God and Jetfire (18 page)

 

FIFTEEN

They're here
, Jevn whispered. Paula and Erik tapped lightly at the door, and Jevn was tiptoeing over to let them in. I lay on clean sheets in postpartum, where I fell in and out of sleep, holding Jonathan in the still deep darkness of early morning. Staff came and went quietly, and Jevn and Nina spoke to each other outside of my range of vision.

I opened my eyes for Paula and Erik, who planted their feet at a distance and leaned in brightly to congratulate me. They took Jonathan carefully in their arms and, as they chatted to Jevn and Nina, continuously returned their gaze to him. I didn't feel anything then, not jealousy or anger or fear or happiness. At that moment, anyone might have come in and held him. Everyone else was extra; their feeling for him incidental and minuscule. I experienced a peaceful amnesia as I blankly accepted their comings and goings, meeting and forgetting them all at once. Paula pulled him close and smiled; Erik opened his mouth in pretend surprise. They lay their hands gently on his tiny, soft chest and whispered,
Hello! Hello, little boy!
I didn't mind at all. I didn't have to say hello.

They must have stayed for only a few minutes, because that's all I remember before they were gone. Then I saw Jevn had Jonathan, but the distance between his joints was too great and our son too little; he couldn't mold himself around Jonathan to cradle him tightly. He held him in a nest of tangled elbows and wrists, bending acutely. He spoke softly to Jonathan at close range, frozen in place, as if the father's job was to hold his son completely still until the glue dried. As if his nose was securing Jonathan's. Or maybe he thought the father's job was to supply his son's first breaths.

*   *   *

It wasn't until morning that I remembered the plans we'd made. The thought didn't come naturally to me, but because Jevn was sitting in the chair facing me when I woke.

“What time should I tell Paula and Erik to come?” he asked, and I must have answered, but I only remember that we spent the early morning passing Jonathan back and forth, laughing at the jolts of his body as he learned to hold himself still and at his spontaneous and triumphant stretches. Still exhausted from labor, I took short naps with Jonathan pressed against me. I woke when nurses would knock at the door and push him onto my breast, and when midwives made their rounds,
How's Mama today?
They examined my stitches and gave me a hemorrhoid pillow to sit on. Other nurses stopped by with lunch. I was protected within a swarm of services and constant interruptions, perpetual reminders that I was a patient, and you couldn't ask much of me. I welcomed everyone who entered, and I was happy to look out the window when they left. I was happy to recall, with a distant fondness, that I'd once been an architecture student in a city whose name I just then remembered.

*   *   *

We had entered the state-mandated seventy-two-hour waiting period: three days and nights to adjust to motherhood before I could legally sign papers. Ohio's official acknowledgment that birth is a transformation for both mother and child, one powerful enough to undermine any decisions made prior to it. A last opportunity to change your mind, it was still not enough time to put together a new plan if you did, but it was a painfully long time to spend with a child you felt certain about giving up. Before the birth, Molly suggested giving him right away to family or friends, to foster care, or even to Paula and Erik—my signature would just make it official, three days later.

Our workbook had other suggestions for avoiding unnecessary pain.
Do not have a natural childbirth. Do not breast-feed. Don't “room in” at the hospital. Have your adoption plan and the reasons for it written out and handy in the hospital, for reference after the birth.
I had ignored all of it, and as I lay in the hospital bed, nursing my son, those seventy-two hours no longer seemed a needless formality. They were the measure of my motherhood. They were walls built in the absence of my own to protect it. I had seventy-two hours to sleep next to my son and smell him. To show him the sunset and the view over the treetops in the park across the street. To swaddle him close and watch him discover his length. Seventy-two hours to be a mother. I wanted all of them.

*   *   *

Jevn went home to take a shower, and I called my parents to give them the news. They congratulated me and said they planned to drive up in the next couple of days to meet everyone. I looked at Jonathan as I described him to them; seven pounds twelve ounces seemed such an incomplete appraisal, and I laughed, looking at him, reducing him to those things, ten fingers and ten toes, knowing he was hearing me, knowing he knew it was not a good description. When I hung up, I turned back to him. Our conversations were captivating but mostly wordless, mostly smiles and looking, reading each other's faces. But soon I felt someone at the door, and I saw that my architecture theory professor was waiting at a distance for me to invite him in. He was a big black man, but I'd never seen him outside of school, and without its aura he seemed smaller. He took all the time in the world to look at me.

“You look ten years older.” He smiled from the far end of my bed. I could tell he meant it in a good way.

He sat down gently on the bed, thick reading glasses and a clean black beard streaked with gray. He had a way of watching concepts formulate, gazing up at them in the air, reaching out gently to touch them and responding to their feel. He speculated about design without authority, except the authority of his reserve and modesty. I held my son and listened to him.

He marveled at my transformation to motherhood, pausing occasionally to examine me. He said he hadn't become a father so easily. For months after his daughter was born, he couldn't really believe that he had a biological connection to her. It was only after she was several months old and he was left alone to care for her for a weekend that he began to feel their bond. He was telling me not to expect Jevn to have the same experience I had. And reminding me that, even among mothers, I was on my own.

He smiled at me gently, but the fat folds of his face kept it slack, tinged with sadness, as though he could see something over the horizon I couldn't. He had never hesitated to talk about his personal life, or God, or death, as a way of talking about architecture. Or maybe what I liked so much about him was that he talked about architecture only as a way of getting at those things.

Jevn returned in the afternoon, just before another professor stopped by with a gift, a toy that was black-and-white-striped with a few splashes of color, a product, he explained, of the latest research in newborn visual development. Jevn was very close to this professor, but I didn't like him. He entered awkwardly, not suited to social visits, not scaled for intimacy, and then he sat on the edge of the bed and grinned as though it was all very amusing.

*   *   *

Paula and Erik didn't arrive until later in the afternoon, and I recall only that Jevn and Erik went together to the solarium. It seemed they had more in common at that moment than Paula and I did. My motherhood was engulfing and absolute, while hers was contained and in question. But Erik and Jevn could perhaps share the same disbelief about fatherhood, that same tentative and abstract connection my theory professor had described. Jevn said they'd talked about something of the sort; Erik suggested that all fathers were, in a way, adoptive fathers.

When they left, Jevn told me he enjoyed conversation with Erik. It often seemed that the things Jevn felt most deeply, he expressed with the least elaboration. He would point to only the most self-evident reality, and you'd know that the entire, infinitely more complex truth was still hiding in the bushes; this was just its tail. I knew he was telling me he wanted them to have Jonathan. That he trusted them, and that even after so recently meeting his son and having enjoyed his fatherhood for so few hours, he was ready. The world may be reconfigured, but that feeling about them hadn't changed. I didn't respond.

But then, visiting hours were over, and we were alone. I walked around our room in only my hemorrhoid pad and panties. I'd been sponged clean, but I was still caked with spit and vomit and residual blood, my son's and my own, the humble regalia of motherhood. I came out of the bathroom, breasts first, pelvis proven, and Jevn cringed and asked me
please
to put on clothes. I argued that both the nurses and my son needed constant access to my body. And my boundaries had been redrawn; I was inside out, my precious interiors could now be passed around the room. Any gesture of modesty would have to extend outward to enclose him. Jevn sighed. In clothes, I walked to and from the solarium to gauge my injuries and to try to move at the speed of real life. Sometimes I practiced carrying my son, like my turquoise lunchbox, to see if I could imagine carrying that weight forever, and to see if I could let it go.

*   *   *

Women are
built
to bear babies—that was what Nina told me to reassure me that the pains of labor would be bearable. Our bodies contain ancient wisdom and animal strength; when labor begins, she promised, I would know just what to do. But my next step had fewer precedents in nature. Were women built to give babies away? What ageless detachment, what primitive reserves of indifference, could I count on in a moment like this? What could I find in the pages of my workbook to persuade me it could be done—what so many people had told me, with certainty, they could never do? What did Molly, what did anyone, really know about that?

I wanted thunder to clap and the mouth of the world to devour me before I could sign papers if it wasn't right. I wanted my own body, still bleeding, to tremble the pen out of my hand before it could renounce my motherhood. But there was no question what I would do. My mother was proud of how carefully I'd prepared. My father called it an unmitigated disaster, mitigated. Molly had never seen a couple work so hard to find the right family, and my professors were impressed that I did it all while keeping up with school. My boss didn't mind that I hadn't come in to work since Monday; he told me from his PalmPilot he knew this would take some time.

As I went to sleep that night, Jevn in the chair beside me, I tried to imagine the pain of giving up a child—a pain more mysterious than childbirth, one no one could reassure me about. I tried to feel it. The magnitudes and velocities and shapes and frequencies of the sorrow—as I'd experience it the next day, and then, years later, after the loss had weaved and wound its way through all the fibers of my life. But I could only imagine it as a lump sum. A single impact. A loss of oxygen. Falling off a cliff. Pushing my head through a windshield. Things that made me flinch at night as I fell asleep thinking that soon I would sign the papers. I woke up breathless, the air knocked out of me. In my mind I had taken one step too far toward an unimaginable future—and I fled back, waking with a start—to return myself to the fork in the road that was still accessible to me in the early light of morning.

Sometimes it wasn't my imagination that woke me. Sometimes it was my son, shifting slightly. Aroused by the gentle first contractions of hunger, pressing his tongue lightly to the roof of his mouth in the tender beginnings of his strongest reflex. And I was like a tool calibrated to register the early tremors of an earthquake; I was ripping through the surface of my sleep before his still semiexploratory movements had organized themselves into want.

I understood the risks associated with the intimate bonding of breast-feeding and sleeping together. Lying there beside my son as he smacked his jaw in the darkness, I was reminded powerfully of the warnings detailed in my workbook. But what more reasonable first test of whether you should let go than whether you can? Natural childbirth, breast-feeding, “rooming in” were not, after all, responsible for creating the dangerous bond. The dangerous bond was already present.

*   *   *

Forty-eight hours in, the hospital began to prepare our discharge. It was the natural moment to give my son to his new parents. I could return to the only life I knew, and my son would never touch the things of my world and rearrange them. But while Jevn filled out paperwork, I found myself clinging to the letter of the law. I had seventy-two hours; that meant twenty-four left. I wandered the hallways while he worked, looking in at the other mothers. There were mothers eating Doritos and receiving cards and balloons and flowers. Motherhood was perhaps no less brand-new and mysterious for them, but they had their lifetimes to make sense of it. How could I make a decision when I'd had only a glimpse of motherhood? How could I know if it was a thing I could live without? What was the meaning of wanting such things—your own heart, your own cells? Are these desires we should have to defend?

I'd become another kind of creature, and for all I knew my child was some new and necessary subsistence. The smell of his head could comprise my new universe. My food was the way he blinked his eyes; my breath was when his elbows straightened. What we had was not yet even a relationship. I could see that he was a person outside me, but I was unable to experience for him those things we experience for other people: sympathy, concern, interest. He was a satellite creature of myself. His return gaze closed our systems. He folded easily into my new hollow. What was the meaning of giving him away? Who thought now was a good time to do that?

There was something I still needed to know. I couldn't possibly know what. Giving him away wasn't possible, it wasn't possible, it wasn't possible. But I couldn't tell anyone this, that I was rethinking the whole plan. I would make enemies of everyone who had supported me; my entire scaffolding would be ripped away. I just wanted seventy-two hours, that was all.

*   *   *

We had to leave the hospital, but we couldn't take him home because if we did, Molly and our workbook had warned us, it was unlikely we'd go through with an adoption. Instead, one of my friends arranged for us to stay overnight in the hotel where she worked. Jevn glanced angrily at me as he helped me pack our things, including a car seat lent to us by a crisis pregnancy center. He rolled me in the wheelchair, my son in my arms, to the discharge area. Someone admired Jonathan in passing and asked, inexplicably, if Jevn and I were siblings. We both smiled, confused. But I tried at that moment to imagine what it was we were, having had a baby we were going to give up. Our relationship cut short by the thing that is supposed to be binding. I could just see the light of actual day, through the vestibule and the automatic exit doors, admitting measured breaths of warm air into the refrigerated hospital lobby. It was sunset. I would become a real mother, and I would know what we were, when that light fell on us in the real world.