Baby Steps Read Online Free

about women having babies well past their twenties, so I thought I could do it, too. I didn’t realize that my time was running out.
    Although I didn’t give birth there, in a sense, Cambodia is my daughter’s birthplace. It certainly was the place of my rebirth. When I got back home, I wrapped my arms around Ron and told him everything.
    â€œI need to go to the fertility doctor,” I whispered in his ear. “Everything is probably fine . . . but I need to find out how much time I have. You don’t have to go with me.”
    â€œI want to go with you,” he said. “I’m going with you.”
    And so our journey began.

CHAPTER TWO
MOTHER

    Life began with waking up and
loving my mother’s face.
    â€”George Eliot
    Â 
    F ertility may be on a lot of people’s minds the first time they have sex, thanks to those didactic “teen pregnancy” videos they show in junior high sex ed class, but it wasn’t on mine. I was more focused on the embarrassment—the mortification, even. Because I hadn’t really wanted to do it.
    I was fourteen years old, and I hadn’t wanted to have sex. Neither had the boy I’d reluctantly allowed to deflower me. But there it was.
    It happened because a group of us were hanging out in my mother’s living room, giggling at the sound of chanting emanating from the back room where my mother was meditating. It was a running joke in my house; because of the heavy influence of hippie spirituality, my friends liked to make everything into an Indian chant: “Ice cream tastes so good,” my friends would say in dreamy, singsong voices. “It feels so good in my stomach, I think I want some moreasana.”
    It was embarrassing, this strange environment that was my home, but it was also all that I knew. I laughed along because we were the sort of high school group who did everything together, and our internal ridiculing was always affectionate, if cynical, in the way only teenagers can be cynical. We were also one of those groups of teenagers in which everyone was paired up, like in that movie St. Elmo’s Fire. All except for me and this boy, whom I’ll call Adrian.
    Adrian and I didn’t necessarily like each other, although he was incredibly cute. I didn’t relate to him. There was something restrained about him. He was from a conservative Middle Eastern family and I think he was just a bit slower in the ways of love than the other boys. I was slower than the other girls, even with my freewheeling hippie mother, but we just didn’t click. It’s not that we disliked each other, however, so when the peer pressure for us to hook up becameoverwhelming, we dutifully trudged upstairs, kissed awkwardly, and then he applied the obligatory hickeys to my neck as proof. We did the deed, and when it was over in seconds, we were both mortified and struck dumb, unable to talk to or even look at each other.
    When we came back downstairs, my friends were satisfied. In fact, they cheered. I was not satisfied, and neither was Adrian. I tried to make a joke and he ignored me. He had completely shut down. This made the situation worse. So much for my Splendor in the Grass fantasy. We weren’t in love. Hell, we’d barely touched each other. And we both knew we’d been hoodwinked by our peers. We recoiled into ourselves. I sat on the couch, arms crossed sullenly, and then we both proceeded to pretend it never happened.
    But I couldn’t deny the hickeys. The next morning, I noticed them with fresh humiliation. Makeup didn’t work, so I put on a turtleneck sweater. It was a warm spring day, but I couldn’t figure out a better solution. I managed to slip out the door unnoticed, but after school, when all my friends came over again, my mother came into the kitchen and her eyes locked on my strange fashion choice.
    â€œCome here right now,” she said to me.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œCome here right