Given Up for You Read online

  I thought of Allie, my “little sister” from Sisters Inc., many times during Family Week. I thought of how many of the women and men around me had asked themselves the same questions Chris and I had, and how they had come to a different conclusion about how best to become a parent, and I was awed by them and their children, everyone’s bravery, everyone’s faith.

  On our first morning in Provincetown, we took the kids to Race Point for some real waves. While Chris and Gaby tried to show them how to stay on their boogie boards, Kelly and I read on the beach. Kelly was reading Confessions of the Other Mother, a collection of essays written by nonbiological lesbian moms. When I asked her how it was, she made a face and said, “Not great, really. But I want Chris to read it. I’m curious what she thinks.”

  I didn’t tell her that there was no way in hell Chris was going to read that book. Chris—unlike Kelly and me—did not seek out motherhood narratives. She was wise in this regard: as both Kelly and I could attest, it was nearly impossible to find an account of motherhood—lesbian or straight—that resonated. I had already skimmed Confessions of the Other Mother, and I knew Kelly didn’t like it because none of the essays told her story.

  The four of us moved in rotation during our week in Provincetown: two mothers on duty, two mothers off, which meant that I didn’t see much of Chris. Instead I stood in the waist-deep water at Herring Cove with Gaby, hoisting the children onto their plastic floating alligators, laughing as we watched the dads march their complaining children all the way down the beach to the gay end of the cove. “Why can’t we stay here?” we heard kid after kid ask, dragging their beach bags through the sand, gesturing to an open spot next to a two-mom family. Their fathers ignored them and kept walking. “I’m with the kids,” Gaby said. “Why not stay here? Same water.”

  “You can’t give up everything,” I said.

  Gaby squinted at me, said nothing.

  “Okay, you can,” I said. “But isn’t it kind of great that they aren’t?”

  Grace refused to take a nap in her rented crib—the afternoons were hot and she was too excited by the idea of her playmate Emmet right downstairs. And so Chris, despite the heat and lack of shade, pushed Grace around town in the stroller until she fell asleep. Gaby stroller-napped Emmet too, and while they were both out, Kelly and I sat in the house’s cool kitchen looking at magazines and talking.

  “Can I help?” I asked one afternoon, as Kelly was getting ready to cook an early dinner.

  “You sit,” she said. “You don’t ever get to. Cooking is relaxing for me.”

  I felt the sharp edge of everything Kelly said about what I did and didn’t get to do. I read so much into her assessment of me, even more since a conversation a few months before when I had asked about her plans for Mother’s Day. “Oh, Gaby and I are too radical for Mother’s Day,” she had said. “But I can see how it would be important for someone in your situation.” I hadn’t said anything in reply, but that night when I relayed the conversation to Chris, I burst into tears.

  “Which situation, exactly?” Chris asked.

  “The one where you go to work and I take care of our kid,” I said, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “We’re lesbians. We’re supposed to deconstruct the patriarchal model, not replicate it.”

  Chris howled with laughter. “Did Kelly actually use those words?”

  I laughed too, a loud and barky half cry, half laugh. “Well, not exactly, but she hinted.”

  Chris pulled me to her and kissed me hard. I pulled away. “This is exactly what Kelly’s talking about.” But Chris pulled me in again, and I didn’t resist.

  “She really pushes your buttons, doesn’t she?” Chris said.

  “Why doesn’t she push yours?” I asked, resting my head on her shoulder.

  “Because I don’t really care what she thinks of me.”

  I wanted to say, that’s because what she thinks of me is worse. But it was too hard to make Chris understand that there was a hierarchy of mothers, and she was above me in it. She had a child and a career. She might be conflicted, she might feel guilty about getting home late, about missing bedtime or music class, but she was conflicted because she was striving and ambitious and engaged. She was conflicted because motherhood was something that had added to her identity, not usurped it.

  But I knew Chris would simply dismiss all that. She was adamant about the importance of my life at home with Grace, and while I appreciated that, I didn’t appreciate her refusal to acknowledge how complicated our arrangement was. I didn’t appreciate the assumptions she made—many of them unconsciously—about the shape and measure of my day, assumptions about what would happen to that egg-crusted cast iron skillet she left on the stove yet found—miraculously clean and dry—back in the cabinet the next morning.

  And if I couldn’t explain all these things to Chris, then surely I couldn’t explain them to Kelly. So when she told me to sit and relax, I did. She sliced shallots and salted fish, carefully removed pith from pink grapefruit and mixed it with chunks of ripe avocado. I put another ice cube in my glass of rosé and flipped open her copy of O Magazine. We chatted some, commiserated about preschool admissions and the upcoming season of holidays with our in-laws.

  Later, after we had all finished an early dinner and decided to take the children into town for an ice cream, Kelly said she would stay behind. “I need to vacuum,” she said.

  When Chris and I protested, Gaby told us not to bother. “Kelly loves to vacuum. She’s been looking forward to it all day,” she explained. We all laughed then—even Kelly—and as we walked to town without her I thought of how lucky it would be to love your work and your chores, to align your desire so perfectly with your responsibilities. It did not occur to me then that perhaps such alignment had less to do with luck than it did intention, with crafting your own resonant and familiar narrative.

  One evening when Chris was giving Grace a bath and Gaby was watching Funny Girl with Emmet, Kelly and I walked across town to pick up sushi. “Oh, the Martin House,” Kelly said wistfully, pointing at the sign for the beloved—and not at all child-friendly—restaurant. “Remember those days?”

  I did. Chris and I had last eaten at the Martin House the summer before I conceived Grace. We were vacationing in nearby Wellfleet and I was ovulating. But because we were at the beach, we weren’t doing anything about it, a fact I had grieved in the weeks before we left. But my grief, surprisingly, barely made it over the Sagamore Bridge, and by the time we got to Wellfleet it was gone. That week we slept on the second floor of a tiny cottage, in a loft with a view of the water. The cottage’s bookshelves were filled with old cooking magazines, Gourmet and Bon Appétit and Fine Cooking, and so each morning I took a stack of them to the beach and learned how to cook. And one night we drove to Provincetown for dinner at the Martin House. I wore a silk dress that tied around my neck and we ate mussels and oysters, drank a bottle of wine. Before dessert I began to feel the familiar twinge in my side, the pressing weight of a swelling ovary. I began to say something to Chris, something clever about a good egg gone to waste, but I stopped myself. If she were a man I might have rushed her through dinner and back to our bed, but she was a woman and we were in no hurry.

  I remembered that evening now as my last experience of pure desire for a baby, a desire unblemished by the possibility of failure. That night my treasure, which was not the baby herself but rather my sweet longing for her, returned to me one last time. Three months later, I was pregnant.

  “You know,” I said to Kelly, “in those days all I wanted was what I have now.”

  “Wow, that is so sweet,” Kelly said. She pulled her sunglasses down onto her face. “But I miss those days like hell.”

  I missed them too. I missed them like hell. Because in truth I didn’t have everything I had wanted then. In trying to conceive—even in pregnancy—I had harbored the illusion that the baby, when she arrived, would slide neatly into the spot my longing for her once filled, peg into hole, and the lon
ging would vanish. But that is not what happened. Grace made her own space; she was both more glorious and more consuming than anything I could have known to want. But the truth was it had been easier to want her. When I wanted her I traveled and worked and loved Chris; I ran steep hills; I read novels and drank wine. I went to bed and woke, and knew nothing of the long hours between, other than my dreams of her. When I longed for Grace I knew exactly who I was. And now she was here—she was two years old!—and I did not know myself. A longing still remained in me, although I could not yet discern its shape, and so I didn’t know how to fill it.

  In Provincetown we fed the kids early and put them to bed before dark. Gaby and Kelly switched off nights of bedtime, which meant that one of them was always off duty, always ready with wine and cigarettes on the patio. Chris and I did more of a bedtime mashup: I gave Grace a bath; Chris read to her; I returned to rock her to sleep. Then we spent a good while (especially when on vacation and in an unfamiliar bedroom) going back into her room. I marveled at how Gaby and Kelly could listen to Emmet’s crying and not flinch when it wasn’t their night. “It’s hard,” Kelly said to me once, when I asked her about how they split soothing responsibilities, “although not as hard as it was when he was a baby and still nursing. That was torture for me. He only wanted Gaby. Nursing makes co-parenting nearly impossible.”

  I agreed with her entirely, and yet I would not have sacrificed nursing for a more egalitarian parenting arrangement. Nursing was hard and often painful; it made my range of motion in the world maddeningly small, tethered me to Grace even when she was older and could go hours without my breast. But still I loved it. Those daily—hourly—chances to slake her thirst and quiet her cries were respites from the worry and the stress of decoding her. Nursing slowly weaned me from the miracle of pregnancy to the work of motherhood; it delayed, mercifully, the end of our animal days.

  In the evenings, when Emmet and Grace were sleeping, we sat in the falling dark of the yard, ate lobster rolls and take-out sushi, did tequila shots, and lost all track of time. We were not beholden to a babysitter’s curfew or tomorrow’s morning rush. We didn’t even need baby monitors; we just left the bedroom windows open. In Provincetown we had our first conversations in years without the background noise of that terrible, agitating static. Each night we seemed to reach back further, to sink more quickly into stories of our meetings and courtships, old girlfriends (theirs, not mine), our childhoods. Each night I could more clearly see the shape of their scars, their losses. I listened to Chris talk about her family, her many closeted years, and how they both made her work hard, perhaps harder than she needed to, always wanting to prove her worth. Kelly told us that her parents feared her not only because she was gay but because she was smart, and so to move beyond them she made a personal and professional life from her own alchemy of sexuality and politics and intellect. And Gaby, who had been uncomfortable in her female body since she was young, told stories of her transformation into a mannish woman whose body could still conceive the child of her dreams, fulfilling, she believed, the one purpose of her uterus. She talked of how happy she was to be returning to her androgynous self.

  And me? I was the girl whose parents—whose entire family—loved her with a deep and even-keeled devotion. My gayness had not cost me a friend, or a colleague. It had not, in the end, even cost me my chance to have a child. Those nights in Provincetown I felt myself cleaved from the three of them; I saw myself as they saw me. As different. “And you,” they all said—even Chris, “you wouldn’t know.”

  But I knew. The trouble was, I couldn’t explain how. Who would want what I had lost? In the world I lived in no one had God, no one considered herself religious. I knew plenty of observant Jews, but to be Jewish was an entirely different proposition than claiming Christianity. The Jews I knew hung their framed ketubahs over their mantels and their chuppahs over their children’s cribs; they mounted mezuzahs in their doorways, gathered with friends to light candles and eat homemade challah on Shabbat. Even the most secular people I knew took no issue with such observances. But Christianity was suspect, and Catholicism was downright absurd.

  What I had lost was my sense of entitlement to belief, my place in the world of religion. I thought I could remain faithful in my own small and secret way, but a secret faith can’t last. Faith required light, and connections with other believers forged in moments of shared experience, of confessed doubt and wonder. But I did not talk about God with anyone in those days. My friends were not believers, and neither was my wife.

  The temperature climbed the whole week we were in Provincetown, and by Thursday it was 90 degrees. Such temperatures were unusual, which was why our butter-yellow Victorian didn’t have air conditioning. The rooms were sweltering, and the still afternoon air made being at the beach for more than a few minutes unbearable. One particularly hot afternoon Kelly suggested we take the kids to the pool at the Provincetown Inn. “Tell her there’s a bar,” she said as I went upstairs to clear the new plan with Chris.

  “I didn’t come to Provincetown to go to the pool,” Chris said. She was lying on the bed in the pizza oven that was our bedroom. Chris was raised spending summers on Cape Cod and she loved nothing more than the ocean; she loved it with the zealous and inflexible love of things past. It was remarkable to me how Chris was able to remain so true to her old desires, her old impulses, despite having a child now. She still wanted what she had always wanted; loved what she had always loved. In many ways I could see—and it worried me—that having a child had returned her to the struggles of her childhood, her lack of agency, of freedom. She hated being accountable to anyone else’s schedule; she hated schedules in general. When we were first together, she told me that her sanity is dependent on two things: solitude and exercise. “Exercise,” she once said, “is like breathing for me.” At the time I was impressed, and I wondered what I needed as much as I needed oxygen. Nothing came to mind. Now that we had a child her fundamentalism annoyed me. “Breathing is the only thing like breathing,” I now said when she tried this line on me.

  “It’s too hot at the ocean,” I said.

  “Not in the water.”

  “The kids can’t stay in the water for more than a few minutes. It’s too cold.” This was one of those times when New England in general, and Cape Cod in particular, made no sense to me.

  I took off my sundress and pulled on my bathing suit. “Come here,” Chris said sleepily, motioning for me.

  “We’re leaving.”

  “Just for a second.”

  I leaned down to quickly kiss her. She pulled gently on the strap of my swimming suit. “I miss you,” she whispered.

  “I miss you too,” I said, although my voice did not match the tone of her whisper, the emotion, and we both knew it. I was rushing; it was true, rushing to get downstairs. I was often rushing then. But I also didn’t like it when Chris said she missed me. It made me defensive. She was becoming another person whose emotions I was responsible for, who needed something from me that I couldn’t quite give.

  On our last day in Provincetown there was a Family Week parade down Commercial Street. We tied balloons to Grace’s stroller and dressed her in pink Converse sneakers and pink sunglasses. Emmet wore a black tank top with a ♀ on it. Because Emmet and Grace were still young, we hadn’t participated in many of the planned Family Week activities: the art and theater workshops, the sand castle competition. Until now I hadn’t really experienced the scope of the gathering, its grand and lively energy. We congregated on Commercial Street, which was filled with children. The older ones carried signs decorated with hearts and rainbows; the littles sported costumes: fairy wings and superhero capes, springy bug antennae and crowns. Their faces were painted with rainbows and flowers and soccer balls. Some people sang as we walked; some started chants about love and pride. Most talked loudly and laughed with each other, trying to keep up with their kids, stopping to take pictures and tie shoelaces and lift tired toddlers into wagons and onto shoulders. />
  The parade ended at the park in the center of town, and the marchers gathered to listen to speeches from Family Week organizers. Gaby and Kelly stood close, arms around each other, looking more affectionate, more comfortable than I had ever seen them. Grace sat on Chris’s shoulders. I could tell Chris was a little bored. I listened to the speeches, looked around at the beautiful and buoyant children, and I wondered if Grace would need this parade someday. Would she need to come to Provincetown the first week of August for its consolations of sameness? I loved the sight of the face-painted children, and yet I didn’t count Grace as one of them. If someone had asked me why, I would have said, “Oh, we live in western Massachusetts,” and I would have smiled and explained, “It’s very progressive. We’re very lucky.” But that was not the reason I didn’t see Grace among these children. When that gay man with the southern drawl had leaned over the table on New Year’s all those winters ago, he had told me something I still believed about myself: I was the exception. And if I was, then surely so was my daughter.

  15

  Eleanor’s Desk

  To celebrate her fortieth birthday, Chris wanted to climb Mount Washington, the highest peak in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. “Your birthday is in November,” I said. We can’t climb Mount Washington in November.”