From “I Was So Hopeful for You,” collected in the anthology What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, which will be published in May by Simon & Schuster.
Before my father sent me the email I’d been waiting for my entire life, I tried to solicit it. He left us when I was just a baby, maintaining little contact with me, but it wasn’t until college that I felt brave enough to try and get his attention. I got his email address from my aunt, sent a long, gooey letter about how I couldn’t know myself if I didn’t know him. I wasn’t like my mother, my siblings; some part of me had always felt out of place, desperate to please people, to prove myself. Was he the answer?
Eventually, he wrote back, a paragraph in response to my five. He said he liked all foods but chicken potpie and ignored most of my other questions. I replied anyway. He didn’t answer. Every now and then, I’d initiate this type of exchange, feeling the same combination of hope and preemptive humiliation when I hit send.
Once, he responded from a different email address. It belonged to a woman, and when I googled her, I found that she was his colleague and young. Her Facebook profile was only semi-private. In one of her pictures, my father carried a small blond boy on his shoulders, both of them squinting toward the sun. I kept tabs on him that way from then on, through Google searches I conducted more often than I want to admit, clicking the same results over and over: the sepia-toned photo from the summer camp he’d attended as a kid, his girlfriend’s Facebook page. I wondered if he also searched for me. Surely, he must think of me sometimes—as far as I knew, I was his only biological child. And yet, it was strange, how he’d answered via his girlfriend’s email, as if he were trying to make it harder, not easier, for me to reach him.
During my junior year, my laptop broke. Asking my mother to help was not an option. I waitressed a few shifts a week at an Italian place in Midtown, earning cash that New York City promptly ate. I wrote to my father and asked if he would co-sign a $3,000 private loan. I didn’t consider asking just for the laptop, or only for what the laptop would cost. Fair or not, I felt I was owed more; one of my mother’s stories, after all, was that my father, wherever he was, had plenty of money. After some deliberation, he agreed.
The paperwork was full of fascinating information: his birthday, for example, which I’d never known; his address in Michigan; his middle name. We talked on the phone. I learned he’d been in New York recently. It had not occurred to him to seek me out—he must not have thought I would have expected him to. Interesting place, he said, or something along those lines, but I couldn’t live there. It was the most straightforward evidence I’d ever gotten that my yearning for closeness was not reciprocated.
A few years later, I fell behind on my loan payments, and I received a terse message from him about credit and how it works. I responded childishly, and he wrote back within hours. It was thrilling to learn, finally, how to get him to pay attention to me. The closing line of his last response still rattles around in my head: I was so hopeful for you and now that does not seem to be the case at all. It was a happy time in my life, a span of years I’d go back to if someone gave me the chance. I made $34,000 a year working for a literary nonprofit, but I was writing a book, closing in on a first draft. I had interesting friends and a partner I loved. I was twenty-six, and everything out of reach had started to seem possible. The furious, smoking girl I’d once been who’d tried to ruin my life—I thought I’d killed her, or at least converted her self-destructive impulses into ambition, but it seemed that in his mind she lived on. A door I’d been holding open for him swung shut. It was a relief to let it.
The first time I saw my son, really saw him, he was in a plastic box and trussed with wires and tubes, like a chicken from outer space. My husband was sitting next to the box, his sterilized hand poking through a hole in the box’s side. One of the baby’s tiny fists was curled around my husband’s finger. “Isn’t he cute,” my husband said, his voice breaking. The two of them had claimed each other already. Black matter moved through the tubes coming out of the baby’s mouth; that was the meconium, I was told. “Yes,” I said, as if from a great distance away. I waited to feel a surge of something—love, or simple recognition. We had brought three names with us to the hospital, and I could barely remember what they were. Baby Buntin, the doctors called the baby in the box. Buntin. Someone was already wheeling me away, back to my room, so I could attach my breasts to the giant machine and extract colostrum to feed Baby Buntin, when they’d let me give him some.
I just never bonded with you, my father had once confessed. I couldn’t get the line out of my head in the weeks to come, even though the disassociation I’d felt after the baby’s birth disappeared the instant I held him for the first time, masked up in the NICU room with its glass walls, careful not to dislodge the CPAP machine secured to his head with what looked like a large rubber band. His face had a crease in it, right at the top of his nose, from being squished up in my belly, and we both had splotchy purple skin—his from the oxygen issues, maybe, mine from bursting so many blood vessels pushing him out. My husband and I gave him a name. We took him home, where my mother had cleaned our house and hung a welcome home banner, made me dozens of oatmeal cookies that I’d eat two or three at a time in the middle of the night between breastfeeding sessions, hungrier than I’d ever been while pregnant.
That cold confusion that gripped me when I first looked at Baby Buntin: Was that, or something like it, what my father had felt? It was terrifying to imagine that feeling extending for days, weeks, months, as the baby grew more and more alert, reaching out for things, as my son was doing with his perfect webby fingers, fixing his little gaze on our faces. The same part of me that had wanted to impress my father in college tried to understand it, to rationalize it. But I couldn’t. I was falling down the rabbit hole in the other direction.
In the days after my baby was born, everything that had once burned for me dimmed; it was replaced, instead, with the irrefutable brightness of him: my son, with his huge black eyes and his bread-and-milk smell, trying with every ounce of his will to lift his head off the floor. Oh, is there anything more impossible than writing about why you love your own baby? I couldn’t believe him, sometimes, even when he was in my arms—that he was mine, that I belonged so essentially to this family I had made myself. Bonding seemed like too remote a concept; the two of us were one. When other people held him, I stared at them until they gave him back.
All my life, I’d felt so fucking hungry. As a child, watching other people with their families; as an adult in New York City, clawing for a foothold. I ate too much, drank too much, exercised too much, worked too much—trying to perfect the self, trying to fill some yawning pit of need. Always desperate for more of everything, as if in some fundamental way I’d never gotten enough of—what? Whatever a father gives a daughter when he stays? But when I held my son, I felt full. All that wanting: gone. It was earth-shattering, and a little like death. At first, I thought I’d been simply wrong, wrong about everything. What if babies, for me, were the thing, not writing, teaching, making art? Books had nothing on the baby; the baby was a universe, the ultimate creative act.
Now, looking back at that first postpartum year, I am reminded of the times in high school and college when my drinking was most out of control. I didn’t care if I wore dirty clothes, blew every deadline, never talked to my closest friends. My son blotted everything else out—I was obliterated, and I liked it. I would have told you I was happy. The truth is I’d erased myself, just as I’d tried to with all those drinks, but this time, who would tell me to stop? Not the day-care waiting lists or the lactation consultant who appeared minutes after I had given birth. Not my mother, who loved that we’d found, in the baby, a common obsession. And certainly not the baby, whose life depended on mine depending on his.
At night, I’d often wake a few minutes before my son cried out. I’d stare into the darkness just outside my open door until I heard him. Nyah, nyah, when he was four, five months old, and then a full-throated cry loud enough for the neighbors to hear. I picked him up and sat down in the nursing chair. In the dark, half asleep, listening to my son’s whistling little swallows, I’d think of my mother’s life, after I was born: a year or so postpartum, she fell for my sister’s father. What would it be like to have the space in your mind, in your body, to fall in love with someone new, to make plans for restarting your life? To want something. To give your baby a bottle of formula, tuck her in, and go meet someone else in the backyard. Look at me, rocking in that chair for hours. Wasn’t I a better mother? I felt angry, sometimes, when my son latched—angry for what I imagined I hadn’t gotten. But didn’t I also feel something else? Yes, I envied my mother. She’d held on to herself.
It was the same damage, the same old stupid wound. I’d just found another way in. I wasn’t erasing myself because I loved motherhood, the endless loop of caring for my infant, because all of that was enough for me—it was because I’d finally found what I was looking for. Someone who could never leave.
My father lives on a small, man-made lake. It’s private, lovely, and blue, with cottagey houses dotting its shores, some of them quite large, others modest and shingled, all with docks that extend like tongues into the water.
My husband and I pull up in his driveway. I change my son’s diaper in the back seat, my pulse galloping. I’m nervous—I’ve never been here. I agonized over whether to introduce my father to my son, but in the end, we’ve come here almost on a whim—it’s July, we’re stir-crazy, and when we got an invitation, my husband and I decided it wasn’t really a choice. My son, at fourteen months, won’t remember any of this. And isn’t it true that I want to see it? See them together? My son looks more like me than he does his father, and I look more like my father than I do my mother. I want to see just how alike they are, measure it in real time, the brownness of their eyes, the angle of their smiles.
My son isn’t yet walking on his own, but he loves to explore with someone holding his hands, so my husband takes him around the wide lawn as my father offers us drinks. My father gets very invested in my husband’s beer preferences and forgets to bring me a glass of wine. Hummus, my son shouts, seeing the food on the patio table. He can’t walk, but he can say dozens of words, and I wait for my father to notice this, to be proud. Wow, his partner says. He’s a little talker.
We sit down to eat. We’re on a strict time limit, a couple hours tops. My husband and I live and die by bedtime: seven, seven-thirty if we push it. Bedtime has given us our life back, hours of kid-free time we use to write and read and watch shitty TV or just stare into the sinkhole of our phones. When my son misses his or, worse, falls asleep in the car on the way home, we’re in for trouble: multiple wake-ups, an early morning.
After dinner, my father wants to take us out on his pontoon, show us the lake. It’s almost six-thirty. Just for a minute, my husband and I agree, because the weather is beautiful, because my son does look like my father, because the pontoon is big and fancy and the baby has never been on a boat before. We wrestle my son into a tiny life jacket; my father has one just about the baby’s size, as if he spends a lot of time with small children. The boat loops slowly around the lake as his partner carries out the conversation. It’s funny, my husband says. He’s such a guy. It was true. After so much wondering, the defining mystery of my childhood had turned out to be a regular man, a beer drinker and country-music fan who liked taking out his pontoon. If anything, my life makes less sense as his daughter, not more. This was not the story I’d imagined.
The baby, balancing between my legs in his puffy orange vest, whines loudly, but I show him the water rippling behind the boat and that, for a moment, changes his mood. We should probably head back, my husband tells my father. It’s basically bedtime, and we’ve got a drive.
Just one more loop, my father says, and then describes some special feature of the lake we can’t absorb because the baby is trying to rip off his life jacket, and then he’s whimpering, pulling at my shirt, but I can’t nurse him on the boat with our life jackets on, and I’m not sure we can take them off, and I don’t want to ask my father because I don’t want to be rude, or nurse in front of him. The boat keeps moving away from my father’s house.
It will only take a minute, says my father, staring at a destination none of us can see. My husband gets out his phone. It’s after seven now, and my son is still fussing, too loud for any of us to talk. We reach the place my father wanted so badly to go, the boat lulling for a moment near a small outcropping of sand, where a distant family runs in and out of the water. He glances at me, as if to say, See? He’s trying his best—both of us are. But I don’t know what I’m looking at.
I was so hopeful for you, I think, as my father finally turns the boat around.