I smear some sunscreen on Honey and take her outside in her T-shirt, her little diapered butt shuttling back and forth while she runs unsteadily around on the grass periodically sitting down hard on her butt. I make to chase her and she shrieks and I think good good this is fine and I run and scoop her up and fall onto my back squeezing her and cover her face with kisses and she screams with joy.
The proprietress of Honey’s home daycare speaks to the babies in Cantonese. Engin is very distressed that he is not here to speak to her in Turkish, and asks me every time we talk whether his linguistic interests are being represented. I have told him that based on my limited understanding of human speech development, it’s no good for a nonnative speaker to talk to a baby, because the essential somethingness of it won’t be transferred. Engin feels however that hearing something is better than hearing nothing. What’s interesting to me is that on the rare occasions when I do force myself to speak Turkish to Honey beyond the terms of endearment that I use to give our conversation at least a sort of Turkish affect, she looks at me with perceptible puzzlement. She knows enough to know that I’m doing something different from what I normally do, which makes me feel both proud of her for being so discerning and bad that I’m being an American imperialist parent and boxing her dad out of her cultural formation. It has always been my policy to speak English to her because I pride myself on my English and Engin’s English is good not great and frankly a bit of a mystery since he so seldom uses it. But I want Honey’s English to be native perfect because English is her mother tongue and mine and I’m helpless not to love it, full of senseless grammar and airless flat vowels though it is. I have to remind myself, Engin is her father and we are married and his interests must be represented and I want her to be fully bilingual, trilingual even. It’s a gift a gift a gift to speak another language, my deepest wish is that I could do it effortlessly, that I was born to it.
I look at my watch and once again we have missed the window to speak to Engin who is by now back in Istanbul but in bed probably after trying fruitlessly to Skype us again and again and I go limp and lay back on the grass staring up at the unsmiling blue sky and wonder when they are going to get some fucking cell service up here. I have at this point developed a shadow sense of time like two clocks on a banker’s wall, San Francisco and Istanbul, but so far having this shadow sense does not translate into actually timing my actions appropriately to contact him at the right time, and usually this just means that I am perpetually feeling harassed to make contact in our circumscribed window. During the week I am rushing too much to get to work to have a meaningful morning conversation. Engin is a night owl but Honey comes home at 6:00 and goes to bed at 7:00 which is 5:00 a.m. Engin time so typically we have a brief viewing on weekday mornings so he can at least look at her and exchange kisses, and then I call him before I go to bed and we can actually talk, which actually I hate, it’s boring to talk to someone on the phone every day. In the beginning there was a siege mentality—the Emergency had happened and there was the painful but necessary recounting and commiseration re: hours spent on hold with fucking USCIS and the NVC, there were action items and fact-finding and document checks and sharing of information. But now we are stalled waiting for something to happen and we talk about the future as though it’s a fantasy island we both know we’ll never see. I know that calls in these long-distance situations are not really about the sharing of news but about the maintenance of connection, the assurance that each party still exists and is living breathing in the world sending love across the sea, not to mention reassuring our child that her father still exists and giving him some glimpse of the true love of his life, but it’s come to feel like another fucking obligation. I know women who live apart from their men who keep Skype on in the background to chat while they cook or clean up the living room or paint their nails, but I do enough inane pointless narration at Honey. It’s easier to have TV shows on; the show doesn’t need anything from you. So I go about life thinking of Engin as something like my partner in a challenging and as-of-yet mostly unprofitable business venture, waiting for our ship to come in, until those moments when I really remember what he is like and would give anything to be sitting next to him on the couch, laughing with our shoulders together and Honey across our laps.
Honey is trying to tear the head off a geranium and I say “That’s not what we do to flowers, gentle, gentle” and I suddenly feel so tired and I think how nice it is to be with her and how simultaneously not-nice. I did not have a thought in my head except go go go when I bundled her into the car yesterday and started the drive northeast but now I wonder if I just wanted to be not in the office and whether I might have achieved this by taking a day off work and going to the playground for god’s sake. Honey for ten hours during the day is a blank space to me, that’s how my brain treats her, as though she functionally ceases to exist when she is at daycare, until all at once I get desperately lonesome for her and look at the videos the daycare proprietor sends on WeChat and strain to hear her voice among the cacophony of little babies cooing together on the rug. But I have no knowledge of the texture of her days there. I have always found Honey to be a very sunny caring conscientious baby—a generous temperament—I wonder how much of this is the daycare and how much is me. I know the blank spot where those fifty hours a week should be is a blessing, surely it is the absence of worry that allows me to blot her out like someone who has been etherized, kind of like I do to Engin. Maybe it’s because I don’t care enough. I don’t think that’s it, though.
When I went back to work Engin stayed home with Honey, which is undoubtedly what prompted him to decide to go back to Turkey to improve his prospects of employment. I remember I felt jaunty and efficient setting out for the office that first day, leaving him with a supply of frozen breastmilk I had been dutifully collecting since she was born. I answered e-mails while I pumped in Ted’s closet and put pictures of Honey up on my bulletin board and I ignored the fact that pumping took up roughly two hours of the workday and generally felt that things were going to be okay. But when I got home that evening I ran up the street to the house only to discover from Engin’s apologetic face when I opened the door that he had put Honey to bed.
It’s pathetic but I don’t feel like I have spiritually recovered from that week somehow even though I went back to a beautiful glass office and not to a sweatshop or a goddamn Subway sandwich shop or to be a nanny in Westchester County. When I came back Meredith was trying to be supportive and talked constantly of how awful it is and told me how she used to pace like a wild animal when she was away from her children and I both felt guilty because I had not yet paced, and how odd it was that we should both be sitting there saying “yes, it is very bad” when we could instead be staging a revolt. But her kids are teenagers and she is over it and in fact grateful to come to a quiet beautiful office now so her moment for revolution has passed.