen, all I could think was that it was dark inside my womb. I didn’t want my baby in there alone and unseen when they turned the monitor off.

The body works along, without our consent whether living or dying.

I endured a few very hard weeks hoping for a natural miscarriage and, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I scheduled a D&C.

I found myself really curious about how the D&C procedure is performed. I asked the doctor to explain the approach in detail to me. Why does a physician go in blind when they remove the fetal tissue? Wouldn’t it help to have the procedure guided by ultrasound? Why do you do it in the dark? Why can’t you see?

When I asked the OB these questions, a lady I had never met but had already spoken to on the phone, she seemed offended and sort of scuffed when responding. “Um, I’ve done this before. We don’t use an ultrasound because we don’t. We know how to do it.”

Is it so much work to educate a patient about your methods, about the risks? I pressed on. “How are your outcomes? What are the risks?”

Again, annoyed and terse. “They’re good. There is a small risk of puncturing your uterus and therefore of bleeding, of hysterectomy, and, of course, even death.”

“So I could wake up without the ability to have children?”

“It’s possible, but what else are you going to do?”

She actually said that to me.

The first nurse couldn’t get an IV in. Another nurse came in and got it. She offered her condolences to me. The office was plastered with pink and red hearts. Fresh roses sat proudly at the nurses station. It was Valentine’s Day, after all. My husband offered a thankful nod and the nurse left. He held my hand and waited with me, assuring me it would be okay. He was an ocean of calm.

A small-framed man walked in, the anesthesiologist. We pulled his chair close to mine and started with this:

“My wife has sat where you are sitting five times. We joke that we have two only-children because there are nine years between our first and second living children.” He had kind eyes and a friendly energetic voice. “I’m going to talk you through the risks of anesthesia. The procedure involves sedation, no intubation or ventilation but there is a risk, less than a lightning strike, that I would need to intubate you, okay? It’s safer to do this than to drive home. You could have a bad reaction to the medication but again, these are old meds, very well studied and I am an excellent doctor.” He went through a few other risks, including the tiniest risk of death, which he said was like suffering two lightning strikes in the same day and told me I’d wake up a little groggy.

He consistently addressed me before addressing my husband. He put his hands on mine and said he was so sorry I was suffering and he wished me well, hoping that I would fare better than his wife. As he was leaving the room he turned and said “After this, you can start over and try again.”

I wrote him a thank you note later. That man is why I let them wheel me into the room, let the somewhat rude OB scrape the baby out of my body without even looking.

He was right. I did get another chance to start over. Two months later, they peeked again and saw a strong heartbeat and a tidal wave of heat with their machines. I was ten weeks along when Dad passed away in the dark of morning. And the mystery of that baby growing in the dark accompanied the grief, the way the sun rises even if you didn’t sleep great. I had a daughter that December, she has my Dad’s curls.

I got to try again two years later and have a son. We named him after my dad. He was born as fast as a lightning strike into a unlit hallway of the birth center. The midwives turned on the lights later and we all laughed at the trail of blood I left from the lobby to the spot he emerged. “That looked a lot better in the dark,” the midwife said. That was true. When I play the video of his birth in my head, I see nothing. I don’t need to see it. I had gone through enough life and death by then to trust what I can’t see.

I feel the power of his body moving through me. The weight of him leaving me, the people bustling around me, I hear myself yelling out, I hear splashes of liquid hit the floor. A nurse tells me to squat, which I ignore and deliver him standing up. I don’t even see him yet, he is just pressed against my abdomen screaming. I hold him to my belly. I feel his squishy shoulders, his tiny frame. At that point, we didn’t know it was a boy. I did have to move out of the dark hallway to confirm that.

•••

CARLY BERGEY is a Speech-Language Pathologist, singer, and writer currently crafting a memoir about her work as a voice therapist. Her creative and academic writing has been published in Intima, Pulse, the ASHA leader, ENT Secrets and CHEST. She lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with her family.

The Size of a Memory, the Size of a Heart

By Laura Giovanelli

On our fridge, there’s a pair of grainy black-and-white ultrasound stills, held up with a small plastic duck magnet and looking back at me and my husband every time we open the door for half-and-half or orange juice. In the photographs, our baby looks like a fuzzy cashew. A lima bean. A smudge on a window you could wipe away with Windex and a rag. It’s hard to believe this is where we all begin.

You may be daydreaming about having a boy or a girl, but the external genitals haven’t developed enough to reveal your baby’s sex. (Try our Chinese gender predictor for an early guess!) Either way, your baby—about the size of a kidney bean—is constantly moving and shifting, though you still can’t feel it.

I am going to be a mother, and all I can think about is my father.

My dad and I haven’t talked in nine years. But I’m the one it seems to bother. Closer to a decade than not. No phone calls, but also no letters, no emails, no texts. Not that I can imagine my dad—or the practical, literal, somewhat-adverse-to-technology engineer who was the father I used to know—texting. When I was a teenager, he was morally opposed to call waiting; in my early twenties, I alarmed him with my fumbles at blogging. I’m not alone in this—my parents had three daughters, and my younger sisters don’t have contact with our father either. It’s been so long since we’ve last talked that I have to stop and count, skip back like I’m flipping through a photo album in reverse, tallying up the times we missed. Graduations. Christmases. Birthdays. Father’s Days I avoid thinking about by giving the card section at Target plenty of distance starting right after Memorial Day.

It is surprisingly easy as an adult to go through everyday life not talking about the person who contributed half of your genetic makeup. When other people talk about their fathers, I smile or nod and hope the conversation moves on to weather. Or I talk about my father-in-law, or I cast my mind back to some time when my dad and I were talking, the more distant and innocuous memories papering over more recent unpleasantness. It’s as if I have one half of a family tree and simply painted over the other side. As if I’m walking around tilted, weighed down by one branch heavy and rich with boughs and leaves and fruit, and on the other, there’s nothing but air.

•••

There are some big no-no’s when it comes to activities for expecting moms. Some of them are pretty obvious—no bumper cars, no new tattoos, no hot tubs—but others may surprise you.

I tell my mother I’m leaning toward sending my dad a letter. I have specific reasons. A letter is quieter. It does not demand but asks. Informs but does not interrupt.

And then, of course, I make excuses not to write it—I’m busy with grading, with talking to my students about their writing, with planning a friend’s wedding shower. In early March, I wake up, and before I can change my mind, I write to him, still in my pajamas, standing up in my kitchen, early spring light bathing the wooden countertops as I blow toast crumbs off the page. What I have to say is short and straightforward, more of a note, really, scrawled on a bright green handmade paper card from a long ago Christmas stocking. The paper feels fibery, alive, like skin; I think this card will be good luck. This feels like a special occasion, the right time to use it, but I have to use two because I ruin the first by splashing tears onto the ink.

I tell my father if all goes well, he will have a granddaughter around Labor Day. Maybe I make a bad joke about planning my pregnancy that way, evidence of a nervous tick I can’t seem to avoid even when I have the chance to edit it out. I write that I am thinking of him. That I don’t expect anything in return.

But the truth, of course, is I do expect something. I can’t not expect something even as I try to let him go. The letter itself is an extension of a hand, even if it is hesitating and trembling and uncertain. In that small envelope, I have sent part of my heart.

•••

Your pregnancy: 15 weeks! Your growing baby now measures about 4 inches long, crown to rump, and weighs in at about 2 1/2 ounces (about the size of an apple)…although her eyelids are still fused shut, she can sense light. If you shine a flashlight at your tummy, for instance, she’s likely to move away from the beam.

Each Monday, cheery pregnancy email newsletters arrive in my email inbox comparing our baby’s growth to something edible: this week your baby is the size of a kumquat, the size of a mango, of a rutabaga, of an ear of corn. One week, my husband will receive a digital bulletin comparing our growing child to a pot roast. I’ll get an eggplant.

Included in these newsletters is no advice on how to talk to your estranged father.

My father and I stopped talking for reasons that now make us both look foolish. Maybe we have that in common. Perhaps I can stash this away in the basket of traits I’ve inherited from him: overly thick and unruly dark hair! hazel eyes! stubbornness and the inability to admit we’ve been wrong about something!

I’m sure, too, he has his own version of events, but here is how I remember it. Nine years ago, my youngest sister was graduating high school. To celebrate, my mother’s family planned a party. What my father said after he was invited: he was just there for the ceremony, flying down from New Jersey for that and only that. What he didn’t say: he had done the calculus, the return-on-investment, and the three children from his first marriage were not on the winning end. I remember pleading with him outside the newspaper where I worked at the time, my face hot and sweaty from being pressed to my cell phone. I paced up and down between hydrangea bushes, attempting to appeal to his most logical side, what rhetoricians, or people who study language and communication call logos, as in logos = a waste of time and money to fly five hundred miles only to sit in a hotel room. And then, because this was always a second and often less successful tactic with my dad, I attempted to appeal to his emotions (pathos = come on, it’s his daughter, my sister, we’re talking about here). He was unmovable as a boulder, which made me a foaming, irrational kind of furious. He grew calmer. I grew angrier. Mistakes were made, as they say. He cancelled plans to come at all. Maybe he mailed me a card, maybe followed up with phone call or two—all of this is lost in the fog of anger and hurt I was determined to wallow in—and after that we settled into a firm standoff of silence.

Here’s an addendum. The way my husband recalls it, I was also trying to persuade my dad to stay a few days longer. I was proud of the life we were building: the old bungalow we were renovating, our careers, our promise. We had 401(k)s! We had health insurance! What more can you ask of your adult children, especially if you happen to be into logic? He declined. He had to get back for Father’s Day, he said, to spend the day with my two younger half siblings.

Even now, right now, when I Google these dates and re-Google them, I’m shaking my head thinking, no, no, memory, you have it wrong. Memory may be slippery but a calendar isn’t. In 2008, my sister’s high school graduation ceremonies were on June 14. Father’s Day was the day after.

•••

Your pregnancy: 16 weeks! Get ready for a growth spurt. In the next few weeks, your baby will double his weight and add inches to his length. Right now, he’s about the size of an avocado: 4 1/2 inches long (head to rump) and 3 1/2 ounces. He’s even started growing toenails.

The pregnancy newsletters are silent, too, on when you will know you’re bonded with your unborn child. Will it be when they are the size of a turnip? Of a butternut squash?

Early in my pregnancy, I hope I wake one day and find my instinct to be a parent waiting for me beside my bed with my glasses. Instead it feels as if I’m walking around with a low-grade flu for two or three months. It’s a malaise that spreads to my head and my heart. My body changes but not in a way that delights me; most mornings, it’s time for another nail biting game of “what clothes will fit me today?” The first and only time I enter a maternity store, I ease around racks of tee-shirts declaring in chubby script “Happiness is On the Way” implying that, at least to the wearer, happiness had never existed before and indeed could not without the prospect of becoming a biological parent. “It’s a miracle,” a friend says of my pregnancy. I shrug. Isn’t it just nature?

Science assures me indifference is normal. According to anthropologist Meredith F. Small, prenatal bonding usually happens during the second trimester. This is when mothers begin to feel their babies move; the moving it seems, makes things more real. The attachment changes with experience, too. In one study, women who have given birth and raised a child for one year felt a stronger bond with their offspring than when they were still pregnant. And this attachment isn’t solely a matter of sharing a body. It leaves room for fathers and non-biological parents to bond with their children because they want to, not because they have to. Logically, this all makes sense. Still, I study the grainy image of the cashew on the fridge and try to name what I’m feeling, testing it like it is a twisted ankle. Is it love yet? Now? Now?

What is messy and confusing about with my relationship with my father is that there is so much good I can’t wipe from my hard drive. It isn’t possible for me to just pack these childhood memories away, like old books or toys or faded clothes that really should be taken down to the Salvation Army for a donation. I replay them even when I don’t want to: the tree house he outfitted with a crate and pulley system so I could haul up my books and less compliant passengers, such as my cats; the handle he engineered out of duct tape and cardboard so I could carry cupcakes to school without squishing them; the eight-foot tall bookshelf he designed and built me after college. The nights when I had a stomach bug and he sat with me on the bathroom floor, holding back my hair as I wrapped my arms around the cool, slick sides of the toilet bowl. The wide-mouthed Cheshire cat faces he sketched in red marker on paper bags when he packed my lunch, or the songs he made up to sing to me when I had nightmares. The time, more than a year after I graduated college and should have been better able to take care of myself, when I called him from the side of a Pennsylvania interstate because my ten-year-old Nissan Sentra’s alternator had given out and I had no idea how I was going to pay for the towing let alone the cost of repairs.

Perhaps we all keep a running tally of how the people we love the most hurt us. And our parents, because they often are our flesh and bone and blood and the first humans we know, they are the ones destined to be at the top of that list. A plus in the black here for something that makes us feel loved. A row of red minuses for the things that really tick us off. Are we ever really even? When do we understand our parents as people?

•••

Your pregnancy: 20 weeks! Your baby weighs about 10 1/2 ounces now. He’s also around 6 1/2 inches long from head to bottom and about 10 inches from head to heel—about the length of a small banana. You’ve made it to the halfway mark in your pregnancy, so celebrate with a little indulgence. Need some ideas? Try a new nightgown or pajamas, a prenatal massage, professional pictures of your pregnant self, a beautiful frame for your baby’s first picture after birth, or a piece of clothing that makes you feel really good.

For years, I thought a letter was the key to crack the silence. It was all I needed to pick this lock: a handful of magic words, a password, just like in a fairy tale. But now that I’ve sent it and it’s gone and nothing comes back, a letter also gives me license to imagine what could have been and what might have happened. What if it got lost? I wonder if I should email instead. I wonder if I even still have his email address, if he is even still working where he worked eight years ago, if he is working at all, because he could be retired. What are other ways of reaching out to your estranged father? Hallmark doesn’t make cards for this. I weigh the emotional pull of an ultrasound, the possibility of a birth announcement. “Should I send another letter?” I ask my husband. “What about certified mail?” I’m not even sure how certified mail works; will he have to go to a post office to sign for it? It seems aggressive, to send a letter that way. Demanding to be read, or least to be seen. The certainty appeals to me, though. How else do I know he knows?

What I did not write my father: I didn’t tell him it took me a long time to get pregnant, longer than I thought I should have to wait, as if becoming a parent was my right. At first, we told ourselves all the things other people were telling us: to be patient, to not worry, which, as the anxious among us know, worrying about worrying is really the most futile game a human can play with their mind. After two years, we began to see doctors. I didn’t tell my father I tried to see my life without being a mother even as we were so bent on having a child we were on the verge of starting in vitro fertilization. And we knew—we didn’t talk about this much but we knew—once we opened that box we would keep throwing money we didn’t have into it, as bottomless as it might be.

I didn’t tell my father, either, how friend after friend gave birth to one kid, then another, in the time we were trying for just a first. The few I knew were struggling, I avoided like they had a disease I could catch. How, when I heard one couple was starting IVF with an egg donor, I scoffed out loud it was going too far but inside, I was envious of their choices. I didn’t tell him what it was like to be jealous of your friends’ miscarriages, because, if you miscarried, at least you knew you could conceive. I didn’t tell him how I stopped going to baby showers. How I laid on the crackly, tight paper of an exam table at my infertility doctor’s office gazing at a poster of a Caribbean beach taped to the ceiling. There, I waited three separate times for a nurse to insert a catheter loaded with my husband’s sperm and three separate times it was in vain even though the sperm and the egg were right there, we were setting them up on a date and pulling out all the stops, a view of sugar white sands and palm trees and everything, so how could this not happen?

I didn’t tell him how infertility tests showed nothing wrong. How, for me and my husband, trying to make something together began to feel like it was cracking us apart. How we blamed each other and then when we were tired with that, we turned back to blaming ourselves. How phantoms hovered over our bed as we tried, again and again, to bend our bodies to our will and create the image of a family fixed in our heads.

How when I missed my period just after Christmas, I took five pregnancy tests over a week, so uncertain I was by then that my body could even do this.

If I could say something to my dad now it would be that I’m lingering in the doorway of parenthood, peering down the hall and trying to see down its dimly lit walls and understand where to walk and what to do. A letter, I realize now, also gives us an exit.

•••

Your pregnancy: 23 weeks! With her sense of movement well developed by now, your baby can feel you dance. And now that she’s more than 11 inches long and weighs just over a pound (about the size of a large mango), you may be able to see her squirm underneath your clothes. Blood vessels in her lungs are developing to prepare for breathing, and the sounds that your baby’s increasingly keen ears pick up are preparing her for entry into the outside world. Loud noises that become familiar now—such as your dog barking or the roar of the vacuum cleaner—probably won’t faze her when she hears them outside the womb.

By the middle of my fifth month, my belly has the tight, round heft of a basketball. If I lie very still on my back, I see my skin vibrating like a drum. The pregnancy updates remind me this may be my baby hiccupping. I picture her turning and tumbling in her amniotic sea, flipping like a fish. As soon as nineteen weeks, the prenatal newsletters suggest, a fetus can start to perceive sounds outside the womb. Talking or singing to your baby is encouraged. Instead, I talk to my father. I tell him how I think I see my husband’s nose on our child in a more recent ultrasound, how she was leaning on her right arm and the ultrasound technician whacked my belly to get the baby to move so she could be sure that arm was there. I tell him I am scared. Not just of labor but of what happens after, of trying to be a good teacher and a writer and a mother and still hold onto myself, my adult, fully-formed-if-flawed self who drinks a little too much bourbon and stays up a little too late reading in bed and probably doesn’t eat enough vegetables, even at thirty-seven. I tell him there are things you hope for your child, and in my case, in addition to all fingers and toes, I hope she doesn’t inherit my anxiety and my deep desire to please and fix. I tell him how I hope she will be braver and better and more curious than me, and I wonder if every parent feels that way, if that’s why we keep on going.

I ask him what he hoped for me, when I was a piece of stardust, floating peacefully inside my mother.

I also ask my father questions. I start with the normal kind of questionnaire-like, the catching up conversation starters you might ask a college roommate you’ve fallen out of touch with. Do you still go to Maine each summer? Do you still run? Do you still love trees and know how to identify them by their leaves as well as their bark? Did you ever make that trip to the Grand Canyon? Am I even remembering that right, that you wanted to go there? If and when you went, were you as disturbed by the herds of gawkers with selfie sticks as I was? Because if so, here we can pause, laugh, hold onto something we have in common. We can take another sip of our beers before we move on to the more difficult questions, the ones he will never answer. In complete sentences, please consider how can a parent just give up talking to his children. For extra credit, what does my stepmother think of all of us? Does she urge you to contact us? Or, because it’s the easier thing to do, because that would open wounds and vulnerability, does she just not talk about it, as you surely do not talk about it, nor encourage my half siblings to talk about it. What are my half-brother and -sister like? Do you text them? Come on, really? You can’t not text with a teenager now. Do they wonder about us? Do you see us in them? What, to you, is family?

I tell him I want the lightweight freedom of forgiveness—for me and for him—but I’m mired in the thick, dark mud of anger. I tell him we can see each other’s broken places now, the cracks all of us as adults try to glue back together. The places where cracks have become invisible parts of us, the scaffolding that carries us through life with resilience and experience. The places where the workmanship was more hasty.

•••

Your pregnancy: 30 weeks! Your baby weighs almost 3 pounds (about the size of a large cabbage). You may be feeling a little tired these days…you might also feel clumsier than normal, which is perfectly understandable. Not only are you heavier, but the concentration of weight in your pregnant belly causes a shift in your center of gravity.

At a friend’s wedding in April, surrounded by a circle of new spring leaves, she and her new husband turn to each other and to his two teenage children from his first marriage and then all four of them pledge to love and support each other. It is the opposite of trite—it feels true and real, a very public way of making a new family. Later that month, I stop by my neighbors’ house, a lesbian couple who have each had a baby within a year and a half. I am there to go through hand-me-down baby clothes. In their living room, I fold tiny shirts the size of my hand, socks smaller than my thumb. The two mothers sit cross-legged on their polished wooden floor and ease their babies into their laps and at some point they both begin to breastfeed. So here is another kind of family. One block over, there’s a family with two white parents, one from France and one from Indiana, and two adopted black teenagers, and that is another kind. There is my middle sister, who has lived with her boyfriend for years. My single friends who bought houses for themselves and their dogs. Divorced couples with kids who still make a point of eating some meals together, or buy houses close enough for their kids to walk between, or don’t. All of these are families.

A few weeks later, my husband and I drive across the country. I am headed to write for a month at a residency in Washington State and we combine it with a route through the Southwest and then up the California coast. We stop in Los Angeles, and my aunt, my father’s sister in-law, insists we stay with them. They are good and generous to us; my uncle, my father’s younger brother, keeps saying, “We’re all family here,” and each time he does my heart opens and breaks all at once. Maybe the boughs on one side of my tree aren’t dead. Maybe they are leafing out. My husband likes my uncle, appreciates his collection of antique corkscrews and bottle openers, his home brewed beer, his stories and photos of camping and traveling with his kids throughout the West. I wonder what kind of father-in-law my uncle will be someday. What kind my father would have been.

•••

Your pregnancy: 37 weeks! Your due date is very close now…While you’re sleeping, you’re likely to have some intense dreams. Anxiety both about labor and about becoming a parent can fuel a lot of strange flights of unconscious fancy.

I sometimes forget what is happening to my body in these final weeks but then I will be doing something ordinary, like getting dressed, and I catch myself in the mirror, all round and curve, and I’m surprised what I’m now feeling in my heart and my womb is so physically evident to the rest of the world. My immediate future is written for all to see—motherhood, parenthood—inviting speculation and soothsaying from strangers. She’ll be a princess, she’ll be sweet. I just want my daughter to be. I trace my fingers down my linea negra, the dark, pigmented line that appears on many pregnant women’s stomachs, dividing their bellies into two tidy halves like the neat crease of a peach. My daughter inside, her head down low near my pelvis, positioned to eject. The scrape of her arms, the lean kick of her limbs. She’s becoming more fully formed each day. She is no longer a fish; she is a human with all her parts still safe inside, still unwounded, unbroken, unscarred. Still all possibility.

•••

Your pregnancy: 39 weeks! Your baby is full term this week and waiting to greet the world! He continues to build a layer of fat to help control his body temperature after birth, but it’s likely he already measures about 20 inches and weighs a bit over 7 pounds, about the size of a mini-watermelon.

On the late August day when my daughter is officially full term, a short letter from my father arrives sandwiched between a West Elm catalog and a Home Depot credit card offer. In romantic comedies and beach reads, this might have caused me to go into labor. Instead, I leave it unopened on the dining room table for a few hours while I pace around the house, making up things to do. When I finally tear open the envelope, I see his familiar tight, tall script, the handwriting of the Cheshire cats, the handwriting I’ve known since I could read. He says he has been meaning to respond, that he has been carrying around my letter. Happy for us. Small steps. Send details when you are ready.

Instead of a resolution, I’m left with more questions. Is it is too late to be a parent at any point? When is the damage done, or when can the relationship between a parent and a child be saved? Does forgiveness have an expiration date? When can I stop looking for hurt and harm?

Sometimes when we decide to have a child, we put a lot of faith in its power. We impose incantation on what is really just biology. Foolishly, we think it can save a marriage. Make us stronger. Make us kinder, more empathetic, more patient, into people we aren’t really, at least not all the time. We all know this in our hearts this isn’t true, and yet, as a species, we do this again and again. I knew having a kid would mean I would be a parent. But I also thought it would be the spell to have both my parents in my life. But even this, this growing person inside of my body, all these cells dividing and folding and weaving their way into someone new, a beautiful magic chronicled by ultrasounds and fetal heartbeat readings and genetic tests where we breath hope toward that deep, dark salty sea inside of me—even this isn’t enough to repair my relationship with my father.

The truth is I want to turn to my own parenting now, to my daughter and my chance. I want to push into the future rushing toward us like a wave. When people ask if we are ready, I am now saying yes, and yes, and yes. Yes, in that her crib holds a mattress and yes, her car seat is installed and inspected, and yes, we have built a fort of readiness out of diapers and pacifiers and tiny hand-me-down onesies, but also our hearts are ready, so ready, so open. Yes and yes and yes.

There is so much I don’t know about being a parent right now. I’m pausing here on this curb of pre-parenthood, waiting to cross a busy street to the other side, a street I will never cross again and corner I will never return to. But I carry this image in my head in these last hours and minutes. It’s of me and my daughter together working in the garden on an early spring day a few years from now. We dive our bare hands into the soil, turning over the dirt to wake it up. We knead in compost. We count earthworms. Then we feel bad and nudge them back into their dark homes. We rip into colorful paper packages, the seeds inside as small as periods at the end of sentences, all these tiny promises of radishes and lettuces and peas. We sprinkle them with a soft blanket of soil as if we were putting them to bed.

I will tell my daughter each seed is like a little wish for the future. I will tell her we plant them, and we hope, and then we just have to wait.

•••

LAURA GIOVANELLI is an essayist and writing teacher. Her other personal writing can be found in The Washington Post. She was a newspaper reporter for nine years and has an MFA from NC State University. She now teaches at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Regeneration

By Carla Sameth

Do you ever have one of those days where nothing feels like what you want to be doing? Like when you said goodbye to your twenty-one-year-old son who is visiting you and your wife in Connecticut where you’re staying temporarily, and he’s heading over to New York City, by train, to experience the city on his own terms? And you are nervous—like old times?

•••

Do you remember saying goodbye to your son as he went into the first inpatient treatment center? Do you remember leaving that day sobbing swimming pools worth of jagged tears? Ear-shattering howling when you were in your car. You thought you’d lost him forever. He blamed you for all of it: the drugs, the anxiety, his unhappiness. You saw the other boys. You’d see this again. You knew about the bullying, imagined the fear, intuited the sense of aloneness. Perhaps he was still hating, while desperately missing you, his mom. Trying to run away and wanting to climb into bed with you. He was still tethered but the line was frayed.

Once you left him at summer camp and he was the one who would not stop crying, who would not stay on the bus while other kids gave quick hugs and skipped happily away for the summer. Later, you might wonder if you should have turned yourself in to the Child Protective Services because you insisted he go. After all, you had plans, he was going with your friend’s son and you couldn’t just send her boy without your son. Then he sent that letter—you know, the please, Mom, rescue me now before it’s too late letter. And when you called, he told you he was okay, not to come. Later you wondered: were they threatening him with something?

•••

Did you know that worms fly onto your car and manage somehow to hold on even as you drive rapidly down the freeway? What makes them cling so steadfastly to the windshield? What are they doing there? Is it fun? Is someone scared for them? Are they saying Wheeeeee!!!

There is a man, Mark Hostetler, who calls himself a “Splatologist” and studies the “bloody show” that appears on windshields. He wrote, That Gunk on Your Car: A Unique Guide to Insects of North America and will tell you what are the most common insects to splat and leave road kill on a windshield.

Another article by Forest Health tells us about Canker Worms on windshields when I see a picture it looks like the worm on our windshield this morning. We—my wife, my son, and I—all wondered about that worm during the twenty minute drive to the train station to drop off my son where he’d take a train to New Haven and another to New York City.

My son’s dad, who I divorced long ago, was nostalgic about departures in a particular way that I can relate to—like saying goodbye to a loved one in a train station. But he was talking about an ex-girlfriend, “the one that got away.” And how you know that’s the end when you hug goodbye and say, I love you.

When my wife and I said goodbye to my son this morning, we knew he was coming back on Monday, and we know that we will see him again before he goes back to California. But what if someone murders him, or rapes him with a steel pipe, or really anything in the youth hostel? And what if he’s so tired and jet lagged (remember, he said he couldn’t sleep all night) and he loses all his identification? And he gets picked up and put in immigration detention indefinitely because he looks so much like he’s from the Dominican Republic, or Ethiopia, or Brazil. What if he’s racially profiled and accused of something that justifies a taking down by police, then he’s arrested, and he ends up on Riker’s Island?

•••

The worm must have lost the battle and been blown off from his sticky spot on our windshield or crawled off as if nothing fazed it. But it’s no longer there. I looked it up and I’m quite certain this is that sticky worm from North Carolina. How did it get there on our windshield here in Connecticut? I was in Charlotte two weeks ago but didn’t go by car. Did the worm come back with me? Come out of my suitcase, my clothes, my hair? Or maybe I ingested it by mistake and it came out in my poop.

•••

Saying goodbye to my son this morning hurt my heart. There are so many things I wanted to do, to be, to give, as a mother. I wanted to leave my son with the ability or means to have financial security, a house (but my second marriage and recession killed that), with a sense of self worth and safe refuge always (although, my wife and I don’t even know where we’ll be physically living in some years). And of course I wanted to be the all-encompassing earth mother.

I can say that he knows I’ll always be there for him. But always calm, I didn’t make the grade. My list of regrets is long and it’s more like an A –Z essay of all the ways I failed.

•••

Thinking and feeling: Worms have a brain that connects with nerves from their skin and muscles. Their nerves can detect light, vibrations, and even some tastes, and the muscles of their bodies make movements in response.

So they have a brain. Does it cause them pain—do they use it to torture themselves?

What about a heart? (This same article says they have five hearts!)

My son wonders what would it be like to be that worm—would life be simpler, easier, less painful?

What does it mean when my son imagines it easier to be a worm then to live his own life?

I get it; I’ve thought about being a cow.

But if a worm has five hearts and each heart can be broken many times in a lifetime, do worms live in constant grief?

•••

My son says his cousins (my sister’s two kids) are just perfect. I ask him to consider himself an amazing person: passionate, creative, with a great sense of humor and justice. To consider all that he is—partially because of what he went through—who created him/his family, and the experiences positive and negative. His recovery that helped solidify the spiritually sound young man he is. I tell him, again, that he has a big life ahead of him. He didn’t have a ready answer but said he thought he knew what I meant. I tell him I love my niece and nephew, but my time with him, well, I didn’t have the right words, but it’s a real three scoop banana split, maybe strawberry, pineapple and hot fudge, without the calories, and more. It’s joyous I tell him, my life with you, or when he sends me a link to a song or movie and watching it makes me cry. The posts on FB where he tells me that he is proud of my graduating from my MFA program. At fifty-seven.

My son has sometimes seemed like he wished to be someone else. Or that his name be Joe, instead of Raphael. When he was about five, a young girl he went to preschool with would come over to play, and one Friday afternoon they fought over the possession of a worm. Don’t worry, they regenerate, they’ll repair themselves my mom told me when I said I imagined they would rip it in two soon. My mom knew these things; she scored the highest in biology (Regents exams) in New York in her day. Raphael wanted to bring that worm to Shabbat dinner. This is not something my sister’s mother-in-law would have appreciated. I was odd enough already—single mom, lesbian, biracial child, financially…variable.

If worms can regenerate, I wonder if they become two brand new beings?

Do people regenerate themselves; do parents secretly hunger for this, an ability to create a second chance for all the earlier screw-ups? Do they live through their children and then try again with the grandchildren, employing entirely different strategies?

I couldn’t regenerate my business and I’m happy to say I finally traded it away to write for pennies or a kick in the pants. Worries fill my head in a way I doubt would happen as a worm but I suspect at ninety- or one-hundred-years-old, I’ll look up and say, And I went all this time without being homeless or hungry. And my son was just fine. God, I hope I don’t live that long. I just want to be a good enough person for the rest of what life I have. And maybe someday spend time with a grandchild or two.

My wife seems to have no desire to be reborn a worm on a windshield. She says she hates people and rails against every living human in her most curmudgeonly times. She doesn’t wish for regeneration, only rest. Once when I wailed about my stockpiled fatigue to my son’s dad, When do I get to rest? he said, You rest when you die.

My son used to cling to me and we seemed inseparable. And then, in his early twenties, it became time for my son to separate from me, and he had to pull away in a manner that felt almost violent in its starkness. When he was in his teens, drug addiction tore him away from me while at the same time we were still fiercely, unhappily intertwined. In recovery, for almost two years, our relationship under repair and thriving, I saw and spoke with him far more regularly than my friends did with their kids who went away to college. They sobbed tears of empty nesters while I was grateful for getting back my loving son. Then it was time for him to move out of the young man’s recovery house and get on with his life. And his young sober social life was more alive then what most of us experienced (not sober) at that time in our lives. Out there enjoying himself, without the same contained structure of the recovery house he’d lived in for almost two years, after we’d been together so intensely all his young life, he sometimes didn’t return a call or text for a few days. He acted like a “normal” twenty-year-old. I got my first dose of empty nest. He was really leaving home, leaving me, and in a healthy way.

I felt gutted. I just remember his little boy head falling over my shoulder when I carried him, asleep. Warm, soft, muggy sweaty lovey heavy feeling.

I remember his little baby lips moving in his sleep, nursing, leaving little milk blisters from sucking so much. And I remember how many ways a mom is split in half each time we say goodbye to our children: at birth, the rare moments one of us sleeps, at preschool where he feels torn away and you wonder whether he sat alone playing in the sand all day like you found him, or at the last residential rehab where there were more drugs inside then outside? I don’t know if we regenerate or not. Or if we are left unmoored. With only phantom limbs.

When my son left for New York this morning, he seemed ready. And tired. He said we snored and his long lanky body was too big for the sofa. My wife and I argued over whose snores kept him awake. And I wonder, will I hear from him today? That he arrived safely and is living his dream of traveling alone in New York City?

He probably has forgotten about the idea of being a worm right now. I miss him.

And I know that I can’t be the sticky worm on his windshield though; I’d fall right off.

All five of my hearts are breaking.

•••

CARLA SAMETH is a writer and mother living in Pasadena. Her story, “Graduation Day at Addiction High,” which ran in Narratively, was selected by Longreads for “Five Stories About Addiction.” Carla was selected as a fall 2016 PEN In The Community Teaching Artist, and teaches at the Los Angeles Writing Project (LAWP) at California State University Los Angeles (CSULA). She is a member of the Pasadena Rose Poets. Carla has an MFA in Creative Writing (Latin America) from Queens University. Learn more at carlasameth.com and on Twitter: @carlasameth.

Transference

By J. J. Mulligan

My daughter has begun to do this thing where she tucks both of her little thumbs inward and then clenches her four fingers around the thumbs into tight fists held in front of her, all while tensing the muscles seemingly in her entire body. She doesn’t breathe for a few seconds as her face grows from a porcelain white to pork pink and finally to bullfighter-cape red. A few veins stick out in various places and she shakes slightly from the effort, as if her thirty-two inch body were lifting some invisible too-heavy weight. Then she abruptly stops, unclenches her hands and releases everything she had previously tensed. The red leaves her face and she goes about whatever she was doing before.

She did this the first few times in the same afternoon. We asked her what was wrong, why she did that—as if she could respond—and then finally we told her, “No! Don’t do that!” She understands surprisingly much for a one-year-old, but she kept doing the clenching and tensing no matter how many times we admonished her in Spanish first, then English although she understands it less. My wife began to cry and I was at a loss for words to console her. We called the pediatrician, not sure what was happening with our daughter. The pediatrician asked us a few questions: Did she have a far-off look in her eyes after the “episode”? Did the actions seem involuntary? No and no, we said. Another string of questions led the pediatrician to rule out seizures and thus he saw no need for us to take her to the emergency room. Because we had the one-year visit scheduled already in two days, the pediatrician told us not to worry—he would look at it then.

Those two days, of course, were agonizing. Any new parent that hears the word seizure in reference to their child, even if it’s to say that they don’t suffer from seizures, is incapable of ignoring possible symptoms. We looked for a far-off look in our daughter’s eyes at every turn and analyzed every movement to make sure it was voluntary.

Two long days later we were in the pediatrician’s office, with our daughter receiving the necessary vaccines, her height and weight being checked, blood drawn to check iron levels and so on—all the standard one-year visit formalities. At some point, between vaccines, our daughter tucked her thumbs inward, clenched her fists as tightly as she could, and tensed her entire body. She turned red and visibly shook from the effort, this time looking more as if she were ferociously constipated than if she were lifting an invisible weight. The pediatrician pulled the needle back and asked us if this was what we had called about. Yes, we said, this is exactly what she’s been doing that has us so worried. That, the pediatrician responded, is your daughter’s way of expressing her frustration or anger at something. Because she can’t speak yet, she has to show or let out her frustration in other ways. It’s perfectly normal, he concluded, and in fact, from the age of one up until eighteen or twenty months, she will have moments of intense rage, with outbursts of tears and screaming that could last several minutes. We should ignore these moments and not try everything in our power to console her—the outbursts will pass with time.

My wife left the appointment satisfied with the pediatrician’s explanation—seizures left her mind—and ready to ignore our daughter’s future fist clenching scenes and moments of rage when they should start to appear. I, on the other hand, was distraught; I knew that the pediatrician didn’t have the full story and neither did my wife.

During my days, I represent immigrant youth from Central America who can’t afford an attorney and are being deported—many of them will be slaughtered by gangs in their home countries if they’re returned. What my wife and the pediatrician had not taken into account was my daughter’s time alone with me following those days when the world seems to have you in its teeth and won’t soften the bite. The times when I would come home from work destroyed from my interactions with the Department of Homeland Security and she would cry deep and uncontrollably into my face while I tried to put her to sleep. Or a fifteen-year-old Salvadorian girl would share the rapes she had suffered on her journey to the United States, and then my daughter wouldn’t eat the food I had prepared for her that night. Or a young woman, an undocumented college graduate, would beg me to find some form of immigration relief that she could possibly qualify for so that she can live out just a slice of the American Dream she was told existed for everyone, and there would be nothing I could do for her, and then my daughter would thrash around while I was changing her diaper and everything on the changing table would be a mess, dripping to the floor. All of these moments would intertwine inextricably with the 2016 presidential race, the ominous cloud hanging over everything and all of us.

In those moments, where my thoughts would seem profoundly dark although the sun had just set and rays of light still broke through the Brooklyn townhouses visible from my daughter’s bedroom, I would clench my teeth and tense my whole body, not breathe for a few seconds and if there had been a mirror nearby, I likely would’ve seen my face turning red as well. I would shake slightly from the invisible but actual weight and if I was holding my daughter in my arms, I would hold her a bit tighter and sometimes even jump up and down a few times, begging her through gritted teeth to stop crying and go to sleep, eat her food, or be still while I changed her diaper. The throbbing at my temples would become less dull and unrelated frustrations would blend together. My daughter had undoubtedly picked up her fist-clenching, body-tensing behavior from those moments—I know it and no explanation from the pediatrician can change this. The frustrations of my days representing immigrant youth in an unfair system, interspersed with the twenty-four-hour news cycle on the general decline of American policy and politics—including a man that wants to deport everyone, all of the young men and women who have become more than clients to me—are bleeding into my nights with a rapidly developing baby, who soaks up every emotion and stimuli her father gives her. These are the cracks on the hardened shell of a man who keeps everything in.

•••

In one of my rare escapes from the house after work, I met up with a friend at a bar not far from the Nostrand stop I get off at the other day. As with any conversation for the last six months, we talk about the presidential race and it feels as if we are summarizing an episode of Jerry Springer more than the intricacies of the highest office. I try to share some of the things I see and hear at work, but as often happens, not much comes out. I say the government is unfair and that President Obama, a man I love, is complicated when it comes to immigrants and immigration. Complicated indeed, replies my friend. He brings up the basics: the two million deportations carried out under President Obama that have torn apart families versus the Executive Orders signed by him to protect young immigrants and the undocumented parents of US citizens.

We change the subject. This friend of mine has a more hands-on job than mine: he works at a butcher shop in Park Slope. I prefer to hear about his job, since he’s always creating new sausage recipes and so on. He mentions a Banh Mi flavored sausage he is tinkering with.

After we clink glasses on our second beer, he tells me something he’s never told me before about his job, and it sticks with me. He tells me that he has no problem advising each person that enters the shop which cut of meat is the freshest that day, which would make a great dinner and the best way to cook the meat; that he derives pleasure from imagining the customers enjoying their meat products; that he even enjoys slicing the meats and arranging them on display. But, in order to do all of this, he said it is vital that he cannot think about the lambs being slaughtered.

I thought about this a lot on the walk home. Every immigrant youth that has come into my office has the same question, the question that has forced itself into every legal intake I’ve recently done, every application I’ve completed, every court appearance, as if none of these painful and tortured migrant lives really matter in the end. It is the question everyone working with immigrants—and maybe all of us in general—cannot escape: What if he wins the presidency?

Eleven million people will be deported, he says. No Muslims will enter the country and Mexico will pay for a wall to keep everyone out of the U.S.

My friend’s comment came into my mind again tonight on the way home from work.

Now it’s one a.m.

I have sat at this couch since eight p.m. watching a map of the United States of America slowly and incomprehensibly turn more red than blue. I listened half-heartedly to analysis and prophecy—teetering between falsities and doomsday—finally turning the television off when the end was all but assured. I didn’t wait for the final call or hear either candidate speak; I held a slim hope that I was already asleep and the morning would reveal the actual reality. My eyes have been closing for some time and there is no one awake to talk with me. This could all not be happening.

Asleep or awake, I get off the couch. I pour myself a glass of water and go into my daughter’s room, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark, to the new world. Once they have, I look into her crib and see her lying on her back, arms and legs in a peaceful outstretched X with her chest slowly rising and falling in the middle. I reach into the crib and pick her up. She murmurs slightly and moves a bit as I put her on my shoulder and carry her to our bed. My wife is sleeping just as peacefully—she has an early day tomorrow and was convinced enough by the confident and uniform predictions that tonight held no surprises. She watched the first states being called, shaking her head when I tried to explain what little I understand of electoral college. Then she went to bed and I thought I would follow soon after. My wife, the immigrant. America has just slit her wrists.

Looking at my wife and holding our daughter in my arms, I become more aware, somehow more at ease than at any moment in the last year—as if all of it has been a daze of too many deadlines and deportations played to the soundtrack of bigotry and racism. I know what is happening now: the dull fear, the this-will-never-happen, is reality. I am awake. I feel my daughter in my arms and shiver at the thought that my days had been transferred to her in some way, that her bright eyes and developing mind are soured by emotions I have let overrun me. How do you help others without destroying yourself, your family? How do you keep a belligerent world from seeping into your daughter’s bedroom? My fatherhood has been enveloped by a dark blanket which I just now—ironically—feel that I am shaking off. This is the moment we have most feared coming true. And I find that we are ready for it.

I lay our daughter next to my wife and crawl into bed next to them. My daughter has kept on sleeping just as peacefully as before, like her mother. I roll onto my left shoulder so that they fill my view. It doesn’t seem so dark now; I can make out all of their features. I think to myself that every day will be okay if this is how it ends. I breathe deeply and instead of tensing muscles and clenching teeth—symptoms of the anger and frustration I’d felt so much in the last year—I discover love and comfort where it has always been. The world away from our mattress matters as much as an itch on a toe as you fall asleep: you leave the doorstep of sweet dreams if you scratch it. These women next to me are my lifeline. I see this as if a blanket has been lifted.

My eyes are too heavy now but I steal one last glance at them, then I quietly fall asleep. Tomorrow the world will be different, but this and us will not. We were part of a tussle; now comes the war. Tomorrow the fight erupts: the butcher is coming for every lamb.

•••

J. J. MULLIGAN is a non-profit immigration attorney representing immigrant youth who cannot afford an attorney in New York City. He is a new father, former college basketball player, and a diehard San Francisco Giants fan. His writings and translations have appeared in his mother’s native Chile and in various publications here in the U.S.