Read Online What Was Mine by Helen Klein Ross - Free Book Online

being less upset than she seemed to be puzzled. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps I have blocked out a wailing resistance. But I don’t think so.
    Picture it , my friend had said, and it will come true . I was filled with gratitude for my good fortune—and remorse for the way it had come to me.
    I’d sometimes call my sister “from Kansas,” putting questions to her, but most things having to do with taking care of a baby—how to burp them, carry them, get them to sleep—couldn’t be explained over the phone. Cheryl kept offering to fly down to help and I had a devil of a time talking her out of the trip.
    Every few days, I’d call in to the office, reporting progress. “She rolled over today for the first time!” I’d say, failing to mention that the bed she’d rolled over in had been mine in New Jersey. Or “Another delay,” I’d lie. “The birth father needs to cosign and they can’t find him.”
    I got a message from the art director who’d helped me place the ad saying how happy she was for me, but that deadlines were urgent and she was pairing up with another writer. I didn’t care.
    I lived those first weeks of motherhood in dread of the doorbell. The few times it rang, I felt every hair on my body upend. I feared that something would break in my case and that the authorities—or even the wronged mother herself—would show up at my door to take her back. The few times the bell rang, I never answered it. Instead, I’d peep through a gap in the drapes. The bell ringers wore benign-looking uniforms in post office blue or UPS brown. But what if they were disguised to gain access? What if I was a suspect being spied upon? They’d leave packages on my doorstep but I’d wait until after I put Mia down for the night before creeping out to retrieve them. The packages were baby gifts. Baby clothes from my sister, a Sony video camera from friends at work. (The agency I worked for had the Sony account.) Once a flyer fell from the door when I opened it: Missing Infant , it read beneath a photo of Baby Natalie . I crumpled the paper and threw it away, glad that the photo looked nothing like her.
    I didn’t answer the phone. I rarely went out, waiting for dark before backing the car out of the driveway, so no one could see that I had a car seat, to buy groceries in distant towns.
    What worried me most during those weeks was that she would get sick with something. I’d have to bring her to emergency and the jig would be up. I guessed there were alerts to airports and hospitals for a baby fitting her description. Each time I changed her diaper, I did a complete body check, scouting for redness or rashes or lumps. I kept careful notes on her feeding and poop schedules, as one book advised—although later, I realized that advice had been for nursing mothers, to inform them if their babies were getting enough nourishment.
    Mia usually slept through the night, but one 3 a.m. she was crying inconsolably, though her diaper was dry and she didn’t have a fever. Remembering the little lump I’d felt in her gum, I guessed she was teething. In despair, not knowing how else to soothe her, I sat onthe rocker with her in my lap and undid the top of my nightgown. I thought maybe milk would come, maybe I could calm her with it. Weren’t there stories of wet nurses and women in bomb shelters nursing babies whose mothers had died? These thoughts were crazy, but I didn’t care—I was desperate to give Mia whatever she wanted.
    The sight of my breast did calm her immediately and I guessed that she’d been breastfed before, though she’d been weaned by the time she came to me—I knew by the odiferousness of that first diaper. She stared at what was being offered, with a glance at my face as if asking permission, then moved her face forward and seized my nipple between her gums. It hurt like hell, as if my