Authors: Kelly Corrigan
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Sometimes, when I’m with you girls, I kind of shake my head and say Meg’s name out loud, almost like a prayer, which means that I’m thinking about how unfazed she’d be by the Play-Doh
in your teeth or how much she would like the fairy hut you built or the way you made yourself a math worksheet and then filled in all the answers and gave yourself a big A+. I want her to have this thing I have that’s so ordinary and tedious and aggravating, and then, so divine.
It’s no small thing to encourage someone to become a single parent, to take on the bottomless work and cost and heartache that comes with children. Dad thought I might not want to push it. He thought Meg would do fine with the logistics and frustrations, the “blocking and tackling,” as he put it. He was more worried about the unknowns. What if she adopts and the parents show up later and want the kid back? What if her child turns out to have learning disabilities or a genetic disease, or deep, unresolvable anger? What if some future boyfriend walks away, saying he really loves her kid—but he wants to have “his own”?
That conversation slowed me a bit. But then, Dad’s a man. And he was talking about regret. I just couldn’t imagine it would come to that. Mothers never come to regret their children, right? Not the mother of the trisomy baby who is born with his intestines on the outside and only lives for weeks, not the mother of the schizophrenic on
America’s Most Wanted
, not the mother of the fifty-six-year-old who lives at home and drinks in the morning—no mother regrets her child. Right?
The weekend Meg turned forty, we drove to To-males Bay. On the ride up, we got talking about our first road trip, twelve years before, to Lake Tahoe.
“You know the first thing I liked about you?” I said. “You blush. I don’t know anyone who blushes.” She laughed. “I don’t!” I said. “And I think it’s so funny because you’re such a competent person. I mean, you’re not silly or girly or even remotely giddy. You know?”
“Yeah. Although…,” she said, glancing at a CD in her car door pocket.
“Yes, there is that. That has always troubled me.” Meg is the only person I know who listens, unironically, to John Denver. She cried when they announced his plane had crashed. She also loved
Titanic
, a crap movie that got way too much credit. But other than those two flaws, which are probably linked by some kind of rogue gene, Meg is solid.
“You know what I liked about you?” Meg said. “You didn’t hold anything back. You were right out there.”
But I was holding something back. Partly because we are, all of us, always holding things back. And partly because I was nervous, afraid that as soon as I said what I wanted to say, she’d think I’d given up on her chances for marriage or, worse, that I’d never believed they were particularly good to begin with. “I have something I want to say.” My
voice cracked. “I want to say that as much as I love Edward and love being married—which I really do—there is no relationship that has been more—”
“I know where you’re going,” she said.
“Should I go there anyway?”
“Yes.”
“So I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be and know I can’t say what it’d be like to be a single mom…” We were both facing forward, looking at the road. “But given everything I do know, no matter how hard it is, how lonely or stressful, still, I would not want to leave this earth without being a mother.”
She nodded.
“And you—I think you, in particular, were born to be somebody’s mother.”
She hit her blinker and switched lanes. I rode out the silence. I had said enough.
“I think,” she said through tears, “I could be a
really good mom.” We sat with that for a minute, and then she added, “I went to a sperm bank Web site.”
“You did?”
“I did.”
A few months later, Dad took over the morning routine so I could go with Meg to the fertility clinic for her procedure. It took fifteen minutes. When the nurse opened the door and Meg appeared, I wanted to scoop her up like a new bride so all that sperm from donor 11874 didn’t fall out. On the ride home, we talked about what would happen if it worked.
“How will I tell my mom? My dad?” Meg asked. “My
grandmother
?”
“I don’t know. I mean, you’ll tell them that you really wanted to have children.”
“They’re not gonna like this.”
“They love you,” I said, meaning something entirely different than I’d ever meant before. I felt so sure, having become a parent myself, I could speak for them now. “They want you to be happy.”
A week later, Meg got her period.
“Maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be,” she said on the phone, sounding like a mother already, prepared to sacrifice her own happiness for the sake of her child.
The choices we have are staggering. You girls will have even more.
In time, Meg tried again.
“It worked,” she said when I picked up the phone.
Every hair on my arms lifted. “Really?”
“Really.”
I screamed and you both came running into my office and we turned to October 2 in my calendar. I colored in the entire day, line by line, with my orange highlighter. When you saw the tears coming down my cheeks, you said, “What’s so wrong about October second?” and I said, “Not wrong. October second is the day Meg becomes a mom.”
I studied you girls that afternoon, like art. Your collarbones, your coloring, your shoulder blades—fine and slender as a bird’s. Claire, you were sitting by the French doors to the deck that needs replacing, wearing only your underwear and the ruby red slippers Meg gave you that were years away from fitting. As you leaned forward to run your finger over the sequins, the light hit the trail of hair that swirls down from your hairline in the back and it lit up like phosphorescence. Georgia, you were up in the bath with your eyes closed and your ears just
under the water, your hair spread out around your face, humming that song from
Les Miserables
that you saw Susan Boyle sing on YouTube.
Who will look at you like I do?
I think about your futures a lot. I often want to whisper to you, when we’re tangled up together or I’m pinning your poetry to the bulletin board or repositioning the pillow under your head so you don’t get a crick,
Remember this. This is what love feels like
.
Don’t take less
. But what I end up saying is, “This was my dream. You were my dream.” I’ve said it too many times though; now when I look at you all soft and gushy and say, “Guess what?” you say, “This was your dream. I was your dream.”
A month later, Meg was still pregnant.
“I’m going to go see my grandmother. She’s not
gonna live for nine more months. I gotta tell her,” Meg said.
We practiced over the phone as she drove down to the airport. I thought the key was to lead her grandmother there so that she’d know what Meg was going to say before she said it.
“So I’ll start by talking about how I always wanted to be a mom.”
“Right, perfect.”
“Okay.” She sounded resolute but then she came back with, “She got married when she was nineteen.”
“And?”
“She’s one of the most conservative people I know, Kelly. She goes to church every day. The church that won’t give condoms to Africans with AIDS. What do you think they think about babies out of wedlock? From online sperm banks?”
In St. Louis, Meg sat in the living room with her grandmother and told her.
“Oh thank
God
,” said the woman born in 1912.
Meg looked up.
“I always worried that your brains and beauty were gonna go to waste. Go in my bedroom. There’s some knitting by the window. Yellow.”
On the radiator, Meg found a tiny sweater, almost complete. The buttons were pinned on and the second sleeve still needed to be attached.
“I wasn’t sure who I was knitting that for,” her grandmother called out from the other room. “Isn’t that something? I just was knitting a baby sweater for no one in particular. And now I know. Isn’t that something?”
So girls, will you please believe me when I tell
you that I love you enough to take in the full reality of your lives? That I can understand the things you think I can’t and I can see and know and embrace every bit of you, full frame, no cropping?
This morning, Georgia, you slipped into bed with me before six. After some adjusting and resettling, you said, “You know what I’ve noticed?”
“What?” I asked.
“A lot of times, elbows are bent.”
“It’s true.”
“That’s why the skin is so wrinkly on the tips,” you said, finding my elbow under the sheets as Claire appeared in the doorway looking like a cross between Sandy Duncan and Jeff Spicoli.
“I know some people who never bend their elbows,” she said.
“Who?” you demanded.
“The people in the straightest-arm-club,” Claire said, in her singsong voice.
“There’s no such thing!”
“Yes there is.”
“Where?” you said.
“In Arkansas,” Claire said.
“Mom, tell her!” you said, a tireless champion for Truth against nonsense.
“Oh boy,” I said, looking in the direction of the clock without my glasses. “Does that say seven?”
After breakfast, I sent you both upstairs to brush your teeth, something that never seems to take long enough, while I cleaned up the kitchen; the last few bloated Cheerios, a nearly finished lanyard you started at Camp Tockwogh, a cootie catcher we’d made that predicted the future—
You will be on
American Idol,
You will swim in the Olympics, You will live in Bora Bora—
a third-grade spelling list that started with
enough
and ended with
ground,
a homemade book that said:
Once upon a time—
blank page, blank page—
The End.
I put that in a drawer. Maybe I’ll throw it out later, maybe not—I never know which souvenirs to keep.
We walked to the bus stop.
You guys wanted me to let you wait alone. You told me to “stop babying you,” so I stood 143 steps away.
I could still see you. But God, you were small on that corner. If I’d taken a picture, you’d have been just two shapes.
The bus pulled up, the doors opened, kids called out your names. You were fine—better than fine. I was there. I saw it.
Meg and her daughter live in San Francisco and are thriving. However, if you know a guy, a special and good man (preferably born before 1970), I trust you’ll let me know.
monday,
august 2, 2004
August is a terrible time to be born.
I aspire to be the self-actualized person who no longer needs or even wants her birthday to be noticed. I fight the urge to plan something. It’s so self-serving, I tell myself. But this one—thirty-seven—this one is shaping up to be the most mundane, uninspired birthday to date and I’m not sure I can leave it alone.
To:
The Ladies
Re:
Lunch
Date:
Monday, August 2, 2004
As I’m sure you’ve committed to memory, my birthday is August 16. Mine and Georgia’s and Madonna’s and Menachem Begin’s. But this year, I just want to celebrate mine. Could I talk you into meeting me for lunch in San Francisco? Maybe somewhere with a deck that serves an icy
noontime cocktail? Lemme know if you can sneak out on Sat August 21 and I’ll get back to you with a locale.
Love,
Kel
PS People bearing gifts will be stoned to death.
Oh well, I think, noting that my childish need for birthdayness won again, I tried. I hit send and start my routine: pull on yesterday’s yoga pants (I don’t actually do yoga), pair them with a new green T-shirt from Costco, toast frozen waffle for Claire, smear bagel with cream cheese for Georgia, water down juices for both, strap girls into car seats, drop girls off at preschool, come home to move things (dishes to shelves, cans to recycling, socks to laundry basket, bills to pile, shoes to closet). By 11:30 A.M., after I’ve lost the whole morning to a couple dozen five-minute tasks, it’s time to head out for pickup and begin the afternoon routine, which is as dull and typical as the morning routine, so I’ll spare you.
Edward, my husband of four years and the father of these girls, is in Philadelphia for work. He usually bathes the girls; it’s his time with them at the end of each day, and based on what I overhear, it generally starts out pleasant, quickly becomes trying, and then, by lights out, circles back around to delightful. The fact that he puts the girls down “after a long hard day at the office” makes my mother adore him. As she should. He’s full-service.
On this particular night, after washing the crumbs of chicken nuggets off their plates and successfully negotiating a trade of ten lima beans for a handful of chocolate chips, I take the girls up to the bathroom. Georgia likes to wash my hair. She likes to be the mommy. She’d like to wash her little sister’s hair too, but Claire won’t have it. When Edward is away, I often find that I’ve been talked into the tub so the girls can pour too much shampoo on my bushy brown hair. This night is such a night, except on this night, as I brush past my breast to get some soap out of my eyes, I think I feel something hard, just there, under the skin. I touch it once, pressing it lightly with the open palm of my hand, and then, after a flash of shock passes through me, I force my full attention to bathing the girls.
My girls are good—one chubby, one scrawny, both funny. Claire is a year and a half old, and Georgia will turn three next week. They seem older, but for different reasons. Georgia regularly confounds me with questions like “Does wrecked mean ruined?” and “What means language?” Claire is topping out at the hundredth percentile for height, weight, and head size. They love Van Halen and Play-Doh and fighting over old rubber bands and barrettes they won’t keep in their hair. I love them madly and hope they will be older sisters to more kids just like them.
As I dry myself off, I know I have to touch it again, just to be sure I’m wrong. But I’m not and so I start moving at a manic pace, directing the girls in that weird, strained way mothers do in movies when they find out a bomb is about to go off in their basement, right below where their children are blithely playing with their Legos.
“Georgia, honey, I need you to get in your pajamas right now and meet me at the top of the stairs. Claire, pick up that nightgown and bring it straight to me. Let’s go, sweetheart. Right this minute.”
As I give them their instructions, I dial my ob-gyn at home. Dr. Birenbaum is also my friend Emily, and she lives about ten minutes away. She answers, and I can hear her ten-month-old babbling in the background. Emily is happy to have us come over and give me a quick feel.
It’s late, dark outside. On the short ride over, we listen to the American Idol CD that Georgia’s friend left in our car. The girls are thrilled to be riding around in their pajamas instead of going to bed. I tell them we are having a dance party at Emily’s.
“Mommy? Mommy? At Emily’s? When we are having the dance party, Claire can’t dance on the table because she could fall and be in a cast. Right, Mommy?” Georgia asks. I had recently impressed Georgia with a story about a boy who broke his leg by jumping on a bed. He had a cast on for six weeks.
“Because she will cry and have to go to the hospital and get so many shots. Right, Mommy?”
I had emphasized how unpleasant hospitals are.
Then I hear myself say, “That’s right, Peach. Doctors, hospitals, lots of shots.”
Emily gives me an exam on her sofa. We joke about her husband coming home to find me topless on his couch, arms over my head. I say I was hoping he would be there so I could get a two-for-one. Georgia and Claire are terribly charming, asking if Emily will tickle them too and then trying breast exams on each other. It’s probably a cyst, Emily assures me. I leave Berkeley twenty minutes later, relieved to have a doctor involved. Emily will line up a mammogram for me in the next couple of days, just to be sure.
I come home, carry the girls to their beds one by one, and wait for Edward to call from his business trip. He works for TiVo, and he’s gone to Philly to negotiate a deal with Comcast. When he calls, he runs through the highlights of his day—the contract’s coming along, stuck on one issue, one of the guys is a real prick. We tell each other how tired we are. He mentions a sore throat.
Then, in a carefully controlled tone, I say, “So, when I was in the bath with the girls, I was, you know, washing myself, and I found a lump.” As I talk, I touch it again and again, like you would a loose tooth or a canker sore, each time, surprised to find it still there. “It’s hard as a rock. It’s so right there. You won’t believe it.”
I tell him everything Emily told me; that it is hard, which is bad, but it is movable, which is good, and that in younger women, lumps tend to be cysts.
“Okay, that’s good. And you have no breast cancer in your family, so that’s good. And hopefully you can get a mammogram tomorrow or the next day and we can be sure,” he says, in character. He is a man of reason, my husband. He does not buy into worry. “It’s gotta be a cyst,” he adds. We hang up a few minutes later, both projecting optimism.
Alone in my room, though, I feel the onset of alarm. I lay my whole body across it, to muffle the earsplitting sound. To fall asleep, I read a long article from a ten-year-old National Geographic about Hurricane Andrew in Florida. On the cover, there’s a dirty, sticky, sunburned Marine holding a newly homeless toddler. The guy who wrote the article says that over the course of ten days the hurricane revealed itself, starting as just a patch of thunderstorms, then becoming a tropical storm, and eventually showing its true colors as the unstoppable hurricane it was. A local TV reporter named Bryan Nor-cross stayed on the air for twenty-two hours straight, “talking his listeners through the most horrifying hours of their lives, telling them how to find safe places in houses that were blowing apart.” I don’t usually last for more than a couple of pages at night, but tonight, I keep going until I finish. I have to follow the arc from panic to toil to renewal. I have to get to the end, to the part where the devastation gives way to rebirth. I read this one sentence over and over again, until I am ready to turn out the light:
“Seven weeks after the storm, there are signs of recovery. Many trees are flush with new growth. Power has been restored. It will be a splendid place once again.”
