For the Sake of a Name

In the holy books of the Torah, drunks, whores, stuttering prophets, hardened pharaohs, masturbators, sinners who boil baby goats in their mothers’ milk, greedy stepfathers, back-stabbing brothers, and slave drivers all bedevil God’s newly grafted universe, but Sarah is the one who laughs at the Creator himself. She is ninety and barren and hiding in a tent when God tells her husband, Abraham, that his wife will soon give birth. Eavesdropping, Sarah “laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband has grown old, shall I have pleasure?’” That God eavesdrops on her eavesdropping and grows indignant at her laughter, that she then denies having laughed, is less important than what happens next. The promised child is born and christened Isaac, which means to laugh. Sarah, as many baby-name books will tell you, means God’s princess. They were together, then, a princess and her laugh, echoing.

I remember this story late one night when I cannot sleep. A woman sleeps next to me, and she turns into her shoulder, mumbling in echoes: ya, ya, ya. This word, a lazy “yes” in my mouth, holds twin meanings in Spanish. Ya refers to the present tense, as in “now,” but with a change of context, it can also signify the “already” of things past, as in, Didn’t that happen already?

When my mom found out she was pregnant with me, she was thirty-one and skinnier than she’s ever been. The doctors had recently discovered that the source of her sickness, those bouts of vomiting, the headaches and monthly pain anchoring her gut against some tide unseen, was a disease called endometriosis. The blood that lines the uterus, normally thickening each month in preparation for a baby, becomes confused in women with endometriosis and crawls outward instead, coating the stomach, ovaries, liver as if they too might host a child. From such confusion, women grow sick, lose weight, and often, as with my mom, the only cure is to remove parts of them. In 1977, the doctors who diagnosed her took out one of her ovaries and warned they might need the other too. “If you could have a baby, that might heal you,” they told her. “Alternately, you may never be able to conceive.”

In that moment my mom must have regretted leaving her first husband; he was selfish and unthinking, yes, but handsome, brilliant, and ready, so long ago, to give her a child. My father was kind, but also chubby with an unkempt beard. He didn’t remove his cowboy hat when he met my mom’s mother in her Hyde Park brownstone. And though he wanted to marry her, he already had a son from a marriage before and wasn’t so sure he wanted another.

Despite all this, she said yes to him one night not long after her diagnosis. My father had picked her up at the airport and, driving away from the tollbooth, he laughed at the rudeness of the gum-smacking, gaudy-lipsticked woman who had taken his money. My mom thought, If I am going to raise a child, it should be with a man who finds joy in such small irritations. But first she thought, If I am going to have a child. That I was born ten months after their honeymoon means she took it on faith that she would love him even if childless, but she didn’t need to. I arrived twenty minutes past midnight on a cold night in January: her cure. After me, blood no longer grew where it shouldn’t; with me, her barrenness filled.

In Hebrew the word for barren connotes emptiness, but also a life uprooted, as if the inability to have children also irrevocably cleaves you from the family tree. This pain is first seen with Sarah in Genesis. She is beautiful and promised by God a child and yet remains empty. Desperate, she sends her female slave Hagar to sleep with Abraham in her stead, as if she could amend her body with the womb of another. The fact that Hagar...