Miss Fortune (11 page)

There are no noises coming from the backyard, and I can't imagine that kids this age are just lying back in a hot tub, relaxing with their thoughts.

Julie must see the panic on my face because she hits my arm and says, “Take it easy. It's empty!”

It turns out that Julie wanted us to spend the day drinking wine (“Oh, come on, pretend you're a French mom!”) and soaking in the hot tub (“Come on, pretend you're a Swiss mom! They do it all the time!”), so she drained the tub, but when she saw how filthy it was, she stripped her kids down, gave them each a sponge, and plopped them in the empty tub with a running hose, telling them to “Scrub, scrub, scrub!” before going inside to make herself a cocktail.

We get to the edge of the hot tub and peer in. Henk and Annabelle are naked, smeared with dirt, and sitting in about a foot of filthy black water while quietly chewing on their antiseptic sponges.
These are the kind of sponges they tell you not to clean your fish tank with or all the fish will die.

Julie hoses the kids down and then sends them inside to play. About a second after they're back in the house we hear a scream, one of definite physical pain. At eight months pregnant, I go running into the house full speed. I look behind me and assume I'll see Julie about to pass me or at least keeping up, but instead I discover her at the fridge, scooping more pudding into her mug. She sees me see her and says, “Oops!” and laughs and then follows me into the bedroom.

When we get to the bedroom, Annabelle is pulling on Henk's penis. Full weight, leaning back like she's water-skiing. Henk is freaking out, screaming. It's so horrifying I can't even speak.

Julie jumps in and ungrasps Annabelle's hand from poor Henk and scolds, “No, no, no!” with her mouth full of pudding.

“You guys, go put your clothes on, and if you want you can do your ‘High School the Musical' show for us—we'll watch.” Henk still has the hiccups from crying, but this cheers him up and suddenly he and his sister are back on. “He'll thank her later, I'm sure,” Julie says after they run, hand in hand, out of the room.

As soon as Julie's sure the kids are in the living room rehearsing, she takes her one-hitter out of her pocket, packed and ready to go, and offers it to me. “Here, take a tiny hit. It makes their shows
so
much better. Otherwise, they can get really long.”

I calmly explain to Julie that I'm pregnant and I've decided that I'm going to wait until my kid is born to start fucking him or her up. “Oh, come on,” Julie says, “take a tiny hit. Pretend you're a Dutch mom!”

In the living room, there's no preshow excitement in the air. In fact, Annabelle and Henk are both just lounging on the couch. Still naked. I head toward the La-Z-Boy chair in the corner of the
room, but Julie races over and beats me to it, leaving me to sit on the couch flanked by naked children.

Rocking in the La-Z-Boy while eating another mug of pudding starts to make Julie uncharacteristically self-reflective.

“When both the kids were first born, I talked on my cell phone all the time. I think that's why Annabelle has attachment issues. Poor Annabelle, she's all fucked up.”

“Julie, she's right here.”

“Oh, she didn't hear me.” Julie waves me away and jumps up, gets a handful of pistachios and throws them in her mug, then flops back down in her chair.

“Yes, I did,” Annabelle says.

I'm going to spend more time with her, I think. I'm going to look in her eyes. I look over my shoulder to start the resolution right now and discover Annabelle sitting on the couch with her feet up in the air, staring off into the distance as she puts a pistachio in her . . . crotch. She's doing it very innocently and absentmindedly. Just la-la-la. She doesn't even seem like she's aware she's doing it. I, on the other hand, notice.

“Julie . . . Julie!” I'm trying to get Julie's attention without shaming the child.

Finally Julie sees what's going on, looks slightly embarrassed, and says, “Oh, gross. Annabelle, stop!”

She then starts talking about how important making eye contact with your baby is.

“I know it sounds dumb, but you have to try and remind yourself, if you can, to look your baby in the eyes. Believe it or not, it makes a difference. I didn't do any of that stuff, the skin on skin after they were born . . . none of it. I really regret it. I do.”

For a moment Julie looks like she's going to cry. I might join her. When someone with seemingly no self-awareness suddenly
becomes aware, it's painful. I feel as if she were in a coma for years and we all just assumed she had no idea what was going on around her, but it turns out she heard us talking shit about her the entire time.

I'm about to tell her, “I'm sure it's going to be okay; you can make it right!” when I notice a little hand feeling around on my face. At first I don't know what's going on, but then a pistachio is suddenly being shoved into my mouth. I clamp my lips shut, but Annabelle's little fingers manage to push the nut in through the side of my mouth. Annabelle, Henk, and Julie shriek with laughter.

Welcome to the earth, little spirits; thank you for teaching me that underwear and shame are key to a happy houseguest. I'll try to remember this after my child is born, which will be happening never. This pregnancy is endless. I'm going to be pregnant my entire life.

•   •   •

That was quick. Less than twenty minutes ago I had a baby. I'd suggested the name Kareer Killer but we decided on Leo. It's amazing, and if I weren't so nauseous, I'd be crying tears of joy. I have to do the skin-to-skin contact—putting Leo on my naked chest—that the birthing classes went on and on about, ASAP; otherwise he'll get a learning disorder or never learn to love unless it's a woman (or man, fingers crossed) swaddled in a hospital-issued baby blanket.

David rips open my hospital gown and lays Leo's little body on my chest right as a wave of nausea hits me so hard that I'm forced to hand him right back. After a few deep breaths I feel like I can probably hold Leo without yacking on him so I turn to tell David this and am met with a sight that I cannot make any sense of. I literally cannot figure out what I'm seeing. David is sitting in a
chair in the corner of the recovery room with his shirt off and Leo is on his chest. There's a young blond nurse pinching David's nipple and directing it toward Leo's mouth. The nausea comes back with such force I can't speak. I just lie there watching the bizarre first moments of Leo's life.

David claims the nurse acted of her own accord. She saw him trying to give skin-on-skin contact (like the classes told us to do) and assumed that we were doing some hippie bonding moment, so she jumped in and was trying to support whatever it was we were about. The nurse says that she walked in and was shocked to find a half-naked man in the corner holding Leo. When she told David she was going to give me the baby to nurse, David said, “I'll do it,” and she thought, “Okay, dirty hippies, whatever you want.”

The first night after Leo's birth I'm not able to sleep. I'm anxious that he's starving. I'm starving him to death. I'm killing him. He's not able to latch on for breastfeeding and it's going to give him brain damage. Are all of his organs formed? They haven't told me that yet. His heart could be riddled with holes. One of his eyes is loose. It's rolling around too much. I need a Sharpie so I can connect the moles on his back and see if they spell out “666.” I can't catch my breath. This isn't some postnatal hormonal anxiety attack. This is THE TRUTH coming through.

The next morning, I wake up to Leo crying to be nursed. I sit up in bed, ready for the anxiety again, but it isn't there. While I nurse I stare at Leo and wait for it to return, but it has vanished. Leo with his wispy brown hair and big eyes that are looking deeply at the world, yet I have no idea what he's seeing. They remind me of the eyes of a whale. At first I'm relieved, and I want to guarantee the anxiety won't return by going online and getting a month's supply of Xanax for Leo and me. But maybe it's a good thing. If I can face the existential angst of being alive, I think I'll be a better mother. Yes, a few dark nights of
the soul are a good thing, a necessary thing, and I shouldn't spend my valuable time trying to escape them by brushing them off as hormonal or shutting them down with some online black market Xanax from India. Especially because my niece, Kaitlin, will be coming to visit again next month and she could hook me up with handfuls of the real stuff for free.

I
'm nine months pregnant, sitting in Dr. Addis's office listening to him make arrangements with Cedars-Sinai to do an emergency C-section for seven thirty tonight.

According to Dr. Addis I have a medical condition that pregnant ladies can get called “preeclampsia,” which means I have crazy-high blood pressure, and if the baby doesn't get out of me soon awful things could happen. I could have a seizure. Or explode. That's not even the worst part. The worst part is that Dr. Addis is insisting we “call a mother” to set up some help for after we get home with the baby.

“You'll be recovering from a major surgery; you're going to need help,” Dr. Addis tells us as he's writing down instructions to get to the hospital. “I'd offer to come over and help but I'm playing golf next week with one of my patients' husbands.”

No, no, no. We don't need any help. David and I are old; we can handle it. I don't want any family members around those first few days we're back home. Not even my favorite ones. Those first few days at home as a new little family are going to be so intimate.

There's going to be a lot of snuggling on the couch with baby
Leo, taking turns singing “You Are My Sunshine” to him, and kissing each other as tears of joy rain down on Leo's new little mushy head. As a
Glamour
-magazine-diagnosed codependent, I'm not a good host in the best of circumstances. You throw a baby in the mix and the first time one of our mothers is wading around in ankle-deep dirty bathwater because our drain doesn't work, I'll be a wreck.

To be honest, I'm not convinced that I even have preeclampsia. I don't feel sick at all. It is true that when I take my socks off it looks like the bottom part of my leg has been sewn on. I like to say I look swollen up like an abandoned dead body, but that bothers most people and I'm trying to replace it with “bloated with the blessing of a baby.”

I wouldn't be surprised if what I was really suffering from was a condition called “My Beverly Hills gyno has a dinner reservation at Nobu for eight
P.M.
so let's get this going.” On the bright side, I'm going to have a baby tonight. David grabs my hand and I try to smile at him, but my face is so bloated I have to put my fingers in the sides of my mouth and pull up.

Nobody is more excited about my C-section than Ronda, my surgery prep nurse from Saint Louis. “You are going to
love
a C-section. Keeps your vagina nice and tight.” I love Ronda. She's an older African American lady with long gray braids who laughs without smiling and walks so slowly it's like she's standing still. Ronda's hooking me up to a magnesium drip telling me a story about how she walked in on her aunt giving her uncle a blow job when she was a little kid. “It really messed me up for a long time. She was the churchgoing auntie, you know what I'm saying?” Sure, I know what she's saying, but what's the magnesium for?

“So you don't have a seizure, honey.”

Oh god, this birth is all medical-emergency-like. I really was
hoping for it to be more born-in-a-tub-with-dolphins-like. At first I'd been high-fiving Ronda about getting to skip out on missing labor—but now as my insides are starting to feel like they are on fire from the magnesium, I can't believe I'm never going to experience what it's like to go through labor. If I don't go through the excruciating pain of childbirth, how will I increase my capacity for suffering? Labor serves a purpose. It's nature's way of preparing you for motherhood and learning how to shit the bed in front of people.

Rhonda thinks I'm crazy for feeling this. “How you get that baby here has nothing to do with the kind of mother you're going to be—and I'm telling you, you're gonna be cracking walnuts with that vagina.”

At seven thirty
P.M.
, curtain time for theater lovers, Dr. Addis sliced me open, and a license plate, a stripper shoe, and a baby boy fell out. Leo is here. The bliss I feel is unreal and perfect.

I'm no longer in the cute little maternity recovery room with rocking chairs and comfy flowered-print couches for the visiting family members. I'm in a straight-up hospital room with Leo lying in an Ikea-looking container next to me and David sitting on the single metal chair in the corner. A nurse who looks like she's fourteen years old but is wearing a lot of makeup to pass as nineteen walks in and mumbles something about “getting me to the bathroom.”

This getting-to-the-bathroom thing is not as much fun as she made it sound. I try to stand up but I can't remain on my feet without holding on to her for dear life. In the bathroom she lowers me down onto the toilet, tells me to “let her know when I'm all done,” and turns around and faces the bathroom wall to give me a sense of privacy even though she is standing right next to me.

I pretend to knock on an imaginary door to alert the nurse that I'm done peeing. “Knock-knock-knock!” She grabs a spray bottle that's on the sink, turns around, and without any warning she aims
it between my legs and starts aggressively squirting at me with this “I'm gonna get it!” focus. Like it was bug spray and she'd just seen a wolf spider.

She pulls a pair of gauze medical underwear on me, and I start crying for all the people in the world who have to have their crotches spray-bottled clean. For the morbidly obese, Thai sex workers, and the elderly.

She drags me back to the bed and I start sobbing on her shoulder.

Back in my bed with Leo finally on my chest, there's one thing I am certain of—there's no way David and I will be able to handle taking care of Leo with just the two of us. Dr. Addis was right. We are going to have to ask one of our mothers to fly out and help us before David's milk starts coming in.

The problem is that I'm adopted, so I have two mothers and that means I have to choose which one to ask. If I ask my birth mother first, and she says yes, which she may, I worry that my adopted mother will think that I asked my birth mother first—because I will have. I've known Diane, my birth mother, since I was nineteen years old. My adopted mother actually did the search to find her, yet I still find myself trying not to show too much enthusiasm for Diane. Whenever my mother asks me how Diane is doing, I say something like, “Well, you know, give that lady a baked good, a Long Island iced tea, and a dog pillow to pass out on, and she's happy.” And my mom will laugh and shake her head, like, “Oh, that's Diane.”

Diane helped take care of three of her grandchildren who were born this year. Or maybe she just brought Chanel lipstick to the mothers right after they had their babies. I can't remember what form her post-birth care took.

But I can't ask Diane because my mother is the first mother, like Queen Elizabeth, and must be consulted first.

I make the call to tell my mother that she won the help-me-to-the-bathroom sweepstakes, but it turns out that she can't come because, sadly, she hurt her knee. I'm fairly certain that after I've regaled her with tales of medical underwear, spray-bottle cleaning, and the challenge of inverted-nipple breastfeedings, she picked up a letter opener and stabbed herself in the kneecap.

So, the real winner is Diane, who might turn out to be the better match anyway. Once she gets past her maternal urge to shove the baby in a pile of dirty laundry and go out dancing (I assume that's what she did the day after I was born), she'll have a much easier time staying in our tiny apartment because she, unlike mother number one, doesn't mind sleeping on couches. Actually, she's probably the best choice since her other three are grown and have all been having babies recently.

David wants to know why we're not even considering his mother, who lives in Brooklyn, but then agrees that she tends to choke a lot and that could be nerve-racking. Whenever I bring up her choking habit, David tells me how beautiful she used to be and how refined and well-bred she is, as if this explains it, like she was bred with a small, ladylike esophagus that makes eating a whole lamb chop unimaginable. Besides, the F train doesn't stop in LA so she's off the list.

One call to Diane and it's set; she's going to fly out and help us for a week after we get home. “I vacuum and I do laundry,” she said. I didn't care if all she did was fluff pillows. I needed her to spritz me clean once in a while and give me her emotional support. I wanted someone I didn't have to fake new parental bliss around, and Diane was perfect; she didn't fake anything. In fact, the last time she flew across the country to see one of my solo shows, she came backstage afterward, walked right past me, collapsed on a couch, and announced, “Man, that was tough to stay
awake through.” Later she apologized and blamed the pitcher of margaritas she'd had before the show.

•   •   •

My friend Gay Jay (I don't actually call him Gay Jay anymore after Chinese Lesbian Kristin yelled at me to stop) has stopped by the hospital under the guise of seeing the new baby, but I've known him since seventh grade. What's really brought him here is the opportunity to see me vulnerable. He would have paid good money to catch the breakdown-in-the-bathroom scene. He's being patient, though, and diligently oohing and aahing over Leo, though I can tell it's boring for him. He tries to get some action started by poking me about motherhood (“Are you excited about being humorless, sincere, and chasing cars you think drive too fast with a rolling pin?”), but I'm too worn-out to take the bait. He asks me to save my Percocets and is about to leave when I mention Diane's visit.

“
Oh my god!
You are going to ask the woman who gave you up as a baby to come and help you with
your
baby? When she sees Leo she's going to see the face of the baby she gave away and have a major flashback. This is beyond profound.”

“Should I hire a documentary film crew?” I ask, knowing that Diane is not going to have painful emotional flashbacks about my birth.

She's a probation officer by trade, and though she tends to talk in a baby voice, say words like “otay,” and dress in pink overalls and bright purple clogs like a giant toddler or Rosie O'Donnell playing a handi-capable adult, she's tough. She's moved past the moments of my birth and giving me up long ago. She's not what I would call unemotional. She's empathetic, easy to talk to—has all the traits of a good person—but she doesn't indulge emotions or wallow in regrets. Years after we first met we were picking up some dinner, a
box of white zin and American cheese, at a Denver Safeway when she spotted a giant salami in the meat section. She picked it up, waved it wistfully in front of her face—“Oh man, I knew this guy. I miss him”—and threw it back on the stack. That was as close to expressing regret as I ever saw her.

The lactation specialist shows up. Jay can't get out of the room fast enough. He tells me how he hopes I don't plan on losing the eighty pounds I've gained because he's never seen me looking so radiant and dewy, shields his eyes, and runs out, but not before letting me know that he thinks I'm being incredibly naïve about Diane. “Just get ready.”

•   •   •

Diane and I have known each other since I was nineteen. Our reunion, though life changing, wasn't the hysterical emotional scene I'd been led to believe it would be from all the dramatic reunions I'd been watching on
Oprah
since seventh grade. When there is a reunion on the talk shows, adults run to their long-lost mothers or grandmothers or kindergarten teachers like they are hostages that have just been freed after thirty years of captivity.

There was one
Oprah
where a middle-aged, somewhat odd woman—let's just call her “Florida Cracky”—had been separated from her twin sister through the magic of the Florida foster care system and hadn't seen her since she was three years old. I didn't even like the woman. But when her sister came onstage and they saw each other for the first time I was howling with sobs on the couch. It turned out, of course, that even though they hadn't been raised with each other, they were
exactly
alike, the only difference being one drew her eyebrows on with a Sharpie and the other one went natural. It didn't matter what the details were about the people or the situations—it could be a father meeting a daughter for
the first time, a fireman meeting the toddler he freed from a sewer, or the cast of
Happy Days
—any reunion of any type left me sobbing.

Yet when it came time for me to meet Diane, the last thing I wanted was a big dramatic scene. On the plane from Indianapolis to Denver, sitting next to my mother, Sharon, I tried to remember if I'd ever seen a show where the long-lost child calmly walked up to his or her birth parent and just shook hands. “Hello.” “Hello.”

I knew that when it came to life's big moments you could never predict how you were going to act, much less how others would. My adoptive mother is an ex-ballerina who is obsessed with table manners and tucked-in shirts. She's not one for big displays of emotion. My worry was that she would think that Diane expected a big show and she'd turn all Liza Minnelli on me, with manic hand gestures, tears, and fake laughter.

The entire flight I was shoving doughnuts in my mouth but was completely unable to swallow them. Crumbs just went flying out of my mouth like I was Cookie Monster. Right before we landed, I was complaining of starving and then I threw up. At nineteen years old I couldn't identify that I was overwhelmed with nerves. When I couldn't find my seat belt and my mother pointed out that I was sitting on it, I screamed, “
No, you are!
”

My biggest fear had been that Diane would be a seven-hundred-pound shut-in covered in dirty washcloths who collected Cabbage Patch dolls that she gave the same name she'd given me after I was born—Tammy Lisa. Now that I was walking off the airplane about to see for the first time the woman who birthed me, my fear was that she'd sob into my hair or give me a long, lingering hug. And it would be in front of my mother and all the strangers in the airport and I was sure that everyone would be watching to see how I reacted, waiting for me to crumble. Thanks to the Thorazine that my body seems to naturally produce to help me survive, I shuffled off the plane and
then stood there, stone-faced, as my mother and Diane hugged and cried.