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  A few days later, with my period now undeniably late, I take a test. I am pregnant.

  I think of all the champagne I drank during the wedding week and imagine a deformed fetus growing in me. I think of the cramped apartments we’ve looked at so far, most above our budget. I hear again the clear thought I had on the drive out here, about not subjecting children to this world. Was I thinking that for a reason? Was it a sign? This is not the way I want to start a family. I am filled with gloom and fear, terrified to have a baby and terrified to end this pregnancy willfully.

  Dicken’s face is dark with concern for me and our situation. The more I panic, the sicker I feel, and the more overwhelmed he becomes.

  *

  Our families can’t understand why we are leaning toward an abortion. “But you just got married. It’s all so perfect!”

  Both of our mothers were once devoted Catholics, but they no longer attend church regularly. They’ve both become New Age enthusiasts, going on pilgrimages to sacred sites and meditating regularly. My mother is always looking for something new to explain or deepen her life. One minute it’s acupuncture, the next minute it’s numerology. I’m looking for answers too, but I don’t understand how such an intelligent, educated woman can be so credulous. I want a practice, a way of approaching life that’s rooted in an ancient culture. I just don’t know what it is yet.

  My own religious and spiritual beliefs are mixed up and contradictory, with elements of rebellion against the formal church I was reared in as well as an obsession about my own morality. I view decisions as either right or wrong. In my nauseous, anxious, ungrounded state, every choice feels wrong right now. I tell myself I am bad, that somehow I must deserve this. I feel the weight of sin in the air.

  As a child, I listened carefully in church and Sunday school. Desperately wanting to be good and lovable, I worked hard to be a dutiful child of God. I took the Ten Commandments literally and knew I’d broken some—I lied to my mother, I stole candy from my sister—yet I was too shy and shame-ridden to confess my sins to Father James. I could vividly picture the black spot on my soul.

  Convinced I was doomed and beyond hope, I lay awake at night petrified by the thought of hell. By my mid-teens, I had stopped going to church, hoping to end my suffering and start afresh, but the guilt and dogma I’d been bathed in was already internalized.

  And now, at age twenty-two, pregnant after a week of drinking, I still badly want God’s approval. I secretly believe I might be able to make up for the sin of getting pregnant at the wrong time if I can do what’s right. With no clear “good girl” path, I feel more doomed than ever. Though I won’t articulate this, I also feel angry. Angry that things are not going according to plan. This is not how it was supposed to be. My life, our first days of marriage, the course of the world. Everything feels wrong, and I will never find my way back to grace.

  Dicken’s mother, Caroline, presses us to carry on with the pregnancy. “I’ll help you raise the baby.” I try to erase her words as I hear them. The kindness hurts too much.

  My mother tells us to do what we want. “I hate to see you suffering with this,” she says. She will fly out and help us through this trial.

  I can’t describe the desperation I feel. We are thousands of miles from home. We have no place to live, no friends, no community, no source of income other than a small monthly allowance from my father, and a trust fund I know about vaguely but have no access to yet.

  Dicken, who was also raised Catholic, internalized a gentler God than mine. I’ve always been struck by how forgiving he is, with himself and others. His kindness is what drew me to him, his unconditional love a hearth fire that warms my colder nature. Dicken is mostly upset about this pregnancy because it’s causing me pain. He doesn’t see decisions in black-and-white, the way I do. His answer comes in colorful dreamscape—he dreams we catch a dolphin, my favorite animal. “We had to take it back out to sea,” he tells me, his eyes filling with tears. “It wasn’t our time to keep it, even though it was beautiful and we loved it.”

  On the table at the doctor’s office, I can hear the machine whirring. I can’t feel the lower half of my body, and my mind is vast, white, numb. Dicken’s tears fall on me as he holds my hand. I tell myself to be happy the awful nausea will lift soon.

  *

  Two days later, I begin my graduate program in psychology and start an internship at a day treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. I love the children, I hate myself. Dicken gets a job scooping ice cream and begins a premed program on the weekends. Our sex life is dormant for months, because Dicken is afraid to get me pregnant again, and I am too numb to experience desire.

  CHAPTER 3

  Spring 1997

  We are living in Portland, Oregon. Dicken is in his third year of naturopathic medical school. I’m a therapist in a dual-diagnosis program for teens and adults, seeing some of the most desperate, alienated people in the city. Friends ask me if I find the work depressing, but somehow the opposite is true. As I gain experience, I grow more comfortable working with challenged patients, and I’m able to see the sweet humanity in each, especially the young ones. It fortifies me to witness people at the bottom, in the darkest states imaginable, and see hope, glimmers of light, the help that good people offer them, and the help they offer each other.

  All this makes me more confident about bringing life into the world. But I still have moments of doubt, especially seeing adolescents as young as twelve who are extremely violent and self-destructive. I think of myself at that age, pretending to be happy and compliant, but in quieter ways, I was just as lost. Is anyone in this world truly happy?

  “These poor kids,” I tell an older coworker, a parent herself. “How do they get messed up so young? Is it just me, or is our culture getting darker all the time?”

  “No,” she tells me. “Look at their parents. They’re all children themselves, addicted, abusive.” As if she can read my thoughts, she adds, “You don’t have to worry. You’re going to be a wonderful mother. You’re so gentle.”

  Yes, I tell myself, Dicken and I will never make the terrible mistakes these parents make.

  One evening, after a three-hour meeting with the meditation group we’ve been part of for a year or so, I come home feeling open and relaxed, in touch with a rare sense of peace about myself and the world. Dicken and I make love without protection for the first time—a spur-of-the-moment decision, in a way, but also something we’ve been moving toward for quite some time.

  I quit my job the day I find out I’m pregnant. I don’t want our baby to spend its first nine months in a locked-down ward, and I don’t want to have to see the results of bad parenting.

  Two weeks later, I start to bleed. It’s an early miscarriage.

  I cry for hours. Dicken holds me, looking more concerned than tender.

  “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  “I want to have a baby.”

  “Okay.”

  The topic needs no further discussion. He trusts me to know how we should proceed.

  We wait one cycle, try again, and get pregnant. This time, it sticks.

  *

  Again, I feel terribly ill. Though the sickness eases considerably by the second trimester, the days seem to stretch on forever. I have little to do and spend most of my time pining for the baby, wondering, wondering, What will he or she be like? What will motherhood be like? I try to write, not just in my journal like I always do but something more serious, some short memoir pieces. I can’t concentrate, and figure all my creative juices must be going into this baby. I am aimless and lonesome by myself in the house all day while Dicken is in classes and doing clinic shifts. I long for company, but most of my friends work or go to school, or live far away.

  A woman I know from our meditation group is also pregnant and doesn’t work, and we visit each other. She lives in an organized spiritual community with about a dozen other families who all own apartments in the same housing complex. They have communi
ty meals and share chores. My friend tells me she is never lonely. “I can always find someone to have a cup of tea with, or do laundry with, or yoga.” I look out her window at the communal gardens in the backyard, where people grow vegetables and flowers. I can’t see any weeds, only neat paths and healthy flowers and a brightly painted play structure.

  I decide this is how people should dwell, tribal-like, not in isolation the way most Americans do. My younger sister Maud is traveling in India for the year with her boyfriend, Tom. I know from her letters she is taken with the Indian tradition of extended-family living. I miss Maud terribly. After a rocky relationship as teenagers, she and I have become close allies. I write her, suggesting we all live together when she and Tom return from India. The letters I send take weeks to get to her; she picks them up at the post offices along their planned route. A few days after I send my letter, before mine could possibly have reached her, I get one from her suggesting we live together when they return.

  Maud tells me she and Tom have decided to become farmers and grow organic produce. They’ve met a woman working on a traditional farming project in Ladakh who is from Ashland, Oregon, and has urged them to start a farm there. Our mother has just decided to retire to this small town of Ashland, and Dicken has been offered a job as the junior doctor in a naturopathic practice there.

  I am overjoyed at the beauty of this synchronicity. How could we not go ahead? I imagine our kids having the kind of childhood I wish I’d had. Country, not city, with nature as an influence instead of the ambitious, career-driven climate of Washington, DC. A quiet life full of people and home-based activity, not nanny-supervised kids in a big, busy house and wearing starchy dress clothes to church every Sunday.

  January 1998

  Maud and Tom fly home from India shortly before I go into labor. The birth is long, three days. The pain is so intense I would take any drug available, but since I have decided not to go to the hospital for this, I have no choice but to deliver the baby naturally. At one point during a break between contractions, I think to myself, Well, at least I’m not afraid of dying anymore. There’s no way it could be this bad.

  When the baby is finally born in our living room, with seven of our family members and three midwives in attendance, looking like a mini-replica of Dicken, I feel as triumphant as I ever have in my life.

  Two weeks after Jasper’s birth, I’m on the couch nursing him, watching the Winter Olympics on TV. The long-distance cross-country skiers are sprinting for the finish line, looking exhausted. That’s not so impressive, I think, recalling my grueling labor. I now see almost anything else as easy. I know I could climb Everest, I could swim the English Channel, but I don’t need another heroic feat to prove anything to myself or anyone else. I feel relaxed and complete. I never anticipated this before childbirth, but I feel purified on a soul level, like everything I have ever done wrong in my life has been washed away, my slate wiped clean. I am forgiven. And having this baby in my arms is the most fulfilling way to celebrate my new state.

  Late that night, Jasper is fretful; Dicken is asleep, needing rest for an exam the next morning; and I am tired, my stitches from a small vaginal tear burning. I find myself longing for a reprieve, then quickly catch this impulse: This is what I wanted, this is the choice I made. I stay up late rocking Jasper in my arms. For the first time in my life, I am sure I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. My body is weary, but what serenity there is in knowing my exact place in the universe. I feel glorified.

  *

  The first year goes well. I am blissfully serene much of the time, madly in love with my baby and my husband. I am with Jasper almost every minute of the day and night, thrilled by merging my being with his, and happy to settle for the glory of being a martyr mother in the rare moments I’m not feeling content.

  But year two exposes some major cracks in the foundation.

  CHAPTER 4

  Summer 1999

  We have moved onto the land we bought with Maud, her husband Tom, and their baby daughter Grace, born just ten months after Jasper. Here in the mountains of Southern Oregon, near Ashland, the town where my mother and her husband Ralph have recently retired, the plan is to raise our small children together in a back-to-the-land utopia. Tom runs the farm, baby Grace on Maud’s back while she works the soil; Dicken practices natural medicine in town; and I stay at home, being the happy earth momma I was born to be. Our lawyer father calls us “dropouts” for foregoing ambitious careers and choosing this unorthodox lifestyle, but we don’t take it personally. We snicker behind his back that he’s the one who’s deluded and missing out on the good life.

  *

  Maud and I are sitting on the dilapidated sofa in the one-room kitchen/bathroom/living space we’re sharing while we build our 4,500-square-foot, two-family house. We’re sipping tea and chatting while Jasper and Grace play on the wooden floorboards. For the third time in ten minutes, Jasper, age one and a half, walks over to Grace, nine months, and whacks her on the head. Grace wails.

  I run to them and grab Jasper, telling him, “No!” in a stern voice.

  Maud picks up Grace. “We’re out of here,” she says. “This isn’t working.”

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “Why should you guys have to leave? We can go.”

  But she’s already gone. The room is quiet. Jasper looks at the door and reaches his hands out, mournfully calling, “Gugu,” his name for Grace. I turn to get a marker and piece of paper to distract him, but when I turn back around, he is gone, the door open. I run out into the yard, catch up with a giggling barefoot Jasper, and carry the squirming, protesting bundle back into the kitchen. On the way in I notice nails and scraps of wood scattered all over the ground, and remember the rattlesnake Tom found coiled up in the barn the other day, and make a mental note to find Jasper’s moccasins. It’s before eight o’clock, already hot out, and I am tired.

  Back inside, I feel aimless and uneasy, wishing Maud was still around. It’s been a few months since Jasper started lashing out at Grace for no apparent reason, and it has taken a toll on all of us. This is not turning out to be the idyllic cousin-as-companion scenario we factored into our back-to-the-land plans.

  I settle Jasper in with the paper and marker, then call my mom, relieved to hear her cheerful voice answer the phone.

  “Hi, Mom, it’s me, Cinda,” I say, and she immediately asks, “What’s wrong, sweetie?”

  I describe the situation to her.

  “I just don’t get it,” she says. “Why is Jasper so violent?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve tried doing what the books say, and he doesn’t seem to respond.”

  I read parenting books compulsively. A recent one points out how absurd it is that women so lack confidence as mothers, they would rather be told what to do by an author, usually male, whom they’ve never met. I heartily agree, shaking my head in pity at these mothers. When I finish the book, I move on to the next one.

  “What about a therapist?” Mom suggests.

  I groan inside. I’m a therapist, I’ve worked with kids, I’m supposed to know how to deal with my own kid who’s had every advantage we could give him.

  “Something’s not right with him,” she says.

  Tears spring to my eyes. “I don’t think he’s that bad. Isn’t it normal for boys to test physical limits at this age?”

  “Benny never did this.” I flash back to all the old home movie footage of me and my brother, a year older than me, playing as babies and toddlers, and can’t remember a single violent scene.

  “Well, I don’t know what to do, Mom. I’m exhausted by it and can’t figure out what’s right. I’m trying to give him everything I can. I’ve devoted my whole life to him. I don’t understand why he’s angry or why he’d hurt anyone! No one’s ever laid a finger on him.”

  “Maybe you’re giving him too much. He’s probably angry that he’s so dependent on you. It must be a terrible internal conflict for him.”

  What am I supposed to do with that? I
start to cry.

  “Oh, sweetie,” Mom says, real concern in her voice. I’m the daughter who very rarely breaks down. “I think you need something for yourself. Why don’t I take you shopping later this week? You could use some nicer clothes. It’ll help your self-esteem.”

  I cringe at the words “self-esteem.”

  My mom, a lawyer for twenty years, went back to school to get a master’s degree in social work at the same time I did mine in counseling. Frustrated by the law’s inability to protect the children of her disadvantaged clients, she decided to work with kids on a one-to-one basis. Despite her legitimate reasons for pursuing social work, I suspected her timing wasn’t completely coincidental. She always talked about how she felt disconnected from me when I was growing up, how she couldn’t seem to find a way to reach me. I didn’t think she was aware of it, but I believed her return to school in a similar field was a way to find a connection. And for a while, it worked. During those two years, with three thousand miles between us, we chatted often about programs, classes, ideas. We bonded as never before.

  But by now, our relationship seems to have gotten more and more complicated, with lingo my father calls “psychobabble” running rampant, the enmeshment and self/other evaluation sessions ever increasing, threatening to turn every conversation into a house of mirrors.

  “I better go,” I tell her. We say our goodbyes and hang up.

  I look around the messy room, aware of a deep exhaustion. Everything seems hopeless and overwhelming. I feel trapped, like the walls of my life are coming in on me. I begin to cry again, then think, Look at me! I never cry. Things must be worse than I even know.

  “Mama, Mama!”

  Jasper’s piercing cries snap me out of my trance and I see that he is making the baby sign for hungry, stuffing several fingers into his mouth. I rally, heading to the cramped, disorganized kitchen corner of the room to find something healthy for him to eat.