by Mary F. Pols
Matthew could eat three lobsters in one sitting. He was an expensive teenager.
“Let’s,” I said. I sank back on my elbows, admiring the way my belly protruded in my wet suit. I hadn’t exactly found the serenity I had hoped for in Maine, but I was getting the sense that serene pregnancies were just another fantasy.
RIGHT AFTER I GOT BACK from Maine, Matt called with encouraging news. He’d landed a temp job that seemed likely to last at least for a couple of months.
“They said they’ve got a lot of work for me,” he said, sounding positively jubilant. “They showed me this room of files they want reorganized. I could be here awhile.”
The company, a bond trader, had its offices down in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.
“It’s a killer view,” he said. “You can watch the ferries coming in. I can see Oakland. If you were driving across the bridge, I’d practically be able to see you.”
I’d never heard him so upbeat.
“That’s great,” I said. “I’m really glad.”
“Anyhoo,” he said. “I’m off to get a burrito.”
I looked at the phone, bemused.
“Anyhoo?” I said. “Does your mother say that?”
“No,” he said. “Homer.”
“Who?” I said.
“Homer Simpson,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “Okay, well enjoy your burrito. And I’m really happy for you.”
I hung up the phone smiling and went back to looking through the mail that had accumulated in my absence. There was a big box from Amazon. I opened it up and found a stack of pregnancy books. Hip mommas, thinking mommas, hot mommas, and even a guidebook for mommas on a budget. Then there was a big, beautiful, glossy coffee-table book about pregnancy. I looked for a note in the box. “Thought these might come in handy,” it said. “I’m so excited for you. Love, Sara.” Sara was one of my oldest friends. We’d met interning at an alternative weekly, gone to journalism school together, and then worked at the same paper in Southern California. Sara was strong and brave and a feminist. I could have imagined her having a child on her own, that is, before she married our friend Mark and had two children with him. Theirs was an emotional landscape I envied. I opened the coffee-table book and started looking at the pictures. Cells dividing, microscopic egg sacs, and then the tiny fetuses. They were so fragile, so delicate, so amazing.
I looked at the note again. When I’d told Sara about the whole emotional landscape conversation with Sam, she’d clucked sympathetically and told me not to take Sam too seriously. “He’s the most bombastic man in the world!” she’d said. But she knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from taking it to heart, and this was her way of saying, I’m here. I never doubted that my friends would rally around me. But I felt bolstered by Sara’s care package.
The first winter after a wildfire is tough. The rain pounds the naked ground, and without trees and shrubs to anchor the wet earth, whole hills might give way. I’d seen the wreckage of mud slides. But I had also seen what happens in the spring. With their larger, overhanging competitors out of the way, the grasses and flowers rebound with ferocity. Seedpods cracked by the flames, their contents lifted by the hot winds, spread farther than ever before. Once, I followed a park ranger as he walked through a burn area in the Santa Monica Mountains, showing me how varied the blooms were after the fresh start of a fire. He tramped off the path and cupped a dark brown flower with a yellow center in his hand. “This is a chocolate lily,” he said. “They’re usually pretty uncommon around here. But we’ve been seeing quite a few of them. It’s amazing what turns up after a fire.”
Maybe I’d find some chocolate lilies in my new landscape.
CHAPTER 6
Living with Boys
EACH TIME I VISITED my gynecologist the contradictions of my luck pulled at me. “Looking good,” she’d say, looking at the ultrasound image. “Such a strong heartbeat,” and I’d hear the beautiful sound of that heartbeat, like a galloping horse running toward me. I’d feel overwhelmed with gratitude, knowing how hard it was for so many women, first to get pregnant, then to stay that way. Here I was, with this baby I hadn’t planned, and he or she was doing everything just right.
But in the waiting room, I was often the only woman alone; all the other women had a man with them, a man who had his hand on her knee, proud, possessive, soothing. After that depressing first trip to the doctor, I had decided that Matt wouldn’t accompany me on any prenatal visits; there was too much pretense about it. Moreover, his passivity, the way he just sat like a lump, drove me insane. He was the absolute opposite of me.
“You’re one of those people who always sat at the front of the class, aren’t you?” he said to me.
“No,” I snapped. “I sat in the back when I was in school. Or the middle. Don’t make me sound like Tracy Flick.”
“Who’s Tracy Flick?”
Our points of reference were always off. I felt as though I needed a crash course in Homer and Bart Simpson in order to speak his language.
“The girl from Election, Reese Witherspoon’s character,” I said. “She was an uptight overachiever. And as it happens, now that I am an adult, when there is information I need or want, yes, I do sit in the front, so that I can increase my chances of getting that information.”
I was lecturing. Something about Matt’s cluelessness inspired this tone of voice from me, which sounded suspiciously like my father’s. But I did believe in asking questions, lots of them. Being a journalist had taught me that being a shrinking violet didn’t get you anywhere. Sometimes you had to humble yourself and ask the obvious question, the one that might make other reporters turn and look at you—thinking, Duh!—because the chances were quite high that none of us actually knew anything. The other lesson I learned was not to take no for an answer. Not until the person I was asking had shut the door, locked it, and gone to bed.
Matt had spent his whole life sitting in the back row. He was honest about his academic failings, telling me he had earned such bad grades in high school that he had no chance of getting into the colleges he’d imagined himself going to. He admitted that he’d deliberately done badly in school, figuring he’d distinguish himself by remarkable failure rather than the success he was scared to hope for. “I remember my mother pounding on the table every night, trying to get me to do my homework,” he told me. “And I’d just look out the window until she got worn out.” He went to a community college, applied himself just enough to transfer to U Mass, then slacked off for the rest of his academic career. The thing he’d been good at was lacrosse. I knew enough to know that even if he’d only sat the bench on the U Mass men’s lacrosse team, he had to have had talent. Normally skills involving helmets and shin pads would have meant nothing to me. I had survived being the second to last picked for volleyball, kickball, and every other elementary and junior high school gym sport (the girl in leg braces was generally last). But Matt was so far from my dream co-parent that I was grasping at straws. While talking to Wib, I offered up the tidbit that the father of my child had demonstrated considerable prowess on the lacrosse field.
“What position?” she asked. Her son played lacrosse, so she knew the sport.
“Goalie,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said, with as much enthusiasm as if I’d told her Matt had majored in quantum physics at MIT. She is an encouraging person by nature. “That means he’s got to be good under pressure. Coolheaded.”
“Really?” I said. “God, I hope so.”
AFTER I SCHEDULED my amnio appointment, I decided to break my rule and have Matt come with me. I needed him; I wasn’t allowed to go home alone after it, and none of my friends was available. Amnios are recommended for women over thirty-five, but I also really wanted to know the sex of the baby. Ultrasounds weren’t definitive on this topic; my friend Kir had spent her entire third pregnancy assuming, wrongly, that she was having a girl based on what the ultrasound technician had told her. I wanted a girl more than a
nything. I actively did not want a boy. I’d recently heard a guest on an NPR program discussing how difficult it was for boys born to single mothers to grow up without strong male role models. I’d spent ten minutes sobbing in the car over that one. Moreover, my observations, limited though they were, had led me to believe that if I had a boy, he had a better than average chance of being a gun-toting, Game Boy–playing, Ritalin-popping beast. Boys weren’t supposed to be verbal, so I expected if I had a boy, he wouldn’t say much of anything until he was three, and at thirteen he’d stop communicating entirely, except to greet everything I said with a grunt of contempt. Then I’d have to deal with wet dreams. I also assumed that a boy would be just like Matt. I pictured myself pounding on the kitchen table while his eyes drifted away from his homework and toward the window. “You’re just like your father,” I’d be snarling at my teenaged son. “I never should have gone home with him!”
In the unlikely event that destiny, having tampered with all my plans for myself to date, would have also robbed me of a companion in dollhouse decorating, I wanted to be prepared. Not that I’d be putting a baby boy out on the mountainside for the coyotes. But I didn’t want to have a look of dismay on my face if and when they said, “It’s a boy!”
Matt took my hand as I lay on the table. The gesture reminded me of being on a field trip in elementary school when the teacher makes you hold hands. The nurse let me see the baby on the ultrasound screen for a minute; then she turned it away so that I wouldn’t see the needle making its long descent into my womb. But Matt watched on another screen, while I watched his face. He was rapt. I realized this was his first glimpse of the life inside me, and I was gratified by the pleasure on his face.
WHEN I’D TOLD MATT I was definitely going to go ahead with the pregnancy, I said I wanted us to live together for the baby’s first year. The fearful part of me was imagining being alone all night, every night, with an infant’s mysterious needs. I also thought it would be better for Matt. He could escape his vile hovel and start living like a grown-up. I reasoned this arrangement would be better for the baby, who would then get to bond with both parents on an equal level. Also, I didn’t want my child to grow up thinking of Daddy as the person who lived in a dump.
On the day that he’d said, without stopping to think about it, that he wanted to be involved in our child’s life, he’d made me feel that we could be a team, and though I’d question it later on, I was proceeding as if we were just that. When I wasn’t quaking over the challenges I’d set for myself, I was sure I could help him get his shit together. I was older, wiser, and prided myself on being a problem solver. Matt needed a makeover. Improved living conditions would be just the tip of the iceberg.
“I think it would be good for all of us,” I told him one night on the phone. But I knew even as I said it that this might not sound like such a great offer to Matt, who was clearly trying to keep as much physical distance between us as possible. Since my announcement, his half of the sexual current between us had evaporated completely. He’d started treating me like a sister. He’d actually called me “sport” the week before.
“I think I could make a nice home for us,” I had added, to fill the silence on the line. “I have plenty of furniture. You’d just need a bed. We’d get a three-bedroom apartment. Or two, and you could have one and the baby and I would take the other.”
“That sounds like a sitcom,” he’d said dubiously. “What if I’m seeing someone or you’re seeing someone?”
Did this guy have any social graces?
“That’s what you’re worried about?” I said. “Your sex life?”
I wasn’t anticipating doing a lot of dating in my infant’s first year of life. I couldn’t look beyond that time frame, because to look farther into the future was too overwhelming. To start considering Matt’s future sex life was even more daunting. I suddenly pictured myself with the roommate from hell. I’d be pacing the halls in the middle of the night with my precious baby girl, who would be howling with displeasure, while behind Matt’s door, some pretty young thing would be howling with pleasure. I could only imagine our breakfast conversations:
“You better have used a condom.”
“We did.”
“All three times?”
“Yessss,” he’d say, pouring Froot Loops into a bowl. “Is there any milk?”
He’d eventually agreed to the arrangement, provided we’d make our home together in San Francisco. I hadn’t lived in the city for years; it had been too expensive for me on my own. But there would be advantages to it. For one thing, I could just hop on a bus and get to my night screenings, instead of commuting by car. I’d also be close to Liza.
Nevertheless, as I’d gotten to know Matt’s history, I’d become nervous about sharing a place with him. The longest he’d been at any company since he moved to the West Coast was four months. I had to consider the possibility that he might not be able to hold on to a job. I had no financial cushion at all. If I got stuck with the full rent for a two-bedroom in the city, I’d be bankrupt in two months. So I sat him down one day and told him I worried he’d be a rent risk. Sharing a place was no longer on the table. He was dejected at getting a lecture, but clearly relieved to be off the hook.
My prenatal counselor had suggested I consider living with another single mother. We could pool our resources for day care and rent. The prospect made me feel tragic; there I’d be in some sort of Berkeley commune, my dirty-faced brat hand in hand with the dirty-faced brat of another idiotically careless woman, a pot of black beans bubbling on the stove. But I knew I had to start asking the tough questions, start treating the possibilities for my future like a story I was reporting. I posted an ad on a Web site that matched single mothers. Then I went looking for local members of Single Mothers by Choice, a national group. There had to be a chapter in the East Bay, where cultural and social freedoms reigned supreme.
An officer in the local chapter called me back. Sasha’s voice was breathy, her tone friendly. She was eager to listen, and when I got to the cat litter story, I could practically hear her nodding sympathetically. It felt good to spill my story to someone who might have some wisdom to offer. Or at least that’s what I kept saying. “I was hoping you could offer me some wisdom.” (Somewhere inside me, I could hear my mother’s cynical voice responding: “Well, dearie, the first wisdom I’d offer is to use a condom in the future.”)
Sasha sighed. “You’re just like me,” she said.
Oh, thank God. I wanted to be just like someone.
“The father of my child?” she said. “No job. Actually he’s homeless. I got pregnant one night when I visited him in the homeless shelter. Kind of intentionally.”
He’d seen his daughter exactly twice. Once they had bumped into him at a street fair. Another time he’d turned up at her parents’ house demanding to see the child. Drunk. Even with his Baltimore accent, Mountain Dew in one hand and empty résumé in the other, Matt suddenly looked better to me. Yet Sasha recommended that I cut off all ties with him.
“Whatever you do, don’t put his name on the birth certificate,” she continued. “If you do that, then he’s automatically entitled to visitation. If you leave it off, he’s going to have to do DNA testing to prove that the baby is his, and it doesn’t sound like he’s the kind of guy that would want to spend money on that.”
Single Mothers by Choice would help me, she said, but there was something I needed to know.
“Most of the women in the group have unknown donors,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“They used a sperm bank. And they have some issues with women who do know their donor. So there is kind of this faction, see? There are people like us in the group, just not that many.”
There have been many times in my life when I didn’t do something I should have done and then been dogged by guilt for not having behaved in the practical, sensible way. With this in mind, I told Sasha that I would come to the next meeting of the single mothers�
�� group, even though the world of donors you weren’t supposed to know and drunk homeless donors you did know sounded thoroughly unappealing. She also suggested my moving into an apartment near her that might be vacant in the next few months. “We could share child care!” she said brightly.
I drove by Sasha’s place a few days later. The front yard was filled with the rubble of plastic toys. I decided I’d stop some other time. Then that weekend, I set out for my local library, where Sasha had told me the East Bay’s Single Mothers by Choice group would be holding a meeting. I tried every door, peered in windows, and circled the whole building, but I never found them. Maybe, I thought, I’ll just see how things go for now on my own. If I get desperate, I can always track them down. Then I went home and threw up.
WHEN I CALLED for the amnio results two weeks later, I was sitting at my dining room table, which also served as my home office. I had the computer on and was surfing the Net, not expecting to get a human being on the other end of the line. My genetic counselor was gleeful as she told me that, despite its advanced age, my egg had been in perfect condition. No genetic deformities detected, everything healthy and progressing well.
“And did you want to know the baby’s sex?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, bracing myself.
“You’re having a boy!” she said gaily.
“Oh,” I said, and mumbled a few things before getting off the phone.
I had a hair appointment across town about fifteen minutes from then, so I made my whiny phone calls from the car. I started with Kir. She’d had two girls before she had her son, and it sometimes seemed as though she’d willed the first two pregnancies to turn out the way she wanted. I remembered Kir sobbing, in the last weeks of her third pregnancy, that perhaps this baby was a boy after all. Her supposition was that only a wretched boy could make her feel so physically ill. So I thought she’d understand my misery. Certainly she knew immediately what was going on. All I had to do was say amnio and sob into the phone.
