What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  Do what you will with that information. I’m still sorting it.

  I did not want my boyfriend’s kids to summon deities to ruin my life, so I was not particularly calm. Rob, on the other hand, was very calm. He is not a child of divorce, and is also an eternal optimist. He was sure we’d all get along great!

  This is, of course, why we are a good match. I am on constant alert to impending disaster, and he is constantly certain that everything is going to be okay. We developed a shorthand for discussing this difference between us, which came from something I read once about anxiety. Basically, ancient man lived to procreate another day if he was on the lookout for things that might eat him, like a bear. So, mild anxiety that there might be a bear behind that tree keeps you ready so you can escape if there is indeed a bear behind the tree. An ancient man with no anxiety often became a delicious amuse-bouche.

  So when I sense impending doom, and Rob seems relaxed and calm, I say:

  “Dude, bear behind the tree!”

  Often, there is a bear behind the tree, and he’s grateful I showed him, surprised that I even knew to look. Other times, he takes my hand, and makes me walk around the tree, and points out that there’s no bear after all, and I calm down. It’s a good combo.

  We thus rolled out the new-girlfriend news at a snail’s pace. In my experience, there were a ton of starving grizzlies behind this tree. I didn’t love that the kids hadn’t gotten any “Daddy’s dating” news before the “Daddy has a girlfriend” news, and we briefly toyed with the idea of making up stories of bad dates for them to hear about for a couple of months. That had been my experience when my mom started dating, and, after hearing about enough guys breaking up with her for aerobics instructors, or having nervous breakdowns in Venezuela over another woman, I was rooting for her to find someone. But we ultimately decided that starting the whole shebang off with a lie seemed incorrect.

  So he just told them about me. And they didn’t cry, and wail, and beg for Daddy to go back to Mommy. They asked to see my picture, and wanted to know how we met. They said they were glad to see their newly divorced father so happy, after such a sad year. They talked about wanting to do some activity they were good at when they met me, so they could impress me.

  Basically, they made me feel like an asshole. I was a terrible child.

  Meanwhile, my stepmother got sicker and sicker, not responding to any of the treatments. I threw an over-the-top Christmas, with a shopping spree designed to cure cancer. Instead it just cured a lack of cashmere shawls, and scarves for balding heads.

  Meanwhile, Rob and I carefully planned the kidmeeting. We handpicked activities—nothing the boys would feel insecure doing, a combination of hangout time and playtime, and then, so we could just get used to being around each other without having to talk, we’d go see a show. We settled on the Cirque du Soleil show at the Santa Monica pier, realizing later that we had fallen into the perfect stereotype—Daddy was introducing his kids to his new girlfriend by taking them to the circus. I had images of two weeping children, holding a balloon and a cotton candy and a huge stuffed bear that in no way made up for their broken home.

  To avoid this, we had a set of rules, also based on things I hated as a child with dating parents. We would not touch each other in front of them. We would let the kids choose which of us they would sit by at the show. At the end of the night, Rob would not walk me out to the car. I didn’t want them to wonder what he was doing down in the garage with me. I wanted them to feel like I was leaving him with them, like I was a visitor and they were the home team. I would only hug them good-bye if they hugged me. Again, a lot of worry.

  My therapist says, “All tenderness comes from your first pain.” That is, all of those buttons that get pushed in your life, all of the things that bother you and worry you irrationally more than the same things bother other people, they all have to do with your first big heartbreak. I could access the feelings from those early years with my stepmother like they had happened yesterday, and I was terrified of making Rob’s kids feel any of them.

  I met up with all of them at the beach on a sunny winter day a couple of months after they learned about me. (Polepole!) The oldest wanted me to see him surf, on a new board he had just bought himself. I walked across the sand, and spotted the three of them silhouetted against the sparkling ocean. One big man, two little ones. They were a flurry of happy movement, hugging, wrestling, playing. I started to laugh, and cry a little, all alone on the sand, and snapped pictures from a distance, a stepkid paparazza. Was this what my family looked like? After all of these years of looking at other happy families, was this one mine?

  The kids ran up to me, and shook my hand. They answered my questions, and asked me questions, and I buried the nine-year-old in the sand. The twelve-year-old showed me his scars, and I told him that, one day, girls will flirt by asking him to tell the stories of how he got them. He liked that, and vowed to make up some good stories. They were whip smart, and hilarious, and seemed completely happy and calm.

  We cleaned up and then walked to the circus, stopping on the way at the playground rings on the beach, so they could show off their tricks. I did some tricks, too, giving myself a little whiplash, and a blood blister. Like me!!!! At the circus, the little one switched seats, and sat next to me. It took everything I had not to touch him—he had his father’s dreamy curls, and keeping my fingers out of them was an act of extreme willpower, reminding me of great first dates, where you’re trying to play it cool. At the end of the night, they hugged me good-bye. I was in love.

  And, the next day, I got the review: the kids had made a new Wii avatar named Kristin. A little boy home run.

  Two weeks after I met the kids who will make me a stepmother, my evil stepmother died. Now, this is the happily-ever-after in Disney films. The moment that is followed by song-and-dance numbers, where happy little people and all of the creatures of the forest flutter and celebrate, and the long-tormented princess gets her prince. Ding-dong.

  In real life, the princess, in the form of a thirty-eight-year-old, grudge-holding sitcom writer, found out via text from her eleven-year-old sister:

  MY MOMMY PASSED AWAY

  We learned that the tumor had been growing for years. It took a long time for it to fill her breast, because it was a very large breast. At my stepmother’s funeral there were many mentions of how proud she was of the top half of her body. My stepsister, who stopped working and moved home to nurse her mother and take care of our littler siblings when her mother was diagnosed, said that her mom would often talk about her high school years in the Philippines, where she was “popular, because she was skinny with big boobs.” My nineteen-year-old sister talked about how confusing her mother could be on the subject, shouting, “Don’t let boys touch your boobs” at her whenever she left the house. Yet, when it came time to buy a prom dress, she would guide my sister to the dresses that were the lowest cut, with the advice, “Show more of your boobs, it’s sexier!”

  In Greece, it is bad luck to compliment the beauty of a new baby, because there is a superstition that it will attract the negative attention of the Gods. So, like an actor is told to “break a leg,” new parents in Greece hear, “What an ugly baby!” That was what I was thinking about as I listened to Patty’s sisters and daughters talk about her obsession with the exact body part that ended up killing her.

  I did not plan on speaking at my stepmother’s funeral. I thought I had nothing nice to say. I thought that everyone would see the truth: that my heart was breaking for my motherless little siblings, but that I was not grieving. Because maybe my father now had a chance for a fresh start from a woman he could not afford to divorce. Maybe he would even sober up now that he wasn’t in an unhappy marriage, and do yard work again, and get off the couch and engage in the world like he used to and be the kind of father to my baby sister he had been to me before it all went so, so wrong. Maybe he would finally be happy. I was afraid everyone would see that even though Patty and I had, finally, exc
hanged “I love you”s, and I had prayed to the God I once invoked to hurt her to this time make her better, that I wouldn’t miss her.

  But then my siblings spoke.

  And they were eloquent, and beautiful. I was so proud of these people that Patty had made. They told us all things I had never known about their mother, and spoke about her in ways that made me wonder if I would have hated her so much if she hadn’t been cast as the Bad Guy in the movie of my life. Then they led us all in an Our Father, a prayer I only knew because I had said it at a tremendous number of other people’s weddings:

  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  I had spent the week watching my siblings sleep in one room, piled on and around each other for support, just like their family-centric mom had taught them to do. And I realized that, someday, when my own mom dies, and when our dad dies, I’ll have them just like they have each other. If it weren’t for my stepmother, I would have had to go through that alone. Instead, I’ll probably go through it in a bed filled with people and dogs and cats and snacks. And, so, I stood up, and I thanked Patty for giving me the greatest gift of my life.

  And I wondered if she might not have been so awful if I had been as kind to her as my boyfriend’s kids were being to me.

  Vacation romances are so sweet because they’re finite. Every moment together is one of your last. They’re the one bite of dessert you’re allowed on your big diet, the fifteen-minute nap stolen by an exhausted new parent. The world is a thing that exists only to tear the two of you apart, which brings you very close together. And the fact that you found each other at all, on this huge planet, in this Bedouin cave or that boat in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef, feels like a miracle.

  But regular relationships are going to end, too … even if it’s when you’re a hundred years old. Furthermore, life is going to end. (I’m tempted to say, “Life is going to end, man,” because my reference to mortality makes me feel ridiculous. But it is, man.) And if you can somehow remember that all of life, and every relationship, is going to end, man, every moment becomes sweet. Every kiss could be your last, even thirty years into a marriage, even if you marry a much younger spouse who is supposed to outlive you, even if you Settle for Mr. Good Enough who you’re sure will never leave you, even if you wait for Mr. Movie Moment. It’s all as fleeting as a once-in-a-lifetime weekend on an exotic island. The challenge is to hold on to that.

  The summer after losing her mom, my baby sister came out to L.A. and went to summer camp with Rob’s boys, who are about her age. Rob’s oldest son pointed out that if Rob married me and he married my (adorable) sister, he and his father would be brothers-in-law. Which will most probably end up a TV pilot. Watching my sister and Rob’s sons play together felt like the happy ending to so many sad divorces, so many splintered families. The pieces were finally re-forming into something new.

  Am I still terrified of settling down? Of course. But I think it’s going to go okay. Last week I had a Saturday-night family dinner with the three boys. I picked up dessert, which has become my thing. Rob had just had a work triumph, and so I also brought a bottle of champagne, and a bottle of Martinelli’s. He wasn’t sure if he’d gotten the champagne flutes in the divorce, but we found them, buried deep in a high cabinet. We blew dust out of the flutes, and poured four glasses of bubbles.

  After dinner, we decided to play Wii. The kids turned on the game, and dozens of avatars they had created ran around on the screen. There I was, the little me they had made, and I wasn’t fat or old, like I had feared. I looked a lot like me. A little version of their dad was there, too, and both kids, and both sets of grandparents, and the kids’ mom. All of us running around on the same screen now, together.

  I ran this book by Rob before I sold it (making him read this last chapter first; I’m no dummy). I wanted to make sure he was okay with it for obvious bleeding-on-Brazilian reasons. After settling down with a couple of stiff drinks and the manuscript, he reassuringly offered me his complete support. And then this:

  “You inspired me,” he said. “I’m kind of jealous of all your adventures.”

  Oh shit. The last person I want getting inspired to run off and have sexy single international adventures is him. But then he continued:

  “I think before we have another kid, I want to have been on all seven continents with you.”

  I told my mom about this perfect ending that he gave me, for my life, and for my book. Our girl doesn’t have to stay home to find love and family, she has to hit the road again, but now with one to three extra boys in tow!

  “Hm, interesting,” my mother said.

  One week later, she called with an offer she had never before made: for my Christmas present, she wanted to buy Rob and me a trip.

  “Anywhere in the world Rob has never been,” was my mother’s only stipulation for her attempt to purchase a grandchild.

  This spring we hit Asia and South America, trips that incredibly poetically filled up the last page of the single-girl passport I got for that first trip to Argentina. That passport features a photo of a shiny, bleary-eyed, thirty-year-old girl who had rushed to the last-minute passport desk after a sleepless night spent tussling with a young punk rocker. It replaced the passport with the photo of the pudgy-cheeked college senior about to go to Europe with her first boyfriend for the first time. Both of them are now in a hidden drawer with my grandma’s jewelry, the place where I keep my most valuable possessions.

  I’d tell you the stories from my first trip out of the country with a boyfriend in almost fifteen years … but they’re personal. I will say that it was really nice to be flying back to Los Angeles free of the debilitating realization that I had to get back on Match.com when I got home. And I will say that all Rob has left is Antarctica.

  “Surely he’s not going to hold you to Antarctica,” my mother said.

  Epilogue

  “Awesome for Awesome”

  In perfect-movie-ending timing, as I write this last chapter of a book about my single life, I’m living the last week of my single life. Rob and I bought a house together in Santa Monica for the four of us and my cat and his sons’ dog, and we’re moving in next week, the same week my book is due. So I’m sorting through closets filled with decades of old love letters and pictures and plane tickets, old money belts filled with lists of long-gone clubs in Amsterdam and international phone numbers and travelers check receipts (remember those?). I’m putting them all away into boxes as I run back and forth to my computer putting away memories into this book. The book can go on a shelf in our new house, the boxes might have to go into deep storage. But they’re both getting put away.

  I found a renter for the single-girl house that I bought nine years ago, the house I thought I’d only be in for a couple of years before finding my guy. A hilarious comedienne is moving in, using it as her landing pad after a divorce. It makes me happy that someone who makes me laugh is going to lick her wounds in the house that kept me warm and safe while I licked mine.

  I’ve been walking around my neighborhood taking pictures—of the baristas who helped me learn how to have Sunday breakfast alone, of my favorite Banksy mural of cats running across a wall down the block. I’m only moving eight miles away, but I’m saying good-bye to this place like it’s an exotic, beloved foreign land that I may never see again. I’m really sad about leaving my house, and my life. But how lucky is that? It means despite the lonely moments, the nights in bed saying “I love you” to no one just because it had been so long since I had said “I love you” before going to sleep, that I was happy here. Even though this book was all about my struggle to NOT be a sad, single girl looking for love, that does not mean I was not often a sad, single girl, and I was absolutely looking for love. I just thought love was going to look different than it turned out to look, and so I ran away from it a lot. But my story wasn’t ultimately a sad story. Being a single girl was pretty spectacular. Thank God I’m blue about changing my life. It means
I’m trading awesome for awesome.

  I don’t think I would have published this book if I were still single. I would have been afraid it would be too much for someone who was considering dating me. Even though I was comfortable in my skin as a single woman, and I’m proud of the life I’ve lived, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable enough to do something as naked as write this all down if I was still looking for love. Shockingly (to maybe only me), being in a relationship has done the opposite of limiting me. It’s emboldened me to try something much scarier than I would have tried if I were alone. Maybe Rachel the Hasidic journalist was right: love frees you to be the person you actually are.

  My ending up with a nice guy with two kids in my own town is as much of a miracle as it would have been for me to end up with a priest from Argentina. It took an awful lot of running to and from so many things to turn into the person who would make this choice. My nice guy may live in my city, but I had to travel farther to find him than I had to travel to find Father Juan or Aleg or Inon or Cristiano. It was a long trip … but a great one.

  So, finally, finally, I didn’t choose a bite of decadent dessert that leaves you hungry, and a little sick, and disappointed in yourself for the poor care you are taking of your body. I’ve finally chosen a healthy, delicious, three-course meal. But if there is one message I want to put out into the world with my little life story, it’s this: It’s also okay to sometimes have popcorn and red wine for dinner. It’s a harmless kind of naughty that can make a night alone on the couch a lot of fun.