Baby Crazy, I Said March 18, 2009

I have a serious impulse control problem. For serious.  I actually jumped off a bus to stare at a man who was running shirtless downtown.  Today.  He was Ralf Moeller whipped with Michael Jai White emulsified with Rick Rossovich and  drizzled with Gregg Butler.  (If you’re gonna Google them, have your ciggy at the ready.)  And there I was with my gym bag- staring as his appropriately squared man boobs boinged past me- before reality stuck it’s boot in my bum to remind me that I signed myself up for a 15 minute wait  for another bus.  Oh, and there’s the whole husband thing.

My point?

My point is that a married woman who would voluntarily extract herself from her sole transportation to ogle a man she has no intention of interacting with is not prepared to have children.   I lack the restraint required to not leave a kid in a vehicle while I run inside for the Clinque Moisture Surge lotion my esthetician said my dehydrated skin screams for.  (What? I’d leave on the AC and a Kidz Bop CD. I’m not a total monster.)

There’s nothing about being pregnant that looks fun to me. At all.  The BFF swears pregnancy was the 9-month time of her life.  Only it wasn’t because I was there.  She remembers great skin and presents. I remember uninvited strangers groping her poked out belly and itchy bellies.  And I don’t get babies. In a word? Episiotomy.  If I’m getting stitches in my nether region, that kid better come out clutching some jewelry.  Or mortgage payments.  Babies are Benjamin Button in tiny, overpriced, primary-colored gear. They poop, they cry, occasionally they giggle but only before something putrid and wrong falls out of an orifice.   Then you gotta freak out about their lumpy little heads.  Was is black and white shapes that stimulate brain function or plush tactile toys?  If I choose to play tunes from Grease instead of Brahms will baby’s first word be ‘pussy wagon’?  Pre-school, kindergarten, parent/teacher conferences, school pictures, recitals, electronic family newsletters, Sears quality Christmas photos, braces, zits, periods, pubic hair, SATs, end of the year banquets, graduations. Ack!  Plus, I don’t know if I can endure 1.5 Hubster’s in my home. Forever.

But those are my safety answers.

My defense against the knee-jerk reassurances fairy dusted on women who announce their birthing reservations.  What I say to combat the comforting notions that it will be different when said child loafs around in my uterus and takes a red carpet walk from my lady bits into a poorly lit,yet, sterile room.  The naked truth is that I don’t think I am capable of being a parent.  The altruism that mothers express, in my world, is not in the amniotic fluid. It’s an intention. It’s learned. It’s a choice.  A choice my mother, as my primary caregiver, chose not to make. I wasn’t potential, clay to be molded, or a personification of possibility.  I  was of value because I was collateral, a plastic token to cash in at will.  Children, like monkeys, thrive better on actualization, love, and affirmation than sustenance. I had days and weeks where the freezer was stocked with microwaveable foods but I had to go outside the home for connections.  And my desperation for connection cultivated in fucked up sexual, relationships stunted friendships clouded by jealousy and fear, and the one-night stand where I left him a note and my sweatshirt as parting gifts. Because I thought Emily Post would approve.  My decisions, all decisions, are rooted in the need to fill that void created by persistent neglect. Mine first.  And my degrees are in Psychology and Counseling. I can identify the when, where and how.  But I’m still here. Wrapped in a blanket of selfish self soothing.  Putting me first because I know that I will be with me always.

Then there’s my experience with race.  My experience is constantly challenged as being less than.  I didn’t learn the Black Anthem until I was in college. And my kid will be half of that. My kid will be the one who has to identify and choose and have their accomplishments be attributed to exception and outlying.  And I’ll need to console, support, and empower; things I may have to fake.

One day I may.

Until then, my uterus is in tact. My shoes collection grows. And I get fulfillment in making strange children on a bus smile.

Baby Crazy, She Said March 14, 2009

I’m adding a little twist to the She Said/She Said project. I have considered that both The ABFF and I are a bit…loquacious and reading both our thoughts in one post may be a bit daunting. So here is a test of the not-so emergency blogcast system to see if it makes it easier on the eyes to split our our ideas in consecutive posts.

She’s on first.

Baby crazy I ain’t, and will probably never be. Call it my own variety of sociocultural conditioning, or what have you, but the drive to give birth for me up to this moment has always translated into the writing of poems and the initiation of artistic projects. I do not spend a lot of time with babies and/or small children. I am disturbed by the young mothers I see zipping around Green Lake and through the lanes of the Whole Foods market in my neighborhood during the middle of the day, as if everyone else is invisible. When I lived in Taiwan, I was appalled at how spoiled my cousins’ babies were – my cousin Cong-hui’s 3 y.o. still sucking on a pacifier and about 20 pounds overweight, eating everything in sight with a nil vocabulary (in any language). The world revolves around mothers and the cult of motherhood in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. Might these views derive from my own conflicted relationship with my absentee mother? Absolutely!

One of the women who was a bridesmaid at my wedding was recently outed on facebook as expecting. She didn’t post her sonagram, which is how I have found out about other friends’ pregnancies – the news leaked out through the indiscretion of one of her facebook friends. I have known this friend since I was 12, and know that for a long time she had quit birth control and was “not trying to not try to get pregnant.” Of the triumvirate of friendships that we shared, R was the first to have sex, get married, own a house and get pregnant. But she postponed the last for a long time, and now that it’s here, it’s given me something to reflect upon. The male friends from our childhood started having children in their early 20s, but many of the women decided to wait, for whatever reasons.

I have been co-worker to new moms and women on the verge of giving birth. The limited range of conversation has often made me want to stab myself – think Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler” when a fan recognizes Randy the Ram behind the deli meat counter and won’t let it go. The Ram fakes an accident on the meat cutter and slices open his hand, quits his shitty, job and walks out of where he doesn’t belong.

What is to be done to bring us back into the present and to intervene upon the baby babble related to feedings, sleeping, pumping breast milk, poo consistency and color, teething, socialization, etc. Is my aversion to babies perhaps the sense that once women cross over into motherhood, that there ceases to be a sense of how conversation excludes women who 1) choose not to have children, 2) can’t have children biologically. Maybe it is the privileging of motherhood in a way to me that seems completely alienating and severely limiting. The greater divide and disconnect between my experience of being a woman and women who choose to have children.

So, given these deep aversions to mothering, imagine my surprise then when at a reading of zen poetry in Montreal, I hear Peter Levitt read a stunning poem about his third wife dreaming the face of their son before he was born. Something about that image and idea opened a floodgate of tears for me that wouldn’t stop. Peter tells me that when his wife was in labor for 8 hours and about to give birth, she made no sounds and went somewhere else. Afterwards, he asked her where she disappeared to – deep inside, she said. How do women know if the time is ever right, or if we feel ready to become mothers? My fear is that if I am not baby crazy in the way that so many women of my age and older are that reveals to me what I some seem to know deeply know about their own biology, how then will I know if the moment came and then passed me by?