Baby Love (16 page)

It must be sexy.

Tonight I drove myself to the drugstore for a nail clipper and another bottle of Tums.

Going out alone was eerie. I felt exposed in a way I’ve never experienced. Being a New Yorker, I am used to walking around at night. I know how to scan for danger without thinking about it. But I’ve never felt like I should be at home, behind closed doors, because the streets are unsafe. I definitely have never felt that I need to have a man by my side to protect me.

But that is exactly how I felt. It was brutal. I felt like my stomach made me a walking target, as if predators could smell my vulnerability. I had thoughts about being mugged, raped, or kicked in the stomach repeatedly. What an awful, awful way to hurt someone. When I think of all of the women and babies who have endured that kind of violence, my mind goes into spasm. I want to vomit.

Talked with Glen about it when I got home. He of course told me that I should not be driving around at night, alone, six and a half months pregnant. I was infuriated. I should be able to drive around any time I want and not have to worry about being bludgeoned to death. He agreed. You
should
be able to, he said, and hopefully one day you will. The real question is what are you going to do in the meantime?

Indeed.

Maybe it’s that the rain hasn’t stopped for three days, but today I am bored out of my mind. I am finally doing what everyone says I should have been doing for the last couple of months, resting, but it feels more like jail.

I have officially moved into the waiting phase of this pregnancy. Because even though I can go out and a part of me wants to go out, I really don’t have the energy to go out. I would have to get showered and dressed, climb into the car, start it up, and will it down the freeway. No matter where I decide to go, I would have to acquiesce to being the center of attention. I’d have to pretend I was wearing a shirt with a big arrow pointing to my belly and “Ask me about my baby” emblazoned above it.

I am a lady-in-waiting. I am waiting for the big day, the big event, the arrival of the mystery. I know this is a sacred, spiritual time. I am reveling in the predawn of maternity. I am bonding with my baby. I am storing up energy for the upcoming marathon. I am taking care of myself by not exposing myself or the baby to violence, confusion, and chaos.

I know all of this, and I am grateful that I have the luxury to hole up and hide out. I don’t have to do makeovers at the Macy’s cosmetics counter, I don’t have to harvest rice from sunrise to sunset, I don’t have to sit in front of the computer fielding interoffice e-mails because I am worried that while I am on maternity leave someone will steal my job.

I know all of this, but still . . . All I can think about, besides being bored to death, is food. What can I eat next? In the last two hours I have had two bowls of chicken soup, three pieces of toast with chicken, two soy ice cream sandwiches, two huge glasses of organic lemonade, an apple, a pomegranate, and as I write this, I’ve got designs on a steak, a few pieces of sliced turkey, some brown rice, and an orange. Eat and wait. Eat and wait. Eat and wait. And watch movies. And answer e-mail. And write thank-you notes to the people who gave me gifts at my shower. And rub an infinite variety of oils on my bursting stomach to prevent stretch marks.

Glen says I am peripatetic and that he always knew this would be hard for me. “This” being the slowing down of my mind and body, the near cessation of my endless roam. I shake my head at him and think to myself that I understand that this is necessary for family life. I know I don’t want to re-create my hypermobile childhood for this little baby.

But there is a secret part of me that thinks he might be right. Who are you kidding? the little voice says. You have a nomadic heart, do you not? You have learned that wherever you go that’s where you are, but gosh, you sure like getting there and meeting yourself again.

TWO VERY POWERFUL and influential women were on television a few weeks ago, speaking triumphantly about the fact that they don’t need men. I understand that. If you can financially provide for yourself, you are no longer dependent on another for economic support. I get it. But there are so many other kinds of support. When I think about trying to have this baby alone, without an intimate other to console me when I am worried and cook for me when I am so nauseated I can barely look at the kitchen, let alone stand in it, my head starts spinning. I understand the wisdom of having good friends to get these needs met, but really, I think we need partners in life.

I don’t know if it’s because I am a child of divorce, a Gen Xer accustomed to relating primarily though e-mail, or the daughter of a women’s movement ambivalent about the institution of marriage, but until I met Glen, partnership was elusive. My relationships, while not lacking in intensity, lacked the magical togetherness quotient you find in healthily fused adults. I had never achieved the ineffable calm of couples that don’t finish each other’s sentences, not because they can’t, but because they’d rather be quietly supportive of each other instead. I had never been half of a couple that checked in several times a day, no matter how mundane the conversation, to calibrate their movement as a unit from afar.

The most significant obstacle I faced to joining the club of the deeply, truly committed was my complete and utter ignorance of the importance of partner choice. I simply did not understand the necessity of intellectual compatibility and, even more important,
emotional reciprocity
in relationship. I now believe that there should come a time in every young woman’s life when a more experienced loved one explains this absolute key point. It’s not about marrying for love or money, it’s about partnering for sanity, survivability, and the calculable probability that together the two of you will create something more gorgeous and powerful than you ever could alone.

There was also my religion to contend with: absolute autonomy. I would rather die than give up travel, sexual freedom, financial independence, and the cordoned-off secret section of my psyche where only I could go. I kid you not: When I met Glen, I thought I could have a baby with him and another with Ade in Africa, shuttling back and forth every six months. It wasn’t until Glen reminded me that I almost died in Africa, and then gently suggested that my plan was completely unrealistic
in terms of maintaining intimacy,
that I realized I needed to get real and throw down the anchor.

I didn’t have a visceral sense of what it might be like to merge with something or someone other than myself until I was thirty years old and listening to the Dalai Lama. He was talking about the myth of independence. If you are so independent, he asked, who grows your food? Who sews your clothes, builds your house, makes sure that water comes out of your showerhead? How were you even born? The fact is, he said, we have not done one single thing alone, without the help of a small army of others, and yet we walk around talking about the necessity and supremacy of independence. It’s completely irrational.

For a brief moment I felt a softening of my self-perception, a relaxation of my ideas about where I stopped and other people began, a letting go into inseparability. I was not autonomous and never would be. What a relief! The Dalai Lama went on to say that no condition we find ourselves in is permanent. Rich people can become poor. Healthy people can become sick. Young people become old.

I flashed on this while watching the two women on television: the powerful and self-sufficient will become not so powerful and not so self-sufficient. These dynamic women for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect will both need someone at some point. I would wager that it would be more satisfying to them both if this someone did not have to be paid to show up.

I am not blaming feminism, because without parity and equality, partnership is just another word for exploitation. But I am suggesting we take another look at what we’re thinking and saying in the name of “empowerment,” and how that shapes our actual lives and impacts the people we love. As a mother, I worry about how it makes boys and men feel to hear they are not needed, and can be made obsolete by the presence of enough money and a few good girlfriends. I worry about how it makes them feel to hear that we don’t care if they disappear from the face of the earth because we have enough frozen sperm to get us through the foreseeable future. And what about the millions of women who can’t afford to not need men? Is empowerment impossible for them?

The more I learn about partnership, the more certain I am that the male partners of the women on television already put up with a tremendous amount of stress and strain just being the husbands of two very powerful, very visible women. Do you think they want to be more or less present, more or less intimate with their wives, after hearing that they aren’t really necessary? I know how I would feel if the person I devoted my life to told millions of people he didn’t need me.

Wrecked.

Because the fact is that we do need each other, and we are locked into this dance with the whole frickin’ world whether we like it or not. This lack of separateness is awful and terrifying, amazing and exhilarating, and just plain true. It seems to me that men and women both need to come up to speed on this, instead of competing for the prize of who can do without whom for longer. There is power in partnership, otherwise the modern, government-sanctioned version of it, marriage, wouldn’t be able to hold.

But I began this mini-manifesto simply because I have never felt as much dependence on another person, male or female, as I do now that I am pregnant. Granted, I do feel a tremendous power, a sort of Yes, I’ve got the fetus now, no one can stop me, but then when that necessarily subsides and I think about the thousands of decisions that are going to come up, the millions of moments where it will inevitably take two heads screwed on right to muddle through, I feel a tremendous need. To be a single mother, while I feel I could do it, at the moment seems an impossible task.

What I need is a partner: someone who will show up. And what I need to become is a partner: someone who will open the door. I have no idea if I can sustain it as long as I want, which is forever, but I’ve never felt so motivated to try.

Blessed be the editors, for they giveth work!

I spoke today with the editor of a high school English textbook I am writing an essay and teaching section for, and he put me on task. I have several subsections to write, answering questions like: What is the difference between an article and an essay? and What is my writing process like?

I decided to write the main essay for the textbook on hip-hop culture and what it was like before it became a global commodity. It’s a personal piece about living in the Bronx in the eighties when it all began. And how, as a youth movement, hip-hop was about kids being free and expressive and having a good time. Most important, it was about kids from different cultures finding a common language.

Anyway. It’s not like I don’t have a whole other book to write, but it is nice to have a few short pieces to focus on. Otherwise,

I watch way too much TV. It’s just so nice to lie about, clicking the remote. Right now I am in love with
Girlfriends
and
The King of Queens.
I’m convinced these shows are helping me bridge the chasm between single urban professional and suburban nuclear. My life at the moment is two parts
Girlfriends,
two parts
The King of Queens,
one part Discovery Channel.

Good news: I read on the Internet that mothers who eat a lot of chocolate when they are pregnant have happier babies.

The baby is super-awake today. I sense his awareness more than ever, that he’s waking up and taking things in. I’ve started talking to him, out loud instead of just in my head. I tell him all of the things we’re doing, like getting the car washed and driving to the chiropractor, buying laundry detergent and calling Grandpa on the phone. This morning I told him about Sonam and that she’s going to be with us in the hospital. I told him not to be afraid because she has delivered hundreds of babies and she loves us.

It’s all so exciting, but between interviewing doulas, training for the labor marathon, making sure I’ve got the right breast pump, and eating everything in sight, I’m totally exhausted. I get why people have their babies in the hospital. It’s the planning, stupid! I feel like I’m making a Hollywood film with a two-person crew. If I were to have this baby at home, I would have to do all of what I am already doing, plus shop for plastic sheets and a fifty-foot hose for the water tank.

I’m finally convinced I’ve made the right decision. I just want to go to the hospital, have this baby, and then come home to a sane, stable environment. I know it sounds rough, but I have a hunch that giving birth is going to be hard enough. I don’t also have to transform my apartment into a birthing center.

Since I haven’t heard from my mother about the birthday tea since she brought it up two months ago, and since I’ve been feeling a bit sketchy about the whole thing anyway, I wrote her a note telling her that I don’t feel comfortable moving forward with what I could only imagine wasn’t really going to happen anyway, seeing as how my birthday is in ten days. I wrote that I am still having reverberations from all of the horrible things she said to me, and just don’t feel safe. I apologized again for anything and everything I have done that has ever hurt her, and I thanked her for the offer, and I did all of the other nice things a daughter is supposed to do.

She wrote back: “Walk free, with my blessing.”

I feel the inward turn today. I have no desire to do anything at all, other than eat, sleep, and dream. I have work to do and yet my brain does not cooperate. It wants only to lie here and contemplate the sky and the trees, to feel my baby move from side to side, to wonder about his face, his future.