Had some part of my not-to-be mother come willing after all to concede to a lifelong commitment? Had she come searching for some new beginning in that ending?

Just like I must search for a way past her ending, lying silenced on an operating table, toward my own beginning.

Three

2010

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I’m born of insecurity and need, of my mother Seema’s desire to fashion a family and home for and by herself.

Even so, it’s not until a few weeks after learning about my incipience that my mother comes to accept my inclusion in her life. During that time, the promise of me battles with the threat I pose: the disruption I presage, the additional responsibility for someone else’s happiness that I entail. She withholds from my father information of my conception when they meet to sign the summary dissolution, afraid Bill may convince her to keep the child, to raise the child together, or even to get back together, before she has time to decide for herself. But afterward, the task of delivering me, of raising me single-handed, is too formidable, too frightening to consider. You’ll never be ready for a child, Bill had said, and she believes him.

What changes her mind?

Is it to a happenstance, her sister’s visit to San Francisco, that I owe this life?

Consider: Receiving Tahera’s call out of the blue after her separation from Bill, Seema nearly discloses her pregnancy, conjuring up a future that definitely includes me, so she can better arouse Tahera’s sympathy and pity. Later, she feels guilty: she’d come close to trotting me out as an actor in her play for her sister’s compassion. Now she can’t compound the guilt by deciding to abort me. Her guilt makes me real. I’m born of guilt.

When Seema agrees to have dinner with Tahera’s family on that visit, it is to prove to herself that her sister doesn’t have anything she needs or desires. But despite her impulse toward disdain for the virtuous domesticity presented to her, she can’t help feeling envious of her sister’s life, echoing as it does the vibrance of her exiled past. “Wait till you’re a mother yourself,” Tahera says, as if that prize is out of Seema’s reach. I’m born of envy and rivalry.

Another way to look at the visit: Seema hasn’t decided yet to keep me. She spends the day with Tahera’s children. She sees my potential in them, and her mind becomes fixed to something more definite—perhaps these eyes, perhaps this voice, perhaps this way of holding the world both in an embrace and at a distance. I become real to her. By the end of the day, in some deep and unconscious stirrings of her mind, she has formed a resolution to give me a chance. I’m born of hope.

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