Big strollers are obnoxious. Big strollers make your fellow humans on the sidewalk, at the café, in an elevator dislike you intensely. Even if I still give you an isn’t your daughter such a darling glance, I will feel dirty afterward.
There are small, narrow, umbrella strollers out there. They are remarkably efficient and narrow—did I mention their narrowness? They also collapse into the size of an umbrella—hence their name. They have straps so you can sling them over your shoulder and along your back, thereby taking up even less space.
My rage bubbled up recently in one of my favorite shops: Larchmont Beauty Center in Los Angeles. The aisles are narrow and the place is packed floor to ceiling with small objects shoved onto prongs—bobby pins, combs, barrettes, curlers, old-fashioned retro things, new hip cool things. It’s what makes the place such a joy to be in; it’s a curiosity shop for beauty. But as I contemplated whether to buy some hair gel, a mother with an extremely wide stroller turned down my aisle. A grinning baby with arms outstretched gleefully grabbed, with its peanut-butter-smeared fingers (or maybe it was pulverized Goldfish crackers), every object available at a height of two feet. I realized that I was going to have to move, and the mother looked at me with this horrendous self-involved, unaware smile, like, “What am I going to do? I’m a mother!” Her left hand was breezily holding her Starbucks cup, and written on the side of the cup, in black Sharpie, were so many instructions for its making; a percentage sign, various unintelligible letters and numbers. And above these was what I assumed was her name, written like a hurried dash across the top: Kitty. Of course her name was Kitty. She’s not even Kat. She’s Kitty.
And while we’re on this subject, what about older kids in strollers? Children who are five, six, even seven years old—many of them are so relaxed and comfortable they have their legs crossed as they look out from their perch. Here comes the king! Here comes the queen!
It’s truly perverse.
So I say to mothers and other caregivers: Pick up your damn kid. Carry them. Make them walk. Better yet, get them to carry stuff! It’s a great workout and you can interact better with your kid. It will cut down on the shopping you do, you will accumulate less, fewer resources will be used up, and you will save money. It will make you physically fitter, so it will likely prolong your life. And think of it this way: if you live longer you will have more time to recoup on your investment on this annoying and energy-draining kid.
Thank you for letting me get this off my chest. My feelings about this have clearly taken up too much space in my brain. And so, now, I vow to let it go.
CHAPTER TEN
Three Boyfriends and Reflections on a High School Crush
Save a boyfriend for a rainy day, and another in case it doesn’t rain.
—Mae West
We have come to the time where I am ready to discuss the romantic liaisons that I experienced when I was a new mother.
Among my notebooks, I came upon a fancier one—smaller, older, and covered with red plaid fabric. I hadn’t looked inside in years. I opened the cover and was transported back to the early eighties, when I worked as an accountant at Columbia Pictures in Burbank, California. My first real job. The notebook contains several years’ worth of New Year’s resolutions. I cringe at the restrained but loopy Catholic-girl writing style. From year to year my list does not change very much. “Lose weight!” “Read more books, and less magazine articles!” “See more movies, watch less TV!”
“Do not get married and have children!!!”
That last one made me laugh because I was not in danger of getting married or having children, at least then. What’s funny is that I felt so strongly about it that I felt I needed to write it down. As a resolution. I wasn’t even dating anyone. I wasn’t pursuing a particular career path at that time, either. Was I trying to convince myself to feel that way? Was I really wanting to get married and have children?
Then there’s the issue of the overabundant exclamation points. Certainly one wouldn’t have New Year’s resolutions with anything but exclamation points, for what are New Year’s resolutions anyway but a declaration of war, an emphatic stab of a flag into the sands of one’s own personal desert of time that stretches out to the horizon.
When I was with Joe #10, I forgot that I ever had been a person who didn’t want a traditional life with children and a husband. My journals remind me that I am a jumble of contradictions.
About three months before I was set to go to China to adopt Mulan, I met a man. Let’s call him Joe #11. He was a successful fiction writer, really funny and very charming, and just sad enough to be interesting. He thought it was fantastic that I was adopting a baby.
I kept thinking, Isn’t this just the way? Just when you move ahead with your life and stop waiting for some guy to be the key to it all, that’s when it all comes together. Then I would nod to myself knowingly. Ha, ha.
When I got the date I was to travel to China, Joe #11 announced that he wanted to come with me. I was really, really tempted to let him come, as things were going so well between us. I felt cautiously optimistic about our long-term prospects. If he was the guy, and this baby would be ours to raise, why not let him be there from the start? On the other hand, if he wasn’t the guy, letting him come would be impulsive and weird.
I was already feeling protective of my daughter, and I didn’t want to imagine her as a teenager in her bedroom, perhaps looking at some old photos of the day she was adopted in China, and hearing her say, “There’s me. There’s my mom. Oh, and there’s some guy my mom was dating at the time.”
I didn’t feel I could ask Joe #11 point-blank if we were going to be together for the long run. I couldn’t ask because I didn’t know how I felt about him! All I knew was that he was asking to come along, and he could get a ticket and he would be there. He seemed very enthusiastic. He was very, very cute. He really wanted to come to China. Oh dear. Oh dear.
In the end I said no. Looking back, I feel that the clarity of motherhood was already working wonders on my psyche. The old Julia would have been impetuous and gone for it. The new mother Julia was cautious.
We agreed that he would be there to pick us up from the airport when we got home. He would take us to my house, but then I wanted my daughter and I to come in through the door for the first time on our own. Therefore we planned for him to pick us up, drive us home, and drop us off but not come in. It seems odd to me, now, that we had this all planned out in advance. And yet, it was just the right thing.
Before I left on the trip, he came over to put the car seat in his car. I asked him, “Are you really going to drive around town with a car seat for two weeks?”
“Sure!” he said.
Wow. Great. Enticing. Confusing.
While I was in China, Joe #11 called often. I would tell him about the baby and I felt he was politely listening, waiting for his turn to tell me what was going on with him. He had come to rely on me to listen to him unload about his day. I was glad to do that, but I was also falling in love with someone else: my new baby. I wanted a boyfriend, and he was a good one. But I was also in the midst of a much bigger and unprecedented thing. I cut the phone contact down to a minimal amount.
When Mulan and I emerged from customs in L.A. to the waiting area, Joe #11 was there as promised, all smiles. When we got in the car, I put Mulan in the car seat and then, just reflexively, got in the backseat with her. Now I think this was an odd thing to do, but at the time I didn’t even entertain the idea of not sitting right next to her. This little move spoke volumes, I think. It made Joe #11 “the driver,” not “the boyfriend.” I wanted to be sitting next to Mulan because it was her first experience in a car seat, and I was worried about how she was going to react.
Mulan began to cry. She was very unsettled by the newness of the situation. She took deeper breaths and cried harder and louder. One might call her crying “screeching.” She screamed bloody murder for the entire forty-five-minute ride home. All I remember from that ride, besides trying
desperately to calm her down, was my view from the backseat of Joe’s clenched fists and white knuckles on the steering wheel. Not a good sign.
He brought us home, and as we agreed, he dropped us off and left. I didn’t hear from him for a couple days. It was a little odd, but fine; I was in my own world, and it was just what I’d indicated that I wanted. I wasn’t sure if he was giving me space because I wanted and needed it, or if he was trying to pull back. How are you supposed to act when you’re dating someone who adopts a baby? There are no rulebooks for that sort of thing.
He hung out with the two of us a few times over the next several weeks. We once had a picnic together on the beach in Santa Monica. Another time we met at a restaurant and afterward walked along Third Street near La Cienega Boulevard and window-shopped, Mulan in a backpack. When I hired Lisa, and I was back from filming the pilot in Vancouver, he would ask me on proper dates. One night we met each other at a romantic Italian restaurant on Melrose, and I made sure I didn’t dominate the conversation with baby talk. Afterward we were both waiting for our cars at the valet, and I said, “Hey, you should have breakfast with me and the baby sometime. It’s really starting to get fun. We’ve been going to Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard on Sunday mornings and we even have a favorite waitress.”
He turned to me and said, “Julia, first of all, I have had breakfast with the two of you before. And second of all, I’m dating you, not your daughter.” I’m embarrassed to report that my knee-jerk reaction in the moment was to apologize. I said, “Oh yes. Of course. Yes.”
We stood there in strained silence, waiting for our cars. I looked at my watch and saw that I would get home in time to put Mulan to bed. I realized how excited I was to see her. I pulled myself together and stood up a little straighter. I said to Joe, “Actually, you are dating me and my daughter.”
So, basically that was the end of Joe #11. I was sad.
But only for a few days.
Then about six months later I met Joe #12. We’d worked together on a radio show and then began to hang out. Joe was about seven years older than me, but in many ways he seemed much older. Not in looks—he was very handsome, and fit—but just in his style of life, I suppose. By then Lisa was a major part of my life.
Just in general, dating was weird. I mean that it was weirder than it had always been. Suddenly dating felt like it did when I went to school dances in high school. This is because there was so much organizing you had to do just to go on a date. People had to be notified (Lisa) and the times had to be established. You had to go when you said to others you would go and you had to come home at the time you told others when you would come home. Lisa was my de facto mother, as she smiled with my date in the living room while I threw on lipstick and combed my hair in the bathroom. I found myself hoping that Lisa thought he was a good guy like I hoped my parents would like a high school beau.
The best thing about Joe #12 was that I wasn’t that into him. I liked him a lot, but we were never going to live together. He bothered me just enough that I felt safe. I wasn’t going to fall in love. Fantastic. Best of all, we stopped going on dates and began to just hang around my house with Mulan.
Joe #12 was a surfer and musician who spent most of his time in the ocean. He’d grown up in Hawaii and when Mulan turned two years old we both went with him to Kauai and I met his lifelong friends. He packed his things in a pillowcase. I kid you not. A pillowcase. When the plane to Hawaii had to sit on the runway for some mechanical checks for two hours before we were okayed to take off, Joe #12 took out his ukulele and sang Hawaiian cowboy songs (called paniolo) to the passengers. He stopped singing before people wanted him to and Mulan was thrilled to clap along with the music.
We stayed with his friends in Kauai who had surfboards and some of his clothes. I wouldn’t call him a hippie, but I think a lot of people about ten years younger than I am would call him a hippie. (However, he was not a pothead. In fact all the potheads I know are definitely not hippies, they are suits—professionals who work in corporate jobs. I dunno, maybe it’s a fluke of who I’ve met, but I’m just sayin’.)
Joe #12 was the kind of guy who, you’d find out from some random conversation with his friends, had spent a year in Guatemala, just, y’know, hanging out. Not really in one specific place. Then, in another random conversation I found out he had also spent six months in St. Petersburg, Russia, y’know, just hanging out. Just enjoying . . . St. Petersburg.
Wow. Wild.
Joe #12 was the guy I went to Mexico City with, when the Chinese Pat nanny totaled my car. While we were together, he gave up his apartment in Venice and bought an RV. His plan was to drive along the California coast, finding better and better places to surf and figuring out where to park his RV at night so he could be right there in the water when the sun came up. The last thing in the world he would have considered was having or being officially part of a family.
And yet.
He had an easy way with Mulan that I really loved. Sometimes we would spend whole days together and then take a nap, all three of us passed out on the bed. It really felt family-like. At the beach, he would be so careful with her in the water, and he liked to carry her on his shoulders and run along the waterline. One morning Mulan started saying, “Dada, dada,” in his direction. I gave her a look like, “Ix-nay on the Addy-day, kid.”
However, after about nine or ten months together, after one very luxurious three-person nap, I asked him casually, and yet pointedly, “Do you ever think you could be part of a family?” I realized that I had come to care deeply and even love this guy. But after I asked him this question, the air between us was suddenly dead. He said he needed some time to think about it.
A few days later, he came to me and said, “I love you. I really do love you. And I love your little girl, too. But I cannot . . . I cannot do that. I don’t have a life that could be like that . . . No, I can’t. I can’t be that guy for you.”
Even though everything was on a very easygoing basis between us, I felt that this conversation meant we had to shift. I guess I did want to be open to the right sort of person. Hanging out with him was enjoyable and fun, but it was stirring my feelings, feelings I did not want to have stirred up.
We decided to dial it all back. A lot.
Frankly, I was sad. I felt like I’d been through all this before, too many times. I got ready to be really, really sad. I got on the sofa and turned on the Food Network. I found that the shows on the Food Network had changed—from being about cooking to being about competitions with ringing bells and noticeably more men than women. They weren’t the old cooking shows I remembered from my last breakup.
But something else surprised me deeply. Here I was in the sad position—on the sofa, with the TV on, in the fetal position, and I’d added a baby on the floor. But the surprise was this: I actually wasn’t all that sad. Frankly, I was sad for Joe #12. I thought he was missing out.
I got up and turned off the TV.
I flew to Spokane with Mulan to go to my twenty-five-year high school reunion. As I walked into the auditorium I was surprised to see a boy I’d had a deep crush on in school. Actually I would say we had had a relationship, but I’m not sure he considered our make-out sessions and feverish debates about European history (we were in Advanced Placement European History together) a “relationship.” In fact, looking back I have no idea what he was thinking, and I’ll bet you money he certainly had no idea what he was thinking when it came to me.
So, I had this high school crush, and yes—let’s call him Joe—I really fell for him. I thought he was brilliant and because he was brilliant I deduced he would be interested in a girl equally brilliant. I tried to cultivate an intentionally “smart” look. I purposefully failed an eye exam so I could get glasses. I think I was probably the only girl in the world who thought wearing glasses was really going to help make some guy fall for her. The reason I was in Advanced Placement European History in the first place was so I could sit next to him.
Occasion
ally, we’d talk on the phone for hours. Occasionally, we’d make out. But we were not boyfriend and girlfriend. I went to college at the University of Washington in Seattle and he stayed in Spokane and went to Gonzaga University and we wrote letters back and forth—I think I spent more time and effort writing him letters than I did writing term papers and essays for my classes. It wasn’t that I didn’t do well in my classes—I was doing fine. What I mean to say here is that the first time I really cared about every single word, about endlessly editing and waking up in the night vacillating about punctuation and paragraph structure, was when I was composing my letters to him.
I thought if you wrote a guy a letter that was witty, brilliant, thoughtful, and insightful about the whole world, well, he would surely fall in love with you. I remember writing him one letter that I was positive was going to win me a Pulitzer Prize, if only someone would submit it, which he would, after having read it, and also after proposing to me, because how could he let such a brilliant writer get away?
He worked part-time, late at night, at a Catholic funeral home in Spokane called Hennessey-Smith. I used to hang out with him there when I was in town. Hennessey-Smith’s major competitor at the time was a place called Ball & Dodd, and their motto (“On Your Way to God, Stop at Ball & Dodd”) generated much mirth among us Spokanites. Honestly, I wished Joe worked at Ball & Dodd, but how could I complain? I got to see the backstage area of a funeral home. I would help him vacuum the casket rooms, and then we’d have passionate make-out sessions.
I noticed that the room was divided between Irish-themed caskets and Italian-themed ones. The Irish caskets were lined with silk and printed with images of St. Patrick stepping on the snake, a lovely tableau for the dead to gaze upon for the rest of time. I didn’t know if I’d want to look at a slithering snake while underground, but then I wouldn’t have wanted an Italian casket, either, with its copy of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. All that food and no way to eat it, like watching a frozen version of the Food Network for all eternity.
If It's Not One Thing, It's Your Mother Page 8
