It's Okay to Laugh (13 page)

M
y mom is my mom.

And by that I mean that like most women, I love and adore her and also she drives me insane and there is a very real risk of my elder-abusing her in a few years, given the right circumstances. The wrong circumstances? Either way, watch out, Madge!

Some women are going to read this and say, “Not me! My mother is my
best friend
!” To which I say, keep telling yourself that. Because I'm not afraid to admit that sometimes my mother breathes and I can hear the air moving through her nose and suddenly all the love I've ever felt for her just dissolves into a puff of smoke. And sometimes I see her and I love her so much my heart could explode. But then she asks me if I'm planning to get a haircut soon and I need to go into the other room and take five. But
then
she plays with the ends of my hair while I watch TV, and I feel like I am seven again and she is the most perfect human I've ever met.

The love we get from our parents is not completely unconditional.
It's impossible for it to be, because before you even
have
a child, you have fantasies about who he or she will be. In the early stages of love, you look at your partner and say things like, “Oh, gosh, our kids are going to be so cute. And I bet they'll be good at math and love golf, like me. And they'll have a funny upper lip, just like you.” So a child is born into a nice warm pool of expectations, and while your parents will love you no matter what, the fine print reads that they will love you
more
if you turn into the person they imagined you to be.

I knew as a child that my mom had some idea of who I should be and how I should get there. Madge was always very interested in showing me how to do things. That is different than teaching someone how to do things, which is difficult with children because they aren't good at anything, and it is easy to lose your patience and just do it for them. Which is basically how I remember my mother: standing behind me, holding my hand and guiding a paintbrush across the paper; holding both of my hands and knitting, then purling. Sometimes it was frustrating, but sometimes it was kind of awesome, like when she took my fifth-grade report on Minnesota, ripped it out of the plastic cover I'd bought at Walgreens, and bound it with leather and birch bark. I didn't just get an A, I got sent to the state fair, where my mother won a blue ribbon. Sometimes it was benevolent and lifesaving, like when I was fifteen and finally got my period, a year after I lied about getting it to fit in. I had just read the warning brochure that comes with every box of tampons and was convinced I was going to die of toxic shock syndrome, and I couldn't get my tampon out. Nothing had ever been up there before, so it was really wedged in, and also, you do have to apply some pressure when you're pulling on a string attached to a cotton plug that has soaked up your uterine lining. I was crying in the bathroom, imagining how embarrassed I would be at my
own funeral with everyone knowing that I died of tampon disease. When Madge knocked on the door to tell me to quiet down, I told her what was happening, and prepared to die of embarrassment. But Madge opened the door, reached over, pulled it out for me, and
never mentioned it again
. Like a boss.

My dad was strict and intimidating, but he wasn't the boss of our family. Madge was our boss. She had veto power over all of our father's decisions, which was good because his default answer for every question was just no. Madge had a full-time job but also managed our father's finances as he grew his freelance career. I think just knowing in her heart that she had the power to uproot and run away with all the money really got her through the trying times of raising four children with a man who would write her love poems but also ask her every night when she returned from work, “Where is my dinner?” As if it had gone missing, and only a woman could find it for him. When shit went down and you were caught trying to sneak into the house after midnight buzzed on a few Mike's Hard Lemonades, it might be our dad who threatened to knock you into the middle of next week, but it was our mother who would break you down with a cold, icy silence that told you just how disappointed she was in your existence. She could be harsh, but fair.

I was afraid to learn how to drive, but she encouraged me from the front seat of her brand-new SUV as I lurched around our neighborhood, slamming on the brakes every few seconds and wondering why people chose to drive when walking and biking were so much easier. “Go ahead and pull it into the garage!” she said when I pulled into our driveway, dripping sweat. Our house had been built in 1932, so the tuck-under garage wasn't exactly spacious, but I squeaked us in without scraping the sides. And then I forgot which pedal was the brake, and made a game-time decision just to
pick one, which ended with our new car smashed into the cinder-block foundation of our house. My dad popped up out of nowhere, screaming about how I shouldn't have smashed the car into our house, but my mom calmly locked our car doors and put the car in “park” for me. “Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it,” she said, and traded her fancy SUV for a very safe, very sturdy Subaru.

No matter how much you love and admire your mother, you don't always want the wisdom she is so eager to share, especially when you're a woman. It goes back to that whole wanting to kill her just for breathing wrong thing, which most men I know don't feel about their moms. Woman to woman, we want to be able to assert who we are apart from the woman who raised us and the choices she made. We don't want her rearranging our cabinets or giving us diet tips or telling us that she doesn't care for our boyfriend. We don't want her opinion until we want her opinion, and at that point we just want her to agree with us.

Our relationship has had several hiccups, where I have been convinced that my mother no longer loves me at all. I'm prepared to take responsibility for the few months she ignored me in college after I thought it would be funny to create a very elaborate hoax where my boyfriend and I convinced my parents we were dropping out at age twenty to get married. We'd started the prank a few weeks before, for maximum effect, and the “punch line” was delivered through a letter that arrived on April 1, and told them they were dummies for believing us. Unfortunately, my parents had already begun damage control phone calls to our extended family to tell them about the upcoming nuptials. I can see now that I should have instead faked a pregnancy.

But at twenty-six, when she closed me out of her life because my boyfriend just wasn't good enough for me,
in her opinion
? Not super-chill. And looking back, no, he wasn't marriage material.
But neither was I. And every one of those hearts I stepped on got me right to Aaron, so wasn't it worth it? I returned to her, contrite, and with evidence that I had shed the offending boyfriend, and she opened up the little Nora-shaped space in her heart and let me back in for weekly yoga sessions and Sunday brunch.

This is a phase I thought I would grow out of, but nope, I'm thirty-two and I just want my mother's approval. It is a bit easier to come by these days. Not because I am so much older and more mature because I do still wear my retainer to bed, but because my mother and I share a category that most of her friends won't even occupy for many years. We're both widows.

My father died just six weeks before my own husband did, their cancers eating them alive and leaving just gray, hollow shells behind. We lost the same two people in very different ways. I lost the future I expected with Aaron, and she lost the man she'd spent most of her past with. I lost my father and my husband, and she lost her husband and her son-in-law. We are carrying our grief differently, but we show up for each other in ways that the rest of the family just can't. I know, when I see her pause at the bookcase or stare into her morning cup of coffee, that she is somewhere else, off exploring the alternate universe of what could or should have been. When she returns from her time travels, her eyes are wet and she gives me three squeezes
: I. Love. You.
When I tell her I am moving to Arizona—no, California—or that I am going to get Ralph a dog—no, some chickens—she just smiles and says, “That sounds great.” When I tell her I had a postmortem chitchat with Aaron after he died, and that he told me I need to move out of our house, she clears out two rooms for me and my son, and we become roommates once again. When I tell her I got a little drunk and made out with a guy in a van, she laughs, even though when I told her the same story at twenty-four, she shook her head and told me to grow up.

This is progress, right?

For once she is not here to share her advice with me, or to hold my hands and guide me through it until I've reached competency. I don't have to live up to her expectations, because she doesn't have any, because she has only been a widow six weeks longer than I have, and six weeks is not enough time to get any sort of proficiency in a new life. Widowhood, living without the person that you have chosen to share your life with, is not something either of us knows how to do. We can only try to learn from each other, show each other how to survive, and love each other somewhat unconditionally, some of the time.

I
know what I'm seeing before she tells me.

I knew when the midwife excused herself from the examination room, claiming not to be an ultrasound expert. I knew when the ultrasound tech looked at the screen and recommended we move to her room, where the machinery is more advanced. I knew when I saw her face, and the tiny white figure hanging motionless on the monitor.

I knew the night before, even before Googling, that no blood is good blood when you're pregnant. I called the twenty-four-hour nurse line, curled up in bed, with Aaron beside me playing with the ends of my hair and tracing an infinity symbol between by shoulder blades. “It's not
blood,
” I tell her, “it's just, blood-ish. Like, it's more gray than pink.” Never in my life have I paid such attention to anything that's come out of my vagina, including the very alive child who is sleeping in the room next to ours.

“If you're not in pain,” she assures me, “you're probably not having a miscarriage.”

I close my eyes and try to listen to my body, but I can't hear a thing above the noise in my brain.

It
'
s gone.

You wanted too much.

Ralph will never have a sibling.

You should have been happy with what you had.

Aaron doesn
'
t need this right now.

It
'
s gone. It
'
s your fault. You made a mistake. You wanted too much.

My father once described the ultrasound photos I provided of Ralph as “an invasion of a baby's privacy” and asked not to see any more of them. I don't know if this is a standard practice for Libertarians, or just a typical contrarian response from my dad, but I respect it. Babies dance along with the ultrasound machine, like a little alien trying to avoid detection, a little white whale darting around your uterus hiding from Captain Ahab, a little marionette with invisible strings.

But not this baby.

“I'm sorry,” the ultrasound tech said slowly and quietly, “your baby just isn't alive.”

Alive is a very important aspect of being a baby, and I hoped she had a really good “but” to follow that sentence: “but it will be! Just let me see here . . .”

There was no “but.”

I roll my head away from the monitor, toward the drop-ceiling tiles and the window that looks out onto a suitably gray afternoon. Outside it is raining, a brisk October rain that has brought out the sweet smell of decaying leaves and the impending chill of winter. Aaron had an MRI at seven this morning, an ungodly hour that leaves him fading and exhausted in the passenger seat outside of the clinic.

“You can stay in the car,” I tell him, “it'll just be a few minutes.”

“No, I should come in,” he says, trying to unbuckle his seatbelt while his left arm hangs lifeless in its sling.

“No, no. Really. It'll be fine. You should listen to your show.”

He kisses me and taps my nose with his pointer finger.

“Boop. I love you, Norn.”

There are many women in and out of that room. Perfect strangers, these medical professionals, hugging me closely, their tears finally turning on my own emotions until my cheeks are in their full Irish mode: red and splotchy, hot to the touch.

Can you come up here, darling? I text him, and fifteen minutes later, there's a knock at the door.

I don't know when it happened, when the butterfly heart I'd seen at eight weeks turned to the ghost inside of me. What was I doing not to notice something so monumental? Driving my car, shopping for groceries, eating a bowl of cereal in bed—none of these seem like the things that should keep a mother from noticing her baby no longer is.

He needs help getting the door open. His left arm has stopped working entirely, and his left leg recently followed suit, dragging a bit as he walks. I've begun tying his shoes in the morning, fastening his belt, which has moved in a notch. Even behind his dark, thick-rimmed glasses his eyes are puffy and tired, his giant head balanced precariously on a rail-thin body.

“I'm sorry,” I tell him, because that's what I am. For all of this.

There's a secret passageway for women like me: They don't lead you past examination rooms filled with round women waiting to be told how well their babies are growing. They lead you back through a maze of beige hallways, to an office where you and your husband can sit side by side in two armless chairs like insolent teens waiting for the principal.

My midwife is crying when she opens the door. A year and a half
ago, she'd delivered our Ralph, and I'd learned after chatting with her between contractions that she lived next door to one of my best friends when I was growing up. Kate and I spent our Saturday afternoons playing Desert Island, a game where two aristocrats (me and Kate) washed ashore on a desert island (her unmistakably deciduous backyard in southwest Minneapolis) with their servant (Kate's little sister, in charge of grabbing us snacks from the kitchen when we were tired of foraging, aka poking around in my future midwife's backyard and mashing leaves from her plants into “soup” we pretended to cook in five-gallon ice cream pails).

My midwife has the sweet face of a good Minnesota woman: naturally flushed cheeks and clear, bright eyes, an unfussy natural beauty that comes with over thirty years of ushering life into this universe, and sometimes watching that life flicker out before it can arrive.

“There's nothing you could have done,” she tells me, and I want to believe her, but I know, somewhere inside of me, that she is wrong. Everything is
someone
'
s
fault, and who else could be to blame but the person whose biological responsibility is the creation of life? Even my father can't blame Obama for this one.

I just want to know what to do, and she lays out my options:

        
1.
    
Go home and let your body miscarry naturally. As much as I'd love to spend the next two to five days waiting for my dead baby to bleed its way out of my body, I politely decline.

        
2.
    
Take a pill, go home, and let my body miscarry. Again, not for me.

        
3.
    
Get what is basically an abortion, but for dead babies. They can do it tomorrow. I tell her I will be there at 8:00
A.M
.

There's only one way out of this place, though, and that means through the waiting room. I put on lipstick and run my fingers through my hair before we open the door, buttoning my coat in case any of these women can somehow see by looking at me that I've failed at my genetic duty. Everyone stares at us, but only because Aaron has the gait of a zombie, and holds my shoulder to steady himself while we navigate through a maze of poorly upholstered 1980s waiting room chairs. They are the same ones your doctor has, and every doctor in America. I imagine that every medical license also comes with a collection of bland upholstered chairs.

“Fuck,” I say as we walk down the cold, gray parking ramp, “I have to call my mom.”

I fasten my seatbelt and turn the key in the ignition.

Nothing.

I vaguely remember the gas light coming on when we'd pulled into the parking ramp.

“Oh, shit.” Aaron says, “I turned the car on while I was waiting for you because I was cold and we ran out of gas. I totally forgot.”

When I stop laughing and wipe the tears from my eyes, I call AAA. They're thrilled to hear from me, and to let me know that our membership expired two weeks ago.

I'm out of options, because calling any of our friends means telling them not just that we've run out of gas in a hospital parking ramp, but that I just miscarried a baby they knew nothing about. So, five minutes and one credit card charge later, we're once again card-carrying AAA members and a tow truck is on its way with a gallon of gas.

I'M FILLED WITH SECRET SORROWS.
Across the city, my father is dying in the intensive care unit of another hospital. He was diagnosed with cancer of the everything in May, when an oncologist
told him he'd have six months to live if he skipped out on chemo. We're nearing the five-month mark, and despite chemo, he's withering away in a hospital bed in a first-ring suburb. Nobody knows he's sick, really. He's a marine at heart, still, stoic and strong and not about to be a bother to anybody. “I don't want to make a big deal of this,” he told my siblings and me, all lined up on the floor of my parents' living room, cross-legged, confused as kindergartners being told that Santa doesn't exist. “I don't want anyone talking about this.”

This
being a cancer that has carved out its invisible infrastructure within his strong, healthy body, colonizing his esophagus, his lymphatic system, his lungs.

Aaron's seizures, once a crazy, once-in-a-blue-moon kind of thing, are a regular occurrence now. “Nora!” he'll shout. “I'm going down!” And I'll rush to his side and tackle him onto our bed, a sofa, or any soft surface I can find.

After a seizure, his nose conjures fragrances from out of nowhere, a side effect of all the chemicals in his brain releasing willy-nilly. “Who's frying onions?” he asks me disgustedly as he regains control of himself after the hostage takeover his brain just pulled on his jerking, helpless body, as if while I was scratching his back and calling 911, I'd also had time to put on a pan of fragrant white onions, just for the occasion.

THE DAY OF OUR HORROR
show at the midwife's office, Aaron's oncologist had conservatively told us that Aaron's brain wasn't getting any better, and was maybe getting worse. The picture of his brain, a blurry black-and-white image on a PC screen, had more white than it should, evidence that despite the air strike of chemo and radiation, we were fighting a war on terrorism that could not be won. These are facts that Aaron wants to keep to ourselves, so I
had tucked them away next to the pain of my father's secret cancer and the tentative joy of our secret second baby.

Culturally, we train ourselves not to speak of pregnancies before the twelve-week mark, but after an ultrasound at eight weeks, we'd slowly spilled the beans to our family. I ordered a T-shirt for Ralph that read
BIG BROTHER
in bold, bright letters, and some maternity leggings for myself.

We've all bought into the power of the jinx, that the only way to usher a baby safely into this world is to make sure you just don't get your hopes up too high. I jinxed it with that order from Old Navy, so this is my fault.

I've spent weeks being sad for my father and sad for Aaron, each of them volleying me back and forth across the city in a selfless game of Ping-Pong, assuring me as they fade before my eyes that they are fine and my time is best spent with the other.

But now, I am sad for this baby.

It's a new kind of sadness to feel. It's not for myself, and it's not a typical brand of mourning, either. It's cold comfort to know how many women have been here before. How many women I know. How many women around the world heard the same news on this same day, felt the same perceptible loss of something that almost was. Almost is always the hardest, isn't it?

They and I have all felt the throat full of jagged glass, the boiling of tears behind our eyelids, the sudden presence of a mysterious, age-old sorrow that stitches us together into the invisible patchwork quilt of love and loss. I hope like me that they all have a child at home to cling to, though I know many of them do not, and for those women I cry just a little bit more and whisper the only prayer that makes sense: “I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“For what?” Aaron asks, and I'm unaware I was even speaking aloud.

“For everything,” I tell him, and open the car door to flag down the tow truck.

SOMETHING LIKE 20 PERCENT OF
pregnancies end in miscarriages, and carrying the joy of a secret baby within you doesn't prepare you for the sorrow of a secret loss. If you lose a baby, and nobody knew about it in the first place, does it make a sound? You're damn right it does. It's a deafening loss, in a pitch only your ears can hear. When you open your mouth and tell people about that hole that was punched through the center of your heart, you'll be surprised at who comes to fill it, at how many women raise their hands and say, “Me, too.”

The day I found out about my second pregnancy, my friend lost her second pregnancy. It was just a little bit of blood, and then a lot. It was hours of pain, another labor for a baby just a few weeks along. Amid the blood and internal wreckage, she'd found her child, the size and shape of a small shrimp, and buried it outside in her garden.

I carried with this second child the sorrow of my friend's loss, and a bitter sense of irony as my own body swelled with life while Aaron's waned beside me. We lay together in a rickety bed in an A-frame cabin in northern Minnesota, Aaron nauseous from chemo, me from morning sickness. It was August, but the forest was so damp and cold it felt more like March, and we slept like the dead under layers of wool blankets, waking only when Ralph kissed both our faces and said, “Morning, guys.”

If you're reading this, you're one of the 80 percent of zygotes who made it all the way into this world. Do you know what that means? It means you did it! You are supposed to be here. You're incredible. You're a fucking miracle. Try every day to remember that, when you are confronted with jerks or people who don't use
their turn signals. We all got here. We're alive on this planet, this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam, against all odds. And also, please use your turn signal.

Just before all of this, I was reading Anne Lamott's
Traveling Mercies,
unknowingly preparing myself for weeks of impending heartbreak. The night before I would lose this baby, this paragraph would leap from the page and embed itself in my brain.