Baby Steps (2 page)

I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

—Blanche,
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Tennessee Williams

 

I
have always found it extraordinary and somehow tragically beauti
ful that strangers tell each other things they would never tell anyone else, might never have otherwise said out loud, knowing they will never meet again. It happens all the time, in anonymous places—on a subway, on a plane, in a bar.

It began for me in 2007, on a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I probably looked about sixteen in my pajamas, backpack full of books and camera, my new brunette hair (dyed for a movie) in a ponytail, standing there in the Incheon International Airport in South Korea, waiting to meet with the head of the International Red Cross. But I wasn't sixteen. I was about to celebrate my thirty-fourth birthday.

The airport was huge, light and airy and full of glass and steel, decorated with trees and flowers in a style I didn't yet recognize as uniquely Asian. I was ready to do something I thought was important: travel with the Red Cross on a relief trip. I'd been volunteering with them for a while, and now I had the chance to see more of what they were about. These trips were for big donors who wanted to get more involved and see where their money was going. In my case, the Red Cross wanted me to be a spokesperson for them. I jumped at the chance to learn more about the organization and to go to a part of the world I'd never seen, where I might be of service. I had always wanted to do something like this, to make a difference in the world, to feel like I wasn't just living for myself. So here I was, halfway across the world, in a group of total strangers, waiting for a plane to take me to Vietnam.

My fiancé, Ron, had bowed out of the trip at the last minute. A clothing designer, he owned a popular and swanky Hollywood boutique, and business all but shut down when he left. Things were not in a state for shutting down at the time, and when he first told me he
couldn't join me, I was disappointed. I'd been thinking of the trip as “our trip.” But then I began to see it as “my trip,” a chance to regroup and find myself again. I'd been through a lot, career-wise. I'd recently quit my job playing Serena Southerlyn on
Law & Order,
and my life hadn't exactly changed the way I imagined it would. Maybe I was looking for an escape, but now I pictured myself as the intrepid traveler, off to the other side of the world. I would be the person I imagined I could be when I was working long hours on the set and dreaming of freedom. At least I'd be one of the versions of myself I'd imagined, when my life was full of possibility.

Now, my life seemed precarious and full of panic. Or something. I'd imagined fabulous things would just happen to me when I left the show, and when they didn't, I realized I might have to go out and find them myself. I didn't exactly have doubts about leaving a successful acting job with a regular paycheck, but I was feeling a little bit lost. What was next for me? There were so many things I wanted in life, or thought I wanted. But whenever I turned my mind to them, they seemed to float away toward something else, like those lights behind your eyelids that you can never quite catch when you try to look directly at them with your eyes closed.

I wasn't focused. I wasn't driven toward any one path. I was a million people waiting to happen, and some part of me hoped this trip would shake me out of my shoes or hold a mirror up to my face or that I'd somehow have an enlightened moment, an “aha” moment, so that I could come back home to Ron knowing who I really was and where I wanted to go next.

And Ron . . . my Ron. As I stood there in the airport, thrilled with what might be about to happen to me, I didn't miss him yet, but I was sorry for what he might miss on this great adventure. I thought I loved him. Maybe I loved him. I
did
love him, in my way. But I had a history of running from commitment, and although I hadn't had the
urge to run from Ron yet, although we actually seemed surprisingly compatible, I wondered what kept driving me away from men who loved me. I had a lot of soul-searching to do. At least I knew that much.

This time alone would be clarifying, I decided. I wanted love in my life. Marriage, a family . . . didn't I? I'd always known I wanted to be a mother. But my own strong single mother, who kept us afloat after the divorce when we struggled emotionally and financially to make it on our own, my mother who always went in her own direction no matter how weird and anti-establishment it was, had raised me alone, so it was hard for me to imagine how to reconcile relationships with my desire to be like her. I wasn't sure why I thought that going to Cambodia would answer any of these questions, but travel has a way of wearing down the layers of a habitual existence, revealing what you're really made of. I wanted that. I feared it, and quested after it.

Twenty-four hours after boarding that plane to Vietnam, I stepped through a doorway into a room filled with young women and small children. I said hello in Vietnamese to a mother breastfeeding her child. She smiled timidly at me. The room was busy with the sounds of babies and children and young women murmuring and cooing or laughing and sharing their stories in a language I didn't understand. I stood with the other Red Cross volunteers and donors who had joined us on this trip, waiting to be introduced to the crowd and the Red Cross people in charge of this event, where young women would receive information, guidance, and help raising their children.

Suddenly, a young mother thrust her child into my arms. For a moment, I didn't quite know what to do. I looked at her, startled. She smiled and nodded. Then I looked down at the bundle in my arms. A child. A baby. Tiny, cinnamon-skinned, perfect. I cradled him. I tried to make him smile. But what did I know about babies? The humid air
was thick with the smells of jungle and heat, and I felt sweat trickling down my back, but I held the baby tighter. The whole place felt foreign and strange to me. I must have looked foreign and strange to these young mothers, and yet this woman had trusted me with her child. Why? What did she sense about me? Was it my mother potential?

I held the tiny baby boy closer. I stroked his shock of dark hair. He was warm and calm, utterly content. Then, as quickly as he had been given to me, the baby was whisked away, only to be replaced by another—a little girl this time, who stared into my eyes and gave me a half smile. It was a gesture of respect, to let me hold their children, and I felt deeply honored and moved. Did they assume I was a mother? I was older than most of them, so to these women, of course I was. It is what women do. That's how they must see it. Even though I'd barely given it a thought yet. I felt foolish suddenly, thinking I was still too young to have a baby.

As we moved quietly through the crowded room in that tiny house, jostling women breastfeeding and juggling little ones, I felt comforted and buoyed up by a sweet chaos I had yet to fully understand. Clinic workers held charts out in the front of the room. They educated the women on proper care and hygiene. Most of the women had long black hair and golden skin, and many of them looked barely twenty years old. I was part of a sea of young mothers. Would I be like them someday?

It struck me suddenly that even with their economic and social hardships, having a baby seemed like the most natural, easy thing in the world. And where was I in that scheme? It was over a decade since I'd been twenty years old. I began to wonder, theoretically at first but then with an increasing urgency, if I perhaps ought to get going on this business of having a child. Sure, I was only thirty-three, but as I looked around, I wondered if I, like so many American women, was thwarting the natural order. Had I been too busy to notice
the ticking of my biological clock? Had I taken fertility for granted, assuming I had all the time in the world? Had my body stopped sending me signals because I'd ignored them for so long? In this room, I felt like an older woman, someone who had surely already had all her children. Why hadn't I felt more urgency about becoming a mother? Was I that far removed from the natural cycle of life? Where was my baby? Would my baby ever exist? Why hadn't I thought about any of this before now? These are the questions that began to overwhelm me as I stood in that room full of beautiful mothers and beautiful babies.

I could hear the click-click-click of the Red Cross photographer's camera shutter as he captured the scenes and characters in the clinic. Jenny, a Sigourney Weaver look-alike and a Red Cross donor, held a little boy, tears spilling down her cheeks. I knew she had two little boys at home. The sight of this malnourished child meant something to her, something different than it could mean to me, although I found it tragic and moving and heartbreaking, too. “My boys are so lucky,” she whispered, in wonderment.

Patty, another wealthy donor, had skipped her characteristic red lipstick today. It would have looked out of place in this crowd. She looked warmer, more motherly. “It's harsh the first time, isn't it?” she said, patting Jenny on the back. Then she turned to me. “You want kids, Lis?” she asked. How many times had I heard that question?

“Yes,” I said, feeling surer. “Do you have them?”

“I never did,” Patty said, with no regret. She had such a maternal nature, the answer surprised me. “These are my kids. This has been my life's work. This is how I am a parent.”

I didn't have to ask her if it was enough for her. Clearly, it was. I wondered at all the ways a woman can be a mother. Would this kind of work be enough for me? Or did I want my own baby? The question hung in my mind.

After a week in Vietnam visiting orphanages and hospitals and handing out medicine and food and vitamins and information to young women and their babies, our little group moved on to Cambodia. I missed Ron and I felt like I was living in my head. I was also culture-shocked and a little disconcerted by these new maternal feelings. I felt turned inside out. I'd wanted the ground to shift, and there it was. Now that we were in Cambodia, I felt even more moved by the plight of the people we visited with the Red Cross.

Cambodia wasn't what I expected at all. It was supposed to be an afterthought, a quick visit during the last forty-eight hours of our trip, but I found myself surprisingly head over heels in love with a culture that brimmed with kindness, enlightened simplicity, and ancient beauty. I was so in love, in fact, that I decided to extend my trip so I could stay another week after everyone else in our group of aid workers and some of the Red Cross's more important donors had gone home.

I would turn thirty-four the next day. I wanted to celebrate my birthday in Cambodia. Alone.

But I had a lesson to learn first, one that would resonate with me for the rest of my solitary week. One that would come from a stranger.

One of the last donors to leave, a rugged, tanned, and laid-back Texan named Jack who'd joined us after a vacation in Thailand, offered to share a car with me from the hotel to the market on his last day. I was happy for the company. I'd admired him throughout the week. He had a sincere, brutally honest way about him, but everything he said was tempered with a radiant smile that put people immediately at ease. We spent the greater part of the afternoon wandering through the tables and stalls piled with silk scarves and bags, jewelry and books, bottles of palm wine and woven baskets and wood carvings and clothes.

“So, what next?” he asked me in his slow Texas drawl, as we walked in and out of the darkened aisles of stalls. At first I thought he meant which market stall would we browse through next. Then I realized he meant something else. We'd been talking about the orphanage and what we might buy for the children there. I realized he was talking about children. The whole week had been so full of children.