When Did I Get Like This?, page 9
A week later, I got the amnio. David said it was a good thing I had kept my eyes closed because the needle Dr. Merman inserted into my womb was, quote, “freaking long.” I held my breath and meditated on my healthy womb, my healthy baby, the needle staying far away. In a moment, it was over, having hurt less than a bug bite, and I felt such extreme relief that the procedure had gone well that I had forgotten about the reasons I had had the test in the first place.
Mary said, again, “So I have your results,” and I figured she was just in a hurry because she had someone else holding on the other line.
“So, good,” I said. “Are we good?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“You and David need to come into our office this afternoon,” she said finally.
I clutched the arm of the couch. “Okay,” I said, as calmly as I could. And hung up. I didn’t press Mary for more information. Clearly, I didn’t want to.
I vaguely remember calling my friend Debbie and hijacking our shared babysitter for the afternoon. Then I called David at work, another rare phone call in the middle of the day. He was always insanely busy, so what was the point? David and I had a long-standing agreement: while he didn’t have time to chat, he would always pick up my call, under any circumstance, if I told his assistant I really needed him. As long as I didn’t have her do it unless it was something really important. Until now, I never had. “I need to speak to David right now,” I told her, trying to keep the shake out of my voice.
I plopped Connor in front of a rerun of Lassie (his favorite show) and got in the shower, because even though it was two in the afternoon, I hadn’t done anything to make myself presentable to the outside world. Until the phone rang, I hadn’t had anywhere I needed to go. I had to reach up and steady myself against the slippery, wet wall. Just take the shower, I told myself. You know how to do this. You can get through these next two minutes. I rubbed the soap in circles, moving down my body and reaching my abdomen, which had already relaxed well into the Definitely Pregnant stage. Anyone could see there was a baby in there—it was not a secret, not an abstraction. My baby was real, and there was something terribly wrong.
From above, I watched myself put on the maternity pants, hand Connor off to the babysitter, and take a cab across town to Dr. Merman’s office. David met me in the waiting room, his face gray, his hand cold when he took mine. Mary was uncharacteristically silent, busying herself with the papers on her desk. After a few moments Dr. Merman opened his office door and called us in.
I had found Dr. Merman through a friend who was also a patient. She used to call him “Doctor Mister Rogers” because of the soothing monotone in which he spoke. I had always felt safe with Dr. Merman’s reassuring manner, grandfatherly age, and apparent vast experience. Whatever bumps we hit—unexplained infertility, endometriosis, an umbilical cord around the neck during delivery—we could put our trust in Dr. Merman, who had dealt with all of these things a hundred times before.
“The results of your amnio show what is called a ‘genetic translocation,’” Dr. Merman explained, once we were seated across from him. “Sometimes, as the chromosomes are forming, they break apart. When they rejoin themselves, it may not be in the same place.”
I had forgotten how to breathe. I imagined helixes dangling, stuck to each other like flypaper, tangled beyond repair.
“Now, your baby has what is called a balanced translocation,” Dr. Merman continued, gently. “All the necessary genetic material is present. It’s just not in its usual location.”
“So…what is the problem?” David said. (He would do the talking.)
“There may not even be a problem,” Dr. Merman answered. “But we have to test both of you to find out. If one of you has the same translocation in your DNA, then it’s inherited, and since you’ve made it to healthy adulthood, we can assume that the mutation is inconsequential. But if this is occurring in your baby for the first time, then it becomes a little more complicated. It could be a sign of severe disabilities.”
“How many times have you seen something like this?” David asked. (He wanted the stats; numbers were what he could wrap his head around.)
“Twice before,” Dr. Merman said. “Once it turned out fine.”
We were all silent for a moment.
“We are going to get both of you tested today,” Dr. Merman said, closing the folder. “There is about a sixty percent chance that one of you has this same aberration; in that case, we can assume that it will be nothing. Even if neither of you has it, there’s still a sixty percent chance that the mutation will cause only developmental disabilities. The baby might be slow learning to walk, or have trouble learning to read.”
“How would we know what kind of disability it would be?” David asked.
“We wouldn’t,” Dr. Merman said. “You would have no way of knowing until the baby was born.”
“So on the forty percent chance of the forty percent chance there’s something really wrong with the baby,” David said, pressing him, “what would we be looking at then?”
“In that case, you would want to consider the possibility of terminating,” Dr. Merman admitted, using a euphemism that did not really soften the blow.
I cried quietly while Mary took my blood. I forgot to notice whether it hurt or not. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
“It will take ten days to get your test results,” Dr. Merman told us by way of farewell. “In the meantime, I recommend you seek genetic counseling.”
Instead, David and I went home, sat in front of the television without watching it, and told no one. What was there to say? That there might be some undefined but horrible thing wrong with the baby we had announced months ago? And that we could not know how really horrible things were for another week and a half?
No option seemed thinkable. How could I consider ending a pregnancy with only a 40 percent chance of severe defects? What if I guessed wrong, and the baby might have been fine? On the other hand, what if the baby were born with defects beyond medicine’s capacities? Down syndrome would have at least been something that we could research, that we could wrap our heads around. Granted, these questions were the reason genetic counseling existed. But what could be less comforting than discussing a variety of worst-case scenarios we could neither confirm nor deny?
“No two translocations are the same,” Dr. Merman had said. “They are infinitely complicated.” Like snowflakes. And since our snowflake still had a 60 percent chance of being healthy, we chose not to talk about it for those ten days, at least as much as possible. “I’d take three out of five odds in Vegas any day,” David said, which was a good point, even if he didn’t say it with much conviction. We’d joke about which one of us might turn out to have the screwed-up DNA and how it would have manifested itself. I said it was surely him, since he had distant relatives with an entire extra set of teeth impacted in their jaws. Surely it was me, he argued, since my whole family had the “Ferguson tail,” where our hair grew to a neat point at the nape of the neck. Weren’t these quirks written on our DNA somehow? Might not all yet be well?
On another quiet afternoon with Connor ten days later, only this one jangling with tension, the phone rang again. “It’s you,” Mary said, as soon as I answered. “Thank God. You have it too. Everything is going to be fine.” We called our parents that night when David came home from work, our deliverance bubbling over. You have no idea, we said, how hard this has been. But there’s no reason to worry! The baby has it, but Amy also has it, and Connor might even have it also, and we’re all fine. My mother-in-law tried to catch up on our ten-day lead of anxiety and release. “Wait. If Connor has it, wouldn’t they have caught it when you were pregnant with him?” she asked.
“Well, no,” I answered, “because I didn’t have an amnio with him.” Huh.
It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment: there had never really been any reason to worry. If I hadn’t had the amniocentesis, it all might have been avoided, since I would never have known to panic over a nonissue in the first place. After all, it seemed that I had had this defect myself while in my own mother’s womb, but she never agonized over it, because she never had the tests. The amnio had created the crisis, giving me half-baked disaster scenarios that had put me on the ledge, and needlessly so.
I called my five brothers and sisters to let them know they probably had this abnormality also. This way, if it came up in their own prenatal testing, they would know not to worry. But on the other end of the phone, I could hear less relief than puzzlement. How was one supposed to react to this news? There is a mutation inside you—but it’s meaningless. Have a great weekend!
Having been declared mutation-free, David was punchy with relief, teasing Mary at our next ultrasound. “I bet you hated making that phone call,” he said.
“Oh, Lord Almighty,” Mary replied. “Let me tell you, it was awful. But it’s better to know.”
Really, though, it wasn’t.
Before this all happened, Mary had asked me if we would take the genetics-clad certainty the amnio provided to find out what we were having. I said no, but later events had changed my mind. If everything turned out all right, our reward would be to know this baby fully. If we had to learn everything about it, the chambers of its heart counted, the strands of its DNA unraveled and examined, then it seemed only logical to get this one last piece of trivia: what kind of baby it would be.
After all the testing was done and the baby declared healthy—as it had been all along—Mary gave me an envelope to open with David at home. This one last time, she knew more about my baby than anyone else. Even me. “It’s a boy!” Mary wrote in her parochial-school cursive. “Congratulations!” I remember trying to show some excitement, hoisting flutes of sparkling cider with David to celebrate, but feeling only a numbness that the crisis was past. Whether the baby was a boy or a girl seemed so inconsequential compared to the relief that he would be whole.
A pregnant woman seeks comfort in her visits to the obstetrician, the reassurance that everything is all right. But these days, she is much more likely to find something to worry about there: only one side of the baby’s umbilical cord is transporting blood, and it might be fine, or it might not. Your baby has a cyst, and it might be benign, and it might not. What cannot be known still far outstrips what can.
I had been lucky. The pieces of my baby had come apart, dangled, and then come back together. Everything was still there, if a bit shuffled. Sometimes, though, I still peer at Seamus as he plays, as he sleeps, looking for the quirk that he and I share. I have not yet found it, but it must be there somewhere. We are translocated, he and I, and I still wonder if it is, one of these days, going to reveal why it is there.
CHAPTER NINE
Meaningful Montessori
There is a particular brand of frantic that attends the first time since giving birth that a mother of a newborn has to get out of the house and be somewhere before 9:00 A.M. It doesn’t matter if it’s your first baby or not. When you have a second child, you know how to cope with the exhaustion. Heck, you can even manage to handle two under two most of the time. What you can’t handle is putting on makeup and blow-drying your hair for the first time since your water broke, plus trying on everything in your closet looking in vain for something that fits and that you don’t look still-pregnant in.
About six weeks after my second child was born, I was in the kitchen, nursing Seamus for the seventh time since 4:00 A.M. while making a sippy cup of watered-down juice for Connor, then one and a half, whose overnight diaper sagged to his knees. David shuffled into the kitchen in his boxers, rubbing his eyes. “Why are you not dressed?!” I shrieked. “I have three people to worry about! You have one! We cannot be late! Will you just put your clothes on!” After finding something in my postpartum, indeterminate size that would look serious but not desperate, corporate but not snobby, we met the babysitter at the door, handed over two crying babies, and rushed out to hail a cab. What could be so terribly urgent, you ask? Only a meeting where Connor’s entire future would be decided. Where he would go to college, his level of success—why, his very ability to pursue happiness—were about to be determined. All by his parents’ ten-minute interview at the Meaningful Montessori of Manhattan.
Although Connor had only been walking for a few months, our family was hip-deep in the application process to nursery school in New York City. Actually, schools. Okay, nine. Nine! Sound unreasonable? Only until you understand that it is statistically easier for your child to get into Harvard than into the Shining Time Nursery on the Upper West Side. (And only a little bit more expensive.) The number of kids under five in Manhattan has increased by almost half in the last ten years, and so nursery schools have to choose among hundreds of applicants for the handful of spots that aren’t already promised to siblings of current students or “legacy” children of alumni. (That’s “sibs” and “legs,” to parents in the know.) If Jesus Christ were alive today, he’d skip the business about the camel and the eye of a needle and just say that it is easier to get into Little Big Apples on Lexington Avenue than for a rich man to get into heaven. And all the people on the Mount of Olives would be like, “Ohhh. That’s really bad.”
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, when I had just turned four, my grandmother heard about a nursery school at a church where our neighbor worked, and she walked me in the first day. That’s where I went. My parents didn’t apply anywhere else. Heck, I’m not sure they “applied” there. I might have just shown up. Why would they have looked elsewhere? It was a room with little chairs, other kids, nice ladies, and finger paint. Those were the only criteria most of our parents were working from—that is, if they sent us to preschool at all.
And I’m not saying that was bad. That was good. That was sane. It was ridiculous to think Connor’s path in life would be determined before he could speak in complete sentences. I hadn’t gone to a designer preschool, and I had found gainful employment, had I not? So I was not going to lose my mind over where Connor played with blocks three mornings a week. I didn’t care where he went. The only problem was, I wanted him to go somewhere, and that was by no means a foregone conclusion.
This was why David and I were about to attend nine school tours, nine parental interviews, and nine open houses/curriculum nights/“head of school forums,” whatever those were. This meant eighteen mornings as panicked as this one had been, and for David, it meant skipping eighteen mornings at work. I would tolerate no opposition from him on this. According to the moms on the urbanbaby.com message boards, there was no way I could go alone. “If both parents aren’t at the interview, they will interpret that as a lack of commitment to the school,” one mother explained. “These schools are just looking for a reason to throw your application away. Don’t make it that easy.”
So there David and I were at our first interview, a little sweaty from our morning’s exertion but on time. Meaningful Montessori’s head of admissions glanced at us over her half glasses and indicated we could sit in the two uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs opposite her desk. We sat knock-kneed, watching her as she glanced over Connor’s application. I saw another toddler’s application atop the pile on her desk; it was typed. Shit. I had printed!
Describe your child’s use of language.
That was a tough question to lead off with, since as I have already made clear, Connor was then what the specialists would call “preverbal.”
“Connor can say ‘Hi’!” I wrote in my neatest Palmer method. “And ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy’!”
Unfortunately, there were still three blank lines, beckoning for more.
“Connor also knows what the horsey says,” I wrote. “In fact, he is fluent in all barnyard animal sounds.”
Still more space.
“He uses language…in a manner quite appropriate for his age,” I finished with a flourish, hoping that sounded like a parent who made sure of such things.
How much TV does your child watch?
“One hour in the morning, and half an hour before bed,” I wrote confidently, proud of myself for never succumbing to a midday Diego marathon. Then I remembered that since Connor was not yet two, the only correct answer, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, was “None.” Since a cross-out would have been too glaringly obvious, I appended, “On weekends, that is.”
How does your child express anger?
Was this a trick question? Was I supposed to say, “He doesn’t”? Because Connor threw tantrums that could be heard in Europe. Concluding that the broadly descriptive phrase “terrible twos” must mean there were more like him, I admitted that Connor did get mad at times, but in a really, really advanced and school-ready way. “Connor tells me he has an ‘angry message’ for me,” I wrote smoothly, “and then we role-play with hand puppets.”
When does your child go to bed?
Now, see, why did that matter? That was my decision as a parent, not Connor’s. Then a shiver went down my spine as I saw it all clearly: none of these questions were about my son. They were all about me. What kind of mother I was. The parenting decisions I had made had shaped my child, and it was those decisions that were under the microscope. Each of them. All of them. In order for these educational professionals to decide if Connor would be good enough for their school, everything I had ever done as a mother was fair game.
