Chapter Three: “I Thought You Were A Nice Girl!”

Maternity Hospital by Tamara Hodzhakulova

My mother stood at the foot of my hospital bed, smiling brightly, chattering inanely.

“Ma,” I said, “You do know about the baby, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“About the hydrocephalus.”
“Oh, that. So, he’ll have an operation.” Not one facial muscle twitched, not an eyelash fluttered.

“You don’t care, do you?” I shouted. “You don’t even care!” I actually leaped forward on the bed—I’ve no idea what I intended—but Bob gently placed a hand on my shoulder to stop me from going any further.

My mother’s smile never wavered, but her eyes burned like dry ice. In her steady gaze I got the message: Get control of yourself, Madam.

I had no intention of getting control of myself: my mother had known something was wrong with my baby, and she’d marched in here the night before, all smiling insouciance. Worse, she had somehow led me to this hospital bed with never a hint at what might transpire. A husband might betray, a father, even a sister–but a mother was not supposed to betray.

That morning my obstetrician had come in during rounds, and announced, while squeezing my bound breasts (on doctor’s advice and the mores of the day I wasn’t breastfeeding) that “the baby might have hydrocephalus.” Life stopped. My heart stood still. My view of the world began to alter, and it would never look the same again.

Throughout the morning, as I began to deal with the news, I discovered that everyone else had known, but had followed Bob’s instructions to keep it from me so I could “rest” for a day. Not only did I never trust him or anyone in my family again, I also lost trust in my own perceptions. Two years later, when Stacy was born, I repeatedly asked, post-partum, “Is she okay?” For months afterwards I never quite believed she was.

During my first pregnancy I would wander through the baby department of Macy’s, fondling frilly dresses, tiny bonnets and little white shoes adorned with bows. My sister would drag me across the floor to point out miniature bow ties and three-piece suits for little people, but I wanted no part of them. Easy for her to coo at overalls and vested suits, I thought, with her pretty little girl sitting beside us in her stroller.

Thus, when they told me I had a boy, I was surprised to feel a touch of pride. Me? I thought, awed. I had a boy?

Of course, this was before I learned that my boy had a life-threatening medical condition, a birth defect as they charmingly called it. For one brief day I gloried in having reached woman’s greatest life achievement, successful motherhood. I suppose that’s the way most new mothers feel, and for longer than a day–but I have never really known what it’s like to exult in the status and genuine joy of new motherhood. For me, it’s been fraught with guilt, shame, incompetence, and failure from the start. This kind of stuff never entirely goes away .

Two years later, when Daryl’s condition was more or less stabilized, I was seized with an overpowering urge to procreate once more. I now realize that, right around the time a firstborn turns two, we mothers start to miss their infancy, no matter how painful or difficult it may have been. Watching our babies turn into little people so soon, we feel a sense of loss.

Throughout my second pregnancy I worried, most of it blessedly subconscious, about the health of the baby I was carrying. This was only natural, and not just because of my experience: the fear of something being “wrong” is, like heartburn and swollen breasts, a byproduct of pregnancy, and relief is as much a part of the afterbirth as the bloody placenta.

In my case, the fear was not so quickly dispelled. The minute Stacy emerged, I cried out, Is she all right? and later on I asked every medical person who wandered into my room the same question. They thought I was neurotic, until I told one nurse about Daryl. “Ah,” she said, addressing a nurse trainee, “when they keep asking like that, there’s usually a good reason.”

Of one thing I had been certain—that my second child would be female, and she was. The first time I gazed upon my daughter snuggled against my swollen breasts, an unfamiliar feeling washed over me, one I had not experienced with my newborn son. Suddenly I was no longer a girl myself, but a woman–a real, grownup woman. I remember this moment as vividly as if it happened yesterday, and I now ponder its significance. Does giving birth to one whose physicality replicates our own contribute to the tangled web of mother/daughter relations? Does something that feels delicious at twenty-one turn bitter as we age and our daughters blossom? I have never felt consciously jealous of Stacy, but as we know, consciousness doesn’t always equal reality.

My fantasies of daughterhood, while different from my mother’s, turned out to be just as unreal. When I look back, it seems to me that I viewed Stacy’s birth as an ending rather than a beginning. A deep need had been met, a nearly lifelong desire satisfied. Her birth represented the fulfillment of necessity: I had my girlchild, she was here at last, and my attention turned to the next thing. I allowed my unhappiness with my marriage and life as a suburban housewife to surface and intensify until it could no longer be denied: I wanted out.

Stacy, not yet three when I left her father, wailed as strangers carted off the stuff I sold out of our garage. She cried when I disassembled her canopy bed. She cried every Sunday night when Bob brought her back to our two-room apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The day we left New York for the woods upstate she sat on the back of the U-Haul and said, choking on tears, “I can’t wait til I grow up so I don’t have to live with nobody.”

Breaks your heart, doesn’t it? And that’s just the beginning of the life I dragged my children into as a “free spirit.” Daryl didn’t seem to mind the constant moving around, the shedding of material possessions, the abandonment of routine and stability–the chaos– quite as much as Stacy did, but now that the chips are in, it’s clear that he just didn’t express it. That’s a male characteristic I suppose; ironically, it’s been impossible for me to draw conclusions about gender differences based on my children, since Daryl’s experiences and behavior were shaped too much by disability to distinguish what is or is not gender-related.

My mother wasn’t the least bit surprised when I told her Bob and I were divorcing: she claimed she’d seen it coming even as she half-carried me down the aisle, my father holding me up on the other side. This is no exaggeration: in the photo, my white satin heels do not touch the wooden floor of the synagogue.

When I told my mother I was pregnant, a look of horror crept across her face. “I thought you were a nice girl,” she said, on the verge of rare tears. Here she’d been fretting about her older daughter with the trampy makeup and bleached blonde hair; she was hardly surprised when that one got knocked up. But in her preoccupation, she’d failed to notice her younger daughter coming home at all hours, hair and clothing in disarray.

A few minutes later she told me to pack my bags and leave without telling my father, declaring, I am not going through this again.

Well, of course, she did go through it again. She told my father as soon as he came home, and many somber, embarrassing family conferences with Bob and his widowed mother Sylvia followed. In contrast to my parents, Sylvia was ecstatic. The way Bob’s life had been going since he’d come home from National Guard training, she’d been terrified he’d end up in jail, or worse. His older brother had married a shiksa—so the news that her baby was marrying a nice Jewish girl, and giving her another grandchild to boot, was almost more nachas than the woman could bear. She loved me ferociously and immediately.

Sylvia. I must pause to write about Sylvia. Or no, it isn’t a pause: Sylvia is an integral part of my story, and her own life sheds another glaring light on the mother/daughter matrix. Bob told me her story, along with a fair chunk of his family history, on our Carribbean honeymoon: I sometimes wonder if he was trying to scare me off before we even began.

Sylvia’s mother was foremother to Andrea Yates: she drowned two of her four young children in the bathtub. Ten-year-old Sylvia was next in line, saved only by the unexpected arrival of an uncle. This was decades before America turned into Therapy Nation, before the discovery of post-partum depression, and before it was recognized that traumatized children require special attention.

At fifteen Sylvia married her beloved Charlie, and was inordinately grateful to him for rescuing her from the bleak and lonely future of her expectations. They had a daughter who was well into her teens before Sylvia got pregnant again, and had two sons in the space of three years. She doted on those boys, her unexpected life bonus, treating them like Jewish princes. The same cannot be said for her treatment of daughter Mildred: their relationship was wild and violent right up until the day Sylvia died.

Some Sylvia aphorisms, uttered several times daily and followed with an apologetic little giggle:

Ya gotta be grateful.
We should only have such troubles.
We should live and be well.
Kinehora.
What could be bad?

“How are you today, Sylvia?” Ya gotta be grateful.

“The store made the drapes too short.” We should only have such troubles.

“Does the brisket taste all right?” She taught me to cook and I feared my dishes weren’t as good as hers, but, What could be bad?

All these homilies added up to a philosophy of life as tragic and filled with suffering. Sylvia was inordinately grateful for any little crumb that happened to drop into her wretched existence. I was one of those crumbs.

In my wedding album, the contrast between my mother’s attitude and that of my new mother-in-law cannot be missed. Sylvia beams, my mother winces. In one picture my mother stands at a table with her closest relatives, looking for all the world as if she’d just bitten into a lemon. And yet it has only recently dawned on me how difficult that day was for her. Of course I knew she was unhappy, that she wished I wasn’t pregnant, wished I wasn’t marrying Bob, who was not, she thought, my intellectual equal (that was the least of it). For years I’d crack jokes about the photos of my mother whenever people looked through my wedding album–but I never really considered how hard it was for her to go through the rituals of that day, to hold her head high among the judging relatives and friends, who surely knew from the rushed arrangements that this was a shotgun wedding. My mother pulled off a respectable reception for more than a hundred guests in three weeks flat, and she stood beside me on my wedding day when she probably would’ve preferred to eat worms. And I think that this woman hated me?

Actually, in the years just preceding my marriage she had not been hateful: she genuinely liked the person she thought I was becoming. A year out of high school, from which I graduated at sixteen, I went to work as a secretary for U.S. News & World Report. I commuted into Manhattan on the Long Island Railroad, and came home each evening excited by my adventures in the city.

What my mother did not know was that I was, literally, living a double life: aspiring city sophisticate during the week, same old teenage hood on the weekends. She didn’t know about the drive-in, where Bob and I would be locked in sweaty embrace in the back seat of his car. Nor did she know I still went out drinking with my girlfriends, those same friends she’d despised from my high school days.

My mother had worked as a secretary prior to marriage, and would do so again in her later years. She was essentially a city person who hated traveling by car, could not drive one, and never fully adjusted to the suburbs. Thus, she approved of my job and my city life, and would’ve been delighted to see it continue. She laughed at my daily escapades and repeated them over the phone to Aunt Janice, who lived down the block. When my uncle took me to cocktail hour at Toots Shor after work one day, I told her we’d gone to The Toot Shop; she found my cluelessness about chi-chi New York society endearingly funny. The day I shook Robert Kennedy’s hand as his motorcade rode down Fifth Avenue, I came home in a state of elation bordering on hysteria, and burst into the house shouting out the story. When she called Janice with the daily report, I could hear affection for me in her laughter.

She discovered a new Jewish singer/comic who I also fell in love with, and we bonded over Babs and her songs laced with lyrics of female empowerment. These were probably the best years of our relationship.

And now this. This Gargantua, as she privately called Bob, this six-foot-three ex-football player and barroom bouncer had knocked me up in the back of his car and was whisking me off at the tender age of eighteen. She was heartbroken, yet she carried me down the aisle and delivered me to my fate, her head held high.

A few years after my father’s death she took my sister and me to Paris, where we got drunk in cafés in the middle of the day, the wine working on us like truth serum. When we got around to the topic of my pregnancy, my mother swore that she had told me I could have the baby without getting married, that I could raise him at home. I have no recollection of any words remotely like this; the only thing that even comes close, and it’s a stretch, is my father repeating like a mantra Let’s see what can be done. I assumed he meant abortion, which was not only still illegal, but horrific to my teenage sensibilities. Twenty-five years later, in a Paris café, my mother insisted he was saying I didn’t have to get married to have the baby. I’m quite certain this was purely wishful thinking on her part: this was, after all, the 1980s, and her favorite sitcom was Murphy Brown.

When Stacy got married at twenty-eight, she’d graduated college and lived on her own for three years, supporting herself by working in an art gallery. The man she married was kind, sensitive, and came from a wealthy family. Not only were they were in love, they were also best friends. I was thrilled—and yet her well planned wedding at a Santa Monica country club was one of the hardest days of my life.

How then could I not have acknowledged, until now, the torture my wedding must have been for my mother? Why have I not understood the depth of my mother’s pain before this too-late date?

I wish I could tell her I’m sorry. Surely one of the worst things that human beings experience is an inability to see our dead just one more time, to tell them just one more thing. As hard as the struggle with my mother was, I’d give anything to still be doing it face to face, instead of on these pages.