Devotion (21 page)

Sometimes I check my e-mail while driving.

I forget to wear my seat belt.

When in New York, I dash across the street during any break in traffic.

I used to smoke cigarettes, though I’m not sure that counts. I quit at twenty-five.

This is a list of actions—potentially damaging, even devastating actions—I do or don’t undertake that are within my control. It’s hardly like I’m skydiving, or helicopter skiing. A risk-taker I’m not. But I certainly don’t need to check e-mail while driving. Obviously, I could be wearing my seat belt at all times. Jaywalking isn’t really necessary. So why do it?

Last year, I was rushing to make a noodle kugel for Rosh Hashanah. I didn’t bother to unplug the handheld electric mixer before I used my index finger to remove cheese that was stuck to
the blade. I accidentally switched on the mixer and cut a gash into my finger. Michael saw it happening, and started to yell—
What did you do? What did you just do?
—as he reached the phone to call 911. It’s the one and only time an ambulance has come up our driveway—despite all my nightmares and fantasies—and it was because of something I did that was entirely my fault.

Jacob’s longtime babysitter, Maria, is a devout Mormon, and one of the most capable people I’ve ever known. She once told me that her religion teaches its adherents to focus only on the task at hand. When cooking dinner, cook dinner. When driving, simply drive. Whether walking, eating, arranging flowers, or putting a child to bed, do so with undivided attention. When making a noodle kugel, don’t have your head in one place, and your…finger, say, in another.

I worry constantly about all those things that I can’t control. Nutty stuff—but it’s part of my fretting nature. In the words of Sylvia, I am easily startled. In the absence of anything to startle me, I am capable of startling myself. But when it comes to the things that are within my grasp, I am slowly learning what the Mormons—and the Buddhists, for that matter—already know.

One afternoon at Garrison, Sharon Salzberg spoke about a Buddhist teacher in India, a widowed woman with many, many children who had no time to sit on a cushion, meditating. How had she done it, then? Sharon had once asked her. How had she achieved her remarkable ability to live in the present?

The answer was simply this: she stirred the rice mindfully.

I was blessed—or was it cursed?—with a highly attuned sense of my physical self, and could usually tell within days when I was pregnant. After the first loss there were others. These pregnancies lasted a few weeks, a month. One held on for nine weeks before I began bleeding. We lived with an absence, a ghost child. We didn’t make travel plans. I declined out-of-town speaking engagements. My life was a split screen. Were we going to remain a family of three? Or was Jacob going to have the little brother or sister he often asked for?

We kept Jacob’s baby clothes boxed up in the basement, along with his crib and bouncy seat. We stored his tricycle in the garage. We didn’t decorate the spare bedroom, nor did we give it a name. It wasn’t the guest room. It was the future baby’s room, though we didn’t call it that either. Jacob turned five, then six. It was beginning to feel like it was now or never. I was forty-two and a half, then forty-three. Conceiving the old-fashioned way had begun to be, statistically speaking, highly improbable.

One day while driving near my house, I had what felt like a eureka moment. I had the answer! My body was clearly defective. I secretly believed that I was to blame for Jacob’s infantile spasms. No matter how the doctors had reassured me, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been able to protect him. What made me think it would be any different with another child? I knew—I was certain of this—what we needed to do.

I came home and told Michael my great idea: we needed to find an egg donor. A young woman with healthy eggs. Up until that moment, I had never considered the possibility, but now it seemed like the only way.

“An egg donor?” Michael asked. He looked concerned. “I don’t know, honey. I’m not sure how you’ll feel if—”

“It’s fine,” I answered, as if I had thought the whole thing through. “I love you, and the baby will be biologically yours. And Jacob will have a sibling. That’s what matters.”

Once I had arrived at this solution, it was as if I had leapt onto a fast-moving train. Though Michael remained unconvinced, he was willing to make the leap with me. What we wanted—a second child—overrode all possible misgivings. We had been pretty beaten down by the compounding losses, and it didn’t take much to talk ourselves into it. We didn’t stop to think—because stopping and thinking might mean stopping entirely. The key word was
want
. We
wanted
. And that desire made us blind and slightly crazy.

I embarked on a search for an egg donor with all the energy I could muster. Project Baby! I was good at projects. I did research, made lists. There were agencies, I quickly learned. Did I want a beautiful egg? An Ivy-educated one? A triathlete? Jewish? As if browsing the aisles of the world’s most esoteric supermarket, the choices were staggering. There were supermodel eggs. Supermodel/genius IQ eggs. Supermodel/genius IQ/cello prodigy eggs. It was only a matter of deciding what was important to us.

Most evenings, after Jacob was asleep, Michael and I sat on the leather sofa in our library, scrolling through postage-stamp-sized pictures of donors.

“What about her?” I asked, pointing to a cute girl with curly brown hair. She played varsity tennis at a school I admired, and seemed like someone who might, in other circumstances, have been my friend.

“She’s too tall,” Michael said. “We’re not a tall family.” Then he pointed to a small blonde who looked a little like me. “What about her?”

I studied her photo and the biographical information next to it.

“She lists scrapbooking as her hobby.”

“So?”

“I hate scrapbooking.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose, then looked at me.

“Does that matter?”

The thing was this: it did matter.
Everything
mattered. Height, eye color, intelligence, smile, hobbies, ethnicity, religion. Parents, siblings, grandparents. It mattered because I was trying to find my own replacement. At first, I thought maybe I could improve on myself—pick a prettier, smarter, less neurotic version of me. But as time wore on, I began to realize that I was looking for something else—something ineffable, and far harder to come by. I was searching for nothing less than a soul mate. I studied the results of highly detailed questionnaires—taste in food, age at first menstruation, musical preferences—as if these details, once added up, could possibly give me a real sense of the whole person.

I wanted—needed—to fall in love. But I couldn’t fall in love. Not with a series of photographs, not with a list of personality traits. I began to feel older, more tired and more sad with each passing day. I had come face-to-face with something I wanted
badly that I simply couldn’t have. Finally, I had my second eureka moment, but this time it didn’t arise from that intense wanting. Instead, it came from a place closer to the core.
This is my life
, was how it went.
My singular, blessed, imperfect, beautiful life.

I have practiced yoga with many different teachers since walking into my first class nearly twenty years ago. I’ve been to classes in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Los Angeles, Boston, all over Connecticut. Crowded, sweaty classes where the mats overlap on the floor and from side angle pose, you can carefully study the intricacies of your neighbor’s tattoo. Empty, air-conditioned studios with custom-colored mats and complimentary green tea served afterward. Once, from the carpeted locker room of such a studio on the Upper East Side, I heard a crowd cheering and rushed to the window just in time to see the Dalai Lama emerge with his entourage from a hotel across the street.

All of my teachers—some of whom I’ve never met, others who have become my friends—have taught me lessons I’ve needed to learn. I never know when a piece of wisdom is going to stick. I only know that, if I stay open and receptive, eventually I hear something new—or perhaps simply in a new way. From a teacher in Sag Harbor, I discovered the centering power of breath practice,
pranayama
. A teacher in New Orleans taught me to let my yoga practice settle in while lying in
shavasana
, rather than jump right into the rest of my day. Another—one I’ve never laid eyes
on but whose podcasts are available on the Internet—had helpful insights into headstand.

But it was a teacher in Santa Monica who provided me one of my most valuable lessons. I had wandered into her class one morning, while on a trip to L.A. to meet with a potential egg donor. I was feeling confused and vulnerable. As soon as I entered the studio, I wanted to turn around and walk right back out. It was a cavernous room, filled with tan and impossibly fit twenty-something actor types wearing the latest yoga gear. The teacher—a tall, curvy woman named Ally Hamilton—paced the room wearing a cordless headset. I panted and sweated my way through the most physically challenging class I’d ever done, all the while thinking
I should leave, I should leave, I should leave
. But I didn’t leave. And at the end of class, after
shavasana
, Ally instructed us in a practice that has since become a part of my everyday life.

At the end of my hour of yoga, after the sun salutations and twists and inversions and backbends and stretches, after I have rested for at least a few moments in
shavasana
, I sit up at the edge of my mat and place my palms together as Ally Hamilton did that morning in her busy California studio. I lift my palms to the center of my forehead—my third eye—and ask for clarity of thought. I wait until the idea of it has sunk in just a little bit. These things take time. Then I slide my palms down to my lips, and ask for clarity of speech. Again, I wait. Often, the phrase
Say what you mean and mean what you say
floats through my head. Finally, I slide my palms down to my chest, for clarity of action. I wait until I think I understand.

Clarity of thought.

Clarity of speech.

Clarity of action.

So simple, isn’t it? So simple, and yet so easy to forget. I place my hands together in prayer and remember. Just as my father laid tefillin each morning, now I am finding my own touchstone. It may be different from my father’s, but still, it’s a ritual. I think he might even have approved. After all, it’s a formal way of considering, however briefly, what matters most.

It was a hot summer Sunday. Michael and Jacob were off to another Red Sox game, and I had planned to spend a relaxed afternoon with my aunt Shirley. I had been looking forward to some quiet time with her. As always, I was brimming with questions. But as she ushered me through her front door, she seemed a bit distracted.

“Sweetheart, I have a surprise for you. We’re going to a wedding,” she said. A wedding? I looked down at myself: I was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, flip-flops. I thought perhaps I had misheard her.

“I didn’t tell you before, because I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” Shirley said. “Naomi—Joanne’s youngest—is getting married today. In Chicago. Here, sit down. I’ll be just a few minutes.”

I watched as Shirley climbed up the wide, curved staircase, past Moe’s electric chair lift. I had no idea what was going on. A wedding. In Chicago. I stood and walked around the library, looking at the assortment of family photos arranged on top of
the grand piano. More children had been born since the last time I had visited. More young men in black hats, lovely wives holding newborns. My latest novel still had a place of honor on the coffee table. I gazed up at my grandfather’s portrait, wishing for the thousandth time that I had known him.

“All right, this is the best I can do,” Shirley called as she walked quickly back downstairs. She had changed into an elegant black suit, and was fastening a pearl choker behind her neck. “Cheryl is going to be here in a few minutes to set it all up.”

“What’s—I don’t—”

The doorbell rang, and in came a young woman I recognized from various weddings and bar mitzvahs. She was the wife of one of my cousin Henry’s sons, but I didn’t know which one. She had four children in tow. The boys, who were perhaps three and four, were wearing suits and ties, shiny black shoes. The girls, slightly older, were in party dresses and Mary Janes. Everyone except for me seemed to be prepared for a special occasion.

“Bruno has Uncle Moe ready upstairs,” Shirley said. “Come.”

I followed Shirley and her great-grandchildren up to the master bedroom. Moe was in a wheelchair, wearing black trousers and a white business shirt. A yarmulke rested on top of his thin gray hair. Bruno, his home health aide, stood behind him. In the center of the bedroom, a very large computer monitor had been set up on a rolling cart.

“This should work,” Cheryl said as she turned on the computer. “I tested all the equipment yesterday.” With a few keystrokes, the screen was suddenly filled with a crowded ballroom. Hundreds of chairs were set up on either side of an aisle bedecked with white satin ribbons. In the front of the ballroom, a chuppah.

“See?” Shirley turned to me. “I told you we were going to a wedding.”

Someone—probably Cheryl’s husband—was holding a laptop on the other end, slowly panning the room. Video-chatting.

“Will you look at that.” Shirley smiled. “Moe—Moe, can you see?”

My uncle’s eyes were glued to the screen.

The faces of an older couple appeared.

“Moe? Shirley? Is that you?”

“It’s us,” Shirley called out.

“Mazel tov! We wish you were here!”

“This is as close as we could get,” Shirley said.

The screen then filled with my cousin Mordechai. His black hat, long dark beard, twinkling brown eyes.

“Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!” He then peered closer. “Wait a minute—is that Dani?”

I waved from behind Moe’s wheelchair. Once again, inappropriately dressed for a family function.

The ceremony was beginning. Through the shaky, handheld laptop connecting the ballroom in Chicago to the bedroom in Brookline, we watched as the groom walked down the aisle, flanked by his parents. He wore a black hat and a black overcoat, which he had wrapped around himself. Underneath the overcoat, I knew, was a
kittel
, a shroud just like the one in which he would someday be buried. He looked like a character in a nineteenth-century novel.

“He’s a psychoanalyst,” Shirley whispered.

The groom had reached the chuppah. He turned to face the screen.
Mazel tov
, he mouthed.
Mazel tov.

Naomi was now walking down the aisle, her parents on either side of her. She took her place next to her husband-to-be, then smiled and gave a small wave to her grandparents.

“She’s a wonderful, very special person,” Shirley said. “A beautiful bride.”

We watched as the
sheva brachot
—the seven marriage blessings—were recited, each by a different rabbi. Naomi circled the groom seven times, her face serene beneath her veil. Shirley held Moe’s hand. The great-grandchildren sat on the floor next to his wheelchair. Were those tears in my uncle’s eyes? I couldn’t tell.

In just a few minutes, the ceremony concluded with the breaking of the glass, and more calls of “Mazel tov!” from the wedding guests. But before the new husband and wife even looked at each other, before they embraced their parents or walked back up the aisle, they both turned to the laptop screen and spoke to the grandparents—the ninety-three-year-old man and eighty-six-year-old woman who were simply too old and frail to have possibly made the trip from Boston to Chicago.

“Mazel tov, Gram!” Naomi called. “Mazel tov, Grampa!”

“Mazel tov, sweetheart!” Shirley called. “Mazel tov, Meyer!”

In Chicago, the wedding guests began to dance. The women danced with women, and the men danced with men, in ever-widening circles. And in Brookline, Shirley reached her hands out to Cheryl, to her great-granddaughters, and to me. She was regal, incandescent as we danced around Moe’s wheelchair—our circle connecting to that hotel ballroom and far beyond.