Primates of Park Avenue (24 page)

All of motherhood, always, has been about such tradeoffs and choices, as sociobiologist and scholar of motherhood Sarah Hrdy tells us. Like our female early
Homo
ancestors, and like animals everywhere, we seek to balance the well-being of our offspring with that of our future offspring, and with our own. Otherwise everyone dies. Or does less well than they might otherwise. Whether privileged or poor, Hrdy has noted, “women are constantly making tradeoffs between subsistence and reproduction that are similar in outline.” My conundrum was ages old, nothing special. But it felt catastrophic.

I stayed in the park, next to the water, for hours. When it was nearly dark, I went home and spoke to my husband at length. I called my doctor’s answering service, and he called me himself shortly thereafter, and I told him I would not be having the procedure the next morning, after all. He asked if we should reschedule and I said no, we were going to skip it entirely. Falling into our bed a few hours later, our children tucked into their own rooms for the night, I marveled at how soft it was, and how comfortable. Sleepy and satisfied and finally peaceful, I pulled my husband’s arm around me. “We’re lucky,” I said, and he agreed.

Being a baby or child has always been a relatively dangerous proposition. Prehistorically, historically, and even today, there is no more perilous period of human development than infancy and childhood—except being a fetus. Even in the industrialized United States, with all our prenatal care, the majority of conceptions do not make it to term. An oft-cited 1988 study found that 31 percent of clinically recognized pregnancies ended in miscarriage. When you factor in unknown pregnancies, many estimates suggest that more than half of all pregnancies “spontaneously terminate.”

Once you’re born, the odds are strongly in your favor in the US and many other developed countries, of course. Nearly 994 out of every thousand babies born in the US survive infancy. But a million babies still die worldwide every single day—mostly from complications of prematurity, disease, and malnutrition. The risks during infancy and childhood were tremendous in our not-so-distant historical past and staggering in our evolutionary prehistory, and they remain so for many traditional peoples. For example, 43 percent of children living in “untouched” hunter-gatherer groups die before age fifteen. And Sarah Hrdy estimates that an astonishing half of all !Kung women die childless—but not because they have no children. One average, they have 3.5. The devastating math is personified in the case of Nisa, a !Kung woman who was interviewed extensively by anthropologist Marjorie Shoshtak in the 1970s: she’d suffered two miscarriages, given birth to four children, lost two before they became adolescents, and then two more before they became adults.

Where childhood is perilous, how can motherhood be anything other than terrifying in its delicate contingency? Even today, even in a context where you can forget it is or ever was hazardous to be a child and a crapshoot to be a mother, it began to seem to me as I watched my anxious mommy friends and watched myself, picking up and dropping off and cuddling and losing our tempers, that we could never really forget.

Inside us, I began to suspect, as we held our breath at playgrounds and watched warily for milestones at playgroups and released tension at moms’ nights out, informing our mothering is this deep truth, this inescapable collective calamity: that forever, we have lost our babies as often as we kept them. Burying our babies is as much a part of our fundamental, deep, inherited experience of motherhood as holding and nursing them. Consoling ourselves and others over our lost children is very possibly with us, in there, every time we console our children over a scraped knee. As is the case with so many other pressures that contributed to who we are, so many other realities that formed the shifting and variable backdrop against which we became, the software of motherloss is and must be, I became convinced in my years in the ostensibly safest of places, the Upper East Side, still in there. And on some level, the very deepest one, mustn’t it inform every single decisions and choice we make about our children? Aren’t we all mulling it over all the time, even when we didn’t realize we were, just like Candace?

Evolutionary psychologists who seek to understand the impact of loss on mothers and on our entire species put it this way:

Child death has played an important role in the evolution of humans. Of all stages of development, and at all historical times beyond modern history, childhood has been associated with the highest levels of mortality. Compared to other evolutionary pressures such as surviving as an adult or finding a mate and having children, the odds of failure to directly contribute to one’s genetic line are greatest in childhood. The enormous potential evolutionary pressure exerted by child death should have significantly influenced human psychological adaptations. Despite this potential influence, child death may be one of the least studied influences on human evolutionary psychology (Volk and Atkinson, 2008).

In a town like Manhattan, in a tribe as privileged as the one I studied, tragedy hits with a strange double force. You are knocked in the head by the fact of it, first of all, and then by another echoing pain—the knowledge that you are neither cosseted nor safe, in spite of all your attempts to have made it so. You work out. You have the pediatrician’s number memorized. Your home is insured in detail and carefully ordered—you have a professional organizer, for God’s sake, who charges $200 per hour to hold the chaos and uncertainty at bay. And yet. When you scratch the surface, just about every mother I know has lost, or her sister or best friend has, in ways that are practically unspeakable. At two weeks pregnant, or at twelve. At thirty-nine weeks, a cord looping its way around the baby’s neck, a vine killing a flower. The newborn suffocated by the baby nurse who rolls on him in the night in her sleep. The two-year-old who falls at the playground—a little fall, nothing, she didn’t even seem to hit her head—and dies of a concussion a few days later. The toddler who tumbles from the window, dying in traffic, breaking every single heart in the city. The one-year-old who goes to the best hospital in town for a simple, straightforward procedure and never comes home. Three girls, swept away in a fire. The ferocity of the fire, of the loss. Here. Right here. In our world. On the Upper East Side, a place that feels safe, a place where anything is possible, until it is not.

I had been sick a lot during the pregnancy, nauseated beyond anything I had experienced before, but no one was alarmed by this. I threw up daily, but I had with the other pregnancies, too. I threw up in the morning first thing, and then when I brushed my teeth, and then when I took my son to school. I threw up mid-conversation with moms outside school and on the phone. I threw up in bags in taxis. I took it as a sign that the baby was doing well, since that’s how most obstetricians take such things. Still, it did take a toll, being sick and exhausted every day, and I felt bad for my younger son that I couldn’t play with him the way he’d like. “Let’s pretend Mommy is a blob and you’re a little boy,” I’d say, lying on the floor of his room. He would pull all his toys up and play around me. Later in the pregnancy he would pat my breasts and my stomach, smiling. “Funny,” he managed one day through his pacifier, patting.

I had lost some weight, but I had in the last pregnancy as well, and the baby was progressing nicely, passing all the measuring tests and genetic tests and amnio with flying colors. When we found out it was a girl we were stupefied—
We
don’t have girls! We have boys!
we wanted to tell whomever was in charge of these things—and that is when my husband, who had been ambivalent about doing this all over again in his fifties, came around. Sometimes he would say, excitedly, “There’s going to be a baby!”

She was a burden, in a way, this baby, taxing our space and stealing the older one’s crib and requiring private school and college tuition and a renovation and four or five more years of a full-time nanny. That was why I had felt, until the very last possible second, that this baby could not possibly be. But now, the more we planned for her, the more excited we were about having a her to plan for. We prepared and plotted and slept easily. I decided I wanted her to have my last name, and my husband, who had put up a terrible fight about it with the previous two, agreed without a single bit of pushback. I also decided, without telling my husband, that I wanted to name her Daphne. How could I not submit to her, this baby who so wanted to be born? How could I not give her a name?

You don’t think of New York City as a place teeming with nature, but it is. There were lots of trees on our block, and a leafy entrance to Central Park not far away. In the early summer mornings the birds do not sing—they screech. I could hear them before we even stepped off the elevator to walk through the lobby of our building, on our way to my obstetrician first thing that wet day. I had called the previous afternoon to report that I might be bleeding, it’s hard to tell with black underwear, and when I put a Kleenex down there it was light pink, not red, and that was okay, right? In a tight voice my doctor told me to lie down—from his tone I knew he meant
really
lie down, not some halfway, maternal kind of lying down where you keep popping up to read one of your kids a story or get dinner ready—and drink some water and call him back shortly. Then I called my husband, who said, “You bleed when you’re pregnant. You always have. It’s what your body does.” I agreed with a sigh, mentioning that my doctor seemed to be taking this very seriously, but that it would be fine. He went to a work-related event after my sons’ nanny agreed to stay late. “It’s probably nothing,” I told her.

When I called my OB later to check in as instructed, he said to drink more water, and hold absolutely still until I was in his office first thing the next morning.

Now the doorman swung the lobby door open, and the bird sounds were nearly overpowering, mostly blue jays making their urgent, unbird-like screams, and we stepped out, first under the awning and then into the rain toward the waiting black town car. That’s when my husband, never one to be rude, asked, “No umbrella?” Our building’s doormen typically walk you to your car carrying an umbrella for you when it’s raining. That way you experience seamless cosseting and comfort, door-to-door. But the rain wasn’t really serious—not yet—and our doorman shrugged it off with a laugh, as did I. Then I crawled into the car and lay down across the backseat with my head on my husband’s lap, and my husband said, “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with people.” He looked out the window as we drove across the park—quiet and desolate and gray in the rain, not the hepped-up, crowded, insipid park of sunny weekend days but the park I loved, emptied out, quiet, moody—and shook his head. “He should have used a fucking umbrella. My suit is soaked.”