Given Up for You Page 9

  In early May it was decided that the legislature’s proposed amendment and ballot measure were not enough to stay the court’s decision, and that marriage licenses would be available to gay and lesbian couples. Chris wanted to get our license right away; we needed to get married before the baby arrived. I agreed, but still I dragged my feet. We were already married. But the truth was, legally speaking, we weren’t, and we needed and wanted the legal benefits of marriage. And we wanted to be part of history. Even I had to admit I wanted that. So we went to the town hall and filed for a license. The clerk was cheerful and kind and, in her reserved New England way, genuinely pleased to give us what we needed. I called Steve, the minister at the country church where we occasionally attended services, and asked him if he would perform the ceremony.

  “But you know,” I said after he told me it would be his pleasure, “we’re already married.”

  “I know,” Steve said.

  “So I don’t want another wedding,” I said.

  “So we’ll make it something else.”

  Steve came to our house in the early evening, sweetly dressed in a linen jacket and blue button-up shirt. Before we began the brief ceremony he drank a glass of water and told us a story about Dot Mason, the woman who had lived in our house for generations. We went into the living room, made a few jokes about my bare feet and pregnant belly, and began. Steve read a reworking of the first Psalm, changing “a tree planted near streams of water” to “two women resting near a river.” He asked us to make promises to each other, and as I repeated the words he slowly offered me, not the vows we had written and recited two years ago, but new vows, I was filled with an uncomplicated happiness. The room was bright in the summer evening. Chris said her new vows, holding my hand, reaching over to put her other hand on my belly. I rode the minutes of that brief ceremony the way my children would someday ride the small open-car train at the park—their hesitation and dread giving way to the joyful understanding that not only was this nothing to fear, it was something unexpectedly perfect, and over much too soon.

  In truth I loved no name more than I loved Grace. In the week before my due date, when every part of me seemed to be softening under the heat of the August sun, when every anxiety—even the anxiety of labor—started to loosen its hold on me, I woke one morning and the name was the first thing that came into my mind, and it did not frighten me.

  “I think the baby’s a boy,” I said to Chris that afternoon, “but if it’s a girl, I think we should name her Grace.”

  Chris nodded, and I knew she was trying not to show her excitement. “Sounds good,” she said.

  “But I think it’s a boy,” I said.

  “I know you do.”

  The baby was a girl.

  And it was the nurse, clipboard in hand, who first asked for her name.

  “Grace,” Chris said and looked at me. “Right?”

  “Right,” I said in dreaming disbelief that we had a girl child to name, that the boy child I felt certain of was nothing but an idea.

  After the nurse left I called my friend Karin to tell her that the baby had arrived. “It’s a girl and her name is Grace,” I said.

  “Well,” Karin said, “the Grace of God.”

  The Grace of God. Would such a thing ever again roll so easily off my tongue? I tilted my head and raised my shoulder to cradle the phone so that I could touch the baby’s birth-flushed face. “She is,” I said. “She absolutely is.”

  We held Grace all that night in the hospital. Chris lay beside me on a cot the night nurse brought in, and we whispered to each other and passed the baby between us. Sometime before dawn, I fell asleep with Grace tucked beside me like a hot water bottle. When morning came exhaustion began to creep in, but suddenly there was so much to do: hearing tests, nursing consultations, heel pricks. As we were packing up, a gray-haired woman in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses came into the room with the paperwork for Grace’s birth certificate. Our attorney had told us that when Chris legally adopted Grace two months after her birth we would be given a final birth certificate, but a preliminary one still had to be filed, and it would have only my name on it. But then same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts and no one knew what the decision meant for children born into these marriages. Chris began filling out the form, and when she got to the line for father’s name, she said, “What should I write here?”

  The woman took the clipboard from Chris and looked down at it over her glasses. “Well, look at that,” she said, smiling. “This is my first baby with two moms since the ruling, so”—she paused for a moment and looked over the form—“I think we should cross out father, and you should write your name.” She looked at Chris. “I’ll type in your name.” She nodded, tapping the clipboard emphatically. “That’s what we’ll do. We worked hard for this, we waited a long time, so let’s just do it!”

  Chris and I looked at each other. We? Chris smiled at me, and then she took back the clipboard and finished filling out the form. Later, when I asked Chris if she thought that woman was a lesbian, she said she didn’t think so. “But how can you know?” I asked. Chris thought about it for a second. “She looked just like my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Cuppenheimer,” she said. “And Mrs. Cuppenheimer was not gay.”

  My parents were with us in the hospital room that morning, and a few months later my father would tell everyone at the Christmas dinner table that our encounter with the birth certificate woman was the moment when he knew that his granddaughter was going to be fine. When I heard him say that, heard him tell the story with tears in his eyes, I was struck by how careful he had been to keep his worries to himself. I made the choice to marry Chris and have a child with her because my father—both my parents—had long insisted that this world was mine to live in without fear and, if necessary, in defiance of the social expectations that confined me. But while that might have been the world my parents offered to me and my siblings, it was not the world they were born into. My father’s world still had plenty of room for worry. Of course mine did too, despite how hard I tried to push it away. I was nursing Grace at the Christmas dinner table when he told that story; I was holding her socked foot to my mouth, kissing it again and again while she ate, while she reached for my glasses and my hair and my necklace. I was trying not to cry with my father. I was trying to be that girl who fell in love with Chris and wanted to marry her because she believed everything she once dreamed of was still hers to have, and to hold.

  11

  The Church on the Hill

  When Grace was five weeks old, Steve baptized her at his church, a two-hundred-year-old Congregational church on a hill. Chris had found the church, which was called West Cummington Congregational, or West Cummington for short, when she joined a peace and justice study group led by Steve. After a few meetings of the study group, Chris asked me if I wanted to go to the Sunday morning service with her. This was an unexpected reversal: she had never wanted to go to church before now. But she was drawn to the unorthodoxy of the place and of Steve, who was also a sheep farmer and a poet. I went with her a few times after I stopped going to Mass, and I liked it, despite the fact that Steve hardly ever mentioned Jesus. A few months before Grace was born, Chris wanted us to become members of West Cummington. Part of me was excited for the chance to start over in a new church. But mostly I was reluctant.

  I met with Steve one June afternoon to discuss joining West Cummington. “I’m actually Catholic,” I said, “which is tricky right now.” I smiled and looked down at my enormous stomach. I had become my own perfect excuse for my avoidance of the Church—a pregnant woman married to another woman—although I could see that Steve wasn’t totally convinced.

  “I’d love to know,” he said, “genuinely, since it’s not my tradition, what you find there.”

  “Well,” I said, not knowing how far to go, how much to say, “I love communion.”

  “Transubstantiation.” He said the word with a certain gusto that, while not disrespectful, was also not entirel
y reverent.

  “Yes,” I said, wondering what he would think of me if I told him I believed in it. But Steve was so kind, and even though I didn’t know him well, I was certain that he had heard much more complicated stories than a pregnant woman’s magical beliefs.

  “You know,” I said with a shrug, “it’s this way for me to have a sort of love affair with Jesus.” Oh my God, did I really say that? My cheeks burned with embarrassment. I looked down at the floor.

  Steve leaned back in his chair, nodding vigorously. “Now that,” he said, “is something I can understand.”

  I didn’t know many people at West Cummington, although they all seemed to know each other extremely well. This was my experience everywhere I went in this small town where we lived now, all these shoulder-to-shoulder circles with no space for anyone new. And even the people who welcomed me at church had little interest in socializing. I was beginning to understand that people who lived in the hills were there because they valued their privacy and independence. The families I was getting to know were kind, but they were islands.

  The church itself was a white clapboard building with tall paned windows and a bell tower. Inside there was only the sanctuary and a small entryway, no fellowship hall, no running water. There was a scattering of apple trees in the churchyard and a steep and rocky hillside so close to the back of the church that when you pushed open the swollen wood door behind the last pew you were met with only green and soil and ledge. The room slanted gently so that those in back were afforded a view of the minister in front. There were no adornments—no cross, no stained glass windows, just a grand piano, a wooden pulpit, and red carpeting down two side aisles. As is customary in a Congregational church, there was no center aisle. Chris and I had moved to the land of Congregationalists, of Emerson and Alcott and all their brethren, and it seemed to me that this church would please them all to no end. I wouldn’t have minded a center aisle. I wouldn’t have minded a little ceremony, a few brushes of gilt. “I would like a little more Jesus,” I often said to Chris when, driving home on Sunday mornings, she asked me what I thought of the service. As though I didn’t know where to find him.

  On the Sunday morning of Grace’s baptism, Steve called us to the front of the sanctuary. Before the baptism, all the congregants had dipped their fingers into a bowl of water from the stream that ran below the church, offering their blessings and wishes for Grace. Now Steve took that water in his cupped hand and let it fall through his fingers onto Grace’s head. Later my mother would say how pleased she was by the volume of water he used. “I like a good dousing,” she said. I nodded my agreement, although in reality I was a little taken aback by all that water.

  When Steve baptized Grace, when he asked us all his official questions, questions about our desires for her baptism and our devotion to her growing faith, I was nodding and saying yes, saying we will, but I was thinking of Father Dowling, I was remembering how he had once explained baptism and original sin to me, all those years ago at St. Patrick’s. “What if at the moment before baptism,” he had said, with that inimitable smile, “the baby in my arms is absolutely perfect? What if it is her world—her new world—that is broken?” He held his arms in a cradle then, moved them slowly back and forth. “What if it is those who came before her who have strayed, doing wrong by each other and by God? Then the water must be to protect her,” and with that he dropped an invisible handful of water over the invisible baby in his arms, his fingers opening like a firework. “Baptism seals the perfect and unformed self against the darkness of the world, but also,” and he raised his finger to emphasize his point, “baptism acknowledges that the child contains the darkness, not because of anything she has done, but because this is her world now.” And with that he folded his hands on his lap and glanced over at the notes he seemed to never follow.

  “By what name is this child known?” Steve asked us, jolting me from my daydream, my vision. I answered him with Grace’s whole long name, all the other names she might have had long forgotten. He lifted Grace’s wet head to his lips and whispered to her, kissed her, and handed her back to Chris.

  At home that afternoon I sat on the couch nursing a sleepy Grace while everyone talked and mingled. Again I thought of St. Patrick’s. What if we had baptized Grace there? What if I had handed her over to Father Dowling and he had drizzled holy water on her head—that stale water, steeped in marble—and recited the liturgy and above us there were the carved angels and the stained glass, everything glowing, everything the color of sunlight?

  12

  Milk Dud

  During the first winter of Grace’s life I took her into the snowy woods behind our house nearly every day, sometimes on snowshoes, sometimes on skis. I zipped her into a down snowsuit and strapped her to my chest in a Baby Bjorn. She was happy in the cold air; she fell asleep without crying and woke content, two things she did not do inside. On the weekends Chris went out with me, and on clear mornings we pushed Grace in the jogging stroller down the ice-rutted road to the river, where the sounds of water tumbling over ice and rock soothed her into a long sleep. When we came back home, Chris stoked the fire in the woodstove and I nursed Grace in a wooden Adirondack chair I had pulled close to the fire for the winter. We talked while Grace ate, and if I was lucky enough for Grace to doze off for a few minutes, I would lean back and sleep myself, my shirt still open, Grace’s lips still attached to my breast.

  Most everything Chris and I remembered from the first year of Grace’s life was about sleeping, or not sleeping. “What do you remember that was good?” I asked Chris when Grace was much, much older. “Give me a lovely memory.”

  She thought for a moment. “Remember when we used to light the fire early in the morning when you got up to nurse her and then we would all go back to sleep in front of it?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “But can you remember anything lovely that happened while she was awake?”

  “She was a really beautiful baby,” Chris said, “but she cried a lot.”

  Chris took a four-week maternity leave after Grace’s late-summer birth. The leave was unpaid because she had not herself given birth; it was the same leave offered to men at her company. Chris had made the conscious decision to be out as a lesbian at this job, telling her boss at the first interview that she was moving to Massachusetts to live with her girlfriend. Being out made everything different. She kept pictures of the two of us on her desk; I went to office holiday and dinner parties; when I called Chris and her assistant picked up the line, we chatted about grandchildren and gardening. And her colleagues were great sports about both our wedding and pregnancy. They gave us a party a few weeks before we were married, and another before Grace was born, at which they showered us with generous and thoughtful gifts.

  All the women Chris worked with who were mothers had either husbands who worked part-time or nannies. In Philadelphia Chris had been one of the guys, but here, as a married lesbian with a baby, she was different than both the working fathers and the working mothers. She had more familial responsibilities than her male counterparts and, I think, more guilt. But not as many responsibilities or as much guilt as the women she worked with. Because she had what they didn’t: a wife, who was at home with her baby.

  When Grace was a few weeks old we took her to Chris’s office, and the women all wanted to talk with me, wanted to hear about the birth and to reminisce about postpartum hormones and pumping breast milk at their desks and a six-week maternity leave that had turned into a year, had turned into two years. The men all wanted to hold Grace. They fought with each other for the chance to lift her up in the air, to lay her across their laps. The company’s general counsel, whose children were all in high school now, assured Chris and me that the colicky babies were the smart ones, the ones who didn’t sleep well were the smartest of them all. He was a kind man, gray-haired and tall. He held Grace in one hand, his arm along her back, his palm a cradle for her head.

  I didn’t have colleagues for whom I could proudly unw
rap Grace and introduce her by name, no one to whom I could show off her curly blonde hair and elfin smile. I had finished my MFA the summer before Grace was born, and in the weeks that followed graduation my school friends had moved away for fellowships and teaching positions. Even my thesis advisor had retired to Manhattan. I had ended one life—the life of the teaching grad student—just before I began my life as a mother. I can see now that this was part of the troubles that were slowly rising in me: it’s a risky proposition to become a mother at a time when you aren’t also something else.

  Before Grace was born we thought we might do some traveling during Chris’s maternity leave. Maybe the beach for a little while, or New York. After all, who knew when Chris would have so much time off from work again? But Grace cried too much and slept too erratically for us to travel with her. Soothing her each evening took hours of Herculean effort: walking, bouncing on a yoga ball, doing deep knee bends with her swaddled and pressed against our chests. Chris made CDs of the songs that seemed to quiet her, songs by Joni Mitchell, Ritchie Havens, Cat Stevens. She was our seventies baby. Chris burned the CDs on our computer and then made up titles for them, labeling each disk with a Sharpie: “Milk Dud,” “Blast Off Waltz,” “Morning Bliss.” Eventually we discovered that k.d. lang’s cover of “A Case of You” could soothe Grace like no other song could, and so Chris made a CD that was a continuous loop of it. When we put the CD on in the car, Grace would almost immediately stop crying and start looking out the window pensively, as though remembering many a lonesome evening spent in the blue TV screen light. Chris and I couldn’t stop laughing the first time we put on the song and saw Grace’s wistful expression. “I feel like we should offer her a sippy cup of scotch,” Chris said.

  Grace was a fast baby. She was born after five hours of labor and twenty minutes of pushing. She could finish nursing in less than ten minutes (both sides) and finish a nap in twenty-five. And until she was a year old, she only napped in our arms, or in her stroller, never in her crib or in the white wicker Moses basket my mother had kindly bought for me a few weeks before Grace was born. Grace took approximately one nap in that Moses basket, a nap my mother clocked at thirteen minutes long. By the time Grace was two weeks old the Moses basket was entirely filled with diapers and burp clothes and pacifiers still in their wrapping. I kept it only because I thought maybe someday Grace would want it for her dolls, a thought that I now admire for its perspective and its hope, considering how little of either I had in those days.