She's Having Her Baby

by Lauren Sams

  ‘This is why I’m kind of glad I’m an only child.’

  Nina nodded. ‘Plus you get to be selfish and you have a whole backstory for it. No-one can even blame you.’

  ‘Right? It’s the perfect crime.’

  The waitress delivered our bread wordlessly and we dug into it.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ Nina asked through bites of sourdough.

  ‘I think I’m going to work for Lee. I got a really good vibe from her. Plus, I’m not exactly brimming with other options.’ After my less-than-ceremonial exit from Jolie, Lee had called. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ she’d said – not a question, a statement. So we did. We talked for nearly four hours about magazines we loved, writers we admired and cover options we’d like to run. I told her I wouldn’t be running a Twitter account or an Instagram or a MyFace or whatever. She laughed and said it was fine, there’d be a young person to do all that for us.

  Nina’s eyes lit up. ‘Mmm … I see you doing one of those blogs where your boyfriend takes photos of you dead-arming it around town. Or you could host a YouTube channel where all you do is show people what you bought that day.’

  ‘Don’t joke – that’s actually a thing that people do. And they make shitloads of money doing it.’

  ‘I know! But how do they make so much money? I don’t get it.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I can’t even run a national magazine, let alone a YouTube channel from my living room.’

  I laughed but since I quit Jolie – well, since I was forced to quit – I had felt completely unmoored. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t at work. I didn’t make any sense without something to do, somewhere to be. Now I spent most of my time accompanying Ellie and Lucas to the park, something that was ostensibly preparing me for motherhood (that’s how Ellie sold it, anyway) but was really making me wonder if adoption was a better path.

  Every morning was exactly the same. Ellie would wrestle Lucas into his Baby Jogger, strapping him down like a mental patient because, for reasons unknown to people over the age of three, the mere sight of the pram sent him into a conniption the likes of which I have not seen outside of the fashion world. And even then it was only in anticipation of the Ginger & Smart sample sale: that is, completely understandable.

  Once she had successfully wrangled the straps around Lucas’s screaming, writhing body, Ellie would make her way to the park a few blocks from her house. Once there, Lucas would bound out of the pram with the sort of enthusiasm I usually only mustered for the lamb at Porteño and run to the rest of the uncontrollably loud toddlers, with whom he enjoyed many activities, most of which involved shoving, fighting and battling for the last organic rice cracker in the packet (always stolen from another kid and reluctantly permitted by Ellie, who would be too embarrassed to bring ‘packet poison’ to the park, lest the other mums think she was just phoning the whole motherhood caper in). Still, Ellie insisted he loved every minute of it. As I watched Lucas pull the ear of a fellow toddler named Oliver, who was squealing with the kind of high-pitched ferocity that, again, I rarely saw outside of the fashion industry, I doubted this, but said nothing.

  If the toddlers were curious creatures, their mothers were stranger still. I watched them closely, trying to figure out exactly when they’d switched from being regular human beings, with interests and careers and regular hair-colour appointments to … to these – these Mums. They were Professional Mums. All they talked about were their kids. Or their husbands. And when they talked, they really talked.

  ‘Hi, I’m George. I’m here with Ellie,’ I’d said to a woman who I’d deliberately sidled up to because she looked young, with her fishtail braid and her Céline t-shirt. If I was going to hang with mums, they could at least be cool, in the way I imagined myself to be.

  ‘Hi,’ she’d said. ‘I’m Emma. This is Callie,’ she said, patting the head of a small, dark-haired girl.

  ‘Hey, Callie,’ I said as Emma bent down to attempt to wipe Callie’s face clean.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Emma, standing up to face me. ‘She hates getting clean. Don’t really know how she’s my child, to be honest – she loves dirt. She’d sleep in it if she could.’

  ‘Oh, that must –’ I began before Emma cut me off.

  ‘She gets it from my husband, I guess. It’s gross. She really needs to learn the importance of hygiene, you know?’

  ‘Right –’ I said, before she interrupted again.

  ‘So I asked Jared to teach her how to wash herself properly, you know, and it was such a hassle for him to even do it. Like, is it really that hard to stick your kid in the shower and teach her how to use a face washer? I don’t know, maybe it is if you only see your kid for, like, thirty minutes a day.’ Emma paused for breath, rolling her eyes and taking a big sip of her $6 coffee. ‘Anyway, so he leaves the room and when he comes back, Callie’s bawling her eyes out because she ate, like, half a bar of soap. I mean, it was organic, but … we still had to take her to emergency.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘Correction: I had to take her to emergency.’

  I found myself nodding along, tacitly agreeing, all the while thinking: is there not someone else with who you can have this conversation?

  And there were plenty more.

  There was Jane, mum to three-year-old Ava and seven-month-old Curtis. The first time I met her, she was dressing Ava in kneepads and a helmet, ready for the playground. Even Ellie, who wore the silkiest of kid gloves with Lucas, thought this preposterous.

  There was Clare, Caucasian mother to the equally Caucasian, if confusingly named, Akira. There was Bernadette, mum to Greer, who wasn’t allowed to play Simon Says at daycare because ‘it encourages conformity’.

  Then there was Rivka, a beautiful Israeli PhD student who had recently relocated to Sydney with her husband, who worked at Google. At first, I’d completely friend-fallen for Rivka and wondered how soon I could ask her if she wanted to start a book club together. She was awesome. Until she told me that she, her husband and her twin babies were Paleo and no, baby Henry couldn’t have any of my banana bread because he was ‘totally intolerant to gluten’. He’d never actually had it, but Rivka knew – a mother does – that even one grain of wheat would be poison for her little one. Apparently.

  There was Brenna, mum to fifteen-month-old Evie, who told me quite earnestly one day about the diet she had followed to have a daughter.

  ‘I knew it was the pineapples that did it,’ she said, while I thought, ‘Or maybe it was the X chromosomes?’

  But I could see why Ellie liked coming here. The mothers, though some of them had batshit rules about parenting, were nice enough and treated each others’ kids well. There was an unspoken rule that all food was communal (not drink bottles, though; if a toddler picked up another kid’s Tommee Tippee water bottle it was tantamount to the spread of Ebola, as far as these mothers were concerned). The women held loose conversations about returning to work and which baby carrier was best and the new cafe that sold cronuts, while keeping two watchful eyes on all of the kids in the enclosed playground. If anyone fell or cried or had a tantrum, any one of the mothers could be counted on to go to their aid. So that was nice.

  But for me, it was also a lesson in what not to do. I didn’t want to have endless conversations about which organic rice cereal was best for starting solids or why Aldi nappies were a waste of money. I didn’t want to gush over a child I felt didn’t deserve gushing over (and, yep, I know that’s slightly heinous). I wanted to have my baby, dress it in Country Road Kids and read Madeline together. That would do just nicely.

  And I couldn’t stand Ellie’s hypocrisy with these women. She relied on them for company, to fill her days and punctuate the boredom of being with a toddler for ten hours at a time, but as soon as they were out of earshot, she began bitching about their store-bought nappies or silly gender diets.

  Nina sipped her pinot grigio – ugh – and ducked her head a little, bringing me back to the present. ‘Listen, George. I’ve got to ask now, or I never will.
’

  She paused. I raised my eyebrows like, ‘Go ahead.’

  She took a breath. ‘Why did you … I thought you’d … why are you keeping the baby?’ In the end, she asked the last part so quickly the words almost blended entirely.

  I’d known that Nina would ask me this question, but I still didn’t quite know how to answer it.

  I breathed out through gritted teeth and felt my eyes widen, that ‘fucked if I know?’ look. The truth was, there were so many reasons, but I wasn’t sure I could articulate them for Nina. I wasn’t sure it was fair.

  Because I was afraid that if I didn’t it would be the wrong choice.

  Because in the end, I let fear take over and that fear, the fear of not ever having children and realising I’d missed out, that fear won.

  Because I started to doubt something I’d believed for a very long time and I didn’t know what that meant.

  Because I started to think, maybe this won’t be so bad. Maybe I’ve been wrong all this time. Or maybe all along I just needed a push. An accidental mid-thirties pregnancy to make me think, well, this could be it.

  And finally: Because I think I can do it. I think maybe I can do it and not be Ellie.

  ‘It just felt right,’ is what I said instead, which was just about the farthest thing from the truth I ever could have said.

  In fact, it was because it felt wrong to call time on this pregnancy. Like I said, the fear won.

  Nina smiled and nodded.

  ‘And, um … I don’t know, really. I just …’ I couldn’t make the words fit in the sentence properly. I decided to play Nina at her own game and laugh at myself. ‘I think maybe I was a fifties housewife all along. Just needed a bun of my own to bake to see things clearly.’

  Nina laughed. ‘Oh yeah, you’re going to be a real Donna Hay homemaker.’

  ‘I am. All organic everything … and handmade swaddles and –’

  ‘Swaddles? How do you know that word?’ Nina asked, like I was six and had just dropped the C-bomb.

  ‘Hanging out with Ellie, I guess.’ Actually, I had no idea. Was I becoming a mother by osmosis, magically learning a new vocabulary?

  Nina smiled, but it was still too uneasy to talk about any of this freely.

  Thankfully, she changed the subject.

  ‘Hey, when you rang the other night, you mentioned someone called Callum … or …’

  ‘Colin?’

  ‘Yeah. Who’s that?’

  I rolled my eyes and shrugged. ‘Nobody.’

  Nina smirked and tilted her head forward, the universal girlspeak for ‘don’t bullshit me’. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Just this guy I had a drink with. But nothing happened.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About a month ago.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘I was having a drink – don’t judge me, just one – and he came up and we talked. And then he disappeared.’

  Nina nodded. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, I was telling him about the whole … baby thing, and then he went to buy me another mineral water and he never came back.’

  Nina raised her eyebrows. ‘He just never came back?’

  I shook my head. ‘He was a creep in wolf’s clothing.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘I know! He was listening to me, and nodding, and asking questions – well, maybe not asking questions – but, you know, he seemed interested, and then … nothing.’

  ‘No, I mean your metaphor. Creep in wolf’s clothing. That doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Oh.’ I waved her criticism away. ‘Well, the point is, he just disappeared. Everything was going so well and then … he ghosted.’

  ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘I scared him off.’

  Nina’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do you really think he was that shallow? What was he like about the baby stuff?’

  ‘Great! He was great. We were really … connecting, you know? It was fun. He seemed … nice.’

  ‘Then I don’t get it. I mean, he could see you were pregnant. If he was trying to chat you up anyway, why would he then suddenly get scared off? It doesn’t make sense.’

  I shrugged, chewing my bread, which, by this point in the pregnancy, wasn’t much more than a vehicle for butter.

  ‘Something else happened,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t think he was scared off. Why don’t you just call him and ask if you can start over?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to. I’m embarrassed. Also I don’t have his number.’

  ‘How long did you wait for him?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Can we stop talking about this, please? Does it really matter?’

  ‘Yes. How long?’

  I shrugged. ‘A couple of minutes?’

  ‘A couple of minutes? That’s not long enough! Maybe he had a toilet emergency.’

  ‘Ew.’

  ‘Ugh, you always do this. You expect life to be cookie-cutter perfect, for things to happen exactly the way you imagine them.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  Nina laughed and shook her head. ‘Remember Robin? That awful guy you were hooking up with after I got back from Contiki?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He was like the bad boy you wanted to make good. And when he turned out to be just a plain old garden-variety douche, you couldn’t believe it. Then there was Brendon, who was nice and normal but you found something wrong with him. Then there was Dave, who was funny and smart and everyone liked him but you couldn’t see yourself with him, for whatever weird reason. And Jason, who was seriously great, and you blew it. No-one is going to be perfect, George. It’s not like high school, when we wrote those big long lists of what we wanted in a boyfriend. This is real life. This is adulthood.’

  I couldn’t believe Nina was talking to me like this. ‘Neen, back off. Why are you being so mean?’

  She pulled back. ‘I’m not. I’m just calling it like I see it.’

  ‘You are. Look, if we’re going to be friends … I can’t be a punching bag, OK?’

  ‘That’s not what I’m doing,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes!’ she said, folding her arms across her chest.

  I softened my gaze. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to attack you, but … do you get what I’m talking about? I can’t be your enemy, Neen.’

  She let a breath out. ‘Yeah. I guess. Sorry. I’ll back off.’

  I gave her the strongest smile I could muster and tried to veer the conversation back into more stable territory. ‘And look, don’t take this personally, but it’s kind of hard to take relationship advice from somebody who stepped out of a fairytale and married her high-school sweetheart.’

  Nina laughed, but not the way she normally did when I ribbed her about practically never having held hands with anyone but Matt. There was a note of bitterness there.

  ‘Mmm.’ Nina was nodding, but her eyes were downcast and distant.

  Our waitress returned. ‘The steak frites for you, madame, and the risotto for your friend.’

  Then she stopped, and waited.

  ‘Yes?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Uh, would you like some cracked pepper?’

  ‘Sure, thanks,’ I said.

  Nina nodded.

  The waitress waited.

  ‘May I get you some more water?’

  ‘Uh, sure, that’s fine. Thank you.’

  Still she waited.

  ‘I’ll just go get that for you now.’

  I nodded slowly. She stayed put.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  She nodded. And stayed.

  ‘Are you … Georgie … Georgie Henderson?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, bashfully. ‘I love Jolie. It’s my favourite magazine. I buy it every month.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so nice to hear. I actually don’t work there anymore.’

  ‘I know! Sad face,’ she said, and pulled a theatrical sad face. ‘Lucy
Fitzgerald is taking over, isn’t she? I’m so excited. I follow her on Instagram, and she is so funny.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said tightly.

  ‘I mean, between the Make-Your-Own-Ryan-Gosling-Meme thing they’re putting on the website, and the new live office stream, I’m never going to get any studying done, ever again,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Right. That’s … great. Uh, look, could we get that water please?’

  She nodded, her eyes widening with the realisation that she’d totally fangirled. Over Lucy. ‘Oh, of course. Be right back.’

  ‘My biggest fan,’ I deadpanned to Nina.

  ‘She’s a teenager. She doesn’t know what happened. She thinks you quit and Lucy took your job.’

  ‘I guess,’ I said, still smarting from my loss. ‘Ugh, I mean – what is it about these readers? Why do they want memes and live video streams and 3000 pictures of Katy Perry’s manicure instead of good, solid content? I mean, what’s wrong with the humble written word, Nina? Have we all become stupid?’

  ‘Enough!’ Nina held a hand in front of her face. ‘This, again, is exactly what I mean. Things change, George. You have to move on. I’m sorry that this happened to you. You got screwed over. However … I don’t want to be rude, but …’ Nina was the only person in the world who could start a sentence like that and I’d stay to hear the end of it, ‘… you still have a Hotmail account, George. Hotmail. Times have changed. We have this thing called the internet now. I think it’s really going to take off.’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘I’m serious. Come on, hon, this is news to you and nobody else. I know it’s awful to hear, but seriously … couldn’t you see this coming? I mean, maybe not the whole being replaced by someone twelve years younger than you part, but – Meg did tell you that you needed to get on top of this. And you didn’t. Couldn’t you see what might happen?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘George … you are one of the smartest people I know. But sometimes it’s like you’re looking at a world that nobody else lives in.’

  ‘Like a brilliant autistic artist?’

  ‘No … more like someone who can’t see something they don’t want to see.’

  She was right. I knew I had to let go, but I was still too outraged. Some part of me – a rather big part, truth be told – wanted Meg to be wrong. I wanted readers to stage angry protests and demand I be reinstated. I knew it would never happen, of course I did; but I couldn’t let go of the wish that it might.