One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (43 page)
Read One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir Online
Authors: Suzy Becker
After dinner, I get the dishes started and Lorene helps Aurora get ready for bed. The two of them call when it’s time, and Lorene and I trade places. Aurora is lying in her big-girl bed, a toddler bed that sleeps one small person comfortably. She has the framed picture of Daddy Steve beside her pillow and she is inhaling an open Ziploc. “See, Laya? It smells just like Daddy.” It’s his T-shirt.
I fold myself in beside her. “Does it make you sad?” Laya asks.
“No. Some parents go away and never come back. It’s like a business trip, Laya. Daddy always comes back,” Aurora explains.
“Okay, what am I reading?” I ask her. She points to a big book of fairy tales. She wants to hear
The Little Mermaid.
“ . . . Looking through the porthole, she sees the prince. Her heart pounds. It was love at first sight.”
“What is ‘love at first sight’?” she asks.
“When you fall in love before you even know somebody.”
“Did that happen with you and Ma?”
“Ma and I knew each other for a long time before we fell in love. Love at first sight is more of a fairy tale thing.”
“Oh. I want to be David.”
“You wish you were a boy?” Aurora shakes her head no. “You wish you were older?”
“I wish Ma was twenty-eight when I was born. I forget, how old were you when you had me?”
“Forty-two. Sorry.”
“Why forty-two?”
Ask Mary.
“If I hadn’t waited so long, I might have had someone else. Sarah Nastyman or Doshua Stump or . . . ” I won’t say it was all meant to be, the brain surgery and everything; but I will say I am so lucky it is. Now that they’ve favored me (with my old eggs and defective tube), I can acknowledge the incredible odds against all of it.
“Let’s get back to the mermaid,” I say. After the story ends, she falls fast asleep. I let the toddler-sleep vapors overtake me and wake up twenty minutes later. I fix the covers, smooth her hair, and whisper, “I love you . . . more than you love ice cream.” Then I pad next door to change into my pajamas. Fresh from a power nap, I am ready to start the night shift in my studio.
Three hours later, I can see our bedroom light go out. An extra hush falls over the house.
It’s even better than you dreamed.
It took a village to write this book.
A bottomless thank-you to my agent Edite Kroll who read and thoughtfully edited the manuscript more times than one would think humanly possible. Then again, I think she’s superhuman. It was a privilege to work with my editor Nancy Miller and the rest of the Bloomsbury team: Lea Beresford, Laura Phillips, Sara Mercurio, Patti Ratchford, Cristina Gilbert, Laura Keefe, Alona Fryman, and Megan Ernst. I would also like to thank my village readers: Brooke James, Susan Oblak, Janet Zade, Bill Strong, Kathy McCullough, Robin Becker, and Marcy Krasnow. Their insights made this a much better book. I am heavily indebted to the all-night kind-but-ruthless editing services of Karen Dukess and Kathleen Cushman. And I am probably indentured to the book’s designer, the talented and unflappable Cia Boynton.
Big thanks to Birdsong at Morning, Robin Becker, Tamara Grogan, Hilary Price, the Jameses, the Ewing-Hannans, the Nashes, and the Park Slope Community Bookstore for generously sharing their spaces, and to the Lachances, the Oblaks, the Rabinowitzes, the Carrolls, and the Rezacs for the play dates which made it possible for me to finish this book.
I’d also like to acknowledge a couple of divine interventions (friends I made in my advanced maternal age)—Brooke James and Nancy Aronie. And my dear old friend (a.k.a. Aurora’s new best friend Big) Bruce Kohl, who is practically family. Which leaves my family itself— the Wicks-Beckers, Robin Becker, Alan Becker, Linda Mita, the But-mores, Steve Dillon, Lorene Jean, and Aurora Jean Becker—the people for whom I would do anything and who have done the same for me, over and over and over.
A
BOUT
S
UZY
B
ECKER
Author, artist, educator, and entrepreneur Suzy Becker began her career as an award-winning advertising copywriter and then founded the Widget Factory, a greeting-card company. She entered the world of books with what would become the internationally best-selling
All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat,
and has since written and illustrated several award-winning books for both children and adults. She and her family live in central Massachusetts.
Visit her website at
www.suzybecker.com
.
B
Y THE
S
AME
A
UTHOR
All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat (and Then Some)
My Dog’s the World’s Best Dog
I Had Brain Surgery, What’s Your Excuse?
FOR CHILDREN
Manny’s Cows: The Niagara Falls Tale
Books Are forEatingReading
Kids Make It Better
This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2013 by Suzy Becker
Excerpt from “Natural Resources,” copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1978 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., from
The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950–2001
by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Becker, Suzy.
One good egg : a memoir / Suzy Becker.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ePub ISBN 978-1-60819-327-1
1. Becker, Suzy. 2. Infertility, Female—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Mothers—United States—Biography. 4. Fertilization in vitro, Human—Popular works. I. Title.
RG135.B43 2013
618.1’780092—dc23
[B]
2012043595
First U.S. edition 2013
Electronic edition published in July 2013
Designed by Cia Boynton | Boynton Hue Studio
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