Sling Baby

At the Green Sage Coffeehouse in Asheville, NC sits a guy with a little wool cap on his head and an Eagle Creek satchel and some earthy looking shoes. He’s reading The Preeminent Guide to the Power of Crystals as Agents of Healing and Self-Transformation. I feel like I just entered the supernatural portal back to Santa Cruz, which I sometimes say is where I’m from. The portal is so wide open I can smell the patchouli oil and the Nag Champa wafting through.


I noticed some other things on my recent trip to Asheville. I noticed a lot of hipster white women with messy, uncolored hair like mine and no makeup and clogs and babies. Also just like Santa Cruz, people really like to show off their babies in Asheville. Babies in the Laughing Seed Restaurant with their dredlocked daddies and their mommas carrying them in batik baby slings. Babies in strollers in the Publick House downstairs. Babies in the art galleries, babies in the bookstore. If you weren’t thinking about having a baby before, go to Asheville and see if you still feel that way.

The idea of motherhood is something I started kicking around like a hacky sack after turning 40. Did it hit me like a baseball bat? Not really. More like a koosh ball. A gentle nudge. It feels a little wrong to admit such ambivalence about something that so many women want with every fiber of their being. But that’s the unvarnished truth of it. I want to have a baby (I think).

Paul is a rare wonder. A three-time father who’s been at the parenting gig for 16 years, he stops dead in the street to say things like, “Oh. My. God. Look at that adorable baby!” Believe me, I consider myself extremely lucky to have found a man my age who’s not just willing but eager to do the baby thing - in his case, all over again.

But what do I really want? Part of me hesitates, I think, out of sheer embarrassment at having become that cartoon t-shirt so popular on the west coast 25 years ago… “I can’t believe I forgot to have children!” After all those years and all those opinions I pronounced like they were my own original ideas: “It’s environmentally irresponsible to give birth with the world so overpopulated” was one of my favorites. “I don’t want to give up my independence” was closer to the truth.

And do I now? Some days I like my peaceful little life: my house with everything put so tidily away and my car with no fingerprint smudges on the passenger windows. I can drop $125 on shoes on a whim and eat trail mix for dinner sometimes. Plus, it's not like I'm some kind of childless hermit. Between the teaching gig on weekdays and every other weekend with Paul's three sons, I participate in raising children - from a safe little distance, but it counts.

Other times, I want to be needed in that fundamental way that only parents experience. I want to feel little fingers squeeze around my pinky. I want to teach someone how to ride a bike and a surfboard and how to drive stick. I imagine my teenager asking advice about love, and all these blunders of mine being amusing and useful to him. I even see my grown child visiting me when I’m old - which she might, if I do my job right.

I have tended always to seek adventure, collecting experiences, living for the now. And now, when I see babies, I am filled with an urgent longing, but it doesn’t come from my uterus (as it does for so many women I know). It comes directly from the same part of me that loves to try new things - ocean sailing, rock-climbing, naked jumps off of piers in Newport Beach.

Is it a good idea for someone like me to have a baby? Paul says I’ll be a good mother, and sometimes I think that’s true. Other times I wonder. Can I get away with entering motherhood as a skydiver jumping out of a plane?

But hey. Somewhere in Asheville there’s a hippie drinking chai latte while pondering the healing power of crystals for everything from diaper rash to colic. If he can do it, so can I.