An Excellent Choice

by Emma Brockes

  When I come out of the toilets it’s almost five p.m. and getting dark. I’m not going to get pregnant. The thought strikes me with the force of a blow to the head. It’s not for the best. There’s no “teachable moment.” It is simply the truth of my situation and for a moment, standing on the steps of the convention hall in the cool Canadian air, I feel high on the novelty of letting it go. I leave the center and cross the road to McDonald’s, where I order a Quarter Pounder with cheese and sit at a table with a woman in a misshapen brown jacket, with whom I trade life-is-terrible vibes. I start to cheer up.

  When I get outside again, a small crowd has gathered in front of the convention center to watch a light installation being switched on and in the crowd I spot a face that I recognize. Rosemary! It has been seven months since I saw her in Edinburgh, since when she has changed jobs and moved countries. We embrace, screaming.

  “World’s biggest name tag,” I say, holding up my ID badge.

  Rosemary makes a somber face and holds up her own. “By this lanyard shall ye know me.”

  I know Rosemary hasn’t done anything yet about starting fertility treatment and I don’t want to discourage her by sharing my news. I have been so committed to the idea of getting pregnant on the sly and presenting it as a brilliant fait accompli that I want to keep my failures to myself. I sense in my friend a similar reluctance to bring up the subject, and although I’m relieved, I’m sad, too. We have entered that no-man’s-land in which small variables between women of late childbearing age feel like unbridgeable gulfs, and until we’re on the other side of it, there is no point in trying to meet each other halfway. Instead, we talk about how sheepish we feel to be attending the conference without having invented a nanotechnology.

  The truth is, I have spent the last four months pushing what I think of as the boundary between biology and technology, which in this company is laughable. Here, the anxiety about progress isn’t should we, but could we. “How cool is this?” is justification enough. The following day, at the buffet—a presentation of deli meats that, mercifully, doesn’t ask us to interrogate and reinvent the concept of lunch—I meet a woman who tells me she is a neuroscientist for a “stealth unit” at Google, working on “how to download human thought.” There are others, too, all brilliant, all potentially world changing, but whose efforts strike me, in my febrile state, as so much window dressing on the primary unfathomability of how to be alive in one’s body. Surely the only point of progress is to find new, more reliable ways in which to deliver the old certainties? This isn’t a story about technology; it’s a story about love.

  I like the firefly expert. I like the guy who says, “I realized for the first time that light has substance and can be designed.”

  “Is it terrible that the thing I liked most was Billy Collins’s poem about the dog?” says Rosemary. We are on a late afternoon break, vaguely stalking Larry Page around the auditorium perimeter.

  “No. I liked it, too.” Collins, the former U.S. poet laureate, had come onstage in sneakers and a red fleece and in a gruff, untheatrical voice recited a poem with no motivational value whatsoever about a dog anticipating its death.

  I think about the brilliance of the mechanical cockroach; of how in order to replicate life, one must be able to break it down into its constituent parts, and of how the poets do this in arguably harder terms than the scientists. The big word at these conferences is “disruption,” but it can be a narrow understanding of what form that might take. Satire, for example, is a disruptive force that, like the proverbial dog whistle, can’t be heard by those who favor the exclamatory mode. Might not the poem about a dog be as powerful, in its way, as the blueprint for how to download a thought? Isn’t that all a good poem is, anyway?

  When my phone goes off, I leave Rosemary and walk through the heavy glass doors out onto the terrace.

  “Is your head itching?” says L. I snap out of my reverie.

  “You’re joking.”

  “It’s probably a false alarm.”

  “You are fucking joking.”

  My head instantly starts itching like crazy. “Fucking Melanie,” I say. L, the baby and I had been to a friend’s house the previous weekend and she’d sworn blind her kids’ nit outbreak was under control.

  “We’ve done the treatment just in case. You need to go to a pharmacy and buy the stuff.”

  Fifteen feet away, Al Gore stands looking out across the water, talking on his cell phone.

  “How far do these things jump?”

  * * *

  • • •

  IT’S NOT THAT I regret not having started out sooner. I’m not so lost as to believe that my younger self could have handled this; in fact, it seems to me the only thing worse than my present predicament would have been to be in my present predicament but with fewer resources. Neither do I wish I had frozen my eggs, a proposition that strikes me as ludicrous. The ideal time to freeze one’s eggs, like the ideal time to start preparing for one’s retirement, is in one’s twenties, when it seems as if it will never be relevant. Nevertheless, I have two friends in their midthirties who are looking into the possibility of freezing their already quite elderly eggs, with a view to buying themselves another ten years to find a man. (Interestingly, both are confident their families will pay for it. Where parents once labored to cover their thirtysomething’s wedding, now they’re on the hook for their thirtysomething’s egg-freezing operation. “They have to do it,” said a friend the other day, “because they gave my sister a shit-ton for her problems, so they owe me. And anyway, otherwise they’re not going to get grandkids.”)

  Besides, I like the focusing element of working to deadline. The shelf life of a woman’s reproductive system is generally perceived to be a bad thing, but there is something to be said for being forced to prioritize. Meanwhile, men can drift on for years, messing up themselves and everyone else in the process. If I am unambivalent about wanting children, I am equally unambivalent about the value of the years I’ve spent not having them.

  What I’m not prepared for is the complete lack of a plan as to how my life might look in their absence. Having kids in one’s late thirties or early forties coincides almost exactly with the first sniff of midlife crisis, which is good if the baby thing works out. There is nothing like new life to defer one’s encroaching decrepitude. If I don’t have a baby, however, those years just got harder. I’ll have more time on my hands, in which case, like any surplus resource, the value of that time will fall, and with it, somehow, the value of whatever comes out of it. If I do have a baby, on the other hand, I will create a background condition in which I am forced to be sharper and more resourceful than if I had to provide only for myself. I want a baby for all the reasons mentioned, but I also want a baby because I function best when there is some kind of resistance to overcome. Having a child is supposed to undermine one’s ability to work, but that’s not how I see it. In the tiny chamber of my brain dedicated to pure self-advancement, I think a baby will maximize my performance.

  But I’m not having a baby. I have a job to do, followed by another. When I leave the conference in Vancouver a night early, missing Sting’s keynote speech (“Ah, shame,” says Rosemary), it is to fly down to San Francisco for a meeting at Facebook and at eleven p.m. I check into a roadside motel in Palo Alto. The balmy air feels outlandish after the deep cold of Vancouver. Perhaps Americans feel this way when they check into a bed-and-breakfast in the Lake District or a Travelodge off the A412—wholly invisible—and, as I tend to in these places, I fantasize about dropping out to live here for months, like a medieval mystic or a stylite up a pole: silent, sexless, anonymous, dreamless, stripped of all impurity and baggage. I don’t need to be a mother. I don’t need to be anything. I just need to get under these boiled white sheets and, with the sound of crickets bleeping in the warm air outside, sleep more deeply than I have done for weeks.

  The next morning, I take a cab to the
Facebook campus. I am interviewing Sheryl Sandberg for the paperback release of Lean In, in advance of which every woman with kids I know has urged me to find out how many nannies she has, what time she leaves the house in the morning and how many hours of the day she spends with her children relative to working—all inquiries that, it turns out, she not only is disinclined to answer but knocks back as fundamentally hostile to feminism. Men don’t get asked these questions, so why should she? It’s a rationale I’ve been hearing since I was twenty-two and made the mistake of asking one of Britain’s foremost feminists about juggling “work and children,” whereupon she looked at me over her half-moon spectacles in a way that ensured I never asked that question again.

  At least, I never asked it directly. Instead, I insinuated it every which way. I have asked women about “guilt” and time management. I have asked actresses if they take their kids with them on set, and novelists if it’s hard to shut the door. I have asked if motherhood has “changed” them, not a question that ever solicits an interesting answer, but one that, for most publications, is pretty much insisted on when a high-profile woman has children. And of course in the face of all this, Sandberg and the other women are right to demur. For the longest time, women have been expected to forfeit their identities in the blowtorch of motherhood, to have a baby and watch it subsume everything they have achieved over decades of professional effort. They are expected to drop down to three days a week, miss promotions, lose income, while their husbands surge ahead and get a free kid on the side. This imbalance makes me so angry that when I see male friends with young babies being praised to the skies for doing a fraction of the child care, I wish I were heterosexual purely for the satisfaction of having a child alone, rather than with a man who, however dedicated in theory to the 50/50 child care / housework division, will almost certainly end up taking the piss out of me.

  But hang on. Even in this, I am being disingenuous. As I wander around the Facebook campus, stinging slightly from Sandberg’s remark that the most important decision a woman has to make is the one about whom she has kids with—for all my ravings about men doing less of the child care, I know if I had a baby I would want to do everything for it myself. That’s how my mother did it, that’s how I want to do it and even if I was in a conventional marriage, I imagine I’d consider any baby I gave birth to as being more mine than his. I know a lot of women who feel this way and it gives their husbands a yawning great get-out, not to mention making them feel horribly excluded.

  Meanwhile, the instinct of professional women not to discuss their domestic arrangements is understandable, but raises problems of its own. Now, not only are we supposed to feel guilty about if, when and how we have kids, but once we’ve had them, we’re supposed to feel guilty about admitting they matter. Don’t let on that it’s difficult. Don’t let motherhood interfere with your corporate persona. It’s a fear that can bring on a weird fanaticism: choosing—for those few who have the luxury of choice—to take only two weeks of maternity leave or to travel during the late stages of pregnancy, gestures designed to shuck off the yoke of maternity, but that always strike me as the feminist equivalent of the preacher who, to illustrate his faith, goads poisonous snakes into biting him at the pulpit. It’s the impulse behind all those slummy mummy columns that appeared in the British press ten years ago; the rash of “I’m a terrible mother” pieces, listing the gin and tonics, the sloppy housekeeping, the hilarious scrapes of the unmonitored children as if they constituted the most outrageous rebellion on the part of the women, but which ended up defining them in terms of their domestic arrangements as firmly as any 1950s housewife.

  After the interview, I buy L’s baby a branded sweatshirt at the Facebook gift shop and wander for a little longer around the campus. I walk past the graffiti wall, the fire pits, the soft play areas; the posters on the walls urging staff to be their “best selves” or asking them “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” (Hold a negative opinion about Facebook, perhaps.) Past the refrigerators stocked with energy drinks and the countless concession stands that give Facebook its fundamental character—as a place where you are never farther than ten yards from an opportunity to eat a free burrito. Eventually, I leave the campus and sit outside on a bench in the sun waiting for a cab. I sometimes think I could write an entire book about all the places I have sat waiting in the course of my job. Every railway intersection in the north of England; the convention center toilets of every major city in North America; the fringes of public gatherings in support of fox hunting / protesting the Iraq War / celebrating the queen’s eightieth birthday / mourning the queen mother’s death. Corridors, so many corridors. I can summon whole years of my twenties by envisaging the green patterned carpet of the Dorchester Hotel. It would be called On Waiting and would be described on the dust jacket as a meditation on the value of liminal spaces, and Alain de Botton, among others, would praise it to the skies.

  The taxi comes. It’s like all California taxis, stinking of old cigarette smoke and with ripped seats and a driver telling me the story of how he came to America from Armenia. It’s considered bad form for journalists to quote what the taxi driver says, a barometer of how little interaction we have with “real people” outside the bubble, which is fair, and yet there is still something about these transitional moments. I often have a clearer memory of them than of the destination itself. Looking out of the car window, I feel alone, weightless, off the grid. I will wait, as we all wait, for things to pick up or to slow down, for my options to widen or dwindle. I will wait to be lucky, or unlucky. That evening, I fly back to New York from California and when I finally get to Brooklyn it is past midnight. The next morning, the bleeding has stopped and for the hell of it and because I can’t think of what else to do, I buy a pregnancy kit from the pharmacy.

  “Something very weird has happened,” I say to L on the phone. I am standing in the bathroom, looking down at the spatula with its crosshatched blue lines. “I’m pregnant.”

  NINE

  Falling

  JOY AT THE CLINIC. Joy unconfined. It feels like winning a race. I have done it! I am the most brilliant person alive! Having decided that failing to conceive is none of my fault, I now accept full credit for the pregnancy. “You did it!” exclaims a nurse, rushing down the corridor to greet me, her colleagues hard on her heels. “We’re so happy for you! After coming in here every week for so long!” (This is a stretch, even for me. I’ve been trying only for four months; what on earth do they say to women who’ve been going for years?) Dr. B is more cautious. “This is good, very good,” he says, glancing at the results from my blood test, “but early days.” He looks up abruptly. “Congratulations.”

  So here it is, the longed-for state. And how does it feel? It feels divine. I feel excessively, abundantly, ferociously pregnant. I feel as if I have done something unique in human history, not least because, overlooking the small issue of medical science, I have done it completely alone. A day after the blood test, on a warm morning in late March that either genuinely presages spring or feels that way as a side effect of my mania, I wander around Central Park, inhaling the sweet air and communing furiously with the cells in my uterus. I imagine myself apprising the baby of its dramatic eleventh-hour coming into being—how it clung on for sheer life during the deluge; how sure I was all was lost and then, hallelujah, you were there all along! Barely a week since conception and already it has a great story to tell.

  “Oh, wow,” says L, and if there is anxiety in her voice, I choose not to hear it. “Congratulations.” And then, because she has been here herself, she advises me not to tell anyone, advice that I promptly ignore.

  “I knew you’d do it!” says Merope on the phone from London, confirming my suspicion that this is not a biological event but a referendum on my character.

  “A December birth,” I say to Oliver, looking at the calendar and calculating a due date between my own birthday, at the end of November, and my mother’s on Dec
ember 16. “Sagittarius. The best sign.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” he says.

  I don’t call my dad, the person who will hurt most in the event of my own injury, which suggests that some part of my cautious self is still functioning. Neither am I so far gone as to believe the fizzing in my uterus is anything but imaginary, nor that its source is “human” in any meaningful way. Three days after conception, it is very much a “baby” in the same way that the synthetic meat in a fish stick is “crab.” The only reason I know it exists is because fertility treatment has made me privy to an earlier stage of my pregnancy than nature intended, confirming the faint line on the pregnancy test long before a missed period. There is a good, evolutionary reason for this delay, shielding women who lose a pregnancy this early from the realization that they were ever pregnant. With fertility treatment, there is no such thing as not realizing anything; everything is realized, and recorded, and broken down into a thousand tiny cliff-hangers, every day bringing another blood test and phone call confirming or confounding the course of my pregnancy. I am pregnant on Thursday, but will I still be pregnant on Friday? And Saturday? I feel like a large ship trying to navigate my way down a narrow canal, or a creature scuttling over hot sand, trying to keep its points of contact with the earth to a minimum. Meanwhile, just out of reach, the promise of open water.

  “Not good news,” says Dr. B on the phone the next morning. I am standing at my office window, looking at the woman in the apartment across the street. She is doing yoga, as she does every morning. Bend and stretch; bend and stretch.

  “Your hormone levels are dropping,” he says, aiming for sympathy but sounding vaguely annoyed. “We’ll do another test tomorrow, but if the numbers don’t come up . . .”