I had a baby then. It must have just been born, but it was bigger, heavier, and more grown up-looking. During the day, I went to work, then went to my parents’ house in the evening, and when it got dark, I drove back home on the shiny, nighttime road. Then I remembered I hadn’t changed my baby’s diaper! I actually had no recollection of ever changing a baby’s diaper. I walked in the baby’s room and saw it lying on the bed flat on its back. The diaper made its butt look huge. I thought the baby would be crying and screaming, but it was simply lying there, not protesting against anything. When I realized I had to change the diaper, I got scared.
Some time later, I realized I hadn’t fed my baby in quite a long time. How the fuck was that baby so calm?! So I took it (it’s an it because I didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl) upstairs to my room and climbed on the double bed facing the wide wall and the door. I sat up straight, my back resting against a fat pillow, and the baby lay softly on my lap. My body and its body melted and warmed each other, and my breasts were suddenly naked. I wasn’t surprised, I knew right away they were my own breasts, only rounder and full with milk. My baby’s mouth instinctively found my right nipple and took it in its tiny, warm mouth. It was almost too natural. I thought I saw the milk flow from the inside of my breast through the dark skin of my nipple into the tiny pink baby mouth.
My memory of breast feeding ends here. The next thing I remember is doing some weekly shopping and driving around town. I thought about going back to college after summer, about the multi-colored life I had there. I didn't’ want to give it up for one baby, but there was no doubt the baby was mine. I never once wondered who the father was—it didn’t cross my mind, which seems utterly inexplicably to me now. But all that mattered was that it was my baby, hence, my responsibility. I was only twenty, I knew that too as clearly as I knew a bright-blue sky, and I thought that was way too early to raise a kid. I didn’t ask myself why I hadn’t done anything about that while I had been pregnant. All that mattered now was how to deal with the baby. I couldn’t take it with me in college, and I couldn’t bring it on my travels. My chest grew cold with the weight of responsibility and limitations. I decided that I had to put it up for adoption.
That automatically made me a terrible mother, of course. I felt guilty for giving life to a human being which I didn’t want, when it had no fault in that. But I wouldn’t be happy if I kept my baby, so I knew I had to leave it behind.
Suddenly, I felt there had to be another way. I walked night streets again, looking at dark sidewalks, and searched for a way that this could all be a sham. I thought it might be a dream, so I inspected the reality of the story I believed. It was all cut up in fragments, and logic often failed to explain much. I had my clues—I was dreaming. The dilemma would resolve itself soon enough.
I returned home to my baby. This time it was sitting up on a bed with its back to a window, which now looked out to a bright day and tall, green trees. I hugged my baby, who was now almost certainly a boy. I reminded myself this was the last time I saw my baby, the dream was coming to an end, and it would all be over soon. That made me so sad that I started caressing my baby’s plump face, his shoulders, his tummy, his thin, black hair. Now that I knew I had no choice but to leave him, I didn’t want to, it hurt, he was my baby. He raised his eyebrows much too wisely that he could have really and asked:
“Why do you make it so hard on yourself? You always have to want what you can’t have.”
I kept on caressing his hair, his forehead, his baby nose. I started crying in front of my baby, in front of those tall trees and that bright day. I woke up crying and twirling in my bed, still thinking of my baby and the way he sucked on my nipple with his eyes closed.
As I was writing on my laptop in a narrow, blue seat on a plane, a loud two-year-old passed by me. She stopped by me, pointed to something on my screen with her chubby finger, and said some foreign words. My heart skipped a beat—something is growing inside me.
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