God and Jetfire (26 page)

I didn't want it to go away. Admitting my regret felt forward-looking. It felt like progress. It brushed away all the lies that were so tempting to believe, exposing the real project. Which, like Laura said, had to do with not reconciling those realities, but somehow living them fully. Angel and slut. Mother and not a mother at all.

But regret was also terrifying, and as soon as I said the word, I understood why they hadn't. I abandoned that forest in Michigan, as I had my son's house. As though it were birth motherhood itself. I wanted to wipe every surface of myself clean. I felt disoriented, like I'd been driving the wrong way on a highway for hours, and when I realized it, the whole world appeared suddenly freakish and foreign.

I wrote to my sister. I tried to express it. The alienation of regret. Regret undid things. It stole the oxygen out of the delicate universe I'd agreed to live in—I needed to know, can a mother
live
without her child? It was a straightforward but urgent, physiological question. She responded,
don't look back—look at the future!—that is what you wanted—don't ask yourself “what if”—it is not profitable speculation—amounts to nothing useful—cut it out:)

*   *   *

In January, I moved into an unfurnished three-bedroom apartment in Boston with five people from my program. I slept on a mattress made of two summer-smelling pool floats stacked one on top of the other and bound together with bungee cords. In the middle of the night I'd find myself on the hard floor, my hip dull with pain, and had to find the energy in my sleep to blow them up again. The pipes banged and clanged, like someone was beating them erratically with a hammer. The winter wind came right through the window I slept beneath and brushed me longwise from shoulder to toes. I waited at the bus stop with my roommates in the morning, but we parted at South Station; I walked across a long, cold, windy expanse onto land made of rubble to my internship at an architecture firm. My internship task was to find the right red for the interior of the lobby of a building that was well under way, and, like the leafless trees and the barren landscape, I concentrated my energies on essential pursuits. By my desk, I kept a picture of my son and a passage by Gabriel Garc
í
a M
á
rquez about gratitude that Jevn had given me. Gratitude was many people's paradoxical solution to regret.

I would not tell myself lies. But I wanted to be able to commit to a certain way of feeling. I wanted to be steady like Jevn, and moving to a new city meant I could do that—put the story down and make it stick. I bought a serious, calf-length, black wool coat and wrapped myself in it like a vestment. I decided I wouldn't mention my son at all; my motherhood a vow of silence. I didn't, after all, have a son to go home to.

After work, I walked four miles back to my apartment. I set a straight trajectory on the sidewalk of the city I didn't know, keeping my head down and aligning myself with the right-hand edge. When someone crossed my path, I assured myself that I had the right-of-way within the narrow and unmarked sidewalk lane. Someone would swing his arms too wide and nearly hit me, or step out of a shop and merge into my path, not seeing me. Invariably, he wouldn't notice he'd cut me off. I tried not to react; I could be so easily overcome with grief. I told myself I belonged here—and yet, what was the Surrender but an official agreement, signed by all of us, that I didn't? I tried to think about red. The Right Red. Near the Common, I passed by bumpy graveyards, where freeze-thaws had shuffled and unsettled headstones. Bodies and bones mixed with soil; old chambers of lungs and coffins buckled and cratered the frozen ground. It seemed even the grave was a restless place. And mine was a cratered and unsettled motherhood. I couldn't keep it buried. I studied the faces of new friends I met as I told them the story for the first time. I wanted to see whether they thought mine was a livable condition. Their faces would reveal what they wouldn't say, but they seemed to share my question, studying me for answers as they looked back.

I couldn't deny my motherhood, and I couldn't claim it honestly. I couldn't do anything simple or consistent; I couldn't even stay sad. Sometimes, bracing myself against the cold wind as I walked along the Charles, I found myself smiling.

One of my new friends told me about dances held almost every night at different locations, and, knowing little else about Boston, I started going. I'd learned to dance when I was young, in a barn filled with old car and bus seats planted right into the sloped dirt floor. Everyone wore taps on their shoes, and they danced alone without partners, as good Christians do. A kind of clogging called flatfoot, it looked simple, so I'd tried it. I tapped and leapt and bounced to the music, but an old man pulled me off the dance floor and escorted me outside. He went back inside, and a few minutes later a little boy fell out the door and looked up at me, perplexed. He'd been told to teach me to dance, but he didn't seem to understand not knowing how to dance. He did a fast wagon wheel and some ornamented basics and looked up at me to replicate them, but try as he might he couldn't slow them down or explain them. What I could see was the gravity. Unlike tap dancing or ballet, which aspire like the cathedrals to weightlessness and height, flatfoot was low to the ground and heavy. You were always lifting yourself up from a burdensome weight.

I danced almost every night. Dances with set steps, old contra dances and clogging that connected me back to the South. The structure and constraint of fixed movements established for centuries, the wild release of the whole history of myself, gains and losses, contained in my spinning mass.

*   *   *

And sometimes on Sunday mornings, I went to church and confronted God the father. I had never been in a better position to hear him, reduced by my loss to a state more primal than motherhood, more detached from desire than a monk. But now it seemed absurd to ask why. Why had it all happened, what good was in store because of it? God seemed to me very much a man, casting generative potential into the void without turning back to see what got fertilized. His creative prowess was a heartless force, and his reasons couldn't be known by me.

The only thing I felt was the holy difference. That the Big Plan had very little to do with me. God's ways had never been mine. People at church said I should be grateful about the adoption, but I liked facing that cold hardness blankly; it elevated God and made me turn on him.

We sang the Our Father and raised our fists in aggressive submission.

*   *   *

I took a weekend off in February and flew to North Carolina to see my son. He was locomoting, backward, mostly. He drooled so much they had to change his shirt several times a day. When Erik disappeared into the woods to help Sarah find her shoes, I ran with Jonathan, threw him upward and caught him, and he smiled at me. The morning I left, he lay on his stomach, on my stomach, the way he had when he was first born and they piled him, slippery, on top of me. He searched my face with all his senses. Put his hands in my mouth, gummed at my nose. Pulled my hair. When I left, my throat felt scratchy and sore, and I marveled that my son had an independent biology, and that he had made me sick.

When I got back to Boston, a boy I'd met at a dance said that he admired and respected me, but he'd been thinking about it, and if I was able to give up my own son, he couldn't help but wonder what else I was capable of. He didn't want to see me anymore, but it was just in time. My ten-week internship was almost over, and I was already packing to go. The weekend before I left, in one of the oldest churches in Boston, I was baptized into an incongruous understanding of God, the only thing certain that I often thought of him. In a strange union that embraced my body, its history and its denial, I was baptized under three cupfuls of water in the name of the Father, the image of the detached; the Son, my tragic loss; and the Holy Spirit. I left town without having found the Right Red, and in my internship evaluation, my supervisor said it would be a shame if I didn't pursue my love of dancing.

 

TWENTY-ONE

In April, Jonathan was nine months old. The colic had subsided, and he was practicing language that Paula described as “the funniest little combination of mumbling and humming.” She said his voice was very much a little boy's voice. He was beginning to balance on wobbly legs and had a full head of bright white hair and a mouthful of baby teeth. She sent pictures of him proudly pouring a pitcher of water over Sarah's head in the tub, Sarah's eyes shut tight, laughing. He smiles like the sun, I thought—like the happiness is coming from within him. I realized I had thought of him like the moon.

Paula said that when Sarah turned nine months old, she realized she'd been Sarah's mother for as long as her birth mother had, and that felt significant. People would sometimes ask about Sarah's
real
mother, and although comments like that bothered her, having had her own nine-month gestation she found herself feeling a little more like a
real
mother. Now that Jonathan was nine months old, I hoped she'd feel more like his real mother, too, and that I might experience some kind of positive inverse: my son would feel to me more hers, and my loss, less.

We talked about these things like we weren't right in the middle of them. We were always lightening our relationship by exposing it to air: the fraught and complex aspects of our joint/mutual/exclusive motherhoods. She was the person who came closest to being able to understand. I'd tell her really hard things—like the feelings of regret I'd unearthed at the birth mothers' retreat—and she'd describe her own ambivalence as an adoptive mother. She said because she'd seen the strength of my bond with Jonathan, her motherhood could never be simple. Openness didn't make anything easier, but she said it at least gave her the assurance I was busy with school and not plotting to steal my son back. I laughed at that, but it was important—being able to share some of what we were each going through was heartening. Whatever the animal complexity of what we'd done, ethically and intellectually, we were solidly on the same side.

*   *   *

And at nine months, Jonathan was doing his own kind of sophisticated thinking. Paula said he was now able to recognize and remember people. When he saw someone he knew, he'd smile and his face would light up. But I didn't expect him to remember me. I might not even recognize him, he was growing so fast. On my way to see him, I reminded myself that much as he might have grown, he was still just a baby; I'd try not to expect anything at all. When I arrived, he crawled furtively behind a chair, and when Paula picked him up, he buried himself in her chest, glancing at me from the safety of her arms. Sarah made it easier by leaping into mine, but squeezing her I wondered,
If he does recognize me, what does he see?

Paula would probably have prepared him for this visit by explaining that I was his mother in some simple way a nine-month-old could understand. This was important data he'd now be able to store and use, and maybe next time, and from then on, he'd recognize me and know something about how important our visits together were. But how could she not at the same time explain that I'd given him up? Those two facts were inseparable. Could he love me for one without hating me for the other? I touched his hand to say hello, and he drew it back as if he were afraid of me. And I realized I was afraid of him, too.

*   *   *

That question consumed me as I carried him to the park that afternoon. He had warmed to me after spending the morning watching Sarah climb on me, and run away squealing, and return all over again, and Paula suggested I try taking him for a walk. But it was the first time we'd been alone together since his adoption, and I was nervous. I pushed him gently on an infant swing, grabbing his toes every time he returned to me. I felt lucky when he smiled, arriving at my collarbone. But watching him watch me, I wondered what image he was now taking in to store. I told myself his furrowed brow meant he wanted off the swing, but I was afraid it meant more. I lifted him up, chatting continuously, adding stories, songs, spins in a circle—in a race with his growing consciousness. The more experiences we shared as his understanding took shape, perhaps the less he would see me through the stark circumstances of his birth and adoption. His affection for me might stand a chance against his anger. He studied me at close range, and it seemed urgent: I could not let him cry. His tears at that moment would seem decisive.

Rain suddenly began falling hard, lightning and thunder; real and outside of us. We stepped into a gazebo for shelter and watched it pour. I loved storms. They bent the rules of the day; people came alive and abandoned plans and ran for cover. The rain made our strange relationship feel real. Our relationship could get wet. It invigorated me. I stepped into the storm, holding him. Me and him and the pummeling rain, the only important facts of the gray and watery world. He wrinkled his face and looked at me, and I remembered putting him in the shower as a newborn to make him cry. I tried to own the confidence in our connection I'd had then.

When the sky began to clear, the world was a steaming memory, puddles everywhere reflecting a sky that had forgotten it made them. He pointed at one, and I dropped down to a squat. I leaned forward, and he held one hand around my neck while he splashed in the puddle with the other. Our heads were smashed together to give him leverage for the splashing hand, and he would turn, his nose nearly touching mine, and smile and scream. I stood back up, we found another, squat, splash, scream.

I had forgotten how magical puddles were. They reordered the known universe of my neighborhood when I was little; we knew exactly where to go for shallow ones and deep Barbie bathtubs; oceanic ones that spread across the street. We'd pick up earthworms along the way, returning them to the grass before they dried up or got run over. We called that activity STEW: Save The Earth Worms. I put Jonathan down and rolled up his pant legs. He steadied himself on me with wet hands, earnestly, as if our splashing was serious business. When I was finished with his cuffs, I lifted him and put him down at the edge of a shallow pothole. He kicked it and laughed. Then he crouched to touch it. I felt I'd found something real between us. Not my motherhood, but some simpler alliance.