Something I’d always suspected was proving to be true: that not having children was like standing in some kind of glass-walled anteroom to the world of military wives, credentialed but not yet fully endorsed. Was it just that we were all so wildly different—different home states, different religions, different educations, different jobs, different pasts—that made child-rearing our one resounding commonality? Partially, I think the answer to that one is yes, but I also think it’s more complicated than that. The uncertainty of detachments, of finding yourself suddenly alone in a town far from home or, God forbid, in the midst of a deployment or yet another relocation—the act of bringing a baby into this particular world seems like even more of a high-wire act than it might otherwise be. We know, in a heightened sense, how much we need each other despite our differences, and how much more complicated the road ahead is about to get.
And no matter who you are, or who you were before, the weird, murky months of growing from one person into two makes you see the world with different eyes. Threats pop up that didn’t seem like threats only the day before, and the world suddenly becomes aware of the plural you and your changed physical space in a way it wasn’t before. Oddly enough, beyond the immediate concerns of managing his birth, the road ahead didn’t worry me as much as the one behind. Our boy would get out into the world somehow, and he would get a name once he got there. What was more troubling was how the past, the brush with the idea of splitting up in Singapore and our hesitant and bumpy reunion after the deployment, brought to mind other failures. My disastrous teenage years kept surfacing in my dreams. Failure, being shamed and ostracized, losing my grip on the world, and being wholly without community—the dark days of the dawn of my depression—all of these came bubbling up in the months of my pregnancy to speak to me again.
CHAPTER 15
My parents had a terrific fight the night before dropping me off at boarding school. It was our first trip together outside of Saudi Arabia, and we’d just spent two weeks driving around the Scottish Highlands so my parents could replay the highlights of their early marriage and the beginnings of our family for Doug and me. It was a beautiful trip, but most of our pictures show me scowling in ripped jeans and a Nirvana T-shirt. I knew they’d all be going back to Saudi Arabia without me, and as much as I’d been confused and unnerved by my time there, it felt even weirder to be separating from my family.
I’d chosen St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, because I wanted to be near something familiar, even though the school itself was tucked way out in the swanky northwestern hills. Everything had been squared away for months—after our brief vacation, we would come back to Texas, camp out for a few days in the house in Georgetown, now empty since the renters had moved out, drop me and a trunkful of clothes off at boarding school, and then my parents and Doug would head back to Saudi. But at the last minute, my mother balked, simply digging in her heels and saying, “No. I can’t do it. This is wrong.”
My dad countered with all the logical arguments—the long-term plan, prior measured discussions, reassurances about my maturity and the quality of the school—but she wouldn’t budge and they both got loud. Ultimately, my dad asked me to make the final call. Honestly, it pissed me off. I was nervous about going to boarding school, but for the last year I’d been told this was the only option. I was fifteen years old, my bags were packed, and I already had a checkbook and a checking account in my name. My family was depending on me. Of course I went.
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I was assigned to room 20 in “New Dorm,” so named even though it was more than four years old. A holdup in the paperwork to dedicate our building to a wealthy donor lasted until after another, newer dorm was built, named Towner House, and populated with other multiaddress girls. My room on the second floor had gray linoleum floors, two recessed closets with no doors on them, two black metal frame twin beds with four-inch-thick mattresses, and two battered wooden desks, mine with the word “FUCK” carved deeply into its surface. The room’s right side had already been claimed by my roommate, a tennis prodigy named Melanie from a town near Dallas.
My parents walked me around to find the coin-operated laundry room and the hall pay phone. This was in the days before cell phones, voice mail, and e-mail. This pay phone, shared with twenty other girls who may or may not pass on any messages they received, was my lifeline. A fax machine tucked away in the administrative office was the only way to exchange documents for signatures or get written permission to leave campus. And then, of course, there was international mail.