Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  I’m sure I looked at her blankly. Like who?

  “There are men who might be more attracted to you as a mother,” she said. “Men who might be better to you and for you in the long run. No guarantees, of course, but it could happen. Your romantic life doesn’t have to end just because you have a child.”

  “So are you saying I might actually attract a better caliber of man?” I asked. “More mature?”

  She gave a little shrug, the kind they teach in therapy school, the kind that says, I’m not going to spell it out for you, honey. Do some work here.

  Then we talked about money. I’d have to expect to pay at least $8 an hour for infant day care in the Bay Area, possibly up to $16, she said. She’d be happy to hook me up with a good agency to find someone with references, but I’d be looking at close to $1,300 in day care bills every month, at least for the first year of the baby’s life. I got two paychecks a month, each about $1,600. I was sweating so much, my underwear was sticking to me.

  “But there might be some creative solutions,” she said. “Can you change your work schedule at all? Or ask Matt to stay home with the baby? It doesn’t sound like he’s very ambitious. Maybe he’d like that.”

  Asking Matt to be Mr. Mom was a possibility, although that would mean I’d end up being the breadwinner, which, given my salary, would be a bad state of affairs. Changing my work schedule might be an option too. One woman in my department worked Sunday through Thursday so that she could have the same days off as her husband. I could do something like that, ask Matt to take the baby on Sundays while I worked. That would be one less day of day care.

  The counselor wanted to know how I felt about having an abortion.

  “On some level, I can’t really imagine it,” I told her. “I know how it works and I’ve been through it before, but I told myself never, ever again, and to imagine breaking that vow and living with myself afterward is almost unfathomable. Even though I know it might be the most sensible thing, I know I’d have to be prepared for some serious depression.”

  I looked down at my hands. More and more they look like my mother’s. I wonder when the age spots will arrive, when arthritis will bend my knuckles, twist my long fingers the way it twisted hers. Six children. It couldn’t ever have been easy, but I think we made her happy.

  “And I fear I would regret it for the rest of my life,” I said. “I fear that I could take away my only opportunity to be a mother.”

  “These are good things to think about,” she said. “I recommend you make a list.”

  “I have,” I told her. “Pros and cons. They come out about even. At least mathematically.”

  “Sometimes five pros aren’t worth as much as one con,” she said. “And vice versa. Keep looking at your list.”

  I left the counseling session without having made a firm decision, but feeling better about my options. I did need to think creatively and I needed to stop my natural tendency to wallow in pessimism. I liked to think of that as Yankee practicality, as an ability to face the truth. But it was possible that it was merely a case of garden-variety negativity. I told the counselor I’d call her the next day if I needed to talk more.

  That night, I stared at my pro and con list. I could shuffle things around all I wanted. I could hope that after an abortion another man would come along and we’d fall madly in love and he’d get me pregnant at just the right time. But could such hope be trusted?

  ON THAT DAY when Peter had told me he didn’t want to end up with me, my mother found me sobbing on the terrace. He had returned to the house long enough to throw his bag into his car and back out of the driveway with force that was both defiant and definitive.

  I put my head in her lap and voiced the first real doubts I’d ever had about myself romantically, that there was something wrong with me, something missing, something that a really great guy like Peter needed to have in a partner.

  “I don’t know,” she said, stroking my hair. “Didn’t he tell you once that he didn’t think you were challenging?”

  “Yes,” I sobbed, lifting my head to look at her. “I still don’t know what he meant by that.”

  “I think what he meant was ‘I’m terribly insecure, and anyone who is too nice to me falls under suspicion of being even more flawed than I am.’”

  She was so soft. It was August and the grape arbor cast a green light on everything under it. The birds had been pecking at the grapes, even though they were far from ripe, and there were hard green nuggets rolling around her feet. She was wearing white canvas sneakers. They were the same kind she’d always had when I was a kid. Whenever we went swimming, she kept them on. That had been her solution to the discomforts of low tide.

  “Moreover,” she said. “I can’t believe that anyone who actually knows you would say you aren’t challenging. That’s absurd.”

  I wish I could have believed my mother then. Or paid more attention to the lesson Peter had given me about hoping for the wrong thing. All that longing for a life with him had been fruitless and self-destructive. Nothing about us had boded well for a future. But I’d believed in the fantasy of him so deeply that I’d held a place in my heart for him for four long years. He’d been my ideal, and, as I looked back on that long-ago heartbreak, I couldn’t see why. I could keep on that well-established path of longing, waiting for something or someone that suited whatever my ideal was at thirty-nine, which could, at forty-nine, seem equally appalling. What made me think any of those guys from speed dating would turn out to be anything special? How realistic was it to fantasize about a life that felt like high tide, when even nature couldn’t hold on to that fullness for more than a minute?

  I would have a complicated future ahead of me, one that looked nothing like what I had wanted. I was terrified. What was growing inside me was still smaller than a pea. But it was solid.

  “A bird in the hand,” I told myself. A bird I was lucky to have. A bird other women I knew were struggling to catch. How could I look them in the eye if I decided that this pregnancy was too inconvenient and daunting to go ahead with?

  I believe passionately in a woman’s right to choose, always have and always will. But it is one thing to have an abortion when you’re a college kid with your whole career and life ahead of you. For someone in my position, in my late thirties, wanting a child, it ultimately seemed untenable. To know that for sure, I had to have this conversation with myself.

  I picked up the list of pros and cons and tossed it into the recycling.

  CHAPTER 5

  Telling the Grinch

  BOTH MY PARENTS were products of Catholic families, Catholic schools, and Catholic neighborhoods in Newark, New Jersey. They’d raised their first two children halfheartedly in the faith, moved to Maine, settled into the academic life, and then completely given up on the rest of us. Politically and socially, they didn’t see eye to eye with the church. But they were a curious mix of modern sensibility and tradition, people who couldn’t completely escape their upbringing. My mother believed in birth control—however badly she practiced it herself—but she’d still get misty-eyed over the pope. My father had once said, in all seriousness, that he always imagined his daughters would be virgins when they got married.

  Like most mothers, mine was the parent who served as point person for matters relating to the children. She was the main instigator of phone calls and letters, the travel agent, and the procurer of all Christmas cheer. My father wasn’t cheap—send him to the grocery store and he’d come back with multiple bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies, while we’d be lucky to get a paltry bag of Milanos out of her—but when we were kids, Christmas always sent him into a deep sulk. He’d hang around the outskirts of our festivities, looking aggravated, as if we were troublesome party guests he hoped would be leaving soon. It was also extraordinarily hard to pick out a present that pleased him. For this reason, Benet and I began calling him the Grinch at some point in the seventies, and because his grumpiness and propensity to fly off the handle were not limited to
the holidays, it quickly became a year-round title. In matters of dispute between the Grinch and his offspring, my mother could generally be counted on to serve as our defense attorney. Whether this was because she actually was on our side or because she just wanted to be on the opposite side from him was not clear.

  But as my mother had faded into dementia, my father had stepped into the breach and become both mother and father to us all. The two of us had always had a stormy relationship, fighting about everything from literature—he was a snob about anything post–Edith Wharton—to deodorant, which he didn’t believe in. But we adored each other.

  I knew that in telling him about my pregnancy, I couldn’t hurt him any more than I had back in 1985. It did seem likely he’d be angry. And could I blame him? I knew what he wanted for me. It was the same thing I wanted for myself, or rather, what I had wanted. I could hardly expect him to make such a radical adjustment quickly.

  My plan was to wait until I was twelve weeks’ pregnant and out of the miscarriage zone. My doctor seemed pleased with my progress and told me she didn’t see reason to worry, but for women my age, the miscarriage rates do start to go up. I figured I should wait until I was sure of my bombshell before I dropped it. I already had plans to go back to Maine for my annual August visit, and a few days after I arrived there, I’d pass that three-month milestone. I thought I’d tell him in the company of my siblings, in the warmest atmosphere I could imagine, perhaps after a day of kayaking in Casco Bay, over a bowl of fish chowder.

  But the familial pressure was mounting. By mid-July, all my siblings knew except for Adrian, who has always had an unfortunate tendency to spill any beans that came his way. They were as nervous about Dad finding out as I was about telling him. I’d rouse myself from another round of vomiting to find another e-mail or phone call asking precisely when I’d break the news. Alison wanted to be able to get out of town in the aftermath. Wib thought Dad’s feelings would be hurt once he realized that he was the last to know. There was general concern that the peaceful August interlude we all looked forward to would turn into a drama of epic proportions.

  Finally, one Saturday morning late in the month, I just went ahead and called him.

  “So,” I said. “I have some news. It’s big news, and it might seem initially like bad news, but really, it’s not.”

  I recommended that he sit down. I sat down myself, and then immediately stood up.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I said.

  He was silent.

  “That is, I’m pregnant,” I said.

  More silence.

  “It’s an accident, completely,” I said. “But I’m happy about it. And the father is going to be involved, and he’s actually sort of pleased about it himself. He’s a very sweet guy.”

  And then it came.

  “Is this young man going to marry you?”

  He’d summoned up his thunder voice, a special tenor he’d reserved in my childhood for serious matters, such as threats of punishment. As in, “I’m going to come down on you like a ton of bricks, young lady.” With all his children grown, he mostly called up the thunder voice now for business-related matters—for instance, recording his outgoing message on voice mail. This time, though, there was also something vulnerable in there, a tremor that gave me pause. The poor old man. Eighty-four years old and getting this kind of news.

  The questions poured out after that, and with each response I gave, I winced a little more. By my father’s standards, it all sounded so bad. No plans for a wedding, or even, for that matter, dating. No Ivy League graduate, no “good” family. (Not that we were in any sense a “good” family.) My child’s father didn’t even have a job. I barely knew him. I could still count on two hands the number of times I’d seen him in person. My one paltry offering was that Matt’s family was Catholic. Never mind that Matt himself had no interest in religion. Neither did I. But my father held on to that like a life raft. I took it as a sign of how desperately my news had put him at sea.

  In between questions, I offered this explanation. I was not getting any younger. I wanted to be a mother. I was dead certain that my life would feel incomplete if I did not have a child. This could be my last opportunity. As I tried to convince my father that it would be okay, I realized that I wasn’t saying any of this just to placate him. It really was true, and I knew that I stood on the firmest of moral grounds. My father would join me there eventually, because he was a lover of firm moral ground. In Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer, one of my favorite books as an adolescent, the young narrator describes believing that if you could see a person’s bones, you’d know the quality of his character. Someone bad would have stained or darkened bones, and the truly good would have the purest, whitest bones. I knew what color my father’s bones were.

  BUT WHAT ABOUT MATT? What color were his bones? My first trip to the doctor with him had been a miserable occasion. It was about eight weeks into the pregnancy. He took the train across the Bay and walked up to my apartment, arriving sweaty and clutching a bottle of Mountain Dew. He looked terribly young.

  We walked the few blocks to the medical center in silence. The first appointment was sort of a cattle call, a conference room full of grumpy, tired-looking women and their jittery husbands, all receiving the most basic of information about their pregnancies, from “Smoking is bad” to “Saltines might help.” Matt and I sat side by side without touching. I passed pieces of paperwork to him and glanced over as he filled them out. So that’s his address, I thought. That’s his social security number. How could all these vital pieces of information be so alien to me? I turned away when I saw his pen hovering over the box for income level. That I was sure I wasn’t ready to know.

  I raised my hand to ask questions about cat litter. I knew all about the don’t-touch-it rule. Contact with cat feces during pregnancy can cause birth defects, and even miscarriage. But I wanted specifics. What if I wore a mask over my mouth and nose? Would gloves do the trick? The nurse who led our session didn’t seem to know what to make of my line of questioning. It must have seemed to her that the obvious solution was to have the father of my child change the cat litter for the next seven months. He was sitting right there, looking perfectly able-bodied. I was embarrassed by the obvious lack of chivalry in whatever relationship we had, but I had to ask the questions.

  Our next stop was the lab, where I had blood drawn to start the process of genetic testing. I’d already felt awful, but now I felt woozy as well. The day was hot and unusually muggy. Afterward Matt and I plodded down the sidewalk together, me feeling so fragile that I clutched his arm like a little old lady.

  “If you think I’m coming over to change your cat litter every week, you better think again,” he announced.

  I hated him at that moment. I hated his face, I hated his hair, I hated his clothes. He was still holding his bottle of Mountain Dew and I hated it too. Who drank Mountain Dew besides sixteen-year-old lacrosse players? And here he was telling me that the most important thing he’d taken away from our first medical visit was that, yeah, our baby could be retarded if I dug around in a box full of cat shit every couple of days, but that wasn’t his problem. If I’d had a box of cat litter in front of me, I would have tried to make him eat it.

  At least that was half of my reaction. The other half was straightforward fear. I was going to need this Mountain Dew–swilling jackass. Instead of telling him off, the way I wanted to, I was going to have to keep my mouth shut. I felt as if I were caught in a vise. Nothing seemed good, nothing seemed right.

  A couple of weeks later I was so worn out from throwing up that I called my HMO and asked for the advice nurse. I explained my misery, and she told me to come in to urgent care right away. Within two hours, I was hooked up to an IV, being given fluids and—gloriously—an antinausea medication called Phenergan. A nurse wrapped a heated blanket around me and told me to close my eyes and rest. It was so blissfully what I needed, to be pampered, to be acknowledged as a person who was too sick to
be left alone, that I sat there crying, but with a smile on my face. I left with a bottle of Phenergan in pill form, which I clung to for the rest of the pregnancy.

  ONE AFTERNOON, my friend Sam called when I was in my new favorite position, curled up in bed. The news about my pregnancy was starting to spread. Sam is my dear friend Kir’s husband, and father to her three children. He’s one of the most direct people I know, and that’s saying something, because most people who know me would say I’m the most direct person they know. So Sam and I share bluntness and an unwillingness to suffer fools. This means we’ve had a few fights in the course of our fifteen-year friendship. I know he loves me like a sister, but he’s like no brother I’ve ever had. My brothers might pick on me, but they never pick me apart. Sam is like Dr. Phil, but more ruthless. I approached his call with some trepidation.

  “Listen,” Sam said. The S lingered. When he’s insistent about something, he puts the emphasis on his Ssss, so that the conversation reverberates with a certain Ssssamness.

  “I just want you to know that I think this is a great thing you’re doing. Children are amazing, and I know you’ll be an incredible mother.”

  I fiddled with the sheets and waited for the “but.”

  “But I hope you don’t have some idea that you and this guy—what’s his name?”

  “Matt,” I said, dully.

  “Matt,” he continued. “Right. I hope you don’t have the idea that you are going to end up together. Because that would be the worst thing you could do for this baby. You can’t count on this guy for a minute. You have to be prepared to do this completely on your own or you shouldn’t do it.”

  I may have been guilty of putting some positive spin on the Matt situation with my friends, but I hadn’t lied about him. Matt wasn’t the person I’d imagined myself having a child with. I wasn’t sure we had anything in common besides a fetus and a love of books.