by Heather Ross
For almost two decades I had shared that advice, with an assuredness that I’m certain was, at times, a little annoying, within the private confines of every “should-I-or-shouldn’t-I” conversation with friends who were facing the important, life-changing decision to have children. My faith in this advice had been unwavering, unbending, and, apart from my commitment to swimming in anything, conveniently untested. I must admit that once it was me in the should-I-or-shouldn’t-I spot, that faith became a little shaky. That’s not surprising. It is rare that I have found faith in anything, which is too bad, because having faith in something is a very good thing, if only because it provides a rest from overthinking and indecision.
In my first few years of marriage, I felt the need for a little more than blind faith to push me past what was a very happy and comfortable stage of my life, and a little more faith that having children would not leave me in a state of regret. And this, in a very roundabout way, is why I agreed to jump into the ocean at Coney Island on New Year’s Day. Because sometimes you have to test faith in order to find it.
“Regret” might be too strong a word for what I feared having children would bring. It was really more of an anxiety about the idea that my life would be irreversibly altered and filled with many new opportunities to make terrible mistakes, just when I felt like I had finally gotten the hang of things. My swimsuit and my hair were dry, so to speak. New York had granted me new, glamorous, confident friends who argued that a baby would ruin them because they would no longer be able to dress up and stay out late and travel on a moment’s notice to exotic places. In contrast, a baby would actually justify my ideal evening routines, which, at that time, involved a string of Tuesday nights eating an entire bag of chocolate-covered, peanut-butter-filled pretzels while watching The Biggest Loser. But even so, I was suddenly good at my life. I’d become a pretty good cook, a pretty good friend; I loved my husband and my pets, and when I was in my kitchen and my dog was sleeping on his little rug under my feet and music was playing, things felt pretty complete—and, finally, peaceful. Why fuck that up?
There was also the issue of my devoted husband. TC found himself reminding me, far too often, that I was no longer going it alone. This was taking some getting used to on my part. New Year’s Day was no exception. When I imagined TC’s reaction to my wanting to join the Polar Bear Club at their annual Coney Island swim on New Year’s Day, I pictured him being supportive and perhaps coming along as a spectator but not being crazy enough to jump in with me. Crazy was my hobby, not his. And besides, I already had definite plans to borrow the extremely warm Muppet-like fur-lined knee-length four-inch-thick warm-up jacket that he had worn between practice laps as a competitive swimmer in college and that now hung in our closet. I also planned to use his Thermos, which was better than mine, and was counting on him, post-swim, to order my favorite wonton soup from Grand Szechuan and to reward my bravery by giving me the corner of the sofa and the remote control for the day, if not the week. When I saw myself in the water, I saw myself alone. Still, even now, I always saw myself alone. So, when TC (and our very adventurous friend Stephen, who had first broached the idea) jumped at the chance to join me, I was a bit floored. “OK,” I finally said, “but I get to wear the jacket.”
TC not only gave me the jacket but also let me wear the pair of sheepskin boots that we shared when we took turns walking the dog. I had my warmer-than-warm Manitoba mittens, a very good hat, and a huge Thermos of hot coffee. Under another layer of fleece tights and a wool undershirt, I wore a bikini. When we stepped out into the bright, cold New Year’s morning (sunny, but well below freezing), I surveyed TC and Stephen. They looked sporty and well layered, almost as though they were headed out for an après-ski fondue. I was taking no chances, making no allowances for fashion, and, as a result, I looked like I had woken up in the coat closet the morning after an ill-fated party at the Notre Dame swim team’s squalid off-campus house and made a run for it … but not before stopping for coffee.
The most surprising thing, upon reaching the pre-swim party on the Coney Island boardwalk, was that so many other people were there. I had pictured dozens of people running into and out of the water—not hundreds. There was live music and a wide variety of costumes, a “strong man” demonstration, and much beating of bared chests. An adorable troupe of water ballerinas in big, flowery bathing caps and goggles fluttered about, giggling to stay warm, while a group of burly bearded men, one of them holding an enormous American flag waving madly in the wind, passed around a teensy flask. This was not at all what I had expected. I guess I had pictured a dozen or so sturdy old men espousing the health benefits and logic of cold-water swims. Isn’t that what I always see on TV on New Year’s Day? Instead, the costumes and mock pageantry made it suddenly apparent that everyone agreed that this was a seriously insane thing to do. And yet, we were all giddy. Everyone seemed so different, but everyone seemed to belong. It was so cold that it hurt a little to inhale, and my speech was impaired by a frozen chin. Loud music was being played for people who were dancing to stay warm. I just jumped up and down, and panicked a little inside.
When the happy mob finally moved onto the beach and the countdown began to the one o’clock call to jump in the water, we made a plan. Genuinely afraid of losing sight of each other and the pile of warm clothing we would be leaving on the beach, we mapped out our route. We were maybe fifty feet away from the water and directly between the large burly team with their American flag and a very permanent-looking wooden lifeguard stand, and we decided that it would be those two things that we looked for when coming out of the water. Confident that we would be able to beeline in and out, we shed our clothes and, when the buzzer rang, ran straight into the ocean.
TC was in the water first, almost completely submerged. He was turned around and dashing past me before I was knee-deep in the water and then gone, engulfed by the screaming crowd that was still rushing toward the surf. Stephen and I were in and out almost as quickly. The water didn’t feel too bad. The air, on the other hand, was bitter. I had no water shoes on (it was difficult enough to find a bathing suit in January with a hangover), and my feet began to ache immediately. I looked at Stephen. His eyes were very, very wide. And panicked. He had just realized, moments before I would, that the wooden lifeguard stand had been moved. “WHY?” he screamed at me from mere inches away, his eyes wild, “WHY WOULD THEY MOVE THE STAND?” It wasn’t a rhetorical question as much as a demand for a new plan, ideally set forth by whoever had moved the stand.
We were suddenly completely disoriented, standing on a very crowded beach that looked the same for a hundred feet in either direction, packed solid with cold, wet, and equally disoriented people. We ran a few feet in one direction, then a few feet in another, and then back again. We were not calm, nor were we able to think constructively. As many times as I told myself that I needed a new plan, that thought process was interrupted by a part of my body screaming at me to make it warm. Each time Stephen and I collided, which is what happens when you run in tiny circles with a friend and you are both in shock, we would repeat-scream at each other. “WHY? WHY DID THEY MOVE THE STAND?” or “$%@!” That was it. I believe I had the opportunity to repeat these two phrases five, maybe six, times before I turned around for just a second and lost sight of Stephen completely, finding myself alone with no one to scream at. My entire body was bright red, except for my hands, which were a sickly gray-blue, and my feet, which hurt too much to look at. I could not think in what direction, other than toward the water, I should run. I was completely and utterly incapacitated and I knew, based on the expressions of almost every member of the confused and panicked mob I was a part of, that I was not the only one. And here is where I will admit, ashamedly, that I was not thinking about TC at all. In fact, when a small opening between bodies allowed for a split-second glimpse of him, it registered as an illusion.
It was actually the long coat, flapping in the wind high above the crowd, that caught my attention. TC stood, bright p
ink and shaking, wearing only his tiny wet Speedo and bright orange water shoes. I knew that he could not see me; his glasses were off and his eyes were closed against the cold. He was stretched tall, with his arms high above him, each of his hands clenched tightly around the end of a sleeve of the jacket, its gold fur lining bright against the sky. It flapped and waved like a huge flag, as he must have known it would, and while I couldn’t hear him, I could tell by the way his mouth moved that he was shouting my name as loudly as he possibly could. When I reached him he was so cold that he could barely manage to put the jacket around me, much less get himself dressed in the warm clothing that lay in piles next to his feet. He had been standing there for many long minutes, each of which must have felt like hours, and rather than take even a moment to put on his wool sweater and mittens and long underwear, much less to steal my sheepskin boots, he had turned himself into a bright pink, flag-bearing human beacon. There was my husband, my family. And there was my faith. I wasn’t in this alone anymore. And a dry swimsuit is highly overrated.
HOW TO
not turn into
your mother
MY MOTHER HAD CONVINCED ME, FROM an early age, that children were a burden to be balanced between other, more rewarding pursuits and responsibilities. I have come to believe, actually, that among my generation of American women, born in the 1970s, I am not alone in this experience.
So, when my mother was convinced by her parents, following the fire in the schoolhouse, that she should give us up, send us to live with our father, and pursue her own life—another marriage, her own financial independence—it felt as though something inevitable had finally happened, after a long, slow wait. We went to live with our father in Virginia. My mother moved to Colorado and became engaged, but the groom changed his mind a few weeks before the wedding date. Our mother called us and told us that he had decided that he didn’t want to be an “instant father.” She was heartbroken, I think, and moved to France to live with an old classmate, who was also divorced. She stayed there for a winter, until she tore apart her knee skiing and was forced to come back to the United States for medical help. By then my father had decided to move to California and wanted to take us with him. My mother moved back to Vermont. I went back to live with her when I was in high school, but my sister stayed with our father, visiting my mother and me during summers but for shorter and shorter stretches of time.
When my sister had her own children, in our early twenties, she told me that she could not understand how any mother—or our mother, specifically—could ever give up her children. I believed, and still believe, that this was a choice that my mother always regretted, and I even sympathized with her and with how difficult her life had been raising us alone. I also knew, though, that this action of sending us away had drawn a line in our lives between when we had a mother and when we did not, when we had been a family and when we had not. I did not, however, understand the weight of what she had done, or the impact that it had had on me, until I was pregnant with my daughter. Or, rather, until I realized that the baby in my belly was a girl, not the boy that, for reasons that were completely unfounded, I was certain I was carrying.
So certain was I about my baby’s sex that I waited until I was five months pregnant to find out for sure. When the sonogram tech said it out loud, that I was having a girl, I was so shocked that I lost my balance and nearly fell off the narrow table I was lying on. This belief, that I was having a boy, had given me some peace of mind in what had been, for me, a frightening pregnancy. As far as I could see, not having had any of my own sons, but having dated and lived with a lot of other mothers’ sons—and now having even married one—my only real responsibility in raising a son of my own would be to convince him that he was without fault, that he was perfect, and that no woman would ever be good enough for him. Kim Canfield, who had both a little girl and a little boy, had told me, “Have a boy, Heather. I chase my daughter around the house, saying, ‘Love me, love me, love me!’ like a crazy lady and her house cat, but my son wants to live in my lap and touch my cheek and hold me, and tell me how much he loves me. Have a boy.” Twin girls was what my mother had. And that was what she was burdened with and what, finally, she had let go of.
I was forty when I became pregnant. My mother and I lived on the same coast, but I saw her, at best, once a year. She and I struggled to make it through a twenty-minute phone call without one of us cursing the other and hanging up. While I tried to stay in contact with her and to acknowledge dates like birthdays and holidays, she complained to me and to other family members that she was always being kept at arm’s distance from my sister and me, as though there was some sort of conspiracy against her that included her brothers and her ex-husband. It was partly true; my sister and I were, by now, in much closer contact with our father and our uncles than we were with her, but she was also becoming noticeably paranoid. When we had good news, we brought it to people who could be genuinely happy for us, which she didn’t seem capable of, and when we had bad news, she had proven, again and again, that she could not be trusted with it and that helping us was not instinctive for her.
She had been living alone for a quite a while and was spending long winter hours in front of cable news, and she seemed to thrive on bad news in the way that people in small towns sometimes do—the more scandalous, the more horrific, the bigger the distraction from her own problems. My problems were of special interest to her. She was desperate to be informed, desperate for something to tell people about me, something that she knew and nobody else did. Once, when I had asked her for financial help, she had turned me down with a rude, dismissive response and then immediately written a lengthy e-mail to other members of our family, telling them that I had asked her for money, that this was proof that I “was not doing as well as I claimed to be,” that she “couldn’t believe anything I told her.” I was humiliated and furious. What other mother would do this? I couldn’t think of one, except perhaps her own. Where was this instinct that other people ’s mothers had, to build us up, to add value to our lives, to care for us and to defend and protect us? There seemed to be something missing inside of her, something that had been missing in her own mother, who had handed her daughter off to nannies and boarding schools for months at a time, whom I had never seen embrace or even hug my mother, who had never hidden her own disappointment in my mother. Was this a learned fault, or was this genetic? Was this something I could overcome or was there something missing in me, too, that would make it impossible for me to love, to instinctively protect, my own daughter?
Following every appointment with Dr. Berm, our obstetrician, TC and I would eat at a French restaurant in midtown. We could walk there from the doctor’s office, even when I was huge, and the food was perfect for pregnancy: rich, hearty, celebratory. We went there on the day we found out that we were having a girl. TC ordered champagne and I ordered club soda, but I reached for his glass as soon as it hit the table. As I sank into my chair, muted by shock and a tidal wave of anxiety that would not subside, I felt certain that he looked happier, more relaxed, and more relieved than I had seen him in months. He had been carrying his own burden, believing that he would be having a boy, secretly worrying that he was not equipped to teach a boy how to be a good man. But he, unlike me, was an organized over-achiever and accepted challenges with a courageous attitude. In other words, he had been reading thick books about the subject.
To make matters worse, I had no real birth plan, apart from feeling certain that I wanted drugs for the pain and that I was willing to pay for a plush private room. TC pointed out that my choices sounded very similar to my vacation plans when my back went out two days before we were leaving for a nonrefundable stay in Mexico. We knew that we wanted to have our baby at NYU. Dr. Berm lived, literally, across the street, and I liked the idea of being able to call him on his cell phone, the number for which he had accidentally given me. I liked Dr. Berm, even though he was known for his brusque manners and controversial politics. At one of our initial meeti
ngs, before I was actually pregnant, I started to tell him how I felt unsure about having a baby, about whether I would be a good parent or even wanted to be a parent, until he put his hand up to stop me. “I don’t care,” he said. “But you are not young, so figure out what you are going to do and then tell me, then I will make it happen.”
“But that’s it,” I said. “I don’t know what I want to do!”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted to do,” he said. “I asked you what you were going to do.”
This directive, this move of taking my actual feelings about my ability to be a parent completely off the table, was immensely refreshing. “I believe I’m going to try to have a baby,” I began to say to my friends, avoiding the words “like to” and “want,” and they didn’t seem to notice anything was missing.
And then, when I was pregnant, Dr. Berm asked me whether I was planning to have an epidural. I pretended for a minute to be undecided, until he swatted me on the knee lightly and said, “Don’t be a hero.” I loved him. Also, in his spare time, he baked his own versions of all five types of Girl Scout cookies. He was perfect. He told me to go online and register on the NYU website, and when I did I saw that the only way to get a guided tour of the hospital was to register for Prepared Parenthood class. We had waited too long to sign up for the weeknight classes, which were sold out, and had no choice but to take a weekend course, all day Saturday and all day Sunday. When I told Dr. Berm our plan at our next appointment, thinking he would be impressed with my dedication to this upcoming event, he said to me, “OK, if you want, but please don’t actually remember any of the information they give you when you are in labor, and if you do, don’t repeat any of it to the delivery nurses. It’ll just piss them off.”