“Having a baby is not something done on a whim,” Carly said, nose in the air.
At this, Donal laughed. Carly had met her future husband, a not exactly legal Irish immigrant, in a downtown bar one sultry summer night, and Maura was conceived a week later. Donal, a walking cinnamon stick of a man—tall, lean, and gingery—turned out to be great, the kind of solid, caring person I always hoped both my sister and I would marry. He had only one fault as far as I could tell—the inability to maintain any kind of financial security. But that was okay. We did the best we could to work around it.
I bit my tongue and didn’t bring up Maura’s inauspicious start. When our father passed three years ago, Carly and I decided to be nice to each other whenever we were tempted to be mean, as we no longer had anyone to referee our disagreements. Donal lobbied for the job, but we agreed he’d be unconsciously biased. We made a pact to at least try to behave ourselves, but our history was long and our tempers short.
Josie helped me resist the snarky comment at the edge of my tongue. She was gently tapping my forehead with the spoon and giggling, her blue, long-lashed eyes twinkling with delight.
“It’s not always like that and you know it,” Carly said, watching us.
“Sometimes it is like this,” I said, and kissed Josie’s smooth forehead to punctuate my statement, fully aware I was overdoing it a little. Truth be told, my nieces and nephews regularly shredded my nerves like confetti. But they could also send my body into hypoglycemic shock with their surprising sweetness, and my love for them felt more than unconditional; it felt unquestionable.
“I’ve held all four of your kids like this,” I told Carly, wrapping my arms tighter around Josie’s belly, “my heart bursting as I did. I used to wonder what it would be like to hold my own, if it’d be possible to love someone more. Are you saying I should live the rest of my life without knowing?”
“Plenty of people do, and some quite happily . . . ,” Carly said, trailing off.
A sudden, uneasy silence filled the kitchen, and I focused on the kids outside, their play sound tracked by the whoosh of Donal’s broom hitting the hardwood floor.
“Jesus,” he said, a note of false exasperation in his voice, “it’s like you two were crossbred with German shepherds.” A natural peacekeeper, Donal’s primary tactic was distraction. “I could make a hair shirt with what I’m picking up. You’ll both be bald before you’re fifty.”
Though Carly had inherited our Italian father’s mass of dark curls and I’d gotten our Irish mother’s straight auburn hair, we both shed like crazy. Donal was always chasing after us with a broom, and his comments usually made me laugh, but today I was too sensitive to anything age related. “My hair looks fine,” I muttered.
Carly didn’t say anything, her attention captured by the scene outside. Patrick, their oldest boy, had stretched out over a basketball and was balancing on it, tummy down. Laughing, his younger brother, Kevin, kicked at the ball, running like crazy when Patrick pushed himself off the ground and chased after him. Carly tensed, releasing a strained breath when she noticed Patrick slow down, unclenching his fists as Kevin escaped to the neighbor’s yard.
With a sigh, Donal finished his chore and joined us at the table. “Maybe Pat should pop Kev in the nose. Just once, to put him in his place.”
“That’s your brilliant solution?” Carly said. “It’d turn into a death match and you know it. I’d be cleaning blood from the streets like a mafia wife.”
Donal shrugged. “Always worked when I was a kid. With boys at least. One scuffle and then best of friends.” He gestured toward Josie. “With girls the weapons are far more brutal. Psychological warfare.”
“Not this one,” I said, nuzzling the baby. “She’ll be above all that.”
He smiled and gently ran his thumb down the slope of Josie’s nose. “When they’re that little you can’t help but be full of hope. It’s how the human race persists. It’s a beautiful thing.”
“Oh, come off it, Donal,” Carly said. “Don’t encourage her.”
“I’m telling the truth as I see it. Any idiot knows babies bring hope to a household.”
Carly shot him a look I couldn’t quite read.
When Donal spoke again, he addressed me. “You’re thinking of having one of your own, are you?”
“I am.”
He ignored Carly’s snort. “Tough decision.”
“Can be.”
“When I’m trying to decide something for my business, I jot down a quick list of pros and cons.”
Carly rolled her eyes. “She isn’t deciding on whether to buy a new power tool.”
“I thought it’d be helpful.”
“It is,” I assured him. “It’s the most helpful thing that’s been said.”
“Having a baby is a serious commitment,” Carly stated, with a note of finality.
“I’ve been around for four of yours! Don’t you think I know that?”
Josie squealed at the anger in my voice, her chubby arms raised and insistent. She wanted her mother. Donal leaned forward, but she gave another sound of displeasure—Mommy, and no one else would do.
Carly glanced at me as she lifted her daughter. I caught her eye and was sorry I had. My sister’s face could never hide what she was thinking.
It said I didn’t really know what it was like. That I could walk away if I wanted to.
That I could hand them back.
I begged off dinner and hid out in my basement apartment for the rest of the night. It was small but not at all gloomy, with pale gray walls and a sturdy queen-sized bed, built to last by Donal. I’d decorated to distract—why not try to forget that I lived underground?—covering the walls in colorful prints, the bed in an oversized, fluffy white comforter, and the tile floor in a bright, haphazardly dyed cotton rag rug. It worked, in a bohemian, this-is-my-first-college-apartment kind of way, and I was fine with that. Technically, I was a college student, and this was my first apartment since I had returned to school. Also, it was free. In exchange for room and board, I helped with the kids, ran errands and cleaned up, and kept Carly company. Sometimes I bought groceries; sometimes she paid for my gas, and we’d fallen into a rhythm, a soothing, agreeable give-and-take that didn’t breed resentment or dissatisfaction.
Was she worried a baby would disrupt this? And . . . was that a selfish concern or a practical one?
I stretched over the bed, listening to the sounds coming from above. Usually, the foot stomping and screeching and giggling would bring me back upstairs to join in the fun, but tonight I wanted to be alone. I needed to think.
Carly’s opinion mattered, and I knew her concerns stemmed from experience. To a certain extent, her life as a parent had always been outlined in struggle. She and Donal were just managing to keep their heads above water now that Carly could work part-time—her job as an office manager for an insurance company supplemented Donal’s unpredictable income as an independent contractor. Still, I sometimes covered the utilities or lent her part of my paycheck until she got hers at the end of the month. They tried to hide their strain from the kids, “but they know,” Carly always said. “When there’s not enough money in the house, you try to cover it up with noise and activity, but every time your kid hears no when the other parents say yes, they know why.”
My child would be hearing a lot of nos. In six months, I’d be the proud owner of a BS in nursing, a slip of paper I coveted but did not guarantee a job. My part-time home-health job currently paid me $14.68 an hour. To anyone with a brain, Carly was right—I had no business getting pregnant.
Dr. Bridget had made it sound so easy, but then she probably cleared more in a year than Carly and Donal’s house was worth. Plenty of money to keep those three towheaded girls from hearing no very often.
Having a baby simply did not make sense for someone like me.
I lay on my bed for a while, hand on my flat, barren abdomen, and watched a house spider wander aimlessly across a crack in my ceiling. I thought some
more, circling back again and again to my financial insecurity, and just as I was ready to shove the whole idea into the pile of indigent dreams huddling under my bed, something Dr. Bridget said stuttered my brain.
Regret was worse than grief.
I’d lost my mother, and then my father. I knew what grief felt like when its claws tore my heart to shreds. It never fully mended—the stitching left bumpy scar tissue and parts forever misaligned. Regret was worse than that?
I sat up, found my Community Health notebook from a pile on the floor, and tore out a page. At the top I wrote:
Should I have a baby?
PROS
It would be nice. Really nice.
24/7 access to that new-baby smell.
CONS
Money (lack thereof), man (super lack thereof), school (finishing up in six months, but still), immaturity (mine), baby living in a basement (mold? spiders?), imposing on Carly and Donal. It could—dear God—inherit my snorty laugh, pointy elbows, nail-biting habit, strangely off-center widow’s peak, and hay fever. Not to mention bringing some innocent person into a world with rampant unemployment, cash-strapped school systems, standardized everything, Snapchat and Instagram, PCBs in the water supply, drought in California, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis, bullying, Ebola outbreaks, terrorism, pollution, rude people, pedophiles, GMOs, Grand Theft Auto, cancer, failing infrastructure, trans fats, school shootings, reality television, overpopulation, racial profiling, dying honeybees, earthquakes, traffic light cameras, supermodels, superbugs, and climate freaking change.
Pause. Deep breath.
So many reasons to not force another life into this mess.
I had other, more personal, items to add, but they were even scarier, and my hand wouldn’t write those. I was nearly forty, midlife if my body agreed to hang on for that long. I’d wasted the first half of my so-limited time on this planet holding myself back, content to march a full step behind everyone else, a shadowy figure photobombing other people’s photographs. I watched my friends struggle to gain what I silently wished for, trading my goals for the cool relief of invisibility, the peace of the unchallenged. I made the mistake of thinking life, if I were doing it right, should get progressively easier. What I hadn’t realized was what I thought was a quest for simplicity was really a slow detachment, so steady and continuous I barely felt my own life fall away from me.
Maybe it was time for that to change.
Having a child meant letting go of easy and embracing difficult. It meant being uncomfortable and anxious, insecure and vulnerable. It meant being fully present in the moment and invested in the future. It meant having enough life flowing through my veins that I had some to spare.
I always felt like the kid too slow to move after the piñata burst, scrambling on my hands and knees to pick up the scraps no one else wanted. But I’d felt a shift in Dr. Bridge’s office, an acknowledgment of something difficult yet truly visceral, more pure and undiluted than instinct.
Hand shaking, I picked up my pen again:
PROS, part 2
I’d be putting someone in the world who will be so loved he couldn’t help but put more love out there. I’d give him my love, and he’d give his to another, and they’d give theirs, and so on, and so on, and though our numbers would be small, the feeling wouldn’t be, and it would grow and grow until our contribution to the great reserve of love, keeping us all one step ahead of so much awful, was substantial enough to count.
Later, after the kids were tucked safely in their beds, I found Carly sitting at the kitchen table, eyes closed, hands gripping the stem of a very full glass of red wine. With such busy days, it wasn’t unusual to catch her taking a ten-second break, eyelids blissfully shut, but she looked frozen, like someone had zapped her with a stun gun.
I stayed quiet for a moment, studying her. When I started taking art classes back at St. Monica’s, Carly was my first model. Her glowing skin, sleepy and heavy-lidded eyes, and halo of dark hair always brought comparisons to pre-Raphaelite beauties, and even in the jaundiced kitchen light, her skin retained that combination of rose and gold my paintbrush could never resist. I envied my sister for many things, but never her beauty. It was her only point of vulnerability.
“Hey,” I whispered.
Carly jumped to life. “It’s late, isn’t it?” She blinked at the wine sloshing around in the glass, and then took a moment to focus on my face. “Don’t look at me like that. The doctor says it’s medicinal.”
“I wasn’t judging.”
“Then join me.”
I set my pro-con list on the counter and poured a glass for myself. Realizing my stomach was empty, I grabbed some goat cheese and grapes from the fridge and tossed them on a plate with some crackers.
“Classy,” Carly said as I brought our snack to the table. “Sure beats Fruit Roll-Ups.”
We ate in companionable silence, pausing only to take long pulls from our wineglasses.
“So what are you going to do?” Carly said after we emptied the plate. “Go to one of those sperm banks and pick a rugged, six-foot-three physicist with mile-wide shoulders and the patience of Job?”
“Why would I pick a Ken doll?”
“That’s what smart people do out in the real world,” she said. “You think honestly about your faults and then find a mate who negates them, and together you’ve got a shot at making a kid who has a fighting chance of not replicating your freak show.”
“That’s not what you did.”
“I got lucky.”
“I’ve never been lucky like that.”
Carly opened her mouth and shut it quickly, probably deciding, as I had earlier, to be nice.
She wasn’t going to call me on the lie—I had experienced that kind of luck, and, true to form, I’d walked away. His name was Andrew, and he was warm, engaging, fully employed, and desperately in love with me. I know because he told me. Frequently. I flinched at all he offered—a home, family, security, commitment—because I’d felt smothered by all that niceness. It zombified me like some kind of mood-altering drug, leaving my emotions fuzzy and indistinct. Andrew broke it off with me when he finally accepted my reluctance and moved to California, where he quickly married and fathered two sons. I’d thought about him every so often in the years since we broke up, but it had been a while since I’d wished I was in his wife’s place. I got a quick flash of his curly brown hair and bright smile and felt a dull sadness that he had come along at the right time for him and the wrong time for me.
“Andrew was ages ago,” I said. “I was a different person then.”
Carly looked down at her wineglass. “I wasn’t thinking of Andrew. I was thinking of Dad. Is this about him?”
It was always Dad, never Mom. She’d passed on before we could escape the black box of adolescence, its darkness shrouding us from everything but the constant turmoil of our daily melodramas. Parents become strangers during the teen years, and the distancing served us well. Mom died of an aneurism while on a girlfriends’ weekend in Kohler, Wisconsin, and by the time her body was returned to us, we’d protected our hearts, and the shift from past to present was painful but orderly, our grief tempered by our youth and its relentless pursuit of the future.
It was different with my dad. I cared for him during the two years lung cancer ravaged his body. I felt his last ragged breath on my cheek, and shut his eyes when he slipped into his final rest. I knew my father in a way even Carly didn’t, and I missed him deeply, as a father and a friend. He was the reason I was in nursing school. Was he the reason I wanted a child?
“Maybe,” I said to Carly. “I don’t know.”
“What do you think he would say about you having a baby if he was still around? Do you remember how he treated me when I told him I was pregnant with Maura? Dad believed in the whole package—love, marriage, kids. But only in that order.”
She was right—he wouldn’t have understood at first. He would’ve yelled or called his priest or stopped talking to me for a week
or two. My father was an angry worrier, his fear for our well-being erupting in quick bursts of red-hot fury. A cooling-off period always followed, his love for us dousing the flames. That man was quick to anger and long to love, and I knew in my bones that when the baby came, he’d have been happy for me. He’d have showed up at the hospital with a fluffy teddy bear and a carful of those creepy, toddler-sized Mylar balloons in the shapes of giant rattles and storks. He would have made goo-goo noises and learned how to swaddle. He would have changed diapers, warmed bottles, and clipped those fragile, paper-thin fingernails. He would have done the best he could with a situation he had no real power to control, as he’d always done.
A tear ran down the slope of my nose.
Carly grabbed my hand and squeezed. “I love you and I trust you, but this is a bad idea, Leona. You know it is. You’re not thinking deeply about this.”
“Bullshit,” I said, my sorrow overrun by a swift, wine-fueled anger. “Aren’t we supposed to listen to that voice inside of us, the one speaking from the pit of our gut? What if it’s telling me yes because this is supposed to happen? What if I have a baby and it grows up to find a cure for cancer or outdoes Gandhi in niceness or sets the world on a better path like Martin Luther King?”
“As much as I think you are amazing and all kinds of wonderful, the chances of that are . . . not good.”
“Well, forget the world-changing stuff. What if it grows up to be a preschool teacher who knows how to make children feel happy and secure? Or the smiling bagger at the grocery checkout, or the nice lady who gives out lollipops at the library? I might not have it in me to raise a president or Nobel Prize winner, but I know I can make a decent person, someone who holds doors open for people and shovels his neighbor’s walkway after a snowstorm and doesn’t whip out his cell phone during a dinner date.”
She took a large gulp of wine. “What if he grows up to be Hitler?”
I blinked at her. “You think I’m capable of producing another Hitler?”
All the Good Parts Page 2