Because I Said So (37 page)

I told him all about my sweet, beautiful daughter, then five years old. I showed him her photos, recounted for him that she understood my explanation about surgery to “get out the bad lump.” But on the day before Thanksgiving, when I told her I was going to also have medicine to make sure no lumps ever came back—medicine so strong that it was going to make me throw up and my hair fall out—she screamed bloody murder. Then I told
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him about how the very next day, she pulled up her chair to the Thanksgiving dinner table and proudly announced to those gathered, “My mommy’s going to have medicine that will . . .” and there she paused, eyes opening wider with wicked glee, “make her hair fall out!”

At the end of my sob story, I promised Jay that I would be back as soon as I could stomach one of his margaritas. I thanked him for his support and made a crack about joining a support group.

Fast forward
through eleven months of chemo, radiation, exhaustion, depression, baldness, and, yes, support groups, I was finally ready to go back to The Matchbox for that promised libation.

The place looked comfortably the same. Crowded, only one stool open, and Jay was behind the bar. Would he even remember me and my story? I asked the guy sitting next to the empty stool if it was taken, and as he answered, “No,” I felt a slightly unfamiliar jolt—he was handsome.

Suddenly I heard Jay exclaim, “Christina! How are you?

Look at your hair! Nice crew cut! How was the chemo? How’s your daughter? Let me get you your margarita!”

I pulled up my stool and spilled my guts once again to him.

My daughter was six years old now, strong and beautiful and so composed through the whole ordeal. The chemo seemed to have worked, and I was getting back to the world.

As Jay went off to fix other drinks, I turned to the guy next to me. Damn, he was good looking, with a full head of short gray hair, a strong jaw, and blue eyes. I was surprised to find myself speculating on whether he was “taken.” He was a lawyer, he said.

When I asked what kind, he said “criminal.” I told him I needed his card because I was the type to really get in trouble and would probably need his services in the near future. He laughed. He said he couldn’t help hearing my story.

“Congratulations,” he said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

I said, “No, I really don’t think I should have another one of
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these.” He looked a little disappointed. “But I am really hungry,”

I said. “Want to take me to dinner?” So he did.

I never did figure out how to tell a prospective date about my cancer—or “break the news,” as the support group counselor put it. I never needed to.

The lawyer and I got married.

Natural Mother

L i s a Te a s l e y

Imogen is born
on a full-moon evening, late in June when the city is hot and empty. Skin the color of wheat, dimpled cheeks, and a crown of soft midnight curls, my tiny heroine goddess effortlessly carries her Shakespearean name. We thought she might make her regal entrance en route from SoHo to midtown Manhattan during the dizzyingly brief four-hour labor. I was fully dilated upon arrival at the hospital. To maintain calm as the nurse rushed me to the birthing room, despite my mother and husband’s panicked breathing as they ran beside us, I visualized baby ducklings giddily pacing the corridors. In the birthing room, as I pushed I urged Imogen to squeeze out like toothpaste. She coop-erated with alacrity, and as her head swiftly popped out, my husband excitedly exclaimed, “We can have another one!”

“Let’s take care of this one first,” the doctor barked.

“It’s a girl, it’s a girl, it’s a girl!” my mother couldn’t stop squealing.

And now here, lifeline still attached, Imogen lies on my tummy, knowingly looking up into my eyes, both of us in awe, at ease with our mutual recognition. Upon the doctor’s command, my husband shyly cuts the umbilical cord, and I put Imogen to my breast. Throughout the entire physically trouble-free, no-hitch pregnancy, we had worn one another so well; now body to body, skin to skin, there couldn’t be a more natural texture in the
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world. We are both ready for the second part of our journey—

mother and daughter together in the outside world. We make a good first attempt at breast-feeding, neither of us discouraged that there isn’t yet milk. When the nurse takes Imogen, my mother follows at her heels to watch her bathe, footprint, and bracelet our little girl.

A crowd of newborns has also arrived on this full-moon night, in keeping with the lunar cycle, the nurses say. They pack the hospital nursery, not one extra bassinet. Most of them are Puerto Rican and similar in coloring to Imogen. The nurses tease my mother that they won’t lose our baby in the mix due to the dimples so identical to her grandmother’s.

My mother is a Panamanian sweet caramel brown. I am African American earth sienna. My husband is blue-eyed, Caucasian light beige. Imogen’s godfather is Iranian, the color of natural bamboo, and when he arrives with white roses, he holds her in his arms, coos, describing to her how she resembles his baby sister. When re-swaddled and placed back in the hospital bassinet next to my bed, she fights to get the mitts off her fists to wipe her own navy glass eyes, her fitful expression like childhood pictures of my husband’s feisty, scrappy, tow-headed brother. Of course, this is something that thrills any mother—seeing your own best world reflected in your infant’s face.

In the morning, when my husband, mother, and I take her home, Imogen fills a fourth of her car seat, and remains a sleeping beauty duckling for an uninterrupted twenty-four hours. But I can’t sleep myself for the excitement of seeing this new ravishing life, a real and true and perfect miniature person whom I hosted in my belly for nine months. I lie on the bed with her and stare at her the entire night and morning through. Over and over, my husband plays Springsteen ballads softly in the background, and all of us—my husband, mother, and I—share in the tremendous bliss.

Tears stream continuously. How can I express the new infinity of my love?

On Imogen’s seventh day, my mother returns home to Los Angeles, my husband back to work, and so we are alone together
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in public for the first time, my daughter and I, Imogen safely wrapped in a sling against my chest. We walk the few blocks from Sixth Avenue and Spring to Thompson and Prince for a pound of coffee. As I make my way toward the door, a girl of maybe twenty with a skin tone close to mine stops me at the sidewalk and asks earnestly with a Caribbean accent, “Excuse me, but where did you get your babysitting job?”

She can’t be talking to me
.

I hold my baby so closely in my sling, and everything about me sings. My shock is so fluid it is viral. How could anyone mistake us for anything but mother and child? Why should my dark skin and Imogen’s light skin influence anyone to think otherwise?

I don’t hear myself tell the woman that I am my baby’s mother.

Maybe I say nothing. But her shoulders shrink in such a heartfelt apology that it could only be too apparent how much her comment crushes me.

My husband and I
met at UCLA twelve years before Imogen was born. We courted two years before marrying, and he was well on his way to a career in the music business, while I pursued writing and painting alongside a string of jobs in journalism, music, and film. We moved every couple of years during the eight in greater Los Angeles, and though very emotionally supportive of each other, we weren’t yet financially ready to start a family. When a new position in New York afforded him more opportunity—

opportunity for me as well, we both assumed—we moved there in 1992, nevertheless with hesitation. I had always felt incompatible with the rat-race pace, and it seemed likely we would be swallowed by a culture of long hours at work.

Even so, when we left the less hectic, more home life–oriented West Coast, where interracial relationships and biracial or mul-tiracial children seemed to be everywhere, neither of us was ready for the snobbery, hostility, and resentful stares we received when we held hands in New York. Incredulous of the second looks, the disapproving tight mouths, we never became accustomed to the
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insults. I was hurt by the white elderly lady who refused to use the stall after me in an uptown movie theater bathroom. During dinner with my husband and his parents—who were always openly affectionate with a daughter-in-law they had known for so many years—I was appalled by people staring at the four of us with the kind of disgust reserved for the sight of regurgitated food at the table.

All of it chipped away at me. I had arrived on the East Coast a boho—a colorfully dressed, wide-eyed, open person—and more and more I was losing myself to the dehumanizing responses I encountered.

The first time
we discovered I was pregnant was when I began a slow miscarriage. The white female doctor we happened upon through our group insurance wrongly diagnosed a tubular pregnancy, and speaking directly to my husband rather than to me, said it was a miracle I had conceived at all given the amount of body hair and male hormones I carried. She then declared that I would most certainly need fertility drugs. Later, the radiologist assured me of the idiocy of this statement, and told me I was having a very natural miscarriage after so many years on the pill—a kind of dress rehearsal.

The radiologist was right. Two months later I was easily pregnant, and thought I’d found the right group of doctors. But by the second trimester, before each ob-gyn visit, I’d find myself hoping that it would be the African American of the group’s three women doctors who would see me that day. Even though it was me on the table,
my
heart they listened to,
my
body they examined, the two white female doctors, just like the doctor who treated my miscarriage, addressed only my white husband, and rarely, if ever, looked me in the eye. It was as if I didn’t exist, my person merely a mechanical object to be checked from time to time.

Friends in the city told me to look above people’s heads in the streets when I walked. But that would have been to change the essence of who I am: As an artist and a writer, empathy is of the
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utmost importance, and I can achieve that only by observing everyone and everything around me. So I would sit or stand on the subway, maintaining connection to the lives going on around me, and in the process taking on other people’s bad weather. I spent far too much time worrying about how others perceived me. I tried convincing myself that New York could be a kind of boot camp for tossing aside sensitivities, for toughening up. But in the emotionally fraught time of pregnancy, it was hard not to worry what kind of world I was bringing my child into. That worry then became a kind of mental slavery.

Out in the street, I was weighed down—not by the extra forty going on fifty pounds, but by the anxiety, ignorance, and turbu-lence of others. When I could no longer fit behind the wheel of my orange Karmann Ghia I sold it, keeping only the California plates propped on my desk. Gone, along with the car, seemed to be my pink coat, turquoise shoes, humor, optimism, and freedom.

I wondered why I had grown doubtful of the kindness of any strangers. Only inside our home was I happily pregnant, exuber-ant over the heightened sensitivities of motherhood, celebratory of the new spirit inside me. When cabdrivers passed me by or tried taking off even as the exiting white passenger held the door for me, I fought back—I yelled, or complained to the taxi commission, where I won one discrimination case and still have another pending. But the fighting-back was getting to me, as well as to my husband.

I wished for the natural fatigue of an expectant mother. And as it became far too harrowing to consciously confront racism on an everyday basis, I finally elected to take positive action for the sake of the energy I was surrounding my baby with. I needed to be myself; I needed to become a more natural mother. Inside, my body was nearly bursting with richness, new life, and possibility; I needed to find a way to get my internal optimism to flower outward.

Impulsively, I answered a choreographer’s ad searching for pregnant dancers in the Urban Organic newsletter. Though not a professional dancer, I love music and love to move, and so, twice a week for two months, I rehearsed the “Pregnant Tango” with seven blooming
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women, our bellybuttons like headlights in our tight red costumes.

There was an incomparable kind of joy in our hormonal, emotional exchange. We performed three nights, and I cried after each one, so delighted to have danced on stage with my child beaming proudly from inside my womb. I imagined that Imogen, like me, could relax and look forward to our relationship post-placenta.

With Imogen
now outside in the world, and the woman’s question about my “babysitting job” just the first of the many insults we encountered together, I find myself quickly losing that natural, contented gleam of new motherhood. Instead of the relaxed, open, and harmonious temperament I’d taken on during the Pregnant Tango dance period, I am back in hypervigilant mode, wary and brittle with the expectation of affronts. I coach myself on toughening up even more, for the three of us. I even deny myself the outrage that hitherto came as second nature to me in my reactions to injustice. Injustice, now, becomes standard in my head, in order to simply cope.

I see my husband snapping back at people, not so much from a position of vulnerability for himself, but as archetypal protector of wife and daughter. We get relief only from the relentless, wearing insults on the occasions we travel back to Los Angeles for visits. We don’t have to hold our breath when someone leans over in line to get a closer look at Imogen.
What a beautiful baby you
have! Oh, but I can see how she gets her looks from both of you
, a sweet older white woman says to us from over the cushy red booth at an L.A. restaurant. After almost a year of California respites since Imogen’s birth, I believe we can escape the East Coast’s grueling objectification in other places as well, and experience natural, unfretted, even festive times.