On my way to bed that night, the woman who had been so alarmed about my stance on marriage stopped me in the hall. “I am very envious of you,” she said in a shy, hushed tone. “I got married so young and had children. I wish I’d done what you are doing. It is wonderful.”
I was still thinking of her remark when I returned home to Toronto the following week to make the final move to my father’s new apartment. It felt strange to be envied by a woman who had done “everything right” and was now enjoying the fruits of it, as if I were the lucky one and not her. I had been so determined not to live my mother’s life, and now that I was as far away from it as I possibly could be, and confronting all the complications that had arisen from my decisions, I found myself curious to know why my mother had chosen what she had, and whether she had wanted it or had simply never considered there were other options. Or maybe I just wanted to know why she hadn’t wanted what I thought she should have wanted. I had never thought to ask her these questions when she had been capable of answering them, and now the life I wanted to know about was no longer one she remembered.
•
In the end, I had to admit my father’s manic cleaning had made the final move easier on all of us. We’d found a one-bedroom apartment for my father a few blocks away from the house where we’d lived when I was a teenager, around the corner from my old high school. When I arrived, he’d been there only twenty-four hours but had already set it up. As I drove over to see the apartment for the first time, through the same streets that I had walked and biked and bused and finally driven through as a teenager, I felt overwhelmed by the circularity of my father’s move: after all this, simply to land right back in the same place we’d been all those years before. I felt as though if I glanced out the window at the right moment I’d catch a glimpse of my teenage self, marching down the block, resentfully planning her escape from these very streets.
This sense that I was continually meeting former versions of myself practically knocked me down when I moved into Maddy’s at the end of May. In fact, it didn’t feel so much like encountering my past as the sense that I’d managed to recapture all the best parts of it. Like when I dreamt we were back in the house we’d lived in when I was eight, or woke up from a dream I was once again waiting tables; it felt like some integral part of me that I’d once said goodbye to had been resurrected. It felt like I was coming home.
And what a home!
“Holy shit,” said the mover, when he got to the top of the stairs and took a look around. The apartment was one big open room—the top floor of the house; Maddy and Ben had the first two floors. The ceiling rose up to eleven feet, and there were skylights over the kitchen and the bedroom, and there was a walk-in closet (there are three things New Yorkers fantasize about when it comes to apartments: dishwashers, a washer and dryer in the unit, and walk-in closets). The mover looked at me: “Well done.” But for once I’d done nothing. I could take no credit. Maddy and I had simply hung on to each other, and then hung on, and then hung on. As though we’d made some implicit vow way, way back when she’d cooked lentils for us the summer we were too broke to buy any other groceries, and had kept it even when it seemed as though we’d both run in opposite directions. So often in the last years it had felt as if things were ending, but change wasn’t the end; life came back around, and back around again if you let it. People leave, but they also come back.
As I rode my bike back and forth between my old apartment and new, transporting the last of my things, I recalled my move from the last place Maddy and I had lived together, and how filled with resentment and anger and fear I had been at the time. How my ability to get my own apartment—no small feat in New York, where signing a lease was nearly as complicated and expensive as getting a mortgage—had been drowned out by how tiny it was, and the knowledge I was committing to a life that felt as though it left no space for another person. Now I felt like I was in a place that allowed me to do anything. Not just because of the space, but because it felt safe, because it was affordable. I thought of all the times I’d bemoaned the husband-shaped hole in my life, the bills I had to foot on my own, the groceries and cooking, the unopened bottle of wine. That space was now filled, for the most part, in one way or another. Not the way I’d ever thought it would be, but is anything?
On the evening I moved in Maddy made a picnic for us in the backyard. We sat on a blanket on the ground, under the cherry tree that was just shaking the last of its spring blooms. The air around us was warm but still held the coolness of spring. It was one of those rare nights you sometimes get in New York before the season tips into the punishing heat of summer. When the breeze shifted, I could just catch a hint of the sea. Hannah, now four and a half, ran around the yard whooping and singing and scrambling up the climbing board her father had made for her and mounted against the fence. Eventually she sat down beside me and picked up a sandwich, staring at me evenly over the top of it as she ate.
“We are sleeping in bunk beds,” she said. “The ceiling of my room is the bottom of your bed, and you’re right above. Monsters can’t get through to me that way.”
I smiled and wrapped my arms around her, thinking of all the things I, too, was now protected from. “That works both ways,” I said.
19. Women Are Well-Acquainted with Thirst
A funny thing began to happen after I moved in. Fairly quickly, as friends came over to visit, the apartment became a strange sort of confessional booth, as if people sensed I was so secure in my life that they could more freely confess their worst fears about theirs. It almost always began in the same way: a friend would arrive, take a look around, turn to me with a slightly awed face, and declare, “I’m so envious!” It became the most uttered phrase in my new home the first month I was there. The idea that I could be a source of envy was still something of a revelation. On paper at least—single, childless, forty—I continued to be the definition of the thing most women believe they should avoid at all costs. And, if it had been just one friend who’d mentioned it, I likely wouldn’t have noticed. Objectively speaking, it was a great apartment. I was a New Yorker, after all; some people here aimed for apartments the way they aimed for careers. This was the equivalent of a corner office with great benefits. But when it kept happening over and over, I began to take note.
“I think they’re just being nice,” the mother of a friend of mine remarked when I noted in passing how strange I was finding it, after years of having it impressed on me that I was destined to remain an object of pity if my life remained on this trajectory, to suddenly find myself on the receiving end of the exact opposite.
The thought had never crossed my mind, but once the initial moment of shock wore off, I suppressed a laugh and sighed. I was increasingly frustrated that some people seemed incapable of believing me when I said I was happy with my life. My life, I was learning, was sometimes even more confusing for women a few decades older to comprehend than it was even for me. They had been forced to survive as well as they could in a world that had demanded they live a certain way, and they had internalized a certain version of feminism that had allowed them to succeed at this: it sometimes did not leave room for understanding, or celebrating, the choices I was making.
As far as I could tell, the men I knew had not given much thought to my choices as they pertained to me as a person. (When men gave thought to women’s life choices, it was never the individual they seemed to have a problem with, just WOMEN, as if we were a great body of water to be sailed over.) Women, on the other hand, often responded to me in the exact opposite fashion. It was as if I were speaking for all women, and in the case of older women it sometimes felt as though they thought I was sitting in judgment on them, that my choices and circumstances were somehow a reflection on theirs, instead of a progression or alternative made possible by their own.
In this particular case, the idea that my friends were just telling me what I wanted to hear was laughable. I knew they were being sincere, and I could see my life from their point
of view. It was as though by coming into my home they were being given the chance to walk a few steps down the path not taken (or avoided), and were discovering it wasn’t as dark and thorny as they’d been taught. Or perhaps it was dawning on them that there was another path (it’s not as though women are ever raised being overburdened with the sense that they have options).
“You make me want to be single again,” said one friend who’d been married for more than a decade. “I mean, I love Sam and the kids, obviously, but this is incredible.”
“So, this is your apartment,” said another, a mother of two, grinning in a hungry sort of way. “Can I please come over and lie on your bed some afternoons and pretend I’m single?”
“I want your life,” professed one woman I’d known for years, who had a much-desired two-year-old at home, before lying down on my bed and weeping. “I hate it sometimes,” she said. “I obviously don’t regret it, but sometimes I hate it. It’s too hard.”
“I wish I’d been braver about not getting married,” said another friend of mine, newly divorced and a mother of two, who was visiting from out of town for the weekend. “I remember being thirty-two and in a state of near total panic at the idea I might be single at thirty-five.”
Every woman I knew seemed to think she was failing in some way, had been raised to believe she was lacking, and was certain someone else was doing it better. Had been told never to trust her own instincts. Taught to think of life as a solution when “done right,” when in reality we existed in a kaleidoscope made of shades of gray, able to be very happy and very sad all at the same time.
I knew the only reason I was hearing all this was because in me they seemed to have found the rare assurance of nonjudgment. I was not a participant in the mothering Olympics; it wasn’t as though I was going to admonish someone for not breastfeeding (I was always thrilled when someone had switched to formula, because it meant I got to do the feeding). Nor did I get too frustrated by the fact that they could not hold a conversation for more than forty-five seconds at a time—I could see their own frustration at this. They were lonely, too. Which was painfully ironic, since I was certain more than one baby, not to mention a few marriages, had been conceived by women tired of being left out of every conversation her married with children friends were having.
“Don’t ever have kids,” said nearly all of them at some point.
“They don’t mean that!” said a successful businesswoman I knew who was expecting her first grandchild. She seemed shocked and offended at the very idea. I wanted to suggest to her that she might change her tune had she had to do her small children mothering in the age of twenty-four-hour email and social media Greek-chorusing. I knew they didn’t mean it, not really. What they meant was don’t fall for the hype. They meant that this was harder than anyone had ever warned them. They meant that the longer they’d been able to rule their own lives, the harder it became not to. They meant that they had been promised things would get easier and better, not harder and more relentless. They meant they’d lost their own hard-won identity in ways they weren’t prepared for, and were still trying to reconstruct it.
“I’m so tired of hearing women tell me how terrible it is to have children,” said my friend Kim one afternoon when she’d come over to help me organize the closet. Kim was in her early thirties, had been married a few years, and I knew was starting to think seriously about kids. “The nonstop negativity is just exhausting.”
This was the flip side, I supposed. I’d watched so many of my friends go into marriage starry-eyed and thrilled and then be bowled over by the realities of childcare that it never crossed my mind what it must be like to hear only the bad parts over and over and not know, as I did, that it came with plenty of good, too. But who sits at a dinner party talking about the magic of a serene midnight feeding? You had to go to Instagram if you wanted that.
“I think they just feel like they were never warned,” I said. “And they don’t feel like they have the right to be unhappy. It’s the same way people are constantly telling me what my life is missing, as if they can’t believe I could be happy alone. I think they’re told they aren’t allowed to be unhappy when they have the only two things women are supposed to want.”
Of course, not every woman came over and complained like this, and never my newly married or about-to-be-married friends, who were caught in the throes of romance and wedding planning. Nor did my single friends, some of whom had similar setups to me, nor my younger friends, who took my life in the way people in their twenties take every accomplishment of someone older: the promise of possibility.
But listening to these friends unleash their doubts and fears did make it that much easier to remind myself, on days that I needed reminding, that everything was just as good as it was bad, and not an either/or. The role reversal, however, was not lost on me. These were the same women who’d married when we were in our early thirties and spent a decade inquiring hopefully and encouragingly about my love life. Now it seemed that just as I had been released from my regrets, they were only now beginning to voice theirs.
The confessional trail through my apartment, fascinating though it was, was usually a one-way street. Some days I felt as desperate for someone to commiserate with as some of my friends did for sixty minutes of uninterrupted sleep. But how does one talk about the exhaustion of going it alone in the face of problems with a baby who has suddenly ceased sleeping through the night? It’s a tricky line to walk, and I hadn’t yet figured out how to do it. The result was that I often found relief talking to people I knew only casually.
This is what happened when I had lunch with an old book publishing acquaintance. She’d recently turned forty herself and was unmarried. I mentioned that it had been a wild year I’d not been prepared for. Was it just me? I wanted to know. Or did others also feel like it was better and harder than they’d anticipated?
“I have never been more relieved than on the morning of my fortieth birthday,” she said. “It felt like I’d been released.”
So I wasn’t crazy! “I feel like we are the beneficiaries of extraordinary timing,” I confessed. “We’re the first generation that can make enough of our own money to live the way we want. I feel like we have a responsibility to figure out what this means.”
“I guess.” She nodded, now looking skeptical. “I mean, I understand that we’re the first wave in this, and it’s supposed to be exciting and we’re lucky, but I’ve never wanted to be part of the vanguard of anything. It’s never appealed to me. And yet here I am.”
Perhaps the remark shouldn’t have stopped me cold, but it did. In all my reckoning with my life in the past nine months, the thing that kept me buoyed was the idea that I had been hurled into an adventure. I thought often of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey (even though, extraordinary man that he was, he didn’t think it was available to women outside of motherhood) and even in my moments of doubt and uncertainty felt immeasurable gratitude that I hadn’t been born too early, even by a few decades. That somehow the person I was capable of being was matched to the time I was living in. I hadn’t stopped to consider that this might not be true of every woman living a similar life to mine.
A week later Jo came over. She was newly engaged to a man she’d met a few months earlier on one of her reporting trips, and in the early stages of planning her September wedding. She was here so we could plan our road trip; in mid-July we were driving her car, her things, and her dog across the country to San Francisco, where her fiancé, Nick, lived.
“This place is so much better than a wedding,” said Jo, walking in, laughing.
•
In June, a publisher acquired the proposal for the puberty guide Naama and I had been working on. It was thrilling to think we’d be writing a book, and the book advance we would be paid meant that for the next little while I could stop the freelance frenzy of pitching articles and just focus on one big project.
A few weeks later, Alexis drove down to New York with a friend and a t
ruckload full of the things I had put aside in my frantic clearing of my parents’ house. She and her husband had reunited, and he was home with the kids while she took a few days away. Along with records, books, and phtotos, she also brought my parents’ white living room couch, which now sat against the wall facing my bed.
I had said yes to the couch without giving it much thought beyond the fact that I now finally had room for a couch and this saved me from spending money. My mother had read to me on that couch nearly every night of my childhood. Those cushions had held my happiest moments, and now my happiest memories.
I spent a lot of time staring at it from my bed when it first arrived. I suddenly had a lot of time. Just like that, it seemed, everything had let up. My father was moved and settled. My mother was being cared for. Rachel was settling into motherhood. My sister and her husband had reunited. I had moved to a lovely new home and sold a book. As my mother might have said, “giddy Fortune’s furious fickle wheel” had turned and taken with it many of the responsibilities and concerns that had dominated my last year and a half.
It all should have been a relief, but instead I felt conflicted by the shift. To suddenly find myself unnecessary on all fronts was jarring and made me feel strangely disposable. And what was I now supposed to do with all the freedom?
I’d started my fortieth year pondering what felt like an unmarked path ahead, but so much had happened that required my attention that for months the answer seemed to be that freedom means being at other people’s disposal when they need you. Now I was at my own disposal. I felt like one of those families that had spent their lives below the poverty line and won the lottery, only to file for bankruptcy a few short years later; they’d never been taught how to have money, and the abundance of it seemed to do more harm than good. I had all this freedom—how to use it well?
No One Tells You This Page 21