LITMIR.BIZ

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“HELL” sign lets you know you’re close to Cincinnati.

      It was time.

      How did I put it? Not long ago, I asked Zoë what she remembered of that day.

      “You said, ‘I have something I want to tell you,’” she told me. “You kind of scared me. I thought maybe you were going to say Grammy had died, or you and Dad were getting divorced.”

      After that she didn’t remember, and I didn’t, either. I probably said an awkward and pause-filled version of, “I was raped when I was thirty years old, on a college campus, and it scares me that you’re going to college.” That’s what I know I felt: I had to tell her what had happened to me as a kind of magical insurance policy, so it would never happen to her.

      We both remember that she started crying, almost instantly. Not the vocal kind of crying, but the kind she inherited from me, silent and stricken, our chins trembling and our eyes filling with tears until they spill over and run down our cheeks.

      I told her the story I had told so often in the hours and days after the rape: I was working, I was late for an interview, the building was empty, the guy was there, he cut me on the throat. I didn’t talk about what he did to me after that.

      I remember clearly one thing she said. “Now I see why you and Dad were so overprotective. Especially Dad.”

      This was news to me. I thought I was the one driving them crazy with my hovering. I was so wrapped up in my fears, I hadn’t even noticed that my husband was tied up in his own knots of worry and fear over our children.

      “Really?” I said, looking over at her.

      “Sometimes it feels like you guys are stalking me,” she said.

      I told Dan a few months later, when I picked him up for summer break. This time I drove to Cincinnati alone, thinking the whole way about how and why he had come into the world.

      It occurred to me that he was a child born out of my fear.

      The night I was raped, twenty-one years before, my husband took me home from the hospital to a bare house, a center-hall colonial built in 1927 in Shaker Heights. We had just moved into it, our first house after years of apartments, and we had no furniture for three of the four bedrooms, let alone the two extra bedrooms on the third floor. Our parents joked that we had to do something to fill all those rooms up. Meaning children.

      But I wasn’t sure I wanted children, and the “not-sure” teetered toward “never.” I hated babysitting when I was a teenager. I avoided other people’s children at parties, and if someone forced a baby into my arms, it never failed to start wailing. Those twinges of yearning women call baby lust? I never felt them.

      Freud wrote that we cannot truly imagine our own death. “Whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators,” he wrote. “At bottom, no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: In the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.”

      But I was no longer convinced. I had glimpsed my own death in a gloomy theater, in a smear of my own blood, and it changed everything. I lay awake through the nights, aching with the knowledge of what Harold Brodkey called “this wild darkness.” While my husband slept next to me, I started thinking about what I wanted from this too-short life. I began to think about having a child. I hate the drugstore perfume of sentimentality, but one thought broke through my barricades: I could push back death by bringing life into my life.

      By the anniversary of the rape, I was pregnant. My son was born October 7, 1985, eleven days after his due date, no more ready for this than I was. We named him Daniel and gave him my last name as his middle name. The nurses cleaned him up before they handed him to me, wrapped like a burrito in a blanket, showing only a thick head of black hair and a face all battered and bruised from the suction-cup delivery that came after a thirty-six-hour labor—a story I would repeat probably way too often in the coming years, usually on Dan’s birthdays. Lucky boy.

      The labor ended only when the doctor gave me the thing all journalists must have: a deadline. Deliver within two hours, she said, or we do a C-section. With the help of copious drugs and the suction device, I delivered. When the nurse presented him to us, my husband said, “He looks like he was mugged on his way here.”

      When I held my bruised baby, my heart cracked into a mosaic of intense love, opiate-fueled bliss, and hideous, morbid fear. I felt like the mother in “Sleeping Beauty,” cradling my child against the curse of a jealous witch.

      My husband took my tears to be of happiness, and I let him think it. He sat next to me on the hospital bed, and we passed our burrito baby back and forth as we admired him. He looked back at us. We cooed.

      And then he looked right at me and said, “Hi.” He really did. We both heard it, and nothing will ever persuade us it was just a burp.

      Once home from the hospital, I started crying and could not stop. I wept as I nursed my son, filling him with milk laced with my anxieties as I watched my tears drizzle down my breast. It did not take long for him to begin crying, crying endlessly, cramped with colic and the calamitous fears I fed him. We cried together. I wept alone in bed. I wept in the shower and I wept at the dinner table while my husband, my mother, and my stepfather sat in silence, heads down, the food going cold.

      “I’m fine!” I kept telling them. I tried to form a smile. “I don’t know why I’m crying!” And I really didn’t know why. I had a healthy baby who would be beautiful as soon as his birth bruises faded and he stopped crying. I had a home, a job, a husband who loved me.

      My mother, who had arrived in Cleveland before I was even out of the hospital, patted my back as I wept and told me all I needed was a good long sleep.

      “Let me get up with him for a few nights and feed him from a bottle,” she said. “We can put his cradle in my room.”

      I heard this kind offer as if it were a threat to kidnap my baby.

      I was still weeping when my mother and stepfather left, still weeping when the other grandparents arrived, still weeping when they left, still saying, “I’m fine!”

      Two weeks passed this way. My husband went back to work. That first morning, I sat on the couch in the quiet, my baby on my lap. We were alone.

      One of the twenty-six baby books I was consulting at the time advised parents to keep up a steady stream of conversation with their baby. I looked at Danny on my lap, and he looked back at me. He had that look of intense, worried concentration babies sometimes get. He was ready to listen, but I didn’t have anything to say. What did the book mean by “having a conversation” with an infant?

      I propped him up a little higher on my leg and gave it a try. “So here we are,” I said. “You and me.” We stared at each other in silence. I pressed on. “I want you to know that I will always be here.”

      Now he looked puzzled. “I am your mother,” I explained, “and you will always have me. I will always love you. I will protect you, and I promise I will never, ever let anything bad happen to you.”

      He listened carefully. Then his face crumpled, and he started crying.

      And now here I was, two decades later, driving to pick him up from college. I wondered: Does Dan have a memory, all these years later, a relic buried deep but almost reachable, of what I told him those long, slow mornings and afternoons? Do he and Zoë know that my attachment to them, so much of the time, was based in fear?

      That fearful attachment was offset by my recurring detachment. I hovered above my family much of the time, observing us from a distance; and as my children grew older, they began to notice when I checked out. They learned to call me back, demanding my attention. “Mom! Mom!”

      How much of their childhood did I miss? How much mothering did they miss? When I ask myself these questions, I grieve those day-by-day, year-by-year losses like a death.

      I arrived in Cincinnati all tender and melancholy, but Dan broke my mood as soon as he got

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