Waltzing the Tango

A Late Boomer Dances to the Wrong Tune

Gabrielle Bauer

• Publisher: Dundurn Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781554886852
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Biografías de ciencias sociales

Short-listed for the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction So you grow up as a member of the baby boom. You're well-brought up, well-educated, and your parents have great expectations. And, yet, somehow, you just don't feel you belong. Along the way, you find the right wrong boyfriends: the poet-husband, and bane of your mother's existence, the married Japanese doctor. When love at last arrives, and the realization that it's just not in your nature to hold down a nine-to-five, stick-with-the-program corporate job, you discover that the one thing you thought would be very easy - conception - doesn't happen. Square peg in a round hole? Absolutely. But now it's called Waltzing the Tango - the humorous memoir of Gabrielle Bauer. It's a tale most women will not only identify with, but will also laugh along with - occasionally with the painful pangs of self-recognition.

Ready [or Not]

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.

Anne Lamott

1

By the time I finally got pregnant, at the two-thirds mark of my thirty-ninth year, the chief qualification I brought to the job was anxiety. I found myself wishing I were back in Japan, where many pregnant women stopped working as soon as they found out they were in a family way. (I remembered one of my English students complaining that his pregnant wife called him every two hours at work because she was so bored padding around the house all day.)

I spent the first couple of weeks in a stupefied daze, compulsively checking my breasts for signs of tenderness and my stomach for signs of convexity. Even my writing got pregnant. I banged out magazine queries on topics such as pregnancy after infertility, pregnancy after abortion, pregnancy after thirty-eight.

I had all the symptoms of the too-precious pregnancy — the obsessive attention to my body, the exaggerated fear. What if, this very second, the embryo is detaching itself from the walls of my uterus? What if it’s an ectopic pregnancy, a blighted embryo, a hydatidiform mole? Time slowed to a crawl as I paced around the living room, wishing I were further along in the pregnancy, wishing it were next week, tomorrow, ten minutes from now. Anything but now, with its panoply of dark possibilities.

I spent my days poring over pregnancy books and imagining, Eeyore-like, all the gloomy fates that might be in store for me and for the fetus. I would not call it a baby. I would not allow myself to get attached. (But of course I was attached, desperately. It was just a dumb superstition, thinking the evil eye could be averted by having no expectations about the future.)

I palpated my breasts while I walked, while I rode elevators, while I sat in coffee shops. People gave me curious looks. I rated my breasts’ tenderness on a scale of one to ten. When I went to Dr. Feinman’s office I badgered him with breast questions.

“Something’s wrong, I know it. My breasts are only a two today. Yesterday they were a three.”

“Say what?”

“Oh, that’s my rating system,” I mumbled. “My point is they’re hardly tender at all. One of my pregnancy books says they’re supposed to be almost unbearably sensitive by this time.”

“Not necessarily,” he said.

“But they’re not even getting larger or firmer. Isn’t that a sign that something’s wrong?”

“Not necessarily.” He poked around my vagina with his ultrasound probe. “Look, here’s the baby. Good, good, lots of fluid around it. See the heartbeat?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say what?”

“Don’t call it the baby, please.”

He looked at me with concern in his eyes and suggested I make an appointment with Kay Tannenbaum, a counsellor who worked with women on the infertility treadmill or women like myself, unable to tolerate the mystery and uncertainty of the pregnant state.

I took to Kay immediately. Her twinkly face, full of warmth and concern, her rich contralto voice saying Yes, yes. Every time I trip or stumble I think I’m about to lose the pregnancy. Yes, yes. I’m even afraid to drive over bumps or railroad tracks. Yes, yes. The other day I stamped my foot on the sidewalk — I’d gotten a forty-dollar parking ticket — and spent the rest of the day worrying that I dislodged the placenta. Yes, yes.

“Sounds like you’ve heard all this before,” I told her.

“I have,” she agreed.

“You mean I’m not crazy?”

“Of course you’re crazy, but it’s perfectly normal, under the circumstances.” We both laughed.

“Let’s face it,” she said. “The stakes are high for infertility patients. One of my clients is so scared to lose her pregnancy that she refuses to walk up and down the stairs to the subway, which means she can’t go to work unless her husband drives her. She says she would gladly lie down in bed for the whole nine months if that would guarantee a successful outcome.”

“I’ve had the same thought,” I admitted, relieved to have someone to share the craziness with. We agreed to meet once every two weeks for the rest of the pregnancy.

Shawn worried about my obsessiveness, but dutifully went to the library every few days and returned with yet another stack of pregnancy books, all of them urging me to be good to myself. “Once a month, treat yourself to something terribly wicked, like a slice of cake or pie,” one of them chirped. Yeah, right. I had been averaging a chocolate bar a day since I got pregnant.

I somehow found more comfort in reading about difficult or failed pregnancies than about healthy ones. I wallowed in other women’s heartbreaks: the twisting cramp that turned out to be an ectopic pregnancy, the routine sonogram that revealed a stopped heart, the in-vitro pregnancy that dwindled from two live embryos to one to none. I knew everything there was to know about incompetent cervix, placenta previa, placenta abruptio, placenta accreta, preeclampsia, prolapsed umbilical cord. I knew what HCG, CVS, and MAFPS stood for.

“Everyone tells me to think positive,” I told Kay. “You know, ’believe in a positive outcome and then it will happen,’ and all that holistic jazz. As if I or anyone else were entitled to a healthy pregnancy.”

“Optimism is for the innocent,” she said quietly, then spilled out the story of her own two ectopic pregnancies that left her with no Fallopian tubes. “Nobody knows what influence, if any, we have on the course of our pregnancies. If being pessimistic makes you less anxious, then be pessimistic and to hell with what people tell you.”

At fourteen weeks I had my blood drawn for a plasma fetoprotein test. A computer crunched the results together with my age and other variables, and spat out a number: one in three-hundred-and-forty-five. These were the odds that the fetus had Down Syndrome. The only way to confirm or rule out this possibility was through amniocentesis. “If it were me, I wouldn’t do it,” said Dr. Feinman. He told me about a patient who got pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, then chose to have amnio and miscarried right after the needle was injected into her uterus. “She saw the whole thing on the ultrasound monitor. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant experience.”

“But that’s pretty rare, isn’t it?”

“About one chance in two-hundred. Look, you’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get pregnant. My recommendation is to leave it alone.”

He’s right, I told myself. One in two-hundred was a greater risk than one in three-hundred-and-forty-five. I would never forgive myself if I had the procedure and miscarried as a result. It’s settled, then. I won’t do it.

At four o’clock the next morning I woke up with a start, having just dreamed that Shawn and I gave birth to twin boys with grossly enlarged heads. There was a doctor hovering over me, and I asked him if my sons would be mentally retarded. “Not retarded,” he said, “just limited.” That’s what I was afraid of, I realized as I sat up in bed. I wanted my child to have no limits at all.

“What do I do?” I wailed to Kay. “According to the numbers it should be a clearcut decision. But it isn’t. I’m going out of my mind with ambivalence.”

“To hell with the numbers,” she said. “The important thing is what the numbers mean to you. Do you need to have the information in advance? Do you need to rule out the possibility of a chromosomal defect, like Down Syndrome, or are you willing to take what comes?”

A few years earlier, while I was teaching at Yamaha, the mother of one of my students had asked me if I would be willing to give keyboard lessons to her seven-year-old daughter, Iris, who had Down Syndrome. Ashamed of my discomfort at her request, I agreed to give Iris a lesson in my apartment and see how it went. I put together a lesson plan: black notes and white notes would be boats and water, groups of three black notes would be ships, groups of two black notes would be row-boats, and so on. I thought it was brilliant, until Iris actually sat down at my synthesizer.

“Boat,” I chirped, hitting the black notes.

Using her hands as sticks, Iris did an intense drum solo on the keyboard.

“Now stop that for a minute,” I said. “Here, look at the white water. See the waves?”

Iris continued her solo, adding vocals to the mix. “Eeeaaaah.” Slap slap slap slap kerplunk. “Buuaaah.”

“See the water? See the rowboat? See the ship?”

Iris got off her chair, sat down under the keyboard and started pulling on the wires behind it.

I looked over at Iris’s mother. “I don’t know if I’m the right teacher for your daughter,” I said miserably.

And that was pretty much how I felt now, facing Kay. I didn’t know if I was the right mother for such a child. In her memoir, Expecting Adam, Martha Beck describes how having a boy with Down Syndrome gave her “a new way of seeing,” which she considered a great gift. I wasn’t sure I had this capacity. I knew there was great beauty in these children, but I feared that all my energy would be used up in learning to see it, that I would have none left for anything else.

The procedure itself was quick and painless. The doctor, a woman, talked and moved with a brisk efficiency that put me right at ease. I watched on the ultrasound monitor as she injected the long needle into my abdomen, then slowly extracted the pale yellow fluid from the amniotic sac. “Doesn’t look like we’ve disturbed the baby at all,” she said.

Two weeks later I got a call from the amnio lab. “I’ve got good news for you. She —”

“She?” I shrieked. My mind flooded with old-world images of satin, lace, fluttering pink ribbons. Sugar and spice.

“She has forty-six chromosomes.”

I was grateful, of course, but also unsettled. I felt I’d gotten away with something. By sheer luck, I had avoided a test of character I would no doubt have failed.

The craziness continued. I refused to buy any maternity clothes, even though none of my old clothes fit me. Buying them would be an admission that I didn’t expect to miscarry anymore, a triple-dog dare to fate. Fetal movements were my new obsession. When I felt a kick, my whole body sagged with relief. When an hour or two went by and I didn’t feel anything, I jabbed my belly to prod her into motion. If that didn’t work, I dove into bed, put my hands over my abdomen, and waited. Don’t come in, I said to Shawn, I’m concentrating. Come on, sweetheart, talk to me.

One evening I complained of a crampy feeling in my pelvis, and Shawn suggested putting a hot-water bottle on it. I lay down with the bottle on top of me and dozed off for a while. When I woke up, the first thing I did, as always, was to wait for a sign of her presence. Thirty, sixty, ninety minutes went by. I leapt out of bed and ran to Shawn, who was strumming his guitar in the living room.

“We killed her,” I shrieked to him.

“What are you talking about?”

“The heat. The heat from the hot-water bottle raised my internal temperature and killed her. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Shawn started to laugh. “If that’s all it took to kill a fetus, there wouldn’t be six billion of us on the planet.”

I started to laugh too, and then I felt a tiny kick, a more vigorous one, and fell to my knees saying Thank you Thank you. Any man other than Shawn would have fled for the hills long ago.

When I reached the six-month mark, Shawn broke the news of my pregnancy to Jeena, his ex-wife. When he told me she had turned pale and said not a word, I understood perfectly. But the next day she called to congratulate me.

“Thanks,” I said uncertainly.

“How’s your stomach?”

“Not too bad,” I said. And all of a sudden we were jabbering about morning sickness, stretch marks, and Braxton-Hicks contractions. We talked for half an hour. It was the first time we had said anything except Is-Shawn-there-please-yes-just-a moment to each other.

“I talked to her,” I said to Shawn when he walked through the door that evening. “To her.” I marvelled anew at the magic of the pregnant state, its power to cut through rivalry and pride.

My due date was fast approaching, the fetus had shifted into the head-first position, and I still hadn’t set foot in a baby store. “Am I completely deranged,” I asked Kay, “for not wanting to have any baby items in the house? I mean, here I am, eight months pregnant, and we don’t have a single item of clothing, not to mention a crib or change table.”

“You come by it honestly,” she said with a chuckle.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a Jewish superstition against making advance preparations for a baby’s arrival. For example, it’s not in the Jewish tradition to have a baby shower before the actual birth.”

“Sounds like the opposite of the positive thinking my friends have been pushing on me.”

“That’s right. It’s part of our collective identity, I think. With five-thousand years of persecution behind us, we’re not about to count our eggs before they hatch.”

“So I’m not crazy?” I asked her. This had become a joke between us.

“Of course you’re crazy,” she said. “But you’re in good company. Listen, my parents were the same way. They had no cradle or crib when my brother was born. He slept in a drawer for the first week.”

“My baby’s not even going to have a diaper when she gets home. If, I mean.”

For the past two months I had been sporting a mantle of varicose veins on my legs and feet. Thick ropy veins that meandered and bulged like tree roots. When I stood up my legs turned navy blue. A couple of weeks before my due date, Shawn got me a gift certificate for a pedicure, and when I hiked up my skirt the pedicurist sucked in her breath and said, “Madre de Dios,” at which I promptly burst into tears. The following week, the plum-sized bulge on the side of my left knee started to clot, and Dr. Feinman was worried.

“What I’m concerned about is the possibility that you could develop a clot in one of your deep veins, which can be serious. I think we should admit you to the hospital and induce you.”

“Can’t you just do a Caesarean?” I asked, and realized that this was what I had been hoping for all along. No fuss, no muss, no possibility of the umbilical cord wrapping itself around her neck.

“Are you serious? Most women would do anything not to have a Caesarean. In any case, I can’t really justify doing one in this situation.”

The following day I was admitted to the Women’s College Hospital’s high-risk unit. The young woman in the cubicle next to mine was six months pregnant with triplets, two girls and a boy. There was a buzz of activity around her bed: obstetricians, nurses, psychiatrists, social workers, all conferring gravely. I strained to make out their words.

“How are you planning to care for them?” someone asked her. “What arrangements have you made for help?”

“Well, I have an eleven-year-old son. I’ll get him to help out.”

“No husband or partner?”

“No. But my sister may come up from Jamaica for a couple of months.”

Later that day a team of doctors crowded around her bed. “According to the tests we’ve done, your little boy isn’t doing very well and may not survive much longer inside the uterus,” one of them said. “If we induce labour now, we have a good chance of saving him. If we wait, you’ll only have the two girls.”

“OK,” she said dully, and I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from shouting Have you all jumped out of your minds? I watched helplessly as they wheeled her out of the room.

And then it was my turn. After the fourth prostaglandin suppository my contractions finally started. Sixteen hours later, Dr. Feinman swam into my field of vision and told me that the labour was stalled. “We’ll do a quick trial of forceps, and if that doesn’t work we’ll go ahead with a Caesarean.”

“Yeah, whatever.” At that point I’d have agreed to have my left arm cut off if that would get the baby out.

I was wheeled into the operating room, given a pelvic anesthetic and told to spread my legs apart. “Now bear down,” said Dr. Feinman as he worked the force...