None of the other soft or medium markers for Down syndrome were noted in our anomaly scan, my midwife reassured me. Little Gustav did not seem to have calcium deposits on his heart, abnormal fingers and toes, or any fluid-filled spaces in his brain. Nevertheless, like all mothers in this position, I studied his ultrasound images as closely as possible, trying to determine from his pixelated profile whether his face was characteristically flat; what about the shape of his eyes or the folded palm of his “hello, good-bye” wave?
“No matter who this baby is,” Ryan said, “we will love him.”
Surprisingly, he was calm when I could not be, and in the face of his composure, I realized that my fear was not about raising a child with a disability but rather about feeling guilty and selfish. I was nervous people would say, “Serves her right,” and then sneer or laugh lightly. “She was so greedy!” My amniotic fluid felt spiked with my colleagues’ insults—“If your family were a microcosm of the world, you’d have more than doubled its population.” Another one joked, his dry sense of humor like the shock of static electricity, “Haven’t you ever heard of birth control?” I could hear their voices: “Who does she think she is?” Was I being punished for my crimes, and if so, with so many words to describe those crimes, which came first? How would my own father testify, if I were charged in a court of law? Did boring old depression count as a mental disease or defect, and was this enough to explain why I’d continued to ladle Ryan into the pressure cooker of childbirth?
Around this time, I was still breastfeeding Francis to sleep. I’d remain on the edge of his twin bed most of the night, my belly bloated between us like an extra pillow. In the morning, he would tell me about a recurring dream, with variations. The dream always began with Gustav escaping from my womb. Sometimes he’d cut his way through my belly button; other times, he’d climb up and out of my throat.
“What did he do then?” I’d ask.
“He tried to kill me,” Frank would say. For nights on end, he awoke to images of my baby emerging able-bodied but violent, seeking some indescribable vengeance. Frank seemed neither scared nor emotionally wounded. More than anything, he was mystified; he was not yet three years old.
We were all nervous about baby Gustav but for different reasons. I wanted Gustav to be born healthy and so-called normal, but I realized that was every mother’s wish. I marveled at mothers in our community raising children with special needs. They rose elegantly and heroically to the occasion, but could I? With all our latent fatigue, could we do the same? Only so many wishes or prayers could be granted. During this waiting period, I convinced Ryan and Irie to paint our walk-in closet a delicate blue and green. We’d remeasured and realized another bed would not fit in the boys’ bedroom. I knew our baby would likely never sleep in the closet, as all my infants and toddlers had always slept with me, but I felt he deserved a proper space.
“I can’t believe we’re making a bedroom for our baby in the closet,” Ryan said.
“It has a window,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, but it doesn’t open.”
I felt a sense of familiarity roosting in the small cubbyholes of our small house. Real Wisconsin birds, robins and sparrows, nested on all the exterior nooks and crannies: inside the downspouts, in the bushes, above the garage door, and on all the hanging ledges. A realtor told me birds’ nests are good luck; you should never knock them down, even to put your house on the market. From Colorado, my mom sent two hand-knit baby blankets for Gustav. All the traditional baby colors had been used up: pink (Irie), blue (Leo), yellow (Fern), and green (Frank). Gustav’s tiny afghans arrived by mail. They were pale orange, the color of sherbet.
In one of my all-time favorite picture books, The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, nobody believes the young boy’s seed will grow. “I’m afraid it won’t come up,” his mother and father tell him. His older brother predicts definitively that it won’t, but the boy tends to it anyway until it sprouts. When he finally pulls his carrot from the dirt, it is nearly too large for his wheelbarrow. It grew, “just as he knew it would.”
For four weeks, I tried to embody this kind of faith, telling myself, This baby will grow as he is meant to grow. And when we returned to the same ultrasound technician in the same room in the women’s clinic, she reported the measurements of Gustav’s kidneys—4.0 and 3.9 millimeters. Although she could not tell us that he’d “measured normal,” we openly expressed our relief. We had arrived at our appointment knowing exactly what the technician was scanning for.
“Have you picked out a name yet?” she asked.
“Gustav,” I said. “Little Gussie.” His feminine nickname leapt from my lips as if he were a character in some gossipy story my grandmother was telling, and I’d known it all along.
CHAPTER 10:
Boiling Over
Storytellers spin tales, endlessly, of third, fourth, fifth, and sixth babies “just falling out”—in cars, on sidewalks, in elevators—in what is called “precipitous labor” or “birth without warning.” A family friend was born on her driveway before her mother could even be hoisted into an ambulance. Wombs are known to open wide, dropping amniotic sacs like water balloons, newborns the trinket prizes inside.
I started contractions in the night, and our babysitter, Gabby, picked me up for the
