Then I saw you. You were on the other side of the tent, and a woman I didn’t recognize had her hand on your forearm while the two of you spoke. She smiled at something you said, then responded. You laughed. All of a sudden I felt nauseated.
“I need some air,” I whispered to Darren, who had found another investment banker and was talking shop.
“Oh!” he said. “Are you okay?”
I nodded. “Just a little queasy, I’ll be fine.”
I’d only gotten over the morning sickness phase of the pregnancy a few weeks before. Darren was used to watching me vomit, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience for either one of us.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Positive,” I answered, and headed out of the tent.
I took a few deep breaths and then turned back around. There were no walls, so I could see straight inside the tent. I couldn’t find you anymore, but that woman was talking to someone else, her hand on his arm. That did more for me than the deep breaths. My nausea abated.
I was about to head back to Darren when I felt someone touch my shoulder. It was you, of course.
“Luce,” you said.
I turned. “Gabe,” I answered. “Hi.”
The skin on my shoulder prickled with goose bumps where you’d touched me.
“Nice dress,” you said.
Darren told me once that when men say that, they mean, “You look hot in that dress.” I’ve never been completely sure if he was right about that. I should’ve asked you then what you meant.
“Thanks,” I answered. “Nice shirt.”
Your dimple appeared. “I can’t even tell,” you told me. “You look exactly the same.”
Then I turned sideways and held the drapey dress close to my body. “How about now?” I asked.
Your eyes grew wide for a moment before you smiled. “Well that’s . . .”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s a baby.” It wasn’t much of one, just about a four-month bump. But I couldn’t wear my regular clothes anymore. I’d had to buy a new dress.
“Congratulations, Luce,” you said. “I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks.” I let go of my dress. “How’s everything been on your end?”
Your smile faded and you shrugged. “Coming back to New York is always strange. It feels like I’m in Back to the Future and I’ve returned to a world that jumped ahead while I wasn’t looking.” Your eyes wandered back to my stomach.
“Your world’s changed too, though,” I said.
You shook your head. “I can’t explain it. My world’s changed, but my New York feels like it should be the same. Everything should be just as I left it, like coming back to a childhood bedroom.” You stopped abruptly. “I’m not making any sense.”
“No,” I said, “you are. Your safe space has changed.”
“Yeah,” you said. Your gaze lingered on my stomach. “Yeah,” you said again. Then, “I should probably go . . . it was great to see you, Lucy. Good luck. I really am happy for you.”
You walked quickly toward the bar set up next to the sundial.
I wanted to call out and tell you to wait. I wanted to ask you more questions so I could understand what you were feeling, so I could hear what your world was like. I wanted you to touch me again and give me goose bumps.
But you were right to walk away. Nothing good could have come of prolonging that conversation. So instead I went back to Darren.
“You feeling okay, sweetie?” he asked.
“Much better,” I told him, and leaned my head against his shoulder.
Without missing a beat in the conversation he was having, he wrapped his arm around me and dropped a kiss on the top of my head.
It didn’t give me goose bumps, but it did feel good.
li
One thing I’ve learned—from work, from you, from my life with Darren—is that as far as I’m concerned, ninety-nine percent of surprises should be avoided at all cost. When I can prepare for something, I’m much better at handling it. If I could have prepared myself when you were leaving New York, if I’d known you were in talks with the Associated Press for a job, I can’t help thinking I would’ve been better at dealing with it. But the fact that it was a surprise, that . . . that made everything harder. That’s why we decided to find out the baby’s sex. I wanted to know so I could prepare. We learned we were having a girl a few weeks after the reunion. I didn’t bother getting in touch with all the women there who’d asked me. I figured they’d find out on Facebook if they were all that interested.
Because of my distaste for surprises, I read books—I can’t tell you how many books—on different people’s birthing experiences, on what to expect, on the choices people had. I thought it might help prepare me—might stop the nightmares I was having about giving birth on the subway or in my office or in a taxicab. Or the ones about the baby tearing me open like that scene in Alien. I made a birthing plan, like the doctor suggested, but I knew as I was making it that the baby could have her own birthing plan that I would not be privy to.
I went into labor at night, after dinner at Heights Cafe. I ate a burger—actually, half a burger because there was practically no room in my stomach then for food. The baby was due in two days, on November 21st, and Darren said that we should get in as many date nights as possible before she was born, even if it just meant half a burger at a restaurant within walking distance of our apartment. We’d figured out as much as we could by then. We knew we were going to name her Violet, after Darren’s grandmother, who’d passed away when he was sixteen. I loved the name—the sound of it, the way it was a flower and a color, the nickname Vi. We’d decided on a middle name, too—Anne—after my great-aunt. Violet Anne Maxwell. I still love her name.
So after dinner, as we walked home, me with a coat that barely closed over my stomach, my underwear started to feel damp. Is this too much information? Do you actually care what it felt like the night Violet was born? If you tell me to stop, I will. Just give me a sign. No? Okay.
I remember thinking: Really? Now? One of my modest pregnancy goals was to make it through the whole experience without “making a mistake,” as we called it when we were potty-training Violet. Kate had needed to change her underwear almost every time she sneezed while she was pregnant. I’d really hoped that wouldn’t happen to me. When we were a block away from our apartment, though, the trickle of wetness turned into more than a trickle, and I realized what was happening.
I turned to Darren. “I think my water broke,” I said.
He stopped dead in his tracks. “Really?” he asked. I could see the excitement in his eyes. “Wait, you think or you know?”
“I think I know,” I answered.
He laughed and hugged me and kissed me and said, “Can you walk? Are you okay? Should we call the doctor? Right now?”
Even though I was already worrying about what would happen from that point on, and even though my leggings were wet and getting cold, I told him I was pretty sure I could walk the block to our apartment with him, and that we could call the doctor when we got there. He held my hand the whole way, talking much faster than he usually did about who we had to call and what he couldn’t forget once we left for the hospital. (The phone chargers! His laptop! His iPod and speakers!) He’d made a few playlists for us to listen to at various parts of the labor and delivery experience. I wasn’t sure I’d want to hear any of them, but it gave him something to do, a way to prepare.
We waited at home, trying to watch a made-for-TV movie that I can’t remember at all, until my contractions were five minutes apart, just like the doctor said. And then we took a cab to the hospital. Twelve hours later, Violet was born. She was beautiful and perfect with dark hair and dark eyes and the longest eyelashes I’d ever seen on a baby.
Darren has this thing where he thinks all his friends’ babies—and Jay and Vanessa’s triplets—looked like
either Winston Churchill or Mr. Magoo when they were born. He’ll still hold up his computer screen every now and then to show me someone’s kid on Facebook and say, “Churchill or Magoo?” And truly, they do always look like one of the two options.
When Violet was washed and dressed and wrapped up like a burrito, with a little striped hat on her head, the nurse handed her to me, and I looked up at Darren. “Churchill or Magoo?” I asked him.
“I think she’s the first baby in the history of the world who looks like neither. She looks like you,” he said. “Lucky little girl.”
Then he slid off his shoes and climbed into bed with me, and the three of us cuddled. At that moment, I truly was in awe—of the way Darren and I had created a person together, of the way genetics made her look like me, of the way biology works to make this moment of happiness possible.
“I love you,” I told Darren.
“I love you both,” he said back.
I need you to understand that I do really, truly love him. What he and I have isn’t perfect, but it is absolutely love.
lii
When I got engaged, all of a sudden I felt like I’d joined a club, one that had a membership that went back decades, centuries, millennia—the Club of Women Who Had Become Engaged. I felt the same way about getting married, like my membership in the Club of Women Who Had Gotten Married was shored up when I put on a white dress and walked down an aisle and said I do. But nothing felt more like joining a club than having a child. There was a dividing line between the women who had babies, and the women who didn’t. The Moms and the Not Moms.
And even in that club there was a subset—the God Help Me Moms and the Expert Moms, the ones who Facebooked photos of their children dressed in pristine outfits, asleep on satin pillows, with captions like I Dream of Daddy.
I was not that kind of mom. I am still not that kind of mom. I will never be that kind of mom.
I joined the Mom Club—had to, there was no way around that—but I counted the day a good one if both Violet and I were clean and fed and had slept more than five hours total in a night. I had three months of maternity leave, but by the end of eight weeks, I felt like I was fraying at the edges. Being a stay-at-home mom was nothing like I imagined it would be.
Kate called at least once a day to check in on me, even if she could only chat for a minute or two. She’d had her daughter, Victoria, six months before and her firm had a really generous maternity plan, so she’d just gone back to the office and was working like crazy, trying to make sure she wasn’t mommy-tracked. “It’ll get easier,” she told me. “I promise.” But it didn’t feel like it was.
I was nursing, and Violet ate practically all day. Or at least that was what it seemed like. On some days I didn’t even bother putting on a shirt. And I came up with what I called the Fecal Incident Levels. Level One was no big deal. Level Two filled a diaper. Level Three leaked out through the leg holes. Level Four oozed up her back. Level Five was the worst—it basically meant there was feces smeared from her shoulders to knees. It required a bath. And often a change of clothes for me too. Between Levels Three, Four, and Five, I threw away so many onesies, it’s amazing she had enough to wear.
One day, though, Violet somehow managed to reach Fecal Incident Level Six. We’d had a great morning. She was clean, I was clean, we’d both eaten—though I hadn’t really slept more than three hours in succession in days—and since the heat in the apartment was blasting, she was wearing only a diaper and a T-shirt. She had just started to smile, and my heart melted a little each time she did.
We were having such a good day that I’d decided to make a real dinner, something that had happened maybe twice in the last eight weeks. I’d put Violet in a little baby seat that vibrated and turned it on. Then I’d defrosted some chicken and started breading it. The radio was on—a ’60s station that reminded me of my dad—and I started singing along to “My Girl.” My hands were covered in eggs and bread crumbs, but I felt great. And then Violet started wailing.
I looked over, and froze. The first ever Fecal Incident Level Six. Maybe it was because of the vibrating chair, or the angle she was sitting in, or the lack of clothing other than diaper and T-shirt, but somehow there was poop on her thighs that had gotten onto her hands and into her hair. I took a deep breath, quickly rinsed my hands, and lifted her out of the seat. She flailed her arms, so now there was poop on my cheek, on my shirt, and my wrist. And then she spit up in my hair. She was still screaming, and I started crying too.
That was how Darren found us.
“Lucy?” I heard him yell from the entryway. “What’s going on? Why’s Violet . . . ?” And then he made it to the kitchen. “Oh,” he said. “Oh my God.”
He dropped his briefcase on the floor and took off his suit jacket. “I got the poop machine,” he said. “You go shower.”
I looked at him and took a shaky breath. “Strip first,” I said. “You don’t want to get this on your suit. And she’s not just a poop machine. She’s a puke machine too.”
“Yikes,” he said, working the buttons on his shirt and dropping it on top of his jacket. “What do you think the headline should be for this one? Naked Man Saves Wife from Soiled Baby?”
I laughed a little bit. “How about Naked Man Does What Wife Does All Day Long with Soiled Baby?” I suggested.
“Really?” he asked. “This happens a lot?” He’d gotten completely naked, except for his boxer briefs, and took Violet. “Oh, gross,” he said, once he had her by her armpits.
“Well, not a Level Six,” I told him, “but Level Five isn’t that rare.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, as the three of us walked to the master bathroom. It had both a tub and a shower, and we’d put the little plastic baby bathtub in the larger one for Violet. Annie joined our parade once we got upstairs, barking her confusion.
Darren started the water for Violet’s bath while I stripped and got in the shower and Annie curled herself up on the little rug in front of the sink. Through the steam, I explained to him about Fecal Incident Levels. And while I was at it, I told him that I wanted to go back to work when my maternity leave was over. That I needed to. We’d been having this conversation since late in my pregnancy, but I’d put off making an official decision because it had felt like there were too many variables, there was too much I didn’t know. I knew what Darren wanted me to do, though.
“I thought we’d discussed this,” he said.
“We did,” I said, as I quickly shampooed my puke-stained hair. “And now we’re discussing it again.”
“But I thought you agreed that Violet would be better off with you than with a stranger. No one will take care of her the way you will.”
I leaned my head back into the shower stream. “To be honest,” I said, “I think that you’re wrong. And that’s only part of the issue. I’ve been thinking about this thing that my grandfather used to say all the time: Those who can, do. He meant it as a mantle of responsibility. If you can help someone, if you can do something good, if you can make a difference, you should. And I can. I’m capable of making more of a contribution to the world than I would be making if I stayed home with Violet every day. I made a commitment to myself on September Eleventh to live my life in a way that would give back. And I want to do that. I need to do that.”
“But don’t you love being home with Violet?” Darren asked, as if he hadn’t heard a word I said.
I took a deep breath. “There are moments that are wonderful,” I said. “But I love being an associate producer, too. I love making television shows. I’ve worked my ass off for the last five years, and I’m good at what I do. I’m not good at this.”
“You just need more time,” he said, dropping Violet’s T-shirt and soiled diaper into the trash can. “There’s no way you can think your job is more important than your daughter.”
I was ready to kick something. Or cry. Or both. I
gave my hair one final rinse and turned off the shower.
“Of course I don’t think that,” I said, wrapping myself in a terry-cloth robe. “But I value my own happiness too. And if I stayed home, if this was my life, I’d resent it. I’d resent her. And you.”
“I think she’s peeing?” he said, as he slipped her into the baby bathtub.
“Happens,” I answered, kneeling to take over.
“So many women would die for this opportunity,” Darren said. “You don’t need to work. I make enough money. I have this job so you don’t need to work.”
“No,” I said, shampooing Violet’s hair. “You have that job because you love that job. You love making money and having people respect you. You love the high that comes with closing huge deals.”
“That’s not the only—” Darren said.
I stopped him. “And you like being a provider, too, I get it. You like being able to take care of us. And I appreciate it, I do. But don’t pretend you work just so I don’t have to. You work because you like how your job makes you feel. Just like I like how my job makes me feel.”
Darren was quiet. When I looked up at him, he seemed to be evaluating me, assessing me.
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