Because I Said So (38 page)

We could never feel sorry
for ourselves with a helicopter waiting for us at Jamaica’s Kingston airport. It is as if our feet could touch the treetops of the lush neon landscape; I fly with my
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eleven-month-old baby in arms, my husband on one side, pilot on the other, as we land on Golden Eye. What used to be Ian Fleming’s estate is now the compound of my husband’s boss, who has invited us to stay while he is away. With a choice of seven guesthouses, we are waited on hand and foot by a private staff, who take kindly to us. Of course, we choose the guesthouse with a front door opening onto the beach—spending days in the water, sand, and grass, our urban baby finally getting a taste of gorgeous nature. Imogen holds onto my leg, head back, her mouth open to the spray of the outside shower, all of us elated to be naked in the fresh air. She laughs, toddling after the hen and chickens, clapping her hands as they skedaddle from her. She kneels in the sand, building odd and royal monuments, making friends with roaming beach dogs and cats. The three of us sit in the shallow, quiet bath of the ocean in a ring-around-the-rosy. Self-consciousness, anxiety melt away.

Due to the sneaking paranoia that something could break this spell of easy familial reverie, we hardly ever leave the private property. And why would we want to go anywhere else? For one of the few times since the week of her birth, Imogen, my husband, and I are free to be in perfect sync. On the plane back to New York, luxuriously rested and mellowed to jelly, my guard is way down when the white American flight attendant hands my husband an American immigration and customs declaration for him and “his” child, while I, holding our baby, am handed a Jamaican immigration card without so much as a question. We tell ourselves it’s back to the grind.

With the ever-increasing escapes, mostly thanks to my husband’s work, Imogen is well traveled by her twentieth month.

When the phone rings in a Miami hotel, I run to get it and she chases after me, tripping over a cursedly placed woven-straw chair that busts the gentle, narrow space between her eye and brow. We rush her to the emergency room, my baby bleeding in my arms, and the triage nurse asks if we know how to “contact the parents of this child.” Neither of us can believe that she can’t see the singular panic and concern that only a mother and father
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exude for their threatened baby. Do we not seem real and natural with her? An hour later, as the three male nurses hold our baby down to apply a butterfly bandage, the African American explains to the two Caucasians how one can tell from the curly hair and golden complexion that she is “mixed” and so, therefore, standing right here are the parents. My husband and I each have one of Imogen’s hands in our own, and we share an unspoken moment of promise and strength. When the white male doctor arrives on the scene, he looks me in the eye as he speaks, and I’m grateful he understands we are human.

By the time I feel ready for a part-time nanny, extreme sensitivity becomes the main requirement. My husband and I go through disastrously awkward interviews with a string of prospective babysitters—three of them happen to be white NYU

students—who look from me to my husband, wondering why, sometimes aloud, the exiting babysitter is doing the questioning.

Finally we meet a warm, talkative, fortyish Puerto Rican who reminds me just a little of my Panamanian mother, and who immediately recognizes me as Imogen’s mother. She is hired. I stay on one side of the loft writing, while the two of them read and play on the other side. After a few weeks of Monday, Wednesday, and Friday shifts from one to four P.M., I take notice that our babysitter is becoming more and more attached.

“Imogen looks so much like me that if I took her home to Jersey no one would know she wasn’t mine,” she says to me one day. Few statements could be more frightening in my frazzled, insecure psychological state. The frequency of my vulnerability—

of not being recognized as Imogen’s mother—has scared me away from ever letting her out of my sight. I’ve taken no chances.

During the days, thus far, the babysitter hasn’t been allowed to take my baby out of the house, and this rule continues through the length of her increasingly unreliable employment. She calls in sick at least once a week.

Two babysitters later, my paranoia ever increasing with the extreme violence, racism, and fear I’m feeling everywhere, our talk of leaving New York takes on paramount seriousness. Our
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current babysitter lives through the nightmare of losing her sister to murder—by her own boyfriend. Though our babysitter’s horror could have happened anywhere, the everyday dehumanizing that I encounter on the street takes on a new, sickening depth.

Our life has not been shabby here: the SoHo loft above the fish restaurant is considered chichi by anyone who visits, restaurant mice included. Nevertheless, I have grown tired of the week-day view through my window—of lunch breaks on the grass island, all kids of color tracked for lesser achievement at the corner tech school. Lowered expectations. At the most basic, selfish level, I miss having my own car, a bubble of security to get my baby and myself to and from home rather than worrying about the time of night on the subway, the danger, the sense of threat, the dread of rain or snow when cabs are scarce and black people more easily avoided by the drivers. For these six New York years, strained by the glare of racism, I have become too hurt and intimidated to see or express my individuality, and conversely overly conscious of how my baby, my husband, and I are perceived.

Though I stand five foot ten, I’ve made myself small. I am neither natural nor the best mother I could be, and through closer examination of it all, I need to shed the outer and inner judgments I feel.

I crave the freedom I had in L.A., as well as a mother’s delight in a world’s recognition that Imogen is mine.

Imogen and I leave New York a month early while my husband wraps up his old position with the company for the new.

Even the search for a preschool back home in Los Angeles is a delight. I can feel the ease in my neck, back, and voice. I had always been considered the type who smiles most of the time, and my face reclaims that easeful openness. When strangers approach us, I no longer feel my body tightening, preparing for the blows. I stand my full height and meet the world with optimism. The freedom I feel after our escape from New York isn’t simply attributable to my car’s turquoise paint job, or funky clothes. Maybe it isn’t only geography. Los Angeles is far from utopia. I know my experience of racism and objectification on the East Coast isn’t unique, just as my experience of simply being a member of the
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human race on the West Coast is something others still struggle with. (It well may be the case that if I were a Latina woman with a white husband and baby with skin fairer than my own, my experience in L.A. would be similar to what I felt in New York.) Even so, the difference for our family is as stark as black and white.

What has come to matter most to me—what always mattered most—is the way I relate with Imogen, now without the weight of what had become a kind of haunting. So many white Californians are quick to say, “How beautiful your daughter is!” California black people remark upon how closely, at two and a half years, Imogen resembles me. “She is a light-skinned version of you!”

they exclaim. Imogen’s self-assuredness becomes all the more apparent, all the more defined, as she surely feels how much more relaxed and natural I feel as her mother. One afternoon I get up to do a silly dance with an Austin Powers talking toy. Imogen does her best imitation of my steps and words. I call her Mini Me, and this becomes the nickname she most prefers for years—over Immi, Munchie, Piccolina, and Moe.

Of course she is not a miniature of me, and not one of the three of us would want her to be. Eight years old now, Imogen is a complete individual, proud of her Skate Rat fashion tastes, Hot Wheels car collection, woodworking pieces, new karate levels, stellar math and chess abilities, gifted academic placement, and incessant humor. Since we moved back to the West Coast six years ago, our family has had little or no struggle with “interracial” or “biracial” issues, only an annoyance with categories for race on school forms.

Now, out from under the thumb of any but the most minimal, ordinary irritations, we are seen just as we always imagined ourselves to be: a family, pure and simple. I am constantly inspired as Imogen blossoms into her ever-increasingly unique and brilliant self. And just as I never deny her self-expression, I don’t deny my own.

No Blame

R o s e l l e n B r o w n

Almost every time
I take part in a “Q&A” after a reading, I hear a variation on this question, often presented in a plaintive voice filled with (what I take to be) trepidation for the future:

“How did you manage to write after you had children?” No man has ever asked this. Nor have many women who are already mothers seemed to feel the need to inquire, unless out of sisterly curiosity; presumably they’ve either figured out what they needed to or they’ve resigned themselves to putting their writing aside, at least for now.

It is not a question I answer glibly—I am truly sympathetic to anyone who still has this challenge ahead of her—but I suspect that my experience may still come across as too facile or self-congratulatory. “No, I never stopped. I doubt I could have managed a novel, but fortunately I was writing poetry when my first daughter, Adina, was born and I discovered the advantages of the fragmentary way in which poems can be worked on. (Say I need a two-syllable word that means ‘encourage.’ I could spend the day trying out a cascade of words, filling in the blank. Plus she was a good napper.)” “I hired a high school girl who came to my house four afternoons a week.” “After I made the bed, I did no housework until late afternoon, after my ‘own’ work was finished for the day. Who cares when the breakfast dishes are done?” “My husband defended my ‘right to write’ more zealously—that is,
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without self-doubt—than I did. Luckily, he knew he was marrying a writer (though of course he had no idea what that would mean).” “I had already published a bit, which made my writing easier to justify to myself and others (chiefly my mother . . .)” “I learned to use every spare minute. I was better at that when time was scarce than I am now.” And so on. All these things are true, but they make those years sound too easy and unconflicted.

Picture this: About to deliver my second child, I have asked my hippie babysitter, who is devoted to such things—it is 1970—

to throw the yarrow stalks that are used with the
I Ching
to divine the future. Coins can be used instead, but I am delighted that Laurie has access to the real thing. I am skeptical but curious: Will the particular arrangement of the dry stalks reveal the sex of my unborn child? (This is many years before ultrasound.) We sit opposite each other on the living room floor, and I fling the stalks down between us like pick-up sticks.

There is no easy way to describe this, but let me try: The
I
Ching,
or
Book of Changes,
a three-thousand-year-old collection said to be one of the “Five Classics of Confucianism,” presents its predictions through a three-stage process. This begins with more than seven hundred pages of arrangements called hexagrams, which are composed of six broken and unbroken lines in many permutations, each of which is meant to be a graphic representation of the order in which the little stalk piles lie after they are tossed. Each of these hexagrams is accompanied, in turn, by a lovely but cryptic paragraph of prose poetry said to foretell the future. The poems have evocative, mysterious names: “Treading (conduct).” “Darkening of the Light.” “Biting Through.”

“Grace.” They conceal even as they illuminate; they make the curious work hard at interpretation. (“Nine in the second place means: / There is food in the
ting
. / My comrades are envious, /

But they cannot harm me. / Good fortune.” “Nine in the third place means: / The handle of the
ting
is altered. / One is impeded in his way of life. / The fat of the pheasant is not eaten. / Once rain falls, remorse is spent. / Good fortune comes in the end.”) It does not matter, to dabblers like Laurie and me, that we don’t know what a
ting
is. Something from the kitchen, we
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assume. More to the point, we recognize that before I cast the yarrow roots down, I will hold my destiny in my own hands. And then I will let it go.

I ask the
I Ching
whether my baby will be a boy or a girl. The

“answer” to my question is almost a rebuke: It is a perfect balance of yin and yang, and discloses—happens or chooses to disclose?—

nothing.

I am embarrassed at the idea that I have asked something impertinent. “All right,” I say, “let’s try this.” I have been very worried that a second child will complicate, even put an end to, my writing. I have managed just fine with one, but what difficulties await me now that both my arms will be full?

This time the
I Ching
seems to smile on me. Understand that, although all the hexagrams suggest the proper—moral and pragmatic—way to act, some of the apparent subjects of those mysterious fortunes concern military matters, princely power, riches, shame. Which is to say, many seem only remotely connected with my particular urgencies. Laurie bends over the flung stalks, calculates their placement, finds the corresponding hexagrams and matches them up with their texts. Because of the particular way the stalks have fallen, leaning on one another, tipping this way and that, apparently I have produced a “change.” I am owed not the usual one but two responses.