“If you start talking about having a baby soon, I’ll slap you,” she said. “I promise.”
“Good,” I said. “Because I’m starting to see the appeal. You have sex and then it just happens to you. At you. You don’t have to do it yourself, every day, out of nothing. And I’d have the perfect excuse to never write again.”
“Exactly.”
I’d been with Dustin for three years then and the subject of babies felt more dangerous than ever. When he and I walked around the city and passed storefronts with baby clothes in the window, I held my breath, averted my eyes. I told him, in what I hoped was a neutral tone of voice, about cousins or old roommates getting pregnant. Just stating the facts. I handed him my phone in the dark of our bedroom with a daring “Look at this baby!” As if maybe if one of them was cute enough he’d sit up in bed, look into my eyes, and say, Let’s do it. Let’s have a child together.
Avoiding the subject with him meant hiding on the other side of our railroad apartment and reading worst-case-scenario birth stories of strangers on the internet. I’d send the scarier ones to Halle. Subject: harrowing!
Oh my Godddddddd, she’d reply, then she’d send me a link to the personal blog of someone with eight kids or a debilitating disease.
Motherhood was the farthest thing from the lives we were living but still out there waiting for us, the great “eventually,” the great “inevitably.” Of course we had more important things to do first, or that was the party line. We had our careers.
Was it a defensive act, our busy-ness? All those photos of how full and rich and happy our lives were, as if to say, See, we’re fine without children. Quick, someone plan a dinner party or a weekend upstate before we start squinting at our boyfriends, wondering if they’d meet us halfway.
I would have said that it was with morbid curiosity that I spent hours reading the personal blogs of women, usually religious, often Mormon, who had gaggles of children all dressed in J. Crew and eating pancakes. Their lives, or what they presented of them, were startlingly simple. They seemed to do nothing but cook and clean and go on photogenic outings with their large families, all of them wearing spotless clothing. Their inner lives, or what they shared of them, could be broken down into a few themes and always included gratitude for all of God’s blessings and the desire to slow down and be more present so they could better enjoy their precious time with their precious families. Oh, and their desire to have more babies.
After a couple of years of obsessively reading these women’s blogs (ironically, I told myself), I began to see the appeal of their ethos. None of this deciding-how-you-feel-about-marriage crap. No weighing options, no making your case to a boyfriend who wasn’t sure if he wanted to get married. No putting off babies to the very last minute, no pretending you didn’t care, no playing it cool for so long you didn’t even remember how to have real desire, real hope. These women, the dreaded mommy bloggers, at least knew what they wanted. They had a clear path, while my friends and I were looking at videos of their babies on our phones and handing them to our boyfriends, who rolled their eyes but—“I swear!”—cracked smiles. It would be all I thought about for a week, how he’d smiled at the video of a baby, and what did that mean?
Instead of asking direct questions—too risky—we took moments like these as signs, played them on loops in our heads, dissected them over drinks. If this was childish, it was a cultural childishness, that of the ambitious young woman too smart for her own good. We were city dwellers, and we were dating (if you could call it that) in a pool of men who always had other, better options. There was always someone younger, someone who expected less. We knew how to play it, how not to need anything. We could almost convince ourselves. Most of us swore we were not interested in having children, and those who might be were supposed to act blasé about the idea. The only acceptable response other than “God, no” to the question of wanting children was “Oh, maybe someday.” Wanting to have a baby was a desperate quality in a woman, like wanting a relationship multiplied by a thousand, and it got more desperate with age. The possibility of ending up alone was always there, in the background. My friends and I all took turns being convinced it would be reality, with varying degrees of acceptance. Being alone in New York didn’t seem so bad—exhausting, maybe, but stimulating, always something to do, someone to see. But admitting you wanted a baby—and wanted the pancakes and the maternity clothes and the chubby spawn around a table—and then not getting it because it just didn’t pan out? That was too much, too cruel. Better to try for things more within your control: Better jobs, nicer apartments. Enviable vacations. Better to shrug and say, “Maybe someday.”
(Except for Sara. Sara says she genuinely doesn’t want to have children, and we believe her. I envy her decisiveness. She knows.)
The problem was that with every year of being by ourselves, of moving forward with work, of getting used to our freedom, of learning how to be happy, we got closer to needing to have a baby (Time’s up!) and completely upending the lives and selves we’d been building.
Only at our lowest and most confessional, or our most conspiratorial, did we acknowledge that we had a deadline. If one of our childhood friends had just announced a pregnancy on Facebook, or if one of our moms reminded us she’d had three kids by the time she was twenty-nine, or if one of us was ovulating and had just run into an ex who was married now? Then we got worried. Then we started looking up fertility statistics and how much it cost to freeze your eggs. Other days, days when we saw a woman trying to carry a stroller up the subway steps or heard that a woman we were jealous of had just moved to Paris or published a book or bought a house or gotten a divorce, well, then we were still young, had so much living to do. Why ruin things now, just when they were getting good?
We told one another we had till we were thirty-eight but privately thought thirty-five. If you wanted more than one kid—and who would dare to be so greedy—well, best to start at thirty-three. Just don’t share this out loud. Life math, years counted out on fingers across from one another in bars and diner booths in big cities across America, dictated that you needed a year or two of marriage before you had kids so you could “enjoy life as a married couple,” which felt as compulsory as it was made up. Pregnancy was ten months. Everyone said nine but we knew better. Our expertise on the subject of pregnancy was a dead giveaway of our private preoccupation, much as we’d disavow it. A year to plan a wedding (though, if necessary, six months)…and there we were, back at our current age. Twenty-eight. Fuck.
Before we left the bar, Lindsay showed us the programs for her wedding that Brian had designed and we oohed and aahed. “I just hope I’ll be able to drink for it,” I said gravely, and she shot me a look. “I’m not trying to steal your thunder, I promise,” I said, mostly joking.
“Unless you give birth at my wedding reception, you won’t, don’t worry.”
Halle and Sara made faces into their drinks and I laughed.
When we said our good-byes, Halle called after me, “Take a test, dude!”
“I will, I swear!”
I woke up the next morning feeling hungover from the one beer I’d drunk, and when I went to the bathroom I found blood in my underwear. So Lindsay was right, I thought. It was just stress after all. I put in a tampon and went for a run in the park.
Later that night I felt for the tampon string, yanked it out, went to wrap it up in toilet paper, and saw that it was blank, not a trace of blood. Confused, I put in another one and went to sleep. In the morning, still nothing. This had never happened before. My period had never started to say something and then taken it back. Where was the rest of it? I waited and waited. This was new. This was unprecedented. This was some coy shit.
By Wednesday my period still hadn’t come back, and I was getting no real work done. I was fed up with myself. I couldn’t live in the uncertainty any longer. I stood up from my desk and went out the door.
I headed down the block in twilight just as people with day jobs who got out
at a decent hour were pouring out of the subway stations. Dustin would be home at seven from his book-marketing job and would be up late working after we had dinner. Our life did not look like I thought it would when we had a baby, someday, that was for sure. We didn’t own a home, or a car. I didn’t even have health insurance. We lived in a railroad apartment; there were doorways but no doors, just one long, narrow rectangle. The bathroom had no sink, the ceiling was caving in, and the linoleum on the kitchen floor peeled up in more than one place. There was no extra room where a baby could live; there were no rooms at all, really.
I was not a writer-writer. I was editing a personal-finance blog part-time for a thousand dollars a month and living off dumb-luck money I’d gotten when an internet company I worked for when I was twenty-four was acquired by Yahoo.
I crossed the street to the drugstore. It felt foolish to say, Let’s have a baby! Imagine the optimism. I had wanted a baby the way you want things you can’t have, dreams you know you won’t pursue, or not yet. Like, One day, when we open a restaurant, or One day, when we live in an Airstream trailer, or One day, when we make artisanal caramels on a goat farm. Dustin and I had a lot of these. I was ashamed to want a baby, to be that sort of woman. And, worse, to want to bring a child into our barely established lives.
I went through the automatic door of the drugstore, down the fluorescent-lit aisles. I grabbed the most expensive test I could find—$23.99 and digital, advertised as error-proof. I do not intellectually subscribe to the idea that expense is a reliable indicator of quality, but I suppose that when it comes down to it, my gut is ruled by the illusions of capitalism.
PREGNANT
NOT PREGNANT
It wasn’t just the phrasing that made me want it to say yes. Pregnant meant new and different; pregnant meant we were fucked but maybe in a redeeming way. Pregnant meant throwing up our hands, giving ourselves over to fate, doing something crazy. It seemed romantic, reckless, wild, like packing up all our stuff and going on a long trip with no itinerary. For twenty years. No, for forever.
When Dustin got home from work I gestured toward the pink box on our bed (Know five days sooner!) then walked away, embarrassed, feeling a sort of pregnancy-test impostor syndrome. Like, Who am I to be taking this? It looked like a set piece in someone else’s life.
“Ooh, hoo-hoo,” he said, kissing me hello.
I tried not to smile. I tried to conjure some dread. “I’ll take it in the morning,” I announced. “Supposedly that’s when it’s most accurate.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You know. When your pee is the most…potent.”
Dustin gave me a funny look and shrugged. I wanted to prolong the ambiguity for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate, like when you want dessert but don’t order it at a restaurant—self-denial as reflex. I was all worked up, dying to know but also wanting to spend one more night as not-a-mother.
When Dustin woke up to pee the next morning, I told him to check the test that I’d peed on and left on the back of the toilet without looking at it. I was hiding under the covers.
“It says pregnant,” he called from the bathroom.
“No!” I said.
“Yup,” he said, laughing. He was standing there in American Apparel underwear, shirtless, leaning in the doorway and holding the test with a strange casualness, like it was a cigarette or his toothbrush and not a harbinger of things to come.
“No!” I shouted. “No!”
“Well, that’s what it says.” He came over to me, pulled off the blankets, and kissed me hard. Before we let the news settle in, he pulled off my underwear and then his and we had rushed, crazed sex. He didn’t stop to rustle around for a condom, didn’t pull out and come on my stomach. I was pregnant. We came at the same time and then collapsed. We both stared at the ceiling.
Breakfast was quiet. I was in his T-shirt feeling a brand-new sort of bodily vulnerability, like what if a spider crawled up my leg and up my birth canal and bit the baby?
“Are you freaking out?” I asked.
“No,” he said, and he gestured for me to come sit in his lap. Quiet tears streamed down my face.
“Don’t freak out!” I said when he left for work. He waved without turning around, walked down the hall with his bike on his shoulder. I got back in bed, took out my laptop, and immediately chatted Halle.
Hiiiiiiii.
Did you take a test?
Yep.
?????
YEP.
We met on the corner of my block ten minutes later. She held out her arms as I walked up to her. “Congratulations, dude! You’re going to be a great mom.”
I pulled away. “Ha, no, I don’t know. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”
I told her the story on our way to Enid’s, a restaurant in the center of our neighborhood where we had been meeting to catch up since we first moved to the city. I went through all the details: how Dustin reacted, what I said, how I felt, and then we sat down at a booth.
“Okay,” she said. “Obviously you are going to have the baby but I am totally willing to humor you by having this debate.”
An hour later, after we had talked about money, about health care, about my grad-school applications, about changing my wedding date, we were back on the sidewalk in search of prenatal vitamins. Buying them without Dustin there with me felt like a minor betrayal. “But if we do have the baby, we want it to have a spine, right?” Halle and I giggled in the aisles of Duane Reade. Part of me loved this feeling of being steamrolled by life, of being totally fucked. I was rueful, ready to lie down. It was funny, wasn’t it, to face something this big? To go through with something that was so clearly a bad idea?
“I guess I should cancel my Weight Watchers subscription!” I said to Halle when we were back out on the street, my contraband in a plastic bag around my wrist. I was flinging it around, letting it hit my thigh, like a small child.
“Yea-ah!” she said.
“It’s fucking eighteen dollars a month!” I said. “Fuck you, patriarchy!” We laughed, darkly. I’d finally managed to jettison my lifelong desire to lose ten pounds. All it took was getting pregnant. Unfortunately, that also meant giving birth and raising a child, trading one set of impossible societal expectations for another.
“I should go work,” I told Halle, still laughing in disbelief. “I need to get some writing done today.” As if I weren’t going to go sit in the library and panic-Google for the next five hours.
How much do babies cost per year
“I regret having my child”
abortion new york city
best time to have a baby
baby age 29
writing career, baby
cost of birth without health insurance new york city
writer mother new york city
“Okay,” Halle said, hugging me again. “I love you. I’m excited!”
“Love you too,” I said, weak, tired. “Thanks for meeting me.”
“Of course, dude!” she said, all Midwestern sweetness. “Just one thing, though—”
“Yeah?”
“I support you no matter what you do, but if you do have the baby, you have to let me throw the gender-reveal party.”
“We are not going to have a fucking gender-reveal party!” I yelled after her.
I sat down at the library just like I’d been doing every day for weeks. I didn’t write a word.
That night I met Dustin in a church basement after he got off work. Not to pray but to pick up our CSA farm share. We stood in front of crates of late-summer tomatoes and zucchini, solemn. We’d been playing house for years and the universe had called our bluff. I thought of us lugging a newborn down the steps, tried to imagine carrying all these vegetables and a baby too. No, we would skip next year. Or we wouldn’t have the baby. One or the other.
“I talked to Amy today,” I said. “She says she got an abortion on the Upper East Side.”
“Yeah?” he said. “And you had this talk out of nowh
ere, huh?”
He was smiling. He looked relieved.
I rolled my eyes, threw tomatoes in a tote bag. “Anyway, she said they put her to sleep and when she woke up, she was sitting in a big armchair. Then she ate cookies. Then she left.”
“Cookies, eh? Were they good cookies?”
I looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“What?”
What I was feeling then was subconscious but undeniable. I rushed through pears and flowers and up the steps of the church basement, back out into the September air. I was full of rage, even though I’d brought it up. The hysterical pregnant woman already. I had been trying to appear reasonable, to be (or appear to be) open to his preferences, as if having a baby were like choosing where to order takeout from. Whatever you want!
When Dustin caught up to me he had a tote bag over each arm, bayonets of kale poking out from under his armpits. We walked in stride, in perfect weather. The sun was starting to set, doing pretty, atmospheric things. It made me want to put sad music on in my headphones and walk around feeling like the protagonist of my own life.
“Well, for me,” he said, “to me, and of course my opinion only counts so much, but I just don’t know why we would do it when we aren’t ready.”
Something sank in me. His reaction was logical but somehow I hadn’t anticipated it—it seemed impossible that we could love each other and yet feel so different, want such different things. I realized that he had been at work all day feeling fine because he figured we weren’t going to go through with it. Was that why he’d insisted he wasn’t freaking out? I had managed to talk to all of my friends that day in the library, everyone but him. “You have so much time,” Amy had said. Then again, she’d told me she still did the math to see how old her kid would be. She didn’t regret it, no, but how could you not think about it from time to time? How could you not do the math? Loss was the word that stuck with me.
And Now We Have Everything_On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 2