“Ok, what should we play?” I glance in the side-view mirror and ease the car onto the highway. My wife, Ella, is in the seat next to me, fiddling with the radio volume. “Let’s play ‘what we’ll do with our kids,’” she says and smiles. I grin back, “OK, you go first.” She looks out the window, considering options, “Read the books we loved when we were kids,” she says and begins to list them. “That’s good,” I reply and counter with “and we’ll make them pancakes for breakfast on their birthdays. And they can choose the shape of the pancakes.” The game goes on this way for a while, with each of us taking turns brainstorming ideas of how we plan to raise our future children. We play it on airplanes, on road trips, as we wait in line at the supermarket, anywhere, really. We’ve been playing various versions of the game for years, long before we started the logistical maelstrom of finding a sperm donor, tracking my fertility, choosing a midwife to work with on the insemination process. Long before I finally got pregnant last fall.
When I found out I was pregnant, we were beyond exhilarated. I took the pee test three times, staring at the stick over and over, dumbfounded. We cried a lot that day, mostly euphoric tears. But it was a bittersweet joy. We’re ecstatic to be having a baby, but we also know that this is a child Ella’s mom will never meet. Even writing this now, 22 weeks later, a sharp pain stops my breath.
A lot of people complain about their mothers-in-law, so much so that it’s become a cliché. I never had a reason to complain. Ella’s mom was a rare kind of person. Profoundly devoted to those she loved, she had a sixth sense about showing her unconditional love and support in a way perfectly matched to the peculiarities of each of us. Ella spoke to her mom several times a week; they were best friends. We both reached out to her regularly for advice, especially for difficult decisions like where to move or which job to take. She had a gift for listening deeply and asking the right questions. She had a quiet wisdom and an unwavering patience, but also a great sense of humor and fun. She loved games.
When Ella’s mom left the physical world, last February 23, everything changed. I wish there were a less hyperbolic way of stating that, but there just isn’t. How we perceive the changing of the seasons, or the immediacy of living life, or our relationships with friends, family, strangers—all of these are viewed through a new prism that refracts the light in ways we hadn’t been aware of previously. Sometimes it makes rainbows on the walls. Sometimes it blinds us.
Inhabiting the role of “mother” is a process. I’m now a little more than halfway through my pregnancy (according to my app, our baby is now the size of a spaghetti squash) and am only just beginning to get to know him, and me, and me with him. I talk to him all the time and find myself using phrases my mom used with my sisters and me. They spill out of me, words I didn’t know I knew. Increasingly, over the past months, I’ve noticed the ways in which I’m similar to my mom. We make the same kinds of jokes. We both dance and sing along to the music in drugstores and supermarkets (incidentally, this dancing in public mortified me as a preteen). We both have a way of flattening any challenge or complication that stands in our way, getting things done that others said were impossible. We both have short fuses and are very passionate about the people we love. I’ve known all of this for as long as I’ve known myself, but lately I’ve been wondering what it will mean for the person I’ll be when this baby makes me a mother.
It’s within these two frames of reflection that Ella and I are becoming mothers. Each of us in a silent conversation with our respective moms and past selves. We’re trying to live inside both stories as we create our own, new narrative with our own, new little person. How can we hold tight to her mom’s legacy, revisiting her memories and family stories? What can we glean from my mom’s stories, revisiting my memories, and trying to make sense of it all? What part of this will become our motherhood?
It kind of comes back to the game, actually.
“Ok, how about arts and crafts?” Ella might ask me. “We always had all these crafts around the house, and my mom would be making creative things with my sisters and me. Let’s do that.” Then we’d talk about the kinds of crafts. Origami, maybe, or collage. Finger-painting of course. I want to try some papier-mâché, but that would have to be outside. We’ve started working out some Shabbat traditions to practice with our child, an amalgam of the ones our families (mine religious, hers religiously atheist) practiced when we were kids. So we bless the candles and the wine, but we also read poetry and play songs on guitars. “Every week,” I told Ella a few weeks ago, “my parents would bless me and my sisters and add something really good we’d done that week. I want to do that with our baby.” She likes that idea.
By playing the game (more and more as the baby grows), we’re coming up with a value system within which to be mothers, and it’s begun to boil over into other areas of our life. “What would your mom say?” one of us will ask when the other is faced with a challenge, or “What would you do if the baby was already here?” As we break apart the choices our mothers made when we were young, our choices come into focus more readily.
We’re realizing that our mothers are with us all the time, even though they’re both far. Her mother is, of course, out of physical reach. Mine is back home, in a whole other world, several degrees removed from our everyday reality. Ella’s mom is with us when we plant flowers in our garden or learn to identify the songs of the birds that come to visit. She’s with us in the quiet moments, when we meditate or take the time to turn off our devices and listen deeply to someone that we care about. My mom is with us when we’re innovating new creative projects, when we have a dance party in the living room. She’s in that satisfied feeling we get after a day of hard but productive work. They’re both with us when we love our friends and family unconditionally. They’re both with us when we play games, and laugh, and love.
Late last night I awoke to the feeling of our baby kicking more strongly than he’d ever kicked. Such a surreal feeling, an independent being making impressions on your insides. After a few moments I woke Ella and put her hand on my belly. “Do you feel that?” I murmured. “That’s our son.” We lay there for a few long moments, the whole family together.
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