Baby steps

"Would you like to hold the baby?"

It's a simple question with an ostensibly straightforward answer: yes or no. But I'm caught off guard. Lana, one of the friends D. and I are having dinner with, doesn't let on that she's noticed as she bounces her four-month-old daughter gently, but it's too late for me to cover my hesitation. Lana's husband, absorbed in conversation with the men at the other end of the table only a moment ago, glances my way with interest. I suddenly wish I weren't sitting directly across from him -- or anyone -- where the blush rising on my face is impossible to hide.

"Sure, if you want me to," I say, regretting my word choice instantly. If you're okay with that is closer to what I'd meant to convey, not this noncommittal, indifferent-sounding reply. I'm actually dying to hold this baby, to feel what an infant feels like in my arms. But the last half-hour of conversation with Lana has been all about her new-mother anxieties -- finding the right nanny, enrolling her daughter in infant-level music and dance classes, even teaching her how to use sign language. "So the baby can express her thoughts even when she's preverbal," Lana explains. A budding helicopter parent? Maybe a little. Later in the evening, when the baby is asleep in her stroller, Lana will keep one hand on her chest to make sure she's still breathing. "I'm freaked out about SIDS," she'll say.

While I don't quite get the reason it's so urgent to put a non-ambulatory child in a dance studio, I understand this last concern and, given the newness of motherhood for Lana, the instinct to hover. Which is why I initially resisted asking to hold this little girl -- I didn't want to add to her mother's worries. If it were your baby, I tell myself, you'd be obsessing about the germs she'd be exposed to from strangers. I've picked up that tendency from my own mother, always conscious of what my hands have handled before I touch anything that goes near my eyes, nose, or mouth. Unfortunately, as much as I don't want to become her, I suspect this particular disposition will be hard to suppress when it is my turn to be a parent.

And when will that be? I wonder. D. and I are at minimum several months from trying to start our own family because I'm still recovering from food allergies that played havoc with my immune system while they went undiagnosed. After spending most of the previous year systematically identifying the culprits that were making me sick and eliminating them from our home, I'm much closer to feeling at my best again, but after putting off our plans for the three years I'd been inexplicably, constantly ill, waiting even just a few more weeks for my body to heal feels hard. Suddenly, I'm unable to keep my eyes off this infant sitting happily in her mother's lap, the perfect embodiment of everything I've been trying not to want more and more as the delays have continued. Or so I think. There are still days when I'm not sure if my reasons for wanting children are motherly in nature or more rooted in the desire to have a family of ours, different from my family of origin or D.'s. After spending recent holidays with both, we are both readier than ever to make the idea of us -- whatever that may be -- more distinct.

Maybe because Lana is keenly observant -- and knows some of our story -- she can see all this in my gaze. Or I'm just doing a terrible job of hiding my longing, which, in my mind, sometimes borders on the unseemly. Either way, when Lana offers the baby to me, I feel exposed, embarrassed by the possibility that she's picked up on the thoughts I'd rather keep private. These breaches -- spillovers, really, of emotion I can't quite hold in -- happen so much more easily these days. I am as tender-skinned as the oncoming bundle of arms and legs I reach out to take.

The baby is unwieldier than I expect. Perhaps, because the only living thing I've held in the last year and a half has been our cat, I expect her to have a different center of gravity -- or at least some such sense of mass in my lap. But so quickly does she try to change position, arching her back to see what's behind her from this new perspective, that it is all I can do to keep her from launching backward, her head too close for comfort to the table's wooden edge. I turn her automatically to get her out of harm's way; still, she wriggles in her purple-footed pajamas, curious about everything but me. To my relief, she doesn't seem alarmed to be in a stranger's hands. Do I let her explore? I give her some room to peek over her shoulder at D., seated to my right, whom I don't dare to look at -- I won't be able to bear it if he's laughing at my predicament. I know my inexperience is showing, but I don't need the one person who knows how emotionally complex the idea of motherhood is for me to be amused when I am anything but.

I know I cannot know this baby's habits or anticipate her movements as her mother does. I remind myself of this as a less rational part of me waits for her body to feel less foreign in my arms, as if those storied mothering instincts every woman is supposed to possess might relax me, give me the knowledge of what to do next. To feel next. Because isn't that what I'd wanted to find out? What I might feel in this moment with not my hands but my heart? As much as I haven't wanted to admit it to myself in recent months, I fear, with every pang of desire for motherhood, that I don't have the capacity for it. That my heart isn't built to love a child -- which holding this one, I hope, will disprove.

Of course, this test is fundamentally flawed for the same reasons this baby feels so strange to me: she is not mine. Still, that less rational part of me insists on searching for just an inkling of motherly response, whatever it believes that might look like. Delight in her impossibly round cheeks? The irresistible urge to tickle her belly? Anything but this mode of intellectual observation and analysis I keep reverting to -- I'm apparently unmoved by cuteness. I let my gaze drift from the baby toward the half-eaten dinners on the table, not from disinterest but discomfort. To look at the baby directly is to torture myself with the expectation of feelings that refuse to surface. What must Lana be thinking of me? I wonder. Now that I'm past my initial panic over protecting her daughter from injury, my stoicism in the face of something biologically designed to melt me with its pheromones must look unnatural if not outright bizarre. I might as well be holding this infant on the end of a ten-foot pole, I think, afraid that if I look down, I'll find out that it's true. I stare obstinately at my water glass, desperate to find something to distract me until I can compose my interiors and hand this baby back to her mother without completely revealing my disappointment in myself. I don't want Lana to see the letdown in my expression and misinterpret it as distaste.

I don't realize I've taken the baby's hand in my own, gently massaging her palm and fingers as I do our cat's paws. It is habit, almost like manipulating a worry stone -- our cat inevitably hops onto my knees whenever I'm seated at the kitchen table, and after some time, we settle into this position. Suddenly, I'm aware that the baby's fingers are gripping mine. With surprising force, the baby pulls one digit to her mouth and gums it, exploring the texture of my skin. A pause. She draws her prize back out, looks at what she's tasting, adjusts her grip, squeals. Before I know it, she's got a second finger in her other hand, a look of satisfaction on her wide-eyed face.

There, a voice in my ear whispers. And then it is silent again.

Is that all? I ask, though I already seem to know there is nothing more to be said as the tension I didn't realize I was holding in my shoulders eases. I look again at Lana's daughter, who cannot get enough of her new discovery, reaching for a third finger, a fourth. My body relaxes more.

I am not suddenly enamored with this baby or babies in general -- and, to my relief, I no longer expect to be. But I understand what my heart wished to feel as it waited for my mind to get out of the way: connection. To know that it is possible.

"My hands are clean," I reassure Lana as the baby grabs for a knuckle.

Mother knows best

On New Year's night, the final evening of our holiday visit, my mother and I are the last ones standing in the kitchen. D is in our room down the hall getting ready for bed, and my father, after a weekend of being on call, is sound asleep. We keep our voices low so as not to disturb them, but my mother, finally alone with me, makes her whisper more purposeful.

"You know, now that you've changed your last name, ours will be lost forever in your family."

Before this visit, D and I agreed, should anyone start to ask me about my health -- a challenging subject, given all the questions we still have and the skepticism we often hear from my family about the kinds of testing and treatment we've pursued -- that I would go find him, bring him into the conversation, so that I would not have to defend our choices alone. I don't expect an attack from the angle my mother takes, though, as she scrubs at her wok with her hard little hands. Leaning on the granite by the sink, I am suddenly vulnerable. I can tell she's been waiting to talk to me on my own.

Where is this coming from? I wonder. And why now, five years after my name change became official? Maybe my mother is thinking of the family we've wanted to start for so long but have held off on because of my health, how our children will bear only D's name instead of his and my father's. Or it's my writing, the essay I had published in the fall but never mentioned until this visit. I used a pseudonym as it was, unwilling to place my name, maiden or married, on the work -- because the subject was so difficult for me to write about, much less discuss, I didn't want anyone to find me just yet for further questions.

I wouldn't have brought up the essay had my mother not pressed me so hard to find out what I was really going to do with my life instead of tutoring as I have been. What are your goals? she'd asked.

"Putting something together that I actually believe in publishing," I said, which, without a detailed plan attached, was an only somewhat satisfying response. Whatever my mother's reasons now for raising this other concern about lost legacies, I feel her disapproval like a blast of west Texas wind carrying the smell of cattle ranches from the next town down the highway.

I know I shouldn't respond -- there can be no good outcome from midnight conversations about family differences -- but so much of my writing is tied to this very issue, the knots in our relationship I am forever trying to untangle by examining them, sentence by sentence. I've chosen to be published under a pseudonym not just to give myself privacy but also to protect that process of personal and relational inquiry, taking on a persona whose name won't be recognized by anyone who knows my family. This way, I can write without fearing their real-life loss of face. Not that I expect my parents' friends to read the kinds of literary journals I'd submit my work to, but in this electronic age, I am searchable, linkable, forwardable, potentially viral.

My writing persona, regardless of her name, needs protecting too. To use either of my surnames is to be who they imply I am: wife, sister, daughter, with everything those identities carry with them. Not that I wish to deny those aspects of my life experience, but I am more than all that. I am other thoughts and questions and indeterminacies that do not yet know how to bear up under the labels automatically bequeathed or contracted to me. For now, then, it is easier to shed these names temporarily and just be me, with a pseudonym as a neutral placeholder where it would be inconvenient for someone to address me simply as "she" or "you."

But that's not the answer to the question my mother is really asking on this night.

Why couldn't you have kept our name? It's a loaded question because it immediately implies that I did not choose as I should have (consider why did you change your name for comparison). The differences are minute, but words and meanings are my territory; I can't help being attuned to the subtexts in my mother's query even if she doesn't realize they are there. Why the clannishness tonight? I'd like to ask in return. I glance inadvertently toward the guest bedroom, confused by my mother's sudden coolness toward my husband. I'm hurt on his behalf.

And then it all comes out. Suddenly she's on to our financial arrangements (joint), our career decisions (too much in favor of D's advancement and not mine), even our past marital problems (the particulars of which she can only guess at since I don't share them -- and she is, of course, largely off base). It is all I can do to parry with fragmented sentences in the face of this onslaught. "You give him too much control," she says at last, still at a whisper but eyes blazing, angry for reasons I can't fathom. Do I just run?

I wish I had.

Cornered by so many accusations, I lash back. "My marriage isn't like yours," I spit. "The choices we've made have always been ours -- not just D's or mine."

The argument deteriorates from that moment. I've found the bruised places in her heart, and everything she throws at me from then on is more of the irrational -- which I don't recognize until long after I've met her barb for barb. I am terrible at refusing to engage.

That is what I need to learn, though, because the boundary that marriage establishes between me and my parents is a necessary one. Like my decision to use a pseudonym to separate my writing persona's role from the roles I have to take on in real life, my decision to limit the information I provide about my married life when my mother asks is protective -- young marriages, like young writers' identities, have weak places, foundations that need work. The protection that such a boundary affords as D and I contemplate starting a family of our own has never been more important.

But the price of maintaining that boundary is clearly something I didn't completely anticipate. If anything after this ambush, I've learned that much of what my mother thinks of my marriage is what she assumes about it, perhaps based on her dissatisfaction with her own, because I've left her with little real information to take its place.

Still, some of her last words to me on New Year's night tell me that the alternative -- sharing it all to prevent so much misunderstanding -- will be more costly. "We'll never be able to have a heart-to-heart," my mother says, "because you won't let me be honest with you."

As long as her idea of a heart-to-heart is for me to accept unconditionally her opinion on anything I share, I'd rather keep the details to myself.