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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

She loves me, she loves me not
In an exhaustive -- and exhausting -- book on motherhood, anthropologist Sara Blaffer Hrdy breaks some big news: There is no such thing as maternal instinct.
By Susan Caba
[12/09/99]

Sophie's choice
A Canadian court will decide whether Sophie Brassard must give her children a drug cocktail or lose them to a foster home.
By Alyson Mead
[12/08/99]

Hand holding for moms
One father's ode to his doula -- the woman who remembered everything he forgot in Lamaze class.
By David Brauer
[12/07/99]

The fainter
I tried acupuncture, strumming my veins and "Shocking Brain Surgery." But nothing could prepare me for witnessing my son's birth.
By Aaron Shure
[12/07/99]

Trapped and torn
Locked in by a chain of protesters, I wanted to kick myself. My kids were at home and I was about to be pummeled for all the wrong reasons.
By Lisa Guide
[12/03/99]

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He was 5 years old. Our wills were in order. We wrote them ourselves, with Family Lawyer for Windows. Maybe we should have hired a real lawyer, even if it cost more than the flight for our first jaunt away from our son. We also could have taken separate planes. We know people who actually do this, routinely. When childless, we'd mocked them. Suddenly it seemed like a sensible idea. If we cared about his future, if we didn't want to destroy his life, would it be so very terrible to stagger our departures from New Jersey?

"We're not going to die," we promised him, and we mostly believed this to be true. Odds were that the 747's engines would not explode; no terrorists would board; we would not even get crushed by a double-decker bus when we looked the wrong way crossing the street in London. We simply couldn't die because we have no satisfying choice of recipients for our most precious possession -- the fruit of our loins.

Neither, by the way, do any of the other parents I know.

Show me a photo of a doleful Romanian orphan or a disoriented Ethiopian toddler with flies on his eyelashes, propped up by his dying mother, and I will get teary-eyed immediately. Maybe all parents do. No doubt that becoming a parent changes -- and intensifies -- your fears about your own mortality. It also introduces some thorny logistical decisions that are different, I believe, for our generation than for our parents'.

My husband's parents are dead. My parents are 72. They can survive (just) a week baby-sitting, but they are not good long-range prospects as guardians. My sister in North Carolina now has a toddler of her own, so she might rally herself to more enthusiasm about inheriting my son than she did on the occasion of that fateful first separation, three years ago. At that point she said, somewhat vaguely, "Maybe you'd better ask Russell."

So if we die, our son Nicolas -- and the life-insurance money -- will go to my brother in San Francisco, who is, despite the tattoos and earrings, a kind, reliable adult.

Or so I thought.

"How much money do I get?" Russell asked, when we rubber-stamped the arrangements for the will.

A million, give or take. Probably, we told him, enough for college.

"Cool!" Russell said. "Forget college. Nick and I are going to Tahiti."

He was kidding, I think.

Nick's first reaction to the prospect of life with Uncle Russell was enthusiastic. "We'll get a lot of pizzas," he said, "and throw them at each other, and throw ice cream, too." But then he began to worry. "How will I get to San Francisco?" he wanted to know. How would he know we were dead? If we didn't pick him up at school, would they just leave him locked up there in the dark? And who was Russell's wife? Did he have one? Did she want children?

An uncanny question, since Russell's girlfriend would rather have head lice than children.

Of course it is family to whom you are supposed to turn in a crisis, to the rock-steady obligation of blood ties. But family no longer seems to have the same societal weight. While I'm lucky to be close to my siblings, many people I know only speak to theirs, grudgingly, at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It's hard to imagine that, if all members of my immediate family got struck by lightning, a cousin in a distant port could be sent a telegram saying, "You're all he has left," old-novel-style, and feel any moral compunction to rise to the occasion. I thought of this, repeatedly, during the heartbreaking Turkish earthquake. If buildings collapse on us, believe me, no caravans of concerned second and third cousins are going to be braving the jammed New Jersey Turnpike with their own generators in tow to rescue us.

My son barely knows his aunt and uncle, much less his extended family. Now that people don't regularly stay put and die in their hometowns, it's more difficult to foster the close, daily relationships that might allow people to comfortably embrace a child not their own.

Even the simple fact that people marry and procreate later changes things radically. My parents should not be so old in relation to their grandchild (though I thank them for not noting this more regularly during my dating years). If we'd started a family earlier, we might have had time for more than the one little tyke, which in movies, at least, seems to make orphanhood more bearable.

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