by Michelle Tea
After instructed meditation in the public hall of the Zen Center, I was ready to go where the real meditators meditated, a dark little room in the basement called the Zendo. Though I had mostly mastered the forms of meditating in the public hall, my descent into the Zendo brought back all my fumbling intimidation in an anxious rush. One does not just sashay into a Zendo and plop down on a zafu. There are ways of doing things down there. Which foot steps into the space first, the right or the left? How are you holding your hands? When do you bow, and in what direction? How do you climb off your pillow when it’s over? In what order do you exit, and, again, what do you do with your hands? There are answers to all of these questions. I’d gotten some instructions from friends, but I was still nervous. I knew I’d forget, or fuck up. In my nervousness I felt myself rage against these oppressive constraints. Why couldn’t I just walk into the fucking room and throw my ass on a pillow? Because some long-ago monk with OCD developed these repetitive behaviors and we’ve all been following in his compulsive footsteps for millennia?
The more I did Buddhism, the more I got it. In a practice devoted to teaching us to wake up from the hum of our minds, some nifty tricks have been devised. The special way you walk into the Zendo is like a game meant to keep your mind focused. If you’re thinking about what foot is falling over the threshold, you’re not thinking about, like, if that’s your ex sitting there in the same fucking meditation session as you—goddammit, you introduced him to the Zen Center; doesn’t he understand it is your space; what, now you’re going to have to fucking meditate together? I mean, such intrusive thoughts might barge in (it’s funny how having “intrusive thoughts” is a symptom of mental illness; Buddhism teaches that all thoughts are intrusive, and maybe that means we’re all a little mentally ill), but thankfully, some monk a bazillion years ago came up with this handy tool for snapping yourself out of it—just think about your next step. Okay, now think about your next step. And now think about your next step. There is always a next step.
When I started going to the Zen Center, I think I thought I’d meditate myself into a state of wild bliss wherein my ex’s behavior just wouldn’t bother me. I thought the point of meditating was to get yourself into some sort of transcendent zone where you had, I don’t know, an experience. Maybe I thought it would be a little bit like a really rad acid trip, minus the acid. Alas, these were the hopes of a drug addict looking to get high. One thing I have to keep learning as a sober person is, if you want to feel like you’re on drugs, you have to do drugs. Unless I start meditating on a batch of pot cookies (not recommended), I’m probably not going to hallucinate that I’m one with the universe.
What I do get from my practice (and, let me be clear, my “practice” is and always has been shabby enough that any Buddhist worth her rakusu would laugh at me) is ultimately something more lasting than a high, something I can have sober, all day, every day. What I get is the ability to see my mind’s chatter for the honkadoodle bullshit it is. Some of my thoughts are good—they are skillful, helpful, positive. I appreciate them. They make me happy and bring brightness into my life. But some of my thoughts have the tone, timbre, and validity of an Internet comment board, and I treat them accordingly—delete; ignore; I’ll pray for you, you sad, angry person. The more I meditate, the more likely I am to remember that my mind is a wasteland, my opinions not quite as valuable as my ego would like to think. The more I meditate, the quicker I can disrupt the crazy train of thinking. Ever space out while doing chores and come to in the midst of a wholly imagined argument with someone who isn’t there? That’s what I’m talking about. A meditation practice can get you out of the imaginary fight before the first imaginary punch is thrown.
I did have one sort of psychedelic experience while studying Buddhism. I’d taken a 101 class at the Zen Center, and was delving deeper into the roots of the practice, reading new texts (new to me; actually, they are quite ancient), soaking up my teacher’s wise, funny talks. While pondering some teachings about the self and the mind, I had a flash. I am not Michelle Tea! Not at all! Michelle Tea is this life I am living right now, but she’s not me. What is “me”? According to the Buddhists, there’s no such thing. In that moment, I finally understood what they meant. It was a complete disassociation with my “self” that was brief and deeply inspiring. I remember it often, especially when having an FML moment. Fuck my life? This isn’t my life—it’s Michelle Tea’s life! What a cool, weird, amazing, wild life she has had! How excellent that I get to ride along with it! It makes “my” life seem like a movie, which makes the harder parts, when I’m knee-deep in dukkha, much easier to get through. Somewhere behind “Michelle Tea” is a presence that is a little smarter, a little more caring. It’s rooting for Michelle Tea and it’s rooting for everyone. It’s not taking any of it seriously, because it knows that Michelle, like everyone else, is just a little speck in a universe too vast for her lumpy human mind to comprehend. Just a little flash of this, every now and then, is the best we can hope for.
So Buddhism didn’t get me high, and it didn’t make me stop hating my ex. What it did do is show me exactly where the problem was located: in my mind. Which was great, because my mind, unlike my ex, was something I had some control over. I guess I got what I came for, in the long run. My ex and I still disagree about the end of our relationship; he still denies that his overlapping affair had anything to do with our demise. As for me, I know that we broke up so he could pursue other people. But I also know we broke up so I could get out of a terrible relationship I might have codependently stuck with for another eight years. We broke up so I could meet my true love, and get married, and experience the sort of intimacy I always knew was possible. We broke up so that my ex could also eventually find his own true love, a person who seemingly embraces all the personality quirks that made me want to kill him. The Buddhists are right—in life, there is suffering. But there is also relief, and joy and humor, and occasional psychedelic moments of oneness. And when I start forgetting that, all I need to do is put a pillow under my ass and start counting my breaths.
9.
Getting Pregnant with
Michelle Tea
Back when I was dating a lot of scrubs and then got super bored and put the brakes on, something else happened, too. I realized that if I was ever going to have a baby in this life I was going to have to have one now. Not only was it difficult to nail down a decent date, but the likelihood of meeting someone competent enough to raise a rugrat with felt slimmer than ever. Nothing in my dating history led me to believe my dream co-parent was lurking nearby with a love note and a bouquet of ovulation predictors. Plus, even if I was wrong and Mx. Right was in my imminent future, you can’t start having the kids conversation for, what, a year or two, right? I was forty years old. I realized that if I was going to do this thing, I was going to have to do it alone, and fast.
How fast? I jumped on the Interweb to find out. After googling my fertility analytics, I cried. The stats were grim. My tears surprised me; I wasn’t one of those women who desperately want kids. For much of my childbearing life, the thought of a creature growing inside me called to mind that scene from Alien when the monster eats its way through its host-mommy’s chest. I know it’s supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, but childbirth always struck me as parasitic, invasive, the stuff of horror movies. Then, around the age of twenty-seven, my body began to crave the physical experience of being pregnant. This freaked me out on many levels. How can you crave an experience you never have had? It made no sense to me, but I longed for the sensation of a life inside me, a growing roundness, transformation.
My date at the time was a sporty lesbian who was very good to me—too good. She was an alcoholic’s dream: an enabler. Not much of a drinker herself, she loved to ply me with fancy jugs of beer I couldn’t afford, pitchers of margaritas at our favorite Mexican hole-in-the-wall, recreational downers pawned off her coworkers at the AIDS hospice she cooked at. She also prepared me
amazing food and, when I was broker than broke, brought me along on her food bank rounds, letting me grab a few cans of beans. She was ethically comfortable with this—the food bank was for poor people, and I was living way below the poverty line, selling old books and clothes to get by, counting change I’d kept in a jar for just this—a worst-case scenario. But in spite of how bad off I was, she was delighted by the thought of me getting pregnant.
“Are you crazy?” I snapped. Although I could no longer deny that biological clocks were real (I’d hoped they were antifeminist propaganda) and mine was ringing pretty shrilly, my body was clearly insane. I didn’t want a kid! I hadn’t identified myself as an alcoholic yet, but I knew that drinking and partying were my first priority, with writing about my drunk, partying escapades a close second, and trying to be a marginally decent girlfriend a very distant third. Making a living was fourth priority. This was no environment to bring a child into. Thankfully, my date was physically incapable of knocking me up, though in my drunker moments (most moments after seven p.m.) I found myself sharing my envy of straight girls and their ever-present risk of accidental pregnancy. If I just—whoops!—got pregnant, then I’d have to keep it!
“I could find a sperm donor and inseminate you while you’re sleeping,” my enabler helpfully/creepily suggested.
“I’d kill you,” I said, meaning it literally. “Like, actual murder.”
That moment of strange pregnancy craving faded away, but it had left my perception of pregnancy changed. Babies no longer seemed like malevolent creatures that sucked the nutrients from your blood, destroyed your vagina, and killed any dreams you might have harbored for a life of fun and adventure. They just seemed like, well, babies. Some people have them; some people don’t.
At forty, I finally started seriously asking myself how I felt about having children. I realized that the only thing really holding me back was money. If I had scads of cash I’d love to have a brood dashing around my spacious loft, playing on swing sets installed in the ceiling and creating avant-garde finger-paint murals on the walls. But my scarcity issues said No fucking way are we supporting another mouth in this house. I was afraid to pay the extra dollars to upgrade my Internet service; what would a kid cost? But I rebelled against this as well. Poor and low-income people all over the world have children. This experience cannot be the privilege of rich people alone. Surely I have more resources than lots of the women out there doing a great job single-mothering. If they could do it, so could I.
Except I couldn’t. According to the Internet, my chances of getting knocked up at forty were dismal, and if a miracle occurred, the likelihood of carrying to term was also abysmal. I cried at my kitchen table, recalling that kitschy Roy Lichtenstein print of the 1960s lady sobbing into her manicure, I forgot to have kids!
After I wiped my snot away and shut my computer, my optimism returned, as it tends to. The Internet didn’t say there was no chance, just a low chance! Like everyone, I knew some ladies who had popped one out in their fourth decade. Maybe I could, too. In order to find out, I would have to get some sperm.
I know a ton of foxy gay men, and I figured I could persuade one of them to donate their sperm to my pregnancy project. I started by asking only men of color. White people famously wreak so much havoc everywhere all the time, I wanted to do my part to not propagate the race, for the good of the planet. But gentleman after gentleman of all ethnicities turned me down. Maybe some of them wanted to have a baby themselves at some point; others feared that knowing they had offspring out in the world would freak them out. I made it clear I wanted nothing to do with them—no financial support, no parenting assistance, nothing except a willingness to be known by the kid when they got older. But some men feared that they would feel responsible for the child regardless, and didn’t want the angst. I understand that this is a really monumental thing to consider—essentially fathering a child and leaving it for someone else to raise—but for me at the time it felt infuriatingly simple: You’ve got tons of sperm; I have none—can’t you give a lady a break? Be a feminist, for goddess’s sake!
Eventually I learned of a gay boy who’d told friends he’d totally be into sharing his sperm with a needy, baby-mad lady. I knew him casually but had big affection for him—he was a drag queen whose acts were especially brainy and creative. He worked at nonprofits despite a sensitivity to injustice that made even a job in the nonprofit industrial complex too Orwellian for him to handle. Though he was a nightlife habitant, he had seemingly none of the drug and alcohol issues that sometimes accessorize the lifestyle. He was sort of wholesome, and political, and creative and glamorous. And when I asked him if he would be willing to come to my home and ejaculate into a warm bowl for me to somehow inject semen into my uterus, he e-mailed back, You had me at “warm bowl.”
I had sperm! But I still wasn’t 100 percent certain how a person got herself pregnant in this independent fashion. My inquiries led me to a whole subset of my larger community: women who have knocked themselves up, and were excited to share how they did it. I learned that those needle-less syringes used to give babies their medicine also made great sperm shooters, and you could get them for free at your local corporate pharmacy. I didn’t feel too bad about scamming all the freebies, as I was buying the place out of their ovulation predictor pee sticks. When my ovulation line got really pink Quentin would come over, along with my friend Rhonda, a hardy skateboarding Scorpio with no fear. Quentin would go into my kitchen and, um, pleasure himself. I left my laptop in there for his enjoyment, but I don’t know if he ever used it beyond watching Cyndi Lauper videos on it after the deed was done.
When the deed was done, Quentin would holler out to Rhonda, who would slide across my apartment in her socks and retrieve the vintage Pyrex bowl of sperm. Together we would suck the goo up into the syringe, then I would lie back on some pillows, spread my legs, and my dear friend would insert the thing and pull the trigger. How is that for sisterhood! What would you do for your bestie?
We did this a lot, Quentin, Rhonda, and I. Somewhere in the midst of it I met Dashiell. Though I have already documented her considerable charm in these pages, when we first began to date I really didn’t think it would go very far. I assumed that she, like everyone else I tended to be attracted to, was something of a jerk. I waited for her to drop her charade of gentle chivalry and go mental on me. I was too mature now to put up with any more drama—it had finally become so boring, not even hot sex could justify it. And now that I was trying to have a child, anyone hanging around would have to be of a high-enough caliber to expose a baby to. My hopes were low. But date after date, Dashiell stayed constant. Her kindness was authentic, not manipulative. Her moods were steady, not unpredictable. She was the real thing, the kind of person I’d probably always wanted but was now finally healthy enough to attract. And once she found out I was in the midst of trying to impregnate myself, she would surely bolt. A young, hot, mannish woman with not only a job but an actual career, who understood how to take care of herself? Who had impeccable style and disposable income? Her own apartment and a very cute, if barky, small dog? Why would she want to date an older woman with a bun in the oven?
The more I fell for Dashiell, the longer I waited to tell her about my main activity, the more it felt like it was too late to tell her, the more it felt like I had really fucked up. I was a constant flutter around her, but my secret ate at me. I asked friends for advice.
“It’s your business; you don’t need to tell her anything right now,” some 12-step friends sagely counseled.
You should have told her on THE FIRST DATE, texted another friend, a single, mannish woman herself, no doubt horrified at the thought that one of her very own dates could be inseminating herself on their off nights. This time, my friends’ advice wasn’t really helping.
One night Dashiell and I sat side by side at the bar of a fancy French restaurant. I was wearing a tiny strapless Jean Paul Gaultier for Target dress, and
got delicious shivers every time Dashiell touched my waist. Like all women, even homosexual ones, we were talking about Ryan Gosling.
“I wouldn’t want to have sex with him,” Dashiell clarified. “But I would love his sperm.” I coughed and a tiny stream of whatever lovely lavender-infused mocktail the bartender had sent my way slid out of my nose. Dashiell patted me on the back, giving me more shivers, and looked alarmed.
“I’m sorry!” she said earnestly. “Was that a weird thing to say?”
“Ah, no,” I sputtered. “Just went down the wrong pipe.” Goddammit, now was the time! She had opened the door so nicely with that comment. I could just say, Absolutely—I, too, would have loved Ryan Gosling’s sperm, though I must say I couldn’t be happier with the intelligent drag queen sperm I found! But I didn’t. The bar was so public, so crowded! What if Dashiell had a feeling? She’d have to feel it here in this chaotic, trendy restaurant—how awkward. I closed my mouth down around my straw and sipped at my mocktail.
Since the restaurant was near my house, we went there after dinner. We messed around on my bed for what seemed like hours. Still, my secret nagged at the back of my skull, keeping me from fully letting go to the moment. I excused myself to the bathroom, and splashed some water on my face. Just tell her; just tell her.
I didn’t walk back into my bedroom so much as run. Then I jumped onto the bed, landing on my knees beside Dashiell, who looked alarmed at the sudden commotion. “I’m trying to get pregnant,” I blurted. “I’ve been trying since before I met you, and I didn’t know how to tell you, and at first it wasn’t appropriate but then I didn’t know how to say it and then so much time passed and then—well, I just didn’t know how to say it. But I am. I am trying to get pregnant right now.”