Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir (26 page)

I returned to New York that following Monday. In a moment of great sadness and disappointment, Teddy implored me to keep the results between us. He would raise her as his own, he said, whether he and I ended up together or not. But I couldn’t subject my child to that fate, nor could I do that to Adam, however I felt about him. Teddy was broken when I refused. I thought I’d lost him then. Now I needed to tell Adam. His initial reaction just to the news of my pregnancy had not exactly been happy. I dreaded telling him and kept procrastinating. Finally, weeks later, in November when I could stand it no longer, I insisted he visit me in person, so I could let him know he was the father.

Up until very late in the pregnancy, we couldn’t agree on what we would do. How involved would Adam be in the baby’s life? He had always wanted to be a dad, but he did not at all look forward to being a dad to a child who had her own family. We spent hours on the phone, trying to talk
through the different scenarios. I wanted an option where I stayed with Teddy, but Adam would still be a part of the baby’s life and our child would know she was loved by everyone. I didn’t want to lie about who her father was. I also didn’t want to lose Teddy. I had finally realized the high caliber of the man I had before me. I now had to set about making sure I did what was best for the baby, while also making sure Teddy understood how grateful I was that he had stayed by my side. I did not take that second chance lightly.

Sometime in early December, Teddy went with me to get a sonogram. Generally I went either with my cousin Manu or with a girlfriend. This time, no one was free to accompany me. Usually I could feel the baby kick or move from side to side, but for a few days I felt no movement at all. I felt uneasy going alone. Teddy overheard me on the phone to Seckin saying I was very worried. I had been feeling uncomfortable and getting larger. I hung up and looked at him silently. He was reading the paper, and I could see him trying to figure out in his head whether he was ready for this. The moment seemed very long, with him pondering whether he could actually stomach it and me trying to summon up the courage to actually ask him out loud. I asked halfheartedly, sheepishly.

Teddy was woefully delinquent in attending his own yearly checkups. He hated doctors and any and all medical stuff. But he was a gentleman above all else, especially when it came to women. And he could rarely refuse helping someone in need. He acquiesced with the same enthusiasm with which one schedules a colonoscopy. His expression told me that for him, the only thing worse than going was not going.

He met me at Dr. Seckin’s office, around the corner from his apartment on Fifth Avenue. It was awkward at first. He didn’t know what to expect, and I didn’t know what I could expect of him. Maybe he would just sit in the waiting room? When we got there, two or three other women were reading magazines in the waiting area. I was directed to a small
examination room, and after a glimpse at the waiting room, every seat full with a woman waiting to see the doctor, he quickly followed me in. To Teddy the only fate worse than being confronted with all the gory details of my condition was being subjected to the curious eyes of all those hormonal women outside. This was the first time Teddy had seen the inside of a fully functioning gynecologist’s office in all his seventy years. The office had been closed when he had his blood taken for the paternity test.

The exam room was very small, about seven by eight feet, and very brightly lit, too brightly lit. There was a small stool on wheels tucked to the left of the exam table and little floor space for anything else. I lay on the table and pulled my jeans down. I lifted up my sweater and scooched higher up on the table. I had been to these sonogram appointments so often that by now I just skipped the step of putting on the paper gown, to stay warmer in the room. The sound of the crumpling and tearing of the thin paper sheet underneath me seemed obnoxiously loud. Teddy shifted from one foot to the other, visibly uncomfortable. He didn’t know where to stand. He didn’t know where to look. To my left was the sonogram screen. Teddy stood next to it, leaning against the wall by the door. Perhaps he felt this was a safe place for him, since he would have to completely turn away from me to see into my womb on the screen. Teddy suffered from vertigo, and I knew that look, but now he was also suffering from claustrophobia. A tear rolled down my left temple along my hairline and into my ear. He gently grabbed my hand. His hand felt heavy, soft, warm, and large, with calluses at the base of his fingers from years of golf and tennis.

Seckin came in and Teddy stiffened. He’d gone from trying to reassure me back to stoicism in a flash. Good old Seckin understood the emotional subtleties of men accompanying women in my condition to his office. And of course, Seckin was fully aware of the delicate circumstances, too. He deftly handled Teddy’s presence with wisdom, compassion, and grace. Seckin gently asked Teddy to move to the other side of the exam bed so
he could reach the machine and the wand connected to it. Teddy obliged. This time I searched for Teddy’s hand with my right hand. The cold jelly squirted onto my abdomen made a farting noise coming out of the bottle, breaking the tension in the room. Seckin laughed and said, “Sorry,” then moved the sonogram screen, shifting it for better viewing from his and Teddy’s perspective. My eyes were glued to the monitor, but I was also acutely aware of the weight of Teddy’s hand in mine.

“There! Here we go,” said Seckin.

Teddy had been looking down at his shoes, but now looked up at the screen. “What is that?” he asked.

“It’s her heart,” I answered. I squeezed his hand, and we both saw her tiny heart pulsing away on the screen, he for the first time.

“Alll gooood,” Seckin pronounced in his singsong, Turkish lilt.

I was scared Teddy wouldn’t be able to handle it. There was a good chance he could walk out of that examination room and out of my life forever. I was also worried that the growing existence of this child would continually be a reminder of how I had hurt him, and of the embarrassment my actions had caused him. Seeing the growing baby in my womb could make it all too real for him. It could have scared him away. Who could blame him? Why would he still want to be involved with this mixed-up woman who had caused him so much pain? Most men would have run the other way, but Teddy wasn’t most men. And I suppose I, too, needed to know if he
was
going to stay or go, before the baby came. I had had no guarantees from Teddy up to that point, only a sincere promise to try to make the best of the very hard position I had put him in.

There we were, holding hands and looking at this new life willing herself into the universe through me. Once I saw that the baby was indeed okay, I couldn’t take my eyes off Teddy. It did something to him, to witness her beating heart that day, in that little room. It did something to me, too, watching him witness it. In the reflected blue light of
the sonogram screen I saw so many different emotions flicker across his face. Teddy always wore his feelings on his sleeve. He tried very hard to maintain a stiff upper lip, but I was pretty good at reading his eyes. I saw flashes of wonder, anger, deep pain, frustration, sadness, amazement, compassion, bittersweet longing, all of it. I wondered what he was thinking about. Was he angry with me? Did he feel insulted to even be there, doing another man’s duty? Did he resent me? Did he feel unable to express it, as his sense of chivalry would not allow him to speak to a woman harshly, especially one who was pregnant? Did he regret the years gone by in his life when he was conquering the business world and not experiencing what his peers were at home? Was he upset that this was how he was now forced to experience a new life entering the world for the first time? Was he thinking about his own sons, and how he never got to experience this stage of their development? Did he still feel squeamish and out of sorts because of the setting? What would he do now? What did he feel now? Was he just being a good friend or did he still love me? Did he even know? I didn’t know if the vision of that little heart beating away mightily on that screen would push him away or propel him toward me. Both were totally plausible outcomes.

All those emotions and feelings he may have had inexplicably somehow galvanized together into love, pure and simple. In that moment, he had decided to see the glass as more than half full. Whatever he saw tugged at his insides and at mine, too. He looked directly into my face for the first time that day and I could feel the warm sunshine of his love. It took my breath away. He smiled and pointed to the screen. “This is all we need to think about,” he said. “This is all that matters.” That little beating heart on the sonogram had stolen his heart, and in turn Teddy had stolen mine, for good.

In many moments, what Teddy taught me the most, through his actions, much more than any business strategy or financial acumen, was unconditional love: how to receive it and how to give it.

D
espite the drama, the majority of
my pregnancy was blissful. I had a very happy and healthy first trimester. I had no morning sickness, luckily, and even though the baby was too small to do anything, I imagined I could feel her fluttering in my tummy, almost like a tadpole swimming inside my womb.

I loved the mellow buzz I felt being pregnant, like the tipsiness after a first glass of champagne. I liked my body as it rounded. I felt sexy, voluptuous in a “She’s a Brick House” way. I knew that pregnancy, along with my fortieth birthday, less than a year away, would usher in a fundamental shift in the trajectory of my breasts, arms, and thighs. This weight gain, of course, was unlike my past fluctuations. I felt liberated from the normal worries about my figure. My body had a higher purpose. Putting on pounds wasn’t just inevitable but also necessary. So while I still had to participate in the mental tug-of-war between what I wanted to eat and what I should eat, the prize of winning was no longer a flat stomach—it was a healthy baby. Vanity is a powerful force. For so long, beginning perhaps with that accidental audition at Spanish
Elle,
vanity had governed my eating habits. My vanity never quite kept me from giving in to that bowl of
coconut cream curry or those couple of (okay, fine, several) pieces of fried chicken. But it made me feel guilty about the indulgences—guiltily guilty, because I’m aware enough to know that my guilt is unproductive. Now I ate for the baby, not for the reflection in the mirror.

In the early days of my pregnancy, I, like so many almost moms, subsisted on a steady diet of prenatal vitamins and “What the Heck Should I Eat Now?” books. The instructions were daunting, to say the least. The stakes were higher, too: no longer would my inevitable dietary lapses only reveal themselves in my butt or belly rolls; they could affect my child, too. Cooking dinner after a full day of work was hard enough without this added pressure. So I soon shelved those manuals. After all, every reliable author seemed to agree on the same strict regimen of common sense and moderation.

The extent of the moderation recommended by the books surprised me, though. According to the
Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy,
which became my pregnancy bible, mothers-to-be need to increase their calorie intake by only 150 to 200 calories per day in their first trimester—little more than an extra banana, a thin slice of bread with peanut butter, or a glass of milk. Whatever happened to “eating for two”?

As someone who had long fantasized about my next meal halfway through my current one, I was familiar with this challenge. Yet now instead of an “eat less of this bad-for-me food” strategy, by which one could theoretically stay slim, I adopted an “eat more of these good-for-me meals” policy, which would nourish the little person inside me. And since I was going to gain no matter what I ate, I finally got to eat as much as I wanted, so long as the food was nourishing.

Highly processed foods were out altogether. Fried chicken and its ilk would become “In Case of Emergency” fare. I doubled down on any favorites that required minimal fussing. I roasted summer corn over my stovetop’s flame, channeling the street vendors in India who charred ears
over charcoal near temple doors. Plenty of lemon, salt, and smoked paprika or mild chili powder added enough flavor that I never missed my typical pat of butter, which at times made me a bit queasy. I made huge salads, colorful collections of vegetables and herbs, which I kept exciting with an ever-changing array of condiments—essentially, some flavorful ingredient (sherry vinegar or mustard,
yuzu
or yogurt) that I’d turn into dressing with very good first-press olive oil. Perhaps the most dramatic change I made in my diet was the regular addition of red meat. Aside from the no-proteins-barred eating fugues of
Top Chef,
I didn’t eat much beef, lamb, and the rest—a lingering habit from my vegetarian childhood. Yet now I did once a week, for the iron and calcium. I found myself relishing my weekly seared skirt steak and the task of coming up with new ways to sauce meatballs.

Some decisions weren’t so straightforward. Most women renounce alcohol and caffeine. The jury is still out on whether small amounts of either one will affect your baby. Still, the choice to play it safe seems like an easy one to make—that is, until you’re forced to make it.
Of course I’ll give it up!
I thought, gliding on the winds of idealism that marked my early days of pregnancy. Next thing I knew, my eyelids would feel even heavier than my bloated body, and I’d be plodding to the corner for coffee. A tea drinker for most of my life, I switched allegiance for nine months. I did manage to stick to one cup a day. Alcohol was easier to quit, though after the first trimester, which is the riskiest time to drink, I enjoyed a small glass of wine or champagne now and again.

I was drawn to comforting foods, the foods of my childhood: soupy mixed vegetables stewed with ground fresh coconut and curry leaves,
kichidis
(dishes of spiced rice and lentils), and of course my beloved yogurt and rice dish,
thayir sadam.
Whatever I ate, I put in a deep bowl, so it was all the easier to eat with my feet up. I didn’t have many ultra-specific cravings, except for cinnamon, which I mainly consumed in milky banana shakes, and, strangely enough, good old yellow mustard. When the
urge struck, I was powerless. About six months into my pregnancy, it assaulted me on the way out of Bergdorf Goodman, where I had been attending a trunk show for the Padma Collection. My mouth watered at the thought of the sharp, vinegary taste, so I made a beeline across the street to Central Park and the nearest hot dog vendor. I had been very conscientious about avoiding processed foods, but that day those steamy little links floating in their murky New York water called out to me. This was going to be my one very bad transgression.

I ordered a dog piled with relish and sauerkraut, then drenched in yellow mustard. “More?” the vendor asked, incredulous, as I gestured at him to squirt on yet another stripe of mustard. I found the closest hilly patch of grass, plunked myself down, and devoured the thing in four bites. My only regret was that I hadn’t ordered two, because I then had to stand up to get a second one. This was no easy task. For my appearance at Bergdorf, I had dressed in an attempt to look chic, in black leather and heels and gold chains and bracelets galore, though “chic” was becoming more and more difficult as I swelled. So when my several attempts to heave myself up failed, I ended up back on the ground, shiny legs and arms flailing, gold bands jangling—a Mr. T–like beetle stuck on its back.

For much of my pregnancy, I had continued to work out, and box, too, but Dr. Seckin forbade me to lift heavy weights or jump or skip rope. He ordered me to go to regular weekly sonograms and was extremely concerned with the prospect of miscarriage and the baby’s health in general. He became a sort of Olympic coach who checked in with me almost daily. It had been a while since he had practiced obstetrics on a regular basis, but he was watching me like a hawk. He himself had not believed it possible for me to produce this pregnancy totally naturally, and until the baby was out safely, I could tell that he would not let me out of his sight. This was, after all, his professional miracle as much as my personal one.

One day in early October, somewhere in my second trimester, I went
to my usual sonogram, and Seckin saw something he didn’t like. He sent me to Lenox Hill Hospital for another sonogram and that doctor confirmed what he suspected. I had developed placenta previa. Previa is a condition that occurs when the baby’s placenta partially or completely covers the opening of the cervix at the base or bottom of a woman’s uterus. It’s normally supposed to grow on the side or top of the uterus. The placenta provides all the nutrients to the baby as well as removes waste. The danger with previa is that a woman can bleed excessively before or during delivery because of the placenta’s position. In any event, this was not good news at all, and provided another layer of worry for all of us.

I was immediately forbidden to do any exercise of any kind. Seckin informed me that many endo patients do suffer from previa, but that it often happens to mothers who’ve never had endometriosis as well. Figures I’d get this, too, I thought. Up until this time, I had felt a bit of general fatigue, but I had also experienced a low-level hormonal high pretty much constantly since getting knocked up. I was a pretty happy pregnant lady. Seckin forbade me to exert myself in any way. Seckin is a very excitable type, who gets pretty emotional, especially for a doctor who is supposed to be calm in the face of his patients’ anxiety. But all that bedside manner went out the window, it seemed, when it came to me. He could not believe the insolence of my questioning. In these moments, his usual recourse was to become philosophical. “That baby in your womb is like a flower budding in the desert, a scorched desert. Now we have to stop the wind, and pray for rain. Do you understand?!” I understood he was calling my womb a desert, and coming from my gynecologist, this was very depressing news indeed.

During one of my routine and increasingly frequent checkups I overheard two doctors speaking in solemn tones about another patient, a pregnant woman who sounded like she was in terrible health. “Previa . . . advanced age . . . advanced endo . . .” How horrible it all sounded! I
thought about the poor woman, the complications that would surely come with her rare elderly pregnancy, imagining her brittle bones, her bruised and spotted skin, her body’s imminent revolt against itself. Then one of the doctors began to spell the woman’s last name, “L-A-K-S-H . . .”
She
was
me
. Those conditions were the titles of
my
miseries. Mine, I learned, was a “geriatric pregnancy.”

I knew my pregnancy was high risk. Given my age and the late date at which we finally found out I was really pregnant, I worried about the health of the baby. Had I gotten enough folic acid? Would my endometriosis be a hindrance to the baby’s coming out okay? Given the fact that I had only one fallopian tube on one side and one working ovary on the other, had the embryo even implanted properly? So I focused instead on a less dire worry: how to stay active, for my physical and mental health. I’ve long been a gym rat, and up until that appointment, I had expected to continue my boxing, spinning, and the rest. When Seckin commanded otherwise, I picked his brain for alternatives. Running was a no. So was lifting any weights over a measly three pounds. I couldn’t jump or bounce or jostle.

“Can I even walk?” I asked, frustrated.

“Yes, you can walk,” he said.

“Well, can I walk up stairs?”

“Yes.”

“Aha.”

I started on the stairs at the gym, walking up and down the two flights about fifteen to twenty times, but soon stopped. I felt silly and self-conscious, like I was always blocking traffic. Instead, I took to walking the emergency stairs in my apartment building. A fire-exit stairwell, encased in dingy, bare cement walls, connected the floors. There were no windows, no people, no distractions. I walked up slow and steady, skipping one stair with each step. When I traveled for
Top Chef,
Michelle would help me suss out each hotel’s emergency stairs.

I listened to music on an iPod at first, but I quickly abandoned music for the rhythmic echo of my footsteps, the cadence of my breath. The stairwell came to serve as a sort of flotation chamber, except that my mind, not my body, needed stilling. Outside of my cement cocoon, my thoughts churned: What am I going to tell people? How am I going to wedge motherhood into my life, then how am I going to wedge my life into motherhood? And how am I going to fit into my clothes?

I admit that I started my slow climbs out of vanity, as a reaction to the desperation I felt when I looked in the mirror and saw my newly bloated body and contourless face. But my daily ascents and descents began to take on a meditative quality. I spent twenty-five to forty-five minutes a day on stairs, depending on the time I had to spare or how much I could bear. Sometimes I realized that the beads of salty water streaking my face were not sweat but tears. It was in these scattered stairwells that I waded through hormone-fueled emotion and egocentric impulse. It was in these stairwells that I came to understand that the time for self-indulgence was over, that my primary purpose now was ensuring the health of the creature growing inside me, that I’d soon be a helpless little person’s only succor. I rarely looked forward to a session on the stairs. But once I emerged, blinking at the brightness of the day, I felt happy to have done it.

Then in mid-December, I felt a dull cramping, nothing outrageous or comparable to when I had my period, but definitely there. This startled me because I hadn’t had a cramp since becoming pregnant. I called Seckin, who asked me to meet him in his office. When I got there, he determined I was having early contractions and he said we needed to go to the hospital. This rocked me to the core. Up until that time, I had pretty much managed to keep my good humor in spite of everything. But the moment Seckin announced that I might have to be admitted, I felt a sudden helplessness and impotence I had never felt before. An invisible rock formed under my sternum, a heavy ball of dread I could not shake. The ride from Seckin’s
office to Lenox Hill Hospital is a short one, a mere handful of New York City blocks, but it seemed like an eternity. I felt like a prisoner waiting to be executed.

Adam had yet to decide the correct course of action or determine his desired involvement in the baby’s life. On the way to the hospital I phoned to inform him of what was developing. He was in Texas. He did not come to New York.

At the hospital, nurses and other staff struggled to get an IV in me. I became mostly mute and stone-faced as the doctors discussed giving me steroids to expand the baby’s lungs in case she did come early. Right now, her lungs weren’t developed enough for her to breathe on her own, they explained. They gave me medication to stop the contractions, a drug used for heart patients that worked on the muscles of the heart but also calmed other organs, in my case my uterus. I had extremely low blood pressure, so they monitored not only my heart but the baby’s, too. I had pads and patches and tubes taped to various parts of my body and I felt more like a science experiment than a patient. I felt utterly immobilized, paralyzed with fear. I pushed back the only thoughts I had, which were that this was happening because of my emotional callousness. For most of my life I had been a serial monogamist; perhaps this was my punishment for acting like a female Casanova. But why punish the baby? Karma was a big part of my beliefs as a Hindu. So when I first found out about my pregnancy, I immediately attributed it to good karma for starting the foundation with Seckin. Now I considered my current plight also a result of karma. It didn’t altogether make sense, and I was afraid of delving even deeper into my thoughts, lest I create some further turmoil in my system. I was too afraid to let my mind wander, and so I mostly stared out the window of my hospital room. People kept bustling in and out for the better part of the rest of that evening.