“Ready?”
I could hear the seat belt unbuckle, and I slowed down. This was likely the sort of thing that landed people in court cases that were covered on Oprah and launched a thousand hot takes. Child was not wearing seat belt . . . I looked at the clock. It was 8:59. I pulled into the first available spot.
“Ready?”
“Yesssss.”
I jumped out of the front seat, opened the door, and turned my back. Zoe leapt on with the sort of abandon only a person who has never considered there might not be someone to catch them can possess.
“Go, horsy, go!” She kicked the side of my leg with her booted foot.
I’d forgotten that when we left the house I’d been unable to locate my shoes and was wearing my sister’s Crocs, which were two sizes too small. I had a brief vision of both of us face-planting and getting bloody noses.
“Faster horsy!”
The school bell started ringing. The gate was twenty feet away, the school door behind it. There was a lineup by the door that was growing shorter with every step. Surely they would not close it if they saw me staggering across the parking lot. I picked up my pace. I focused with laser intensity on the gate. The bell stopped.
“I’m slipping!”
“Hold on!”
I twisted her around, grabbed her legs, and lifted her over the gate.
“Run!”
She ran. The woman at the door waved at me. “You must be the aunt. How is your sister?”
“I have a baby brother!” Zoe yelled. She had stopped running and was now taking her time walking to the door. She was on the other side of the fence, though, so this was officially no longer my problem.
“She’s good,” I called, wondering if I’d met this woman before. I sometimes had a hard time keeping all the kids’ connections straight. “Baby is fine.”
“Give her our best.”
“Bye Auntie Glynnis!” Zoe stopped at the door and waved at me ferociously. I waved back just as energetically as her little figure, sporting an enormous pink backpack, disappeared through the door. What the hell did a three-and-a-half-year-old need with a backpack that big? I didn’t stop waving until the door was shut. I returned to the car and collapsed back into the driver’s seat. I thought of my mother, who, despite her near-suffocating concern over what other people thought, had never let how foolish she might look yoo-hooing at us through crowds stop her from doing it. I thought of how she’d spent my entire childhood in this routine, moving us from home to school to activity in an endless rotation. And now my sister was in nearly the same one, except hers was far more frantic; it was no longer acceptable to push your kids out of doors and tell them to come back when the street lamps came on. Still, this school run was the common ritual I knew was shared by nearly every woman with children. I could take my guest spot in it this morning if I wanted to, post a picture of my coffee mug perched precariously on the dashboard, include a summary of what I’d just done, and immediately be greeted with fanfare. I’d be part of the tradition of parenthood, if only for a day or a week. It was tempting. I did feel as if I deserved an award for making the bell. I felt fucking accomplished. I felt as accomplished as I did when I submitted a good story on deadline. I felt the old satisfaction of having achieved something tangible; it was the sensation I had most missed when I was writing meaningless posts for lots of money. It was nice. What if this was my life?
That was the question that continued to present itself to me as the week progressed. As showers became an increasingly distant memory, and my hair became even more matted to my head. My clothes filthier. As the nights got later, and the kids’ unwillingness to go to sleep on time slammed up against my nonnegotiable writing routine. It was also there waiting for me when I woke up in the middle of the night to tiny scared voices at my bedside and warm bodies snuggled beside me. Or when I was asked intently by Quinn why Darth Vader wanted to kill his son. Didn’t he love him? And again as I was humbly struck dumb one afternoon in the changing room when I took Zoe swimming and she pointed between my legs and said, “Mommy has fur down there, too.” It was a good punch line to a story I’d later tell, but it was also an intimacy to which I wasn’t accustomed.
Did I want this? I’d been given a gift, it seemed to me. This wasn’t a fun afternoon with someone else’s kids before I handed them back and went off to dinner. This was the deep end, and I was getting the chance to swim in all its messiness and glory for a while.
Parents, especially women, have a habit of talking about motherhood as though it were an exotic mystical land where everything is dazzling; as if they’d walked through a closet and the world has suddenly gone Technicolor. Or at least that’s how it often felt, listening to them from the shores of childless land. With each breakfast rush and school run and nighttime snuggle, I was traveling further and further into that land, if only as a tourist. It did not feel mystical, unless you count the hallucinatory effect of having no sleep. But it was electrifying. There was a charge in this I could not deny, a sense of propulsion and deep, absolute necessity. I’d be okay if this was my life, I thought. I could do this if I had to and probably enjoy it. This was not just fantasy theorizing on my part—I was written into the will. I could envision myself in this life with these kids if, God forbid, it came to that. And I’d probably love it.
Ambition is ambition; like running water it has to go somewhere, and this was a place I could understand it going. The truth was, there was some brief relief to that picture: on a very basic level I would know exactly what I was supposed to do every day, and it would always be important to someone. I’d never have to wonder over my own necessity or whether what I was doing was worthwhile. Like the images I’d found of Princess Leia everywhere in my youth to support my conclusion that she was the ideal of female adulthood, I didn’t have to look far to find reinforcement that motherhood was the one true way. I vaguely knew it would look different from the inside, and that if I ever got there I would likely begin spending a great deal of my time anxious over all the ways I might be fucking up; at least half the world’s economy ran on instilling the belief in women that they were always badly failing at something. But at least there would be a language for what I was doing, and an entire history of people doing it to fall back on for guidance and support.
However, the knowledge that I was good with children, and also that far from hating the idea, I could very much understand the appeal of having them in my life, was not, I understood, the same thing as choosing to have them. What was I choosing? Once I started digging around I realized this was the question that was lodged right behind all the what if this were my life? speculating I’d been doing. I didn’t know the answer to that question. But, as it turned out, I was about to confront it head on.
10. The Showdown
My mother had an encyclopedic knowledge of movies made in the 1950s. In addition to detailed plotlines, she could recount the names of movie stars, their most famous lines, their marriage and relationship histories, and their many roles, as though reciting branches on her family tree. The fact that she would tell me these things in the same tone that she’d use to explain both the Latin root of a word, and how it had appeared in different contexts over time, left me with the impression that Hollywood was a thing to be taken seriously. When I was eleven, my father arrived home unannounced with a VCR. Almost immediately, my mother went to the video store and rented these movies from her childhood, reciting passages she still knew by heart more than three decades later. Gary Cooper westerns, Hitchcock mysteries, all the great musicals, everything Jimmy Stewart. She was a sucker for a good romance. She liked happy endings and hated too much violence. If the movie was too suspenseful, she would disappear to the kitchen, while we remained in front of the set absorbing this particular version of the outside world. Thanks to repeated viewings of films like Rear Window and How to Marry a Millionaire, my understanding of the outside world became synonymous with New York City.
When Quinn was born, I posted a pic
ture on Facebook of Auntie Mame holding forth on her staircase, long cigarette holder in hand; I also posted a clip from the scene where her ten-year-old nephew is expertly mixing a martini. I, too, could be counted on for a similar education, I declared. I was thirty-four then. I liked the idea of being the independent, influential, chic (intermittently, in my case) aunt. A woman entirely in charge of her own life, a life that involved children but in less traditional ways. This was easier to do in my early thirties, when a conventional future (albeit one couched in dreams of a Beekman Place duplex) was still just as possible as an unconventional one.
But when I arrived at my sister’s at age forty and seven weeks, it was not Auntie Mame who came to mind. As the days passed, I began to feel as if I had slipped into one of my mother’s old western standbys, movies that had never interested me very much as a child because the women in them seemed to spend most of their time either cooking, washing, or wringing their hands. But now here I was, some sort of modern-day aging Gary Cooper, striding out to face his archnemesis in a final showdown. Except in my case, it was becoming clear, the nemesis was a week-old baby.
And not just any baby: a perfect baby. Connor wasn’t fussy; he cried only when hungry; he was alert; he was sweet in a way people think babies are when they see them in pictures. He was what people who’d never spent time with a baby thought they would get when they said they wanted one. He was an advertisement for babies.
I had some knowledge in this department. People had been handing me their babies for nearly as long as I could remember. From age eleven (amazingly the legal babysitting age at the time) I’d been the top phone number taped to the suburban fridge, the person mothers raced one another to reach first, often calling weeks in advance. When I was twenty-three and new to New York, I cared for the infant daughter of my manager, a twenty-two-year-old single mother. I carried that baby around the New York City subway system, and streets, with what can fairly be described as aplomb (though it’s just as likely I was simply too young to know enough to be anxious). I handled her with such confidence that everyone in the Spanish Harlem neighborhood where they lived assumed the baby was mine, which often proved handy, as it resulted in a lot of offers to carry things up and down sets of stairs, mostly from helpful young men who talked to me very differently when I was on my own. (The nannies and mothers at the Central Park playgrounds, however, only regarded me with silent hostile suspicion; white lady, dark baby was the inverse of the established norm there. It was weeks before I understood why I was getting such a cold shoulder, but it was an early lesson for me in how the Upper East Side operated.)
Since my friends had all started having children of their own, I’d come to be known as the “baby whisperer.” I was a natural. Babies were neither a mystery, nor scary, nor something I idealized; they were a reality. They had always in some capacity been a regular part of my life.
And now Connor was my evening date. Every evening. Like our morning routine, we’d also developed an evening one. After the kids had been put to bed, and Alexis had fed the baby, she’d go downstairs hoping to slip into some rest of her own for a few hours. I would stay upstairs with him. It was heaven. Holding him in the dark, having him hold on to me, his little heart beating against my fingertips, made me feel as if I were in the middle of a birth announcement: so much love! My heart was discovering new pockets I didn’t know existed, growing and melting at the same time.
It didn’t take me long to realize how naïve I’d been to ever think I could slide into my forties without fully confronting the question of children. The first night after I’d met the married man, we’d been sitting in a crowded hotel bar having drinks, when he leaned over the table and said abruptly, “Do you want children?” I’d laughed. Women my age were always being accused of getting too serious too quickly, but in my experience, men were just as guilty of it, maybe even more so. I’d shrugged. “I don’t not want them,” I said. He’d shaken his head. “I want one so badly,” he said emphatically. A month later, on a trip home from a writing assignment, I spent the four-hour flight with a strangely roiling stomach, wondering if he was going to get his wish; by the time I landed I had methodically planned out everything that would need to change in my life over the next eight months should the test come out positive. It turned out nothing needed changing; I had just been having normal period cramps. But I remembered how quickly I’d slipped into a new set of calculations about how I’d make it all work. I could make it all work if I had to.
“I don’t not want them” felt like a feeble phrase now, sitting here with a babe trustingly asleep in my arms. A dodge. This was an enormous thing, far too big to leave up to chance. For years, I’d resented that my entire life had appeared to the world to be a clock, counting down, at every turn forced to confront the question: baby? And yet, how could it not be? It was still a question in need of answering. I thought back to the night on the beach, and my resolution that I would no longer behave as if I had something to apologize for. There were lots of ways to have children—though many of them enormously expensive, or largely out of reach for a single woman of modest means—but if I wanted to give birth to one, even just a little bit, I needed to own up to that now. Look it straight in the face, so to speak, which is exactly what I did. I uncrossed my legs and raised my knees and gently adjusted Connor so that he was reclined against them and facing me. And then I stared. I stared directly into the face of what I had been told my whole life was the thing that would define it and give it meaning.
Did I want this?
I stared and stared, inhaling the babyness of him. I stroked the curve of his cheek. I slipped my little finger in his hand and let him grasp it in his sleep. I made myself think only of all the good things. I thought of Zoe clinging to me for comfort, of the pride and joy I felt when Quinn had raced off the school bus one afternoon a few days earlier, waving a Star Wars comic book triumphantly in his hand and hollering, “There’s a picture of Princess Leia in here, Auntie Glynnis!” And then for the first time I thought of the parts of me the children I wasn’t having might be missing out on. All the things I could pass on to a child. I had been a recipient of all my mother’s great knowledge. Where would that go?
There was also the thing I kept coming back to over and over. A baby was a clear path forward. If I went home and got pregnant, an entire infrastructure would materialize around my life. I would be seen; even if I was alone I would never be alone. I’d be a mother.
I waited in the quiet for the panic button to go off, or to hear the tick of my own internal clock. There was nowhere to go. No movement to quiet any second thoughts. I forced myself to lay down my emotional arms and be defenseless. I raised Connor up and put him on my chest and let him breathe softly into my ear. And I waited. I waited for regret to wash over me. To be drowned in the knowledge of all my bad relationship decisions, and bad life decisions, bad everything decisions that had led me to this seat, where I now sat alone, with someone else’s baby. I waited for the panic, panic I’d seen overcome so many of my childless friends, to take me in its cruel grasp. There’s still time! the woman’s voice from the wedding floated into my head. A last chance bonus round if I wanted it.
Connor slept on, unaware of the awesome battle that was taking place in my mind, just inches away from him. He knew nothing. He was just a baby entirely reliant on me in this moment to protect him and comfort him. I began to hum softly, still waiting. But the panic I’d anticipated did not kick in.
I made myself walk further down the imaginary path I was on. It was so easy to speak of babies as if they were a concept. Like freedom, and peace. Rosy, ill-defined ideas. But I had seen enough of the reality, was currently living enough of the reality, to know firsthand the practicalities. Maybe I knew them too well. Maybe if I knew a little bit less about what was involved, I’d want it all a little bit more. For instance, if I wanted a baby, then the immediate next steps were clear: go back to New York and embark on the familiar odyssey of a forty-year-old woman chasi
ng down her neglected fertility. I certainly knew what that looked like. Everyone in New York knew what that looked like. I could do it. I understood sitting here that if the switch I was waiting for to flip did, nothing would stop me from doing it.
But then, let’s say I was successful. I’d be doing it alone. Or rather, I’d have to be very okay with the idea of doing it alone, since all evidence of my love life to date suggested this was my natural state of being. First off, my tiny apartment would have to go. I’d have to go back to a full-time job in an office with benefits, or promptly move back to Canada. I tried to picture myself living in Toronto. Yes, in theory the ability to move to Canada meant I was in possession of a universal lottery ticket of sorts, but I had a life in New York that I worked hard for and that I was not eager to give up. Then there was the life beyond the baby stage. I was living that now, too. Some people wanted babies the way they wanted weddings, but I knew what it meant to have children: a life of scheduling play dates and couriering someone to school and back, to after school and back, to sports practices, and managing summer vacations, and birthday parties, and homework, and everything else that sucked up time like a vacuum cleaner that never shut off. And how to pay for all that? I could if I had to, but did I want to have to? It would be brutal, for decades. My life for a long time would exist on the periphery. I would no longer be able to do what I wanted when I wanted. Those concerns would fade if a child ever arrived. But they were real now. And in my control.
That’s what it came down to. The joys of parenthood, I knew, were deep, and often found in the small moments, rooted in a sustained current of unconditional love. However, I also knew without a doubt that the joy of my life was rooted in my ability to move when I wanted and how. I valued that ability to be in motion more than anything. I could hear the arguments in my head, the return of the magazine voices: You’re going to regret this in ten years. You don’t know what you’re missing. Of course, I might regret it. I knew that. There were an endless number of things about my life I might end up regretting. Some I already did. But it seemed to me that going through life making decisions on what I might possibly feel in a future that may or may not come about was a bad way to live. I wasn’t going to have a baby as an insurance policy against some future remorse I couldn’t yet imagine. I had more respect for myself than that. The truth was, no one knows what they’re missing in the end. You can only live your own life, and do your best with the outcome when you roll the dice.
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