Because I Said So (25 page)

Somehow it all worked. I got pregnant. Mission accomplished. I should have been ecstatic, right? I was—except buyer’s remorse kept creeping into my thoughts. Was there some ideal candidate out there whom I’d overlooked in my haste? Should I have gone with the Ph.D. instead of the MBA? Wasn’t it more important for my child to have a predilection for ecotourism than for guitar? I finally realized there is no perfect donor.

One thing about single women who become pregnant: Everyone seems to think it’s their business. While heterosexual married couples can conceive through IVF or even use a surrogate mother, no one’s the wiser. It’s only if you are a single woman that the spotlight shines on the biology of your family. People want the details. I learned to fend off questions about being unmarried and pregnant with vague statements like “The dad is not really in the picture.”

Adding to the circus was my mother, chiming in to enhance my fears and hormone-induced emotional maelstrom. “After how you grew up,” she demanded, “why are you doing this?”

And then I had my baby. And all of the grief and struggle—

162

F u f k i n Vo l l m a y e r

the expense, the void of no father, the hemorrhoids, my mother’s rage—they all just disappeared within days of beholding my perfect little child, Joaquin.

Nine months later, against all good advice, I got pregnant again. The reproductive endocrinologist who was sure that I’d have to do IVF and a lot of embryo hatching was aghast, along with most of my friends. But I felt that if I couldn’t give my son a father, I could at least give him a full sibling. With the very last vial from my donor, I got pregnant with Javier. I am one of the luckiest women I know.

Now Joaquin is three
and Javier is one and a half. What’s it like? Difficult. Really difficult. Often it feels that I just trudge through the fog of my own comatose state doing all the requisite caretaking. First they get sick, then I get sick, and then my work performance suffers. Actually, my work suffers a lot. Tending to the nightly needs of small children starts to resemble the fate of American POWs during the Korean War—insomnia as a special form of torture.

Shoppers step aside when they see me coming down the grocery aisle. “You’ve definitely got your work cut out for you,” they giggle.

I have to agree. There isn’t a day that goes by that my thought bubble doesn’t go up with the caption:
This caretaker needs caretaking.

I look at the nuclear families at the playground—the mom-and-pop families who go on vacations and cook dinner together—

and I wonder, do they know how lucky they are? I want average; it just looks so good from here. Maybe especially because I never had it.

So, shortly after Javier’s birth, I forced myself to get back out there. Out there dating, that is. I wrote a banner for my online personal ad that read, BABE WITH BABES-IN-ARMS SEEKS A FELLA. When a friend read that, she gasped and warned me about sex offenders circling in cyberspace who troll the lines for single moms to get access to their children. While I did not have any pedophiles respond, any worries I had about keeping up my end of the conversation were
I m m a c u l a t e C o n c e p t i o n
163

rather premature. I did hear from a man who wistfully shared his lactation fantasies. What he wanted was a latter-day wet nurse cen-terfold à la Anna Nicole Smith—lots of bosom to go around.

Then, as if there were not enough excretions oozing out of infant orifices into my life every day, I heard from a man interested in diapers. Not an e-mail from a guy in Depends sitting in his wheel-chair at the convalescent home, but sort of a regression fantasist. He mentioned that he was part of a group that had “poo parties,”

where the guests walk around in dirty diapers. Efforts to toilet train my toddler being hit and miss, I declined. (Ah, the Internet—always there to provide an online “community” for all interests.) In all honesty, now I’m not really sure what I want. Yes, I’d love to have had a better past. But the future? Dating and even marriage won’t guarantee a simple or happy ending. Marriage is a leap of faith: That it will work. That it will last. That if it doesn’t, some superior court judge won’t suck money out of my kids’ future in the form of alimony payments to my ex-husband. And I suspect that the demands of small children are so intense that they strain even the best marriages. As much as I yearn for a partner, for someone to love me and to enjoy my children as much as I do, I’ve seen enough modern marriages to know I’d probably be doing pretty much the same thing I am now—most of the work. I’d assume all the responsibility and resent a spouse who didn’t help out enough.

Many of the single mothers I know are cautious or ambivalent about marriage for those reasons. They’re still interested in romantic relationships, but not necessarily in tying the knot. At the single-parenting classes I’ve attended, I’ve seen a huge divide between the divorcées and those of us who have chosen this path.

Many divorced women seem to have a harder time of it.

Whatever the reasons for their frustration, they have something I don’t—animosity toward someone they’ll have an ongoing relationship with for another eighteen years. I’m occasionally sad, even lonely, but I’m not aggravated by a divorce settlement embedded with all the constantly shifting variables of child support, custody, and visitation.

That was my mother’s situation. She was a single mother who
164

F u f k i n Vo l l m a y e r

worked full time and battled the Goliath of indifferent judges, along with an ex-husband who shirked all of his responsibility for his children. I definitely have an advantage over her that way. I have more maturity and money than my mother did—I was twelve years older than she, with savings in the bank, when I had my first child.

But I see that my mother and I were different for another reason. My mother should not have had children. She was just a bad parent, irrespective of her marital status. She had all this drive and rage, and nowhere to put it. Had she come of age in the 1970s rather than in the 1950s, she would have gone on to run a large company instead of a family.

Many of my friends say they forgave their mothers once they had children. “Oh, this is what it’s like,” they realize. “This is how bone-crushingly hard it is.” I wish I could say I felt that way, but I don’t. My mother died from a respiratory disorder just ten days before my second son was born. But not before she had raged at me for my decision to have children, hissing that I’d not only ruined my life, but would probably ruin my sons’ too. She died before I had a chance to prove her wrong.

So here I am,
at a historical moment, on the cusp of a huge demographic change. One hundred years ago, I’d have remained a spinster. Fifty years ago, if single and pregnant, I probably would have given my child up for adoption. Now, along with gays and lesbians and others, I’m a pioneer in the creation of the

“alternative family.” What a relief, really, that there is a new name for it, not like the sad term of my youth, “broken home.”

But I’m starting to feel less like a cultural phenomenon and more like just another mom, Joaquin and Javier’s mom. I am head over heels about my children. I gaze at them in a way that I have never looked at any man I’ve adored—with complete love.

Compared with work and status, I’ve come to think that parenting is vastly underrated. My only regret, really, is that I waited so long.

Thin, Blonde, and Drunk

K r i s t e n Ta y l o r

Two weeks after
my daughter was born, we planned a trip from our home in Los Angeles to New York. We were going to visit Grandpa upstate, then spend a couple of days in the city with my sister-in-law. Capping off the trip was the New Year’s Eve black-tie wedding of our dear friends Sarah and Billy, in SoHo.

This may have been their wedding, but it felt like they were throwing the party for me. Who could dream of a better first night out without the baby?

I had three wishes for that New Year’s Eve: to be thin, blonde, and drunk. Twenty-five pounds had to go, my grown-in roots had to be lightened, and after ten months without alcohol, I very much wanted a drink. Or eight.

Our trip was six weeks away. My first wish denied? You’ve probably already guessed: drinking. At the first whisper of a proper grown-up New Year’s Eve, I had pushed the “breastfeeding = sobriety” equation out of my conscious mind. Then a couple of weeks later, my father-in-law asked if it was okay for me to join everyone in a champagne toast, and I remembered that the baby and I were still very much physically connected. If I did drink, there was always the option of “pumping and dumping”

the tainted milk. But planning debauchery to such a degree does a number on my party mood, and I resolved myself to staying dry.

My second wish denied: being thin. Who can lose twenty-five
166

K r i s t e n Ta y l o r

pounds in six weeks? That doesn’t even work in real life, much less in sleep-deprived/nursing-sixteen-times-a-day/uterus-can’t-shrink-that-fast post-partum life. For those first eight weeks I ate everything in sight, and then stuck my hands into the backs of cabinets for the food I couldn’t see, and ate that too. My weight barely budged.

But I
was
blonde. When my mother came to town, I took the opportunity to hit the salon and get reacquainted with my lovely hairdresser. In 1995 Los Angeles, it was impossible to leave any hair joint without looking like one of the
Friends
, but never mind—my hair was finally streaked vertically rather than horizontally.

New Year’s Eve arrived, and my husband and I got dressed—

he in his tux and I in a gold satin number that slipped over my head. The dress’s bias cut hid my pooch rather well, I thought.

My strapless bra hid the massive nursing pads well enough. We were on our way.

Everything was dandy for the first four hours or so. The ceremony was lovely, and the guests ambled over to a hot new restaurant for a fantastic dinner and dancing afterward. Things got a little uncomfortable around hour five. My breasts, which were used to almost hourly emptying, were all dressed up with no place to go. I was looking like an R. Crumb girl, and the word
granite
kept popping into my head. My milk was letting down like crazy, so I had to keep peeking surreptitiously at my chest to make sure that the nursing pads were holding up. Worrying about leaky milk stains will truly ruin a festive attitude. So will intense pain. I had no choice: I was going to have to express some milk. But the breast pump hadn’t fit into my evening bag. Could I do it by hand as I had read in the books?

I let myself into the single-stall bathroom and locked the door.

Then I remembered that this particular dress didn’t have any buttons. Or zippers. Or Velcro. I had to take the whole thing off over my head and hang it on the door hook. The strapless bra had to come off, too. I stood over the bathroom sink wearing pantyhose and high heels, trying to express milk by hand.

T h i n , B l o n d e , a n d D r u n k
167

They say that when you want to encourage the “let down”

reflex, you should be relaxed and calm. Thinking about the baby helps, apparently. Unfortunately, all I could think about was how good the lock was on that door and how many people were lined up on the other side of it, knocking every couple of minutes. And what would they think I had been doing in there when I finally got out fifteen minutes later? “There goes that coke-head new mom.” “Hope she quit while she was pregnant, so her kid isn’t a drug-addled bundle of blown nerves.” I couldn’t exactly tell the next person in line, “I had to take off all of my clothes and express breast milk into the sink. Sorry it took so long.” I couldn’t even explain it to anyone in the room but my husband, because we happened to be the first of our friends to have kids. No one else would have gotten it.

I didn’t express more than a few dribbles of milk, even when I tried again an hour later. The extra nursing pads I had packed were soaked because my milk let down just fine whenever I wasn’t standing naked in the bathroom. We were going to have to cut out of there and get back uptown to that baby soon. I was just about to make our excuses to the bride and groom when my friend Adam provided me with all the excuse I needed in the form of a full glass of champagne down the front of my dress.

“Whoops, we really should be going. Happy New Year, everyone!”

Later we asked Adam to be our baby’s godfather.

The next morning, New Year’s Day, I was struck by a migraine that must have been triggered by all that backed-up milk. As I nursed my baby and tried very hard not to move my head, I was a little miffed that I had all of the hangover but none of the booze. Now that my children are older, drinking isn’t such a big deal (though I do try to avoid hangovers), and my goals have less to do with the physical changes brought on by motherhood and more to do with how mental the children make me. By next New Year’s Eve, I hope to be present-minded, patient, and up to date on the checkbook. Mothers always dream big.

Fight Club

R a h n a R e i k o R i z z u t o

I am sitting at my desk
when the fight begins. Outside my window, a man is screaming, “You want to take me to court, take me to court!” I hear the words, let them float in the shallow end of my brain as I wait for a response; I wade through the ripples of before to see if there was a screech of brakes or the dull tin-can crunch of someone pulling out into traffic at the wrong time. I live on a bus route in Brooklyn, across from the storage yard for a hardware store, cattycorner to a submarine sandwich shop that attracts double-parked police cars like they were bees, and directly above a clinic that dispatches two private ambulances, but only in the middle of the night. Street noise—whether threats or a boomeranging bass that rattles the ice in my glass—has to be a real contender to make me look out the window.