by Meghan Daum
Soon enough we children were looking after children ourselves. Press-ganged by neighbor parents, I noted their eagerness to leave, how they rattled off emergency numbers while the car keys jingled. We were terrible babysitters, impatient, insincere. The kids knew it. One used to ask accusingly, every single day after school, “What are you doing here, stupid?” I gave up babysitting as soon as I got a work permit and could clear plates for two dollars an hour plus tips.
Around this time, in the back room of a record store I found a 1920s movie poster of two plump children asleep under a blanket of curled brown leaves. Babes in the Woods, said the poster: A Gorgeous Tale of Charm and Adventure for Young and Old. That was an optimistic way to characterize the plotline. Did the kids die in the Hollywood version, eulogized by robins? I tacked it to my bedroom wall. At sixteen I was already nostalgic for our childhood, for the time when the two of us were alone together by choice and not by social fiat, even though my brother was just there on the other side of the wall, besieged. I was doing nothing to help.
From birth, Christian had an innate sense of flair and ceremony: in elementary school, indifferent to mockery, he would cut our peanut butter and jelly into crustless tea sandwiches and include a fluted paper plate in our lunch bags. By adolescence, this aesthetic sensitivity had toughened into a defiant flamboyance, which took breathtaking moral—and sometimes physical—courage to carry off in 1983 New England. The high school cafeteria was a site of martyrdom. Injustices done to him—Brad Crawley throwing Suzy Qs at my beautiful and rare brother!—made my skin burn with caustic fury. But I didn’t have any great plan for saving him. I was dealing with issues of misfitness, too, though instead of blazing, as he did, I moped and skulked. He left for college and the house was horribly quiet. No one to dance around waving a dish towel and singing Sweeney Todd while I did the dishes.
But as the story happens, we went off to school together again, the first of many thousand-mile drives in a 1974 Chevy Impala with a Styrofoam cooler of fried chicken in the backseat. I’d only bothered to apply to one college. Had he decided ahead of time, in his imperious way, that I’d follow him to his? It was an excellent school for the sprawl of things I was interested in, but that seemed almost a lucky coincidence. It was unimaginable that we would be separated, though I regretted that he’d picked a punishing climate. Lake Michigan froze in chaotic slabs all the way out to the horizon.
At college, I was delighted and relieved to find that he was loved. Potheads, sorority girls, supercilious professors, and ROTC cadets adored him for his absurdist wit and his air of having trailed a little bit of splendor behind him, like the bright winter smell that follows you in from outside. Christian presented me to all his various social groups with an almost belligerent confidence that I would be taken in, too. He taught me how to pull a respectable bong hit, how to find the nerve to fling myself into a pool of conversation, and how to sign up for the right classes—that is to say, those with the least practical application: Introduction to the Art Song, the Seven Hills of Augustan Rome, a seminar on semiotic inside jokes in The Name of the Rose. “Come on, sister, have yourself a ball!” the Kinks song went; I heard it for the first time on a body-swallowing sofa while getting high with his new friends. “Don’t be afraid to come dancing, / it’s only natural.”
That first year I was away, one of my small band of outsider friends back home got pregnant. We’d all been strenuously taught that being a teen mother meant the death of hope, but she was doing cooler things than any of us had or would, and she made college look like a desperately bourgeois choice. She had a record contract, she toured, and now she played her electric guitar slung sidesaddle to her enormous belly. I thought that she, if anyone, might be able to invent a new kind of motherhood. But when I visited, the baby cried and cried and cried and cried, creating a sort of huge ear-popping pressure that shoved all thought out of the room. I quietly got up to leave—it somehow seemed almost an indecent thing to witness. My indomitable friend stood with her back to me, gripping the porcelain of the kitchen sink, and said dully, “Please don’t go.” Even her bright mind seemed ground down. Her bravery terrified me, and so did the foreverness of what she’d done.
I still feel the ecstatic release of driving away from that house along the coast road, the long way around just because I could, twiddling the radio dial for a good midnight song to rinse away the static. And for a long while, that is all I thought about the subject of babies, other than trying not to have one accidentally. Every now and then I’d squint my eyes to visualize a time when I’d start feeling the craving myself: when I was thirty, it would be at thirty-two; at thirty-two, I’d be ready by thirty-six; and on it went. I was hitching a ride on Zeno’s arrow, speeding toward a target I’d never reach. Boyfriends were only too grateful, I imagined, not to have the “Where is this relationship going?” conversation.
A job as a book editor took me to London, where Christian had gone to work as a theatrical agent, and after a gap of a decade we once more lived close by. If I felt lonely, I could put a coat on over my nightgown and walk unnoticed through the sleazy all-night carnival of Old Compton Street to hang out at the flat he shared with Mikey, his boyfriend and then, once England discreetly began to allow civil unions, his legal partner. Christian and I spent our professional lives looking after people in sometimes fragile emotional circumstances. It is not easy being a creative person, and oftentimes the tantrums that were thrown, the vulnerabilities that cracked open and needed to be patched up again, could be wearying and unnerving to cope with. Like looking after children, but without the adorability to seduce you into not minding so much. “The world,” he said to me darkly one of those evenings, “has enough people. You and I do not need to add to them.” And I was happy to sign this latest treaty of mutual support and defense.
Scientists say that our pupils flare when they register something of interest; for women, babies top the list. (Porn follows.) But my pupils and my hypothalamus, the seat of desire, did not seem to be communicating. There was no corresponding baby hunger, at least not in that ready place where all my other hungers were shouting for attention. Meanwhile, there had been a societal swing back to the orthodoxy of motherhood. Serious journalists wrote with anguish of their biological clocks, a term I came to hate. Twins in strollers wide as combines mowed the sidewalks, the result of untold numbers of women over thirty-seven enduring a hypodermic in the behind. All of a sudden it was de rigueur for rising stars to be photographed lusciously, peachily pregnant. But a dwindling number of my babyless friends admitted, very quietly indeed, that they weren’t so sure they wanted one, not just now but ever—like a group of medieval heretics muttering agnosticism at a time when that could get you a date with a stake and some matches.
All the available cultural artifacts seemed to be telling us holdouts that if you were a woman, your business was having a baby, and if you didn’t, there was something wrong—with your body, meaning you couldn’t conceive, or your mind, meaning you couldn’t conceive of it. So perhaps this absence of desire in me really was pathological. Dutifully, I added it to the list of things to talk over with my therapist. I could chitchat with her for costly hours about my complicated feelings on this and that—but not, I found, on this subject. I studied the inoffensive museum prints on the wall of her little room, watching her hands lying folded and waiting in her lap. We both, I think, wished I had something more to say.
I wondered often what she hoped I would do. I sensed she wanted me to be courageous, to be bigger than just myself. But she, impeccable Freudian, kept her counsel. Not so others. Is there any other situation in life where people feel so free to tell you what to do, short of checking you in to rehab? “I’d get on with it, if you’re going to do it,” said the gynecologist, blunt as a speculum. “And sooner rather than later.” I didn’t recall having asked her opinion. A literary agent who’d had enough kids to populate a string quartet told me over lunch that I would regret my decision, but by then it would be
too late, and she smacked her hand down on the table so our water glasses sloshed. (What decision? What and when had I decided?) Another woman held both my hands, her eyes drilling into mine, and said that for her, having children was like flicking on the light in a dark room. But the older I get, I thought mutinously to myself, the more I like a bit of dim lighting. At forty, it’s easier on the complexion.
In the meantime, Christian and I had taken to pointing to each other.
You do it.
No, you do it.
And we laughed.
* * *
So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing, if only so that we can help you work through your feelings about not having it!”
And so I set about trying to try, with the same enthusiasm that I would have brought to cooking a Thanksgiving dinner and sitting down joylessly to chew the whole thing myself.
Here’s where I tell you that I love children, and where you look at me skeptically. But I do. I love them for their wild experiments with language; for their inability to feign interest in things that do not truly grip them; for their seriousness and total immersion in play.
But when you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence. It is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself. Anyway, I resented having to explain myself at all, to open a hatch over my heart because a near stranger asked an impertinent question.
A writer friend, defending her choice not to, said, “Boredom in children is useful. Boredom in adults is not.” I, too, was sometimes aghast at the short-fibered thoughts of my friends whose small children beseeched or bellowed as their stories were begun again and again and never finished, whereas I got to spoil myself with long hours of unspooling daydreams. (A nagging thought: What did I have to show for all that free time the mothers didn’t have?) But it’s also true that I was staggered by the transformation of these women. Their devotion, their patience (not something I’d always noted in them before the kids came). They were not showing off; this was not display. There was no statute saying they had to give themselves over so completely. They were going to wipe the face, wipe the bottom, feed, bathe, lull, teach by word, teach by example, read the books, put away the toys, buy the tiny clothes, six months later buy a slightly larger set of clothes, fret about the schools, and on and on; the caring and the worry was never, ever, ever going to stop, not until death. I wasn’t sure I had it in me. Perhaps I was a kind of human geode: sparkly and hollow.
Still, I did give it a go. Never let it be said that I wasn’t willing to get on a scary amusement park ride at least once, even if I bent the safety bar with my grip. But the big joke after all that brinksmanship in my twenties—tense days of waiting for a period to show up after some delicious act of heedlessness—was that it isn’t so easy to get pregnant. And I didn’t. I wasn’t relieved, but I wasn’t sorry either. I felt with some satisfaction that my body had honorably answered for my whole family this lingering question of whether there would be a next generation of Hodells. I’d done my duty, and now we could all move on.
* * *
The two kids with their high white socks were now undeniably middle-aged. One afternoon, Christian e-mailed to say that he and Mikey had something important they wanted to talk to me about. His Important Conversations could be unpredictable and sometimes terrifying: Why He Is the Wrong Boyfriend for You; Your Job Is a Poisoned Chalice; That Lipstick Shade Does Not Flatter. (We all feared the familiar words “I’m going to say this with love…”) We skyped; I trained my face to look serenely receptive.
But this time, it was not about me. The comedy of it! While my family had glanced covertly my way, wondering when I’d get around to marrying, my gay brother had gone and done it. And now, while they’d politely held their tongues on the subject of grandkids, he’d visited a clinic in Connecticut to flip through binders full of baby mamas. He and Mikey squeezed close so they’d both fit onto my monitor to tell me that they’d picked an egg donor with a profile that suited, and with luck and a hundred thousand dollars, in a year’s time they’d be parents. I hadn’t even known they were considering it. Yet it made total sense to me that Mikey wanted children. An atmosphere of calm hangs about him like a cloud cap on a green mountain. Everyone in need of balm seeks him out: the anxious and the shy, little kids, old people. He’s one of the secret, mighty soothers and nurturers of this world.
It’s not that Christian has nothing of this in him. Once I’d passed a shop window and stopped dead at a little bronze meerkat up on its hind legs, scouting trouble in wait for its troupe. I bought it at once: it looked exactly like him. But our pact! What he’d said about the too many other people! I forgot that I’d been at least a little ready to break the pact, too.
They found a surrogate, the magnificent and sainted Sharla, who lived all the way out in Wichita, Kansas. The Connecticut clinic frothed with activity. Both Mikey and Christian contributed—I didn’t ask, but I imagined it involved specialized magazines in a toilet stall—and this was eyedroppered onto the eggs vacuumed up that same day from the donor they’d met for a few nervous minutes before she was wheeled in for the procedure, and whom they had forgotten to get a photo with for posterity. “We’ve got fifteen embryos in the freezer,” Christian reported expansively. “You could have one of Mikey’s, if you want.”
Sharla was flown to the clinic, and two embryos—one of each flavor—were implanted. I was visiting Christian in London when he got the news of a strong single heartbeat, sitting in his fishbowl office with all his employees clapping and cheering around him. He rejoiced with them, and we all cracked each others’ spines with hugs like a convention of chiropractors, but when he shut the door, tears glazed his eyes. “I mind that there aren’t two.”
Soon, Sharla e-mailed ultrasounds in which a little bean could be seen and then not seen, inky and blurred like an old mezzotint. Christian and Mikey talked baby names for hours. “Now let’s do jewels! Ruby. Pearl? Jade.” Soon it was Lusitania, Waterloo, Wichita.
In the end, she was Elsa. I flew to Kansas on her birth to be housekeeper while they figured out how to be parents. Christian was Papa; Mikey was Daddy. But the dot of blood harvested when she was minutes old would show that she was Christian’s biological child. That’s mine, he whispered disbelievingly. It would take a month to get Elsa’s documents in order, and they rented a paper-walled suite in a sort of shantytown for transient executives. Sharla pumped as much breast milk as she could muster. Bottles of it sat, unsettlingly yellow, in the fridge among our groceries. This generous stranger, no blood of ours, had the most sustained physical relation to Elsa of any of us. She had made her—or rather, she’d allowed Elsa to make herself inside her, spinning her little body from the genetic material of my brother and a pretty, brown-eyed law student of Hungarian extraction from Rhode Island whom none of us would ever see again.
Not everyone falls in love with a newborn. That is this auntie’s secret. Elsa was a red and wrinkly visitor from outer space, skinny, with a slightly lopsided face and opaque, mineral-blue eyes that minutely raked the face of whoever was bent over her with the bottle, searching as her little mouth worked. Things were most definitely going on in there, but who could say what? Her squalls were spasmodic, weak, shuddering, as if her small bones weren’t sturdy enough to withstand the gusts of wanting. Christian found her crying somehow hilarious. When I welled up at the noises of grief, he snapped, “Are you drunk?” He snatched up Elsa, who was swaddled like a canapé, and speed skated around the living room in his socks, singing Christmas caro
ls. Elsa stared up at him transfixed, plastered into the crook of his arm. He whisked past me. “There’s Tatie Courtney!”
This was the shocker. He was a natural father: easy, confident, fearless. How was he allowed to be different from me?
Wichita seemed to be all mall, and we toured them in the enormous rented SUV, shopping for the numerous bulky items necessary for the comfort of a week-old baby. Christian was explaining how her life was going to go. “She’ll ski, she’ll speak French, and she’ll play tennis and the piano. Everything else she gets to pick for herself.”
The atmosphere in the car shifted a little; I could tell he was working up to something. I glanced over at his profile with the ribbon of Kansas beyond it. His Byronic swoop of hair was clipped like Caesar’s now, but he’d grown into his handsome nose, and I thought he looked very distinguished and not at all improbable at the wheel of the big car.
“Tell me about the … about the coochie.” He couldn’t quite get the word out.
“You mean the vagina?” I bit down a laugh. Really I was thrilled to be asked about a subject I could at last feel learned about. “First of all, think of it as a kind of self-cleaning oven. You don’t need to get up in there with any soap or whatnot. It takes care of itself as long as you keep the outside area clean, and…” So I went on.
His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel after a time. “Okay, that’s great. I don’t think I can hear any more right now.” He appeared to be breathing through his mouth. “But thanks. Really helpful.”
