Emma's Laugh: The Gift of Second Chances - A Memoir

CHAPTER 1

I PEELED MY BODY AWAY from the wetness of the sheets and heaved myself out of bed. My eyes landed on the plastic diaper pail that occupied the corner of our bedroom, like some sentry on the lookout for an incoming baby. Next to it stood a cake fashioned out of Pampers that balanced a basket filled with baby paraphernalia: lotions, creams, shampoo, gender-neutral onesies. I laughed to myself at the absurdity of the situation. Here I was, rolling out of bed where my water had just broken, with the baby right on schedule, and nothing to show for preparedness other than the gifts from the baby shower my coworkers had surprised me with just weeks before.

This was not my choice. Had I had the energy to challenge my mother’s old-world, cultural superstitions, which dictated that one does not celebrate a baby’s arrival prematurely—to avoid tempting fate, messing with the universe—I would have had the spare room of our three-bedroom duplex apartment fully equipped, with all the bells and whistles, furnishings, and requisite five-foot plush giraffe, ready to receive its new tiny tenant. Had my perfectionist tendencies been given full rein to wield the control that I brought to all situations, I would have thrown myself the baby shower, and feigned surprise. My mother didn’t care to know that at twenty-six, having spent more than half my life in this country, I considered myself an American, or at least more American than Ukrainian.

Let’s do this! my husband, Anatoly (Tolya, as I called him), announced with the inappropriate glee of one not expected to shortly push a human out of their privates. He was not doing this. Technicality, I could imagine him answering if I were to point this out.

I forgave him. Because the truth was, we were doing this together, and things were largely moving according to plan. We were both gainfully employed professionals. I’d completed graduate school and worked my dream job as a family therapist. Though many days I felt ill equipped to be helping others while battling my own demons of anxiety and self-doubt, I learned quickly to act the part of the qualified clinician—to fake it till you make it.

Because on the surface, things checked off. We were confident in our parenting abilities, having had the benefit of playing house with my thirteen-year-old sister, Holly, who had come to live with us three years prior. New baby worries were dwarfed by typical teen angst. I believed we were at an advantage, some might even say ahead of the game.

I grabbed the stair rail and stepped down, taking one last sweeping glance at our open living room area—arguably my favorite space. Contemporary but comfortable furniture in the bright color palette of a Kandinsky painting was arranged just so. The red leather sleep sofa that had withstood so much adolescent action when still in Tolya’s parents’ home now anchored our living room. Adjacent to it stood the sexy, steel-framed, round open shelf unit—a serendipitous Soho furniture store find—on whose beech shelves lived my extensive collection of books. A jolt of excitement moved through me as I imagined myself on the couch, nursing, and my favorite books sharing shelf space with puzzles and Dr. Seuss books.

Tolya held the door open for me as I made one final scan of the space I would be returning to with a baby in my arms. Ashes, our Russian Blue cat, sat perched on the faux Le Corbusier Chaise, like a Bastet statue—the Egyptian goddess of cats, the home, family, and motherhood. Perfect.

I tried not to dwell on the notion that he was possibly still grieving the loss of his partner in crime—our cocker spaniel, Jules—who died unexpectedly just a few months earlier. Had I been superstitious like my mother, I would have worried about this foreboding event. But I had not lived long enough for the mystical world to threaten me or impinge on my sensibilities. I believed in science and medicine and playing by the rules for the best outcomes. What could possibly go wrong?

I straightened the tilted hallway mirror and walked out the door.

In the car, I strained to tune in to what was happening in my body; no sign of contractions, only the flutter of butterfly nerves that accompanied all new and anxiety-provoking situations in my life. As I watched my husband’s hands gripping the steering wheel, I told myself that before long, those hands I loved so much would be holding our newborn baby. Tolya’s hands were my favorite of his physical attributes. Though not long-limbed, Tolya boasted long, tapering fingers that seemed to have evolved directly from the pronounced veins that ran like a multilane highway, with protruding knuckles serving as speed bumps. Hands defined but smooth, as if years on the tennis team chiseled them, and the years on the swim team tamed them into soft ripples.

I wondered who the baby would look like. Would it have its father’s generous forehead? —an attribute my mother always insisted characterized intelligence; "Beeg head to hold a beeg breyn," I could hear her saying. I never dared ask what my small, flat, unimpressive forehead signified. I hoped the baby would inherit Tolya’s large deep-set eyes—brown pools of kindness—and not my beady ones, as he once called them, teasingly.

Do you think it’s a boy or a girl? I asked, more to dispel my nervous energy than anything else.

Months ago, when the sonogram technician asked if we wanted to know the sex, Tolya had said, I don’t want technology announcing to me the most natural, momentous event in life. This was coming from a computer programmer, someone who stared at a screen day in and day out. He was not about to allow a machine to dispense foreknowledge and therefore control of the uncontrollable.

Now he said, I don’t know. I thought he would reveal his hopes, but he joked, It’s one or the other.

I secretly wished for a girl.

In the hospital, a nurse wheeled me into a room where a handsome intern was waiting to help things along. We’re going to break your water fully, to speed things up, he said matter-of-factly. I cursed the timing of his youth and good looks. Why did I have to get the hot doctor in these embarrassing circumstances? I was suspicious of the reasons male medical students settled on obstetrics and gynecology as a specialty. The real question was why I was even entertaining those musings. It’s not like we were on a first date and I’d suddenly realized I’d forgotten to shave my legs.

Before I could finish my thought, I felt a flood of wetness. The contractions heralded a tsunami of pain that washed over me, then ebbed. Drugs seemed the obvious answer. My mother’s war story of how she labored with me for twenty-four hours without pain medication surfaced briefly at the rim of my awareness. I felt a tinge of sympathy for her and said a mental prayer of thanks that I was delivering my baby in the United States, where drugs were plentiful. This was 1996 and not the backwards 1969 of Soviet Ukraine.

I awoke from a blissful epidural-induced sleep, savoring the quiet and peace. Though it only lasted a moment before the delivering doctor turned on the bright overhead light and announced that it was time to push. Encouraged by him, I sat up to a practically upright position to see my baby make an entrance into the world. One last push, and a tiny grayish being emerged almost effortlessly and then was placed on my chest.

It’s a girl, the doctor said.

My skin bristled in a warm afterglow, and as I clutched my baby, one hand on her head, the other on her bottom, all I could think was, I did it—wholly convinced I had produced something truly singular and original, my greatest creation. I felt completely at one with her and apart from the world. My husband, the doctor, the nurse ceased to exist—receding into the peripheral darkness of the delivery room. And it was just me and my baby—my slight, ashen, still baby.

The doctor made his way to us, Tolya at our side. He lifted the baby and placed her face up into the crook of my arm. I looked down at her, and that’s when I saw it.

Something’s wrong, I said.

I looked to Tolya. Fear was engraved into his face, in the widening of his eyes. I mined my brain for the maternally correct words. She doesn’t … look like either of us. I fixed my desperate gaze to the doctor.

That’s what I said. What I thought was critical, ugly, and completely unacceptable. What I thought as I cradled this small, greenish, alien-looking baby, my daughter, Emma, was that she looked sick. Abnormal. Imperfect.

Of course, I had no experience with what a newborn looked like seconds after entering the world. I expected to see a balding, cherubic infant, with features that suggested some future version of what could evolve into my thick straight hair, my husband’s aquiline nose, my grandmother’s hazel eyes. What I saw was low-set ears; wide-set eyes; a flat, practically nonexistent nose bridge; tiny lips; and a small head. She was visually striking, but not in the way I had expected.

I lowered my eyes to survey my baby’s face again. Emma’s mouth grimaced at no one in particular, as if she were preparing to howl in protest at being so rudely disturbed—evicted from her warm cocoon of a home and thrust under the offensive, sterile light of the overhead examination lamp. Yet no sound of protest escaped the twisted gash that was her mouth. It was then I realized that she hadn’t yet cried. There was no piercing sound that is the expected rite of passage of one just initiated into the world.

She didn’t announce her presence. She arrived much too quietly.

The doctor stepped forward, and I waited for his reassuring words—for him to tell me I was overreacting. Instead, his downturned mouth and furrowed brow mirrored mine. I felt my eyes well with sadness and imagined that the mascara I had vainly and hurriedly applied at home after my water broke was leaving a dark trail of despair on my face.

My baby was seconds old, and already she was flawed.

We’ll have to run some tests, the doctor said. He removed Emma’s soft body from mine and handed her to the nurse, who whisked her away to administer the Apgar test.

The Apgar test, we later learned, was designed to quickly evaluate a baby’s physical condition shortly after birth. The higher the score, the healthier the baby. Sometime later, Tolya and I would recall the numbers and laugh at the absurdity and improbability of her 8 out of a possible 10 score. She couldn’t have gotten much credit for being greenish-gray instead of pink, floppy in tone, with an absent response to stimulation and an immediate need for supplemental oxygen. Perhaps the nurse was trying to be hopeful.

I turned to Tolya. What’s happening?

I don’t know. He shook his head.

It seemed impossible. We were young and healthy. I’d been so careful. I’d exercised during my pregnancy, took the horse-tranquilizer-sized prenatal vitamins religiously. I’d even excused myself from helping transcribe a book my social work school professor recruited me for, so I wouldn’t expose my belly to the radiation.

I attacked the task of conceiving like a zealot—graphing my morning temperature so I could track my ovulation and do the deed on just the right days, and no others. Tolya, get up, I would say, shaking my husband awake on those days. I’m ovulating. Let’s get to work.

Oh my god, he would moan and try to roll over. But I persisted. The naturally pleasurable act morphed into a scheduled chore, a to-do list, bereft of color and passion, but not humor. The end justified the means in my mind, and I was not to be distracted from my mission.

I had loved being pregnant. Loved the doting and the extra attention—the knowledge I’d always be able to get a seat on the train if I opened my coat, stood tall, and thrust my pelvis out just enough. I didn’t even mind so much strangers touching my belly as if they knew me intimately, gushing as if I were carrying their child. Aww, how far along are you? a woman on a train asked once, her foreign hand making its way over my roundness. Life as a human incubator had been lovely.

The next several hours were a blur. It was as if someone had taken an eraser to the Assignment of the Day carefully written out on the blackboard and obliterated the words, leaving behind a messy residue of chalk.

I left the delivery room in a wheelchair, ignoring my mother and sister-in-law’s tirade of panicked questions: What’s wrong? Why are you crying? Where’s the baby?

I cried the length of the hospital corridor on my way to the recovery room. Don’t look at me. Don’t pity me. People’s glances landed like punches to the gut. Something about seeing another person cry is intriguing, like slowing down to take in a five-car pileup on the highway. I’ve known the feeling of wanting to come up to a stranger and ask to hear their story.

Someone helped me onto the hospital bed, I heard a baby cry, and then there was blackness.

I think I slept. Snippets of a baby crying, nurses moving in and out, talking, lights behind the curtain separating my world from another’s left tracks on my dreams.

The crying baby was not a dream. But the crying baby was not mine. The cries belonged to a healthy baby born to the lucky woman with whom I was sharing the recovery room. I vaguely recalled her complaining about being asked to nurse her child in the middle of the night when all she wanted to do was sleep.

I glimpsed day from beyond the curtain separating me from my neighbor, her bed closest to the windows. Despite the morning light seeping in from above and below, my corner of the room felt painfully dark.

My baby was missing from my arms. My breasts did not know her touch.

I stirred and turned to see Tolya sleeping in the chair by the foot of my bed.

You okay? he asked, opening his eyes. Loaded question. I could not reach for the words. All I could do was shake my head as the familiar sting of tears from the night before resumed. A pain emanated from below. I could feel blood staining my pad and imagined my bleeding heart the source.

Sometime later that morning, my delivering doctor paid me a visit. He was joined by another obstetrician. They stood at the foot of my bed and asked questions. They spoke dryly, their voices solemn, but they were not devastated. I expected them to look stricken, like I felt inside.

They asked how I was feeling. I may have answered. I may not have with words. My tear-stained, swollen face spoke volumes for me.

In my head I bellowed, How could you let this happen? You were supposed to take care of us! I trusted you!

They may have mentioned that Emma was undergoing genetic testing. They may have suggested the possibility of a congenital disorder. They said I could see her in the NICU when I was ready. I said I wanted to go home.

I asked to see the baby. It seemed the maternal thing to do, though fear of what I would find whispered I stay safely in bed.

Do you need help? Tolya offered as he watched me get out of bed. I was grateful for his concern, registering briefly that I was not the only one this was happening to, but at that moment I was too deep inside my own swamp to acknowledge it.

The clothes I arrived in the day before felt absurdly large. My stretchy wool pants barely held on to my hips, threatening to slide off. I felt insignificant in my oversized sweater, which had hours before disguised my belly, now already half its former size.

Outside the door to the NICU a nurse handed us paper hospital gowns to don, instructing us to wash our hands in the deep sink before going in. What is this world we have entered?

Nothing prepares a parent for the NICU. No book we could have ever read, no movie we could have watched could help make this ordeal less of a nightmare. Emma lay sleeping in a Plexiglas incubator. If we didn’t know any better, she could have passed for a preemie, like the ones that flanked the room, their visible veins beneath diaphanous, paper-thin skin—almost translucent. At a full-term weight of four pounds, twelve ounces, she looked even smaller. Tubes and wires circled her body. The beeps and lights reminded me of a horrific movie I could have seen on the Sci-Fi channel. I stared at her sleeping form. How could the sky outside be so blue? How could this be my baby?

Can I hold her? I turned to the nurse, noting her pink uniform with playful bunnies in a pattern, which I assumed was meant to be consoling to new parents. Instead, it saddened me. It was not cute. It sliced through my heart—the reality of just how not cute our situation was.

It wasn’t until the nurse gently removed Emma from the incubator and placed her in my arms that I realized just how dependent she was on the wires and tubes sustaining her. My flesh gave her life, but that wasn’t enough.

A sense of incompetence and failure assaulted me.

I surveyed her body. Something, I’d later learn called a pulse oximeter, was attached to her toe that kept track of her oxygen levels. Little round stickers all over her slight body gauged her heart rate. A nasal cannula delivered the supplemental oxygen. But most disturbing of all was the white plastic tube filled with formula inserted into her nose and directed toward her esophagus. The wires composed a veritable petite octopus, its tentacles working to keep Emma alive.

Why does she have the feeding tube? I asked the nurse, trying to keep my voice from shaking.

We tried giving her a bottle, but she didn’t have a suck reflex. The feeding tube ensures that the milk doesn’t go into her lungs and cause her to aspirate. A baby that doesn’t suck. A baby that doesn’t cry. What have we done?

I stared at Emma’s funny face; wispy hair rose from her smallish head. She looked so fragile, felt so soft. Then she opened her eyes, her gaze the glassy surface of a lake. It beckoned me to embrace and protect her, but it frightened me also.

Not yet knowing whether she could see or hear, I whispered, Hi, baby. Mama loves you.

I leaned down slowly to put my lips on her forehead. A tear landed on her chest, and her eyes darted back and forth in seeming acknowledgment. She didn’t appear to look at me but past me—past my smiling tears, as if focused on a middle distance where a lifetime movie was playing, one I did not want to see.

Tolya draped his body over mine and reached to brush Emma’s cheek with the back of his finger. I looked at him but didn’t have to say anything—knowing his thoughts paralleled mine. A dark veil descended on us.

I refused to stay the extra night the hospital offered to all new moms. I yearned for my bed, the covers that would hide me from the rest of this cruel world that allowed babies to be born fighting for survival. I wanted to hide from my own maudlin thoughts that had already painted an ominous, alienating landscape of doctors, therapists, surgeries, medication.

Returning to the apartment that night, I saw our red leather couch as if it were a hot coal—burning, mocking. The cat did not come to greet us.

That first night back at the apartment, I couldn’t sleep. Tolya woke to find me sitting up on the side of the bed, wailing. The sounds were unrecognizable even to me—a primal howl from somewhere deep I had never known existed. The mirrored doors of the wardrobe reflected a desperate figure, doubled over, face in hands.

Tolya wrapped his arms around me. It was all he could do. I was grateful for it.

CHAPTER 2

WE MET AT A FRIEND’S bar mitzvah, though met is not actually the right word. Each time I glanced at the table adjacent to mine, I first felt, then saw a pair of eyes boring a hole through my skull with a predatory intensity—that of a hormonal sixteen-year-old boy, as was the case.

Who’s that strange guy over there? I asked Marianna, the girl I sat next to.

Oh, that’s my brother, she said, smiling without betraying the slightest offense. My face turned crimson.

I’m s-s-o sorry, I said.

It’s fine, we don’t look anything alike. I know, he’s funny looking, she said and let out a rolling laugh. Tolya and I didn’t speak that day. But our paths crossed again shortly after.

I was eight and Tolya eleven when we separately abandoned our respective corners of then-Soviet Ukraine. Our families joined the wave—an exodus of thousands—to freedom. It was the late 1970s, and the Soviet Union had just opened its doors to allow the Jewish population to get their unwelcome tuchuses out. We were political refugees, fleeing religious persecution. Communism was alive and well, atheism was the religion of the land, and Jews, as ever, were persona non grata.

We settled in Forest Hills, Queens, where I assimilated into the folds of the new country seamlessly, as the English language found its home in me as though I had always known it and it had merely been lounging in the corners of my brain, waiting to do its bidding. Queens, as it turned out—often referred to as the United Nations of boroughs—was the perfect place to land. My circle of friends ran the geographic and ethnic gamut: a Patel, a Lee, a Hernandez, a Jackson, and of course, Soviet immigrant kids. This was how Tolya and I met.

I was sixteen years old and Tolya was seventeen when we morphed into cliché high school sweethearts. Young and immature, we had little to talk about, but shared the history of immigrant childhoods and the burden of achievement that our family’s sacrifice dictated.

Then my parents realized the ultimate immigrant’s dream: they bought a house and moved the five of us (my two-year-old sister, Holly, and my paternal grandmother, Basya) from our humble one-bedroom in Queens to the suburb of Staten Island. Though a seemingly progressive step, for me it proved to be the tipping point and my unraveling. At the age of seventeen, I found myself brusquely uprooted and replanted in foreign soil—forced for the second time in my life to abandon everything familiar.

Paradoxically, the immigration from country to country felt less disruptive than the move from borough to borough. Much had to do with my age—teen existential angst, the act of relinquishing long-established friends compounded by the colossal struggle of breaking through high school cliques and negotiating new friendships.

Making it in high school as a new kid on the block became a social litmus test, which I failed miserably. I can’t do this, I would sob, dragging myself past my mother into the bathroom each school morning, leaning