Enter, Baby

A lot happened this week.

My younger sister had her third baby. She had a C-section, which she didn’t want, and while the OBGYN was sewing her up, asked if she had requested for her tubes to be tied. I think my sister said no, but that’s just a guess, I wasn’t there and she didn’t tell me, but she did tell me with great certainty that this third baby would be her last. To that I say: I’ll believe it when I see it because some people are just built to mama.

The next day as I got ready to go meet this new baby, I got a text from a good friend:

I really need to speak to you.

I hadn’t talked to him in any meaningful way for months if not longer, so of course I automatically thought someone must be in jail or dead.

When I finally got around to calling him some eight hours later (insert Frankie + new baby + no nanny), after a few minutes of small-talk he finally explained that his best friend/ex-wife who had previously thought she couldn’t, had found herself pregnant, at 42 years old no less. I was interested but of course wondering what this had to do with me. Other than probably being one of the only pregnant people he had ever known (insert bachelor lifestyle), I had never even met this woman face to face. He proceeded to ask a series of questions, only some of which I knew the answers to. He asked me if I remembered how I felt at six/seven weeks pregnant, asked if I too, had been in shock. I remembered aloud that I had. He said that in spite of her shock that she had known in those immediate post-pregnancy-test seconds that she was happy. I remembered that I had been pregnant twice, that I had known the first time I wouldn’t keep it, known the second time that I would. I said something about being haunted by the first.

Eventually the conversation arrived at the stoplight I knew we were heading for all along- she doesn’t know if she is going to keep it, but knows this is probably her last chance.

I hated that. That women have to do this constant grappling and bargaining and sliding doors routine- walking through the scenario of a childless life, trying to imagine themselves through an impossible decision as though trying to watch an AI version of themselves pick up the pieces, trying to know without knowing if they will be okay, then, alternatively, imagining the idea of that exhaustion-rattled, single-motherhood life, that brighter, richer, fuller life (question mark), that three-baby and maybe-I-want-my-tubes-tied-now life. I hated that women have to eventually and nimbly shift from walking to running themselves through these scenarios because the female clock is real and even faster is the fetal development one.

I think of the movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild” when Hushpuppy says ‘When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me lying around in invisible pieces. When I look too hard, it goes away’.

And that’s just it.

I connected this woman I’d never met, via this friend, with a few people who might be of help. But then I thought, what even is “help” when you’re weighing these heavy, hard-to-hold things?

Frankie’s dad said to me this week that he had a life before I got pregnant, that he had plans and ambitions and he wasn’t going to throw those things away. To be clear, I never asked him to. To be clear, so did I. But it got me thinking about all of these people, all of these lives and ambitions and plans that get interrupted, for better or worse, for want or not, myself included. I spoke to my midwife about it all, the way we do, in fragmented if not distracted text conversations. About healing and decision making and all the life we live up until that positive pregnancy test.

Enter, baby, I said.

And she responded: great Substack title.

And here we are, writing this, only interrupted once by a nap-striking Frankie remedied by one time through the song This Old Man, and I always wonder while I’m singing that one, what even is this game knick-knack and how does one play it on a door? And when this happens, when he cries in his crib instead of sleeping, I usually go into the dark, loud room irritated and hurried, hoping if I give in and rock him he’ll go to sleep quickly, always finding myself wanting to stay and hold him once he’s down, stare at his feet that look more like regular human feet every day. And I guess that’s just it too. We think of things one way before we have babies and then throw it all up in the air once they decide to arrive, letting our lives fall and settle where they like while we’re busy figuring out the details. Sliding doors and C-sections and and momentary happiness followed by shock followed by the plight of women everywhere- to baby or not to baby. In the mean time, I’m going to spend the last few minutes of Frankie’s nap researching what the song “This Old Man” is all about.