by Mary F. Pols
I tried to figure out what this habit meant for him and for me. A Web site called www.adultthumbsuckers.com told me that my boyfriend was far from alone and that I needed to be more open to his needs. “If your spouse or partner doesn’t understand, then maybe they are not the right person for you,” the Web site said. I went nuts trying to analyze him. What kind of mother/separation issues did this signify? Because I still imagined us getting married, I managed to keep my mouth shut for a full month before I spilled the beans to anyone.
“He does what?” my therapist asked. “Really?”
She blew her nose. I’d been seeing her for only a few weeks. Before the revelation of the thumb-sucking, Owen and I had had a few problems, and I was anxious to make sure that I didn’t fuck this one up. My insurance company had sent me to her. That meant I got only eight sessions before they threw me to the wolves of self-pay reality. I think she had the same cold the whole time I was seeing her.
“Well, that’s weird,” she said. Then she looked guilty. We both knew therapists weren’t supposed to make those kinds of judgments. But once she’d put it out there, there was no going back. A professional had declared my boyfriend weird. I gave the relationship with Owen another couple of months, hoping he’d cease and desist, or at least engage in conversation about the issue. One weekend we went away together to Yosemite to cross-country ski. I agonized over how to bring it up. After a nice dinner, when we were lying in bed, I stepped out on a limb.
“When we have kids,” I said, “I don’t think you can suck your thumb in front of them. You know that, right?”
He nodded vigorously. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, he guiltily dropped the sheet, which he’d had up to his mouth, hiding the evidence. That was one of the first times I turned away from him sexually. Soon there were more. I couldn’t get over what a turnoff it was to see a grown man sucking his thumb. Whenever we disagreed about anything, he’d plunge the thumb into his mouth, as if it were in retaliation for some perceived slight. He seemed to want to reclaim some power from me, an imbalance that he perhaps equated with my being older.
The final straw was when I went to Italy for a vacation with my family and realized during an idyllic moment floating down a canal in Venice that not only did I not miss him at all, but I was grateful he wasn’t there with me. The night I got back, we broke up. I didn’t have a single second of regret. For the first time ever, I’d been swimming at high tide, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what lay just beneath the surface.
I’d learned an important lesson about my willingness, or lack thereof, to compromise in order to be with a man to have a family. I could have stayed with Owen, and if I had, I would have had house, husband, and, I don’t doubt, within a few years, children. I knew people who had settled just to get that traditional family. I realized I wasn’t actually capable of that.
BUT HERE I WAS, I was almost six weeks’ pregnant by a stranger, and it seemed to everyone that it might be a good idea for us to get to know each other better. So on the Fourth of July I invited Matt to join all of us at Liza’s. Hugh was there too; on holidays in particular, Liza and he tried to do family things together for the sake of their boys. Matt and I hadn’t talked much lately, just a few conversations on the phone. He arrived, drank a few beers in quick succession, and requested a burger with just a bun and cheese, nothing else. “A slice of tomato, though, right?” I said. He shook his head. “Potato salad?” I said.
“What’s in it?” he said, peering into the bowl. “Carrots?”
“And celery,” I said. “A little red pepper. Some apple. That’s what makes it so good.”
He waved me off. “I’m not much for vegetables.”
Liza was blasting Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and singing along.
“Do you like Neil Young?” she asked Matt.
“Is that who this is?” he said. “I knew it was one of those old guys. Not really I guess. My stepfather likes him, though.”
John was in mid-bite. His eyebrows went up, over the top of the burger. I averted my eyes. Common ground was proving scarce.
After dinner, Liza pressed Matt to try my brownies.
“This woman can cook, you know,” she said. “You have no idea. Her whole family. They could open a restaurant.”
“Liza,” I said, giving her the look that said, Tone it down, would you? I felt like the potential bride in an arranged marriage, being hyped for the groom. Only it would have been a shotgun arranged marriage. Matt took a brownie and chewed thoughtfully. “It’s good,” he said. I was getting the impression he wasn’t a rhapsodizer. “Well, I should get going,” he said. “Thanks for the burger.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek on his way out the door. “See you later.”
“Whew,” Liza said. “After that lovely family dinner I’m going to need to step out back.”
She vanished to smoke. Hugh and I started the cleanup.
“He seems nice,” he said encouragingly, stuffing discarded corncobs down the disposal.
“You think?” I said.
“Sure. He doesn’t say much, though, does he?”
“No,” I said, picking at a brownie. “Not much. It’s kind of a weird situation, though.”
Hugh laughed. “I’ll say.”
I handed him a stack of plates.
“So how old is he again?” he asked. “Twenty-nine? He seems younger, doesn’t he?”
He did. He seemed younger and younger all the time. He worked references to episodes of The Simpsons into half the things he said. I couldn’t believe I’d thought for a second he might be thirty-five. Hugh and I fell into a companionable silence.
“Poor boy,” Liza said, coming back in from the laundry room. “He doesn’t know what to think. And who can blame him?”
John was looking through Liza’s CD collection. “He could have at least brought some beer,” he chimed in.
“He said he’s had only one temp gig in the last month,” I said. “I don’t think he has any money.”
“Oh,” John said. He stroked his beard thoughtfully. He loved that goatee. “Baby daddy better dust off that résumé.”
“What does he want to do?” Hugh asked. Hugh knows how to succeed in business, and he’s baffled by those who don’t.
“I don’t think he has a clue,” I said. “He talks about getting into one of those training programs for stockbrokers, but I think he’s too old for it.”
“He did go to college, though, right?” Hugh asked.
“U Mass,” I said. “On the five-year plan. Or maybe it was the six-year plan.”
“Maybe he’s a slow starter,” John said.
“I hope he starts soon,” I said. “I really don’t want my baby to have an unemployed father.”
Matt seemed so directionless. If you measured young adulthood by the mattress you buy post-college, for instance, he was way behind. He hadn’t even gotten to the futon phase yet. Everything in his dreary little room came with the rent. I wondered if his stunted growth had something to do with his childhood. He’d had a rough time of it; his parents split up when he was five and he had desperately wanted his father to come back. Matt lived with his mother and saw his dad and stepmother only on vacations and weekends. His mom remarried when he was eighteen, and he’d gained a stepfather and a pair of younger stepsisters, but he didn’t have much to say about his family. He warmed up when he was talking about the cats he and his mother had had, or their dog, but he volunteered very little. He asked less. He didn’t seem curious about anything. He waited for me to start every discussion. His responses were those of a polite but only mildly interested stranger. He felt like a visitor to my life, except that, presumably, he was going to be around for a long, long time.
“Hey,” John said. “I don’t suppose we’re still going to speed dating next week?”
“Jesus,” I said, staring at him. “I forgot.”
NEEDLESS TO SAY, despite my fortitude about dumping the thumb-sucker, by the end of my thirty-eight
h year, I had grown quite worried about my future. Sometimes I actively tried not to worry, because people (married people, always married people) said to me, “Oh, when you stop worrying about it, that’s when it is going to happen.” I wish people would stop saying this to their single friends, because not only is it not true, it is inadvertently cruel. It makes you feel as though there might be a formula you could follow to find a happy ending. Or a map that could get you out of the outback of single life if you studied it hard enough.
At any rate, I’d started 2003 with a campaign to find a man and settle down. I was no longer going to leave anything up to fate. I was going to do all the things that had ever been suggested to me by those well-meaning friends eager to see me married. I vowed to try online dating and go on a Sierra Club singles hike, even though I had always pictured those hikes as being filled with a dozen pretty, outdoorsy women in their early thirties and two overweight guys in their fifties wearing Rolling Stones T-shirts. And I would take a class and meet new people, just like in that sweet Danish film Italian for Beginners, where various dysfunctional Danes found love in Italian class. I was going to approach this like looking for a job, with energy and enthusiasm.
When I started online dating, it was initially like stumbling into Whole Foods after a lifetime of shopping at Safeway. But its shortcomings soon became apparent. Most men seemed to be treating it as an extension of the singles bar, and the impression I got was that they were more interested in expanding their dating pool than in having relationships. Yet they wanted women ten years younger than they, presumably for their fresher, more fertile eggs. I also couldn’t get over my disgust at their physical criteria for women. Short was okay, but if you weighed more than 120 pounds, even the real toads weren’t interested. All those coffee dates I’d gone on had proved interesting in an anthropological sense but far from fruitful. Most men seemed far better online than in person, and I found myself impatient with the lag time between e-mail conversations and finding out the bitter truth. One guy I’d gone out with twice had asked for a third date, then called the next night to tell me he had met someone else.
“When did you have time?” I sputtered indignantly before saying good-bye.
Speed dating, in contrast, had the allure of an up-front look at the guy and a chance to see if there was actual chemistry. Sure we’d be talking only for three minutes, but it seemed more efficient. However, the proportion of thirty-nine-year-old women wanting to get into speed dating is quite a bit higher than that of men of the same age, and the company I’d contacted had no openings in the thirty-five to forty-two age bracket for months to come. I offered to bring John; they always needed more men. They booked me into the earliest possible open session. I never dreamed I’d be seven weeks’ pregnant when our session finally rolled around.
“Christ, I hope I don’t have to puke in the middle of this,” I said to John as we approached the Bubble Lounge in downtown San Francisco. “And there’d better be snacks.”
“And babes,” John said, holding the door for me. “Ones who aren’t pregnant.”
The setting was inauspicious, dark and a little sleazy. This was the kind of “singles” place I usually avoided. I ordered a ginger ale and sat down at my appointed table, marked with the letter K.
The third guy to slither into the seat across from me was so nervous that he already had huge sweat marks showing on his blue oxford.
“Hi, K,” he said. “That must stand for Kute.”
“Actually,” I said, “it stands for Knocked Up. That’s me. Can you believe it? I’m just here browsing for a husband to go with my baby.”
He laughed reflexively. Then he registered what I’d actually said. He bit his lip. He glanced longingly over at L’s table. She looked normal. She looked Kute.
“I’m kidding!” I said. “K is for Kidder. That’s me.”
I behaved myself after that, and the guys weren’t bad. A half dozen seemed like guys I wouldn’t mind going out with again. An attractive, earthy geologist from Marin, divorced with two children, seemed incredibly nice. I started to warm to the prospect of going camping with him and his kids, forgetting for an hour or so that I was pregnant. At the end of the evening I turned in a scorecard indicating I’d happily see five or six men again.
The card looks not unlike an SAT form. Once you turn it in, you wait to see how everyone “grades” you. I’d done well enough, with a dozen men saying they’d like to see me again. The next evening, as I pored over their profiles, I was pleased to see that the geologist was also interested in me. But when I got into bed and turned off the light, I realized, of course, that I couldn’t date any of these men. Yes, the geologist had baggage too, but who on earth wanted to date a pregnant woman? (Well, yes, Seal, but I am not, nor was I ever, Heidi Klum.) I lay in bed awake, wondering if maybe I was rushing into having this baby too soon. After all, now I knew I could still get pregnant. I could fall in love, get married, and start trying to have a child with my husband immediately. What if one of these men was the perfect person for me, and I wasn’t going to be able to ride off into the sunset with him because I was having the bastard child of an unemployed twenty-nine-year-old?
When I woke the next morning I was an emotional wreck. I’d turned down my HMO’s offer of prenatal counseling, but perhaps I needed it after all. When Matt and I spoke later that day, he was fretting about when to break the news to his parents. I told him to hold off. “I might not have this baby,” I said. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
He was quiet for a while.
“Hello,” I said, as aggressively as I could. “Are you still there?”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he finally said. “But I’d rather you didn’t have an abortion.”
On this issue, Matt never wavered, not even for a minute. Many men would have jumped at the chance to take the classic easy route, offering to pay for an abortion or drive me to the clinic. That sort of volunteerism is cheap. You’ll never convince me that the emotional toll of an abortion on a man is even one-tenth of what it is on a woman. Matt’s reaction, which wasn’t born out of religious or political impulse, touched me. It came from a true desire to have and know his child. When he had told me everyone wants to have a child, I’d thought, Not everyone. Not, for instance, my boyfriend from college. He’d paid. He’d driven me there. He’d held my hand in the waiting room. Then, when they’d called my name and I’d said, “I won’t do this if you don’t want me to,” he’d said nothing.
I’d had a friend who had gotten pregnant by a very rich man a few years before. She didn’t tell me she’d been pregnant until after she’d had the abortion. “I knew you’d cry and that would make me cry,” she’d said. She was right, I would have cried. I also would have urged her not to do it. She longed for a child and she was crazy about this man. But he was in a longtime relationship he wasn’t about to end for my friend. He’d have set up a trust fund for his child, in all likelihood, but he wasn’t going to be part of some pretty package she might have had in her head. So she’d had the abortion. She was younger than I was, but even so, I’d thought, what a gamble. What if no one else came along? What if that was her only chance to be a mother? (Happily, it wasn’t.)
As I reflected on my situation in comparison with hers, I realized that if money weren’t an issue, I wouldn’t be debating going ahead with this pregnancy. But money was an issue. I had very little, and Matt seemed to typically have about $5 on his person and no more in the bank. My impression was that he hadn’t made a concerted effort to find or hold down a job in months, if not years. His father and stepmother had been sending him rent money regularly. I couldn’t rely on him for money, and despite his quiet opposition to an abortion, I wasn’t sure I could rely on him for any real help with the baby.
On the way in to see my pregnancy counselor, I stopped at the bathroom. Already I had to pee all the time. There was a cleaning lady in there replacing the toilet paper rolls. I looked at her and thought, I bet you have three k
ids at home and two jobs. Yet here you are, surviving. What kind of weak and pathetic person am I to even question whether to have this baby?
Minutes later, I was telling my counselor this. She was in her fifties, a quiet, low-key type, one of those born listeners who nod, but not so much that you cease to trust them. There was nothing remarkable about her. She was the perfect sounding board.
“Everyone’s situation is different,” she said. “That woman could have three children and two jobs and a lousy husband, but she might also have an extraordinary family network to provide her with day care. It doesn’t sound like you’d have that. Your family is where?”
“All on the East Coast,” I said. “My mother is in a nursing home and my dad is eighty-four. I do have sisters, but none of them are going to move out here.”
I looked at her expectantly.
“Tell me some more of your concerns,” she said.
She was wearing a cardigan to guard against the air conditioning chill, but I felt sweaty, partly from the walk to get here, partly from nerves, but mostly from the pregnancy hormones.
“I just wonder if I’m ever going to meet a man now,” I said. “I’ve had enough trouble so far, and once I burden myself with someone else’s child, who is going to want me then? I feel as though I might be throwing away a chance at real happiness. I know I’m going to be creating an incredibly difficult life for myself.”
Before I knew it, I was telling her about Owen the thumb-sucker, and how once I caught him looking wistfully at a picture of me from when I was twenty-eight. I asked him why he had that look on his face. “You were so pretty,” he said. “I wish I’d known you then.”
“Have you considered the possibility that you might start meeting different kinds of men if you’re a mother?” the counselor asked.
