Bringing in Finn (34 page)

It began to snow during our appointment. From the windows in the corridor that led into Maternal-Fetal Medicine, we could see fat white flakes falling in spirals through the air.

Patricia, who went by Pat, was our nurse that morning. “We all vie for who gets to be your nurse,” she said, as she walked us to our exam room and helped my mother onto the table. She took a seat next to my mother and me. The MFM team never treated me as an insignificant member of our party. They fawned over my mother, which I loved, but they also asked me questions about how I was feeling. When they talked about the baby, they addressed me
as the mother and my mother as the grandmother and patient. They seemed as delighted to support a team pregnancy as much as they did a traditional one. In their presence, I felt like a whole and complete mother-to-be.

My mother now looked unmistakably pregnant, her winter coat now pulled wide at the front zipper when it closed. My sheer gratitude that we were moving toward actually having a child was now mixed, on certain days, with a poisonous firing of thoughts that I didn't deserve this gift—that if I couldn't have a baby on my own, the “normal” way, I didn't deserve to have one at all. People earn a baby by carrying one; the sacrifices of pregnancy make you worthy. My mind offered up this thinking in a kind of serpent-like tongue.

My father had given me a CD a couple of years earlier of a talk by a progressive Catholic priest on the subject of worthiness. “To our human mind, we won't ever be worthy,” the priest said. “When my mind tries to trump me with my inadequacies, I tell it,
You're right. To you I'll never measure up. Good thing you're not the authority here.

“We are worthy because we are here,” he went on to say. “If there is any human sin, it is in forgetting that we are already whole.” I tried to imagine the idea of wholeness as a light inside me that I could hold on to when the darker thoughts came.

Pat's pager buzzed on the counter in front of her, and I jumped.

“The doctor will be right in,” she said. My mother looked at me from the examination table, raising her eyebrows as if to ask if I was okay. I nodded and found myself smiling. She was wearing the black maternity pants we'd ordered, a Pucci-inspired top with swirls of purple and black, and a stylish new pair of black rubber boots. I couldn't remember ever having seen her look so confident or expressive. I remembered her saying once that she'd always been afraid of standing out. Now, I wondered if her opinion may have changed. If
I'd seen her on the street, I would have been intrigued. I would have thought she was fascinating.

“I need a urine sample,” Pat said, interrupting my thoughts. She handed my mother a plastic cup. My mother knew the way to all the bathrooms on the floor. Once she was out of the room, Pat told me she could not believe how great my mother looked.

“From the back she doesn't even look pregnant,” Pat said.

“I'm sure she'd love to hear that when she comes back,” I said. “She says she's starting to feel huge.”

When she returned, Pat showed my mother her weight, pointing out that most people would have gained fifteen to twenty pounds by this point and that she had gained only twelve. She checked my mother's blood pressure and placed a thick paper strip with color squares on it into the urine sample to check for proteins.

“Protein in the urine is another sign of preeclampsia,” Pat said. “We start checking around the third trimester.” She took a seat on the wheeled stool next to the exam table where my mother sat. When the test was ready, she recorded that my mother's urine was negative for offending proteins and made a note for the doctor to check on the swelling in my mother's feet.

Dr. Socol, the cohead of the practice, was our doctor that day. He was tall and lanky and reminded me of Alan Alda as Hawkeye on
M*A*S*H
. He affirmed that everything was progressing well. He said the swelling in my mother's feet was textbook and asked Pat about the results of my mother's glucose test. Pat sifted through the papers in my mother's file to discover that the test, usually given between weeks twenty and twenty-four, had been overlooked somehow. Dr. Socol looked concerned and called the lab to put in an order for my mother to take the test immediately.

We took seats in the waiting room outside reception, as instructed, to wait to be called for the glucose test. Conversations in
the waiting room were infrequent, but when they did take place, they had the air of a veterans' meeting at a VA: We might not have known each other or ever see each other again, but we shared a common bond. These women had also been initiated by the Great Mother, and I guessed that pregnancy for many of them was like it was for me—less a scenic canoe ride than walking a tightrope every day—a cold thin steel wire hundreds of feet in the air, where life existed on one side and death on the other.

An attendant in a lab coat brought my mother a clear plastic bottle filled with fizzy orange liquid and returned an hour later to escort her to the lab for a blood test. I remembered Dr. Baker's giving me the same type of bottle to take home with me after my twenty-week appointment. I'd actually been scheduled to take the test the week after I went into premature labor with the twins; the orange liquid had stayed in our pantry for at least eight months, until I went on a cleaning spree and forced myself to throw it away.

While my mother took the glucose test in the lab, I picked up an issue of
Vogue
and attempted to read. The waiting room was empty, aside from a young woman with caramel skin and fleece-lined boots that were wet from the snow. She was heavily pregnant. She filled a cup of water from a tank on the end table and lowered herself carefully back into the chair.

“I am high-high risk,” she said to me. “I lost my first pregnancy at twenty weeks—incompetent cervix. They did a cerclage for my second pregnancy, and it didn't work. I had my son at twenty-four weeks and spent the better part of four months in the NICU.”

“God,” I said.

“He's fine now—Jarell. He's a fighter, one of the tallest kids in his class. He just gets colds more often than some kids, from having been born so premature. Other than that, he's like any normal three-year-old.”

I felt dizzy, as if I'd taken a strong drink. My gut burned with knowing. I had never trusted the cerclage. “I can't believe you went for it again,” I said.

“I didn't, until we found a doctor who does transabdominal cer-clages, with almost a 100 percent success rate. His practice is here in Chicago. It was a three-hour procedure and not pleasant,” she said, flicking her fingers in front of her for a moment, as if she were trying to shake off the memory. “But it worked. My cervix is closed tight. Now I have preeclampsia, though.”

“I lost twins at twenty-one and a half weeks,” I said, wanting in a way I never did in ordinary conversation to voice what had happened in my first pregnancy. “They were stillborn.”

Outside this room, I felt defective or bereft when I talked about the twins. I had yet to speak of their death without a painful tensing of my throat or crying. In here, with another woman who'd been through a similar fire, I spoke with my face lifted. In this conversation, I was not a victim, but simply a warrior who'd seen battle.

“So you know,” she said, holding my gaze steady.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

 

The next day,
we received an email from BabyCenter: “Congratulations, you've officially entered the third trimester!”

“Don't you think it's time to start telling more people about the baby?” my mother asked me when I came to see her after finishing my sessions for the day. I cleared off the bed so I could give my mother a reflexology treatment. I propped her legs on a pillow and began to massage the sides and then the soles of her feet. The skin was soft and white, puffed just slightly on the top of the foot and ankles.

“Oh,” she said, “that feels so good.” She closed her eyes and nestled further into the pillows. I ignored my mother's question. I imagined she could guess our reasons for keeping the pregnancy mostly to ourselves, namely fear.

“Hi, baby,” I said, trying to beam my thoughts into the womb instead. “This treatment is for you, too.” My mother opened her left eye a slit, like an alligator, and lifted her head up to look at me.

I continued to focus on her foot, making long, slow strokes and then pulling the toes at the top.

“Sara?” she said, her eyes opening and closing again.

“Okay,” I said. “I know.” I wanted to wait a couple more weeks, until we reached viability, a clinical term I didn't like but still thought of constantly. It was the point after which the baby could survive on its own outside of the womb—somewhere between thirty and thirty-five weeks. My plan was to stay hunkered down with my work, sock away as much money for my maternity leave as possible, and then start telling people sometime in the seventh month.

My mother confronted Bill and me at dinner later that night.

“Okay, you two,” she said, narrowing her gaze first at Bill and then at me. “You have some important preparations to attend to for this baby. I want to talk about baby showers and my accommodations. I know you offered to keep the guest room intact until the baby is born, but I think that is unnecessary. I will be comfortable downstairs, and I want to help put together the nursery. If you are too scared to do it for yourselves, do it for me. Just because I am also the gestational host doesn't mean I don't want the full experience and excitement of being the expectant grandmother.”

Bill and I looked at each other. I felt scared and superstitious, and I'd been stalling. The baby items we'd been given for the twins had haunted me for years. I think some part of my mind still believed we could have done the first pregnancy differently. That we could have prevented what happened. I thought that maybe if I hadn't loved the twins or prepared for them, we wouldn't have lost them. Or, if we had, the loss would not have hurt so much.

I looked at my mother, her brown eyes light and full, her belly
rounded to the size of a small watermelon. We had no guarantees this time, either. But I took her urging as a sign that it was time to take the next emotional risk.

The week before Thanksgiving, Bill and I spurred ourselves into action. My father flew out to Chicago for the holiday and to celebrate my mother's birthday, on December 2. Bill and I used the time while she was with my father to start on Prentice's series of recommended classes for first-time parents: Infant Care 101, Baby and Child CPR and First Aid. We registered for baby items online. We chose a date for a couples' shower: December 11. As we went through our week, we began sharing our news with friends and clients. People who knew us well mostly cried, even one of Bill's friends. When I told my friend Mark Anthony, the head of the center where I led many workshops, he said many times he'd wanted to offer to carry our baby himself and would have done so if he had been in possession of the right equipment.

After client sessions and dinner, looking at baby names became our nighttime activity of choice. We combed through books on mythology, my Shakespeare collection, and baby-name websites.

“I thought this would be easy for you two—both creative types,” my sister said when she stopped by after work one evening and saw our pile of books and lists of names on loose-leaf paper. It was more likely that because we were both creative people, name choosing was a more involved process. As a writer, I cared about the sound of the name and the meaning.

My sister picked up our master list and scanned the page now marked up with circles and stars. Choices Bill and I both would consider included Fletcher, Hunter, Austin, Jasper, and Finnean. Finn was the name that had been in my heart since the sixth week of our pregnancy, ever since I had thought we might be having a boy. Finnean Lee. The middle name was decided; Lee was Bill's mother's middle name, and it worked with everything.

My mother told me later she liked Finnean best as well but wanted to stay out of the discussion. “I don't want to play the mother-in-law-who's-carrying-your-baby card and swing the vote either way.”

“I like Finnean, but I'm not 100 percent,” Bill said. “What about Bradley?”

My sister and I both made a face.

“I'll tell you what,” Bill said, crossing the living room to put two more logs in the fireplace. “If our child has light hair, his name is Finnean, Finn for short.” I told him I didn't want to name our child on a bet.

“Suit yourself,” Bill said, coming back toward the dining room table and punching my bicep with a light tap. He looked smug, like he'd made a bet he couldn't lose anyway.

“I have light hair,” my sister said, lifting her hands to the side of her head as evidence. Her hair had remained the same strawberry blond it had been since childhood.

“You're the only one in the family,” Bill said. “Sara and I have almost black hair. And light hair is recessive. What are the odds?”

My sister smiled cryptically and shrugged.

As we neared the thirty-week mark, I began to unclench my jaw, which had felt locked ever since we had become pregnant. My brother-in-law told us at dinner one Sunday that he had been born premature—around thirty weeks. I looked at him: broad shouldered, athletic, very much alive. He had followed his passion for sports and now worked as a physician's assistant on the surgical team for the Bears. Thirty weeks. We were not far.

We sent out printed invitations for our shower. I began to tell more acquaintances and friends that we were expecting. On the eleventh, thirty people piled into our house, shaking snow off their jackets and boots. Bill's father and stepmother drove in from Cincinnati, bringing us two strollers (regular and travel), bedding
for the crib, and a faux-sheepskin rug to place on the floor in front of the crib in the nursery. From friends, we received a car seat, bottle systems, baby clothes, burp clothes, swaddle blankets, a baby monitor, and a high chair. My parents bought us a traditional white crib with wooden panels that we'd picked out at the Land of Nod.