“Having babies is the only thing that has ever made me happy,” I said. I’d experienced other forms of joy—(temporary) accomplishment, (temporary) satisfaction, (temporary) relief, and (fleeting) euphoria—but nothing would ever provide me with sustained human contentedness like back-to-back pregnancies and childbirth. I envied fruit-bearing trees their abundance, their succulence, their purposefulness, and honestly imagined, after birth, I’d shrivel back into the earth.
Ryan had scheduled an appointment for a vasectomy consultation, the receptionist encouraging my attendance. A vasectomy was, in many cases, a “joint decision,” she said. We actually knew a guy who sabotaged his marriage by getting snipped without his wife’s consent. Virility, it turned out, was just as important to the laws of attraction as strong hands or thick hair.
Further complicating Ryan’s commitment to the consultation was his own squeamishness. Much as women enjoyed sharing birth stories, sterile men loved to regale us with tales from outpatient surgery. Mere mention of a slit scrotum sent Ryan to the nearest bathroom, where he never vomited but thought he might. He’d even lose his appetite over predictable jokes my dad cracked about sporting a jockstrap post-op. Neither of us was motivated enough, so he canceled the consultation, and we never seriously visited this as a birth control option again.
A baby, I reasoned, remained a possibility. Psychology was the only roadblock to biology. I possessed the resolute and single-minded desire for a fifth baby, and I was intent to deliver another little bindle-bundle into our lives, come hell or madness. But how tricky was I willing to be? The women in my life—mother figures, friends, and mentors—perhaps worried for my big-picture mental health, urged me not to add another baby to the mix. “Slow down,” one of them said. “You’re already running yourself ragged.” Another told me, “You have perfect symmetry. Why ruin that?” They stopped short of telling me I was a junkie or a fiend.
Four children no longer seemed like the right number. As a child and teenager, it was true, I’d envied perfect proportions. I’d scowl at my crooked nose in the mirror, only to exaggerate my disproportionate face, believing bilateral symmetry equaled beauty, and even—not odd—numbers predicted good fortune. Before language colonized all the space in my brain, I was gifted in math, and when the answer to a calculus problem was even, not odd, I’d celebrate with relief. Nevertheless, as I grew older, turning to art more than to science, my expectations and tastes changed, odd numbers, asymmetry, and chaos appealing more to me spiritually. Pregnancy and child-rearing also worked at flipping that switch, such that I no longer enjoyed the predictability of patterns, and I believed, perhaps too boldly, in the risk and possibility of breaking them.
When Ryan visited Wes at the county jail as he awaited processing, Wes looked Ryan in the eyes for the first time in their acquaintanceship. Quite thoughtfully he said, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m going to tell the other inmates I’m in for burglary.” While he had demonstrated no remorse or shame in the psychologist’s office, his self-preservation instincts had been restored.
In all its gruesome and troubling detail, defending Wes for charges of sexual assault was its own rite of passage—unfortunately, the first in a string of cases in which victims were children. If Ryan was going to make a living in criminal defense, he was learning, he’d have to be less choosy. He’d have to set aside his moral hang-ups. And he’d have to hug our children more protectively when he returned home at night. When the public defender’s office called him nearly three years after Wes was sent to prison, Ryan considered taking a new case, a defendant charged with capturing images of nudity without consent, but by now he had learned to review the charges of sexual misconduct before making a decision. When he opened the file, on the doorstep of the public defender’s office, the name Randy Foote flashed familiar in his brain, but the face of the old panty sniffer did not come fully to mind until he began reading this latest complaint.
Foote had invited a father and his children to swim in his pool and then secretly videotaped them changing in his bathroom. The children’s father found the camera and submitted it to police, at which point investigators also found child pornography on Foote’s memory card. For Ryan, the complaint invoked images of our own children, Irie especially. Our favorite way to imagine our eldest child was in her bathing suit, droplets of pool water like sequins on her skin, thick hair hiding under her latex cap.
Ryan turned to one of the secretaries in the public defender’s office and reported, “I’m going to pass on this one.” As he headed back to the elevator and pushed the button, waiting for his shuttle toward higher ground, he realized the pressure to protect our children was just as strong as the pressure to provide for them. As the inevitability of a debate over more children crystallized, he noted Randy Foote and other creeps like him as evidence for his side. With one more baby, how could we possibly keep them all safe?
CHAPTER 5:
Hell’s Lovers
Furthermore, I wondered, could we protect our children from the likes of ourselves? As Ryan’s filing cabinets grew glutted, choking on evidence against his clients, many of them parents incapable of managing their misfortunes and distress, I measured their fuses against ours. Patience was essential, but how much was there to go around? Ryan, the overreactor, and I, the underreactor, had both developed bad disciplinary habits: I mollycoddled the children, unfazed by their antics, while Ryan launched extravagant, empty threats into their faces, his thunderous voice a missile unto itself.
“I’ll throw all your toys in the garbage!” “I’ll give you something to cry about, so help me God!” “If you touch your brother one more time . . .”
