Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1
On a Tuesday in February of 2014, at 1:45 p.m., at the age of thirty-six, I became a mother for the first time, and my daughter became my daughter. We named her Zelda June. She was born via Caesarean section in a scheduled, quick, and largely drama-free operation that lasted roughly a half hour from start to finish. I wouldn’t exactly say it was “painless,” but it was close enough to painless that I still have trouble telling other women who have had children about the experience for fear that I will sound as though I’m bragging. “She has a high tolerance for pain,” my husband, Josh, has interjected when I mention my easy recovery. As I sit here now, I can barely feel the scar she left on me. It is barely visible when I look at my body in the mirror. Those moments there, when Zelda became Zelda and I became her mother, they washed away decades of ambivalence and fear, of random nightmares or missed opportunities and chances walked away from. Washed away were the babies I hadn’t had, in the face of the one I did. I was, like I said, thirty-six years old. I’d been married for almost seven years and had lived in New York City for nine. I put off the pregnancy for as long as I could, telling myself I was too busy; there would be time later. But later was always later, and really, I was afraid; physically, emotionally, mentally, I feared pregnancy and motherhood. I didn’t think too hard about it, and every six months or a year, Josh randomly brought it up and then just as quickly let it pass. “Should we have a baby, Laura?” I’d hear from the other room. “What do you want for dinner?” I’d ask, changing the subject. We’d talked about kids when we got engaged, when we got married: yes, I’d say. I’d like to have kids someday. Someday was off in the future. Someday, I could handle. But someday was stretched out for years as I put it off, put it off. But then, in the middle of 2013, I changed my mind. Someday arrived. I could tell you I had a change of heart, and I did. I could tell you that I was finally comfortable enough, finally felt financially stable enough, owned a house that had a spare bedroom; all of these things took years to fall into place. But really, I was also rather suddenly overcome with an everyday, very common desire: I wanted to be a mother, and I knew that it might take a while to become pregnant. At thirty-five, I thought, “Well, better start trying, I guess.” And then I got pregnant almost immediately. I confirmed my pregnancy with a test on my thirty-sixth birthday, and as I stood in the bathroom, with only a few moments before I opened the door and told my husband, I cried silently in the dark into a towel. I had only just decided, less than a month ago, that I wanted to have a baby, and now there I was, the wheels set in motion: the first step had been a success! I was pregnant. But still, I cried tears of cowardice, of anxiety, and of simple disbelief. Telling Josh, I knew, would set off the chain of events that would end in . . . well, the birth of a baby. I closed my eyes and breathed really deep. I reached behind me and hit the light switch. The bathroom was small, in the center of the second floor of our tiny (it was just eleven and a half feet wide) Brooklyn townhouse. I loved that bathroom, its claw-footed tub, but also the fact that it had no windows. When you turned off the light, you were in total darkness and quiet. It was the only place in the house where that was possible. I screamed into a towel. I didn’t know how to feel. I’d spent so long avoiding even thinking about if I wanted to have children, and then, after years of doing the same thing, I stopped. We decided: “Yes,” I said. “I think we should have a baby.” We had made every major decision that way: I said no by avoiding saying anything, until I said yes. It is in this way that I am, I guess, in control: I hold the Yes cards. Change has always been hard for me, and though I moved through this phase—the pregnant-but-in-denial stage—very quickly, in just a few days, I’d be lying if I pretended it didn’t happen. One of the things that had occurred in the course of our marriage was that, like I said, every so often, Josh had brought up the possibility of having children. He said this—“Should we have a baby?”—as easily as if he were asking if I thought we should get a new couch or some other major but not life-altering purchase. For him, it wasn’t much different than leasing a car, really: changes, even big ones, come fast and easy to him. This offsets, to some degree, me, to whom change comes neither easily nor quickly. “Easy for you to say,” I’d respond, and I was perfectly correct—it was easy for him to say—and then I’d go about throwing up all the potential roadblocks I could think of, simply to defer having to even think about the question. I’d have to have the fucking kid. He would just be the . . . dad. It wasn’t him resigning his body to whatever it was that pregnancy entailed. It went on this way for years, and for a really big chunk of that, I had the best excuse one could think of for deferring having a child: our apartment was too small. Of course, this was New York City, and our apartment was probably eight hundred square feet—which was massive compared to many people, plenty of whom had kids—but the argument did sort of, at least, hold water with Josh. I worried too, of course, about money, and that argument was also pretty valid. Brooklyn is very expensive, and for the first years of our marriage, we simply didn’t have the financial stability that seemed completely reasonable to expect before having a baby. So we just avoided really talking about a child—even a theoretical, future one—for a very long time. But here’s how an argument—whether a loud and angry one, a strategic one, or even a meaningless one about a trivial point; it doesn’t matter—goes between Josh and me: He votes for change; I vote against it. He’s progressive; I’m conservative. I wish this weren’t the case, but like I said, decisions, even big ones, are fairly effortless for him. He’s “not guided by fear,” he likes to say. I don’t think of myself as fearful, just cautious, and caution is easily mistaken for fear, because it often results in inaction. Having a routine, things being stable and predictable, is very necessary for me to be able to function, so I sometimes view major changes with suspicion at the start. It’s not that I have a particularly troublesome time actually making decisions; it’s just that I often draw out the period before. For a long time, I put off having the conversation. I’m not proud of this, but it is what comes naturally to me. I’ve been trying to change over the past decade, because I know how paralyzing and irritating it can be. This was how we bought our house. Josh had wanted to buy a house or apartment for years before we’d even had the money. Dreaming big, even when it’s not realistic in any way, has always kind of been his thing. I didn’t want to move. I loved our apartment, and I couldn’t imagine a better one, only a worse one, with less light or lower ceilings. We had a huge, beautiful loft—how could we ever replace it? It was the same with the baby. I couldn’t imagine a baby, and if I did, I thought usually only of the negatives: a loss of freedom and mental space, all the work I assumed a baby would be. I didn’t imagine its beauty or how a child would add to my life. Josh imagined the best-case scenario, while I fantasized about the worst one. But once enough years passed, and suddenly we did have the money to maybe buy a house, I remained steadfastly opposed to it conceptually, simply out of a resistance to change, even as I relented and walked up the streets of our neighborhood, checking out houses and apartments for sale. “You’re humoring me,” Josh used to say, but that wasn’t exactly it. I was simply waiting for the right moment. And when the right house, built in 1863, on a shady and quiet street, appeared in our sights, I knew in just a few minutes: it should be ours, if it could be. I never know what I’m going to order at a restaurant until I do it. I didn’t know I wanted a baby until I did. I was wrong about owning a house; it was awesome. And I was incredibly wrong about the baby: she is the best, most challenging, and most rewarding thing to have ever happened to us, and to me.
In the days since my daughter’s birth, I have felt on many occasions what I can only describe as “privileged” to know her, so clear it is to me that she’s not my property. She’s not mine, but her own being, and has been from day one on this planet. But I’ve never felt it more clearly than I did in that first moment, when we were literally separate for the first time, after ten months, and I saw clearly, only for a minute, the road ahead. We’d been two people living together, Josh and I, for a long time. Then there had been an odd, somewhat lonely period of limbo in my pregnancy: I had the possibility of another person inside me, but she wasn’t something I could really share yet, not even with Josh. Her existence seemed reliant wholly on me. And now, here we were. I knew what lay ahead: we were fucked, maybe. I was as unprepared for motherhood, I thought, as a person could be. I hadn’t been around a baby in years, didn’t know what having one would be like. This inability to imagine what life would look like on the other side, when the baby arrived, troubled me. But for a moment, everything was perfect. Zelda asserted herself with her howling, angry bawling, Josh was in tears and silent for once, and I was simply there. Her arrival silenced me. Everything had changed, but I had no idea how yet. I was simply her mother. And in that moment of my daughter’s birth, just Josh and me (and all the doctors and nurses) there to witness it, I thought of my own mother. My mother, who had been dead for seven years. My mother, who had loved me and had been beautiful and caring and intelligent. My mother, who had had four babies before she was thirty. My mother, who also had been an alcoholic, whose body simply gave up on life when she was fifty-two years old. My mother, who I walked away from at the age of eighteen and with whom I never really had a relationship worth mentioning again. My mother, Kathy, who was complicated and painful for me to think about still, even though she had been gone for almost a decade. It was my mother I thought of as I looked down at my new daughter, this child I’d never been sure I wanted until the moment I knew that I was pregnant. I didn’t say it aloud that day. I didn’t say to Josh or to Zelda, “I wish my mother was here.” I knew that Josh knew this; it hung heavily in the air. The happiness of those moments was countered only by her, my mother, and her absence. I didn’t say it out loud, but I felt it keenly and was taken aback by the feeling. In hindsight, it’s not surprising, but at the time, I was shocked by my childlike wish to have my mother there, to wish her back from the dead, to have a time machine to change the past, to erase terrible things I’d said to her and terrible things she’d done to me. I wanted in those few minutes, when Zelda’s body was new and still covered in the evidence of her birth, to crawl backward and change almost everything about my relationship with my mother. To pave over what had actually happened with something more meaningful and less terribly sad. I imagined myself into the future, where I’d begin to tell Zelda about my mother, her grandmother, and was overwhelmed. What would I tell her? Would I lie? Would I say she’d been a wonderful woman who would have loved her and nurtured her the way she had loved and nurtured my brothers and me? Or would I tell her my mother was sick and lonely and mysterious and sometimes so like a black hole that even her adoring children couldn’t get inside of her? Was there some space between a fake, fairy-tale version and an unvarnished truth? In the moments of Zelda’s birth, I saw the world with eyes that were open and accepting. That’s why I wanted my mother: even if she remained unchanged, I’d introduce her, drunk and slurring, to my newborn baby. In all my imagined versions of my life, I’d never pictured that to be true; in fact, I would have died to stand in the way of letting her at her worst into my daughter’s life, to let her find new ways of disappointing me, but in those few minutes, I was clear and, I imagined, had an approach to the world approximating what I’ve always thought monks or nuns must have. Accepting. Peace-filled. Full of an unfettered ability to love everyone equally. Even as it was happening, I knew this moment wouldn’t last. But for just a little bit, I had a window into something my cynical, self-protecting mind rarely had access to. It wouldn’t be accurate to say I then felt regret for the way my relationship with my mother had unfolded, but it was true then that I did see other ways it could have. Other ways I could have been, and wanted to be, moving forward. And that afternoon the seeds were planted that I could probably, after years of telling myself the same story of my own life, and the story of my mother, tell another one. I saw that there might be another version, another way of thinking about it, a way that was truer than what I had previously told myself. After decades of believing that “making peace” with something consisted largely of saying, “Fuck it, we did our best,” I saw the possibility of something more nuanced.
