Kathleen Frank
We’ll Be Different
Haley Swanson
Here he is, my best friend announces, extending her squirming baby toward me.
My breath catches in my throat; I’ve been preparing to meet Laszlo—Jaimie’s first child and my godson—ever since she called me at only four weeks pregnant.
Laz and I make eye contact for the first time. A pair of irises, blue like mine, rest above his gelatinous nose, the pupils so dark and glassy that I balk. By the end of the visit, I’ll come to recognize this blank stare for what it is: Whoever he is, or will become, lies in wait.
Nine months ago, I hung up with Jaimie and ordered a bundle of dried lavender to be delivered to her house across the country before calling out of work to wander New York for hours. My husband was alarmed when I returned home that night, clearly having eaten little and blinked only a handful of times since hearing the news. I wasn’t feeling sad necessarily, or even shocked, so much as exhausted, trying to make my voice sound a certain way on the phone when I felt scared for Jaimie. Flashbacks of her engagement at only twenty-three raced through my head; I’d faked it so hard back then that I’d breathlessly sobbed in my office hallway afterward. She was always moving so quickly, so fearlessly, while I wrung my hands about mental health disorders I’d most likely pass along to any biological child, my tendency to choose myself—be it too many drinks out or packing my social schedule before my husband could get a word in edgewise—labor division, my career, traveling, and an enduring adolescent vanity over maintaining a tight core that pregnancy would no doubt rip to shreds, I recalled Jaimie simply saying something like, Babies are cute! and throwing out her birth control.
That’s a reductive summary.
At seventeen, Jaimie had announced: I want to be a mother one day. Her mom was a social worker who’d adopted Jaimie almost a year into watching Jaimie’s birth mother shoot up whatever was on hand. The first few months of Jaimie’s life had been lost to her—where she lived, who’d held her and how. Her birth father was in prison; no one knew where or why or for how long. She got a single card from him the year she turned nine.
And so it made sense that Jaimie would grapple with this choice before everyone else. She’d already parsed out other unwieldy, ineffable facts like mother and father and loss by seventeen, of course only to discover those words are anything but fact.
I told her she’d be a fantastic mom without thinking about if such a proclamation applied to me or what I imagined for my own adulthood. At that age, I was tangled in an abusive relationship, which is a strange way to spend one’s adolescence—choices made for you, the world consequently small. How I imagine motherhood to feel.
Thirteen or so years later, an unannounced cyst bursts on Jaimie’s left ovary. She’s told her chances of conceiving are slim, puts aside the condoms and pills anyway.
My eyes throb all day wandering the city, not just because of my own selfish questioning—what does it mean to be in my thirties and a woman?—but also because Jaimie had only been pregnant for a month. And there are no promises in the first trimester.
When my husband and I discuss children, it usually goes something like this:
Teddy: You’re so against having them that I feel like I have to be more for having them than I actually am.
Me: We already have a kid. My brother.
Teddy: That’s so many years off!
Me: It’s sooner than you think; my parents are older than yours and he can’t be on his own.
Teddy: You underestimate him.
Me: You’ve never lived with him.
Teddy: We’ll do it differently than your parents.
Me: And what if our kid is sick, too? How will we deal with that and him?
Teddy: We will take care of everyone.
When I discuss children with my friend who’s decided she’s never having them, it goes something like this:
Eliza: Why would I have kids when I know all the care will fall to me?
I nod.
Eliza: Money.
Nod.
Eliza: Freedom.
Nod.
Eliza: Did you know your teeth get weaker in pregnancy because the baby is literally taking so much calcium from you?
Nod.
Eliza: You can undo a marriage.
Nod.
Eliza: But you can’t undo a kid.
When I discuss children with my mother-in-law:
Marita: When you have kids—
Me: If we have kids.
Marita: If?
When I discuss children with my mother:
Mom: I met Sarah’s new baby this week. She’s adorable.
Silence.
Mom: And Elena’s! Here, I’ll send you a picture.
Silence.
Mom: I asked if I could babysit next week, get in as much of that newborn smell as I can.
My sister-in-law, to my mother, at Thanksgiving dinner as I chase after her screaming four-year-old son who’s decided that turkey is unequivocally not for him: Oh yeah, they’re definitely having kids. I mean, look at her. It’s a done deal.
The baby stays. He puts Jaimie at war with a body she already rages against. In her first trimester, she’s either vomiting, nauseous, or desperately sucking on cough drops trying not to gag. The second trimester is more of the same. I visit her in the third, hear her through the drywall of the guest room desperately mumbling to her husband late into the night. Her voice crests and falls as if she’s arguing for or against something, I’m not sure.
Birth is long and arduous and bloody.
The year before my brother was diagnosed, the family went to Hawaii. Me, Mom, Dad, our lawn chairs all in a line while he paced the hotel grounds for hours. I watched him from behind the darkened lens of my sunglasses, could see his mouth moving, though no one was with him, his jaw working, the repetitive slap of his sandals on the pavement.
When was the last time you had him evaluated? I asked Mom over lunch.
She shook her head and said, When he was fifteen.
You have to do it again, I said, and she retorted with something about my father’s resistance to doctors.
When we decided to have kids, she said, we just thought they’d be like us.
They weren’t. And it’s not their fault any more than my brother’s. But being raised by parents trying and failing to see themselves in him, this fruitless searching leading to doctor fatigue, burnout? Whose fault is that?
If one more person quotes Philip Larkin to me: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad./They may not mean to, but they do.” Someone has to take responsibility here. And isn’t that inherently the job of the parent? They dragged you into this mess—of the world, of themselves. A perp saying with a shrug, It wasn’t me, instead pointing to the ghost of their mom and dad behind them, who are pointing to another set of specters behind them, and behind them, and behind them, ad infinitum.
Let’s say I do decide to have children. It’s a boy, which is hard for me. I carry him anyway, rub my stomach as I’m supposed to, play him Bach or whatever. Then I birth him, nurse him, help him grow, and he says to me: Mom, you drink too much. What am I going to do? Motion to my mother and say, She did it first! It’s her fault!
Of course, you wouldn’t do that, a therapist tells me in that soothing, expensive tone. You’re different from her.
All daughters tell themselves they’re different from their mothers, I respond.
Last summer, I cleaned out my sister-in-law’s kitchen, scrubbing counters and pairing various water bottles with their graying, chewed straws, her baby bound to my chest. The child was teething, had a fever, a bronchial infection; I quieted him by bouncing all around the house even though it made him continuously spew breast milk onto my loose-fitting shift.
When the stifling Texas heat lessened, I jammed a sunhat onto my head before an evening walk. For the first time that day, I caught a glimpse of myself in their entryway mirror, my clothing damp from spit-up and dirty kitchen rags quickly run under the sink and wiped with abandon. I paused, taking this other woman in.
If there was a baby and the baby was mine, I don’t trust myself not to fade, pixel by pixel, until all that’s left is the fleshy outline of my child superimposed onto my shadow.
Am I a good mother? Jaimie asks.
Laz isn’t even a year old yet. How many times will she question herself before she stops out of sheer inertia?
Mom says the flight she and Dad took to Paris for their honeymoon was incredibly turbulent.I knew it wasn’t rational, she says, but I kept praying the whole time: Please don’t let me die before I have my children.
My children. Could she already see me and my brother?
She imagines him with chocolate brown hair and long eyelashes like one of those baby dolls with glass eyeballs that blink when you tip their soft bodies. He would watch football with Dad, drink light beer, date a couple girls in high school but meet someone serious in college where he majors in political science. He’s a Republican and goes to church and lives near my parents. His wife is beautiful, kind, they have a couple kids, and his job requires a suit and cologne that’s gifted to him each Christmas.
I live next door with my husband whose role models include Ronald Regan and Winston Churchill. Earlier in life, he was a professional soccer player and perhaps a political correspondent (for the right). He doesn’t eat bread. We have more kids than my brother because I’m older, and Mom watches them when I go to work each day at the television station. I copywrite for the anchors—or actually, I am the anchor, as that’s what they wanted for me though I never expressed any interest in it.
My brother was meant to be the writer of the family. His second grade teacher had pulled my parents aside to say so, advising he transfer to an elite school for the arts.
In fact, can I look at some of his nonexistent pages over the holidays? After all, I know people in book publishing, so it’s not too late for him to achieve that dream for them—with my help. In fact, in one of their versions of this story, I never leave the industry to write. Instead, I get promoted to senior editor, work remotely from the West Coast where I moved to be with them and to get my brother’s unwritten book published.
Doesn’t he love cars? I ask. Want a dog of his own? Likes his stock room job? Did you find him a new doctor yet?
But he could’ve been, they answer. He could’ve been.
My brother, his name always on my tongue. Laszlo, his name now tucked behind each collarbone. Who will he be? I can’t wait to meet him.
I dream of a bumpy flight. Do I look like me or do I look like my mother? I can’t recall, only the heat that enveloped my entire body: I do want a kid.
But now, in the daylight, I can’t see her anymore.
Haley Swanson is a writer and co-editor of Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Glamour, Electric Literature,