Baby Love Read online

  My mother said she wished that my birth could have been like that, instead of in the newly desegregated hospital with the doctor she didn’t like, who gave her an episiotomy she may not have needed. My mother’s experience haunts me. I am terrified of being cut. Episiotomy, C-section, I just don’t want to be lying there helpless and at the mercy of a bunch of doctors in a hurry to get to their golf game.

  May 14

  I flew to Seattle yesterday to keynote the annual benefit dinner for the Northwest Women’s Law Center. I talked about how since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been more concerned than ever about the need for people in politics and the public eye to have healthy personal lives. So often the momentous cultural work happens at the expense of family and sustained intimacy with loved ones. I saw a lot of heads nodding as I spoke, and several couples came up afterward to talk about their experiences trying to keep their families together in the midst of giving so much of themselves to the work they care about.

  I met some interesting people at the dinner, including a judge who told me about the evisceration of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the loveliest woman who was seven months pregnant. Of course we had a pregnancy moment because I can’t stop myself from telling every single person I meet my news, and pregnant women? Forget it. It’s all I can do not to grab them and sit them down in a corner somewhere to pump them for info about the road ahead. The vast, miraculous wilderness of gestation is my new frontier. I’m looking ahead, gathering provisions. I think I’m becoming a mother.

  The woman’s name was Anna and this is her second pregnancy; she lost her first child last year to a rare disease. She had sadness in her eyes for the one she lost, but excitement in her laugh for the one to come. I got choked up talking to her. She was inspiring and vulnerable, and I wanted to hug her and take care of her and marvel at her. I was a mess. She lost her child, and then summoned the faith to do it all over again. How do human beings do it?

  May 18

  Stayed up all night finishing a book review of a new Audre Lorde biography I agreed to write months ago. What a fascinating life. At one point she had a husband, two kids, and a wife—my kind of woman! But she also had major issues: a raging temper, self-absorption that wasn’t easy on her kids or lovers. I am determined to live in a way that puts my baby first. I would rather not have a child than subject another human being to eking out an identity in the wake of unbridled narcissism.

  But are narcissists aware of their narcissism? I could be going along la-di-da, thinking everything is fine, oblivious to how my choices are impacting my child. I have to rely on Glen to keep me on track. Last night he told me for the umpteenth time that being a parent is easy if you put the needs of the children first. If we can figure out what is best for them and do that, he says, we’ll be okay.

  May 19

  Super-depressed and nauseated today. Can’t eat. Keep having sick fantasies that the baby is going to be deformed and Glen is going to have a freak accident and leave me to raise the baby alone. I spent hours looking at the listings the realtor sent over. Two-bedroom unrenovated houses for a million dollars. My deformed child and I are going to live in a shack.

  Definitely depression. I’ll be puttering away, feeling fine about it all, and then, wham! The undertow.

  May 20

  Long day. Depressed in the morning, but managed to eke out an hour or so of writing. I forgot the second thing depression takes from me: productivity.

  Had lunch with a writer friend in the afternoon. While we were waiting for our udon, Tina told me about her pregnancy: She was twenty-one, alone, and barely out of foster care. She ate M&M’s all day and taught herself how to be a parent by reading Dr. Spock. She said she was too proud and too angry to say she needed help and ended up alone and depressed.

  I am not sure why, given what she told me, but I asked if she wanted another child. She said absolutely not, no, never. She had preeclampsia, a pelvic cavity not big enough for the baby, and a C-section. She was left with stretch marks all over her body and a baby who at six weeks had to have an operation because he wouldn’t stop projectile vomiting.

  I got it, but as she was talking I kept thinking about her son, Mark. He is absolutely gorgeous. Smart and athletic. Sweet. The last time I saw him, he was wearing khakis and a white sweater and looked like a movie star. He hugged his mom and kissed her on the cheek. It just doesn’t seem possible that he could be the result of such a hideous experience, and yet there it is: the contradiction at the core of the whole endeavor.

  A documentary on celibacy was on a few nights ago, and in it, a psychiatrist talked about the urge to procreate and how it is the strongest human urge, stronger even than the urge to eat. That will to multiply—the sheer force of it leaves me speechless. Take this one in my belly. He is determined to be here. I can feel the force of his being. It’s as if he has something to do here and just wants to arrive and grow up so he can get to it. He’s not ambivalent at all.

  On the way home, I stopped by my mother’s house and shook my head as she dismissed my concerns about money and affordable housing for the baby. Easy for her to say, I thought. She’s got four huge, beautiful houses. I had to remind her that when she was pregnant with me, my father had already bought their house and was supporting her utterly and completely, an option never presented to me, as a baby feminist, as feasible. Letting a man support me while I nest and think positive thoughts, that is.

  Anyway.

  Leaving her house, I was compelled to do a little retail therapy. Of course, the whole time I was shopping I was thinking that once the baby comes I will never shop again because I will have to pay for diapers and child care and car seats and bottles and blankets.

  The thought was like walking into an airplane propeller.

  May 21

  Went to see Marie. She agrees with Glen that because of the hereditary predisposition to pregnancy-related depression (and because of the mood swings, three-hour crying spells, and thoughts so horrible I feel ashamed to even write them down), I should consider increasing the dose of my antidepressant. Even though I troll the Internet almost every night looking for articles on the impact of antidepressants on babies, I felt relief just hearing her say the words.

  I know that between the two of us, the baby is the most vulnerable right now and I need to do everything I can to protect her, but I have to take care of myself, too. I feel selfish and guilty, but also self-aware and proud. I haven’t succumbed to the cultural pressure to sacrifice my hard-won sanity if it isn’t absolutely necessary. I’m still a whole human being with needs. I’m an equal partner in this baby equation.

  I’m agonizing over untold possibilities, but I feel fortunate to live at a time when depression is recognized as a treatable illness rather than, say, a religious or criminal defect. At least a few people understand that the choice I’m making isn’t frivolous, it’s necessary.

  May 23

  Dreamed last night about my ex-boyfriend Andrew, but I think I was really dreaming about all of the guys I have loved but didn’t have children with. In the dream, Andrew and I were driving down a narrow road. It was overcast. Huge limestone churches and tiny houses covered with thatch came in and out of focus out the window. I was talking, and kept touching Andrew’s hand as he moved the gear stick. He nodded and looked at me at all the right moments, but responded to me in Russian. Guttural, emphatic, lightning-fast Russian. I thought to myself that I must know how to speak his language and I cycled through all of the languages I know bits and pieces of, but could find no Russian. It dawned on me that we had no way to communicate, and that we had been this way for a very, very long time. I didn’t flinch, and calmly kept stroking Andrew’s hand, but I thought to myself that our relationship was over, and that everything was about to change.

  This must have something to do with the e-mail I got from Andrew a few days ago. I have been thinking so much about our five-year relationship and what went wrong. The last time I saw him, he was living in Japan and
teaching English. I traveled twenty hours to visit him, and after four days of wandering through temples in Kyoto and two days on a ferry to Shikoku, we had a huge, melodramatic fight complete with screaming and slamming doors and walking out of apartments in the middle of the night.

  I ended up fleeing back to Narita airport in Tokyo in a taxi that cost three hundred dollars, driven by an officious man wearing white gloves and a little black cap. I didn’t understand a word he said, but every ten minutes he would catch my eye in the rearview mirror and say, Narita? And I would look back at him and say, Yes, Narita. And he would say, Okay.

  I can’t remember what Andrew and I fought about, but I have missed knowing, over these last ten years, whether he is alive or dead, happy or miserable. Within forty-eight hours of Googling him, I was staring at photos of his beautiful wife and daughter. They are living in Hawaii; Andrew is weeks away from his Ph.D. In his note he sounded the same. Same dry British-American wit, same Sephardic warmth. I told him about the baby and he congratulated me. He said he always knew I would be a wonderful mother.

  I woke up this morning feeling the distance between my life now and all the people I still love but no longer know. After a lifetime filled with a seemingly endless array of choices, I’m somewhat stunned to find myself making such a definitive one. It’s thrilling to be opening the door to a new life with Glen, but terrifying to be shutting all the other doors to all the other lives. A part of me wants to leave an escape route open, some ember from an old flame smoldering, just in case. But another part says, No, this is it, you have a child to think about now, and turns away.

  Three

  LIKE MANY WOMEN MY AGE, I spent a good deal of time and energy trying not to have a baby. I may be speaking too broadly here, but I don’t think so. Mine is the first generation of women to grow up thinking of children as optional, a project that might pan out to be one of many worthwhile experiences in life, but also might not. We learned that children were not to be pursued at the expense of anything else. A graduate degree in economics, for example, or a life of renunciation, devoted to a Hindu mystic. To live life as one long series of adventures in “sexual freedom” could be added to the list, along with becoming president, or at least secretary of state.

  I don’t remember exactly how these ideas were transmitted, but that I imbibed them is unquestionable. It must have had something to do with my mother being a cultural icon, and the private carryover of her public insistence that even one child could, if not managed properly, erode one’s hard-won independence. In an oft-quoted essay she wrote as a young mother, she remembers her mother’s admonition to have a second child as uncharacteristically bad advice. In a poem written around the same time, she compares me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers. Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontës died prematurely. My mother has me, whom she lists as a delightful distraction, but by context and comparison, it’s clear I was a calamity just the same.

  The effect of living with my mother’s ambivalence about the role of children in a woman’s life, the role of me in her life, could not bode well for me having my own. Ambivalence itself is rarely positive. Ambivalence about one’s offspring is a horrific kind of torture for all involved. It affects me to this day, stealing my certitude at critical moments. I have sat with others and said, Well, of course my mother loves me. But in the very next moment I will purse my lips and squint my eyes and tilt my head back and remember all of the indices of ambivalence, and the thought will arise with an even greater clarity: or maybe she does not.

  People who cannot conceive of parental ambivalence have a very difficult time understanding this, and write it off as the confusion and ingratitude of children. But this is the price of ambivalence over a lifetime: It doesn’t go away. It seeps into otherwise healthy tissue and tinges it with seeds of pathology. Does my mother love me unconditionally? Will it be possible to love my own child this way?

  There was also the veiled competition that throbbed between my mother, an extremely driven artist determined to be successful on her own terms in a decidedly antagonistic world, and my stepmother, an equally educated woman who, more than anything else, wanted to give birth to and raise five children. I can’t say that these two did not get along, because in order for this to be true they would have had to spend time with each other, and they only met four times in thirty years. But their respective choices, the extremely divergent ways they constructed and displayed their femininity, loomed large in my mind. So large that the tension between the two of them as individuals, typical stepmother-birth mother tensions, with the added challenges of being from different races and socioeconomic backgrounds, was transformed in my psyche as a tension between ways of being a woman.

  Because these things are impressed upon us often before we realize we have a mind that can be impressed upon, I instinctively felt that I must be loyal to my mother’s version. This meant maintaining my autonomy at all costs. To stop working and raise children, to be weighed down with tots like so many anvils around my neck, none of these were acceptable. They smelled of betrayal and a lack of appreciation for the progress made on behalf of women’s liberation. Worse, they suggested a kind of ignorance about the truth of the gendered world, which was that unless women refuse, their children would enslave them. Which was that the myth of blissful motherhood was just that, a myth, and the reality was much more banal.

  The only problem with this program was my stepmother. She wasn’t especially well known or respected in her field, and she too, as a stepmother, had her share of ambivalence about being in a relationship with me. But my stepmother brought maternal enthusiasm and predictability to my life. She was enthusiastic about children in general and being a parent specifically, and predictable in that I could count on her to be the neurotic and intrusive maternal figure that Jewish mothers are often characterized as being. While my own mother could be counted on to recommend a life-changing book and to take me to a fascinating but remote village in Indonesia, my stepmother could be counted on to keep the refrigerator stocked with low-fat but tasty food, and to bring at least one camera to all events at which any of her children were to be featured.

  Because divorce was not yet the exhausted psychological terrain it is today, there were no adults in my life who had the wherewithal to identify my dilemma and help me navigate it. There was no one who said to me, the way we now say to kids who are mixed race or bi-religious or have two daddies, Isn’t it wonderful that you have these two role models and they are both so different! No one said over and over again (because that’s how many times it takes) or even once, When you grow up you can embrace motherhood wholeheartedly and still accomplish great things. It seems absurdly obvious now, but growing up, I swear, I could not fathom it.

  I dealt with the impossibility of my predicament by pretending it didn’t exist. I made the requisite strides toward personal fulfillment through professional achievement, telling myself that I would think about having a baby when the time was right. Because I believed that there would be several if not dozens of other possible partners, at twenty I abandoned the first man with whom I could actually imagine having children, and didn’t make another serious attempt until ten years later.

  At the time I abandoned him, I felt relieved. Then I felt sad and despondent. Then I began to dream that my breasts were being chopped off with a huge machete. Constantly. Every day. By the time I got to therapy, I had seen my breasts chopped off at least ten thousand times. By the time I realized, also in therapy, that it was my own hand on the knife, I was already deep into another relationship, infusing it with the same ambivalence. Did I want a husband, children? Did I want to be free and empowered to do whatever I wanted? Was the latter just a ruse to sabotage the former?

  The ambivalence reared its head, this time with a slightly different presentation. I began to tell people hesitantly, Yes, I do want kids, but I am afraid. Afraid? the person or persons would reply. Of what? Hurting them, I would say. An
d then they might look at me with surprise or shock or understanding, and I would feel a twinge of shame and sadness, and then we would go on talking about something else, as if nothing was wrong or odd or out of the ordinary whatsoever.

  Although it may have been risky, I wish someone had told me right away and with great emphasis, It is okay to worry, but don’t by any means let it keep you from having a child! Instead of telling me that I had plenty of time, or that I should adopt because the world is full of needy children, someone should have sat me down, looked me right in the eye, and told me not to let anything keep me from the experience. Trust me, they could have said, barring disease, famine, and the potential for life-threatening violence or financial ruin, no matter what your trepidation, just do it.

  They could have shared some version of what my gynecologist told me fifteen years later: “I’ve delivered thousands of babies, and as a rule, women don’t regret having children, they regret not having them.”

  It is shocking to think that not one person suggested that my fear of hurting my children might really have been a fear of growing up and following my own (not my mother’s) belief system.

  Because the fact is that until you become a mother, you’re a daughter. The fact is that when you almost die so that someone else can live, you become a much larger human being. The fact is that none of the ideas we’ve gleaned about motherhood from the mothers we know and the mothers we watch on TV mean anything at all because motherhood is in the doing, not the thinking about. Motherhood is brand-new every time; motherhood is full of possibility. Just like when John and Yoko said “War Is Over.” Motherhood Is Free.

  If you want it.