“You know I love Jill and Katie,” said my grandmother, “but I’m not sure I’d want to live with them. Or raise their babies.”
“Babies are a lot of work,” my mom added, by which I didn’t know if she meant “So it’s a good thing you’re helping out” or “So I can’t imagine why you’d get yourself into this.” She stood up from the dog and put her arms around me. I had been thinking mostly about Jill and the baby. My own family was much more interested in me. Which, of course, was why I’d come home. To be first to somebody.
“You’re a wonderful kid,” my mother said.
“We better go shopping,” said my grandmother.
At the baby store, my grandmother threw teeny pastel towels and sheets and blankets and many hooded and footed things into a cart with reckless abandon. In contrast, my mother ignored the practical altogether in favor of the pedagogical and chose toys with mirrors, with bells, with balls, with crinkly stuff inside, toys to stimulate the eye, the ear, the first reach of tiny fingers, toys to cuddle and love. True to form, I tossed in books. The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh, Where the Sidewalk Ends, collections of bedtime stories to read aloud, soft books with only ten words total meant, evidently, to cuddle or maybe gnaw (I loved the idea that before you could really digest literature at least you could chew on it).
I was having nostalgia in the book section, surrounded by my literary formatives, covers I hadn’t seen in years whose interiors I still knew by heart. Before I even knew what they meant, their words had inspired a love for more words, for reading and storytelling, that had yet to abate, and I welcomed back into my life Ping and Max who makes mischief and Ferdinand and Mr. and Mrs. Mallard like old friends, for they were. In the book section, I was deluded and nostalgia-ed into imagining that hundreds of nights up at three A.M., hundreds of dirty diapers, hundreds of evenings we would rather go out to the movies, would all be worth it for the chance to read Now We Are Six to our own little one.
It was also all a little less scary now. If my parents and my grandmother had been horrified or even discouraging, I would have panicked about what I’d gotten myself into. I would have brought to the day what I only allowed myself to half consider in the dark—that we couldn’t really make this work, that single motherhood was incompatible with being balanced and sane, that graduate school was a hopeless indulgence, that I was tying myself emotionally to a baby who would never be mine, a family which would never be a family. And if all of those fears eventually came true to greater and lesser extents, they still weren’t good enough reasons not to do it.
I spent a few days at home then drove back to school with a carload of baby stuff. It was these supplies—not the vomiting, not the growing panic, not the ever expansion of Jill—that made it real. Katie and Jill were ecstatic at first—like I’d brought toys for them—and set it all up in a frenzy of Pooh curtains and mini bookshelves and heated debates about where to put the crib/changing table/swing in relation to the window/door/duck mobile. But soon we were all subdued, quiet, not sad, just thoughtful, setting up tiny furniture, arranging little plastic hangers with tiny outfits in order of months. (My father’s point was that we weren’t going to be any more eager or able to shop when the baby was three/six/nine months old than during week one though Katie doubted she would ever be unable or unwilling to shop.) It was still months before Jill was due, and once we had it set up, the room became sort of unofficially off limits. We didn’t want to screw with its newness, its ecstatic energy, by studying in there, reading, grading papers. Still, sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night to pee and find Jill curled up asleep in there on the floor or propped up against the wall looking up through the window at the stars.
A week after I got back with all the baby stuff, a huge box came in the mail. Inside were two new shirts for summer, a mug that said, “No. 1 Granddaughter,” a package of my favorite licorice, two boxes of chocolate covered pretzels, and three rawhide bones. The card read, “For my baby (and her puppy)—Sorry we forgot about you in all the excitement. You’re still my favorite baby of all. Love you. Guess who?” My grandmother signed everything “Guess who?” which made it pretty easy to guess.
People are always really gushy about nothing being more important than family and about real friends being like family. She’s like a sister to me, we say of close friends, like family’s not about blood or laws anymore but only love. Real family is much less sentimental than that though. Family is who you’re stuck with. Jason’s family disowned him when he told them he was gay. His father said he’d get AIDS and deserve it. His mother said he made her want to throw up. His sister said she’d pray for him but never wanted to see him again. Years of letters and tears and awkward conversations later, they achieved a sorry truce. Jason is welcome at holidays a few times a year as long as he never says anything that indicates he’s gay. They’ve never met Lucas. They’ve never even seen a picture. But when I ask him why he even bothers, he scoffs, “Don’t be naïve, Janey. They’re family.” Family, this technicality, mitigates all ills, no matter how diseased.
And mine, meanwhile, my grandmother and mother and father, I knew they would always love me first and best of all. Friends, even good ones, sometimes wouldn’t, not just because friends sometimes get mad and leave your life, but also because friends are sometimes their own priority. Sometimes they put me first, for sure, when they can. But they also have their own families, their own needs. There’s not the same non-negotiation with friends as with family. And it begged the question whether this baby would be family or friend and which, really, were Jill and Katie. Going in, I knew that no matter how hard this was, no matter what disasters happened as a result, if later I lost my best friends and a child who was like my own and all my money and all my sanity and everything that meant anything, whatever else happened, my grandmother would always love me best of all. I could only hope that would be enough.
Those nine months (six by the time we moved in together) felt electric. When school started up again, we all felt at the center of huge goings-on. Every time I left the house with Jill, I thought everyone was looking at us, noticing us. I was sure my students were whispering to each other about my living situation though I’d told them nothing of it. I felt like a minor celebrity around the department, at the center of everyone’s gossip. And stranger still, I felt like I was getting closer and closer to birth with every passing week. I felt pregnant myself. I’d catch myself stroking my (more or less) flat belly while I read a book or sat in class or waited for water to boil or the grill to heat. I tried to talk about this once or twice with Katie, but she evidently wasn’t feeling the same thing. It wasn’t that I wanted to steal Jill’s thunder, but I was so caught up in everything. It was the closest I’d ever come to scandal. It was the first time I’d made a major life change for someone else. It was my first baby and maybe my last.
In fact, of course, I wasn’t pregnant. And in fact, no one really noticed us anyway. We didn’t spend a lot of time out and about, and when we did, people just assumed I was Jill’s friend, which, in fact, was true. We were gossiped about department-wide for about a week and a half before people moved on to other dramas. My students failed utterly to imagine that I had a life at all beyond the walls of the classroom. And though I was sleepless, breathless, about what we’d undertaken, about how it would transpire, this, truly, was the waiting part, the calm. The waiting I’d named before—waiting to find out if Jill was really pregnant, waiting to see what Daniel would say, waiting for a plan—was nothing like this. Every day, practically, she was bigger, rounder, less subtly pregnant. Every day, she would say feel how hard this part is here, or its feet are on my bladder, or my shoes won’t go on anymore. We ticked off the seeming miles of those months in inches. We felt each morning one day closer to never sleeping again. We felt each morning the incremental loss of freedom and sanity. We felt almost moment by moment closer to a responsibility that would never go away and was so much bigger than we could handle. But only on some mornings was it oppressive. Others, I was full of joy at the prospect and promise of it all. I had that healthy pregnant glow about me.