When I was about 20 weeks pregnant with my first child, the doctor suspected something might be wrong. A possible genetic problem, large cranium, short femur, could be nothing, could be, well, everything. It was only days before Christmas, and everyone wanted to get out of town, so I would have to wait to find out for sure.
We had already named our fetus, but neither of us had any illusions about its actual personhood. Actually, as it turns out, we knew very little of our fetus's personhood; we had assigned it a boy's name and. lo and behold, he was a girl. We were taken aback, momentarily, but we shifted seamlessly (I hate to admit it) into thoughts of a pink-hued and frilly future.
Like many moms-to-be, I loved the faceless and amorphous clump of cells growing inside me from the moment I confirmed its existence. I had become a mother of sorts, though the thing I was mothering had a long way to go before it took on a human shape. A mother of an idea really, a dream, of boundless potential and endless wonder. I became consumed with the need to protect, unwittingly cradling my belly even before it burst out of my jeans. Which did not take very long at all.
In the way that only privileged people can -- meaning we had means and education and had figured out we didn't have to take no for an answer when things were really important -- we didn't have to wait, and the diagnostic ultrasound guy found a way to squeeze one more session in before Christmas Eve day. I could barely breathe, much less eat or sleep until we knew, but still, my husband and I tap-danced lightly around the options. The "what-ifs" if the news was "bad."
An option we never considered was the one proposed by my mother-in-law. A devout Catholic, she told us she would keep the baby if we didn't want to. It was not a command, and it was well-intentioned, but it was horrifying. Yes, Judge Amy Handmaid, horrifying, the thought of carrying my baby -- our baby -- to term and handing him over. He was still a him, somebody I barely knew, but if I knew anything it was that I would never be able to let him go once I saw him. Even to the safest haven of all -- the arms of a loving grandmother. I have never faulted her for her beliefs, for her offer. Her affinity for Rush Limbaugh, well, that's another story.
It was all moot, and the large cranium and the short femur (and the absence of a penis) meant only that we were having a diminutive baby girl with a big head. (Think Tweety-bird with a pink velcro bow.) And that I didn't have to make the most heart-wrenching of choices -- a choice that would have affected the life of my unborn child and me and my husband and, of course, any as yet un-conceived siblings of that unborn child. And nobody else. As it turns out, I was privileged again, this time by sheer luck.
I have loved that clump of cells since the day it formed, and, 32 years later, cannot imagine what life would have been like without her, or the two who followed. My guess is I would have loved that clump of cells no matter how she had turned out, had the "what ifs" come to pass and had I chosen to keep a baby with, at the very least, a more uncertain and fraught future than the ones I ultimately had. And dropping her on someone else's doorstep -- even grandma's. -- was a definite non-starter.
Unlike so many women, I was blessed with the outcome of not having to make the choice. But it was mine to make. That is an issue that should never be up for discussion.
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