Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed

by Meghan Daum

  Then, the very morning of my OB-GYN appointment, I started to bleed, more heavily than usual. Just like that, my pregnancy, if it really had been a pregnancy, was over. I was flooded with relief, mad with it. I felt some sadness, a twinge of loss, but primarily, I was exultant and grateful. I celebrated by going out with my husband and some of our friends and drinking tequila, smoking cigarettes, and staying out till dawn.

  Now, it turned out, I was the one who didn’t want to give up this life of carefree independence. My husband’s reaction seemed more complex: part relief, part sadness. I sensed that he had been scared, too, but he’d been more ready than I was.

  Despite a lot of carelessness with birth control in my youth, this was the first time I’d thought I was pregnant. Once it was over, I understood that I’d been saved from losing myself. My earlier desire for babies, now gone, felt like a phantom echo of a lost passion, a heartbreak long ago recovered from. I threw myself back into my own life, greeting all my old depression, mania, bad behavior, and obsessiveness as if they were friends I’d neglected and almost lost. I hadn’t known how much I treasured them.

  * * *

  A year or two later, my gynecologist announced that my fibroids had to come out. One was the size of a cantaloupe, another a grapefruit, a third an orange. Luckily, all these benign flesh fruits were growing outside my uterus. They didn’t cause me pain and could be easily removed, but the biggest one was pressing on my bladder, and when I lay on my back, I could see the rounded top of it poking up through my skin. So we scheduled a traditional C-section-like operation.

  Of course I spent the night before the surgery on the Internet, googling laparoscopic procedures, which have a far faster recovery time and leave a tiny scar instead of a six-inch one. The next morning, I called my doctor, furious we weren’t doing it that way. He countered that the fibroids were too big and told me not to spend the night on Google before an operation; he also postponed the surgery until my state of mind improved.

  About a month later, I had the operation. Afterward, I was sent to recuperate for a couple of days on the maternity ward of St. Vincent’s. I shared a room with a woman a little older than I was who’d just had a radical hysterectomy. We were the only two on the ward who’d come in for an operation, without a baby, with pieces of ourselves missing. We bonded deeply over this; she had kids already, but she understood my own feelings about the matter.

  I had become hugely bloated after my operation and had gained more than twenty extra pounds of water weight, which made me feel like an enormous, lumbering freak. It seemed monstrously unfair that I’d just had a few pounds of flesh taken out of me and had instantly become too fat to fit into my clothes. And it felt ironic: my body seemed to be revolting against the invasion that had just taken place, insulating itself with a thick layer of protective water. With my distended stomach, I felt nine months pregnant. My newly stitched incision was tender and painful from the pressure.

  When it was time to go home, I put on the shapeless, baggy dress I’d asked my husband to bring me, the only article of clothing I owned that would fit. He helped me dress and pack. Weak as I felt, I skirted the nurses’ station so I wouldn’t have to ride out in a wheelchair; I needed to get out of there under my own steam. I leaned against my husband, and he carried my bag and opened the hallway door for me.

  Then something happened, something that has stayed with me ever since. As we went through the swinging hall door to the elevator bay, my husband looked back and saw a beatific young woman approaching, carrying a newborn baby and surrounded by an entourage. She was too far away for him to be expected to keep the door open for her and her husband, mother, and friend, so he let it close and pressed the button for the elevator.

  A minute later the woman sailed through the door, which her own husband held open for her. They all joined us in the hallway.

  “You could have held the door open for me,” she said to my husband.

  Shocked, I stared at her. She was beautiful and tiny, with long, curly dark hair. She wore a gauzy skirt and sandals and looked as if she’d already lost all her pregnancy weight, or maybe she’d magically transferred it to me somehow.

  My husband, as shocked as I was, didn’t answer. We rode the elevator down in silence. The doors opened on the ground floor. I waited in the lobby for my husband to bring the car around, leaning heavily against a planter and watching this new mother allow everyone to pamper her in any way they could.

  Her husband looked over at me. He could have been one of my husband’s cousins, kindly, Jewish, concerned. “Are you okay?” he asked me.

  I almost burst into tears. I was flooded with sadness. Two days on the maternity ward with a C-section incision but no baby, followed by an elevator ride with a gorgeous, doted-upon Madonna holding her beautiful bundle, had hit me hard out of nowhere. I went home in tears. My husband couldn’t console me.

  * * *

  A few years later, in the fall of 2006, I moved out of our Greenpoint, Brooklyn, house into a basement in Hunter’s Point, Queens. I had just ended a devastating, short-lived affair with a married man who lived in our neighborhood, a college friend of my husband’s, probably the worst person I could have chosen. The affair was over; I couldn’t speak to him or contact him, and I didn’t, ever again. I knew I’d done a terrible thing, as had he, and my guilt and regret exacerbated the wrenching and painful and devastating aftermath of the affair. I lay awake in my dungeon apartment night after night. I could not sleep. I was in a state of manic existential despair so profound, so all-encompassing, it drove me to what I now recognize as actual insanity. I had left my husband, the person I loved and trusted most, because our marriage had become intolerable to me. Although he was willing to take me back and work it out and although I wanted more than anything to stay married to him, I had to go. I was propelled out of our house by an instinctive, self-protective urge to flee. And I had lost my lover, whom I was madly in love with and who I believed at the time was my soul mate, because he had kids and I couldn’t take him away from them, and he couldn’t leave them.

  Wracked with guilt and horror at myself and filled with painful, insoluble feelings, I lay awake too desolate to cry. I stared into the darkness for all the hours of the night. My skull echoed with one question: Where are my children?

  The whole summer before, I’d experienced a strange reprisal of my old mourning for the babies I’d never had. I’d thought I had recovered for good from that sadness, but as I felt my marriage disintegrate, the memory of my raw yearning for babies and my husband’s refusal to have them with me came back to me as part of the reason I was now leaving him. It felt like the heart of why I was so lonely with him. As I lay awake in the Hunter’s Point basement every night, that old unfulfilled craving became an obsession I couldn’t escape, a black hole of raw grief I kept falling deeper into. Where are my children? I felt their absence and loss as if they existed somewhere I couldn’t reach, as if they were stuck forever on the other side of a membrane and I could never have access to them. I felt as if they were real. I knew it was part of my current psychosis, a hallucination in 3-D, but knowing this didn’t help at all. I missed my children desperately.

  The part of me that had wanted to be a mother all those years ago had woken up again, and she was howling and keening like a tragic heroine at the end of an opera. Gradually, I pulled myself out of the abyss. In the next months, I finished a novel. In December, unable to bear my loneliness, I went back to my husband and stayed for another two years. We saw a marital therapist once a week. We tried so hard to work it out, but in the end, it wasn’t meant to be, at least not for me. The therapy helped clarify for me that I truly couldn’t stay in this marriage, and I truly didn’t want kids.

  When I left for good in the fall of 2008, it was with sadness and grief, but also resolve and finality, and not one twinge of longing for children.

  * * *

  Since then, my life has swept on without them, and other passions and experiences and sou
rces of love have gradually taken up my energy and attention. There was, and still is, no void where they would have been. In fact, I have no room in my life for kids, no place for them, no time.

  I remember my long-ago feverish urge to have a baby fondly and with relief. It seems to me, in hindsight, that it was a biological, hormonal impulse, an imperative that arose when the right moment came and then, unfulfilled, simply went away over time. If I had had children with my ex-husband, I would have had to choose between staying in a marriage that was unsatisfying and lonely and leaving and breaking up my family and sharing custody with my ex-husband, negotiating everyone’s schedule for many years. Instead of being autonomous and traveling light, I would have had a hard time leaving New York and separating my kids from their father. I might have been stuck there, too. I might never have met Brendan, never moved north to the White Mountains and Maine. I would have missed out on so much.

  I picture my life without children as a hole dug in sand and then filled with water. Into every void rushes something. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into the available space and time and energy of my kid-free life rushed a thousand other things. I published seven books in fourteen years and am writing two more now; I’ve written countless essays, interviews, reviews, blog posts, e-mails. My days are so busy and full and yet so calm and uninterrupted and self-directed, I can’t imagine how kids would fit in. Kids talk so much. They require their parents’ undivided attention on demand. They are expensive. They require oceans of energy and attention. And so forth. No matter how much you love your kids, they’re always there, and you are entirely responsible for them, and this goes on for many, many years. Meanwhile, I’m an introvert and so is Brendan. Children exhaust us, even the ones we love most. Our solitude is the most valuable thing we have, and we cherish it above most other things and work hard to maintain it.

  Sometimes we posit a scenario in which we were both young when we met, and we imagine that we would have had kids, if only because I would have wanted them. And we would have raised them with all our best efforts and unflagging commitment. But we also would have become different people, made different choices, and had a different relationship with each other; more distant and harried, more responsible, more grown-up.

  Instead, we have this life, and we are these people. We get to go to bed every night together, alone, and wake up together, alone. Our shared passions thrill and satisfy us, and our abundant freedoms—to daydream; to cook exactly the food we want when we want it; to drink wine and watch a movie without worrying about who’s not yet asleep upstairs; to pick up and go anywhere we want, anytime; to do our work uninterrupted; to shape our own days to our own liking; and to stay connected to each other without feeling fractured—are not things we’d choose to give up for anyone, ever.

  Meanwhile, there are a lot of kids in my life. I have six nieces and nephews and I am the godmother of my best friend’s son and daughter. But most of my friends do not have kids; I am part of a community of childless people, many of them single, most of them artists of some stripe. Not having kids is the norm for my friends and for me. We get together and find we have plenty to talk about and no one to interrupt us.

  I attribute my present-day happiness to sheer luck. I didn’t choose not to have kids, it just happened to me—my husband didn’t want them when I did, and then when he did, we weren’t able to have them.

  Since that terrible fall of 2006, I’ve never wanted them again. During those long nights I spent lying awake dying of loneliness and pining for them, I think I said good-bye to them forever. I let them go back to the void, those unknown people I would have loved with all my heart and soul but will never know. I can’t miss what I’ve never had.

  THE NEW RHODA

  by

  Paul Lisicky

  (1) I KNEW THE SONG, knew the dreamy leaps of the singer’s voice, but I couldn’t place its name. I couldn’t remember where or when I knew it, but the song felt like a sign now, a little wonder I needed to be responsible to. It wasn’t so much the words—I rarely care about the words; a good song alchemizes sense into pure sound—but the atmosphere, its three key changes, which felt distilled rather than willed into being. How had I lost the song? If I continued to sit still, if I didn’t attend to this need to place it, I wouldn’t have the song to return to again. In a little bit I wouldn’t even remember that the song was something to miss, and if I could be that kind of casual about beautiful things, then why bother trying to write anymore? I know I was probably making too big a deal about this. It was the Fourth of July, Philadelphia. I was sitting in the empty coffee place around the corner from my new apartment.

  I could have asked the barista. I could have said, Hey, what’s this band? But I didn’t want to let on that I actually listened to music like this. To let on would be to expose myself. To admit that I don’t always act my age and know things a twenty-three-year-old might know. An old guy poking around where his nose isn’t supposed to be, or worse, a show-off. I did not want to chance being condescended to. It seemed preferable—safer, really—to keep my not-knowing private even at the expense of losing the song. This was music made by and for the young, not for someone who had grown up listening to the Smiths and buying LPs and cassette tapes at record stores. I was likely the same age as the barista’s father—probably I was even older than his father—and the fact that my life was so far outside the usual paradigms made me feel unexpectedly—what? Raw. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a father. It wasn’t that I was bemoaning a life I could have had—nothing so typical as that. My not being a father had kept me young, had kept my curiosity awake. It was indeed possible to opt out of growing up, if by growing up we mean shutting down our interest in the next or the new. I didn’t have to restrict myself to the behaviors of some role. But not everyone wants to know that. It could be dangerous news, even to a young bearded barista who might just be feeling territorial about the music he plays.

  * * *

  (2) In a not-so-distant past, men like me often died in their twenties and thirties. We continued to do what men like us had always done, and though the sex we had was called “safe,” the sex itself felt like a pact with a grenade. The grenade might not go off right away, but in five years it might blow up in your face, scorching your retinas, while you were out having a peaceful dinner. We were either worried all the time or entirely numb to our worry. A friend of a friend told the story of a man who gargled with grapefruit juice before deciding to go out on Saturday nights. If he felt the slightest sting inside his mouth (maybe a nick from the toothbrush the night before, a bit lip), he’d rinse with water immediately, reach for a book, and spend the night at home, thus preempting the idea of sex in a less than tip-top state, which for him lay too close to the possibility of seroconversion.

  This was not exactly a crazy man. Or, I should say, he was no crazier than the rest of us.

  Meanwhile, another world went on around us. People in that world bought life insurance, health insurance, houses, summer property to be passed on to children, grandchildren. They weren’t exactly in the here and now. They were busy turning to some future, but what is the future when you are always feeding it money? Doesn’t it get tiring to give so much away to a world that you’ll never get to touch and see?

  All my men had was the here and now, which often meant staying out half the night, dancing or standing in front of speakers that buzzed so loudly they hurt our ears. Inside the nightclub hung an oversized replica of an AZT capsule suspended with black wires from the ceiling. It glittered in the hot air, blue band down the center, like some icon we’d conjured up together. The title of the theme night was appropriately irreverent (the name escapes me now), for how could anyone be anything but irreverent about a drug that gave half the people in the room rashes, chills, dizziness, nausea, swelling of the tongue? What do you have when you don’t have a future? You have gallows humor, which, as it turns out, does a pretty good job of turning tinfoil into platinum. The last thing we were thinking about was childre
n, or being parents. We were still children ourselves, though we might have been doctors, professors, caregivers, counselors. A reclaimed childhood was not something to waste—we knew that much—having spent so much of our actual own childhoods repressed, depressed, waiting to get out. Nor was it escape.

  * * *

  (3) Imagine it. Look at a drop of your blood, your semen, your saliva, and think of it containing a thousand little grenades. Not just for you, but for the lover you came into intimate contact with. How would your life change? Could you ever disappear into yourself, your skin again? When you finally got the nerve to be tested, and found out that you did not carry those grenades, could you still think of that fluid as a substance you’d choose to make a baby with? Imagine it.

  One does not feel exactly undead after being dead for so long.

  * * *

  (4) Not so long ago, my friend Dawn asked what it was like to grow up in that time. We were talking about the idea of children, after watching two younger daddies pushing a stroller by our sidewalk café. The evening was arid, windy. A sudden gust lifted the cocktail napkin from the table. I dashed after it and almost caught it before it sailed off over the hood of the car. My ability to explain that era felt a little like that escaped napkin—or was it the gust? My language felt too small for me to contain it. I tried my best to say it my way, through my metaphors, not the ones that have already been branded into us by way of the usual narratives. But the more I talked, the more I focused on Dawn’s face, which was loving, pitying, uncomprehending. She was trying so hard to understand; I could feel her working, and I hated the distance my fumbling opened up between us.