Baby Love Read online

  I don’t know if I wanted her to be like all the other mothers I’ve seen get the news, whooping for joy and crying and jumping up and down, but when she didn’t, I was overcome with doubt. Flopping down on the bed, I regressed all the way back to high school, when I got my acceptance letter from Yale. I was ecstatic, and proudly presented the letter to my mother as she cooked dinner. She calmly husked a few ears of corn, and then asked why I would want to go to a conservative bastion of male privilege. It didn’t take ten seconds for me to question my own dreams. Why did I want to go to one of the most well-respected colleges in the world?

  Why am I having a baby?

  Glen found me lying on the floor, practically catatonic, staring out into space with tears streaming down my face. We talked for a long time about rites of passage, and how everyone is bound to have a reaction that has nothing to do with me. Mothers and fathers have to reckon with their own mortality, with becoming grandparents, and what that means about where they are in the life cycle. He told me to get ready, people say the strangest things when you tell them you are pregnant because it brings up so much for them.

  Like I did when I met with my literary agent about this book. She told me she was pregnant with her third baby, and I said something awful like, How can you possibly take care of three children? Or even worse, Was it an accident? Then I grilled her on whether she would be able to take care of her baby, my book, and me. I was seized with anxiety in the moment, but really, her pregnancy rang my bell. Happy, vibrant, strong, direct. I thought, If she can be a VP of her company, gaze adoringly at a photo of her husband whipped out of her purse, and talk about how her kids are the greatest gifts of her life, this baby thing must be possible.

  I went to sleep pondering whether I got more positive messaging about having a baby from my agent in thirty-five minutes than I did from my mother in thirty-five years.

  April 13

  I’m back in Berkeley, in my apartment that suddenly looks like a broom closet. Where am I going to put a crib?

  Dr. Lowen ordered an ultrasound this morning to make sure that there really is a baby growing inside me. Isn’t that why I’d asked Becky ten times if she was sure? Dr. Lowen says we need to know that the fetus is inside my uterus and not ectopic. Ectopic! Glen had to calm me down. All I could think was that a problem must have showed up on the last blood test and Dr. Lowen didn’t want to tell me on the phone and give me heart failure.

  Glen drove me to the hospital, and then tried to distract me in the waiting room with bad jokes and blueberries. I kept asking him what we’d do if the baby were ectopic, if I lost the baby before I even had her. How is it possible to feel so attached so soon? By the time the technician called my name, I was sure it was all going to end in tragedy. She poked and rubbed and scanned and prodded my uterus for about twenty minutes, looking for the tiny cluster of cells and shaking her head until I was convinced the whole thing was a fluke. At that exact moment, when I squeezed Glen’s hand and said, Well, maybe we don’t have a baby after all, the technician pushed the button on her mouse ball and drew a line from one point to the other. Got it.

  So now it’s super-duper official. I’ve got a baby growing in my uterus. It’s really the most surreal, ridiculous, amazing thing.

  April 15

  Rushed around, getting ready to fly to Minneapolis to speak on the importance of mentorship in young women’s lives at the Minnesota Conference on Adolescent Females. Usually I like going to Minneapolis, but today I am just so tired. I can’t imagine getting on a plane and then turning around the next day to come back. It’s only three and a half hours each way, but at the moment, Minnesota may as well be the North Pole.

  I was up all night consumed with anxiety about money—mine and every other mother’s. By most standards I am well off, but now that all I do is think about the stuff I am going to have to pay for, like the college education that’s going to cost two million dollars in eighteen years, I don’t know. I remember my mother making endless calculations on brown paper bags and blank pages in her journal when I was a child, and my father sitting at the dining-room table writing checks out every month, his brow furrowed and intense. They must have felt the same way, going over the numbers again and again, wondering how it was all going to work out.

  I woke up feeling guilty for even thinking about all this. Most people in the world raise their children with far less than I have. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Even when you have enough money to pay for nonessentials like organic produce and designer toothpaste, there is still the yawning fear of not having, losing everything, living in deprivation.

  I definitely thought about money long before this baby moved into my womb. I worried about how we were going to send my ex-girlfriend’s son, Solomon, to boarding school. I worried about the cost of health insurance, and how little money I put into my IRA. But now my thinking has a frightening urgency. I find myself wondering how all the other pregnant women and mothers and fathers manage what basically boils down to sheer terror in the face of so much responsibility. Religion suddenly makes a lot more sense. So does workaholism. And Xanax. And back-to-the-land movements that emphasize doing more with less.

  I bolted out of bed this morning to research the Voluntary Simplicity movement. I read dozens of entries by people named Sinnan and Marigold who grow their own food, wear only three pairs of pants, and make their own soap. I learned that an American baby consumes two hundred times more of the earth’s resources than a baby from Eritrea.

  By the time Glen woke up, I was deep in my closet, figuring out how many pairs of shoes and sweaters I could transform into fossil fuel in order to justify having an American baby. When he asked what I was doing, I snapped that I was freaking out about money, wasn’t that obvious? He sat in the big chair in our bedroom and put his feet up, watching me. I mean really, I said, how are we going to put this baby through college?

  He paused. There are always student loans. Student loans? I said, lifting my head out of a storage bin at the back of the closet. I had forgotten about those. Weren’t several of my friends still paying off their student loans, and didn’t they seem as neurotic and happy as anybody else? I gently extracted a purple sweater from the giveaway pile.

  Having a partner who thinks rationally and optimistically even when I cannot does not eliminate my anxiety about supporting another human being for the next twenty years, but it certainly helps.

  April 22

  I made it back from Minneapolis last night in one piece, but this morning I almost killed myself with a spritz of perfume. I’ve been trying to ignore the growing intensity of my reaction to smells, but today I just couldn’t. I took off all my clothes, got back in the shower, and scrubbed off the barest hint of perfume I had put on my neck. Then I drove to my homeopath’s office grumbling about what a bummer it is that I can’t wear scent without feeling like I am on a capsizing catamaran.

  Marie’s excitement cheered me up. I feel it’s her victory, too, because from the moment I said I wanted to have a baby, she’s been right there with me, giving me flower tinctures and vitamin D, progesterone tablets and visualizations of myself big and pregnant with a happy, healthy baby.

  After the hugs and whoops, I confessed that I almost gave up on our noninvasive plan because I thought that after six months, I wasn’t getting any younger and should try the medical model. I told her that I had already scheduled the HSG (hysterosalpingogram), where they inject dye into your fallopian tubes to see if they work, and I had a prescription for the ovulation-inducing Clomid in my bag. It was the preliminary, precautionary pregnancy test Dr. Lowen ordered that revealed the fruit of our homeopathic work.

  Marie didn’t bat an eye or get judgmental, and that’s why I love her, my kindhearted M.D. homeopath. She just said, Well, good thing you didn’t have to go through all of that! and started making a list of all the foods I should start eating: farm-raised lamb, eggs, Norwegian fish oil.

  Then we talked about whether I should stop taking the lo
w-dose antidepressant I’ve been taking to counteract God-knows-how-many generations of depression in my family tree. The thought of quitting cold turkey is terrifying. I have gone from being skeptical of my little purple pill, to angry that I need it, to hugely grateful to all of the good people in big pharma involved in creating it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it has allowed me to have some semblance of a normal life.

  As I looked on expectantly, Marie checked her big pharmaceutical handbook to see if trials have been done on pregnant women. Limited trials, she said, but the drug is rated B for pregnancy, which means it’s not stellar, but it is doable. I looked at her across the desk covered with mugs, supplements, and files. Unless we know for sure that it will hurt the baby, I said, I just don’t think it’s a good idea for me to stop. The first thing depression takes from me is hope, and I am pretty sure I can’t have a baby without that. She agreed.

  I left her office feeling good about the decision, but still full of concern. In addition to all of the other ways I can lose or harm this baby, I can now add the possibility of damaging his nervous system with what to some is an optional drug.

  I also wonder about straddling the medical ob/gyn and homeopathic worlds. In theory they are compatible, but in reality I am not so sure. Dr. Lowen is all business and efficiency, Formica and fluorescents, and Marie is soft lighting and colorful art, hugs and flower remedies. Of course, Marie says they are compatible—after all, she is an M.D.—and Dr. Lowen tries to sound sympathetic when I mention the natural methods. But in real life, there seems to be an eerie disconnect between the two that leaves me slightly uncertain about both.

  Which brings me back to where I started, at the perfume that triggered today’s initial bout of uncertainty about what may be the biggest decision I’ve ever made. Is this the beginning of the end? Is this the first of many things I love that I will have to give up for the baby? First perfume and then sanity, sleep, and travel to interesting places? Is this what everybody means when they say your life will never be the same? Say goodbye to emotional stability? Say goodbye to amber, lavender, rose, and sandalwood? Say goodbye to Brooklyn, Paris, and Dakar?

  Is there any peace in this process? I struggled for years to decide whether to become a parent. Now that it’s happening, I’m plagued by apocalyptic visions of how it’s going to turn out. Has it always been this way? Is this elixir of ambivalence and anxiety the universal experience of motherhood, or is it just America, circa right now?

  Two

  MANY WOMEN SAY that for as long as they can remember, they’ve wanted to have a baby. They say that playing with dolls was their first introduction to the idea of motherhood, that they’ve known since childhood they would give birth.

  I didn’t play with dolls. I never knew, the way I knew that I would go to college and eventually earn a living, that I would have a baby. Unlike the women who can’t pinpoint exactly how or why they came to the feeling, I remember exactly when and where I felt the first pang of maternal desire.

  I was in Africa, in a country so foreign that none of my old thoughts about myself could hold. I found I could live without running water and electricity. I could survive armed soldiers and random searches of my bags on public buses. I could be friends, sisters even, with women who covered themselves from head to toe in swaths of black cloth.

  And, because of a man I met, I could fantasize about having a child.

  Ade was and still is a devout Muslim. We met in the middle of Ramadan and spent hours on the rooftop of my guesthouse talking about his culture. In conversations I dominated, I questioned him pointedly about how women were treated. What were his thoughts about the veil? Forget niceties. I wanted to know if the women in his family were circumcised. I asked these questions, but I can’t say I was open to Ade’s answers. Though only twenty years old, I was positive I knew much more than Ade about the gender politics of his country from the books I had read and women I had befriended.

  But Ade wasn’t affected by my arrogance. He listened to each of my criticisms intently, and responded with a rather (compared to mine) complex view. He told me first what he believed (women are as powerful as men and should be respected as equals), and then explained what the Quran taught (one of the Prophet’s wives was a businesswoman who financed his rise), and then finally conceded the interpretation of those with power (women should be subordinate and obedient). He was adamant that there was no circumcision, but promised to ask Fatima, a rare female friend with whom he could talk about these things, and tell me what she said.

  What can I say? I fell for Ade during those conversations. Ade could talk. He wasn’t afraid of me. He seemed to know his own mind, to have considered the issues I raised and come to some decisions, decisions I respected even if I didn’t agree. He was unfamiliar with the intellectual combat I was honing at college, and his lack of competitiveness allowed me a relaxed curiosity I had not known. When he left, I felt awake and alive, as if the door of everything I had learned had been blown open.

  Because of this and other factors too numerous to mention here, I stayed several months with Ade, and one day, after I had convinced my traveling companion to go to Tanzania without me and I no longer knew when I would leave Ade’s tiny island or why, I went out in a dhow with Ade and some friends. We were far from the shore, out on the open sea. I was wearing a gray T-shirt and Ade’s blue-and-white-striped kikoi around my waist. Ade was balancing himself on the hull of the boat, releasing the rope that let the ship’s battered sail unfurl in the wind.

  As the boat picked up speed, I leaned back on my elbows and imagined a future with Ade. Even though his culture and beliefs ran up against everything I knew and held sacred, I found myself fantasizing that I would spend the rest of my life with him, that I would wash clothes by hand in a basin with two cups of water, and give up reading at night because we wouldn’t have electricity. I dreamed that I would dress modestly and respect his mother, that I would learn to cook delicious food in huge aluminum pots over an open fire.

  And then the fantasy I’d never had: the dream that was less about Ade than it was about what I suddenly saw as possible for my life. I would have a baby with Ade, two babies, three babies, as many babies as I could.

  A baby. I want to have a baby.

  And then, just as quickly, I turned my eyes from the sky to the floor of the old boat and thought, That’s ridiculous. I can’t have a baby. I have to finish school and start my career.

  April 25

  I’m back in Mendocino. The drive up from Berkeley last night was awful. I was so nauseated going around the curves, we had to stop the car. As I leaned out the window gulping air and smelling the blood of fresh roadkill thirty feet away, I thought seriously about walking, or going to sleep in the backseat and trying again in the morning. I was so happy to get to the gate to the house. I threw myself on the ground and lay there smelling the dirt and waiting for the world to stop spinning.

  I’m nauseated and exhausted, but none of that has any effect whatsoever on my urge to nest. I’m always trying to make a home because I moved so many times as a kid, but now my nesting thing is on, like, hyperturbo overdrive. My mind just goes tick, tick, tick across every room, scanning for possible upgrades and nooks that could be softer, more comfortable, more homey.

  After we unpacked the bags and bags of food, and after I set up my desk by hooking up my laptop and getting the lamp positioned just so, I checked the shower tile and the light fixtures. Then I went around and made a list of the other changes I needed to talk to Carl, my friend the builder/contractor, about.

  I don’t know how he does it, but Glen just reads and eats and relaxes as I run around trying to make everything perfect. By just leaving me alone, he gives me permission to be myself and I love that. I feel the animal aspect of it, too. I am making the nest and he’s standing over it, protecting all three of us while I do it.

  April 28

  Today I feel sad, tired, and unsure about everything. Like I have no real support outside of Glen
for having this baby. Like I have no healthy models for how to have a family. My parents barely spoke to each other for twenty-five years. After raising two children together, my father and stepmother live somewhat separate lives. My relationships thus far have been, um, educational, but not terribly successful.

  I am trying not to ruminate on all of this and to believe that I can reverse the divorce dynamic by staying with Glen until one of us dies, but it’s like my mind is in a vise. When I am not throwing up or wanting to throw up, I am having anxiety attacks about being homeless, unable to keep my family together, and making the same mistakes my parents made. Other variations on the doomsday theme running through my mind: miscarriage, miscarriage, and miscarriage.

  I would rather die than hurt my baby, but I think I would actually die if I lost my baby.

  Is that a depressed thought or a normal pregnancy feeling?

  April 30

  Today I was outrageously nauseated, but went looking at gates with Carl anyway. I think I can safely describe Carl as an aging hippie. He built many houses in Anderson Valley and along the Mendocino coast, and is incredibly knowledgeable about all things having to do with construction, environmental preservation, and a host of other things we haven’t yet talked about. He’s in his sixties, and has a little shake that makes hitting nails a challenge sometimes, but I consider it a blessing that he has agreed to help reclaim this little house of my mother’s from dry rot, wasps, and a general state of dilapidation.

  After finding a fairly nice gate that I will be able to open and shut without too much effort even at nine months, we went to see the house he has been building for his family for fifteen years. His wife, Martine, made me chamomile tea with honey for the nausea I told her was flattening me, and Carl brought over a book of photographs of the home birth of his second child.