Too Dark

As the two-year anniversary of Balthazar’s death approaches, I have been thinking a lot about the idea of redemption. Though Merriam-Webster defines redemption simply as the act of making something better or more acceptable, redemption is still an old-timey, Jesus-y word. It’s invoked in all kinds of contexts in our secular society: Lindsey Jacobellis is looking for redemption in snowboard cross; a former gang member finds redemption directing a center for homeless youth. And yet no matter what the story, the redeemed appear as if bathed in celestial light, touched by the hand of God.

Which makes the obverse also true.

A baby’s death is such an extreme event I’m not sure that it’s appropriate or even possible to talk about it in terms of redemption. Can it be made better? Will it ever be in any way acceptable? Still, from observing the Facebook pages of other mothers I know, having another child appears to be, if not the path to redemption then at least the sine qua non of healing. The parents still suffer, of course, and always will. There’s no taking that away. The lost child can never be replaced. But by virtue of the fact that the new baby would not exist without the loss of the other, he or she creates an entirely new, joyful future for the family.

It’s not a secret that this was the form I hoped that redemption would take. I asked my husband to try again after Balthazar, and he said no. It’s hard to know how I would have reacted to secondary infertility, or miscarriage, or another stillbirth, or any other scenario in which I failed to produce the requisite “rainbow” baby. I suspect not well. Maybe Jonathan’s right and that would have been the path to madness. But that’s all speculation.  

For a long time I wanted to wear a sign that said, “I want another baby, and there’s no medical reason I can’t have one. It’s him!” With a big arrow pointing to the space next to me. But I don’t feel that way so much anymore, maybe because the space next to me is now empty. I’m creating an entirely new future for myself, and I don’t spend as much time thinking about it.  But redemption? I can’t imagine what that would even look like.

Not long ago one of my Facebook moms, someone I met in a research study out of the University of Nebraska, posted a shout out to all of her friends who’ve had “rainbow” babies. Which I can tell you is pretty much every single woman I know who lost a child this way. Every. Single. One.

I usually just “like” the photos of the adorable children and leave it at that, but I must have been feeling particularly beleaguered that day, because I “liked” the post, as usual, but then I also said, “Please also have compassion for babyloss moms who don’t have “rainbow” babies and never will.”

My Facebook friend deleted my comment. That’s the kind of sad story you should just keep to yourself, you know? 

Even if, like me, you lost your Christian faith somewhere along the way, it’s hard not to feel that redemption shines God’s light on you, deserved or not, and that to fail to find it leaves you in shadow, outside the halo of grace.

*

An alternate scenario was that my memoir would become my rainbow baby. But I’ve had to rethink that as well, because 20 editors have rejected the manuscript, with variations on the same theme:

“It’s hard to bring this subject to the reader unless you’re Joan Didion,” said one, which in translation means: we will tolerate this kind of anguish from famous essayist, but not you. “Other memoirs of this type have struggled to find an audience,” said another. Until they said that I had no idea that Elizabeth McCracken and Emily Rapp had poor sales figures. My personal favorite, though, is this one: “Its readership is limited because it isn’t redemptive enough.”

It’s an interesting situation, to have your life declared too dark for public consumption. I don’t know what to say except that I object.

One of Jonathan’s friends, who is a documentary filmmaker, said that an audience isn’t looking for the Hollywood ending necessarily. There doesn’t have to be a “rainbow” baby, he said, but I have to have learned something by the end, something along the lines of, I’m grateful for what I have.

I’ll tell you this: I am a better person because of Balthazar. I’m more compassionate, kinder, quicker to help others. I am more open, more vulnerable, more emotionally available, more able to receive help. But to sugar-coat it and pretend that the price wasn’t more than anyone should be asked to pay; well, I just can’t do it. To pretend that I’m actually grateful that my son died, I can’t do it. Would I trade it all to be a clueless mom of two, untouched by tragedy, the kind who would unknowingly say stupid shit to someone like me? Yes I would.

I’ve lost a lot. More than my baby. My place in the world, my idea of myself, who I thought I was. I’ve been stripped down to the bone. I’ve been forced to say, well, I have my health and my brains and, for what it’s worth, my heart, and that’s going to have to be enough somehow.

I suspect that I’m not alone. I suspect that many people are experiencing something similar without knowing how to talk about it. Some of them might be interested in reading about those feelings. It might make them feel less alone. How many, I don’t know. Maybe not enough to satisfy the Viacom Corporation, but more than a few.

Maybe the solution is to wait until redemption finds me. Maybe it’s to take the book to a small press, the literary equivalent of indie film. I am going to look at the manuscript and see if I can rewrite it. But I think it would be a disservice to truth and to all the people out there whose lives are happening outside the confines of the acceptable narrative to tack on some saccharine passage or chapter to make other people more comfortable. That’s not me.

I’m grateful for what I have. It’s not easy. It’s day to day. Sometimes minute to minute.

Is that too dark?

The Company of Women

A couple of weekends ago I went to a Bollywood dance party with my friend Jessica. This, it should be noted, was extremely out of character. I always feel really self-conscious about dancing because I’m not any good at it, but this was Bollywood dancing, which somehow took some of the pressure off. How many non-Indian people are good at Bollywood dancing, after all? The relentless dance beat underpinned incomprehensible Hindi lyrics and the strobe light blinked and we twisted our hands in a way that on a couple of redheads looked way more Grateful Dead than Bollywood, swaying and jumping like free-spirited idiots.

It felt great to let go, to sink in. It felt safe, too, being with Jessica. Who does not care how stupid she, or anyone else, looks.

On Saturday I went shopping with three girlfriends. Again, what can I say except that I can’t remember the last time that happened. College? Looking for a cow-print dress at Berkshire Mall? The four of us met at Nordstrom Rack and they tried on dresses and I tried on a black leather jacket and Denise teased me that it matched my badass personality and made me blush. And then I went to Laura’s house and put on a sexier dress than I’ve ever worn in my life and we took the bus to The Nines Hotel to drink Blanton’s and eat French fries with our Crossfit buddies.

A little boy who didn’t live has brought women into my life. Not just a few. A multitude. Some of them I knew already and he has drawn them closer. Others I would never have met, had he not existed. He has brought me married moms and single moms and separated moms, young single women, the newly-married, the long-divorced. He’s brought coffee and tea and drinks and lunch and dinner, dancing and weightlifting and parties. Balthazar has brought me friendship.

It’s not as if I’ve never had friends before, but it’s always been a problematic area for me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why: the most important female relationship of my life was, and on occasion still is, dangerous, hurtful, and empty. It left me unable to trust, reluctant to ask for help, without faith that I could count on anyone. Or anyone female.

When it looked as if I were destined for a houseful of boys, it was a relief. A husband, two sons, even a boy cat; all of my primary relationships would be with men. I don’t have a sister; I would not have a daughter. I wouldn’t be responsible for teaching anyone all of the things I had never been taught myself. I would never have to confront those wounds, those fears.

But life had other plans.

Many years ago I was in a therapy group with a young woman who had recently lost her mother to cancer. Most of the time she came to the group and simply sat, crying quietly, for the entire hour. Occasionally she said, “I miss my mom.” This barest of  language was implicitly understood by the other women in the group. They said the sweetest, most heartfelt things to her in an effort to comfort her. “I miss my mom” meant something to them that it just couldn’t to me. I was completely frustrated by my obvious lack and I tried my damnedest because I cared about her, but I couldn’t feel anything when she said that. That part of my heart was locked, or maybe permanently broken, I wasn’t sure.

Later I met a writer who had written eloquently and devastatingly about the loss of her mother, also to cancer. She was helping me write a memoir about the impact of my mother’s mental illness on me and my family. The thing we shared: our mothers had been our world. But such different worlds.

I read the tour de force opening of her memoir and the writer in me was admiring and the anthropologist in me was intrigued but the human in me was in difficulty. There was a flicker; the Christmas tree lights of empathy illuminated briefly, but there was a burned out bulb somewhere on the line and the whole thing went dark.

She wanted to help me with my writing and I wanted to be helped. Also, I wanted her to like me, but there was this chasm between us. Eventually we discovered the place we could meet: our own motherhood. But friendship was an impossible proposition.

Balthazar changed my family, my future, and he changed my heart.

I’m reaching out in all directions right now and sometimes it feels like a rack and sometimes it feels OK and sometimes it’s downright joyful. I know I can’t do any of this alone. And I find I have women friends who can brainstorm mortgages and tenants and jobs, others who can cheerlead, others who can hatch ridiculous Saturday night schemes. My friends design web sites, they call in favors, they listen, they make me laugh.

Thank you, all of you, from my heart, for all that you are doing for me and all that you are teaching me.

Robot

Recently Jasper had a nightmare that I was shot a bunch of times. I didn’t die, but when they took me to the hospital, the doctors there killed me and turned me into a robot. He was sitting on my lap in the living room chair telling me this, and he started to cry.

“It reminded me of Balthazar, and it made me sad,” he sobbed.

“Why does it remind you of Balthazar?” I asked, a little perplexed. I had thought the dream was about his fear of losing me, but obviously there was more going on.

“Because we can’t bring him back.”

Jasper and I have been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer together. There’s a lot of death on the show, but because it’s fantasy death is often of the “yes, but” variety. Vampires are dead, and yet they walk and talk and sometimes fall in love and have souls. Buffy dies and yet conveniently there is magic to bring her back. Jasper has always maintained a sturdy sense of the difference between fact and fiction, but maybe watching the show has caused him to think more about death, and ways to evade it.

Although, to be fair, this loved-one-dying-and-becoming-a-robot theme long predates our Buffy watching.  On April 8, 2012, five days after Balthazar was born, which also happened to be Easter Sunday, he told me that his stuffed dinosaur Phinly was dead and a robot. Occasionally we still talk about the fact that Phinly is a robot facsimile. The latest is that he is a regular dinosaur, but has robotic implants in his neck.

In some ways Jasper is miles ahead of where he was then, and so grown up. But in trying to make sense of death his unconscious still goes right to robots. A robot looks like your loved one. A robot might sound like your loved one, or do things she would do, but a robot is a machine. There is no blood, no heart. Jasper knows that his unconscious is grasping at straws. A robot mom wouldn't be his mom, even if a robot mom were possible. We decided that I would not die and be turned into a robot.

We can never have Balthazar back, robot or otherwise.

A couple of nights later, while cuddling on the couch watching Buffy, he referred to Balthazar again. “I will always have a hole in my heart,” he said.

Now it’s me looking for a workaround. I desperately parse the sentence. Does it really have to be always? Can it be just for a few years? Something he will outgrow, like his asthma? Or could the hole be really really tiny, like a microscopic hole? Something so small he forgets it’s there? What can I do to take this pain from him? There has to be something. Anything.

*

When Jasper was little he and I would often walk up our street to the coffee shop on the corner. Along the way, Jasper liked to collect the tiny plastic bbs that collected in the crevices of the sidewalk. He thought that they rained down from the sun during the night, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that neighborhood kids shot the neon orange and green balls from their bb guns. His invented poetry of them falling from the sun at night was so lovely and magical.

Most of the children on the street were older than he was, as evidenced by the bbs and the preponderance of basketball hoops. But there was one boy, a year or so older, who lived in a big Craftsman foursquare about three-quarters of the way up the street. He was a sturdy kid with straight fair hair like Jasper's.

"Asper!" he would call from the yard when we walked by, holding up a dump truck or an action figure. There was no chance that we could pass by without a visit.

One afternoon when Jasper was three and Eric was four, they started playing superheroes. Playing superheroes, at their age, consisted entirely of setting the parameters for the game. Accordingly, they began to organize things: who was who, what powers they had. Because Eric was older he took the lead, which Jasper, being a bossy only child, was a little bit annoyed by. I had mounted the steps to the porch to say hello to Eric's mother, so I missed some of the negotiations. On my way back down the stairs Eric said something, presumably to the effect that Jasper's superhero character was make-believe.

Jasper misunderstood.

           

"No, I'm real," he said, emphatically, confidently. "My mommy says I'm real."

When Jasper announced to Eric that he was real, I understood, in a way that had been up until that point intuitive, not conscious, what a mother is for. A mother does more than create a child physically, does more than keep his body alive with her milk and her jars of baby food, car seats and fleece hats. It was the thing I had seen when Jasper was first born and we looked into each other’s eyes. A mother, in her look and her touch and her words, makes a child real.

There was no hesitation in Jasper's voice. There was no doubt. His incontrovertible proof was me. I had said so, and it was true.  Like the boy in The Velveteen Rabbit, who had animated his stuffed rabbit with his love, my love had done this.

*

           

The dark side of this tremendous power is that a mother also can, by neglect or abuse, teach a child that he isn’t real. I’ve worked so hard to spare Jasper that emotional damage. I’ve been obsessed with empathy and with stability, the crucial things I lacked. Consistent engagement, physical affection. Not much criticism, no shame. Eight years in the same house. Four years at the neighborhood school where I volunteer and hang out and know everyone. He’s had the same best friend since he was four, and he needs both hands and both feet to count the rest of his pals. When I was eight did I even have any friends?

I’m sure every generation makes the same promise to their children. I’m sure my father vowed that my brother and I would never feel the pain of his childhood. He tried to spare us the financial deprivation, and he made sure we never felt the strap. But there were other things he couldn’t have anticipated or prepared for. I think that’s just how it works.

Because I’ve failed. Despite my best efforts I haven’t spared Jasper, I’ve just given him a different variety of suffering. I’ve made an empathetic, sensitive, loving boy. And he’s been hurt. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it did anyway. Are the things I’ve done well enough to see him through the rest? If I prayed I would pray for that.

In Defense of Vanity

When Balthazar died I let my hair grow long. It was the obverse of the bad-breakup haircut of your twenties, when a brush with heartbreak drives you to get a short, sassy ‘do that your coworkers call ‘fetching’ and which charms the next guy who becomes your husband. Growing my hair was equal parts laziness and lamentation; the iconography of wild grief demands that your hair tumble out of your headscarf or your diadem and swirl madly in the wind. I mean, imagine Medea covered in the blood of her children, her bobbed hair tucked neatly behind her ears. But also, I think, unconsciously, it represented a desire to turn back the clock to a time when the choices that would place me here had yet to be made.

I hadn’t had long hair since 1994, and I wasn’t sure if I was too old for it.  The phrase “mutton dressed up as lamb” entered my mind, unbidden, from the pages of some moralistic Edwardian novel deep in my past. Would I look like an ‘80’s supermodel or would I look like one of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters? Malevolent old witch or desirable hottie? I decided I didn’t really care which way it went.

Ironically, it looks great. Not 80’ supermodel great, mind you, but I look better than I have in years, maybe ever. A mom friend of mine at school stopped me on the playground one afternoon to tell me so. 

“You look really fit," she said. "Even your hair, your skin…”

I said thanks. Then she asked me how I was doing. She looked completely startled when I began to cry.

“It’s just right there, isn’t it?” she observed, sympathetic but also perplexed. Should it really be right there, after so long a time?

I was crying because looking pretty seemed like such a pathetic consolation prize. I wanted to be a chubby, frumpy middle-aged woman. Or, if not wanted, then that’s what I chose. I chose to be the mom of two who was chronically dissatisfied that she couldn’t lose those last fifteen pounds. Sometimes, when complimented by some kind, generous woman, I want to say, with venom, “Yeah, some moms have babies who live, and some have Crossfit.” Sometimes when an out-of-shape mom looks wistfully at my hips I want to ask her if she wants to trade.

None of the complimentary moms would trade with me in a million fucking years, no matter how “good” I look.

*

But even as I write this I realize how completely disingenuous I’m being; it’s not as if the way I look is an accident. I may have grown out my hair in a spirit of inattention or sorrow, but I have Moroccan oil and Oribe beach spray and a really excellent colorist named Stephanie to forestall the Weird Sister effect. No one’s making me go to Crossfit, or eschew wheat. In The Noonday Demon, his excellent book about depression, Andrew Solomon says: “Depression lowers self-esteem, but in many personalities it does not eliminate pride, which is as good an engine for the fight as any I know. When you’re so far down that love seems almost meaningless, vanity…can save your life.”

I say unequivocally that hell yes, it can. And I appreciate Solomon’s honesty, and the opening it gives me, because it’s embarrassing to admit. In the same way that I have felt that grief should transcend anger, shouldn’t it transcend vanity as well? Shouldn’t I spend my time jotting extremely philosophical musings into a handmade paper journal? Shouldn’t I be reading Yeats or quoting Sartre instead of buying a new tinted moisturizer and debating whether or not I can pull off 2.5 inch Nike boyshorts?

I could pretend that it’s not vanity at all, that the fitness part, at least, is motivated by a more socially acceptable concern for my health. It’s true that at first I wanted to get in shape for a specific, practical reason, which was to have another baby. Mostly, though, I wanted it because losing my looks just seemed to be adding insult to injury. Must I be bereaved and fat as well? Some days the way I look might seem like a pathetic consolation prize, but it’s a pathetic consolation prize I wanted, and have worked to get.

*

One Saturday this month I had my annual mammogram at the same hospital where Balthazar was born. It was my first time back there, which only added to the ominous quality of the visit. Thank God mammography and labor and delivery are in completely different wings of the hospital.

The technician asked me if I had a family history of breast cancer, so I had to repeat the story about my mom and my grandmother and my aunt that I have told so many times to so many different people. You’d think that Kaiser would write it in my chart, but no.

“Oh dear,” the technician said when I told her. As I left I thought, wouldn’t that be just great. I was hoping that the universe would leave me alone for a little while, but I’m fully aware that it doesn’t work that way.

The following Thursday I got a message that I needed to come back in for a follow-up. I went from zero to panic in 5.2 seconds, and in the past I have prided myself on not doing that. I’m different now, though. Now I recognize “It’s probably fine” as the utter bullshit that it is.

I wish I could tell you that my first thought as I listened to the message was of Jasper, but instead it was this:

“Damn, and my boobs are looking so good right now!”

My second thought:

“And my hair, too!”

Like all writers, I imagine, I have lived many, many other lives in my head. I have conducted entire relationships, from courtship all the way to death, complete with scintillating dialogue. I have been in terrible accidents and failed, or succeeded, at any number of careers. It only took a moment to form the requisite scenes: here I was, bald and sallow from liver failure. One of my breasts had been hacked away and I had a little bag by my side to drain the fluid from my armpit. I was wasted and constantly nauseated from chemo; my sole form of exercise had become a slow, labored walk to the end of my street and back.

Forget Crossfit. Forget picking up Jasper and hauling him across the room. Forget my guilty pleasure in being the object of the male gaze. The strength, the health, the hair—all would be gone. What, of all that would be lost, would I miss the most?

Goddamnit, I thought, I’ve barely begun to pull myself together. I’ve really only got as far as my hair, and my biceps and my quads. Everything else is still a mess: work, money, relationships, abs. I’ve got to have more time!  

The follow-up mammogram turned up nothing more than a summation effect. A summation effect is apparently when parts of an image overlap and it looks like there might be something there, but there isn’t. I don’t have cancer and I’m not dying, except to the extent that we all are. And the choices that brought me here have been made and no amount of product is going to undo them. The only question is what I am going to do now.

One thing I am going to do is wear those really small boy shorts to the gym, and just own my vanity, because it may be a silly, easily ridiculed aspect of the psyche, but it’s also been a source of unexpected strength. And, let’s be honest, of pleasure, which is nothing to scorn.