An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  I wasn’t thinking about babies when I got to New York. I was thinking how liberating it was to be far from home. It was the run up to the 2008 presidential election and I spent a lot of that first winter standing in frozen parking lots in Iowa, trying to understand the difference between a caucus and a primary. Simple things became strange. No one knew what I meant when I said “sockets” or “loo paper” and when I judged something to be “quite good,” most Americans thought I meant it was quite good, rather than what I obviously meant, which is that it was terrible. Even lunch in America was exciting. It is hard to remain jaded about life when embedded in the mere act of ordering a sandwich is the drama of having to say “tomato” three times.

  And while I was friendless in those first weeks and months, wandering around Central Park at the weekend with a twenty-dollar salad from Whole Foods and no one to talk to, this too, in its way, was quite thrilling. You can be bolder when there’s an ocean between you and everyone you know, something that mostly manifests in small acts of transgression, like ordering takeout every night or bunking off to drink champagne on a weekday or pretending to be the sort of person who can carry off leopard print, but that one day, I hoped, might give me the push to make more radical life choices. In the meantime, I could write off months, and even years, futzing around trying to figure out where to live, or how to get a Social Security number, or where to buy cheese that didn’t taste of emulsified plastic.

  The real reason I had moved to America—the one I was willing to admit to—was to buy myself time to write a book about my mother, and any thought of babies, along with everything else in my life, fell effortlessly into the category of Things I Can’t Possibly Do Until I’ve Finished The Book. Every day, I sat in the small second bedroom I used as an office surrounded by bits of paper and photos, books stacked haphazardly on the floor, a plant in a green vase with a crack across it in the window, and tried to put my mother’s life into words. I went for long walks around my East Village neighborhood, deliberating over who she had been. The easy part was that I was her only child and the love of her life and that she was my great champion and friend. She played Scrabble with me on rainy afternoons and took me to the jewelry store where she worked, where I played on the adding machine and counted the money. She sat with me through old musicals and made me read Gone with the Wind. She filled me with a sense of my own consequence and the idea that my best was always enough. “Have the courage of your insane convictions,” she said. And, “Of course you can do it, you’re my child.” And, “If at first you don’t succeed . . .”

  This was my mother as I knew her when I was a child. But there was another story, much of which I found out about only after her death from lung cancer in 2003. If, as adults, we are engaged in continuous acts of trying either to replicate our childhoods or to get as far away from them as possible, then my mother fell into the latter category. She had left South Africa for England in 1960 ostensibly for political reasons but for what turned out to be personal ones. Adults who have been abused as children bring a very particular set of assumptions to the raising of their own children, and the fierceness of my mother’s love for me, and the ways in which it came out, were rooted in what turned out to be the extraordinary traumas of her childhood. It shouldn’t be surprising that she, a motherless child whose father was a violent alcoholic and pedophile, should have married my dad, a kind, loving, generous man with whom she could make a safe home for herself and their child, nor that she should choose to live in a part of the world—a leafy village in the south of England—where the worst thing that would ever happen to her was living next door to someone who had voted for Thatcher.

  It was a conventional household: my dad, a lawyer, made the money; my mum, a part-time bookkeeper, kept the home. But she was not a conventional woman. She had the very un-English habit of talking to people in shops and queues. She was confrontational, the kind of mother who told off other people’s children in the dentist’s waiting room while I slouched down in my seat for shame. I took it for granted that, compared with other people’s mothers, my mother was just More: bigger, louder, stronger and of course she loved me more than their mothers loved them, not through any fault of theirs, but as a simple matter of physics. My mother had survived unimaginable abuse as a child and, as a result, had a sense not only of life’s fragility but of its possibility, too, of how far one might travel from any given point of origin, evidence for which was the baby before her. “Those precious feet,” she would say, taking me to the shoe shop for the umpteenth time for the woman to check whether I hadn’t outgrown my shoes. “Those precious hands.” “Those precious teeth.”

  Writing about these things, weighing up my mother’s life and the impact of her mothering on me, dominated my first years in America, and as my midthirties loomed, what had started out as a joy turned into a nightmare; everything subordinated to getting the thing finished. Every few weeks, I broke off to make some money by writing a story for my newspaper and glance longingly toward the day when it would be over and I could finally tackle the rest of my to-do list: find a cheaper apartment, apply for a green card, tidy up, go to the dentist, find saucepans that worked for me, change my cable provider, do something about my hair, repot the plant, get more fiber in my diet, and confront this business of having or not having a baby.

  That last consideration was one I pushed to the back every time. It was too big, too alarming, and a cliché to boot. Prioritizing children isn’t what feminists do, I told myself, a corrective to millennia of their being a woman’s only priority. Some of my friends had kids but most of them didn’t, either because they didn’t want them or because they didn’t want them At All Costs. If there was regret and sadness that came with this, it was accompanied by the understanding that life entails choice and choice entails loss.

  At least my life in New York had opened out by this time. When I met L, I was two thirds of the way toward finishing the book and ready to start going out again. On the surface of things, we looked very different—me, English, lefty, fundamentally unkempt; she, New Yorker, center right, well put together—although if one allows that British journalism and New York finance are two of the most aggressive industries in the world, then on some level we understood each other perfectly. “Everything is sales,” she said one night not long after we met. We were in her apartment on the Upper East Side, where vague shouts drifted up from the Irish bar below. “That’s a terrible way to look at the world,” I said pompously and tried to figure out what I thought “everything” was. “Everything is story,” I said eventually, and this seemed to me an insurmountable difference between us until I realized both entailed spending large amounts of time trying to recruit other people to one’s own point of view. She was ferociously good at her job and I admired this, too.

  Still, on any given day we could disagree about everything under the sun—fact or fiction, Manhattan or Brooklyn, subway or car, Republican or Democrat, all the way down to cats or dogs—so that in the months after we met, it felt like being on an extended safari in each other’s alien worlds. I made her read Joan Didion and took her to press nights on Broadway. She made me read Good to Great and a memoir by Cathie Black, the former chairman of Hearst Magazines, and took me to a car dealership in Queens, where she bamboozled the salesman so thoroughly he practically paid her to take the car off the lot. If falling in love is, partly, a question of finding a docking station for one’s neuroses, I knew I was home when L told me that after her building was evacuated during 9/11, she went straight to a liquor store and bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of hard liquor in case civilization collapsed and the world reverted to a barter economy. Come the zombie apocalypse, this is a woman you want on your side. But there was this, too; the house she grew up in would one day have to be sold, she said, and what she would miss most were the things you can’t take with you, like the sound the stairs made when they expanded at night. Somewhere in my system, a pilot light flared.

 
All relationships have a deadline by which they must either find their level or fall apart, but it is not as hard a deadline as the one on a woman’s fertility, and, as she was three years older than me, L told me from the outset that in the near future, she was planning on trying to get pregnant. Logistically, this made sense; if she was sure she wanted a baby, it would be madness to forestall while we flapped about for another three years trying to decide what we were doing. Emotionally, however, it stumped me. According to every relationship model I knew, you could either be with someone who’d had kids before you met, have kids together and separate down the line or split up and have a baby alone. There was no such thing as being with someone who had a baby on her own, for the very good reason that it sounded like a terrible deal: all the stress and anxiety without the substance of motherhood, the rights and responsibilities that are the beginning of love.

  At that stage, the strongest terms in which I could have put my own long-held but dormant desire for a baby were that I didn’t want not to have one. Materially, I’m not terribly acquisitive. If I ever win the lottery, I’ll have to suppress a dickish urge to dash out and buy a Lamborghini, but in the ordinary run of things, I don’t care much about bags or shoes or clothes or apartment size. What I am greedy for, like most writers and journalists, is insight, and on the rare occasions I gave it any thought, it drove me insane to consider the possibility that if I didn’t have kids, any two-bit newlywed with a baby could lay claim to greater knowledge of human existence than I could. I thought of all the people I hated with children and grew faint with indignation and rage. If there was, behind this impulse, a larger, less tangible longing, I didn’t want to look into it too deeply lest it unleash a full-blown baby hunger I couldn’t get back in the box.

  I did at least manage to move from Manhattan to a cheaper apartment in Brooklyn during those years, around the same time L moved apartments, so that for a very brief window we considered moving in together. After all, we had a lot of fun; we’d driven out to the beach for the summer and she’d come with me on a couple of jobs to L.A. We’d hired a convertible and driven from Las Vegas to Palm Springs, where we laughed ourselves silly playing hipster bingo at the Art Deco hotel. Without a financial incentive, however—I was low on funds, that far into writing a book, but I had low overheads, too, and was paid by my newspaper in sterling, still worth something then—moving in together wasn’t appealing. I had too many books; she had too many clothes. I worked mainly from home and needed space for an office, which meant getting something bigger than either of us was willing to pay for. We also fought a lot. Our fights started out small and blew up to encompass everything. We fought in ways I had never fought with anyone, livid, shouting, crying (her), icy, cruel, withholding (me). “You have no needs,” she once yelled, an insult that baffled me at the time. Surely having no needs was a form of perfection? (Thank you; the limitations of this position have since become clear to me.) After every argument, I thought, that’s it, we’re done, and the next day—truly one of the revelations of adulthood—we made up and moved on. Apparently conflict, which I try to avoid at all costs, can be managed as part of a healthy relationship.

  It did, however, mean that the only way we could envisage living together was in a five-bedroom house arranged over three floors, so that in the event of a fight, we could retreat to different altitudes with an entire floor between us. Instead, we were looking at the standard New York two-bedroom, with barely enough space for one low-maintenance man, let alone two women. Things carried on as they were.

  Or, they almost did. I started to notice small, unsettling changes in myself. When somebody asked me, “Do you have children?”—a question that, until recently, I had responded to in my head with versions of “Are you mental, I’m about eleven”—it started to sound less neutral, more unfriendly. At a friend’s weeklong house party for her fortieth, I looked at the other guests, successful women all, most of whom were at least five years older than me and, with one exception, none of whom had children, and for the first time gave consideration to how they got there. I had always believed as a matter of principle that, medical issues aside, most women without children had acted through choice, but now my faith in this weakened. I watched as a number of friends missed out on having children because their boyfriends broke up with them when they were in the vicinity of forty, before going on to have children with younger women. I watched as women five, six, seven years my senior finally met someone new and went through round after punishing round of IVF. I let my mind drift back to a conversation I’d had with someone years earlier, an elderly friend of my mother’s and a surrogate grandmother of sorts, whom I had loved and admired and who, as far as I knew, had been entirely content to have lived her life without children. Then visiting her one day around her ninetieth birthday, she clutched my hand out of the blue and, with an urgency that shocked me, said, “All that matters is children,” a breach of character so startling I put it down to old age and sentiment, even though, after my mother, she was the least sentimental person I knew.

  Slowly, I started to form visions of the future I didn’t want to be mine. This is, I realize, inverse to the kind of advice doled out by books like The Secret, in which we are told that the key to getting what we want in life is to create a precise picture of it in our head and work slavishly and unwaveringly toward that one goal. Instead, looking back, I see that most of my decisions have been made by figuring out what I don’t want, then doing everything in my power to make sure it doesn’t happen. This may be because my dislikes are more violent than my appetites, but it also, it seems to me, allows for the possibility that there are more routes to happiness than we can imagine ahead of time.

  I didn’t want to be alone at forty-five in a walk-up in Brooklyn, or fifty and on Tinder, dating people with children when I had none of my own. I didn’t want to be seventy, the age my mother was when she died, lying on my deathbed without the image of my child’s face in my head. Above all, I didn’t want to look back on this period, when there was still time to change things, and wish I’d had the courage to act.

  I also didn’t want to “help” another woman raise her baby. Unless I was Mother Teresa (I’m not), the only way it would make sense for me to stick around in the event of L’s having a child was if our relationship changed to become a more conventional union, or—and this is where my imagination really started to strain at the leash—if I had my own baby independently, too.

  * * *

  • • •

  THIS PERIOD OF PARALYSIS might have gone on indefinitely if, in the autumn of 2012, something strange hadn’t happened. My youth, which in line with the rest of my generation had tapered obscenely on from my adolescence into my twenties and well into my thirties, came abruptly to an end. Ordinarily, I like odd-number birthdays; there’s less pressure on them to be fun than on even numbers. I hadn’t enjoyed my thirtieth much, but I’d liked turning twenty-nine and thirty-one. Thirty-three, when I had a joint party at a bar in downtown Manhattan that smelled exactly like London—of spilled beer and Windex—was a blast. That year, however, the run-up to my odd-numbered birthday was different. No matter how hard I looked at it, I couldn’t convince myself that thirty-seven was still my midthirties. It was, indisputably, the start of my late thirties, which meant the next stop was forty, which meant that, according to every magazine article I had ever read on the subject, my reproductive system was about to knit itself a bed jacket and retire. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t broody. It didn’t matter that I was in the wrong country, the wrong apartment, possibly—we hadn’t decided yet—the wrong relationship. It didn’t even matter if I wanted kids or not. What mattered was that if I didn’t act now, or at least soon, the decision would be taken out of my hands.

  I knew of a single example of a woman in her thirties having a baby alone through planning, not accident, and that was Tessa, my friend Laura’s sister, who’d had two children via sperm donor a decade earlier. Tess
a, an energetic and successful entrepreneur from the north of England, was someone I knew only slightly but whom I had for years admired from afar. She was a decade older than me and it was apparent from the way in which Laura talked about it that her decision to have two babies alone had been considered brave but somewhat scandalous. No one at her work knew how her kids were conceived, said Laura, and although it was all wonderful now, it had taken their dad in particular awhile to come round. I had shoved the example of Tessa to the back of my mind in a file marked Too Frightening To Think About Now But That Might One Day Turn Out To Be Useful and that’s where it stayed, right up until that year I turned thirty-seven, which was also the year L got pregnant.

  It would be inappropriate of me to go into the details of how it happened. Our stories overlap, but the story of her baby is not mine to tell. The thing to know about it is that (a) it didn’t make me any more broody (I defy any woman to witness another woman’s early pregnancy up close and think, hey, that looks fun! I should totally do that!) and (b) I wasn’t bound by her decisions. In fact, in the event of trying for my own baby, an infantile strand of my personality deliberately wanted to make different ones, lest I be accused of copying. If we were going to do this thing separately and suffer the deprivations of single parenthood, we might as well realize all the advantages, too—in my case, starting from scratch and doing precisely what suited me and my notional baby.