“ What to Expect in Your First Trimester, 1001 Chinese Herbs for Pre-Natal Development and Wiccan Rites of Passage to Motherhood? Sheryl, I’m not pregnant!”
She winked at me. “Not yet! But that’s because you haven’t seen the last one!”
She pulled out a copy of a book adorned with swirly, gold script and a drawing of couple doing something I didn’t know was physically possible: A Modern Girl’s Guide to the Kama Sutra. I should have guessed. I’ve been married for two and a half years, and my mother-in-law is getting impatient. Sheryl burst into uproarious laughter “I take it Henry never shared the one I gave him as a wedding gift – along with that stupid toaster. He said he was going to put the book down the garbage disposal! You should have seen his face!” She thrust the book into my lap and fell back into her chair, wheezing and spilling some of her Serenity Chai Tea on my living room carpet.
I handled the book gingerly. “Well, thank you, Sheryl.”
“Happy birthday!”
It’s not my birthday, but I gave up arguing that point back before Henry and I got married. Apparently, my being born on February 3rd was some sort of cosmological mistake. According to some very in-depth personality observation Sheryl decided that there is no way I could possibly be an Aquarius, so she assigned me a “real” birthday under an astrological sign that better suits my personality, which is Virgo. “Usually the body and the soul come into being under the same alignment of planets,” she explained, solemnly, “but in your case there must have been some sort of interference – probably a comet or something along those lines. But don’t worry, honey, I can just give you a better one. Oconkwo explained how to figure it out back before he…” She cleared her throat and shook her head . “May he rot forever in hell, that bastard.”
Sheryl lays the blame for the biggest tragedy of her life squarely on the tattoo-adorned shoulders of Oconkwo. It took her three rounds of invitro-fertilization, a lactose, gluten, soy, and nut free diet, and a visit to every temple, mosque, church, and synagogue in a 25 miles radius for her to conceive Henry. After that she was forbidden to even attempt to have any more children. Without constant monitoring, she probably would have tried anyway, but by that point she had ended her fifteen year sojourn in west Africa and resigned herself to monogamy with my father-in-law, Bob, an accountant who fell in love with Sheryl when she offered to read his palm in a coffee shop. He absolutely adores her, suffering everything from getting his aura photographed to prove her theory about his latent physic powers to participating in monthly folk-dancing workshops with her to joining her in a week-long meditation session that ended up getting him hospitalized. But for one of the two times in their entire married lives, he refused to give in to his wife’s pleas, threats, and hunger strikes. He would not let her kill herself trying to get pregnant again, and she was stripped of the dream of having a dozen children,
Sheryl has been nursing a grudge against Oconkwo for almost forty years. In my personal opinion, Sheryl’s ten years of chain smoking and one summer’s worth of experimentation with all the hallucinogenic substances the Amazon has to offer wreaked havoc on her fertility, but she believes that Oconkwo, a shaman/medicine man/elder/spiritual advisor in west Africa had an effect on her uterus unparalleled by petty things like licking a tree frog or inhaling noxious sulfuric fumes. When she decided to leave his tribe after three years of a partially anthropological and partially personal-discovery-related sojourn in the middle of an important festival in honor of the goddess of fertility, he laid a curse on her. To be specific, he cursed her womb.
“Oconkwo,” she hissed, “Last night I had a dream he was attacked by a horde of rabid animals. Maybe I’m foreseeing the future. ”
“Sheryl!”
“He deserves it.”
“Sheryl!”
“But don’t worry, honey. The curse was strictly placed on me. None of that multi-generational, everyone in your family stuff. Your children are safe.”
“Well, I am relieved to hear my uterus is hex-free.”
“You should be! Now, honey, there is just one ceremony I have to perform and everything will be...”
“Sheryl, if you poke me with those crystals again, I am going to throw you out of the house.”
“No, no! No crystals this time.”
“And I am not drinking anything.”
“But, honey, that’s a very important part!”
“Last time I was sick for a week. I am not going to ingest any more of your concoctions.” I said, firmly. I love my mother-in-law, but I don’t want to explain to another emergency-room attendant that I don’t know what it was I was drinking before I passed out on the couch while my panicked husband is shouting in the waiting room and Sheryl is trying to explain to him she was just trying some naturalistic healing to cure my food poisoning again.
“Honey, I got a hold of a special formula. It has been used in India to promote fertility for thousands of years. Its powers are incredible!”
“I am not drinking anything that hasn’t been FDA approved.”
“India has one of the largest populations in the entire world. What more proof do you need that this stuff works?”
“Sheryl, I appreciate your offer, but I don’t think my stomach will hold it down. Indian people have guts of steel. I can tell you that much based entirely on their curry consumption.”
“But, honey…”
“I’m sorry, Sheryl, but I am not going to drink it, and that’s final.”
Sheryl looked mournfully at me.
“But, if you want, we can do the rest of the ceremony.”
She brightened up a bit.
“What exactly is it?”
“Actually, it is my own invention! I made a combination of some of the most sacred fertility ceremonies from all over the world. I gathered everything I need, it will only take a few minutes, and I am absolutely positive that the karma it generates will have you pregnant within a month!”
“Listen, Sheryl, you’re welcome to do this, but there is something I have to tell you first.”
“What is it, honey?”
“Well, Sheryl, Henry and I aren’t sure we want to have kids.”
Sheryl’s jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. Her grip on the arms of the chair tightened. “What?”
“We haven’t decided for sure yet, but with both of our schedules and careers, I don’t know if it would be in anybody’s best interest for us to become parents. Henry is going to be working overtime for the next year or two if he wants any chance at that promotion, and I am going to be taking night classes after work starting in the fall. Henry and I hardly have time to make a baby, let alone raise one.”
Sheryl buried her face in her hands, shaking. She gulped.
“Sheryl, are you okay?”
She moaned.
“Sheryl?”
“I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it.”
“Sheryl, please listen…”
“Why would you do this? The most beautiful, special thing in the world, and you’re going to throw it away? For what? So you don’t have to take maternity leave?”
“Sheryl, that’s not fair.”
“Really? I think…it…you…can’t believe…why would you even…” Sheryl burst into tears, loud, wracking sobs.
“Sheryl, please.” I walked over and kneeled down next to her chair. She glared at me balefully for a moment before she collapsed against my shoulder. I stroked her back while she snuffled noisily.
After a minute, she looked up at me “I don’t understand. You were meant to be a mother. It fits with everything about you - your stars, your previous incarnations – everything!”
I sighed. “Sheryl, I know you believe in all that but…”
“More importantly, I see it in your eyes. Just listen to me, honey.” She looked at me, suddenly calm and focused. It was very disorientating to see clarity in Sheryl’s eyes, and I found myself fidgeting uncomfortably. “You have that same look I used to have before I had Henry. There is something inside you, a yearning that you can’t get rid of. Sometimes when you see mothers with their children. Sometimes just out of the blue. You want to hold a baby – a small, soft, pure little baby. You want to snuggle it and feed it and rock it to sleep. Sometimes it just bubbles up inside you and makes you shiver. It’s a mother’s love without a child, and it just makes you feel empty.”
I stared at Sheryl, incredulously. “What?”
“I can see it in your eyes, just as clear as anything. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
Bona fide insight from Sheryl? Wisdom from a woman whose idea of a good time a scant five months ago included combining copious amounts of alcohol-laced Mayan hot chocolate and an adult gymnastics class? I didn’t know what to do. “How could you possibly…”
“You are a very smart girl, honey, but you aren’t very in touch with yourself. Do you really think if you ignore your feelings that they will go away?”
I stared at her. “But having a baby is an enormous deal! I don’t know if I am ready for that. Just wanting to have a kid doesn’t mean I am qualified to be a mother. I mean, what if I just screw it up? I might be enormously incompetent! I might cause all sorts of psychological problems. I might be abusive, or neglectful, or…”
“Honey, no one is ever a perfect parent. But you would make a wonderful mother.”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you don’t know, but what do you want?”
“Its not that simple.”
“Just close your eyes – get in touch with your meta-physical urges. Maybe your spirit animal will guide you!”
At least now we were back on familiar ground. “Sheryl, I don’t have a spirit animal.”
“Well, you have a heart, don’t you? Use that!”
Henry came home an hour later to me find on the couch, surrounded by burning incense, dream-catchers, geodes, and various good luck charms while his mother danced around me in a circle, waving feathers and yodeling. He took a look around, not entirely surprised. “Hi, mom.”
“Hello, Henry. Don’t interrupt.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I see we’ve got Jesus, Ganesh, Buddha, the Great Spirit, and Darwin watching over the proceedings, ” he said, gesturing at various pictures and sculptures.
“I think its best not to offend anyone,” huffed Sheryl, still dancing around me.
“That’s very pragmatic of you, mom. Is either one of you going to tell me what’s going on here?
“Well, Henry,” I paused, and took a deep breathe “it’s a fertility rite.” I searched his face for a reaction.
“Oh.” His face was blank for a moment and he looked me in the eye, “Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, but only if you want to. We’ve talked about it, but we never decided. What do you think? I mean, none of this means anything unless we both agree. Your opinion is really what matters, regardless of anyone’s yodeling, however enthusiastic, and you know I love you and I think we’re ready but if you don’t want to its okay and, um…”I trailed off into silence, realizing that I was rambling.
There was a long silence. Even Sheryl stopped yodeling and dancing to stare apprehensively at her son. Henry bit his lip and paced to the door and back. Finally, he broke into a smile that reached all the way to his eyes. “Well, I’m in if you are.”
We smiled at each other, and then Henry leaned down to kiss me.
“Amen to that!” whooped Sheryl “I’ll get my baby name book! How do you feel about Starlight?”
Henry snorted “Absolutely not. Only people who are more than are more than one sixty-fourth Cherokee can get away with names like that.”
“How about Laufeia?”
“What?”
“Laufeia! I mean, technically she was the mother of the Norse god of destruction and evil, but it is a lovely name, isn’t it?”
“Again, no.”
“Ekaterina?”
“Mom, where are you getting these names?”
I interrupted. “Sheryl, what if it’s a boy?”
Sheryl snorted this time. “It won’t be. I am sure of it.”
I exchanged a knowing look with Henry. “And why is that?”
“I killed a parakeet.”
I twitched convulsively, accidentally hitting Ganesh with my elbow, but Henry just rolled his eyes. “Mom! Not again!”
“Don’t worry dear, it was in my backyard. And I bought the bird legally.”
“If the Animal Welfare Association hears you sacrificed another one…”
“I wasn’t on public property this time. I bought the parakeet and before I preformed the ceremony in my yard I checked to make sure that Mr. Wilhelm wasn’t home. None of the other neighbors could possibly have seen me behind that patch of bushes, unless they were breaking into Mr. Wilhelm’s house. And in that case, I think they would have bigger things to worry about than what I do with my parakeets.”
“I thought that the employees at Pet World wouldn’t let you in the store after last year.”
“There’s a new girl working there. She’s very cute and she has no idea who I am.”
“Just a second, Sheryl,” I said. “You killed a parakeet? Why?”
“Honey, it’s an age-old way of divining the future. Of course, bird entails don’t work quite as well as ox entrails, but it’s a bit difficult to get your hands on ox around here.”
I cleared my throat. “And the entrails told you that we are going to have a baby girl?”
“Yes! A beautiful baby girl!”
Henry joined me on the couch and put his arm around my shoulders. “Didn’t I ever tell you that was why my family decided to move to the east coast? Bird entrails. And I met you here.”
“So, our marriage is the direct result of your mom poking around at a bird’s intestines?”
“Yep. Pretty much.”
“Right. Well, now that we have validated the method, what do you think we should name our daughter?’
“I am leaning towards Adora.”
“Why Adora?”
“Adora means a beloved gift.”
I smiled. “It looks like Sheryl isn’t the only one who has been looking through a baby name book.”
“Well, it was just once, a while ago. And, obviously, I only got through the ‘A’ section.”
Before I could start to laugh he kissed me again with unexpected intensity. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sheryl get out of her chair with exaggerated stealth and pick something up. She walked over to retrieve Ganesh from the arm of the couch and placed what she was holding in the newly vacated spot. A minute later, I heard the telltale squeak of the front door. Before I devoted all my attention to Henry’s kiss, I glanced over at Ganesh’s replacement. It was A Modern Girl’s Guide to the Karma Sutra. Oh, Sheryl.
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