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Condolences, You’re Having a Baby

I’d never be able to have my friend Tracie baby-sit. In fact, I figured she’d probably never visit my house once my daughter was born. But I never thought she’d get hives because of my baby shower, especially since the “shower” was more like a co-ed drunken bash where I was everyone’s designated driver. Her reaction wasn’t an allergy to peanuts or shellfish or too much to drink. No, what did her in is the very notion that one of her friends—someone as level-headed as she is about womanhood and autonomy—is having a child. She had to take Benadryl and lie down.

She’d given me a Winnie the Pooh bath set and stuffed toy and proudly proclaimed as I opened the gift, “Every kid should have a Pooh. I tried to find Winnie the Pooh in Latin, but couldn’t and I’m not giving you my copy.” Perhaps this should have shocked me. I’ve known Tracie for three years. She has had so many men, she reminds me of a glamorous nineteen forties woman in a long black Cadillac trolling the hillside in search of her next conquest. She laughs at people with children.

It wasn’t until after the shower was over, after my husband and I had piled mountains of gifts into our car, that she said, “I wanted to get you a sympathy card. I knew you’d get the joke, but didn’t know if any one else would.”

I pondered what a card like this might say: Hey, time to celebrate! Life as you know it is over!

Or Your identity is gone forever—You’re a MOM!

Maybe Condolences. You’re having a baby.

This is how I feel ninety-five percent of the time, so I wonder why Hallmark hasn’t cornered the market on this sentiment. At least so Tracie could have given me a token of how she really feels about my pregnancy.

I’ve never been a woman who liked playing with baby dolls. I was given a Cabbage Patch Kid as a child that I still own, but I never changed his diapers. Poor Fitz just sits atop my bookcase in my writing room, a thin layer of dust covering his bald head. He’s a first edition, something I’m very proud of, and that is the reason why I still have him. Not because of fond baby doll bonding moments (although he did see me through the chicken pox), not because I’m emotionally attached. And not because I want to give him to my own daughter. Hopefully, she’ll be like me and want to play with He-Man action figures.

My sisters, though, loved dolls and everything pink. They made pretend crying noises for their babies, pushed them in strollers, picked out frilly outfits, changed imaginary poopy diapers. It seems that since the ages of three my sisters have known they would be mothers, and for the last nine years they have been. I never saw myself as a mom. In fact, I’m eight and a half months pregnant and still don’t see myself as a mother. My daughter’s room is finished, she has been given two of everything, her name is ready, her feet dig into my ribs, and I still don’t feel like a mother.

When I found out I was pregnant there were no string quartets, no violins, no holy music from on high with a light shining down to bless me with the gift of mother-to-be-ness. Instead, when I went in to see the doctor because of a pain so bad on my left side I thought I had a cyst the size of a grapefruit, and the nurse told me I was pregnant, I didn’t believe her. I wanted her to take the blood test again. When she refused and told me I’d have to have an ultrasound that day, I burst into tears. I was crying so badly, she brought my husband into the exam room. When he saw me the first thing he thought was Cancer not Baby. “You’re so pale,” he said, “Are you going to faint?”

During the ultrasound my doctor confirmed that the pregnancy was not ectopic and we could expect a healthy child the following spring. The following spring, I thought to myself, my life will be over.

This is not melodrama: since I learned about childbirth—by watching a video in ninth grade Health class of a woman giving birth—I’ve been afraid of it. I think it’s going to kill me. I’ll be one of those freak women who hemorrhage or die of a heart murmur or coronary embolism just as my child is springing forth from my womb. I’m serious. My entire life I’ve been afraid this will happen.

Now, I’m more afraid that it won’t.

Four years ago I had surgery. The doctor removed lesions from the ligaments on my uterus, ovaries, and rectum. After the surgery he showed me photographs of my internal organs. Pointing at my ovaries he said, “Just look at all those healthy eggs. I don’t see any reason why you and your husband can’t start a family now.”

I certainly saw reasons. Dozens. I was 27. Married less than six months. I liked that it was just my husband and I. We could travel across the country to visit friends and family, we could live in a cramped apartment, we could spend money on DVDs, restaurants and books. We could save up and go to Italy for a vacation, maybe even to live.

So my doctor prescribed a new birth control pill and life went on as usual.

The real reason I’m pregnant is because of my cat, ZuZu. She’s a little stray I found in a parking lot, huddled under a car hiding from an icy rain. The day before I found her, I’d seen a dog hit by a truck just outside of my apartment. The truck didn’t even stop and the little white dog rolled and rolled into the gutter and then remained still. Three minutes later its owner found it, ran into the road, picked it up and bundled it into her car. I like to think the dog survived. But I know it didn’t.

So when I saw a small white cat under a car, I took it as a sign that I should adopt her. We named her ZuZu from the movie It’s a Wonderful Life because she had a cold and sneezed for the first two weeks we owned her. Although we had two cats already, for some reason I thought ZuZu was mine. She would be my comfort, my baby. I never thought she’d be the reason I’d have a real baby.

Because she wasn’t a kitten when we found her, ZuZu’s a bit feral and likes to scratch. Last summer she swatted me on the side of my right hand—my writing hand, the hand I use so much I forget I have a left—and the wound never healed. I went to the dermatologist who conducted lab tests on the wound and prescribed an antibiotic just in case it was infected. I was to take the pill for fourteen days and stay out of direct sunlight.

Nowhere on the bottle of antibiotics was it printed May cause birth control pills to be ineffective or Do not consume with alcohol because this may cause you to get pregnant, idiot. So my husband and I left for a romantic, drunken vacation in Savannah, Georgia. This was the first real vacation we’d taken in three years of marriage. In the Savannah pictures the dark pink wound can be made out just below my pinkie finger, especially in the photo of me at Churchill’s Pub, downing my second pint of Guinness.

Once we were back from our trip, the dermatologist’s lab results confirmed there was no infection and I could stop taking the antibiotics. I’d have to put a special salve on my wound twice a day. It would take five weeks for the wound to heal. By then—because of ZuZu, and Savannah, and Guinness—I was three weeks pregnant.

ZuZu and I have reconciled. She follows me around the house, squeaking at me, crying when I leave a room. Because she’s so small, she’s the only one of our three cats I cat pick up and snuggle, the only one that can sit on my lap and not put my legs to sleep. I don’t blame her for this pregnancy as much as I do my body. And my stupid brain is at fault too. It didn’t know instinctively that antibiotics and birth control pills don’t mix. Why, in seven years of higher education, did I not know this? Why didn’t anyone in ninth grade Health class tell me this? That horrific birthing video is burned on my brain, so I’m sure I would’ve remembered not to make myself a birth control, antibiotic, Guinness cocktail if I’d ever been told it would land me in the motherhood club.

Since my belly has grown—along with my feet and my ass—perfect strangers approach me in public and ask, “When are you due? Boy or girl?” and they make statements like, “How exciting.” These are people who, if I weren’t pregnant, would walk right by me, perhaps even into me, and never think twice. I want to ask them what is so exciting about eighteen hours of labor, or about the two-week-long period I’m supposed to get after the birth. Or the inability to sleep for the rest of my life.

This morning in bed I turned to my husband and said, “We’ve only got three weeks left of just me and you,” and burst into tears. I’m selfish. I crave his attention and when I don’t get it, I stomp my feet and demand it. A baby will force me to grow up, to quit all of my self-indulgences. I’m not ready for this.

My husband is more level-headed than I. “Don’t you think we’ll still be us? Just us plus one?”

I couldn’t respond. If I said yes then I was just being overly emotional, anxious about the “new path” my life is taking. If I said no I was a heartless bitch, not fit for motherhood.

I stared at the ceiling of our bedroom as he coaxed me and told me how much he loved me and the little girl we’re going to have. How he’ll love me even more because I wasn’t just his wife now, but the mother of his child.

As if being his wife was never enough.

Don’t get me wrong. There are days I’m so proud to be the mother of his child that I cry tears of joy. There are days when I think of him holding her, teaching her to play the guitar, reading to her, that I get choked on tears. These are rarities, hormone driven. And in these fantasies, I’m never around. I don’t see myself teaching her much of anything; I don’t imagine mother-daughter teas, taking her to buy a training bra, listening to her heartbreaks. These are annoyances I barely survived in my own girlhood, I don’t want them rehashed.

Instead, what I see for my future is a huge wall. An enormous wall of old smooth gray stone and chipped mortar built up in front of the life-path I’ve so meticulously created for myself. It’s so high, I can’t see around or above it. It completely blocks the path I’ve set for myself—writer, traveler. I’ve finally finished a manuscript of writing I’m happy with; I’m getting published regularly and don’t feel ashamed to call myself a writer anymore. I’d just begun to think that in a few years I’d finally travel to Italy, to France. Now this path is gone. I have no control over what is going to happen. Maybe I never did, but the thought that I did always comforted me.

Instead, what I see scribbled on that wall is a message in Pepto-pink spray paint. It reads Condolences. You’re having a baby.

Just as Tracie was taking Benadryl at my baby shower, another one of my close friends was coming to terms with the fact that her newlywed husband doesn’t want children. This friend has always imagined her life with a child—she’s saved toys and clothes for a little girl since she was small. She has boxes packed and ready to be opened just as soon as she can. But these boxes will remain sealed, she’s learned, unless she wants to give these things away to children that are not her own.

She says, “My husband and I don’t talk to each other because we’re just talking around the child we won’t have.”

I’m angry that her husband has ruined her hopes, that he’s created for her a wall along the life-path she’s set for herself. I tell her she can spoil my daughter like she would spoil her own. And I know that this is a cheap substitute for her loss. Just as I know that what I’ll be gaining in a few weeks, that thing I’ve been dreading since I could remember, pales in comparison to the void she will feel for the rest of her life.

I think of this little person inside of me and how selfish I’ve become. How selfish to resent her before I’ve even given myself the chance to love her. Or her to love me. How selfish to think that I will be a bad mother just because I’d like to take Benadryl and wake up from my stupor without a baby. How foolish.

My husband is wrong about still being myself after my daughter is born. I won’t be me any longer, nor will she ever know who I was before she came along. For that, I’m grateful. I want her to know me only as the mother who wanted her. Wanted her for so long that I fought my body and my mind just to have her. I hope this lie is enough to sustain me for the rest of my life. And I know—from somewhere ethereal, dare I say maternal—that it will be. It has to be. It has to be enough for me to tear down the wall I’ve put in my path, and instead line the way for her and me with the smooth gray stones.

- J.W. Young has been published recently in Best of the Web 2008, Memoir, and, as well as 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers (Random House).