The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs (28 page)

Through the mirror I could see the child’s head crowning, bigger and bigger. The pain was incredible when suddenly it was over and my baby slipped out into the world. The midwife held her up, turned her carefully, then lay her on my stomach. The women whispered in awe, “Ohhh. It’s a girl! It’s a girl!” My newborn found her own breath, after which the midwife cut the cord. That’s when the world began for my daughter and she began for the world.

I was wonderfully surprised. I could have sworn I was carrying a boy. But in the instant I realized that my child was a girl my heart sang with a flood of pure joy and gratitude. In that blessed moment of recognition I was finally able to acknowledge I had wanted a girl so much that I didn’t dare admit it to myself in case it was a boy. A healthy child is a blessing and I’m sure I would have been overjoyed with either a boy or girl, but this was the Christmas I had wanted. Robert wrote down the time of birth on a piece of paper and added the Sanskrit symbols for “Jai Ram,” the English equivalent being something like, hallelujah to God on the highest.

May 17, 1978, 10:38.

*   *   *

My daughter looked different than the babies born to my mother and to my friends’ mothers. My family had blond-haired newborns with tiny little noses, but this one had such a crop of pitch-black hair with a large distinctive nose. Also, the back of her head was elongated like that of an Egyptian princess. Her fingers, translucent, moved in slow motion, like they were sea anemones. I gave her cheekbones a little massage that first night and watched as she leaned in to it. She liked massages! She weighed all of 7.5 pounds. I both loved and liked her immediately. The midwives asked if there was any chance I’d had a venereal disease and I said “no,” so they didn’t have to put silver nitrate in her eyes. Hospitals usually carry out this procedure because of the possibility of blinding, but it can mess up the bonding between mother and child because the child is blinded by the drops for a period of about three to five hours. Here my baby could see me and I could not stop looking at her. And throughout it all I kept thinking:
I know nothing!

Nothing was ever more clear to me than the fact that I didn’t know anything about the total perfection of my baby’s tiny sweetness. Here I was a new mother with my newborn daughter. And with that realization came the understanding that my own parents must have been the same when I was born.
Oh, they were as I am now—awed and inexperienced.
I knew my child was a hero to have been born to Steve and me. I would watch her sleep in amazement, feeling dismayed and teary. For what purpose did she come into this situation? I never felt sorry for her, just a glowing, true admiration. I knew she was courageous from the first day.

Steve had made a huge deal about his not being sure it was his child. But when Robert, one of his closest friends, looked deeply into her face and said, “Well, she sure has his vibe,” I didn’t care about the comment one way or another. I was just so dead tired of being called a liar and of the implication that I didn’t know who my child’s father was, when I’d known and said I’d known all along.

That night, whenever the baby or I made a sound, Robert got up and came inside the doorway to ask, “Are you okay?” and “Is everything okay?” He was so solicitous, so urgent about our welfare. I had torn in the delivery and my nipples felt like screaming fire engines of pain because they were raw from the nursing, but I would assure Robert that everything was fine. I was so surprised by the sense of responsibility and passionate care that this man had toward me and my baby. I could see that he had been deeply affected by her birth, too.

Steve didn’t call. Not a word for three days. I was utterly bereft. Outraged, too. I don’t know if he was distracted or cowardly or both. Robert called him in the middle of the third day and nailed him for his despicable behavior and it was blessed to hear. Steve had turned into such a golden boy by this time that no one came close to having the personal power and moral authority over him that Robert had. I listened from the guest bedroom with our daughter in my arms. Steve flew up the next day.

He stayed for three days. On the first night he came up the stairs and into the bedroom where I was sitting holding the baby. He sat next to me on the Japanese bed on the floor with our backs leaning up against the wall and I started crying. “I just don’t know what I’m going to—” I couldn’t even finish my sentence before Steve cut me off. “You’re clean and dry, so you’re fine!” he said sharply. Then he walked out. This was such an extremely odd response that it startled me out of my fear and sadness. Later I would understand that birth patterns replay over generations. Perhaps the Jobses had said this to Steve. “I was too frightened to love him” were Clara’s simple words to me. I can imagine them saying to Steve, “You’re clean and dry, so you’re fine.…” and left him crying. Many adopted kids believe that they deserve only to have their basic needs met. I often felt that this was true of Steve and that, ironically, it had flipped in him and morphed into his enlarged sense of entitlement.

It was different at the Friedlands when Steve was there. He was persuasive and oh so capable of rededicating the emotional territory to the low hum of his negativity—the result of his own irresponsibility. I don’t know what he may have said to Abha and Robert, but I felt that when Steve arrived he brought a cloud of darkness with him. It turned out to have been a very good thing that he had not been present at the birth.

It was on Steve’s last day that Abha pushed us both outside: “You two have to decide on a name for this child. She’s already six days old!” So Steve and I walked out into the fields that surrounded their house and laid out a blanket. We sat under an open sky with a baby name book and our sleeping child between us. Steve liked the name Claire. It seemed like he had arrived ready to suggest it. I didn’t want it. Claire was too close to his mother’s name and I wasn’t going to honor her in this way.

“They
are
different names, you know?” he said gently.

But I couldn’t go along with him. “They’re close enough to be the same, so there’s no way.”

We continued to look through the book. We both really thought “Sarah” was lovely, but my sister had just given that name to her little one, born six months before. We went through a lot of names and nothing seemed quite right until finally I remembered a name from high school I had always liked.

“How about Lisa?” I suggested. This name seemed so bright and beautiful I could hardly speak the words fast enough.

Steve said, “Oh yes!! I like that!”

We looked up the meaning and found “Light of God.” We liked this, too. Eventually we settled on Nichole for a middle name. “Nichole” has a smooth sense of classic, time-honored beauty, and this fit our child.

Even as a newborn, she was truly beautiful.

Lisa Nichole Brennan.

And later, Lisa Nichole Brennan-Jobs.

Over the next month, when I started to doubt our choice of name, I discovered that Steve was extremely attached to keeping “Lisa.” This was especially strange because he was also publicly denying paternity. The inconsistencies were really too much to keep up with, but I was too exhausted to do anything but adapt. Daniel Kottke called and told me I ought to get some money out of the name because Steve would pay to keep it. He knew more than he was letting on, but I considered the concept of leveraging money to keep my daughter’s name distasteful in the extreme. I had no idea that Steve was naming a computer The Lisa.

Later I understood that he had wanted to name our daughter Claire not because, as I had thought, it was close to his mother’s name, but because he wanted to name the next Apple model “The Claire Computer.” The idea here was to project some kind of idealized feminine saint in association with Apple and himself because he fancied himself another St. Francis. St. Claire is considered the patron saint of TV in Italy because she had visions. While on the one hand it feels unexpected to connect a saint’s particular gifts to technology, it’s sort of perfect, too. St. Claire was a cloistered nun and a clairvoyant with a capacity for “remote viewing,” so in a way the camera, the TV, the computer, and the smartphone really are perfect associations. Taken a step further, if people didn’t have the extraordinary vision and intuition to see the future, then this technology could never have been created. Visions have been around way before technology. And yet visions helped pave the way for technology itself. The Claire would have been just a fabulously great name for Steve’s computer. He should have used it.

It was Steve’s weird fantasy to try to merge biology, mythology, and technology, as if such things don’t have laws of their own. It would seem he was trying to graft everything together for commercial purposes, and also to strengthen his own idealized mythos. Who knows, perhaps he was even attempting to compete with me by trying to birth something in a parallel universe where biology is equal to technology. A computer equal to a child? This made me think of all the men who had tried to infuse life into inanimate objects: Geppetto and his Pinocchio. The Tyrell Corporation and its Replicants. Frankenstein.

Why Steve wanted to use our newborn’s name, while denying paternity and dishonoring and abandoning both of us, was a question I couldn’t answer then. The truth was so horrific it was sort of good at the time that I couldn’t see everything that was in play. To be clear, Steve didn’t have my permission to use our daughter’s name for his computer. And he never asked. He just appropriated the name Lisa and, like so many other things, hid it under the radar of my comprehension. I later understood that Regis McKenna had his team work with Steve to come up with a suitable acronym. Steve claimed at the time that it meant “Local Integrated Software Architecture.” But we both knew the truth. All this monstrous chaos would extend further when Markkula at Apple took Steve off of The Lisa to put him on the team to develop the Mac. Steve then competed against The Lisa, eventually killing it.

*   *   *

During the month I stayed at the Friedlands’ house I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility of putting my child up for adoption. I felt a love toward my child that was both tender and fierce, and I didn’t imagine that giving her up for adoption would be easy. But I wanted the best life possible for her, even if that meant a life apart from me. Abha and her friend took me to visit a woman in the area who was the head of an adoption agency, and while we walked around the woman’s home she told us her story. She said that she had given birth to two children who were fully grown but she and her husband had gone on to adopt seventeen others. Seventeen! She had adopted many babies and kids who were harder to place. Kids who were considered too old, who had special needs or were mixed race. One child had not been placed because of a birth defect. Another, from Vietnam, ran crying whenever he heard an airplane overhead because he had seen his family and his whole village bombed to smithereens. Each child had a story.

This woman and her husband had built separate dorms for the girls and the boys in their house, which were painted chalky pink and blue with little bunk beds. I was glassy-eyed to see this wonder and happy that the children had their home and each other. But meeting this woman didn’t bring any clarity to me about whether to put Lisa up for adoption. I knew that Steve would hate me for the rest of my life if I gave Lisa up for adoption, but I was checking out all the possibilities. Kobun’s words seemed less and less of a gold standard as time passed. It seemed possible that Steve would hate me but what drove me on at this point was, of course, more about love for my daughter and what would be best for her. I thought it was odd for Kobun to have framed things through the idea of Steve’s importance and his hatred. It was a manipulation below his station. I don’t recall Kobun ever advising me for my well-being. Or my daughter’s. It was always all about Steve.

In the Bay Area I had gone to an adoption agency when I was about seven months along. The head of the agency had talked with me in her office saying, “You have no right to keep this child because you have no way to take care of a baby and you don’t seem mature enough. Look at yourself,” she demanded. “You are not capable of managing this!” She was incensed.

I like people who say what they really think even when it is difficult to hear, and I later went back to continue the conversation with her. However, on the second visit I was told there had been an emergency and that I had to see someone else. Disappointed, I went to the information desk to schedule an appointment with another counselor when I saw the head of the agency carrying a tiny newborn baby on her arm. She looked like a speed walker, rushing down the hallway and curving swiftly before she ducked into a small room and out of sight. The dewy-eyed child’s head was planted in the woman’s palm, and its legs straddled over her forearm with the diapered bottom against her elbow at her hip. I wondered why she didn’t hold the child to her heart. Then about four women came running after her like a gaggle of geese. They looked like a cartoon of self-important little busybodies. I felt I was seeing through the curtain into the gap that divided the birth mother and the adoptive mother and I didn’t like it. Since that time adoption practices have developed to humanize the process in the same way that birthing practices have been humanized, but back then my head swam in sorrow for the child and in protection for my own. I found myself as judgmental of that woman as she had been of me. Funny how that works.

I made another appointment with a new counselor at the same agency. This woman was much younger than the head. She seemed clearer and more respectful in her approach with me. She didn’t have a preconceived judgment about what I should do, and her questions were so astute that I finally felt that I could, with her help, work out my next steps. I felt she could help me understand what it would mean to me and my baby to adopt or to be a single parent. She was a gifted counselor.

My relief was enormous. This woman had a clarifying effect on me. I could focus in her presence. I knew she could help me, step by step, to get through this process in a coherent way. I was hopeful and happy when I set up a second appointment, but she called to tell me that she had decided to leave the agency to be with her own kids. I pleaded with her; wasn’t there some way that she could still work with me? She had been so unusually helpful and I knew no one like her. She reluctantly gave me her home number. Yet within a month’s time I found there was no way to schedule consistently. She was busy with her kids and kept canceling. The one person that I’d found to help me think it through fell out and away beyond my reach.