Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  Those first infants in our midst were greeted like gods and goddesses. We hosted showers, we oohed and aahed over sonograms. We attended naming ceremonies in droves, offered to babysit, and took countless photographs of the new parents proudly cradling their progeny.

  Then suddenly, doors were shut. There were schedules to be observed, nap times to be guarded zealously, lost parental sleep to be grabbed in snatches during the day. Trips to Tahoe were a thing of the past, or rather, a thing to be shared only with other couples, other couples who had children. Playdates for Junior were more important than Mom’s playdates with Mary. Moreover, the level at which we single people were allowed to participate had been capped by some mysterious force that seemed larger than our friends.

  April, also single, once gamely sewed together a baby quilt for an expectant friend, from squares we’d all contributed. She made plans to deliver it at a weekly gathering held at one of the city’s public basketball courts. She waited for an hour, then went home. The group, it turned out, had changed its plans and had gone to a more baby-friendly gathering place, but no one had bothered to tell April. Rarely a person to lose her cool, April was furious at the lack of respect all the new parents had shown her, at the implication that her time was no longer valued. I sympathized completely and felt secretly grateful to her for blowing her top; maybe this would make a difference in how we were treated.

  It didn’t, though. The arrival of children simply changes everything. Behind their backs, we thought of these busy new parents as self-centered. Behind our backs, they reassured themselves that they had their priorities straight and labeled us both ignorant and self-centered. In retrospect, we were both right.

  So my time in the trailer was the first significant chunk of time I’d spent with Kir in years. She had a BA from Stanford and a master’s from Berkeley, but her promising career in documentary film had been shunted aside after Teya was born and I had never understood why and how that had been so easy to give up. Seeing Kir’s daily work as a mother was a revelation. Between getting the older kids ready for school, entertaining the youngest, getting him to day care for a few hours so that she could volunteer at the charter school the older ones attended, getting them all home, serving them dinner, and getting everyone to bed, she had barely any time for herself. As we folded mountains of laundry together at night, the fact that she had never had the time or energy to return my phone calls suddenly made sense.

  The payoff also became clear to me. I did most of my writing in the outbuilding that served as Sam’s office. I’d get the woodstove roaring, turn on my computer, and sit in front of his window, which looked out on their woodsy two-acre parcel. When the kids came home from school, I’d watch them play. Teya and Jensen would be deeply absorbed in something in the long grass. I’d poke my head out and ask what they were doing. “Talking to our fairy,” they’d say, grinning up at me, gap-toothed, their faces fresh versions of their mother’s and father’s. Or I’d watch Kir bouncing on the trampoline with her little boy, in her jeans and down parka, looking like a teenager, albeit a very tired one. The kids would ask to see my cats, crowding into the trailer in a happy jumble, squatting to look under the bed and behind the toilet for Casco and McGee. They might request a tea party, and when the cookies and weak tea had been consumed, demand to do my dishes. I’d acquiesce, sitting on the couch two feet away, watching them earnestly at work. They were like fairies themselves, exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I wondered, watching them, listening to them, whether my own child could possibly be as bewitching.

  CHAPTER 8

  Playing House

  A LAWYER FRIEND had been giving me advice about the legal ramifications of having a child with someone I wasn’t married to. I was wrestling with the idea of not putting Matt on the birth certificate. I wanted my child to know his father, but I didn’t want a shared custody situation. Matt had seemed pleased by the news that the baby was a boy, but we weren’t spending much time together. Nor had he proposed any solutions to any of my problems. They felt very much like my problems, not ours. He’d shown up when I asked for his help in moving to the trailer, but in comparison with all my guy friends, who treated my pregnant self like a precious orchid while they joked and jostled with one another, Matt had just seemed like the random guy someone had brought along. Significant, but random.

  The worst part was that every time I made an effort to include him in the pregnancy, I felt rebuffed.

  “No thanks,” he’d said when I suggested he sign up on a Web site that sent weekly updates on the stages of fetal development. I found it fascinating and I thought he might too. “I’ve got enough reading material about pregnancy.”

  I’d given him a couple of the books friends had lent me. He’d barely looked at them when I’d handed them to him. It seemed as though he was holding me—or rather us—at a distance. One thing I couldn’t handle was indifference. It felt like an insult to the baby.

  When the lawyer asked me what Matt wanted out of our arrangement, I hadn’t known what to say. “You’ve got to find out,” he said. “Have a serious heart-to-heart.”

  So I asked him to meet me one night at a cafe near his apartment. I was terse on the phone and made it clear this was a Talk. Matt arrived late, just as I was midway through a plate of one of the few foods I was craving, a winter salad with apple and blue cheese. He seemed tense and nervous. We didn’t exactly have pleasantries to exchange, so I cut to the chase.

  “I’d like a clearer sense of what you want,” I said. “Are you going to want shared custody?”

  He sagged back in his chair and exhaled loudly. His face softened.

  “Phew,” he said. “I’m so relieved.”

  “Relieved?” I asked. “Why would that question relieve you?”

  “I thought when you called you were going to tell me you were cutting me out,” he said. “You sounded mad.”

  Tears came rushing into my eyes. His relief was palpable; he wasn’t bullshitting. He’d been overcome with worry that I was going to tell him to beat it. That meant so much to me. I don’t know what I’d been seeing in him—perhaps numbness induced by terror—but a man couldn’t be indifferent and have a reaction like that. How could I, even for a minute, tell this guy he wasn’t going to have access to his child?

  “I would never do that,” I told him.

  My own tears surprised me. I always assumed I could be ruthless in a crisis. Matt wasn’t proving exactly good in these circumstances, but he wasn’t out-and-out bad. I have to give him more of a chance, I realized. More of a chance than my natural inclination would have allowed for.

  “But you haven’t exactly been attentive,” I continued. “Every time I’ve suggested something to you, whether it is reading a book about parenting or checking out a Web site about babies and pregnancy, you scoff at the suggestion.”

  “It might seem like I’m scoffing, but I’m not,” he said. “I was reading in one of those books that fathers are like a trimester behind in terms of understanding where the mothers are at.”

  Ending a sentence with a preposition. I stopped myself from saying anything. Quoting the books was good. At least that meant he’d been reading and not just watching reruns of The Simpsons.

  “So I’m sort of in the first trimester now,” he continued. “And I’m getting it. I know it’s hard for you.”

  “So what do you want?” I said. “My big fear is that you are not going to be a part of this and then in a few years, when you have some girlfriend who makes you feel guilty about neglecting your child, you’re going to come around and want to be part of his life. And you’re going to try to take him away from me or share custody.”

  In California, as long as he was on the birth certificate and hadn’t demonstrated some solid evidence of monstrosity, he would be entitled to have Dolan with him half the time. I didn’t want my child going back and forth between households if I could possibly avoid it.

  “Listen,” he said. “I was raised by a single m
other. I believe that a child’s place is with his mother. But I want to be there, more than my own father was. That’s important to me. I want to be helpful.”

  I’m sure I looked doubtful.

  “Look,” he said. “I know how to do this. This was my childhood. I’m well equipped for this. I understand it. You have to trust me.”

  He sounded so sincere. But when it came to a child, trust wasn’t something you just handed over. “You’re going to have to prove to me that you’re trustworthy,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I have to be careful.”

  “I will prove it to you,” he said.

  That talk in the cafe was a turning point for us. So was Thanksgiving. Matt’s father, Miles, and stepmother, Frances, were coming for the whole week. Liza had generously invited all of them to her house for turkey, but they’d declined. They wanted to spend the holiday alone with Matt. I felt rejected without even having met them, but I wasn’t anticipating much of a relationship with them. Miles had instructed his son not to sign anything and told Matt that I would have him over a financial barrel for the rest of his life. “Frances is very angry,” his father had said. Probably because Frances had been helping fund Matt’s three years in the Bay Area drifting aimlessly from one temp job to another. She must have been terrified she was going to have to take care of his child now as well.

  Still, I wanted to meet them. With my parents in their eighties, Matt’s parents, both sets of them, were going to matter to Dolan. We made plans for a dinner the night before Thanksgiving.

  I’d put on a pair of velvet maternity pants and one of Kir’s hand-me-downs, a capacious, brightly colored silk top. I actually felt pretty with my bump protruding in front of me. When I walked into the bar, I found them sharing a flight of wine. Miles’s son might think red wine should be kept in the fridge, but clearly Miles didn’t. Matt was dressed up, and he came to greet me, putting his arm around me warmly. He told me later there was a piece of paper in his pocket with my name written on it. He didn’t want to forget this time.

  We shook hands. Miles looked so much like Matt, I was surprised. I wondered if my son was going to look exactly like them. Their easy smiles were the same, and their voices were practically identical. Frances was dainty and pretty. If either of them felt angry or strange about the situation, I couldn’t tell. I felt my antipathy fading.

  “I know this is a really odd way to meet,” I said as soon as we sat down at our table. “I want you to know that this is not the way I would ever have planned to have a child. But honestly, at my age, I’m lucky to have this opportunity at all.”

  “Well, we’re happy to meet you,” Miles said.

  “If you have any questions about this unorthodox arrangement we’re working on, just ask away,” I said.

  Frances was studying the menu. So was Matt. Miles nodded. “We will.”

  He cleared his throat. “Matt, what are you thinking of having?”

  “What’s pancetta?” Matt asked.

  “It’s like an Italian bacon,” Miles said. “Terrible for the arteries, but delicious.”

  “What about this one, botta…arghh?” Matt asked. He was pointing to a pasta dish.

  Frances and I both spoke at the same time.

  “Dried…” she said.

  “Fish roe,” I finished.

  I looked around the table. Our conversation might not be deep and meaningful, but at least it wasn’t going to be unpleasant.

  What struck me about Miles and Frances that night was how in love they seemed. They’d been together since Matt was about five, and it was evident that they still adored each other. He fussed over her—Did she like her sand dabs? Another glass of wine?—and she reveled in his attentiveness.

  Matt was a different person altogether with them. For the first time, he seemed eager to please, to impress. One of my chief complaints about Matt had always been how little effort he expended, professionally and personally. But with Miles and Frances, he seemed curious about what they were doing, what they liked, why they liked it. He wanted to be involved.

  I imagined him as a young boy, visiting his father and stepmother. He would have been wishing his father would come back home and make his heartbroken mother happy again. Already refusing to eat his vegetables, refusing to eat anything but a plain hamburger, writing on Frances’s walls in indelible ink. Meanwhile their love would have been exclusionary without intent. As they talked of their lives together, I noticed the way Matt chimed in. “Wasn’t that the place in that neighborhood you really loved?” he ask during a conversation about the bungalow they’d rented in Los Angeles twenty years before. “Was that when you switched jobs?” He seemed not to have experienced their life together so much as he’d simply heard about it.

  My heart softened toward him. I felt a mixture of sympathy and empathy. I was picturing my own little boy, suffering his own pain over whatever situation Matt and I worked out. What if Dolan longed to be a part of his father’s life and felt left out? And I hadn’t done everything in my power to keep that from happening? I resolved to try harder to do what I could to make the gap between us smaller, and not just on Dolan’s behalf. On that night, I started thinking of including Matt in our lives because of the boy he’d been; I didn’t want him to feel excluded from another set of lives.

  The thought of the drive back to Marin was too exhausting to contemplate. Matt offered me his bed and I took him up on it, thinking we would just sleep. I hated his room and loathed the idea of throwing up—as I knew I would—in a toilet shared by four messy, rootless guys.

  We lay side by side, me in pajamas, him in sweatpants and a T-shirt. And at some point, we turned to each other. It had been about five months since we’d slept together. Sex with him was, as it had been before with him, exciting and fulfilling. But that bump between us made the connection more than physical; it was both a monument to our past sex and the ever expanding marker of our future relationship.

  For the first time, I felt true tenderness toward him. And so we embarked on the next phase of this tentative relationship.

  THE RAIN CAME DOWN in endless sheets that fall, hitting the roof of the trailer with such vehemence that I kept sitting up in bed, feeling for wet patches and turning on the lights to check for leaks in the windows. I tried to think of myself as an adventuresome settler heading West in her covered wagon, but it was hard to reconcile the spirit of pioneering with my fervent desire to have real plumbing.

  I was almost into my third trimester, but still I vomited at least twice a day. It was more random and less explicable. I could eat six clementines in a row, burp, and feel completely content. But I could take a sip of water out of a bottle that had been sitting in the car for a couple of days and the next thing I knew, be throwing up all over myself. I’d given up all sense of discretion. At least it’s raining, I thought as I glumly wiped my mouth after throwing up next to the pump at the gas station. One night I was headed down to the trailer after dinner with Sam and Kir, the dogs at my heels, when the urge to puke hit me halfway across their basketball court. In between convulsions I realized that the dogs were devouring the vomit as fast as I produced it.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. “Where’s the fucking hose?” I dragged it over and began spraying down the basketball court, stopping every few seconds to shove the dogs away as I added to the mess.

  I’d been in the trailer for almost a month. It was time to get an apartment, if only to have a toilet of my very own.

  I went looking for it on an island. Just off the “coast” of Oakland, Alameda was isolated enough to feel somewhat undiscovered, a rarity in the Bay Area. There were wide, tree-lined avenues and a lot of craftsman bungalows mixed in with the Mediterranean and Victorian homes. Canals ran through the Bay side of the island, and people actually had docks and slips and boats in their backyards. The place had a time capsule feel to it; the two main drags were both filled with restaurants, but you wouldn’t want to eat at any of them. There were clothing stores too, but they seemed geared more t
o Edith Bunker than me. Signs of gentrification were creeping in, but slowly. Starbucks had just arrived, and people were actually excited by it. People said Alameda reminded them of the Midwest, but it reminded me of small-town Maine, the big difference being it was only twenty minutes from downtown San Francisco.

  Rents were low, relatively speaking, and—I couldn’t believe I was thinking this way—the public schools on the island were supposed to be good. Going to look at apartments, I’d wear baggy clothes or hold a file in front of my belly, hoping prospective landlords wouldn’t notice. I assumed that tenants with babies were about as appealing as tenants with pet pythons. And I found myself sounding apologetic whenever I explained that it would be just me and the baby. I assumed that even in the famously liberal Bay Area, they’d think there must be something wrong with me. But none of them seemed perturbed in the least by me or the prospect of my bastard child.

  Bastard child. I used that word a lot in those early days. Not with landlords, of course, but with my friends and family. If I was up front about the situation, then people wouldn’t feel they had to tiptoe around me.

  I said it one day on the phone with my father, flippantly as usual. I’d just reminded him that I wasn’t coming home for Christmas. Cash was tight, and I thought I’d just be settling into whatever new place I found.

  “But I’ll come home next summer for sure,” I said. “I’ll bring my bastard son home to meet the family. I wonder, is that like the prodigal son? Not quite I guess. Well, for one thing, we’re not returning.”

  I was babbling nonsensically, but my father wasn’t saying anything.

  “Dad?” I said. “Did I lose you?”

  “I’m here,” he said. Then he cleared his throat. “You must stop referring to him that way.”