THE MAYBE BABY, PART 1
June 19th - 30th, 2022
Before we left for Pai, an itchy spot appeared on my left wrist and by the time we returned to Chiang Mai, it’d grown to a pinkish-red rash creeping up both my arms. Topicals hadn’t helped, so after dropping Kez at his villa, Mister A. drove me to an ER.
This scared Cecilia badly.
As you might imagine, after losing her dad to cancer and a world-wide pandemic threatening the lives of “old people” - you know, like her mom - Ceci was not a fan of hospitals. I mean, is anyone? I knew Ceci’s anxiety could easily escalate to outright panic. I felt it imperative for Mister A to wait with her, even if that meant I was on my own to handle the intake interview, insurance paperwork, exam room and pharmacy - all in Thai.
Reminder: I do not speak Thai.
But Google does.
Now, for just one moment, I want you to imagine the Bizarro World version of my story, where a single mom - with a non-emergency rash - who speaks only Thai - attempts to navigate an American emergency room, pharmacy and insurance paperwork using Google as her translator.
How do you think that’d go?
As a caregiver who spent eleven months in and out of American emergency rooms, I can tell you, with 100% certainty, exactly how it would go.
It would be a complete shit show.
She’d be treated like dirt.
That frantic night we spent in the Sherman Oaks ER, where the CT scan revealed a massive brain tumor in Clayton’s left hemisphere, I was made to feel like a dramatic, bothersome inconvenience. Clayton was a dead man walking and they just wanted us out of there as fast as any ambulance could drive. My request for him to be transferred to the elite UCLA Brain Tumor Clinic was met with open hostility. The nurse spat at me, “Do you even have a doctor there?” She’d already arranged for Clayton to be transported elsewhere and didn’t want to redo the paperwork “just because UCLA takes your insurance.”
I hadn’t been given the time or opportunity to find an admitting doctor. I hadn’t even been told I needed one. When I attempted to make those calls, I was told there was no cell phone usage in the room and I couldn’t stand in the hallway. When I asked what the nurse was shooting into his IV bag, he said it was a medication for seizures. When I told him Clayton wasn’t having seizures, he responded dryly, “Not yet.” Then Clayton was put into the back of an ambulance without me, dropped off at a mediocre hospital where the neurosurgeon’s big plan to save his life was to do a partial lobotomy.
Needless to say, I got him the hell out of there as fast as I could.
That ER trip ranks as one of the worst nights in my life.
Cecilia ain’t the only one with hospital anxiety.
The Thai ER was the complete antithesis of my Sherman Oaks nightmare. Every single person I encountered was kind, helpful and unnecessarily apologetic that they didn’t speak English. I, in turn, shamefully apologized that I didn’t speak Thai. They were inordinately patient with my Google translations, respectful and efficient with their examinations, and absolutely penitent to learn their hospital didn’t accept my travel insurance. The pharmacist walked out from behind her counter to apologize and deliver the bad news personally. I would have to pay the full charge for both my visit and the prescription.
The bill came to $60 American dollars.
Mister A refused to take a single baht for sitting with Ceci.
And we were out of there in an hour.
Turns out, our neighbor’s villa was infested with mites and since we shared a cleaning lady,, the mites had hitched a ride. Our hosts arranged for our villa to be deep cleaned while we cozied up at a boutique hotel inside the old city square. It was a fun change of pace. Ceci had a great time at the night market, meeting people from all over the world. We ate buttered corn out of cups, bought a toy snake whittled out of wood while a local artisan working in leather and metal, fashioned a necklace for me that read CHOSEN.
Chosen. A word that shaped my identity since the day I flung it in the face of Dallas Pauline when he teased me for being adopted. I stood up from my desk, put my little hands on each hip and yelled in front of Mrs. Boyle’s entire second grade class, “At least I was CHOSEN! Your parents got stuck with you.” Which quickly curtailed anybody else getting any big ideas about teasing Little Miss Susan Johnston.
It was the word that signified I was -
Not unwanted.
Not unloved.
Not abandoned.
I was CHOSEN.
Is it any wonder why, once again, that word rang true?
Is it any wonder why I wanted that word hanging on my chest, shielding my heart?
Clayton’s death kicked up ALL the old abandonment wounds. Losing his loving, supportive presence, feeling left behind to face the back half of my life alone, when I’d waited so long to marry in the first place - it all felt wildly unfair and somehow personal. As if the punitive, judgmental God of my childhood had CHOSEN to punish us, our happy little family, for some unfathomable wrong. I told myself that couldn’t possibly be true. Tried to believe it was, instead, the new-age, omnipotent, all-loving Source of Unified Consciousness that had CHOSEN us for some miraculous, divine purpose I couldn’t yet see.
Neither of those soothed the heartbreak.
Feeling CHOSEN became less a matter of truth than a matter of perspective. Good or bad, a punishment or a blessing in disguise, each required an externalized, Higher Power - something outside of marionette me, pulling my strings. Dance, Susan, dance. And I was truly tired of feeling tossed around by Life. I wanted my power back. I wanted to choose myself.
But maybe I had a different kind of choice to make.
My period was three weeks late.
Now, common sense would say, “You’re a fifty-year-old woman, it’s perimenopause.” But the only time I’d ever missed a period was when I was pregnant with Cecilia. My periods were as constant as the tides - literally. Every new moon - tada - ovulation. Every full moon - tada - insomnia, cramps and blood. Before leaving Hawai’i, there’d been that final rendezvous with Major. So technically, a pregnancy was possible, if highly unlikely.
Well, maybe not so highly.
I mean, I had Cecilia when I was forty-one, a “geriatric” pregnancy without any interventions. Clayton basically looked at me funny and suddenly, we were knocked up. All around us, friends were grieving miscarriages, draining their retirement accounts, and repeatedly sticking themselves with needles. My prolonged fertility wasn’t something I spoke about openly. It seemed cruel to do so. Yet, it was true, at fifty, I wasn’t in menopause. I wasn’t even in perimenopause. I had, what they call, high ovarian reserves.
It was a horrifying thought, picturing myself as a pregnant, waddling quinquagenarian.
Worse, picturing myself forever bound to a monosyllabic man I didn’t love.
Bringing us back to this word, CHOSEN.
The issue of choice.
And having one.
I was days away from flying into Indonesia, the largest Muslim majority nation in the world. There is no legal abortion in Indonesia and America had just overturned Roe v Wade. For the first time in thirty-two years of being sexually active - yes, I waited until I was eighteen - a safe abortion wasn’t assured.
Now, before you jump to the conclusion that a liberal, hippie, woo-woo gal like me would easily opt for an abortion, I must remind you I’m adopted. My unmarried, eighteen-year-old birthmother carried me to term - partly because safe abortions weren’t legal but mostly because she was an obedient Catholic daughter who did what her parents told her to do. Either way, here I am, walking this earth and for that, I’m grateful.
Until my mid-twenties, I was decidedly anti-abortion. I wasn’t gonna stand in front of a clinic and harass women; but for me personally, supporting abortion seemed hypocritical. This led to a mantra of sorts, a warning I offered to lovers: “Before we do this, you should know, if I get pregnant, I will have the baby.” Which was highly effective at achieving 100% condom compliance - without complaint.
Then, two of my girlfriends got pregnant; one with a life-threatening condition that required emergency surgery, the other in an emotionally volatile and physically dangerous relationship. There’s no doubt in my mind that abortion saved both their lives. From that point on, I was pro-choice. Abortion still wasn’t an option for me, but for everyone else - not my body? Not my business.
Thirty years later, both those women are mothers.
As am I.
Becoming a mother was something I always knew I’d do. From the age of five, each night in my bath, I brushed my doll’s long, blonde synthetic hair and sang her songs and pretended she was my little baby girl. That doll, with her unblinking blue eyes, became my Maybe Baby and I became her mother because I was nobody’s real daughter, nobody was my real mother, and I understood that if I wasn’t a real daughter and I didn’t have a real mother then I had to become a real mother because that was just how things were - that was the natural order of things. That would right the wrong. My Maybe Baby was conceived there in the soapy suds of my evening bath and for thirty-five years, she traveled with me only as a possibility and a fervent wish.
A wish I wasn’t prepared to manifest.
Hmmmm….
That’s not really the truth.
I did feel ready to be a mother much earlier than I became one.
Waiting was the unwanted byproduct of that twenty-three-year/sometimes-on/mostly-off-again relationship with My Ex. Remember him? The man who texted me, out of the blue, the night Cecilia and Kez raced? It was that relationship that saw me through my thirties, the years when the clock was ticking and motherhood felt less like a wish and more like a primal need. With that said, my Ex is not to blame.
We were at the mercy of forces larger than our love.
And that… is a whole story…
As I said, I met Ex when he was a fourteen-year-old, arrogant, Levi’s-button-fly-jean-wearing-wrestler and I was a fourteen-year-old, equally arrogant, Jordache-jean-wearing-majorette. We went to competing junior highs and were pitted against each other in an academic quiz bowl. He knew all the answers and yelled them out, refusing to buzz in first, costing his team the win and making our team look like a table full of sloths parroting his answers.
I hated him immediately.
It took us three years of becoming best friends to fall in love, less than a year to break each other’s hearts, a summer to try again, a fall to realize that was a mistake, followed up by four years of West Virginia holidays where drunken glares at The Empty Glass turned into make-out sessions on the hood of his Subaru.
“Never again!” I would announce.
And then I’d do it again.
We could not let each other go.
Finally, I fell in love with a photographer from Cape Cod. He moved into my Park Slope apartment and we talked about marriage and kids. That Christmas, when I went back to West Virginia, I called My Ex and asked if we could have a sober dinner and talk. We didn’t make it past the appetizers before I broke the news.
“I’ve met this man. He’s the one. I love him. We’re living together and we’re going to get married. I wanted you to hear it from me.” My Ex just stared blankly, as if I was still that idiot-sloth-parrot at the academic decathlon blabbing out answers he already knew.
“Did you hear me?” I asked. “I’m gonna marry this man.”
To which My Ex replied: “No, you’re not.”
Then he got up, paid the bill and left.
From that dinner on, once a year for the next six years, My Ex would pull one of his ‘call out of the blue tricks’, to ask, “Are you ready to marry me yet?” To which I would huff loudly, roll my eyes, lecture him about all his character flaws, then hang up. Old-school style. With a slam.
Because he’d been right.
I didn’t marry the Cape Cod photographer.
Or the Harvard lawyer.
Or the Venezuelan chef.
Every relationship ended in heartbreak while My Ex just kept calling, one year at a time, “are you ready to marry me yet” until one day, I didn’t yell or slam down the phone but said instead, “I’m not going to marry you, but we can talk.”
And we started to talk again.
And we started to laugh again.
And on the day when I stood in Parson’s Chapel and gave my grandfather’s eulogy and saw My Ex sitting in the back pew, I understood there was no other man on the planet that could ever love me the way this man loved me. So, the next time he called to ask, “are you ready to marry me yet?” I still said no.
But then I said, “You can move to New York if you want.”
And he did.
My Ex moved to New York for a very non-New York reason. Not for critical acclaim or to escape small-town life, My Ex moved for love. To see if our love was strong enough to survive even each other. In the process, he took on a city he never wanted to claim and became a native only two months later when on September 11th, in a high-rise office building above Century 21, he stood staring out his window as two planes sliced through the World Trade Towers.
Flying blades of steel and fuel.
I was in my office, on Broadway and Waverly, when people started screaming that the towers were hit. Knowing My Ex worked across the street from the buildings, I ran down seven flights of stairs and over to the corner of Mercer and Washington to see for myself.
They were.
They were.
The towers were on fire.
Someone standing beside me said they’d been hit by a plane. I couldn't understand. I was so naive, terrorism wasn't even a thought. I said aloud, “But there's not a cloud in the sky. How could a plane not see them?”
I needed to hear My Ex was okay but the cell towers were overloaded. No one on the corner could get a signal. I hurried back to my office to use the landline. There was an awaiting voicemail in my inbox. The sound of My Ex’s shaky voice. “I’m okay. Our building is okay. We're watching everything from the windows. I'm okay.”
I missed his call by ten minutes.
I hung up and tried to call. Could not get a dial tone. Finally, a dial tone but the call was useless. Nothing but a busy signal. And then a scream came from a co-worker in a nearby office, “They've hit the Pentagon!” Another, pale and in a cold sweat ran in from the stairway, “The towers came down! The towers came down!”
I panicked.
My Ex's last message said he was still in the building. If the towers were down, it meant his building was underneath them. I dialed frantically, no dial tone, no dial tone and then finally, a dial tone. I used it to call a friend in Brooklyn, and found her crying, begging me to stay at NYU, to please not cross the Williamsburg Bridge for fear the bridges would be bombed or blown. I made her promise to call My Ex non-stop until she heard from him. I promised I would call once I found him and we were both home.
I could not sit in my office and wait.
I started walking, accompanied by a young girl named Barbara. I did not know her. She was wearing high heels and needed to find her way to the Williamsburg Bridge. I told her to come with me. I could get her down to Delancey. As we headed south, walking down the middle of Broadway, she repeated a mantra over and over, “Your boyfriend will be okay. Your boyfriend will be okay.”
As we approached Houston, I saw the first wave of survivors, covered in dusty ash. People opened the fire hydrants and helped wash their faces. The deli owners rushed out with bottles of water, sodas, buckets of ice, and bandages. What struck me most was the silence. No cars. No rumbling subways. No buses. No sirens. Nothing but people washing each other, whispering words of comfort, holding a stranger in their arms, carrying those that could not walk. It reminded me, very much, of the river baptisms I'd witnessed as a child. The solemnity of the moment, the tears, the tender way people held each other.
We were not allowed to walk further south. My only option was to head east on Houston and take Allen down to Delancey, across the Williamsburg Bridge, get to my apartment on South 2nd and hope My Ex was already there. If he wasn't, I would walk back and dig through the rubble on my hands and knees if I had to. Barbara stayed by my side, “Your boyfriend will be okay. Your boyfriend will be okay.”
Her feet started to bleed and she hobbled in her high heels. I took her hand and we joined the thousands of New Yorkers who found their way to the bridge. We all walked in silence as we watched a thick, black plume of ash rise into the sky and blow across the East River towards Park Slope. Every few steps, someone in disbelief and shock, would turn to look, to see again. They’d stand still as the crowds of people parted, walked around them, careful not to bump them, allow them that moment of disbelief. Bits of burnt paper drifted like charred snowflakes over our heads. Our city burned behind us. We were refugees.
As we crossed into Brooklyn, we were met by what seemed to be throngs of medical personnel, ambulances and firefighters helping the injured. The MTA had buses ready to go, employees were directing us, the refugees, to the appropriate medical care and bus lines. Barbara's feet were bleeding but she opted to stay with me and walk the final fifteen blocks to my apartment. “Your boyfriend will be okay. Your boyfriend will be okay.”
He was okay.
And he was not okay.
