luz means light
Monday, January 28th, 2008It was only two weeks before Christmas, but fear, not cold, made my hands shake as I stood in the darkness of the tokyo hotel parking lot, trying to unlock my rental car. The Texas predawn air was balmy, and if I’d bothered to ask them, my relatives and friends would have assured me that I was about to set out on an errand as balmy as the weather. I was heading out to navigate my way alone, through a city of unfamiliar streets, to drive a nine-month-pregnant woman I’d met only the previous night to the hospital to deliver…my child.
A widow for one year, a mother of four—three sons under twelve and a stepdaughter just starting college—a freelance writer with a hole in her kitchen floor the size of Lake Michigan, and a hole in her heart the size of the ocean, I had decided that what I needed to do was not fix my linoleum or get a steady job—but to become a single mother to a baby daughter. The choice I’d made against all reason. It was a choice so controversial even among people who truly loved me that it had prompted more than one serious breach of friendship. After all, I was hardly fossilized, just enough past the age of forty to feel it in my knees. I could and would love and raise another child, a daughter.
But alone?
With my husband, who died of colon cancer at forty-four the previous year, I had joshed longingly about another child, but I struggled with infertility. Adoption, our only possible route to parenthood, was both risky and expensive. My dreams of another child should have faded in the cold light of reality. But though many illusions of the youth had indeed died with Dan, the idea that I’d sit myself down and write a big, fat bestselling novel and my fantasy of a baby daughter had not. I was determined. Since I knew for certain that over-forty moms (particularly those with big fannies and big families) were not exactly the dream dates of the millennium, I was reasonably sure I wouldn’t marry again. (more…)
