God and Jetfire (10 page)

“I know what you'd sing,” Jevn said, smiling. He was probably about to make fun of me.

“You wouldn't sing at all! You'd just mouth constantly!” I went on the attack, remembering all the times he'd taken my hands and stepped lightly on his toes and bent his height over like a crescent moon as he looked into my eyes and mouthed the Jayhawks,
I'd run away! I'd run away with you, baby!

“Do you build things?” he suggested, and I wrote it down. Of course that question. Jevn often spent vacations on a friend's property, building cabins and saunas by hand, using rock climbing gear to hoist himself along half-built structures. He always came back burned and full of fish he caught in the river. Between Jevn and my father, our child would probably be oriented toward making stuff.

“They should build fires!” I said. I had so many fire memories. Halfway through my childhood, our area got annexed by the city and instituted fire safety regulations, so the fire department was often called to our house, where dad had planted a forest for the exact purpose of producing firewood. We'd have elaborate systems of ropes to guide the fall and then epic bonfires. And, always eventually, the fire department.

“Yeah, definitely,” Jevn said, thinking. I also remembered shivering in bed, and the smell of the wood, waiting for Jevn to get the fire going, that time I joined him at the cabin by the Arkansas. And the thick steam from the oatmeal rising up into the rafters when I finally got up to make breakfast.

“What do you do with holey socks?” I said as I wrote.

Jevn laughed. “What's the right answer to that one?”

“I don't know—it could be a lot of things!”

This was open adoption. We had more than a hundred families to choose from, all of them approved for parenting by every state and agency standard. But it came down to things no agency could measure. And everything we'd be able to give our child we were giving in these moments, thinking hard about what we wanted its life to look like, and harder about how to find it. We would standardize our data to manage the unmanageable. We composed questions that poked and prodded in places we thought we'd find life. Questions we weren't sure how we wanted answered. Others that were deal-breakers. We wrote down every question we could think of.

What kitchen appliances do you own? Will your children share a bedroom? Describe a few of your T-shirts. What did you last give someone as a gift? What is the best time of day? How is your family imperfect? Do you ever build a fire? Do you get dessert? Do you drink Coke? What do you like most about your job? What do you do on a typical Sunday? Thursday? What is fun? How much time do you spend outside each day? What was the last show you saw at a museum or theater? Who was your favorite teacher? Describe your faith without using the word
church
. What would you say if your child told you he was an atheist? What are your quiet hours? Will you buy a car for your child when it turns sixteen? How old is your furniture? Who is your favorite relative? Do you speak any foreign languages? What do you use your basement for? Do you get any magazines or newspapers? Do you ever sleep late? How would you react if your twenty-two-year-old daughter told you she was pregnant? Who does the housework? Do you have a boat? Plane? Snowmobile? What were you like as a student? What volunteer work do you do? How do you celebrate your anniversary? Do you have a basketball hoop? Will your children have chores? Do you listen to the radio? What toys will you buy for your children? What would you do if your child got a D in school? How do you feel about divorce?

For whatever its faults, we'd embarked on a process that put all the mysteries of human attraction back on the scales. It affirmed us as parents, best-equipped, for reasons only nature knew, to make decisions for our child. And facing the piles of profiles that night, I had hope. If there were jukeboxes and llamas, there were bound to be tuning forks and telescopes. We just had to find them.

When the lines of the paper were full, we rotated the page and wrote sideways in the margins. I wrote some; Jevn pulled the page back to himself and wrote others. And after one very thick-crusted pizza, we'd compiled a total of 111 questions.

 

NINE

Of course I couldn't tell him what I thought about at night. That although I still couldn't imagine having a child, I liked to think about showing the world to someone who was new to it. I could imagine an allegiance as deep as family and hard work that means so much you can't feel its hardness. I could imagine how easy it would be for me to offer all the things I struggled to find in couples—things more important than readiness or financial security. I could imagine not worrying about couples from Minnesota and Michigan anymore. And I could imagine Jevn, in time, getting over it.

Then I would remember dog food.

It was expensive to have a child. The couples were always describing their big garages, their flexible work schedules, their fenced-in backyards and college funds. Like they knew money was the Achilles' heel for an accidental mother. None of the invaluable things I had to give mattered in the end, because what I didn't have was money. I made a hundred dollars a week working in the dean's office during the school term; a couple of thousand dollars at most from an internship. I was halfway through the money my dad had saved to help with my first four years of college. Their expensive desires got them babies; mine got me dog food—which I had tasted in the basement once, fishing a kibble out of the big green bag. It was oily and gritty, and I couldn't swallow.

*   *   *

One afternoon I left work early for a prenatal appointment at the university hospital. The baby was healthy, and my midwife congratulated me for gaining a lot of weight in the two weeks since I'd seen her. I told her I'd added milkshakes to my daily diet.
Mama's finally putting some meat on those bones!
she teased me, and I left feeling proud of myself, like I'd really accomplished something.

On the way home, I stopped in to see the woman I worked for in the dean's office. Cherry was in her sixties and had the disposition of her name. She was cheery and efficient, and small pops and clicks came from her dentures when she spoke. The plastic rims of her glasses and the chain that kept them around her neck were always bumping an earring or a string of pearls or her teeth between her pale pink lips as she pulled her glasses down to give me direction. She was a secretary from the old school; she used an electric typewriter and knew proper shorthand. She was sitting at her desk opening a stack of mail with a long, silver letter opener when I arrived. She took a moment to place me.

“Well,
hi
, Amy! Come in, come in! I didn't expect to see you!”

I stood in front of her desk, as I often did, chatting with her as she arranged things on her blotter and tended the phone, gazing at me blankly when it would ring and she'd put the receiver to her ear. I told her about my internship, and she said it sounded perfectly suited to me. Then I told her I was pregnant, and the smile drained from her eyes. She lowered her glasses to the very tip of her nose and raised her penciled-in eyebrows. She paused for a long time, reading me. “Well,” she said, sighing, “you are about to learn the difference between men and women.”

I could tell she meant something other than the most important difference, which I already knew about: that the baby would come out of me.

*   *   *

Not that that lesson was easy. Jevn and I had just signed up for the free childbirth classes Molly had told us about, and in our first session, the teacher showed us that difference in graphic detail. We sat in front of the television on the carpeted floor of a windowless basement at a crisis pregnancy center. Besides Jevn and me, there were ten unwed girls and about half as many boyfriends. They were not in college or college-bound. They were definitely not studying architecture. But they were mostly unlike us because they planned to keep their babies.

The scene in the video wasn't at all like what I'd seen in movies or on television, where women in labor were always screaming at and hitting their husbands, or squeezing their hands until they flinched. Childbirth on TV made you understand it was the worst pain you could ever imagine, and it was always the time when women got back at men for that difference. And for some reason that moment—when the wife reaches out across the divide to strangle her husband—was always accompanied by a laugh track.

But the birth we watched that evening in class wasn't a hilarious, bungled race to the hospital. The couple reclined comfortably in bed at home. There weren't any doctors or nurses. When a contraction came, the mother moaned a little and her husband cradled her head until she fell silent. But in the end, and what left me speechless, was the last sound she made; it was arresting and sincere: the outraged bellow of a large animal, betrayed by its body. A massive head, a horror you never see on television, a bulging perineum, some feces, blood, and other liquids.

A person came out of a person! It spontaneously erupted from someone's insides, starting with its black hair, which bobbled in and out for a couple of contractions, and then its face and slick shoulders. It abandoned its container violently, like a parasite discharged from its host, leaving the mother a quiet, crumpled mass, her head tilted back on the pillow.

I scanned the room; we could all refuse to do this together.

“Did you see that?” The teacher rewound the video. “Okay, right—there, you guys, that squeeze? That's called the fetal Heimlich.”

She pulled her hair to the side with one hand as she picked up a posterboard diagram of a baby, emerging through the mother's pelvis. “This is when Mom's perineum presses the baby's rib cage and forces mucus and amniotic fluid out of its mouth and nose, so it's ready to breathe. No suctioning required!” she said emphatically. “This doesn't happen in medicated labors, guys. You have to have a mom whose uterine muscles are awake and alert!”

After class, I introduced myself to the teacher, who reminded me her name was Nina. I told her I didn't want it coming out of me, I didn't want blood, I didn't want to be naked. I didn't want candles. There had to be another way. A new and improved, in-between, hybrid way.

“Listen to you!” She put her hand solidly on my upper arm and held it there. “Believe me, you're gonna be fine.”

It wasn't hard like architecture school, or hard like a piano audition. It wasn't even hard like carefully crafting an open adoption with your ex-boyfriend. It was impossible—like having a large and living creature burst out of you through your uterus.

Nina invited me to come to her house that Saturday, where she had me sit on her sofa and watch fifty births on video,
Clockwork Orange
–style, one immediately after the other. The films spanned the spectrum of geography and culture: African squatting births, births in the rice paddies of China during which farmer-mothers momentarily interrupt their rhythmic threshing to retrieve the newborn from between their legs, New Age water births in places like Vermont and California. Across the world, women were having babies; perineums on every continent deployed the fetal Heimlich; babies from Vancouver to Indonesia sought the breast; moms everywhere were casting off their clothes and letting babies spill out of them.

When the videos were finished, Nina put her laundry basket on the floor and sat down beside me. “Well…?” she said, smiling and then laughing. I told her that I thought I might let the baby come out that way, but I still refused to be naked when I did. No maternal stupor could make me forget that civilized people wear clothes. She took me under her wing; she said she'd make sure of it.

Nina told me stories from her own single motherhood that gave me confidence about adoption. She'd gotten pregnant when she was sixteen. Her parents kicked her out of the house, so she lived in a car and then a domestic violence shelter, and then she moved in with a motorcycle gang. One day she called 911 after one of the gang's children fell down the stairs and cracked its skull. The authorities discovered illegal ID–making equipment, and after that, the gang started threatening her, so she changed her identity and hid for several years. Eventually, she began dating a pastor and thought she was finally safe, but she discovered he was molesting her daughter. Twenty years later, she was still running from the gang, still holding multiple jobs and struggling to support herself and three daughters. She had long blond hair and crisp bangs, like a second-grade school picture, but underneath them she was worn.

She started teaching free childbirth classes to single moms because she thought she could at least help them get a healthy start. She said pregnancy and birth were as much a part of a mother's relationship with her child as the lifetime to follow, and if I really was going to go through with an adoption, I had all the more reason to make the most of my short time with my child.

“Your baby's going to be beautiful,” she said. She seemed to have limitless energy for other people. “And you're going to find the right family. You will. I'm praying for you.” She rubbed my knee hard, like someone whose job it is to touch people's bodies. “Here, eat some grapes.”

*   *   *

A few days later, my structures professor's wife invited me to dinner, and a studio professor offered me her old maternity clothes. I started being approached by mothers in the grocery store and on the street. They told me swimming would relieve the pressure on my back. That primrose oil would prevent stretch marks. Mothers everywhere were emerging to advise me. It was as if I was a newcomer who'd wandered haplessly into a hidden world, and all its inhabitants, alerted to my arrival, fell in line to initiate me. It was as though there was a secret that only mothers and infertile people knew: that all we are is our bodies, and what we are most meant to do is reproduce them. Our particular choices and interests and talents are incidental; all that matters is the thing that makes every woman exactly the same as every other. And completely different from men.