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.

What Would Mariska Do?

At 43 years old and freshly divorced, I decided to have a baby. It’s very glamorous, don’t you think? Very Mariska Hargitay. That’s how you should think of me, like a 40-something Hollywood celebrity daughter of ultra-glamorous Jayne Mansfield. Because when you think of me as a 43-year-old schoolteacher living in the Bible Belt - and not just The Bible Belt, but the crucifix-encrusted buckle of the Bible Belt - with no plans to get married, it’s not quite as enchanting.

“But I’m going to have a baby,” I thought as I lay on that gurney in the darkened room and the ultrasound tech spread gel on the sonogram wand. “I’m just like Mariska Hargitay.”

I’d waited till my period (so regular you could set a clock by it) was six weeks overdue because I was pretty sure I was in menopause. There’d been 30 months of insomnia and hot flashes and mood swings they could design roller coasters after. There’d been advanced osteoarthritis and X-rays of hand and hip, with X-ray techs asking, “Is there any possibility you’re pregnant?” We know you’re too old was coded in the apologetic explanation that inevitably followed: “We have to ask.”

But after six weeks and Paul’s observation on a camping trip (“Are your boobs getting bigger?”), I did an OTC pregnancy test. I did it right in the pharmacy bathroom with Paul pacing and waiting in full view of the teenage boy from whom I’d just purchased the kit. (One of the great advantages to being 43 is that when you buy things like Super Size tampons and Preparation H and pregnancy tests from pimply-faced cutie pies, it isn’t embarrassing. At least, it isn’t embarrassing for you.)

But even that big, fat, positively iridescent blue + sign didn’t convince me I was knocked up. I still kinda thought it might be menopause. I worked at an elementary school where 75% of the teachers were 25 and a half. I’d attended no less than seven baby showers in the past six months and the common query bandied about by the mid-life moms of teenagers - “When are you going to have a baby?” - was never directed at me. No, in practically the same breath the matriarchal 50-something was leaning conspiratorially in with the pink, plump mother-to-be, dispensing wise words and glancing askance at me there fanning myself from my latest hot flash and nodding, “I’m glad to have THAT behind me!”

Yeah, you can’t be pregnant, you skipped that part, launched straight into the Change of Life, do not pass GO, do not collect 200 gift cards to Babies ‘R' Us…

And when Ultrawoman inserted her magic wand the next day at the doc’s office and said, “There’s the heartbeat,” I almost asked, “Whose?” But there I was, all Mariska Hargitay, the most glamorous first time forty-plus mom in history, holding hands with my boyfriend (already a father of three) like we were still teenagers ourselves staring at a black and white picture of our baby, the size of a grain of rice.

It was a grand feeling.

For two weeks I just glowed like a Hollywood celebrity and rubbed my imagined bump and read all the hospital brochures and thought of spectacular baby names and pictured myself in cute frocks and Danskos, pushing a baby jogger. I pushed from my mind questions of how to pay for amniocentesis and a private birthing suite (and college). I pushed, pushed, PUSHED from my mind the inevitability of telling my parents and the look of incredulity that would no doubt cross my principal’s face. I just walked around for two whole weeks and glowed and thought “I’m having a baby! I’m really doing this! I’m having a baby!”

I wondered, how did Mariska Hargitay break it to her dad?

Before I could figure that out, I miscarried.

And suddenly, I was just a frumpy, childless 40-something from the suburbs again, a washed-out middle-aged perimenopausal screwup with a LOT of gray hair and ten new pounds to lose.

On the plus side, there was a tiny glow of Mariska left inside of me. I may be too old with just one ovary, but the life I've lived has taught me that there is no obstacle I can't conquer. Sure, I’m a late bloomer. But I may just have a baby yet.