Artist's Daughter, The: A Memoir (8 page)

M
y father’s girlfriend pulled her car into a driveway, and I heard the gravel crunch underneath. I’d been disappointed—and a little relieved—when we stepped onto the train station platform an hour earlier to find her standing there without my father.

“There wasn’t enough room in the car for all of us” was her explanation as we tried stuffing our two backpacks into the shoebox-sized trunk of her tiny French car. “You have so many things,” she commented as we pushed our bags down.

I tried not to be annoyed.

The gravel driveway circled a stone fountain, and beyond it was a three-story stone home that looked like it could be on the cover of a French travel brochure. The Loire River moved by slowly behind the house. If I wasn’t feeling my heart race and my stomach turn a little, I’d have thought I’d arrived in a picturesque paradise.

Girls came running out. My baby sister was now six years old, with a two-year-old little sister of her own. Behind them walked my almost seventy-year-old father, looking more gray and frail than he did the last time I saw him.

We’d traveled a lot of miles to this French schoolhouse turned home and studio. To the moment when my husband would meet my father. Derek’s height and broad shoulders were more noticeable as he unfolded himself from the French-sized minicar. As my father approached us, Derek stretched out his hand for a handshake.

“Hello. Nice. To. Meet. You.” Derek directed his words with a loud staccato, as if the language barrier could be overcome with increased volume. I could tell Derek wanted to do right by me, defend me, stand up for me, look my father in the eye in an Old West kind of way to say that he knew. He knew that my father hadn’t called for years at a time. That he pushed me aside like a disposable daughter. That he had other children he cared for more. I was proud of Derek’s motives but wanted him to not be so big and loud. Not so American.

Despite my husband’s chivalrous attempts, my father wasn’t going to engage in a conversation about my childhood. Especially not right there on the gravel drive. Perhaps never. Besides, Derek’s too much of a peacemaker, too charming to not warm up to anyone quickly. Within a few hours, he had two little French girls swinging from his American superhero arms.

The conversations in the days that followed were awkward as we discussed typical getting-acquainted topics: Derek’s family, our jobs, where and how we met. These were conversations I could picture if we had been assigned to this family through a random foreign-study program, but not with my father and sisters. The disconnect between what was and what should have been made all of our words sound echoey, reverberating back to us, reminding us we were saying the right things, but to people who should have already known the answers.

We skipped around anything of substance, anything about my relationship with this foreign family, at least. Sitting at the lunch table after a savory meal of
coq au vin
and red wine, we talked about
the French health care system and tax rate. About the amount of maternity leave a Frenchwoman qualified for and the child-care expenses that were covered while she worked.

As days went by, I displaced my unsettled feelings by becoming increasingly annoyed at a six-year-old who was throwing frequent fits. Now that I have my own children, I recognize my sister’s multiple meltdowns as a combination of exhaustion from an interrupted schedule and the tension we brought with us into her home. At the time I found her to be simply spoiled.

“Why don’t you go with her?” my father asked as my screaming sister pulled my sleeve to go up to our father’s third-story bedroom.

It was four days into our stay, and she was feeling fully comfortable expressing herself with her foreign company. Our conflict had escalated over the last few minutes. I had no desire to see the bedroom he shared with a woman half his age and was a little annoyed that this six-year-old daughter of his thought she could boss me around. She got more agitated as she continued to plead, and I got more annoyed as I continued to say no.

Until our father stepped in and asked me to give in to her. My jaw dropped a little. Did anyone ever say no to this child?

“She is just a child,” he reasoned.

“Just a child”? Did he really want to talk about “just a child”? To go there? I felt the blood rush to my head. How about a child who needed a father every day of her life? Who never threw a tantrum in front of him, not because she was perfect, but because he was never there to see it? A girl who needed affirmation that she was indeed beautiful, talented, and worth paying attention to? A girl who needed to hear that she deserved to be loved and to choose her relationships wisely? A girl who required wisdom, protection, and guidance from her father?

Really, “just a child”? I could tell him about “just a child.” I wanted to scream it all at him. But I knew the six-year-old next to me didn’t need to hear me say those things to her father. I
wanted to protect her from the confusion of my own childhood, so I held it in.

The most maddening part was the disappointed look I felt he was giving me. A look that implied,
How could you treat this six-year-old girl so poorly? With such immaturity? Aren’t you the adult here?

I got up and stormed onto the balcony, where Derek sat watching the river.

“How did that go?” He’d overheard the power struggle the last few minutes. A struggle between sisters separated by twenty years in age, opposing cultures, different languages, and most blatant to me, different amounts of their father’s attention. Derek’s flippant tone told me he didn’t understand the nuance involved. Flopping down in the chair next to him, I looked out at the river and seethed.

That night I slid under the covers of the antique queen bed in the guest room. My anger had tapered down to a low-grade fever of hurt. The grief that was underneath it bubbled up and took over. I slipped my arms around Derek and let his chest muffle my sobs.

“What’s going on?” he started to ask, but stopped himself just as the words came out. There was no real answer because there was no definitive question. The grief was for what could have been, what should have been, and what would never be. We had passed the point of repair. I would never get the daddy from my childhood whom the girl in me still longed for. I had to know how to live in the shape I was in. To move forward with a husband who was willing to put his arms around me and hold me tight for as long as I needed. With a God who allowed the pain to be there and was always willing to love me through it. It didn’t make sense, but it was time for me to be the grown-up and forgive.

A few days later, we pushed our backpacks into the trunk of the minicar to head back to the train station. As Derek said good-bye to the girls, my father pushed a roll of bills into my hand. “For your time in Barcelona,” he said.

I wanted to squeeze out the words, “I forgive you,” but I couldn’t. I wasn’t sure he thought he needed forgiveness, and I didn’t want to stir up tension just as we were leaving. I wanted to be done. I would need to let the burdens fly off me in private. To let go of the anger for my sake, for my future family’s sake, on my own. Forgiveness was about me letting go. It really had little to do with him.

A quick hug and a kiss on the cheek, and we were pulling out of the gravel driveway and then on the train to Barcelona, where Derek and I would sleep at my dad’s apartment after staying out dancing until four in the morning. Where we’d have dinner with my former babysitter and her family and walk down La Rambla next to people who looked like they could be my cousins. Where we ate steaming calamari under the palm trees in the ancient Plaça Reial and drank espresso in cafés tucked between cobblestones in the Barri Gòtic, surrounded by the shadows of my ancestors and a cultural heritage I would never really know. Where I was ready to start living out of God’s legacy. A legacy of forgiveness and love.

M
y hand began shaking, moving the pregnancy test it held, when the two blue lines appeared. At first faint, the lines grew stronger before my eyes. Like magic. Positive. Derek and I hugged and then jumped in the car to race to the drugstore for a backup test just to be sure. The second test confirmed we were expecting a baby.

It wasn’t a practical time to start trying to expand our family. In fact, some might say it was irresponsible. Derek had quit his job a few months earlier to finish remodeling our fixer house, a Portland bungalow repossessed when the previous owner went to jail for dealing drugs from its back door. We took the bars off the windows and reclaimed it as a place of joy. Friends spent hours helping us rip up carpet, lay tile, and remove wallpaper. We got takeout for anyone who was on the crew, and it was months of laughter and gratitude.

Many of our Portland neighbors had nontraditional divisions of labor, and stay-at-home dads were not uncommon. But that’s not what we’d planned, nor what I wanted. The thought of leaving our baby with anyone, including Derek, sounded like misery.
Since before we were married, I knew I wanted to be home full-time no matter the sacrifices. The decision to start “trying” when Derek had no income didn’t make sense. But the maternal pull was strong, and we were surrounded by friends having babies, so I started paying close attention to my cycle, knowing it could take months to get pregnant. It only took two.

Five months after our positive test, I sat on the moving van bench, bouncing up and down as I read names to Derek from a baby name book, and willed my bladder to make it to the next stop.

The last few months had been filled with life-altering decisions. I thought my pregnancy would be consumed with lighthearted choices about nursery colors and stroller systems. But Oregon’s job market was named the worst in the country, so we reversed the Oregon Trail as we made our way east toward the Rocky Mountains in a 2002 version of a covered wagon: a Penske moving van. We were headed to Denver and a job offer for Derek so I could start my new vocation as full-time mom. I was one big mess of opposing emotions: sad to leave what was behind and excited for what was ahead.

We pulled into my in-laws’ driveway, the view of Boulder and the Continental Divide in the distance. For the two months that followed, their house was our temporary migrant camp, our possessions stacked in boxes in their garage, Derek’s childhood bedroom our makeshift home with its high school basketball trophies on the shelves. Our two-month stint there made the baby in my belly the fourth generation to live on that property, my mother-in-law’s parents having been real-life homesteaders there. Derek’s parents, Lynn and Carol, made sure we knew we could stay in their basement as long as we needed.

The conflicting emotions continued: I felt welcomed but at the same time anxious to get my own spot. I was determined not to bring the baby home to Derek’s basketball trophies.

“My grandchild!” Carol’s enthusiasm for her first grandchild was evidenced by the greeting she often gave me—or, rather, she
gave the baby in my belly—when I walked in the room. I cringed when she said it. I knew the words showed she was excited about her grandchild, but it felt like I’d morphed from a woman to a uterus with legs. I could have focused on the positive—her enthusiasm—but I didn’t. I chose to let it sting. I wondered what it meant about my new status as mom. Is that how everyone would see me now? A baby machine? I didn’t really think Carol did. But there was no question I had a new dimension that was part physical and very visible, and part so much more.

I was grateful Carol kept the fridge stocked with all my pregnancy-requested food, but unlike Derek, who was “home,” I didn’t feel like the fridge was mine to raid. Moving to Colorado was moving onto Derek’s turf and further into my married family. A family with lots of cousins, aunts and uncles, and sisters. Real siblings with inside jokes about memories from years ago. Shared experiences and a bond I would never fully understand. And now I was the bearer of the first Kuykendall grandchild, and in some ways my identity shifted in this group from “Derek’s wife” to include “mother of Derek’s child.” The shift was new for all of us, and we were trying to find our footing.

For two months while Derek and my in-laws went off to work, I went to Home Depot to buy supplies for our second round of a fixer house. The only home we could afford in the “up and coming” Denver neighborhood we hoped for had broken windows and grime and graffiti on the walls. Though the previous tenants had been a family of six, the house needed a complete overhaul to be considered habitable for our precious baby.

I heaved my pregnant body in and out of the car and through the heat to run errands so Derek could maximize his hours off his job doing projects at the house that I didn’t have the energy or skill to do. Every evening we rendezvoused at our new house, and I watched him while he worked. Desperate for conversation, I followed him from room to room, avoiding deep breaths in case
any harmful fumes might be lingering. Occasionally I panicked that the house would never be ready and went into cleaning mode, but the temperature, combined with my growing belly and the altitude adjustment, often left me breathless. So I sat and watched my husband, who in a frenzy of energy would put in a second shift as private contractor after his office day job. He was doing his best to provide for us with his own version of nesting.

“This isn’t how I pictured it,” I told Carol as I stood in her kitchen a few days later, trying to hold back the tears.

She smiled. “It never is. That’s motherhood.”

For some reason she found humor in what I said, and I found her response annoying. Maybe because it hinted that my life had plenty of other disappointments, unmet expectations, ahead. This was definitely not how I’d fantasized my months preparing for a baby. I wanted baby showers with tiny cupcakes and a nursery with gingham linens. I wanted foot massages from my husband and late-night ice cream binges. I was getting the late-night ice cream, thanks to a thoughtful mother-in-law, but everything else veered far off the romantic pregnancy bliss I’d imagined.

Our move-in date was moved up a month when I received a phone call from my doctor’s office, telling me the blood test at my most recent appointment had come back positive for a condition that increased my chance of stillbirth. I needed to be induced a month early and closely monitored until then.

Holding the phone in my hand, I couldn’t swallow, my heart racing. Another something not in my plan. Besides, our house would not be ready, the kitchen sink was on back order, and I was worried about the baby. I prayed that God would have mercy on all of us and deliver our baby safely into our arms.