first draft of "Ode to Grandpa"

In my favorite memory of Grandpa, we’re in the garden outside the living room and the tv is on just inside the window, the jingle that opens the nightly news letting us know it’ll soon be time for dinner. Grandma is in the kitchen preparing something delicious. Her focus on the food plus the noise of the newscast prevent her from knowing what Grandpa’s up to. He’s shushing us as we giggle and reminding us not to tell Grandma as he does something she has strictly instructed him not to: he’s standing on his head, his tennis shoes reaching toward the rooftop as his socks slide down his calves. He loves standing on his head for us; loves entertaining us; loves the mischief of it too. In this memory, my cousin Alex and I are probably 10 and 11, but Grandpa seems too gleeful to really be the 68 years old that that would have made him.

During my childhood, he opened me up to numerous other joys. One summer, he made sure my brother and I learned to sail. Others, he dragged us around the fields of Little Compton in the wheelbarrow attached to his tractor or led us on walking expeditions right through the neighbors’ yards to teach us the best routes to the beach or the cove. Once he took me on a walk through Cambridge in the falling snow. He must’ve felt for this kid who grew up in the warm climate of Atlanta; he must’ve thought it important that I know the joy of licking snowflakes off my lips, the crunch of the stuff beneath my shoes. When in college there years later, I tried to find the route he had taken me on, but all I could remember was returning to the house a different way than we had departed—returning through the parking lot of the Quaker meeting house and being delighted—at this point it getting dark out and me becoming quite cold—to find our house just on the other side.

He also took me to visit colleges. When I had narrowed it down to Dartmouth and Harvard, he and my mother got in cahoots and bought me a plane ticket so I could visit both one more time. Before I flew he called to ask me what kind of sandwich I wanted for the drive to Hanover. I assumed he’d pick something up at Au Bon Pain on the way to the airport, but when he met me he was carrying a sandwich he’d made himself, and because he had found my request for no tomatoes or mayonnaise ridiculous—he felt the sandwich would be too dry—he’d included cucumbers, and to this day that’s my favorite way to complete a sandwich. From the airport we drove to Dartmouth, where he left me overnight, then returned the next day to bring me back to Cambridge and leave me in Harvard Yard.

My first year of college, I was grateful to have my grandparents just six blocks away. There were a lot of things I loved about college, but I was a thousand miles from home and definitely homesick. Sometimes Grandpa would call me and invite me over for lunch. While there one day, I cried a little, feeling lonely for home. That day he told me two things: first, that I should think of their house as home too, and second, that there was a garden in the center of a museum in Boston where you could eat lunch in the springtime and where he sometimes liked to take a book and read. I remember the excitement I felt the first time I went to that museum, the satisfaction of knowing that I was sharing one of his favorite things.

My grandparents have given me a lot of life’s most precious moments. Letting me come to Little Compton every summer and just be a kid, enjoying the beach and the yard and the books I’d pull from the bedroom shelves; taking me to Europe for my first time; letting me live in their house in Cambridge in the summers during college—being a second set of parents, really, and the kind with a bit of fairy dust between their fingers. I have recordings I made a few years ago of Grandpa telling me some of my favorite of his stories—because if anything made this man magical to me it was the combination of his storytelling abilities and his insatiable appetite for satisfying his curiosity through adventure and exploration. Oh the stories he told—from his childhood, about the day at age seven that he put his little sister in a wagon and trekked her across Milwaukee to his family’s new home; and from Los Alamos—about the bomb, sure, but also his attempt to sneak off the premises, driving down a cliff-side trail he felt certain had no security gate—until he hit an enormous boulder blocking the path, leaving no need for any security whatsoever down that way; and his delight in Grandma’s being reassigned to the high explosives unit for her safety; and the way it tickled him to tell me every time I asked about the way he first met Grandma, and how their first date went, and how awed he was by her intrepidness at the end of that day.

This was a man who accomplished a great deal in his career, who is known by many people outside his family for his work on the Manhattan Project, in Washington, and in multiple universities. But he was also a man who delighted in heading up a large family, in educating us—for he certainly wasn’t shy about sharing his viewpoints or his knowledge base—and also in nurturing and inspiring us. My grandfather was a man who lived every day exemplifying what it means to really dig in to life and give it good reason to make you grin ear to ear, and that lesson is one I take from his life with appreciation and glee.

second thoughts

The feeling has not been fleeting. Two days after that first glimpse at the sperm bank’s website, I still don’t want those profiles to be the ones I’m perusing. A part of my brain is scurrying to think of all the new photos and text I could add to my online dating profile to try to make me more compelling; is thinking that maybe I should immediately join the various groups I’ve been meaning to become a member of for quite some time—the Sierra Club’s singles hiking group, Toastmasters, maybe another writing class with a new group of classmates—to give myself another chance at meeting someone whom I might fall for. And get to have this baby with. 

A part of me doesn’t want to have given up on (or put a multi-year pause on) that sort of love.

But some love would be better than no love, the other part of me seems to be saying, and you have never been lucky in romantic love. And familial love is pretty hard to rival. When I think about my grandma or my mom and the way they’ve nurtured me, everything in me aches at the thought of not getting to offer my own little one the same. I absolutely do not want to miss out on that. But am I rushing into it? That, I think, is the question of the day.

A number of mothers have questioned whether I am really prepared for this baby. What’s your plan for daycare? they’ve each asked me, appalled at the thought of me leaving a three-month-old at a daycare facility once maternity leave ends but knowing I can’t afford to hire a nanny or stay home longer. What is my plan? I’ve had to ask myself. Mostly, I daydream of hiring one of my co-worker’s moms, who is currently out of work as a nanny and is a truly lovely woman who raised the most amazing son (one of my favorite employees) so I’d be thrilled to have her help raise my own munchkin. But I don’t honestly know anything about the cost of that option or any other. I have definitely not done my homework in this regard. This week I’m wondering if maybe I should.

The thing is, I think my heart is, for once, winning out over my head.

Two images have been floating around my mind for the past few weeks as I’ve undertaken the first few steps of this process. They float, and they fill my heart with commitment to having this kid.

One image is of my nieces and nephew—their faces hover, and I am filled with a sensation of the deepest love I’ve ever known. It is painful to think that I go a whole year between visits with them. The ten precious days I get with them annually are ten of the richest in emotion that I ever experience. Every inch of my body responds to the thought of them with a desire to feel that way daily, yearly, for all the rest of my life.

The other image is of a bookstore in Harvard Yard. I am standing by a display table covered in books, my dear friend Lauren at my side. I’m crying, and she’s holding my hand and cooing at me in the way that a person who doesn’t hug others but who really really wishes at that moment she did will coo. In front of us is the book Our Bodies, Our Selves, and we have just read the section on the ovarian condition that I have recently been diagnosed with. We are 19, and though we are too young to have thought about having babies yet, now we know that my body may not be able to do it, and I am mourning for the child I might never have. I am too young to have thought about having babies yet, but knowing I might not be able to makes me know something else: I badly want to. And I immediately take on a sense of guilt, of disappointment for someone else—because I believe that eventually someone will fall in love with me, and that he’ll want to have children, and that I will break his heart if I can’t. I write my first long work of fiction from his perspective; I watch him struggle as he and his sister fall in love with her first child and he tries to accept that he may not get to have his own. How could a young me have foreseen my own future so vividly when I wrote him into being?

His almost-breaking point comes while watching his newborn niece sleep and reading this letter that hangs over her crib:

                                                                                                                                     December 9, 1998

Gracie, my angel,                                                       

     I am writing this letter to welcome you into the world, into our lives, into your life. I have awaited your arrival endlessly and now I await my (and your) discovery of you.

     We hardly even know you (you burst out to join us only two days ago), and yet we count you as our greatest blessing. You are our most precious thing. We are so eager to watch you develop, to see your life unfold—and yet we take joy in every moment, we savor each gurgle in your throat, each contortion of your wrinkled face. 

     We watch you sleep and we see promise—never ending promise. Please grow up knowing that your Mommy and Daddy will always be watching you like this: with wonder.

                                    with love the size of the ocean and then some,
                                                                        Mommy

That letter, I want to write that in real life. I have so much love to give, such a depth of emotional capacity. I know that I will be an amazing mom, and I know that I can’t let myself miss out on doing so.

But am I really prepared? And do I really need to do it right now??

I hit pause after looking at the sperm bank website. It’s not that I’m having second thoughts about having this baby, or even about being a single mom. I still want to do it. I will plan to do it. I am not wimping out. Nothing makes me feel more zen than thinking about my baby. But I may slow the process down a bit. My doctor told me, after I passed all the initial tests, that the next steps were to pick out a sperm donor, then go off the pill, then get two more fertility tests done when I get my period naturally, and then inject the sperm. I’m thinking I may instead go off the pill, get my period, and get those two tests done—minus picking out the sperm. And if the tests come back clear, just as the others have, then maybe instead of starting to make this baby artificially, I can take six months to be the most proactive dater you’ve ever seen. Maybe I can make one last try at doing this naturally. The reason I felt the need to start now was that I thought my ovarian condition would make it take years to get pregnant. But my doctor says cheerfully that with fertility treatments, it could take just a few months. And I’m only just now turning 36. So maybe I still have time. Maybe. It’s really hard to know.

baby daddy blues

This is that moment – the one I’ve been almost glad to be working 70 hours a week to avoid. This evening I left the office at a reasonable hour for the first time in four weeks. I went to the mall and made some returns; I went to the grocery store and restocked my fridge. Then I got home, nestled into the couch with some hummus and vegetables to munch on, and opened the web page my infertility doctor wrote down for me.

I thought I would just read on the website what the hours of the sperm bank are and then figure out a time when I can go there to flip through large binders until I find my baby’s papa. But this is the 21^st century; of course the profiles are online. And it turns out they look and read a heck of a lot like match.com profiles—which is freaking me out, so I’ve closed the web page after reading about just two of the men. Or, I think I should say, two of the donors.

This is the most surreal thing I have ever done.

The write-ups feel like dating profiles; these guys sound great. It’s hard to wrap my brain around never meeting them. Around not really knowing what their faces look like, or what accents they have, or what the timbre of their voices is like. In daily life, my eye tends to be caught by people’s hands—I study the shape of fingernails, the length of fingers, the structure of knuckles. In my own family, I see all kinds of relationships in physical features like these. My forefingers and maybe thumbs are my Grandma Raia’s; my thighs and eyebrows definitely are too. My ring fingers and pinkies look more like my Grandpa Don’s; my feet, calves, and arm bones are just like my father’s. These boobs could come from either grandmother, but I think my double-F Grandma Lilli is the more likely source. This hair is Mom’s in color and Dad’s in fineness. This Cheshire cat grin, for certain, is Dad’s too, as is my brother’s. My giggle, my voice—I don’t know whom they come from; but I know my brother’s laughter is just like Dad’s, and my Uncle Tom’s is just like Grandma Raia’s. My mom sounds like her father so much of the time it’s uncanny. I want to know these things about my baby and his or her daddy. I want to know who I see in my little one when it’s not someone from my own family reflecting back at me.

To do it this way, the surreal-but-at-least-I’m-not-left-out-of-it-altogether-way, I’ll have to decide on a few factors, and then I’ll have to accept whatever they preordain without any real knowledge of their likely outcomes. The choices I’m given on the website seem so limited. I think I’ll construct a man like the ones in my family, in hopes of concocting a good blend with me. I can pick someone tall like my dad and brother, because I can pick my baby’s daddy’s height. I can pick someone with our family’s dark hair. Someone with our educational levels. From the profiles I can figure out who claims to be other things that tend to have meaning for me—whose profile states that he is poetic, or artistic, or inclined toward making music. Whose profile sounds beatific about nature. But how will I know whose heart is kind, whose arms will spawn snuggly, hug-loving arms like mine? 

What this brief visit to a website makes me realize is that what I really want to pick is an actual daddy for my little one. I know I can love the heck out of this kid, but man does it feel bad to set him or her up for a single-parent life right off the bat. Man at this moment would I like fate to finally get its shit together and put a living, breathing daddy in my and my baby’s path.

soundtrack to my heart

For those of you who like listening to good music, this is the soundtrack to what’s been going on in my heart of late (mid-November through the present):

when I’m soaring along on the road and feeling good:

Dehlia Low: “Going Down”

Dehlia Low: “State of Jefferson”

when I’m soaring along the road feeling nostalgic or wistful:

Dehlia Low: “Living is Easy”

Dehlia Low: “Ravens and Crows”

when I’m still and nostalgic:

The Be Good Tanyas: “Midnight Moonlight”

when I want to just really feel my feelings:

The Be Good Tanyas: “Broken Telephone”

The Be Good Tanyas: “Light Enough to Travel”

The Be Good Tanyas: “Horses”

The Be Good Tanyas: “Hello Love”

when I feel laid back and grooving:

The Be Good Tanyas: “Human Thing”

The Be Good Tanyas: “Ootischenia”

when my soul is smiling with contentment:

Dehlia Low: “Bide My Time”

Dehlia Low: “Plains of Tellico” (especially the last minute or so of the song)
Dehlia Low: "Spoon"

-- From the albums Tellico and Ravens and Crows by Dehlia Low and Blue Horse, Chinatown, and Hello Love by the Be Good Tanyas.

-- From my daydream of what my voice would sound like if I could sing and what my music would sound like if I ever learn to play the guitar, mandolin, or banjo.

-- I find that if I listen to the last three repeatedly, my heart feels light. Like yoga for the soul.

heart's swing

“Heart’s swing. O so securely fastened

to what invisible bough? Who, who gave you that push,

so that you swung me up into the leaves?

How close I was to the fruit, delectable. But not-to-remain

is this moment’s essence. Only the closeness….”

            -- excerpt from an unnamed poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

It’s like walking a tightrope—trying to will my body to maintain balance, focus, and the exhilaration of keeping momentum atop such an un-sturdy foundation. I hoped I would be strong enough to never come down from the high I felt in New Mexico, on all those southwestern highways, throughout those blessed six weeks of rehabilitation, rejuvenation, and exploration. I wanted that serenity I achieved to be long-lasting. But my heart’s swing keeps plunging back toward the hard dirt of earth; swooping upward; then plunging again.

The first day back at work was deadening; I felt taken captive—the dial of my intellect set back to pause, the peacefulness of my mind sent a-flurry. But my heart did, metaphorically, keep beating. It ached with sadness, not wanting to return to the same old routine; yet it also pulsed with hopefulness—certain that it could swing itself back to those heights—at least at times, if not with permanency.

On day four, optimism fell from the sky as well. I spent hours conducting an investigation—minute by minute unfolding layers of an unbelievable and dreadful story. My favorite new staff member, someone whom I and the rest of my team found impressively inspiring, proved to be a crook. He’d been taking money from us for months, lying expertly through both tears and a dazzling smile. He’d opened up to me to blind me, I understood now. He’d breached my trust in a dramatic way, and he’d self-sabotaged, forcing me to fire someone I otherwise thought was outstanding at his job. For both I was unfathomably angry. He’d also introduced me to a new level of worry, as it had to be some serious desperation that would cause a person to steal from children, which is what stealing from my particular employer really is. Thus he’d also generated for me a consuming anxiety. And he’d added his full-time job to my already overloaded plate. My second week back proved to be one of the most exhausting of my work life.

Week three began on a gorgeous Sunday, the temperature in the 60s, the sun crisp in the air, me and a friend happy to hike the foothills for hours, idle our time away at the high point, my heart’s swing frozen momentarily at the peak of its arch as I found zen again overlooking the ocean and bay, the city and east bay, the hovering prowess of Mt. Diablo. I arrived home feeling well again—only to get a phone call, one of life’s most dreaded phone calls. My mom was nearly crying, letting me know that Grandpa was declining quickly and would not last but a few more days. He’d gotten pneumonia and shingles three weeks earlier, and now he was surviving on morphine. The nurse said he’d stopped eating. My grandmother said he would die that night.

He waited until the morning, until his three living children had all arrived. At the nurse’s ushering, they and my grandmother left the room for a short walk; when they returned, he’d ceased breathing. My mother saw a dead body for the first time in her life. My mother, always daddy’s little girl, saw the dead body of her father and wished with all her might to not have to let him go.

I arrived the next evening. I missed all the story-telling and half of my relatives, and I left my grandmother after just a three-day visit. But oh did my heart rebound during those few days with her, this old lady who has shown me the most unconditional love of my life. This magical old lady who shooed me out the door after a not-long-enough visit because she was excited for what I had to do the next day, and the one after that.

The first day back from my grandmother’s I went to the doctor—the infertility specialist—and I got started on the process of becoming a single mom. Right now I’m in the process of getting loads of tests done to make sure my body can nurture a child; right now is a time of patience, and of unpredictability, yet it feels undeniably certain. I am going to be a mother, one way or another. This is no longer something I’m going to do; it’s something I am actively working on. My heart’s swing has flung itself back toward the sky.

The second day back I went to dim sum with two people who once interviewed me for my dream job—and who spent five hours that day trying to woo me into considering it again. Right now I’m in the phase of waiting and seeing; I told them I was absolutely interested, and now they’re going to the mat for me, proposing the idea to their fellow board members. Right now is a time of patience, and of unpredictability, yet it feels undeniably hopeful. I may get to have my dream job; even if I don’t, there are two people out there who think I’m phenomenal and are dying to have me run their show. My heart’s swing has flung itself further upward, now trying to grasp onto a cloud.

It’s most likely that the swing will fall again; most likely that I will drop from the tight rope at least some of the times I tread across it. But I am grateful for all this heart swing activity. I am grateful to have back the emotional life without which I had feared I had learned to live.