by Emma Brockes
One advantage of adoption is that formal advice given out on how to talk to the kids about it is based on lessons learned from generations of adoptive parents doing it “wrong.” When Tessa’s children were young, she says, there were no books on the subject of having kids via sperm donor, except a crap one featuring a hedgehog wearing flip-flops. She joined a donor-exchange network—an online support group made up of families similar to hers—which helped a bit, but mostly she made it up as she went along. I must make an involuntary face, because she says, “What?”
“Oh,” I say. “Um. I can’t imagine joining a support group.”
“It was quite helpful,” she says.
“Hmmm.”
When her eldest asked where he came from, she told him Mummy had wanted a baby and the hospital had given her one. This held for a few years, until a friend had a stern word with her about lying. A fairy story about how babies were made—one that cut out the involvement of a man—just wouldn’t do, so she changed the story and said, “Mummy wanted a baby and a nice man helped.” To which her son inevitably replied, “Where is the nice man?”
Obviously, I say, I am going to have to come up with my own answers to these questions, although, assuming everything goes well with the birth, I figure I have five years on the clock to get my story straight.
“Hahahaha,” says Tessa. “It starts MUCH earlier than five.”
She pauses to call the children over from the swings, where they have been trying to push themselves high enough to go over the top.
“Mummy, Mummy, did you see?”
“I did, darling, don’t go too high. Alex, how old were you when I told you how you were conceived?”
“Um. Four?” says Alex.
“Three?” says Jessie.
They run off again. Eventually, she says, when they were still very young, she gave up and answered every question truthfully, technical terms and all, then warned them not to tell anyone at school; not because the information was shameful, but because she didn’t want them lording their knowledge of words like “sperm” and “penis” over other kids in the playground.
“And did they accept it, what you said?”
Up to a point, says Tessa. They were relaxed about where they came from, but they complained now and then about not having a dad, which made her feel very guilty. She looks at me curiously for a moment. “But you have someone on the scene, right?”
“Yeah, but we’re not. I mean, it’s entirely separate operations. She won’t be their parent. Also, living together just doesn’t . . . I mean, we’ll see how it goes. I only have a year’s lease on the apartment. I might not even stay in the U.S. Maybe I’ll have the babies and want to move home.” She stares at me.
“That would be a bit abrupt, wouldn’t it?”
“I probably won’t. But you know. I could.”
“Right,” says Tessa.
I identify more closely with Tessa than with women having children in couples, but still I’m belligerently uninterested in joining any of the support groups. The very words “support group” make my skin crawl. Why do I need support when there’s nothing wrong with me? And what value is that support anyway? I don’t have brain space for a bunch of untested orthodoxies from women potentially more neurotic than I am. It doesn’t occur to me that it might simply be nice to talk to people who have been through similar things, or that the strength of my rejection is a throwback to a rickety old line of denial. If I am snobby about talking to women who have been in my position, then I must be snobby, at some level, about the position itself. I don’t see this at the time. All I know, the day of visiting Tessa, is that I refuse to seek common cause with a bunch of women I know nothing about.
Tessa and I leave the park and saunter back to the house and while the children play video games in the lounge, she and I sit on the patio under a late-afternoon sky. We drink some wine and she tells me how difficult it is to be the only family in town that looks like hers.
“Come and live in New York among the lesbians,” I suggest. “Your kids won’t stand out at all.”
“But I’m not gay!” wails Tessa. It always infuriated her when she went on holiday with her sister and they were mistaken for a couple. “This is my SISTER,” she would say to anyone who glanced at them twice. “I sometimes wonder if we should have moved to Brighton,” she says. But she didn’t want to live in Brighton. She isn’t remotely bohemian. She wants to live where she is living, where the children have space to run around and where, in ways more profound to her than the technicalities of how she got pregnant, she feels that she and the children belong.
“How was it?” says my dad on the way home.
“Good. Helpful. She’s so nice.” I look out of the window. “It’s funny to be back here.”
“Yes. It all seems like such a long time ago.”
I look at the pubs and antique shops and feel a surge of affection for this part of the world, followed by a tremendous surge of smugness for not living here. How clever of me, I think, to be having these babies in New York, where they will not stand out in a crowd. How clever of me not to aspire to the conventional life that Tessa feels guilty for denying her children. Well done, me, and well done, L. We have beaten the system. We have budgeted for every eventuality. There is just one thing. As with so many of my assumptions of how things will be after the birth, I have overlooked a tiny detail. I can control where we live and I can control how we live and I can control who has rights to my children. But, oops, I forgot about this. I can’t control whom they love.
TWELVE
New Year’s Eve
IT’S NOT A FANCY BUILDING, in fact it’s quite ugly, a utilitarian sixties block a stone’s throw from the park. The apartments are large and airy by Manhattan standards and the views of the skyline are spectacular, but nothing about the block could be said to have “character.” If I had, before now, been asked to describe my dream home, I would probably have gone for a nineteenth-century town house, with cornices and fireplaces and all that Architectural Digest junk. In a million years I wouldn’t have imagined a midcentury American box, with standard-issue low ceilings and in a building with the kind of twenty-four-hour infrastructure—a front desk, mail room, large maintenance staff and management—I’ve always thought spoiled and intrusive. How little we know ourselves, even this far into life.
Within a few days of moving, something occurs to me: that I’ve been nervous in every place I have ever lived, starting with the house I grew up in—so many points of access, so quiet after dark—through my flat in north London, my dad’s house in west London and finishing with the converted brownstone in Brooklyn from which I’ve just moved, and where the fire escape outside my window felt like an open invitation to burglars. Having a lit corridor outside my door rather than a dark street is instantly, miraculously curative. I stop lying awake at night listening for noises. I don’t jump at the sound of the plumbing. L once told me that one of her favorite places to be was in her house growing up, with her parents and siblings vaguely around but none of whom was expressly bugging her. Now I discover this, too, the joy of being alone while surrounded by people.
And not just any people. Old people! “Oh my god, you must be so happy,” says Merope when I tell her I have effectively moved into a retirement home. The building is designated by the city as something called a NORC, or a naturally occurring retirement community, which means that many of the residents bought their apartments for next to nothing when the building went up and are now in their eighties and nineties. As their apartments come on the market, families with young children move into the building, giving it an eccentric air of half old people’s home, half day-care center, with games of chicken—walker versus stroller—playing out in the corridors daily. (The walkers have it every time.) “Welcome to the three of you!” says Pam, a friendly retiree, on the day I move in—when you are expecting twins on your own, people hear a
bout you before they have seen you—and elsewhere on my floor there is a widow in her eighties, several other retired single women, a family with youngish children and two women roughly my age. Of the nine apartments on my floor, six are occupied by single women, a number that rises to seven after the family in the apartment next door moves out and yet another single woman moves in. “It will be so nice to have babies on our floor again,” says Pam. For a few months, before the babies arrive, I have never felt so safe and secure.
I had half wondered whether, in those first weeks after moving, my living arrangement with L would be exposed as the ridiculous proposition it had so often seemed—that we would spend so much time in one or the other of our apartments that the vast expense and small inconvenience of living one floor apart would become increasingly hard to ignore. In fact, we enter a honeymoon period in which the loveliness of living almost together is nothing to the luxury of living sort of apart. Being in identical flats throws into relief a rainbow of domestic differences that hadn’t been so apparent when I was living in Brooklyn. L cares less about mess than she cares about dirt. I don’t care about dirt, but I care about mess. When I go upstairs, the toys and crayons scattered on her living floor leave me twitching with existential unease. When I return to my tidy-ish flat, I note the dust bunnies in the corners and the occasional bug in the sink and thank god L isn’t here to protest. (If L sees a bug, she is up all night going the full Joan Crawford.) These might seem like trivial differences, but when you live in close quarters I don’t think they are and I think they are only made worse by children. At least in the early days, having separate homes keeps us sane.
The act of leaving my flat and walking up one flight also imbues even daily visits with the tiny frisson of occasion. When one of us snaps, the other goes home without it being construed as a histrionic gesture. And while hanging out is much easier when neither of us faces an hour-long commute, to my surprise not hanging out becomes easier, too. It doesn’t mean anything anymore. I don’t sit around thinking, how often does one have to see someone to imply the relationship counts? Is three times a week enough? What does it mean if we decide not to spend the weekend together? There’s no marriage or joint mortgage between us, nonetheless a commitment has been made: my twelve-month lease is unbreakable and this, too, is surprisingly reassuring. I have the long-overdue realization that relationships, like everything else, rely on a balance between independence and the right level of curtailment of freedom to liberate one from the burden of choice.
I go up for breakfast. L sometimes pops home between meetings and comes downstairs to stick her head round the door. We have keys to each other’s apartments and don’t bother knocking most of the time, because the locks are there if we need them. When L comes to mine, she heads straight for the fridge and browses for anything new and exciting. (It’s a noble search, given its fruitlessness. In spite of Merope’s best efforts to teach me to cook in my twenties, I still live mostly off pasta and sandwiches.) When I go to L’s, I head straight for the remote because I’m too cheap to buy cable downstairs. At some point, we realize by looking at the available networks that we live close enough to share Wi-Fi.
“Do you want to?” I ask. “If I can figure out the airport extender?”
“Um.”
“Yeah, me, neither.”
In the evening, I go upstairs to eat with L and the baby, and then we hang out together watching TV. I’m usually quite tactile, but this far into my pregnancy my core temperature is molten and all I want is to lie diagonally across my own bed at night and find no one else there. We bid each other good night and I go home. And this feels remarkable, too.
One evening, L sits on the sofa with her son reading a book she recently ordered from Amazon. It’s about different kinds of families. “‘Some people have two mummies,’” she reads, pointing to an illustration of two badgers wearing earrings with a baby badger in their midst. “‘Some people have two daddies. Some people have one mummy, some people have one daddy.’” Her baby, who isn’t a baby anymore but a toddler and the most delightful child in the world, isn’t quite old enough to formulate questions and we are off the hook for a little while yet. L and I exchange glances. “Some people have a neighbor,” she says, sotto voce.
* * *
• • •
THIS PERIOD WON’T LAST. I know this. Before the babies are born, L and I have all the time in the world to flop around enjoying each other’s company and marvel at the wonder of her son. My children will change things in ways neither of us can begin to imagine. I look down at my belly sometimes and boggle that a mere half inch of skin, fat and fluid stands between me and the rest of my life. Half an inch and three months. Overnight, I am suddenly huge. I look like a stick of asparagus stuck to the side of a watermelon. I feel immense, mighty. I stalk around town sheathed in black leggings, knee-high black boots and a brown cashmere cardigan, through which my belly protrudes like a torpedo. I’d thought the advanced pregnancy belly would feel wobbly, like a beer belly, but it’s strong and firm and I’m so preoccupied with it—that and the need to eat all the time—that it becomes hard to concentrate on anything else. One morning, I go to the Waldorf for a breakfast interview with a nice English actress whom I can barely hear I’m so focused on forking as much bacon into my mouth as I can in forty-five minutes. When we get up to leave, I push back from the table and she says with some relief, “Oh, you’re pregnant!” Listening to the tape afterward, all I can hear is her pleasant voice underscored by a faint and terrible gulping.
I put off all the things I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t book a prenatal class. I don’t buy a crib or a stroller. (Jesus, a “double stroller.”) I’ll inherit a lot of basic baby clothes from L, but I haven’t figured out how I’ll manage in those months after the birth. How does one person, even with help from upstairs, physically meet the demands of two newborns? “You need a baby nurse,” says L, and although I know she’s right, I don’t start calling around or interviewing. I don’t want to break the spell.
And I am busy in those last months of the year. My new rent burden hasn’t started to bite yet and I’m sufficiently padded that it won’t for some time—not until it is added to by the shocking, crippling cost of child care. But I see it coming and through the end of summer, into autumn and winter, I work frantically. I write endless columns. I spend months on the piece about the playwright in Devon, across multiple rewrites and late-night revisions. I tour some of New York’s parks with the head of the parks department, as part of a series about world cities. We start up on 125th Street, in what used to be a rough neighborhood and is now full of ritzy grocery stores and hipster BBQ restaurants. I arrive early and, after buying a foot-long pastrami and Swiss sandwich from Subway, sit on a park bench and look out at the water. When my interviewee arrives, accompanied by a press attaché and several assistants in black SUVs, he gives me a history of the park and talks more generally about the need for clear sightlines in the city’s green spaces. He is, he says, against low tree canopies because they obscure the view. “You’d be concerned as you turned a corner,” he says vaguely, scrutinizing the tree line in the distance, “because you don’t know what’s waiting for you.”
* * *
• • •
WHAT SHUNTS ME ONWARD, in the end, is the fluttering. One night I get home from L’s and peel off my leggings and boots. On the bed, I roll to one side, the only comfortable position left, and that’s when I feel it; a fluttering from pelvis to ribs, as if tiny gills were brushing my insides. My scalp contracts. My god, these things are actually alive. I am woefully unprepared for this birth.
In the United States, as far as I can tell, there is no single central authority for educating pregnant women and, in my case, no stern reminder from my doctor to crack on and sign up for a prenatal class. No one has told me to do anything at all, and because I will never deprogram from the assumption that a patient should only ever act on her doctor’s
orders, I wonder if perhaps I don’t have to. Maybe the birth is something I can turn up to at the last minute and, like any deadline, leave it to adrenaline to sort out. I’ve watched a few YouTube videos on how to breathe during labor. Women give birth in rice paddies, etc. Apart from those early scares with the blood, it’s been an easy pregnancy—no morning sickness, no mood swings. My only unscheduled visit to the doctor over the summer was to Dr. Dolphin, my eye guy, for blocked tear ducts—take that to a therapist—so really, how hard can it be? Then up they start with the fluttering and all that flies out the window.
Here is (one of) the problems with the free market: it shifts the burden of responsibility onto the consumer. If I receive a bad service it’s because I made the wrong choice and the choices in this case are dizzying. Some prenatal classes in New York come with lunch or a goody bag sponsored by a baby store. Some cost hundreds of dollars and entail the services of a “baby planner,” or a “maternal wellness consultant,” or, in my case, a “twin concierge,” who will come around to frighten me in my own home. Some last an hour, some last a day, some are stretched out over two months. All I want is to be in ill-fitting yoga pants in a chilly church hall, being told what to do by the state. Instead, I have to decide between a brand consultant and someone who calls herself a “mompreneur.”
There are other factors, too. The city may be more forgiving than a small English village, but even so, Manhattan is not exactly a place light on judgment and I have to be careful not to put myself in a situation where I’m going to feel freakish. A friend who is trying to get pregnant alone tells me of going to a class on how to manage the injections and discovering, too late, that everyone else there had come in a couple—some gay, some straight, but all of them in pairs. She’d been feeling quite chipper until then. But those three hours with no one else to hold the needle left her feeling self-conscious and lousy.