Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle

by Rachel Dratch

  I’ve Got Spirit!

  During the pregnancy, I felt quite sure the baby would make it to full term. The disadvantage of being of “advanced maternal age” is that you do have a higher chance of miscarriage. However, I felt I would be having this baby, because I realized I had been told just that by Shelley the Channeler not quite one year ago.

  I know that reading all these stories about pigs and dreams and The Secret might make the reader think I am super-into the metaphysical and really New Age-y. I’m definitely open to that stuff, but I don’t think of myself as airy-fairy. I feel more like I started to notice the strange phenomena around me rather than be closed off to them. This whole ball got rolling in a sense when my friend Josan took me to see Shelley the Channeler on my birthday a few months before I met John. Josan herself is psychic—not for a living, not for money, but it’s just a gift she has. So that year on my birthday, I was in LA, and Josan picked me up for a birthday lunch and told me afterward, “We are going to see my friend Shelley the Channeler.” “OK,” I said, “bring it on!”

  We arrived at her house in Rancho Palos Verdes and I met Shelley—a woman of about sixty with a slight Midwestern twang. Or, I don’t know, maybe she was a lifelong mellow Californian. But she didn’t greet us drenched in crystals or dreamcatchers or anything like that.

  Shelley channels a spirit named Kendra. So you sit on her couch and she does this sort of blessing thing and then her head pops up and she has become Kendra. Kendra speaks with an accent akin to an Indian accent and her eyes are bright and girlish and her voice is chirpy like a bird’s.

  “Hello! How are you?”

  I couldn’t help but giggle a bit self-consciously.

  “Um. I’m fine.”

  “Good!” says Kendra. “I’m very glad you are here to see me!”

  Kendra starts talking to me about who I am, who my family is to me, what I worry about, what my strengths are, and it was all spot-on. Instantly. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could find through Google. It was like she knew my emotions, my concerns, anxieties, not facts and external things about me. She wouldn’t say, “Now, do you have a brother?” trying to feel out my situation. She would definitively say, “Your brother is experiencing this or that.” So I’m already instantly impressed.

  Also, side story here—I had done a visioning workshop once in California. OK, now it’s really hard to believe I’m not into all this stuff, but just go with me here. We were supposed to imagine our spirit guide taking us on a journey. Everyone in the workshop seemed to be able to imagine a spirit guide, a specific person they had never met, with a face they could see, that would lead them on this journey. Try as I might, I could not envision a spirit guide. Every time the leader mentioned the guide, I had to confess to myself that this vision just wasn’t happening for me. Instead, I kept envisioning a blue dot. About the height of a person, my spirit guide looked not unlike a large, blue, iridescent M&M. But I referred to it as the Blue Dot—not the Blue Circle or the Blue Orb—the Blue Dot. I would joke with the other participants during the breaks, because I had shared with a few of them that I couldn’t see a person, so every time the leader would say, “Your spirit guide takes you by the hand” or “Your spirit guide takes you into their arms,” I’d think, “My guide doesn’t have arms! It’s just a blue M&M!”

  This workshop had taken place several years ago. I hadn’t thought of it or the Blue Dot in a long time. As I was sitting on the couch and listening to Kendra the Spirit talking to me, she said, “You are guided by the spirit of the Blue Dot.”

  In the tradition of the Great Writers who have gone before me, I will now call upon the phrase “I shit you not.”

  Kendra did make a few predictions for me. She said, “You are going to meet a man in three months. No, wait, six months—in three to six months.”

  By now, I hadn’t dated anyone seriously for five years, so this seemed too good to be true.

  “What should I do to meet him?” I asked. I was thinking, “Does this mean I have to go on Match.com?”

  “You won’t have to do anything. Also, you are going to have one child.”

  I was highly skeptical of this prediction. Sure, that would be lovely if it were true. I would like to believe. But did this spirit from India or somewhere that had an accent that sounded mildly Indian realize that I was turning forty-three at the time and I was completely single? Having a child would mean defying some major odds. It would have to be some sort of miracle at this point. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to offend Kendra. I nodded politely.

  Four months later, I met John in the bar. I didn’t have to do anything. He just started talking to me. And a little less than a year after Kendra told me, I learned I would be having a baby. The whole time in that iffy stage of the first trimester, even when I was thinking, “Well, you never know, this might not ‘take’ due to my age and the chance of miscarriage,” Kendra’s words were in the back of my head. I didn’t even tell John about Kendra, but I had a feeling of “Oh, this is going to happen,” because Kendra the Vaguely Indian Spirit had told me I was going to have one child.

  What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting

  I open the book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, sent to me by a dear friend from home. The first line is “So you’ve made the decision to start a family….” In my mind, that sentence became “So you’ve made the highly premeditated decision to start a family. You and your HUSBAND have been planning and anticipating this for years. It’s finally time! The glorious miracle of life is within you, and you are aglow with excitement and anticipation.” My brain goes blank. Where’s the book that starts out “So you’re forty-three and think you can’t have kids but unexpectedly got pregnant on a trip to Hawaii with a guy you’ve known for six months who you think is a good guy but the two of you aren’t even close to any sort of commitment?” Where is that book?

  After San Francisco, John showed signs that he would be supportive in some fashion, though I didn’t know to what extent. I remember he sent me a big gift certificate for maternity clothes that made me feel like he wasn’t going to run away or not show up. I think that made my parents think he was a good guy as well. They still had yet to meet him. He ended up visiting me about once a month or so and was helping me out when he was here, but because he lived in California, I went to most all of my doctor’s appointments solo. I honestly didn’t mind, though. I had many friends offer to accompany me, especially to the amnio appointment, but I declined. I like braving the doctor’s by myself, and if I have someone there with a concerned look on their face, saying, “Are you okaaay?” it can take me out of my strong zone. I did have my friend David, one of the Dartmouth Gays, accompany me to the genetic counseling session, because I wanted a second person there to think up questions I might have forgotten and to help me remember everything after it was over. I went ahead with the amnio, and everything—all those “advanced maternal age” problems the doctors look for—checked out OK.

  I tried checking one of those week-by-week pregnancy Web sites. Here’s what it said:

  YOUR PREGNANCY: WEEK 22

  If your list of baby things to do seems to be getting longer the bigger you get, don’t stress out. Make a pact with your partner that one day or evening a week, you’ll do something that has nothing to do with the baby. How about the latest Anne Hathaway flick and dinner?

  What if my partner lives in California and is just trying to do the right thing by preparing to be a good dad and we don’t quite know yet where we stand with each other and he isn’t here to take me to the latest damn Anne Hathaway flick? Or worse yet, what if I were a woman whose partner had skipped out and wanted nothing to do with his child and so that “list of baby things to do that’s getting longer” can’t be sweetened by a partner one evening a week or any evening ever? Because there are women out there who are reading that Web site who are in that situation, and ain’t no Anne Hathaway flick gonna solve that.

  I was feeling scared. Anne Hathaway was
n’t going to help.

  Giggles and Tears

  Now I was the one who was pregnant and I was about to be the perpetrator of my very own shower on innocent victims. I hoped to make it as painless as possible. My shower would be coed and in the evening, so I hoped it would feel just like a regular gathering with only a small time allotted to look at tiny pants.

  I didn’t know the first thing about what a baby needs or what items would be necessary to make my life infinitely easier, but I had to create a registry. So I brought in the experts: David and Russell. Maybe because they felt lucky to have won the adoption lottery, or maybe because they actually had to pass the test of being “worthy” of being good parents (unlike the rest of us), but whatever the case, they had done more research on infant care and more preparation before they became fathers than any other parents I knew.

  At the insistence of David, we did not meet at the Babies “R” Us right near my apartment but rather on the Upper West Side at a store called Giggle. This is high-end, gay-worthy baby stuff we are talking. I had just seen the documentary Babies, which features the lives of happy babies in Africa and Mongolia, so absolutely all of the store items were looking particularly unnecessary right now to me anyway, and I just wanted to register for some sticks, a few goats, and a swarm of flies to create a truly happy and adorable child.

  The second I walked into Giggle, I started to feel a ball of anxiety taking over my body. I could see it appearing on the horizon, getting larger and larger, but I was trying to wait to acknowledge it until the process was over. The anxiety was “Oh my God! I could be doing this alone.” My sunshiny outlook, which I had carefully fed and cultivated for five months, was faltering at the sight of the brightly colored Happy Town I was entering. Each toy with googly eyes seemed to stare me down with a challenging expression: “Aren’t you happy? Aren’t we cute? This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN THIS?”

  We started off in the stroller area. “Do you want me to walk you through how this works?” asked the clerk. Aaaand … Brain Shutdown. White TV Fuzz. I knew I would not absorb one thing she said, let alone remember it four months later when the baby finally arrived. I was too busy fighting the fear. “No, let’s save that to the end,” I said. We moved on to the next department, the Breast Area.

  “Oh, Lord. No, no, cannot compute, no, no, no.” I could not handle learning about the mysteries of breast-feeding right away. Yes, I planned on breast-feeding, but all I could think was “Not now. Please, not now.” I had recently seen Maya Rudolph at our SNL reunion show and she was pumping breast milk in an office. I had never seen this before. Believe me, it looked like a damn horror show. I didn’t know nipples could stretch that far. “Um, can we save Breast Town for later too?” This was only the second department we had approached and the second thing I was asking to save for later. I knew that whatever department came next, I would have to face it. It’s like if you taste wine at a restaurant and it’s really bad so you ask to try another wine, but then the thing is, you have to like that second one or you are just being a pain in the ass. Sometimes the second one is even worse, and I’ll choke out through a grimace, “That’s great. Yes, that one.” Notice how I’m turning to a wine analogy for a baby store. Is that a bad sign? Well, it’s what I knew. I knew wine. I did not know nipples.

  We moved on to the cribs. I could handle cribs. I peered into a high-end crib that had cute padding around all the sides. “Now,” said David, “some people are against this padding that goes around the sides, because the baby can roll over and get their face pressed up against it and they can…” He trailed off and made a face of “and you know what happens next.” I filled in the blank for him. “She dead.”

  He nodded and continued, “But if you take the padding off of the crib, they can hit their heads on the bars.” OK. So this crib poses the question: With which method do you want to kill your baby?

  From here on in, each item came with a cautionary tale from David about how each thing you “had to have” could easily turn into a death trap if you weren’t very clear on the instructions. Car seat? “If you put them in the car seat,” said David, “make sure to not just buckle the strap that goes across their chest. You also have to fasten the strap that comes up between their legs. Some people don’t do the strap between the legs and then the baby can slide downward and…”

  I filled in the blank for him. “And … she dead.”

  Baby slings? I had just read about a recall of certain baby slings. You don’t get the right kind … she dead. You had to know the instructions. Side note: I never read instructions. Not on my BlackBerry, not on my camera. I am probably missing out on hundreds of functions just because I shut down when reading instructions. So I don’t know how to use the zoom function on my camera. But it’s not going to kill a baby!

  We moved on to the socks section. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Ahhhhh! I know socks. I can handle socks.” I even doubled back to Breast Town, feeling I could finally tackle it. I had waded around in the pool and was ready for the deep end.

  I left the store feeling accomplished. I had done it. I had registered. There was so much more to do, but I had gotten over the first hurdle. I said good-bye to David and Russell and thanked them profusely. I was going to meet my friend Ricki to see a play, and as I started to walk, I had the nagging, tugging feeling that I was going to cry. Not tears of joy. Not tears of “You did it! Good for you. What a big step!” Tears of straightup fear. I was alone. I could be handling all these things alone. I didn’t know if I was up for the challenge. I felt a complete lack of confidence expand and take over. I didn’t cry, though. I got on the subway and met Ricki. We sat in our seats in the theater and waited for the lights to go down.

  “How’d it go with David and Russell?”

  “Good,” I said. “They were really helpful. But I feel like…”

  “What?”

  “I feel like I might cry.”

  And then I did. Sitting in the seat, surrounded by other theatergoers, I felt tears start to form in my eyes and run down my face.

  “Ohhh,” said Ricki, a mother of three kids with a fantastically helpful and involved husband. “It’ll be OK.”

  Something deep within was telling me it would be OK, but for now this was Fear Day, and I guess I just had to let it happen. This stuff had to come out at some point, I suppose. It’s weird that it happened at a place called Giggle.

  A few months later, Ricki ended up throwing me my version of the perfect shower: It was at night, it was coed, alcohol was served, and to spare others the pain of all those hours I had logged over the years, I raced through the gifts in record speed.

  I have a confession, though. I did receive some baby jeans from the Gap. In spite of my previous convictions, upon opening them, I did say, “Awwww!” and got a little teary over the cuteness of those tiny pants.

  We Are Thrilled to Announce the Birth of … Hercules!?

  Three months into the pregnancy and I was sure it was a girl. I have always been right in guessing the genders of my friends’ kids in the womb, and the second I found out I was pregnant, I just knew it was a girl. I was thinking only about girl names, so sure was I. I did want to find out the gender ahead of time because I already had enough uncertainty about so many aspects of the whole process, though to me, with my self-proclaimed psychic powers, this was just a formality. I went in for an ultrasound one day and the nurse said, “Do you want to know the sex of your baby?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s a boy!”

  All the springs in my head went boioioioioioioioingnngngngg. The nurse kept talking, but my brain was just a blur. I had this girl vision comfortably settled in my head and now that had been turned upside down. I realized as I was absorbing the news that maybe I had made this baby a girl in my mind to make myself feel more at ease. I’m a girl. I know girls. I know what they like to do, and if it was just going to be me as a single mom, I could picture that. Something a
bout having a boy and possibly not having his dad around made me more nervous, even though that may have been an irrational thought. I called up John to tell him the news. He seemed freaked out too, like he may be having the same irrational thought.

  At some point in all of the proceedings, I think when I was about six months along, though I never outright requested it of him, John told me he was planning on moving to New York. He said he couldn’t imagine going through his day in California, knowing he had a child growing up across the country. Luckily, with his job, he could work from anywhere. Again, we still hadn’t figured us out, but I was imagining having to explain to my child why his dad wasn’t here when many of the other kids’ dads were, so I was relieved to know that my baby would have his dad in his life. I’m still going to have explaining to do since I don’t know that we will be a conventional family, but luckily, I live in New York City at the moment, capital of the unconventional families. For now, the plan was that John would find an apartment near me and sublet his place in California. There were the basic logistics of space concerns with my one-bedroom apartment and John working out of his home, but also, given the short amount of time we had dated, we both just felt more comfortable playing it safe. Yes, putting us all in the same tiny apartment would work for the romantic comedy version of the story, but as we already learned in chapter one, I ain’t a leading lady in a rom-com.