Sometimes, sticking to the path ahead is the biggest choice you'll ever make.
Illustration by Lucy Han
This essay is part of our two-week series on choices. Click here for more.
Seventeen months ago, shortly before I returned to New Zealand after five years at university in the UK, my friend Bella wrote to me to tell me she was having a termination: that she would have to have a termination, as if the choice had been made for her.
Inside her, a wiggly, lime-sized being – Ivy – was gently unfurling.
She looks up from the fruit and over to Bella as if she had hung the moon and switched on the stars.
There’s not much you can do from as far away as I was. You can’t offer a shoulder to cry on, or a lift to the clinic, or even a squeeze of the hand. Electronic sympathy may be heartfelt, but it’s cheap - and my blinking black-text reply felt tawdry and inadequate.
I didn’t hear from her for almost a month after that, and worried something had gone wrong. I wrote again, and asked how she was.
“Well, things are good,” she wrote. “One update that comes to mind is… I’m going to be a mother in April 2015.
"Saw you graduated!!! Hurrah!!!”
Bella wears motherhood so lightly you would think she’d been practising for years: we sit in the kitchen and Ivy mashes mandarin segments into the table of her high-chair. She looks up from the fruit and over to Bella as if she had hung the moon and switched on the stars.
There’s a tendency to think about choices as right-angle turns in the road; diverging from the pre-determined path.
In this case, the choice to ‘have’ who was to become Ivy lay straight ahead. ‘Not having’ her was a sharp turn to the left; the path of greatest resistance.
It is hard to believe when I am with them that there could ever have been the possibility of no Ivy. She is sturdy and compact; she throws kumara to the floor as if worried it will poison her through her chubby fingers. She loves to be tickled and hates to be laughed at.
She has more personality than many full-grown adults I know, and every time I visit her I love her a little more.
Ivy isn’t a metaphor, she’s a person, but seeing her reminds me – someone who sees choice as an opportunity to change my mind: pasta rather than fish, going out over staying in, and so on and forth – that choices can be as much about resolution and commitment, choosing not to make a choice, as about veering sideways.
***
When I was a little girl, I asked my mother what colour dress she had worn on her wedding day. Navy blue, she said. A navy blue maternity dress. By the time she married my father, she was seven or eight months pregnant with me.
They instead took other ‘precautions’ and by the end of the holiday had decided to part ways.
I have more knowledge than most about the specifics of my conception: I know that over a Christmas break, my mother came back to London from Japan, where she was working, to see my father. That she had not been taking her contraceptive pills, or perhaps had left them in Tokyo; that they instead took other ‘precautions’ and by the end of the holiday had decided to part ways. They wanted different things, they were at different stages, they were moving in different directions.
Three months later, my mother rang my father to tell him she was pregnant, and going to have the baby.
They resolved to get back together; my father stopped drinking and taking the drugs that make him look wan and jaundiced in photos from the months before my birth. By the time I was born, on October first, they were married. (They separated the year I turned 10.)
I picture my mother looking down at the pregnancy test, alone in her flat in Tokyo; wiggly blue line confirming what, perhaps, she already knew to be true.
She says that in that moment she was overwhelmed with joy and excitement. Even if it meant doing so completely alone, she knew there was no way she could not have the child the wiggly blue line showed to be there, she says. As if the choice had been made for her.
