Her Name is Mama

Her Name is Mama

by Maureen Pendras

Listening by Susanne Kelly

There was a boy in my driveway. It was nothing; it was ordinary. And yet it was neither of these. My older son had seen him first: “Mom, what’s that little boy doing in the driveway?” I didn’t quite believe him. I thought the boy was probably not that little, or perhaps if the boy were that little, he was not there alone. Yet when I looked through the front windows, there he was—alone. Just at the edge of the yard but keeping to the sidewalk. I could tell he was alone by how he stood there—I think it was the way he held his own hands.
        There was something eerie about it. I’m not sure why. I was safely within my life—I mean my house, flanked by my two teenaged sons. But before I went outside, I waved to him from the front room. Friendly and quick and for only a second—but it was as if I were stalling. I think some part of me wanted to verify that he was real, which sounds ridiculous. Waving spoke to me of realness and parted whatever spooky, other-worldly clouds were gathering. When he waved back, just a quick, nervous hand, I hustled out to meet him.
        I spoke in warm tones. “Hi,” I said, with soft, up-and-down vocals.
His eyebrows raised, face and lips taut, he said, “I’m looking for my mom…. Her name is Mama.”
        My heart hung on his words; he was so scared. And little enough that his mother did not have a first name.
        I nodded quickly—seriously—and said, “Ok, we’ll find her.” His eyes were solely on me and mine on his as I nodded acceptance of this task. I thought to myself, I am prepared to go anywhere you need.
        We set off on our search for Mama. And where was his Mama? Had she gone to park the car? Walked down to the lake? Or in some way moved around in her life at her own adult speed and left him behind?
        We took a step. Before either of us realized it, a woman was walking towards us. This was Mama! She collected him in her arms. An older woman followed closely behind and explained how he had fallen asleep in the car, so they had taken the bags into the house they were renting.
        They hadn’t wanted to disturb him.
        The moment he saw Mama he burst into tears. He had been holding everything inside. He had been so brave. To Mama, he poured out his fears and confusion. For that moment in our driveway, he had been entirely alone and had summoned all his courage to talk to me, a complete stranger.
        I waited until he was covered in arms and kisses then said goodbye. The women apologized to me, sorry to have put me out. The apology felt out of place. I thought we—he and I—had just experienced a pivotal moment in his life—an existential truth. He had faced his situation squarely, his aloneness and smallness in the world.
        On the contrary, I felt I’d been given something.

 

 

My grandmother told me a secret once for getting pregnant. I was thirty-five, sitting at her kitchen table. I was right on that edge the doctors refer to as “advanced maternal age” or even, more rudely, geriatric. But geriatric in the medical sense, as if that removes the sting. We had been trying: taking temperatures, counting days, and turning up empty month after month. The obstetrician-gynecologist had said, “You’ve really got to try for a year before we consider there’s something off.” We were well past six months, maybe into nine. And I remember being surprised at that. A year to try to get pregnant! I’d grown up with the terrors of teen pregnancy. In that mindset, pregnancy is the easiest thing in the world. No stopping it. Just open your legs and you’re done for. In those days, pregnancy sat around every corner—every languid afternoon. Easy as 1-2-3.
        But working at it was surprising. Fun, exciting at first. Sex with something else in mind: a purpose. Something beyond me. I had never done that before. But quickly it became a chore. Regimented and routinized rather than based on a feeling in a moment. Dictated by some other design.
        The anticipation was the worst. I read into every bodily sign: Am I nauseous? Stronger sense of smell? Do my breasts hurt? No, no, and no. Rejection slips—month after month. Not good enough.
        My grandmother’s secret? It was a story. She told me how my cousin had wanted to get pregnant but couldn’t, just wasn’t happening. My cousin and her husband decided to adopt two children, a brother and sister. And then, shortly after their arrival, my cousin was pregnant. Zero to three children in no time flat. My grandmother said the kids, the brother and sister, found their baby brother.
        “They called him,” she said—as in a call straight into the stars. “They went and found him.”
        That idea—a baby was called into existence—struck me. That two little kids from this world went and found him, their baby brother, in another world. This spoke of a secret land of babies. When I told her I was having trouble getting pregnant, she said, “You’ve got to call your baby.”
        So that’s what I did. Not as an exercise, like push-ups, not something rote. But rather something done earnestly. I had to find within myself a place of belief. Sling a rope between myself and a child off in the distance. This required stillness and imagining the possibility of this thing, this pregnancy, coming true. I could have it, but I would have to open myself to it. Call it in.
        Two months later, I was pregnant.
        The pregnancy weeks were hard won. Fatigue like I’d never known. And nausea all day, not just in the morning. Something that could settle my stomach, like pasta or a biscuit, sounded good. But it instantly turned to something else, dusty dry rocks in my mouth. And I couldn’t get it down.
        The advice was to eat something. Don’t go too long without anything in your stomach, but don’t eat too much. But eat first thing. Don’t even let your feet touch the ground. Keep crackers on your bedside table. I could feel the nausea so deep it made my bones hurt. The spongy mass of marrow revolting at encountering that biscuit or cracker.
        During those first weeks, I worked and slept—and ate. If I had a thirty-minute break, I’d lie down on my couch and nap. Work and nap. Private practice at least allowed for that, my own use of the time in between therapy hours. Get home; eat something. But I’d smell the food cooking and my stomach would turn over again, like I’d swallowed aspirin without water—disintegrating slowly, one chemical at a time down my throat.
        One evening I came home while my husband, Eric, had been working, recording a couple of his songs with an acquaintance from a local band in the makeshift studio of our front room. I was too tired to say anything to them, so I waved hello and went straight to bed. I dozed in and out of sleep listening to their voices, but I distinctly remember the friend’s voice. He was singing the word “love,” well no, it felt like love, but he was actually singing the lyrics to one of Eric’s songs.
        It was the movement of his voice, sliding up then down, rolling out smooth and soft. He must have sung those lines a hundred times, as I slept and woke and dozed. I thought even as sick as I am, I am here, listening to love.
        At eight weeks we went to my Ob-Gyn’s office for the first heartbeat ultrasound. Confirmed! Heartbeat and so much sickness. They said, “We often think this is a good sign. The pregnancy is really taking hold.”
        Because of my age there were to be many more ultrasounds.
        At eleven weeks we had an ultrasound to check the nuchal translucency, the thickness of the nuchal fold at the back of the neck. It is considered a sound indicator for Down’s syndrome and other genetic disorders. I was nervous for this one. Eric and I entered the cold room, and I waited under a heated blanket. I remember the test took a long time, even my legs became tired which I thought was strange. I rested one of my legs against the technician’s side and felt the warmth of her body as she then held my leg between her arm and side. This also seemed unusual to me, our bodies so close, so familiar, like she was holding me.
        She took the ultrasound pictures and typed in a heading for each slide. At one point, she typed in something like Left Leg, and I remarked, “Wow, I don’t see anything there.” Left Arm, same thing—nothing. I couldn’t see any imagery. Just darkness, not even the snow and shadow of the other images. I noted she didn’t make eye contact when I said that. Just nodded, a taut, professional, semi-smile, and kept working.
        I remember how she stopped the easy chatting with us. She subtly became more focused on her task, hugging my leg and deep in concentration. More images, less chatting. She apologized for the time it was taking. I knew that the technicians were not allowed to give results. But her demeanor and the way she had pulled slightly inward worried me.
        At the doorway, I was reaching, grasping for something. I asked what I wasn’t supposed to ask, “So, is the nuchal translucency okay?”
        She looked in my eyes and said, “Oh, yeah that. That is…fine. The measurement is X,” and gave me the number. I had wanted relief. An easing of the anxiety in my gut, but our exchange did not do that. It was like what she knew came through her eyes into me.
        When my mom asked how the test had gone, I said it was fine, but something about it had felt weird, off. It was as if she were giving me bad news—only she wasn’t. She even said the nuchal measurement was fine, but the way she said it, it seemed dubious.
        I would have to wait through the weekend—no test results over the weekend. Over and over, I would return to the words themselves, the measurement within normal range, rather than my reading of her body language, how long the test took, her holding my leg, or the strange, blank images.
        On Monday, as I drove home from my office, my cell phone rang. It was my Ob-Gyn. My first thought was wow, she’s calling me. But it flitted through my mind, she’s never called me before, why would she be calling me? My heart started pounding.
        “Hi Maureen, it’s Anna. Where are you right now?” She used her first name with me. She had been my Ob-Gyn since I was eighteen years old.
        “I’m in my car.”
        “Oh, okay, why don’t you call me back when you’re home.”
        There was no way I was waiting until I got home.
        “No…no, I’ll pull over. I’m okay. I won’t drive.” I had answered my phone and held it to my ear. I was shaking in anticipation and didn’t have the wherewithal to even push the speaker button. Instinctively, I pulled over because all of my attention was on the sound of her voice and what she was going to tell me.
        “Okay… it’s your ultrasound. There’s a problem. It’s something I’ve never seen before. But, I’m sorry Maureen. I’m so sorry—this pregnancy—we don’t think it will survive.”
        What? She went through it again. The name of the condition, and what it meant.
        “It won’t work? Are you sure?”
        “Most likely not. For us to know for sure, you’ll need about ten more days…. but that will put you solidly in the second trimester. If you want, you can come in and talk about it. But you can also choose to end it right now. That’s probably what I would do in your shoes. We can wait and verify…but there’s really no chance.”
        I felt like a scrap of fabric ripped in two. “When can I come in?” I needed to see her face to take this all in and start to make sense of it.
        This pregnancy wouldn’t make it? Wait ten days? How would I be able to end something without knowing for sure? My guts hurt. My head hurt. My heart broke.
        When we met with Anna in her office, Eric and I both cried, stunned. This office was brightly lit, too bright, and the chairs felt stiff and formal. This office was not an exam room but a consultation room—a room for talking, for facing something, or at least beginning to understand.
        It felt like all the hard work: each meal, each hour, each day, was coming to nothing. Because she had been my doctor for so many years, she said, “I am so sorry Maureen… I think about what happened to your dad and now you’re having to go through this.” In her comment, I felt the benefit of having a doctor who knew me. She was referring to my dad having died of a brain tumor when I was twenty-two years old and the extent of that loss in my life. She had also known him as a colleague, and it was through his referral I came to be her patient. Her mentioning him brought him into the room with us, as if he sat in the other chair.
        How I wanted him in that other chair. In that one sentence she was stitching this loss together with the other massive loss in my life. In fact, she was showing in her empathy what we therapists know in our offices, each loss experienced pulls from all the other losses in one’s life. The new event stretching backward in time to tug on the past and bring it into now.
        I had to walk through the next ten days very much pregnant. Nauseous, tired, and so full of the promise of this pregnancy it hurt. In the specialist’s office it was confirmed that this pregnancy was not viable, no questions or doubts. The perinatologist explained, “If you haven’t spontaneously miscarried by this point, you may just end up deeper in the pregnancy with a late-term miscarriage. It will be dangerous. It is better for your body and your overall state of health to end this as soon as you know for sure.” I was then terribly full with something that wasn’t going to work. The very definition of futility.
        I went into the hospital earlier than expected for the termination as I was experiencing sharp pains. I remember being surprised by the bliss of the pain medication they gave me. I understood the appeal of drugs in a way I never had before. It wasn’t just taking away pain—numbing something—it actually gave me good feelings. As in, lying there in the hospital bed I felt good. I held the button to self-administer, and when I pushed it, I felt a tiny army of warmth circle my body. They felt like friends. A slow steady outlining of my body in warm relief. They started at the back of my neck and walked all the way around my periphery. It felt amazing, and I floated there waiting for the termination.
        At about 4:30 in the morning I was dozing in my hospital bed. Eric was asleep on a rolled-in sleeper chair. My nurse noticed that I was awake and asked me very gently, softly, so as not to wake Eric, “What has happened to you? …You look so healthy. “
        Her question felt like lifting open a window in a hot, airless room. Perhaps she’d gone through her own loss. But in her question, I felt her genuine and kind interest to know—if I wanted to tell her. Talking with her in the stillness of early morning allowed me to string it all together. For myself mostly, but also for her—no obligations, no worry for someone’s feelings—we didn’t even know each other, but tears ran down both our faces. She squeezed my hand one more time before she left my room to complete her shift. The light was coming up outside: yellow striping into blue. They’d be taking me soon.

 

 

Afterwards, my body had to recover. I had had a child’s understanding of afterwards. Kind of like a cartoon where once the baby was out, the woman’s body would look completely normal, back to itself. But this back to normal was an entire transition, not unlike a full pregnancy. Even though I had been at fourteen weeks, my hormones swelled and dipped, just as they would after normal delivery. My body looked pregnant just as it had the day before. None of my clothes fit. I still needed to wear the few maternity items I had bought. Hormones out of balance, breasts preparing to bring milk, I was sweaty and sad.
        What I wanted was to try again. But really what I wanted was that baby back. Right away. I knew I was supposed to wait. My Ob-Gyn had said, “In all honesty this could happen again. Not this exact condition, but something else. You’d need to be able to face another loss.”
        But the depression and the way I felt completely useless, created an intense desire to do something. I felt a new sense of empty—just me now. And I had no idea if this could ever happen for me. If I could bring a pregnancy to its happy ending.
        I also struggled with the meaning of this loss. What was it? How might I talk about it with others? I was early in the second trimester. I’d had a friend whose first pregnancy resulted in a stillborn child. A beautiful, stillborn daughter. I knew I had not had that experience. I felt a terrible loss, but I didn’t feel that loss. I did not want to make the experience too big. But equally, I did not want to make it too small.
        I was letting go the entire future I had dreamed with this baby-to-be. A baby-to-be that had only lived inside of me. Even for Eric the loss felt different, perhaps slightly more of a concept than a feeling. His feeling for me was resolute and heartfelt, but that baby had only lived in me. The privacy of it was lonely.
        Could I find my way back to that place of belief—the obvious, off-hand way my grandmother had spoken of calling a baby? I wasn’t sure I’d ever find that again. If this could happen for me, I would have to open myself to someone new. But because something I’d never dreamed of had happened—a one in thirty-thousandth chance, one my Ob-Gyn had never seen in her twenty-five years of practice—it had shaken my belief that I could be a mother.
        I wondered consciously to myself: could I be a mother? The phrasing of that question made me consider something else: strangely, am I not a mother?
        Could I go through this entire experience and not be a mother by the end? Does the child itself make the mother or the experiences along the way? I was beginning to think it was the experiences along the way. That it was living all the way through this experience, having to face the realities, make choices I didn’t want to make, and to be changed by the events that make a mother.
        The question reminded me of when we had gone to have the pathology confirmed back in the specialist’s office. I had thought to myself, I don’t think I can look at the ultrasound. I didn’t think I could bear looking at the screen and see what would never be. But when I got there, when I was in the cold room and back to being on the other end of an ultrasound wand, I found that I felt the opposite. Not only did I not mind looking, but I wanted to see what was there, in whatever form it was. What would have become my baby. I found I could love even that: what wouldn’t be. This imperfect and unwanted end.

 

 

In terms of another pregnancy, I did wait. I waited through feeling bereft and useless. I waited through my ambivalence. I waited until it felt bearable to me that there could be a new baby. I waited till I could feel excited about a new baby and call that baby here. The way my grandmother had described.
        When I did get pregnant again—about a year later—every ultrasound was a cliff. I held my breath for what bad news might be coming. My sense of hopefulness had been damaged.
        The new pregnancy was terrifying.
        At the eleven-week ultrasound, the nuchal translucency, I was scared. Could I get past this place, this milepost? My heart was beating so hard, I could hardly speak to the technician. But miraculously, I got through it, and the results were fine. We were on our way.
        But then, at twenty weeks, there was a new scare. Although I had said each ultrasound was a cliff, I still couldn’t believe they were calling me again. My cell phone kept dropping the call, and I was frantic to hear, but equally I didn’t want to hear. She was talking about grave concerns—more non-viable conditions. Could it be? Another problem? My hands shook, and I somehow felt like the conversation itself, broken, fragmented, unable to hold it together. I remembered my Ob-Gyn’s voice cautioning us to wait—which I had done!—but that it was possible for there to be more loss.
        Back we went to the ultrasound office. All I remember of the appointment was the feeling of dread, and then how completely it changed. At the end of the ultrasound, the radiologist walked into the room. She looked me in the eyes and said, “I read your chart. I saw what happened to you. I am so sorry for that loss. But I want you to know, your baby does not have these conditions. Your baby is fine. This pregnancy is looking great.”
        I burst into tears. She—the radiologist—had extended herself to me and saw me as a person. I focused on the warmth of her hand holding mine. She had reached through all the protocol and liability to ease my fears. I felt deep relief as she stood there clutching my hand.
        From then on, the pregnancy rode out as smoothly as a “high-risk, geriatric” pregnancy can. Many ups and downs, but miraculously a baby in my arms at the end. A real live baby.
        In the end I got to be a mother with a baby. To me it would always feel hard-won and like we all barely made it—but so cherished. Then time picked up and the steady absorption of everyday life took over: nursing, crawling, walking, talking, and all over again with my second child.
        One day, when the kids were about three and five, we were walking through a dense woodland trail looking for the tallest, most enormous trees. The kids ran off ahead and I walked in the sunlight and shade. A woman passed us on the trail, she’d seen the kids running ahead, and said, “Life is just that good, isn’t it?”
        Yes, life is just that good.

 

 

So, when I saw that little boy in my driveway and I hesitated to meet him, I think it was not what he represented to me, but who: that first flash of motherhood. He was the present moment stretching back and somehow realigning the past, putting it in order, to finally release it.
        For we had met only briefly, that little boy and I. And just on the edge of my yard. He never entered our space. From the outside it was ordinary enough. I stood there with him. We talked very briefly. But we met each other there. Faced a truth—even for just one moment. Then I passed him back to his mother.