I watch a man push a stroller past my kitchen window while I chat on the phone with my friend Rochelle, who is ranting about her work, while her 10-month-old daughter rides on her back, strapped into some sort of canvas contraption.
“So I told that arrogant little prick,” Rochelle says. “How’s Mommy’s little Princess? Does Mommy’s little Princess see the duck? Quack! Quack!”
Its times like this I’m glad I dropped acid in college. There’s no better training ground for having friends with kids. It’s the only way I am able to accept a tee-tiny pink cup of pretend tea with a straight face and overzealous gratitude.
Babies sprouted in my life last year like dandelions – three born in my close circle of friends within months of each other. Another best buddy is raising 2-year-old Sophie McSoph-a-lot (well, that’s what I call her, anyway). She is the bearer of the aforementioned pretend tea. I sit on the floor between her and a patient, old hound named Java – who is these days sporting gray eyebrows – and together we make dollies bounce on the floor in exaggerated steps.
I’m 37-years-old, and it’s just now dawning on me that it would have been fun to be a Mom. I’m pissed this desire came on so suddenly and so late – when there’s a fairly good chance I won’t be able to do a darn thing about it. First of all, reproductively-speaking, I’m older than dirt. And second of all, there’s no baby-daddy in sight. Why, I wonder, didn’t this urge happen 10 years ago?
And then I wonder, what if it had?
I was part of a tightly-woven network of smart, funny ladies in back in SoFla. And I knew leaving them to start an MFA program in Virginia would be hard. But the hardest part of all, unexpectedly, was hearing time and again how envious they were of me. Because I didn’t want them to be envious of me. Especially since I had spent so much time being envious of them. They wanted my freedom, they said, my ability to pick up and go, my unencumbered life where peanut butter and red wine are a perfectly acceptable dinner choice.
“But you get laid whenever you want,” I told my friend Di, a tall, slender blond with a one-year-old baby girl and a husband who earns enough where she can afford to be a stay at home mother.
“That’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said.
Another friend – skidding toward 50 with two children in college – had one too many Bud Lights at my going away party and slobbered into my ear, “I wish I were you.” Which is stupid because I always wanted to be her. Her husband looks like Harry Connick Jr. with dark, sexy curls, and can cook for crying out loud. What more could she want? Didn’t she get that if I had a husband who looked like that, I wouldn’t be wasting time trying to write a damn book.
This is why any decision we make about marriage and babies is absolute bullshit, said my friend Lisa – who stepped off the career tract five years ago to raise her son. Now that he is finally in school, Lisa can’t find a job in journalism because while she was changing diapers, the industry imploded. Now jobs are scarce. The money is worse than ever. She did land one interview, at a publication that seemed extraordinarily hesitant about hiring a Mom.
“Isn’t that illegal?” I said.
She didn’t answer me. Instead she said, “What am I going to do with my life? Who am I going to be?”
Sometimes my friends and I agree that God is stupid and wrong and that women should be able to have babies well into their twilight years – like men. But honestly, I don’t know if that’s the answer either. I really don’t want to be 70, sitting on a toilet, holding a plastic pink stick with a positive sign on it – trying to remember who I hooked up with after bingo last month.
Plus, I know that the moments I spend with my friends’ kids are childhood nectar – playing dollies, drinking pretend tea, wearing random objects on my head to make them laugh. I get this without having to stay up all night in terror with a crying, feverish baby, or standing obsessively at the window, watching my teen head off with my car keys, or juggling the numbers in hopes of paying for college.
But still.
I try to ignore how happy Rochelle sounds when she turns away from the phone’s mouthpiece – and our boring, grown up conversation -- to speak to her daughter.
“Weeee,” I can hear her say. “You’re on the swwwwiiiiinnnnnngggggggg! Mommy’s little girl is on the swing!”
Rochelle returns to me.
“She’s so freaking smart, you wouldn’t believe it.”
We both fall silent, listening to the smart little princess giggle and laugh.
“Oh, I got to go,” Rochelle says. “She’s licking the swing.”
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