Our Difficult Daughter
I couldn’t accomplish the simple things that came easily to others: marriage, motherhood
The first person to learn that I was pregnant was my partially deaf, doddering 80-year-old father. I would imagine that, after learning she is pregnant, a woman first announces the good news to her partner or her mother. But I had neither.
A year and a half ago, in my father’s home in suburban Sacramento, I woke up to a congratulatory voicemail from a nurse at the New York City fertility clinic I’d been going to for two years. I burst from my room at 6:30 a.m. to run downstairs to tell, well, someone. It seemed appropriate it would be my father, but he wasn’t in his usual position on the ground inches away from the television blaring satellite news programs from India.
Worried, I yelled “Papa” outside his bedroom door a few times. He finally emerged, hair standing on end and muttering under his breath, “I think I have Alzheimer’s. I’m sure of it.”
“Papa, I don’t think you do. Let’s go downstairs,” I said.
Still disoriented, he sat down at our kitchen table and I took his warm palm in my mine. “Papa, I have something to tell you,” I said. My father had begrudgingly accepted my decision to have a baby on my own when I first started treatment at the…
