Devotion Page 19

  “It doesn’t fit in,” I answered. “It just is. I’m Jewish. Michael’s Jewish. Jacob’s Jewish.” I thought of Sylvia Boorstein’s elegant phrase: complicated with it. We were complicated by our history, by the religion of our ancestors. There was beauty and wisdom and even solace in that. I no longer felt that I had to embrace it all—nor did I feel that I had to run away. I could take the bits and pieces that made sense to me, and incorporate them into the larger patchwork of our lives.

  I reached into my handbag for the well-worn black notebook I carried with me everywhere, writing in it only passages I had come across that had great meaning to me. “This is the way I’ve come to think of it,” I said, turning the pages. The wisdom of a Catholic monk: “Here—from Thomas Merton. ‘Your brightness is my darkness. I know nothing of you and, by myself, cannot even imagine how to go about knowing you. If I imagine you, I am mistaken. If I understand you, I am deluded. If I am conscious and certain I know you, I am crazy. The darkness is enough.’”

  88.

  It was hard to trust that everything really was okay. I knew what we had been told. The infantile spasms were infantile in nature. The medication had suppressed them. There was no reason to believe that they’d resume, or morph into something else. These seizures weren’t a lifelong condition, but rather a brief and fiery storm that we had been able to douse before it burned us all to the ground. But still—I quietly worried. I zorged—a Yiddish word I later learned from Sylvia—which means “to create unnecessary anguish.” We had been through the necessary anguish. Why was I still doing this to myself?

  Jacob was three, then four, then five. He caught up to his peers. Almost no one in our new Connecticut life knew about his history. I was fierce, and fiercely private, about Jacob. He was thriving. Funny, smart, quirky, gorgeous. I choked back the tears I felt coming on when I watched him with a group of kids, kicking around a soccer ball, or singing in a chorus. But still—I couldn’t quite let go. Letting go, it seemed, was an invitation for disaster to strike. Once, in shavasana at the end of a yoga class, I was in a state of deep relaxation when a woman who had been in a headstand behind me fell over backward, her feet landing hard on my chest. As I jolted upward, the feeling I remember wasn’t anger, or fear. It was akin to grief. See? This is what happens when I trust that all is well.

  Vigilance was essential. Vigilance was the only answer in the face of all that could possibly go wrong. Wasn’t it? I tried to make sure that my anxiety didn’t rub off on Jacob, but I’m sure it did. To this day, he watches me carefully, assessing my mood. What? he’ll ask. What’s wrong?

  One day, when he was in kindergarten, I came to school to pick him up and saw that he was doing something funny with his head. A fast kind of nodding that looked involuntary. I felt it then—the other shoe dropping. Were his eyes flickering? Was I imagining the whole thing? When we got home, I called his pediatrician in New York. She suggested I take Jacob for a second opinion, and gave me a name that was familiar to me from a few years earlier, when I carried a list of national experts around with me like a Bible.

  A few weeks later, Michael and I drove into New York with Jacob, and went to the hospital where the doctor worked. The whole way in, I wondered if this was overkill. I hadn’t seen the fast nodding again. There was no sign of anything wrong. Why subject Jacob to the poking and prodding of a stranger? My hypervigilance had once been very useful—it had saved Jacob’s life when I first noticed the tiny seizures and rushed him to the neurologist. But when was enough enough?

  In his office, the doctor checked Jacob’s reflexes, tossed him a ball, asked him to write his name. He made notes about large and small motor functions. He looked into Jacob’s eyes with a pinpoint flashlight. All the while, he chatted with Jacob about kindergarten, asked what sports he liked to play.

  When he was finished with the exam, he set down his clipboard. “Do you know how lucky you are?” he asked me.

  Yes. I knew how lucky we were.

  But then the doctor hesitated. “This is probably unnecessary, but as long as you’re here, why don’t we do an EEG on Jacob. Just to be sure.”

  It had been nearly four years since Jacob last had an EEG. As a baby, he’d had more than I could count. Either Michael or I would cradle him as a technician applied cold, sticky goo all over his head, and then stuck a series of electrodes on top. The stuff had a sharp, chemical smell. He would cry and cry as he drank down a bottle of milk. He had to fall asleep before the test could commence. Now that he was a five-year-old, we had some explaining to do. A bottle of milk wasn’t going to do the trick. We promised ice cream afterward, and a trip to a toy store. With every ounce of limited acting skill I possessed, I told him it was no big deal. We needed a picture of his brain. He needed to lie still for a little while. That’s all.

  As the goo was spread across his head, I wondered if he remembered the smell. Whether buried inside of him, there was a memory of the narrow room, the cold, sticky stuff, his parents holding him. The fear I tried not to let him see in my eyes. Now, in his Red Sox shirt and blue jeans, he lay there quietly as I held his hand. I hadn’t bargained on this. It hadn’t occurred to me that the doctor might order an EEG. This wasn’t simply a second opinion. Now we were in the realm of quantifiable results. Peaks and valleys on an EEG strip. Suddenly, I was terrified.

  Afterward, we sat in the waiting area while the results were read. Ten minutes went by, then twenty. Breathing was difficult. Michael and I flipped aimlessly through old copies of Newsweek, watched Jacob play with the requisite train set that always seemed to be in these offices. His hair was matted down, making him look older.

  The doctor finally emerged from his office and strode over to us, smiling.

  “A normal result,” he said. I could see on his face how rarely he got to say this to anxious parents. “A perfectly normal result.”

  89.

  Sometimes I check my e-mail while driving.

  I forget to wear my seat belt.

  When in New York, I dash across the street during any break in traffic.

  I used to smoke cigarettes, though I’m not sure that counts. I quit at twenty-five.

  This is a list of actions—potentially damaging, even devastating actions—I do or don’t undertake that are within my control. It’s hardly like I’m skydiving, or helicopter skiing. A risk-taker I’m not. But I certainly don’t need to check e-mail while driving. Obviously, I could be wearing my seat belt at all times. Jaywalking isn’t really necessary. So why do it?

  Last year, I was rushing to make a noodle kugel for Rosh Hashanah. I didn’t bother to unplug the handheld electric mixer before I used my index finger to remove cheese that was stuck to the blade. I accidentally switched on the mixer and cut a gash into my finger. Michael saw it happening, and started to yell—What did you do? What did you just do?—as he reached the phone to call 911. It’s the one and only time an ambulance has come up our driveway—despite all my nightmares and fantasies—and it was because of something I did that was entirely my fault.

  Jacob’s longtime babysitter, Maria, is a devout Mormon, and one of the most capable people I’ve ever known. She once told me that her religion teaches its adherents to focus only on the task at hand. When cooking dinner, cook dinner. When driving, simply drive. Whether walking, eating, arranging flowers, or putting a child to bed, do so with undivided attention. When making a noodle kugel, don’t have your head in one place, and your…finger, say, in another.

  I worry constantly about all those things that I can’t control. Nutty stuff—but it’s part of my fretting nature. In the words of Sylvia, I am easily startled. In the absence of anything to startle me, I am capable of startling myself. But when it comes to the things that are within my grasp, I am slowly learning what the Mormons—and the Buddhists, for that matter—already know.

  One afternoon at Garrison, Sharon Salzberg spoke about a Buddhist teacher in India, a widowed woman with many, many children who had no time to sit on a cushion, meditat
ing. How had she done it, then? Sharon had once asked her. How had she achieved her remarkable ability to live in the present?

  The answer was simply this: she stirred the rice mindfully.

  90.

  I was blessed—or was it cursed?—with a highly attuned sense of my physical self, and could usually tell within days when I was pregnant. After the first loss there were others. These pregnancies lasted a few weeks, a month. One held on for nine weeks before I began bleeding. We lived with an absence, a ghost child. We didn’t make travel plans. I declined out-of-town speaking engagements. My life was a split screen. Were we going to remain a family of three? Or was Jacob going to have the little brother or sister he often asked for?

  We kept Jacob’s baby clothes boxed up in the basement, along with his crib and bouncy seat. We stored his tricycle in the garage. We didn’t decorate the spare bedroom, nor did we give it a name. It wasn’t the guest room. It was the future baby’s room, though we didn’t call it that either. Jacob turned five, then six. It was beginning to feel like it was now or never. I was forty-two and a half, then forty-three. Conceiving the old-fashioned way had begun to be, statistically speaking, highly improbable.

  One day while driving near my house, I had what felt like a eureka moment. I had the answer! My body was clearly defective. I secretly believed that I was to blame for Jacob’s infantile spasms. No matter how the doctors had reassured me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been able to protect him. What made me think it would be any different with another child? I knew—I was certain of this—what we needed to do.

  I came home and told Michael my great idea: we needed to find an egg donor. A young woman with healthy eggs. Up until that moment, I had never considered the possibility, but now it seemed like the only way.

  “An egg donor?” Michael asked. He looked concerned. “I don’t know, honey. I’m not sure how you’ll feel if—”

  “It’s fine,” I answered, as if I had thought the whole thing through. “I love you, and the baby will be biologically yours. And Jacob will have a sibling. That’s what matters.”

  Once I had arrived at this solution, it was as if I had leapt onto a fast-moving train. Though Michael remained unconvinced, he was willing to make the leap with me. What we wanted—a second child—overrode all possible misgivings. We had been pretty beaten down by the compounding losses, and it didn’t take much to talk ourselves into it. We didn’t stop to think—because stopping and thinking might mean stopping entirely. The key word was want. We wanted. And that desire made us blind and slightly crazy.

  I embarked on a search for an egg donor with all the energy I could muster. Project Baby! I was good at projects. I did research, made lists. There were agencies, I quickly learned. Did I want a beautiful egg? An Ivy-educated one? A triathlete? Jewish? As if browsing the aisles of the world’s most esoteric supermarket, the choices were staggering. There were supermodel eggs. Supermodel/genius IQ eggs. Supermodel/genius IQ/cello prodigy eggs. It was only a matter of deciding what was important to us.

  Most evenings, after Jacob was asleep, Michael and I sat on the leather sofa in our library, scrolling through postage-stamp-sized pictures of donors.

  “What about her?” I asked, pointing to a cute girl with curly brown hair. She played varsity tennis at a school I admired, and seemed like someone who might, in other circumstances, have been my friend.

  “She’s too tall,” Michael said. “We’re not a tall family.” Then he pointed to a small blonde who looked a little like me. “What about her?”

  I studied her photo and the biographical information next to it.

  “She lists scrapbooking as her hobby.”

  “So?”

  “I hate scrapbooking.”

  He rubbed the bridge of his nose, then looked at me.

  “Does that matter?”

  The thing was this: it did matter. Everything mattered. Height, eye color, intelligence, smile, hobbies, ethnicity, religion. Parents, siblings, grandparents. It mattered because I was trying to find my own replacement. At first, I thought maybe I could improve on myself—pick a prettier, smarter, less neurotic version of me. But as time wore on, I began to realize that I was looking for something else—something ineffable, and far harder to come by. I was searching for nothing less than a soul mate. I studied the results of highly detailed questionnaires—taste in food, age at first menstruation, musical preferences—as if these details, once added up, could possibly give me a real sense of the whole person.

  I wanted—needed—to fall in love. But I couldn’t fall in love. Not with a series of photographs, not with a list of personality traits. I began to feel older, more tired and more sad with each passing day. I had come face-to-face with something I wanted badly that I simply couldn’t have. Finally, I had my second eureka moment, but this time it didn’t arise from that intense wanting. Instead, it came from a place closer to the core. This is my life, was how it went. My singular, blessed, imperfect, beautiful life.

  91.

  I have practiced yoga with many different teachers since walking into my first class nearly twenty years ago. I’ve been to classes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Los Angeles, Boston, all over Connecticut. Crowded, sweaty classes where the mats overlap on the floor and from side angle pose, you can carefully study the intricacies of your neighbor’s tattoo. Empty, air-conditioned studios with custom-colored mats and complimentary green tea served afterward. Once, from the carpeted locker room of such a studio on the Upper East Side, I heard a crowd cheering and rushed to the window just in time to see the Dalai Lama emerge with his entourage from a hotel across the street.

  All of my teachers—some of whom I’ve never met, others who have become my friends—have taught me lessons I’ve needed to learn. I never know when a piece of wisdom is going to stick. I only know that, if I stay open and receptive, eventually I hear something new—or perhaps simply in a new way. From a teacher in Sag Harbor, I discovered the centering power of breath practice, pranayama. A teacher in New Orleans taught me to let my yoga practice settle in while lying in shavasana, rather than jump right into the rest of my day. Another—one I’ve never laid eyes on but whose podcasts are available on the Internet—had helpful insights into headstand.

  But it was a teacher in Santa Monica who provided me one of my most valuable lessons. I had wandered into her class one morning, while on a trip to L.A. to meet with a potential egg donor. I was feeling confused and vulnerable. As soon as I entered the studio, I wanted to turn around and walk right back out. It was a cavernous room, filled with tan and impossibly fit twenty-something actor types wearing the latest yoga gear. The teacher—a tall, curvy woman named Ally Hamilton—paced the room wearing a cordless headset. I panted and sweated my way through the most physically challenging class I’d ever done, all the while thinking I should leave, I should leave, I should leave. But I didn’t leave. And at the end of class, after shavasana, Ally instructed us in a practice that has since become a part of my everyday life.

  At the end of my hour of yoga, after the sun salutations and twists and inversions and backbends and stretches, after I have rested for at least a few moments in shavasana, I sit up at the edge of my mat and place my palms together as Ally Hamilton did that morning in her busy California studio. I lift my palms to the center of my forehead—my third eye—and ask for clarity of thought. I wait until the idea of it has sunk in just a little bit. These things take time. Then I slide my palms down to my lips, and ask for clarity of speech. Again, I wait. Often, the phrase Say what you mean and mean what you say floats through my head. Finally, I slide my palms down to my chest, for clarity of action. I wait until I think I understand.

  Clarity of thought.

  Clarity of speech.

  Clarity of action.

  So simple, isn’t it? So simple, and yet so easy to forget. I place my hands together in prayer and remember. Just as my father laid tefillin each morning, now I am finding my own touchstone. It may be differe
nt from my father’s, but still, it’s a ritual. I think he might even have approved. After all, it’s a formal way of considering, however briefly, what matters most.

  92.

  It was a hot summer Sunday. Michael and Jacob were off to another Red Sox game, and I had planned to spend a relaxed afternoon with my aunt Shirley. I had been looking forward to some quiet time with her. As always, I was brimming with questions. But as she ushered me through her front door, she seemed a bit distracted.

  “Sweetheart, I have a surprise for you. We’re going to a wedding,” she said. A wedding? I looked down at myself: I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, flip-flops. I thought perhaps I had misheard her.

  “I didn’t tell you before, because I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Shirley said. “Naomi—Joanne’s youngest—is getting married today. In Chicago. Here, sit down. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

  I watched as Shirley climbed up the wide, curved staircase, past Moe’s electric chair lift. I had no idea what was going on. A wedding. In Chicago. I stood and walked around the library, looking at the assortment of family photos arranged on top of the grand piano. More children had been born since the last time I had visited. More young men in black hats, lovely wives holding newborns. My latest novel still had a place of honor on the coffee table. I gazed up at my grandfather’s portrait, wishing for the thousandth time that I had known him.

  “All right, this is the best I can do,” Shirley called as she walked quickly back downstairs. She had changed into an elegant black suit, and was fastening a pearl choker behind her neck. “Cheryl is going to be here in a few minutes to set it all up.”

  “What’s—I don’t—”

  The doorbell rang, and in came a young woman I recognized from various weddings and bar mitzvahs. She was the wife of one of my cousin Henry’s sons, but I didn’t know which one. She had four children in tow. The boys, who were perhaps three and four, were wearing suits and ties, shiny black shoes. The girls, slightly older, were in party dresses and Mary Janes. Everyone except for me seemed to be prepared for a special occasion.