| SWIMMING IN THE REALM OF ETERNITY: (a book about mothers and daughters and the search for a separate self) |
by Jane G. Goldberg, Ph.D. Preface Introduction 1. Being Irredeemably Separate and Unrelentingly Close 2. Symbiosis, Separation and the Pas de Deux of Anxiety 3. The Journey of the Soul between Life and Death 4. Dreams of Flight (and other desires of the soul) 5. In Search of History 6. The Diaries 7. Growing Down 8. A Zombie Without a Mother 9. A Screamless Death 10. The Loss of the Omnipotent Mother 11. Sex as an Act of Betrayal 12. Wandering Around in Psychic Space 13. Murder as Metaphor 14. Mommy Nearest; Mommy Farthest 15. Giving Into Complete Abandon 16. The End of Longing Chapter 1: Being Irredeemably Separate and Unrelentingly Close For such a long time, home meant for me the house I grew up in, my mother’s house – even after I had long left that home and moved to another state. Perhaps in some sense, even now, home always will mean the lush environs of New Orleans, and, indeed, the home of my mother, but, too, the home of her mother and her mother’s mother before her. Home, and its ineluctable entanglement with my relationship with my mother, was where I returned to in states of pride and the desire for closeness; but it’s also where I retreated for comfort in states of fear and pain; and it was the landscape of my struggle to find my independence, the establishment of my true self. On this one particular sultry evening in June, I was visiting my mother, sitting by the pool, letting my thoughts wander, letting my senses gradually coalesce into full-fledged feelings. As I was lost in my reverie, not even the familiar fragrance of night-blooming jasmine -- that sweet scent that had always filled our back yard at dusk -- could shake me out of my deepest fear. This was a fear that had been chasing me off and on throughout my life. Most of the time this fear never quite emerged in full-force; rather, my anxiety foretold, as a mere hint, of its potential ferocity. It was a fear that even the absolute love and acceptance that I had always felt from my mother could not assuage. The fear was that of inhabiting a place of aloneness, living in a dimension of oneness -- without accompaniment, without love, without solace from another. . On this evening, as my fear threatened to emerge, I knew that it was, ostensibly, the fear of losing my mother to her illness, the cancer that had gripped her. But, on a more primitive level, perhaps it was, as well, the fear of losing myself -- because in so many ways, I felt that losing my mother was tantamount to not having a self of my own. Losing my mother was going to mean losing the greatest love of my life. There was never a moment, throughout our life together, that I was not certain of her love and devotion to me. She gave me the feeling that there was always a “yes” emanating from her, stretching over to me. I don’t mean that she agreed with me about everything, nor gave me whatever I wanted. Rather, it was that she was warm, and open, and receptive, and loving. She liked talking with me, and she liked snuggling with me, expanding her individual body boundary to incorporate me. Throughout my childhood, I was utterly responsive to her affections. It was a passionate love affair between us. Sitting there by the pool by myself, I remembered our best days together – the days of swimming: at first, the days when I was young and she would take me with her to Audubon Park to teach her swimming lessons, and how I was her “little helper.” I remembered the Sunday outings on our boat, our jumping off the boat, all of us together -- me, my mother, my sister and brother -- splashing into the water with glee, waving at my water-resistant dad who remained at the helm of the boat (because, as the story was told, he had gotten water up his nose one day when he was a child, and never went back into the water again) - and then we children chasing each other in the water, so sure were we, so confident about our aquatic abilities because, after all, the mermaid we called our mother had been our teacher. And I remembered the days that she and I would swim together in the pool that I was sitting next to – she wearing my bathing suit sometimes, I wearing hers sometimes, as though the two of us were, like our clothes, interchangeable. I was remembering -- and thinking and feeling -- the enormity of my mother’s love for me because I had just arrived from New York to be with her and take care of her, as best I could, in this, her dying time, a period that would spread out over the next 12 months. In that agonizing year, my mother, overly thin and frighteningly delicate, was confined to her bed as I made my monthly trip between cities. These trips were made out of a need to snatch every last minute still left to us; they were made out of guilt, and love, and a sense of responsibility as well as a gift of generosity; they were made in order to be close, and they were made out of fear of the aloneness that I envisioned as my future without her. As I faced this separation of death, the thought came to me that perhaps all the previous separations that we had endured throughout our lives – the normal and inevitable separations that befall all mothers and daughters – were mere dress rehearsals for mastering this, our final separation. In the process of letting go of her that year, I became like a squirrel readying for winter— obsessed with possessing my mother’s belongings, closing that yawning gap of separateness between us. Each trip home I found something else of hers that I wanted with me up in New York: an inexpensive knick-knack, an antique bowl, a dress. I took her white winter wool – something so lavish I never would have allowed myself to actually purchase. I justified my raids on her closet: She wouldn’t miss the clothes, couldn’t even see whether they were there or not; the knick-knack was too cheap for her to care about; the bowl would look too perfect on my bookshelves, set next to the cherished Matisse print she gave me after I moved to New York; I would wear the white winter wool and she wouldn’t -- couldn’t. On one visit, I took back -- Indian-giver that I was -- the pretty little jar with the jeweled top that I had given her for Mother’s Day the year I was thirteen. It was the first present I had ever bought for her, the first time I eschewed merely drawing a picture for her, or making a Popsicle- stick box. She kept all my childish creations; she displayed them and I know she treasured them. But the jar was special to her because I gave it to her when I was old enough to have developed a taste for fine -- often old -- and beautiful things; it was special to me because I had really wanted it for myself, but I lovingly made that sacrifice. Through all those years after I gave her that jar, I would walk into her bathroom, spy it sitting in the place of honor she had accorded it, on the black marble countertop that was the design definition of her bathroom, and I would covet it. I would wonder if I had made the wrong decision to give it to her at all – whether I should have kept it for myself as I had wanted to do. That conflict was so much what we two were about: wanting to share, giving to each other even when we didn’t want to, even at the point of sacrifice, even, on occasion, at the detriment of our own well-being. I felt like a thief as I roamed the house, furtively planning my next steal. Piece by piece I was trying to move my mother’s home into mine. I was trying to ward off her death by acquiring her, by becoming her. And yet, even with the convergence between my mother and myself, I was never quite so intent on defining the differences between us. My mother lay unmoving in her bed, her leg twisted at an unnatural right angle because simply turning on her side had already resulted in breakage of her fragile, cancer-eaten bones, and there was no treatment to be had for these weak bones that had ceased to have any form of living integrity. In the face of my mother’s stillness, I made sure that I kept moving—as though to convince myself that it was not both of us who were dying, and if only because, unlike her, I could. I trained for a triathlon, running six miles a day, followed by a one-mile swim and the obligatory bike ride. The more my mother’s body waned, the more mine waxed. As her body lay immobilized, I rejoiced in the strength of mine. And the buckets of sweat that poured from me; those were my tears. And I defined our differences in how we each dealt with her mother. Dutifully, my grandmother trudged out to our suburban home from uptown New Orleans to make her visits. It was during this final year that my mother was able to inflict upon her own mother her final revenge for the bad mothering that she felt she had experienced. My mother made my grandmother sit in the front part of the house, trip after trip, never permitting her into the back bedroom for a proper in-person visit, not even for a final goodbye. I think my mother was recreating for her mother the feeling that she had when she was a baby: “Hello, is there anyone out there to care for me? Hello, I hear someone, but where is she? Why is she not here with me?” This was the story of my mother’s childhood that I had grown up hearing – a mother not there, a mother who couldn’t/wouldn’t love; a child with no secure sense of self, no confidence, a child filled with self- loathing. I sat with my grandmother during these times of banishment, sharing her shame and humiliation, both of us wanting my mother to be able to rise above her hatred, above her anger, and above the fierce disappointment in her mother that had defined so much of my mother’s life. The day my mother died, regardless of my protests about our differences, it was as though in her final, irreversible act of separation, our minds became fused; we came back to a togetherness that we had not felt perhaps since the thirty-four years earlier when I slid out from her womb. That last day of my mother’s life, her imminent death seemed to call out to me in some mysterious way, pulling me out of my bedroom where I had been hiding away, taking a reprieve from having to listen helplessly to her labored, sparse breaths. I believe that she needed me to be with her those last few minutes of her life and that she, somehow, in and despite her comatose state, communicated with me to come be with her to share our final separation and her entry into the realm of eternity. And now, over a decade since my mother’s death, I can’t remember what I called her. I know I didn’t call her Mommy; I'm not sure about Mama, it could have been Mama; I'm inclined to think it was Mother, but if it were, I would wonder about myself. I know she and I did better than my calling her Mother, with the hint of stoic reserve that Mother suggests. Could I really have separated myself this much from the woman who raised me, this woman who adored me and whom I adored in return, that I can’t even remember my name for her? Maybe I can’t remember what I called my mother because I am still insisting, even in her death, on declaring our distance from each other, just as I did for long stretches of time when she was alive. Maybe I don’t want to know that she is really dead; I can’t allow myself to know that she and I are irredeemably separate - and perhaps the only way to wipe out the fact of her death and the fact of our eternal separateness is to attempt to obliterate memory, to forget her life – our life together. Maybe all the separations that I insisted on while she was alive -- my acts of rebellion, even deceit, my leaving home -- moving to a city 1000 miles away in order to get away from her -- were all preparations for her death -- dress rehearsals -- attempts to prove to myself that she and I were not the same, that I could have life independent of her, proving that we were not fused, as I think she thought of us as being. And there is, too, the fact that I am, truly, no longer my mother’s daughter. I have read that the human body changes all of its cells every seven years. We are all, in effect, reconstituted soup. I see, from observing the various permutations of my life and of the concomitant fluctuating changes of my emotional construction, that the psyche, too, is continuously reborn. Since my mother’s death, my body cells have had two full revolutions. I can’t even guess how many rebirths my psyche has undergone. Would my mother even recognize the person I am today, the self I have become were she to come down from her otherworldly perch? Sometimes I remember best who I was when she was still alive, what I was like back then, in my dreams. I will wake up and be filled with long-lost feelings. For years, through my teens, my twenties and thirties, I lived almost entirely from my feelings. I loved voraciously and blissfully, as well as despairingly and dejectedly. No one was filled with more adoring love of their mother more than I; no one was closer to their girl-friends than I; no one was more involved with the passion of romantic love. I still dream about the protagonists of my past life – each of them. They walk through my dream-world as though in a procession. And in these nostalgic dreams about love and love-lost, I reconnect to the immensely feeling-Jane I was. I was carefree back then. I broke rules; I challenged authority. I smoked a little dope and railed against the government for a war in Vietnam that I thought we shouldn’t be fighting. I insisted on not accumulating worldly goods, harboring the notion that I wanted to be able to pack up everything I owned and hit the road with no more than a twenty-minute warning. Now, I live much more from my mind. I live from decisions, schedules and accomplishments. My life is utterly structured. Even my daily jog is by the clock, a half- hour – no matter (like the postman) rain, sun, snow or sleet. The other day, I accidentally left my watch home when I went running. At first, I felt disoriented, not knowing how long I was running. The next day I ventured out, decisively, without the watch; this was a great adventure for me in my now, fully organized life. How freeing that was, that small act of defiance against myself, against whom I had become, returning back to who I had been. My mother knew a different girl than the woman I have become. My mother knew a sweet, southern-bred girl who never dared to disagree. She never knew the hard-edged New Yorker I have become who can stand up, fearlessly, to large amounts of aggression, irony and sarcasm. She knew that boy-crazy girl who was willing to forego high-school homework, favoring instead make-out sessions in the back seat of a car. (And, as the mother of that boy- loving, sex-craving girl that I was then -- when I told her for the umpteenth time, in my late twenties, that I was madly in love, wanting her to be as excited as I was by this new, fabulous man -- one in a self-admitted long series -- she responded by saying, not so much with irritation, but rather resignation: “Oh Jane, I can’t get excited every time you tell me you’re in love.”) She never knew the woman I became, finally pledging and honoring a promise of eternal, true love to one man. Most of all, she knew a daughter; she never knew her daughter as a mother. I am a mother now, and I live by the precepts of being a mother: I make rules now instead of breaking them. In spite of our differences, with all the separations we endured and all the unknowingnesses between us, I cannot, will not forget my mother. Although my memory doesn’t stream seamlessly together like a film, nevertheless it seeps through in pieces; it’s more like snapshots placed on a gigantic-sized album page with large spaces between all the pictures -- static memories frozen in time -- of sensations, feelings, events and places. I remember her sitting on the edge of the tub, playing with my brother and me when he and I took baths together as young children. I remember the endless patience, the sense that she had no where else in the world to go, that she was exactly where she wanted to be at that moment – with us, watching us play, even playing with us. I remember the song we sang, the three of us laughingly pulling down on our ears, making them hang low, and saluting each other like a Continental soldier. I remember, when I was older, from the age of seven through my teenage years, her listening to my playing the piano every day after school. I played for hours; and although my mother couldn’t tell Mozart from Beethoven, she never stopped encouraging me, calling out to me from the kitchen where she might have been preparing dinner, praising me for my musicality, or my “expressiveness” as she called it. I remember one time when she went to the beauty salon and came home as a blonde; we three children insisted that she march right back to the beauty salon and make them restore her back to “herself.” She complied, as though understanding that her transformation seemed to us as though a foreigner had invaded her body, and that this blonde mother was a mother we did not know. That very afternoon, we had our mother back. And, even when I was adult, she understood my concerns that I am sure most people would have thought were senseless, even idiotic. We were in California on a trip, and I had brought my dog, Oscar, with me. I was a bit nutty about this dog. He went everywhere with me. We had left him in the hotel room, and 45 minutes into our car trip, I couldn’t let go of the idea that the maid at the hotel was going to open the door and Oscar would run out, never to be seen again. I voiced my concern, and I didn’t have to ask. She just said, matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to suggest, “Well, let’s just go back and get Oscar.” Never mind that the turn-around cost us an extra two hours of travel time. To my mother, my feelings, my comfort and my well- being were all-important. These memory snapshots are sparse though. What I remember most of all, and most viscerally, is the feeling tone of our relationship. She loved me, she made me feel loved by her, and this is the gift, above all, that my mother gave to me. This is my memory of her that is most important. My memories of my mother -- capturing those that come easily, searching for those that are elusive -- have become particularly important to me now that I myself am a mother: they fill in the empty space that now exists between my mother and myself; they bring us back together. Though my conscious memory may fail me, at times, I feel that my mother is solidly in me. No matter what effort I, or anyone, make to get away, there is no escape from that which is within. The things that happen in closets I was sitting on the floor of my mother’s closet. A milky light filtered through the eyelet drapes of her bedroom. The play of the shadows from the huge live oak trees out back soothed me, painting a soft carpet of dappled light on the floor beside me. I was probably five or six here, not yet tall enough to reach the string attached to the overhead light. But it didn’t matter. I was surrounded by a treasure trove of her shoes that I could touch and smell and dimly see in the cavernous safety of her inner sanctum. I had an assurance about our relationship. I knew that should she find me hiding out in her closet, as she did often, she would smile and say lovingly, acceptingly, “So there you are.” I accepted, at this age still without resentment, that she would always want to know where I was; and she accepted, still without worry or fear, that, as much as I wanted to be just like her, there were times, too, when I wanted to hide from her, to be altogether separate and away from her. I pulled a high-heeled shoe over my foot. It was heavy and unwieldy. I marveled at how much room was left – how much bigger I needed to grow to fit into her shoes. Yet, as much as I yearned to be like her, I felt a chick-like contentment that I was still her little girl, an adjunct to her towering presence. And now: three decades later-- my childhood has passed, and with it, the pleasure and excitement I had from hiding in closets. I am in my mother’s closet again. We – my sister, brother and I, the heirs to my mother’s estate – have sold the house, and we need to take everything from it, remove all vestiges of the particular constellation of energy that constituted our five lives together, the family we were. I am looking at what’s in her closet – trying to decide what I want to keep for myself. The shoes of course -- those finely crafted shoes -- the soft, Italian leathers, blue, tan and red; the brown and gray scaly crocodile and alligator skins -- those shoes that even now are still slightly bigger than my own feet. Never mind that. I take the shoes (and I commit to wearing them for years to come, heels flopping, anticipating the inevitable blisters from the ill-fit – but I will wear them nevertheless). I take all the glitzy sequined, the rich brocades, the pastel chiffons and the deep-hued velvet gowns, all the plush dresses she wore to multiple weddings and bar-mitzvahs over the years. She wore them well; she looked elegant -- really luminous -- in them. I take them all, even knowing that my sneakers/no lipstick/down-home style will never accommodate her gowns. Yet, I cannot bear to part with them. And, I decide to take the umbrellas too. It’s been a year since I saw her umbrellas -- those umbrellas that had meant so many different things to me over the years, even up to right before her death. My mother’s collection of umbrellas was large and varied. She had, it seemed, one for every occasion and for every outfit. She had the elegant, dressy ones, the ordinary, everyday ones, and the well-worn, over- used ones. I don't think the dressy umbrellas ever actually left the closet. They were perpetually too good to be used. They hung together in the closet, each of them beautifully and richly patterned. Each had its own cover, matching patterns that fit sleekly over their forms. Their handles were carved woods, both dark and light. The two umbrellas that were used all the time were black and white twins; they stayed in the car mostly, ready for use. They both folded into little square packages with plastic covers around them, black plastic for the black umbrella and white plastic for the white umbrella. These folded umbrellas were the perfect size to get trapped in the space between either of the front seats of the car and the armrest dividing the seats – the horsey crack, as I called it. The car was either a Lincoln or Cadillac -- my father always had one or the other -- and the horsey seemed to divide the front seat into two sections, thus making my mother and father seem, to my child's eye, very far apart. I would ride the horsey, and I would stretch out my arms, aspiring to touch my mother on my right and my father on my left, as though the mere act of touching each of them simultaneously was what held them, held all three of us, together. These two umbrellas were perennially getting lost. This was due to the basic disorganization that my mother struggled against all her life. She wanted order, yet could never seem to accomplish it. She wanted a neat house, but somehow it was never neat enough. I didn’t help her with this; in fact, I only aggravated the situation. When company would come over, my room was such a messy embarrassment that she insisted I close the door and we declared it off- limits for any house-tours. Similarly, she wanted to be on time, but she was perpetually rushing around. She wanted her newspapers read in a timely fashion, but she was always behind – reading today’s news three weeks later. Once, when she and my father went to Russia on vacation, she was so behind in reading her papers that she filled an entire suitcase with newspapers, took them to Russia with her, and brought back the ones she had not finished on the trip. The umbrellas, of course, were never really lost. I got wise to the real thief at a young age: the horsey was the culprit. I became a sort of minor hero in those days because my favorite (and only) place to look for lost umbrellas was the horsey crack. Usually they were stuffed down in there, wedged at the bottom, almost to the floor of the car, forgotten victims of my mother’s own use. I was always the one who looked; my older brother was too busy with his cars and motorcycles; my older sister simply didn’t care about pleasing my mother the way I did; my father was either at work or sitting in his easy-chair, not to be disturbed from his newspapers. I would find the lost umbrellas, and my mother would praise me. I would swell with pride at my cleverness, and I would absorb her love and admiration, pulling it into myself, feeling the certainty of our closeness and love. Sneaking around, filled with trepidation The last time I had seen the umbrellas was when my mother was just a month away from her death. She hadn’t left her bed for almost a year. I had flown into New Orleans to be greeted with one of the city’s notorious, torrential rainstorms. As usual, all the low streets were flooded. A usual 20 minute trip in the car could take as long as an hour, as one wielded one’s way around the patchwork of back streets that were higher ground and not likely to be submerged. Such are the travails of living in a city six feet below sea level. When I arrived, Blique, our maid, wanted to go home. I was happy to take her for my mother, but, I needed an umbrella. I looked first in the car trunk (a newer version now of the old Lincoln or Cadillac) for the old white and black ones; I looked in the horsey crack of the car (through all our cars, my father stayed with bucket front seats), though the car hadn’t been driven in months. Finding none of the everyday umbrellas, I realized that I would have to take one of her better ones – one of the ones that were hanging in the closet. The thought -- knowing it would displease my mother -- filled me with trepidation. I snuck, stealthily, into my mother’s closet, in an alcove adjacent to her bedroom. I made my selection – it was a pretty, frilly one – bold red, with a kind of skirt that edged it – but, in spite of its femininity, it looked sturdy enough. I walked into her bedroom to tell her that I was leaving to take Blique home. Furtively, secretly, I held that umbrella against the side of my body away from her so that she couldn’t see it, letting it parallel down the side of my leg, swinging it with the movement of my body as I walked. With my mother’s body almost utterly useless, with her having become mostly deaf, with her partially paralyzed mouth that made her speech slurred, and with her belly swollen as though she were eight months pregnant, this frail, terminally ill woman still held such immense power over me that I preferred sneaking and hiding -- actually manipulating her field of vision -- to letting her see that I was engaged in an act that represented a deviance from the order she had fought so valiantly (more or less successfully) to create. Or, had it nothing to do with the hierarchy of power in our relationship? Was it simply my way of loving her to not disturb the small sense of order that she was able to feebly hold onto in those last days of her utter powerlessness? Sometimes I can’t distinguish between the two: fear or love. The days of my mother’s dying time Those days – the days of my mother’s dying time – are my most intense as well as my freshest memories of my mother. My sense of my parent’s bedroom is that it was perpetually darkened. After my parents had built their dream-house when I was nine, they tinted their bedroom’s sliding glass doors to ward off the intense southern afternoon sun. The room acquired a softened, hushed hue. But, during the time of my mother’s illness, that softness seemed to turn dark and morbid. During those dying days, I craved sunlight, as though it represented life itself – the antidote to her dying, the anti-death. I would flee from that darkness into my own sun- filled bedroom. That last year of my mother’s life, as she lay in her bed unmoving, I would walk into her room. I would sit on her bed and she would tell me her dreams. In one recurring dream, she dreamt that she was walking to the front of the house. We would hold onto that dream as our hope for her future, imagining the day would come when she would --not miraculously, but normally and naturally -- get out of her bed and walk. Although my mother remained imprisoned in her dying body, her psyche/her spirit was still free to roam and her dream reminded us that this was so. In her dream life, she could do the impossible. And then, after day-dreaming together about the vision of health that her dream had given us, I would get up and walk out of her room – and through all of my motions, my comings and goings in and out of her bedroom, I was intensely aware that I was moving; I was able to move, and she was not. During this time, I witnessed my mother’s small acts of separating from me, preparing me for her eventual death. She withdrew into herself, no longer as interested in my life, no longer asking me questions about every trivial aspect of my life. She accepted our times together (gratefully), but never insisted (hungrily), as she had been used to doing, on more. The smallest fraction of time into which time can be divided I was in the room with my mother the moment she died. I was watching her labored breathing, and then, the next instant, it stopped. I thought for a moment that I might be wrong, that my mother was still breathing. I suppose I had not quite given up hope for eking out one more moment of life with my mother. That’s all death takes: an instant, the smallest fraction of time into which time can be divided. One moment my mother was breathing, and then there was no more. Everything that had defined my mother as the human being that she had been, as my mother, as a mother to two other children, as a wife, as a woman of courage and compassion, humor and cunning as well as cruelty and vindictiveness – all of it, all of her life left her in that single instant. Being with her for that moment, that breathless moment in which she inhaled and then exhaled her last, not too regretful, breath was then and remains still the most profound moment of my life. As life left her, there was a sense in which I gave chase to her vaporous spirit as it was floating away from her body. Part of me kept right on going with her air-borne/space-borne, perhaps even heaven- borne, journey, and I think I lost a little bit of myself in the travel that day of death. But another part of me grabbed onto her spirit before it had gone too far, and I pulled this “her” tightly into myself. At that moment, I stopped our life long battle about who was who, who she was and who I was. From that moment on, all conflicts about our separateness vanished, and my mother remains alive inside me, surely as much a part of me now in her death as I insisted, at times, that she was not a part of me during her life. Chapter 2: Symbiosis, Separation and the Pas de Deux of Anxiety Now, more than a decade after my mother’s death, life, brimming life is defining my time as much as death did in those earlier years. I am standing at the gate of the airport waiting for my daughter with Gregg, the man with whom I live, the man who will be Molly’s father. Despite my having been assured that my one-week old daughter is on this plane I await, it all seems unreal. I don’t quite believe that I will be, momentarily, holding her in my arms. It has taken me all these long years since my mother’s death to become a mother. Perhaps I had to wait until she died. Perhaps the closeness we had was sufficient for me all those years that she was alive. Perhaps it would have felt like an act of betrayal to our relationship for me to bring someone else into my life, someone who would compete so completely with her in significance. (The boy/man thing was never a real threat, because when the relationships would end – and they all always did – I would run back to her for comfort.) By the time my mother had become terminally ill, we had reversed roles; I was giving her the same devotion and care that she had given to me all those prior years. It was I who made the sacrifices for her, as she had previously made for me. I took all my vacation time to spend with her; I called her frequently, often daily, asking how she was, rather than waiting for her to call me. I made sure I accompanied her to all her doctor’s appointments – even when they were on the other side of the country – even when they were in other countries. Perhaps while she was alive those last years, she was all the child I needed. The closeness we had didn’t want to be disturbed by the intrusion of another. How close we came to not succeeding This hypothetical daughter -- that I now await -- and I have had a shaky start. It took a search for us to find each other, and I shudder when I think of how close we came to not succeeding. I began my decision to have a baby by trying to get pregnant with Gregg. We tried au natural, and then we tried artificial insemination. When those failed (after our sex life had gone to pot from the prescribed schedules, the waiting for “blue” in the ovulation kit, the head-stands after sex), I put ads in newspapers all over the country. I was never sure of exactly what to write in the ads. What words, which sympathies should I use to appeal to a woman wanting to give up her baby? Then I looked into getting Cambodian, Russian, Chinese and Rumanian babies. Finally, I signed up with an adoption agency. The agency was in Louisiana, my home state, and the women who worked there were southern-sweet. They didn’t criticize me: they didn’t tell me that I had waited entirely too long to begin this process of becoming a mother -- that when my daughter would be a vigorous 20, I would be a dotty 67. They just told me they would get me a baby – even a girl if I wanted. They told me the wait would be longer for the girl-wanted list – girl babies are more desired than boys apparently – but, for me, there was never a question: it had to be a girl. It had to be a girl because my femaleness was my sense of identification with the human race. All I knew about boys was that they grow up to be men and then break my heart. It took the agency a year to call. Over the course of my search, I had lowered my expectations from wanting a musical, athletic, med school student as the biological mother of my child to being able to tolerate a Twinkies-eating, soap-opera addict. But then they told me that this mother smoked. This I could not bring myself to tolerate. I could not accept the child of a smoker. I knew too well the health risks of infants born to smokers. The agency asked me to reconsider. They told me the mother was decent and kind and pretty, and that she liked my |