Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives

287 Pages·2006·0.927 MB·English

by  Lori Leibovich

Maybe Ba by
28 writers tell the truth about
skepticism, infertility, baby lust,
childlessness, ambivalence, and how
they made the biggest decision of their lives
EDITED BY LORI LEIBOVICH
OF SALON.COM
FOREWORD BY ANNE LAMOTT

CONTENTS
Foreword
ANNE LAMOTT v
Introduction
LORI LEIBOVICH ix
Part One No Thanks, Not for Me
To Breed or Not to Breed
MICHELLE GOLDBERG 3
Emancipation from Propagation
ELINOR BURKETT 11
It’s Not in My Nature to Nurture
CARY TENNIS 18
The Baby Stops Here
LIONEL SHRIVER 22
The Life I Was Meant to Have
LUISITA LÓPEZ TORREGROSA 33
The Impossible Me
LESLEY DORMEN 40
Part Two On the Fence
Bloodthirsty Dwarves
RICK MOODY 49
They Will Find You
REBECCA TRAISTER 56
The Rise from the Earth (So Far)
MAUD CASEY 66
Beyond Biology
STEPHANIE GRANT 76
iv CONTENTS
The Daddy Dilemma
LARRY SMITH 84
Next Stop, Motherland
LAKSHMI CHAUDHRY 92
Redemption
JOE LOYA 100
Part Three Taking the Leap
Parenting on a Dare
AMY BENFER 111
Not a Pretty Story
DANI SHAPIRO 117
Second Time Around
LAUREN SLATER 130
We’ll Always Have Paris
PETER NICHOLS 137
Surprise, Baby
MAGGIE JONES 147
Cradle to Grave
KATHRYN HARRISON 157
Mother’s Little Helper
LAURIE ABRAHAM 176
A Dad’s Affidavit
LOUIS BAYARD 184
Once More, With Feeling
JOAN GOULD 191
Triple Threat
AMY RICHARDS 203
ALISA VALDES-RODRIGUEZ Diagnosis: Broken 208
One Is Enough
NEAL POLLACK 224
Mama Don’t Preach
AMY REITER 231
My Tribe
ASHA BANDELE 236
Road Trip
ANDREW LEONARD 246
CONTRIBUTORS 257
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 265
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CREDITS
COVER
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
ANNE LAMOTT
Foreword
B
Y THE TIME MY CHILD WAS BORN, I had seen two ultrasound
photos of him. He looked like a very nice person, perfect, helpless,
sleeping. I love that in a baby. I thought about him every few minutes
for eight months, I thought about holding him, smelling him, watch-
ing him grow. I talked to him, imagined the conversations we would
have, and how much fun it was going to be splashing around in the
ocean, and comparing notes on the mean children in the park. I lived
for his arrival.
But during labor, I began to realize how hard parenthood was
going to be without a partner, any money, or—what’s the word?—
maternal instincts. It also dawned on me that I did not actually like
children all that much.
By then, of course, it was a little too late to reconsider why I
wanted to have a child. Midway through the birth process, there was
no way out; I couldn’t just say, “Let’s skip it. I think I’ll go home now.”
This is the reason most first children get born—because by the time
it’s too late to back out, you have already fallen desperately, patheti-
cally, in love with them.
vi FOREWORD
I loved him intimately, sight unseen. However, by the time he lay
on my chest for the first time, part of me felt as if someone had given
me a Martian baby to raise, or a Martian puppy, and I had no owner’s
manual, no energy, no clue what to do with it.
The other part of me felt like I was holding my own soul.
Fifteen years later, this still pretty much says it.
Why did I, like many other single women, many gay men and
women, many older women, and all the other not-so-obvious parents,
people who used to think they could never have kids, choose to do so?
Let me begin by saying that not one part of me thinks you need to
have children in order to be whole, or that there are parts of yourself
that cannot be revealed any other way. Some people with children like
to believe this. Having a child legitimizes them somehow, completes
them, validates their psychic parking tickets. They tell pregnant
women and couples and one another that those who have chosen not
to breed can never know what real love is, what selflessness really
means. They like to say that having a child taught them about authen-
ticity.
This is a total crock. Many of the most shut-down, narcissistic, self-
ish frauds on earth have children. Many of the most evolved—the
richest in spirit, and the most giving—choose not to. For parents to
imply a deeper realm of living is pure arrogance.
The exact same chances for awakening, for personal restoration
and connection, exist for breeders and non-breeders alike.
But some of us did have children. Here’s why I did.
First, as for so many women of a certain age, my body said, Do It.
Second, I assumed, even though growing up I never had a particularly
strong craving to procreate beyond some Little Women fantasies, that
someday I would be a mother. I had a couple of abortions, not for
convenience but because at the time of these unplanned pregnancies
I was single, broke, nomadic, and a practicing alcoholic.
But when I got pregnant at thirty-four, my assumption that I
would be a mother dovetailed with the knowledge that it would be
harder and harder to conceive if too many more years passed. So, I
decided to do it.
I had my friends’ love, and I trusted and believed in a lot of things.
FOREWORD vii
My faith told me that my child and I would be covered, that God’s
love, as expressed in the love of my friends and family and chosen
family, would provide for us, and this turned out to be true.
I trusted that even though I didn’t know a thing about taking care
of infants, or toddlers, kids, or teenagers, I would be provided with
information on a need-to-know basis. I trusted that other parents
would help me every step of the way, and that if I did not keep secrets
when motherhood was going particularly badly—say, when my son
decided to turn colicky, or have a temperature of 105, or during the
refugee camp days of chicken pox—that there would be healing, and
enough understanding and stamina to get by on. This has also proven
to be true.
I also got a lot of things wrong. I thought there would be some sort
of deep spiritual union between me and my child, a fleshy commun-
ion of delicious skin, of smells and textures and silences. This bond
would be so rich and deep and intuitive that my lifelong quest for con-
nectedness would finally be over. Much of this was fantasy, the long-
ing of a lonely, scared child. But there was soft, unarmored baby skin,
and that was priceless. Yet, there is so much fluid involved in having a
baby—the amniotic waters, the milk, the pee, all the baptisms of
infancy, what Christians call the living water—slaking our thirsts. I
was unprepared for how lumpy the living water of parenthood would
be, and how much grit comes with it.
I believed that being a parent would be a more glorious mecha-
nism than it’s turned out to be—that the transmission would be more
reliable, less of a Rube Goldberg contraption. It’s been a lot of starts,
stops, lurching, flailing, and coasting, then breaking, barely in control
again, gears grinding, and then something easing us forward.
When I saw and continue to see the divine spark of who my son is,
I celebrate that I chose to have him. He has connected me to the
child inside myself, who can still play, and live in the moment, and be
silly and helpless and needy and capable of wonder. Having him also
helped me to connect with my mortality, forced me to dig deeply into
places within that I rarely had to confront before. What I found way
down there was a kind of eternity, a capacity for—and reserves of—
love and sacrifice that literally blew my mind, but also the stuff inside
viii FOREWORD
me that is pretty miserable. It brought me face to face with a fun-
house mirror of all the grasping, cowardly, manipulative, greedy parts,
too.
I remember staring at my son endlessly when he was an infant,
stunned by his very existence, wondering where on earth he had come
from. Now I watch him sleep on the couch sometimes when he’s sick.
He’s fifteen now, and his feet and long legs hang over the armrest, his
limbs drag on the floor, and I kind of know where he came from, only
I cannot put it into words any better than I have tried here. So, I hope
you will enjoy and learn from the writers in this anthology as we try to
convey why we did and didn’t and might have children. Who we are,
and who we aren’t, where we were when we first thought about hav-
ing kids, or when we decided not to; where we’ve been since, and
where we are now. This is our mosaic.