Chapter Seven
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On our third date, over Thai food in Queens, Roman told me his mom, Sue, had been a social worker before she married his dad.
But one night, a man from the halfway house whom Sue had been helping to get back on his feet followed Sue home and tried to assault her.
His dad just happened to have been driving by her house to leave a mixtape, heavy on hair metal and Depeche Mode, in her mailbox.
He heard Sue scream and beat the guy to a bloody pulp.
They got married three weeks later. Sue never worked again.
I told him my mom was a Taurus and that she did tarot card readings and was on the hunt for a fourth husband. “Pass the larb?”
Roman overshared about his family as a way of prodding me, trying to get me to tell him about my past. I never talked about college or the years before I moved to New York.
I hardly ever talked about ex-boyfriends or my early twenties.
I had no fun stories. No Prague youth hostel or backpacking on a Eurail pass; no dancing on a table at Senor Frog’s or stumbling home on Orchard Street after a night at Pizza Beach, holding a girlfriend’s hair back as she cried and vomited over some boy named Jordon.
It seemed like he’d go back to Neolithic times before I even told him my middle name.
Even as we melded together so naturally, I kept swaths of my past, my family, in a safe he’d never crack.
Maybe he liked that. We’d only been dating for a couple of months when Roman asked me to go home with him to Melbourne.
It was his grandmother’s eightieth birthday and he wanted me to meet his Gigi.
Roman’s mother is the best mother I’ve ever met.
She is the kind of mother who let her kids play in the field all day until they came home for meat pie.
She always has snacks in the pantry and remembers friends’ and teachers’ names.
She keeps scrapbooks of clippings for each of her three children: a golden curl from Roman’s first haircut, a Jumanji movie ticket, a molar on a pillow, like a museum’s tiny crown.
Sue looks like she spent her entire childhood at the beach before sunscreen was a thing and hasn’t bought herself anything new in twenty years. She is gorgeous.
The first time I met Sue, in Roman’s childhood home, a cookie-cutter brick two-story on the outskirts of Melbourne with a wild backyard that emptied out into a grassy expanse with a rushing stream, she’d hugged me so hard that my feet levitated.
She loved me immediately, because Roman loved me. That was enough.
When Roman told his mom that I was expecting, she offered to stay with us for a month to help with the baby.
She’d done this with all her grandchildren.
She wasn’t about to let distance stop her.
We sent her every ultrasound. She’d call us and gush, “My American grandson.” How she could already see his fingernails.
Or how she could tell he’d be athletic like his dada.
Or she’d point out the shape of his cranium and say he’ll be a math genius, like Roman.
Before Holden was even born, Sue sent us a lifetime supply of Australian stuffies.
The nursery was filled with wallabies and quokkas, two echidnas, and more koalas than any child needs.
We’d been so certain that Grandma Sue would swoop in on a Qantas flight and show us how to keep our newborn alive that we hardly listened in the infant safety class.
Other parents-to-be took notes and practiced slapping the back of a raggedy doll at the Little Hearts Baby Zone, in a walk-up office building above a Chipotle in Kips Bay.
Not us. We had Sue. In a particularly terrifying portion of the class, titled “Fire Prevention for Babies,” the instructor showed us a photo of a baby playing with a wad of electrical cords.
A haggard mom heating a kettle on an open flame.
A baby permanently disfigured. That reminded me that we should do Korean BBQ that night, before we had to keep our baby away from all heat sources. Roman couldn’t have agreed more.
Then Gigi got sick. They gave her months to live. Sue had to stay in Melbourne.
So each week, Sue tries to figure out the time difference so that she can FaceTime with her American grandson.
She tries to stay upbeat and cheerful, but she is heartbroken.
Instead of showing us how to sponge bathe Holden in a sink, and clean the little wound where his umbilical cord fell off, Sue is on the other side of the world spoon-feeding soft foods and filing nails and nursing dry skin.
The first night we brought Holden home, Sue sang “Wobble Wombat” over FaceTime, the same song she sang to Roman when he was a baby. She started to cry. “I looove loooove loooove you,” Sue said, not just to Holden, but to all three of us.
I took Roman’s hand. The problem with having a family tree with roots that are intact—and not eating themselves alive with some fungal infection like mine—is that you feel everything. The nonstop flood of fear and guilt and caregiving and grief.
There is never time on these calls to grab the phone, to take Sue on FaceTime into the bathroom and lock the door and ask her to tell me everything. Tell me, Sue, how do I become a good mom? How do I keep my baby alive? Please, Sue—someone?—tell me.
“We love you, too, Ma,” Roman said. “Miss you,” I added, and more pure truth couldn’t possibly travel through a spotty FaceTime connection.