Tiny Beautiful Things (15 page)

What you must answer when you delve into this question about whether to have a baby alone, honey bun, is what the landscape will look like for you. Not what it looks like for “single mothers by choice,” but how it will actually play out in your own life. How will you need to restructure or reconsider your life if you become a mother? What resources do you have, what resources will you need, and how will you get them?

Knowing what I know about having babies, three of the four big questions I’d have if I were considering parenting a child without a partner are surprisingly the same questions I
asked myself when I—with my partner—pondered having a baby. They were

So let’s start with those.

You don’t mention financial matters in your letter, but I presume you have to earn a living. Kids cost a fortune, especially if you have to pay someone to take care of them so you can work. My kids are now four and six. Preschool tuition over the past few years has nearly bankrupted Mr. Sugar and me. Literally. When our kids were babies we hired a part-time nanny and juggled child care between us the rest of the time—we both make our living as artists, so neither one of us has what’s called a “real job.” The nanny cost us $15 an hour. We hired her for twenty hours a week. When the nanny came, my husband and I would go into our shared office in the basement and ignore each other so we could each do our thing (at which point our children would invariably settle down for a long nap, strangely able to discern when we were paying someone else to look after them). Every hour that passed I’d think, “Did I make $15? Did I even make $7.50?”

Often enough, the answer was no. Which is a long way of saying that questions number 1 and number 2 are inextricably bound. More so than the man + baby High Commission on Heterosexual Love and Sexual Reproduction dream. Especially for you, since you’ll be the sole breadwinner.

Many partners are great for watching the baby while you work or shower or make phone calls that go better if a small beast is not shrieking in the background. You won’t have one—the partner, that is. You’ll have only the small shrieking beast. What will you do? Do you have any support in the way of free child care? Do not believe all the sweet friends who say, “Oh, M! Have a baby! I’ll totally help you with the baby! I’ll be, like, the baby’s
auntie
!” Those people have good intentions, but most of them are bons vivants who will not take your baby. Or they might take your baby once when it’s spring and they get the urge to go to the zoo because they want to see the elephants. You need someone to take your baby every Monday and Wednesday and Friday from nine to three. One thing I’ve learned since becoming a mother is that most adults aren’t willing to spend much time with other people’s children unless there is some direct benefit to them—namely, money or the promise that you will someday return the favor and take their children.

There are, of course, exceptions. Some grandparents long to play a significant part in the lives of their grandchildren. Do you have an essentially sane, remotely physically fit, non-daytime-drinking, baby-loving parent or two who lives nearby? A sibling or friend who genuinely wants to commit to pitching in? If you don’t have that sort of support, what will you do for child care and how will you structure it and how will you pay for it?

Next, we come to the question of whether your post-child life will be a dreary, sexless hell. There will probably not be too much action for a while. But worry not: this has little to do with your partner-less status. Mr. Sugar and I joke that the only reason we opted to have our second child was so we’d have
sex at least one more time before we died. You’ll be exhausted, hormonally altered, and perhaps vaginally or abdominally maimed by the baby, and thus not thinking about sex for a while, but eventually you’ll come around and be interested in dating again. Some men won’t be interested in dating you because you have a baby. Others will be fine with the baby and you’ll date them and maybe one of them will turn out to be “the one.”

Regardless of what happens with the men, you’ll have a baby. An amazing little being who will blow your mind and expand your heart and make you think things you never thought and remember things you believed you forgot and heal things you imagined would never heal and forgive people you’ve begrudged for too long and understand things you didn’t understand before you fell madly in love with a tiny tyrant who doesn’t give a damn whether you need to pee. You will sing again if you stopped singing. You will dance again if you stopped dancing. You will crawl around on the floor and play chase and tickle and peek-a-boo. You’ll make towers of teetering blocks and snakes and rabbits with clay.

It’s an altogether cool thing.

And it will be lonely too, doing all that without a partner. How lonely, I can’t say. You will hold your baby and cry sometimes in frustration, in rage, in despair, in exhaustion and inexplicable sorrow. You will watch your baby with joy and laugh at the wonder so pure and the beauty so unconcealed that it will make you ache. These are the times when it’s really nice to have a partner, M. What will you do? How will you fill the place where the man you’ve been holding out for would have been?

That is your hard question for me—the one I didn’t ask
myself when I decided to get pregnant and become a mother, though of course it was naïve for me to think I didn’t have to. Not a single one of us knows what the future holds. The unexpected happens even when we’ve got everything mapped out. My friend A lost her husband in a car crash four days before her daughter was born. My friend B’s husband died of cancer when their son wasn’t yet two. My friend C’s husband left her for another woman when their baby was six weeks old. My friend D’s partner decided he wasn’t all that into being a dad a few months after his child was born, moved across the country, and sees her once a year. I could go on. I could work my way all the way down the alphabet. Even if you get the dream, you don’t know if it will stay true.

It works in reverse too. What you fear might not come to pass. You might decide to have your baby and find true love in the midst of that. You might search your soul and realize that you don’t want a baby after all, not if it means going it without a man.

What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

My elderly father is coming to live with me in a few months. My mother passed away about three years ago. My father is going to be living with all of the rest of my siblings as well—he’ll move from one place to the next every four or five months. He enjoys traveling, so we thought moving him around would make him feel more active and independent. I hesitate to say that I am my father’s favorite since I do not particularly relish the idea of that, nor has he ever been a demonstrative or involved parent, but I will say that he depends on me slightly more than he depends on my other brothers and sisters. Recently that has become an emotional dependence as well
.

Sugar, my father has begun confessing to me. At first these weird confessions were small and insignificant, and I chalked them up to the fact that he was feeling his own mortality and therefore taking stock of his life. But more recently his confessions have turned into a crimes and misdemeanors festival that’s not fun for me at all. He’s been telling me about the many women he cheated on my mother with, about how he isn’t 100 percent certain that he hasn’t fathered other children, and tawdry sexual details that spawn visuals I do not want to have. He told me that
when my mom got pregnant with me she didn’t want a fifth child so she wanted to abort me, but feared someone might find out so she canceled the appointment, but cut him off sex, which led to his first affair
.

This is not information I ever needed to know
.

I am a forgiving person, Sugar, but here is the kicker: he ISN’T sorry. I mean, I might be able to take all this new hideous information—like he was fucking the housekeeper in the eighties, for example—if he showed a drop of remorse, but he has none. He claims that he’s telling me and not my siblings because he knew I “won’t judge” him. What the hell gave him that idea?!

As warped as it is, I recognize it as his attempt to bond with me. That being said, I would like him to shut up now. I suddenly don’t know how I feel about him living with me and spouting off this bullshit every day. I am not sure what to do. I feel that it’s my responsibility to care for him, but am I allowed to establish boundaries this late in the game?

Trustee

Dear Trustee,

Yes, you are allowed to establish boundaries this late in the game. In fact, this would be a good idea even if your father hadn’t become an unfortunate font of naughty narratives. An elderly parent moving in with an adult child is a major life transition for both the parties (and in some cases, the adult child’s spouse and children as well). Even in the best of circumstances, it’s wise to map out a family plan in which ground rules and expectations are stated, concerns are discussed, and a plan for conflict resolution is agreed upon. When two
households merge, roles of authority and responsibility must be rearranged—sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically—and they must be rearranged in a way that often reverses the long-established parent-child order. This is unquestionably a complicated thing.

That your father has chosen to further complicate it by becoming the mad sex confessor is no fun at all. I encourage you to simplify it immediately by telling him you do not want to hear another word about his sex life. Be clear. Be direct. Be unwavering. If he doesn’t respect your wishes, cut him off at the quick. If he begins to speak of such things, tell him to stop. If he won’t stop, walk out of the room or pull over to the side of the road or do whatever it takes to remove yourself from his company. If you’re firm and consistent, he’ll eventually get the point.

Once you’ve established this boundary, I encourage you to explore the underlying issues that may be compelling your father to speak to you so inappropriately. There’s a chance that his confessions are connected to a medical condition. Some diseases of the brain cause personality changes. If you think there’s even a chance this could be the case, and especially if you observe other changes in your father, I suggest you consult with his doctor.

A more likely scenario is what you suppose: these confessions are your father’s warped way of bonding with you. Perhaps the best way to get him to stop telling you what you don’t want to hear is to ask him about what you’re willing to listen to. Maybe he simply needs to finally open up about his life to someone he loves. Why not try to engage him on a deeper level? Ask him to share with you other stories of his life—the ones that he’s never been brave enough to tell. Surely he’s got
some that don’t involve humping the housekeeper while your mother went to the grocery store.

For this, for both of you, I’ll hope.

Yours,
Sugar

Dear Sugar
,

I teach creative writing at the University of Alabama, where the majority of my students are seniors graduating soon. Most of them are English and creative writing majors/minors who are feeling a great deal of dread and anxiety about their expulsion from academia and their entry into “the real world.” Many of their friends in other disciplines have already lined up postgraduate jobs, and many of my students are tired of the “being an English major prepares you for law school” comments being made by friends and family alike, who are pressuring them toward a career in law despite having little or no interest in it. I’ve been reading your columns to my students in an attempt to pep them up and let them know that everything is going to be all right
.