Gabriela Halas | Contributing Writer

The restaurant is full, boisterous with millennials, but I keep my voice low. As though talking about how the baby inside of me got there would still the voices in this small, chic restaurant. 

“People will see what they want to see in your baby,” my friend assures me over our shared Vietnamese dishes. 

“If it’s a girl,” I respond, “she’ll never look like me, but people will expect it, our shared gender some marker of alikeness. And if the child is a boy, people will see his father in him and I will get away with assumptions about DNA dilution, which, I assume, will be easier to hear for the rest of my life”. 

We are talking about my child’s arrival, about a month away. There are certain people in my life who know of my donor egg child-to-be, and others who do not. I’ve become mildly obsessed with what our baby will look like, the visual surprise of the donor’s anonymity.

“I think you’ll be surprised,” my friend insists and I want to believe her. “People will see the features they want. And your kids take on your mannerisms so they ‘look’ like you anyways. Plus, there’s no connection between a daughter looking like her mother or a boy looking like his father.” 

She goes on to describe her own kids to me; the son who shares my friend’s slightly down-turned mouth and olive skin, the way her daughter is the female version of their dad. How both are now a quarter Egyptian, straying from their white father and their half-Egyptian mother; in photos I’ve seen they are beautiful and most importantly, to me, individuals irrespective of the family unit. 

This is so obvious, of course. I pick another slice of ling cod with my chopsticks and pop it into my mouth. The meal is astonishingly good. Our words slide easily between how perfectly flavoured the dishes are, how our writing projects are progressing, and the giant topic of family both of us circle, perpetually, it seems, in our writing. Both of us are the kids of immigrants; I came as a child to Canada, and her parents came to Canada and married in a friend’s backyard; two years later my friend was born. And though our parents come from very different countries, once I read an essay of hers in which she had written, “even in my forties, I still hold my parent’s words in high regard,” and I knew she would understand the emotional and psychological attachment I carry with a certain allegiance to family. 

If I’m being honest with myself, I feel a deep trepidation at the looming baby due date. ‘Bio’ lineage and blood family are only one part of who we are, and who we may, or may not physically resemble is meaningless in the greater story of who we become. But who we look like from within our blood families is also a communal linkage, a set of biological and historical privileges; we’ve become accustomed, socially, to the idea that we can see ourselves from a not-too-distant past. We make sense in the light of who our people are. This idea feels sharply contrasted against the familial solitude of the donor egg/sperm child, or child through adoption. 

I also admit I’m simplifying a complex set of relationships. Language around blood and chosen families is now common, as are donors and various kinds of adoption. Yet the identities we strongly hold onto and publicly announce seem more powerful than ever before and range from where we are from, how long we were there, what our family ties are, and the names we use for ourselves. We are more multi-dimensional than ever; will my daughter describe herself in relation to her very beginnings, if that means something to her identity, to her distinct self? She might, and that shouldn’t surprise me. 

//

My DNA dreams keep me up at night. Who am I bringing into this world? As the carrier of this new life, come to me anonymously and technologically, I’ve thus far held trust that the process will deliver. A young woman’s egg (we know she was 21 years old and passed all genetic screening) met my partner’s sperm in a warm, fluid-filled petri dish. Then became the embryo/fetus/baby alive in my womb. From the perspective of a donor situation, my uterus has been referred to as “foreign territory.” Strange terrain for the life inside, which has also been tested and passed all important screenings. The child is growing well according to the doctor’s measured charts, with my own vitals ticking along. We’ve made it this far; I’m known to whisper to my growing belly.

But still. I can’t quite let go of how stuck we are to similarity, to difference. It’s pervasive everywhere we look. A culture of constant comparisons. As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich states, “…I still can’t imagine child without imagining gender,” even as Marzano-Lesnevich undergoes their own gender transformation. And in the stories we make up of difference/alikeness, “…what is a dream if not a narrative…And what is a narrative if not constant foreclosure, this instead of that?” Girl instead of boy. He instead of her. Mother instead of father. Bio family instead of chosen family. Dichotomies pervade, are limited through language. 

In the daily imaginings of my child, including private conversations I have with them, I remind the being that I won’t possess them, that they will be their own self-created person. To trust me when I say, “I do my best to hold space for every possibility” (Marzano-Lesnevich 89). Yet if someone came and unpeeled the layers of my brain, they may decipher some dream-DNA-sequence born into me from decades of my own socialization. Some part of me that yearns to be seen in another’s skin. To rest myself there, in generations past. Barring that, without that, possibility reigns. The future is ours to carve. A center forming through ethereal edges. 

//

I’m stuffing mini chocolate chips into my mouth. I’m alternating the chips between spoonfuls of peanut butter from one jar and almond butter from another. My daughter rests along one of my arms, limbs tucked neatly together against my body, her head and dark mass of hair in the curve of my elbow. Her eyes are starting to focus a little more, in week three of her life, but it seems she can’t decide to keep them open or closed. They open slowly, like a chrysalis, or scan wildly the light and shadows of the room. 

I am hungry. A postpartum hunger that shocked me the day after we came home from the hospital. I spent over half my pregnancy feeling like my skin was being stretched by some goliath’s hands, and that my organs were made of clay–squashed, pushed, or otherwise molded into new and interesting shapes. I felt full for months and it was rare to actually feel empty. 

Breastfeeding feels like it’s sucking all my calories and any muscle I once had seems flaccid, loose at the edges. I need to feed myself to feed her, and all my meals are gulped and hurried. The mini chips are not a meal, and neither are the butters, yet I can’t help but shove it all into my mouth like the baby-land prisoner I’ve become. As though someone will come by and snatch it all away. My daughter will, I realize, metaphorically and physically, tear the food away from me in her own demands to eat. Or to be held, stroked, rocked, hummed to, burped, changed, fed, then fed again in her “clustered eating.” 

I don’t lament any of this. It is, after all, only week three, and to be exact she is 17 days old. It is too early for any kind of mourning or weeping of what once was, even if I can already feel how decentered I am from the before. There’s a common motherhood narrative that I’ve read pre and post-birth, the concept of a mother never being alone. And while this is instinctually true and inherently accurate, I can’t help but grow tired of a certain story of motherhood told repeatedly by North American or European mothers writing memoirs in which we are surprised at never being alone or we see ourselves as ‘in the trenches’ of motherhood. This is no war; I repeat to myself. Despite the above, where I referred to myself as a prisoner; the metaphors seem inescapable. It is the softest incarceration, a supple arrangement if we let it be so. ‘Never alone,’ we, of a certain culture, marvel at how quickly our solitude evaporates. We hold our individual selves and needs in such high regard. The center I used to have feels like mushy memories built entirely from my own free-will; everything I did was something I chose to do. If I expected my life to remain the same, I would be actively grieving and why would I want that?

Now, with her gray-blue eyes searching the contrasts of the room, and only sometimes seeming to land on my face, this afterward is all I have. The defined edges of my life are gone. No longer do I have a schedule outside of her biology. I don’t have anywhere to be, no set time or agenda except the one managed by her growth. The cells of her body appear bigger, roomier each morning. 

I love that I can cradle her in one arm and eat with the other. I brace the largest jar with my hip and scrape the spoon along the edges, gathering morsels of fat. I’ve managed to cook a stew (having chopped the onion, celery, carrots, and squash hours before) with her laying in one arm. The dishes pile because that’s a two-handed job. I imagine myself once this big, contained on one arm, held up by someone’s ulna and radius, and the twenty-seven bones of a hand. If there is an edge to this day it is a frame created from those bones. 

//

In the soft world we inhabit, poems become whatever we want them to be. As she feeds off my body, I read poetry to my daughter. I glance back and forth from the page to her face, ask her opinion on each poem afterwards. She is busy with one of her several basic physical demands and does not offer anything coherent, except her one-month-old eyes searching for something behind my head. If her eyes meet mine at some point in the reading I take that to mean, go on. 

I read to her from either Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, or Best American Poetry 2022. The epigraph to Howard’s collection is, in large part, why I bought the book: A new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography. The new being is both me and my daughter having entered into this space together. Her successful birth feels like she has come into the world a second time – the first was when I found out that I was pregnant, that my body accepted the lab-made embryo not of my genetic material. I’ve also arrived twice—first from my own actual birth, solely dependent on others to survive, and her birth—nurturing that which cannot live without me. Our shared biography begins with verse; the way language cuts an opening across our new life. 

Howard:

My wet cells kindling another/mirror, the sense-presence of you. 

A bloodstream of dark matter/and the truth I’ll never contain

love is a root I stumble over/in search of you.

Memory stalks/all axons and familiar haunts. 

each day I wake and rewrite/this and in doing so/destroy my memory

//

The beauty of poetry, I explain to the baby, is that it can birth you or kill you. A poem is a mother, a dispatch, wound dressing, homage to forgetfulness. Which is another way of saying a poem can be whatever you want it to be. It is what you hear the poet say in their chosen words, and what you imagine. The lines from Howard come from poems that, in my reading, have little, if anything, to do with motherhood, a new child, or the constant draw I now feel from my chest to her chest. The poem, no matter how it is read, is possibility. Is an opening, a gap to slip the body through. 

(I owe nothing 
to the poets
and everything
to my child). 

As she suckles at the breast and I continue reading, the words remind me there are infinite possibilities of language and meaning. Edges that first appear like a horizon line re-center over and over. As we come closer the line we thought was distant arrives, it enters the body. In the same way as my small daughter is limited by expected forms in our gendered, possessive language–she, her, daughter, mine–-in poetry language can be inverted; we become fluid with one another. Poetry’s occupation, and there are multiple, I whisper to her, is the freedom to imagine, to feel, to be changed by a small economy of words; that a partly common language exists to which strangers can brings their own heartbeat, memories, images. 

Others:

Call it science. It’s summer again, and then/everything’s remnant. What did we do those days, /stuck at home, my sons might someday ask. We lived/or tolerated living. We looked away from death. 

The earth never tires of giving/birth. If you get too close/to a volcano, you should/know it may erupt. 

Everyone dreams, my therapist says, of leaving their car on the shoulder to disappear/into the mountains forever. This is normal. 

Dear Earth. Dear Clouds. Why should anything die? I want it all to live/forever. What I mean is I want to stand in my garden and gaze at the sunflowers. Amen. 

my own lightening’s work here is almost done. 

//

I spend hours (8? 10? more?) with her mouth encircling my nipple and areola. I stare at her. Marvel at the size she is, miniature and perfectly formed. There are days, and I hate to say this, that I liken her to a doll. I don’t recall ever having a ‘life-size’ doll when I was growing up; I wasn’t the kind of girl to pretend to feed or dress or burp a baby I was convinced I would have when I grew up. But when I look at this small human I find my mind conjures these play-things. The ways in which she resembles what is familiar, be that imaginings related to commerce or gender. The word ‘doll’ in my mother-tongue, is used by my parents when I send pictures of her on WhatsApp. 

Last night my mom texted me a photo of a photo. The image is all soft edges, gray is given form, where the center is me, my sister, and my mom, from when I was two and my sister was four. My mom leans over us in a thick woolen coat, her black hair rising high in an early-80s curly mess of hair. She looks equally tentative and protective and was only twenty-two. I had a round, chubby face back then. I know it’s not possible, but I strangely resemble how my daughter looks. The cheeks. The pink-olive not-quite-white skin tone I requested from the clinic when they were matching us with the egg donor. Yes, I had to give some wishes to render likeness. 

I look over my laptop where she sleeps in her towel-nest on the kitchen table where I write. I send my partner the photo; look, I say. For an instant, together in this life, she does look like me. 

I admit to this desire. She doesn’t belong to me, but yet, she does. I’ve been relying on binaries, it seems, to make and unmake the language of mother/daughter. Despite the common language, learned from heartbeat, memories, the images of strangers, we are marked by the words we use to give our life shape. Words and images, histories and presents, are not isolated tasks, wrote Adrienne Rich. We exist inside the word, as we existed inside a body. We remake words as we remake our bodies. 

Motherhood, like a poem, is not free from the mark of language. 

When I read poetry to the baby it’s my way of creating a space we can both exist in, even if only for a moment. We must use what we have to invent what we desire; already I’ve invented desire through imagining and creating my daughter. I think of other lines by Rich– Through recombinations and permutations of the language you already know…that this in itself can be an activity of the keenest joy –and wonder if this can be a way to save a life.  

//

I write five words of this essay and I’m called to her cries. I write five more. Go to her. Five again. Five more than what was on the page before. Right now, this is how time and words grow. And like her cries, which I can’t always decipher, I don’t know what a poem might mean. But in the way language can be shaped like water, its fluidity offers meaning. Brings me joy. 

Which is the same when I think about where she came from. The cells that weren’t mine will shape who she is. I dream a stranger’s double helix, instructions encoded within. Our bodies became the text. I arranged and rearranged my own body to bring my daughter here; we’ve created new words, new meaning, through an invented and desired kinship.

NOTES:  

Quotes from Marzano-Lesnevich come from the essay “Futurity” published in Best American Essays 2022, edited by Alexander Chee. 

A new being comes into the world for a second time, out of a deep cut that opens in a biography. Epigraph by Catherine Malbou in Liz Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. 

Select lines from Howard’s Letters in a Bruised Cosmos; in order of appearance (capitalization author’s own): “STANZA AS INFINITY FILTER,” “AS IF OUR FUTURE PAST BORE A BAD ALGORITHM,” “SPRING LETTER,” and “THIS NOCTURNE WENT SUMMER.” 

(T)hat a partly common language exists to which strangers can brings their own heartbeat, memories, images…comes from Adrienne Rich’s, “To invent what we desire” in What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.

Select lines from various poems in order of appearance: “The Innocent” by Jennifer Chang, “Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers” by Tishani Doshi, “Into the Mountains” by April Goldman, “Against Death” by Noor Hindi, and “When a bolt of lightning falls in love” by Laura Kasischke. All poems from Best American Poetry 2022, edited by Matthew Zapruder. 

(L)earned from heartbeat, memories, the images of strangers… is from Adrienne Rich’s, “To invent what we desire” in What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.

We must use what we have to invent what we desire and the quote (t)hrough recombinations and permutations of the language you already know…that this in itself can be an activity of the keenest joy. This quote is from Adrienne Rich’s “Someone is writing a poem” in What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics.

______

Gabriela immigrated to Canada during the early 1980s, grew up in northern Alberta, lived in Alaska for seven years, and currently resides in B.C. She has published poetry in a variety of literary journals including The Antigonish Review (forthcoming), Cider Press Review, Inlandia, About Place Journal, Prairie Fire, december magazine, Rock & Sling, The Hopper, among others; fiction in Ruminate, The Hopper, subTerrain, Broken Pencil, and en bloc magazine; nonfiction in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Whitefish Review, Grain, Pilgrimage, and High Country News. She has received annual Best of the Net nominations in poetry (2020-2022). She lives and writes on Wetʼsuwetʼen Nation land and is currently completing an MFA at UBC. www.gabrielahalas.org.