Because I Said So (24 page)

When he takes MDMA my husband says that we, he and I, are the core of what he cherishes, that the children are satellites, beloved but tangential. He says this under the influence of a drug that makes it difficult to lie, and thus I must believe him, despite the fact that he seems entirely unperturbed by loving me like this.

He feels no guilt. Loving me more than his children does not bother him. It does not make him feel like a bad father. He does not feel like I do. He does not feel that loving me more than he loves them is a kind of infidelity.

And neither, I suppose, should I. I should not use that wretched and vile phrase “bad mother.” At the very least, I should give myself a break; I should allow that, if nothing else, I am good
enough
. Do I really believe that just because a mother would rather sleep with her child nestled in her arms than with her husband between her legs that she is a better mother than I? I don’t know. I’m not sure. I do know this: When I look around the room at the other mothers in the group, I know that I would not change places with any of them. I would not give up the all-consuming passion I feel for my husband, even if by doing so I would make myself a better mother. It would
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be wonderful if some learned sociologist published a definitive study that established, once and for all, that children from marriages where the parents are desperately, ardently in love, where the parents love each other more than they love the children, are more successful, happier, live longer and healthier lives than children whose mothers focus their desires and passions on them. But even in the likely event that this study is not forthcoming, even in the event that I face a day of reckoning, that my children, God forbid, become heroin addicts or, God forbid, are unable to form decent attachments and wander from one miserable and unsatisfying relationship to another, or, God forbid, replace love with a bitter and all-consuming religious fervor, even if any of these things or, God forbid, others too awful even to imagine befall them, I cannot regret that when I look at my husband I still feel the same quicken-ing of desire that I felt twelve years ago when I saw him for the first time, standing in the lobby of my apartment building on Fourteenth Street in New York City, a bouquet of purple irises in his hands.

And if my children resent having been moons rather than the sun? If they berate me for not having loved them enough? If they call me a bad mother?

I will tell them that I wish for them a love like I have for their father. I will tell them that they are my children, and they deserve both to love and be loved like that. I will tell them to settle for nothing less than what they saw when they looked at me, looking at him.

Immaculate Conception

F u f k i n Vo ll m a y e r

My mother was a single mother,
in the same way that my grandmothers were single mothers: All had left difficult marriages and raised their children on their own, without much help. My lineage is deadbeat dads and then some. My father—a violent, often inebriated man—refused to pay child support and hid his assets when he moved to another state. I grew up hearing Mom begin sentences about him with “that alcoholic son-of-a-bitch, your father . . .”

My father may have been Dennis Hopper, but my mother’s parental role model was Joan Crawford. She put on a great face to the public and had a fabulous sense of humor, but her most consistent role behind closed doors was that of a vengeful bully.

Today I rarely drive down Arguello Boulevard in San Francisco without thinking of the time my mother’s car swerved into the oncoming lane of traffic because she was so busy hitting me.

That was the scenario I grew up with—relentless fighting from my parents because my father ignored all court orders and refused to pay for anything, and not much tenderness left over for my brother or me. So I knew I never wanted to do what my mother did: marry, divorce, and then become the sole provider.

And my brother’s remark, “I hated not having a man around,”

only confirmed this. But when I collided head-on with the huge billboard of forty, I realized that I could be a single parent or not
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a parent at all. Like a forensic investigator, I kept muttering to myself, “How did this happen?”

How
did
this happen? I am not a lesbian. Nor do I hate men.

I just couldn’t seem to get it right—find the right guy at the right time who also wanted to settle down and have a family. Through my thirties I went to engagement parties, weddings, and then the inevitable baby showers. I tried blind dates, the personals, even saying “yes” when I got hit on at work. The Peter Pan refrain was always the same: not ready, not sure, not now. Only in San Francisco, where there is an endless buffet of lifestyle choices—

even micro-niches of choices—can children be categorized as just another lifestyle issue. Take the vegan computer programmer who wanted children and an open marriage. Or the nonprofit administrator who said, “Let’s revisit this in two years.” By the time I turned forty, I’d had enough of ambivalent men and was tired of waiting.

I probably could have held out a little longer, but for what?

One of my friends had waited for it all to fall into place—the right guy, marriage—but then the baby didn’t come. By the age of forty-four she was clinically depressed from failed fertility treatments and a husband who wouldn’t consider adoption. Twenty thousand dollars later, she got pregnant via in vitro fertilization using a donor egg. But I couldn’t imagine facing all the medical procedures, much less the astronomical bills.

I knew women who were single mothers, of course, but I always saw them through the eyes of myself growing up. “A single mother isn’t really a family,” I thought. Then one day when I ran into my friend Linda, I suddenly saw her not for what she lacked but for what she had. She was a thirty-nine-year-old attorney—smart and capable—and had conceived her daughter with a gay male friend.

She had deliberately created her own happy family.

Linda invited me to a meeting of a national group she belonged to, Single Mothers by Choice. I went with some trepidation. I thought I’d meet incarnations of my own mother, women who were struggling and stressed out. I braced myself for what I thought would be a long morning of discouraging, teary stories.

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Instead, as the women introduced themselves, I discovered that they were women like me; professionally competent, educated women in their late thirties and early forties. And they weren’t discussing men, but rather the usual gripes associated with working parents—discipline, affordable childcare, and the endless cycle of childhood illnesses. In the middle of the circle was the happy chaos of a dozen heaving, drooling toddlers. Here was the face of a new kind of family, headed by a single parent who was tired but basically happy.

I left the meeting feeling elated one minute, wiping away tears the next. I was happy because I had discovered a different universe of women who had deliberately chosen to start families on their own. Then I’d sob because I realized that for the last five years I’d never had a backup plan. I wasn’t on Plan B; I was on Plan F, for failure. Plan L, for no luck here.

I was a working journalist and had taken on faith those goofy notions that you could have most of it, if not “it all”: a full-time career, plus marriage, plus children, plus time for yourself. But I was wrong. A demanding career and perhaps my unwillingness to settle had brought me to this. So it would be by default, this solo parenting, because all the other possibilities had quietly left and gone home. Yet, thanks to the women at the meeting, my point of reference shifted: I could look to them instead of to my own experience growing up. Lone motherhood was not the ideal choice, but maybe it was the best choice I had now.

And so it began.
I needed more money and a less demanding schedule, so I joined the dot-com boom. Every day I went to work as a writer and researcher for a multinational software company, but my real job became getting pregnant as quickly and as cheaply as possible. I scrolled down sperm bank screens, reading men’s profiles, looking for the perfect guy whom I would never meet. I read donors’ personal essays, looked at childhood pictures, pondered their stated reasons for doing this. Every once in a while it would get to me—here I was choosing the father of my
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child on the basis of genetic profiles and the information that these men were willing to disclose about themselves. (Would anyone ever admit to a mentally ill relative?) Maybe a handwriting analyst or astrologer would have had more insight into who these men were.

Then I’d go back to work. Did I want the Jewish systems analyst whose hobbies included cooking and ecotourism or the mixed-race grad student who golfed? I decided no on mental illness or substance abuse, yes on brains and, owing to the history of melanoma in my northern European stock, a plus for brown skin.

I finally narrowed it down to the Pakistani physicist complet-ing his Ph.D. and the Mexican MBA student who played guitar.

Urdu not being a language I speak, I chose the Mexican donor.

Even in the pre-9/11 world, traveling to the Indian subcontinent to introduce my kids to their heritage didn’t seem that easy. But I do speak Spanish, have traveled extensively in Mexico, and have Mexican friends. Besides, I’m terrible with money and numbers, so the MBA student seemed to be, well, the right guy for me. Or at least for my children.

Every choice has its sacrifices, and this choice had a big one.

The price of bargaining for better genes was forfeiting my child’s right to ever know his or her father. Like most children conceived through donor insemination, mine would almost surely want to have that option. But only one sperm bank in the world guarantees it, and because these donors are the most sought after, the waiting lists are long—too long for someone my age, I thought.

Occasionally I wondered about the real motivations of these donors. I assumed that mine was selling sperm to help pay for graduate school. I wondered what his family thought, or if they even knew. Someday, if he has a family of his own or doesn’t, will this decision come back to haunt him? My friend Mark donated sperm years ago and learned from the sperm bank that his vials had produced at least one child. He’s over fifty, single, and doesn’t have children of his own, yet he says he has no interest in learning about his progeny.

But my curiosity about the donor was supplanted by a stag-160

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gering fact. The policy of my sperm bank is to discontinue using a donor when either twenty to thirty individuals have purchased vials of his sperm or a total of eighty vials have been sold. I got dizzy doing the math. Theoretically, my child could have a couple of dozen half siblings out there who don’t know each other. So it wasn’t just the donor who was anonymous; it was the siblings as well. Then I was jolted out of my ponderings by the stark reality that, hey, I’m not even pregnant yet, by a donor or anyone else.

Nothing about donor insemination
is left to chance. If you are paying thousands of dollars to get pregnant using frozen sperm or other assisted reproductive technology, you have to narrow down ovulation to within twenty-four hours. Like most of modern life, it’s a process that involves tracking, planning, scheduling.

I got absolutely wistful for decidedly unsafe sex. What had ever happened to the beery kiss and fumbling fuck, along with all the other vagaries of my misspent youth? All those mornings I woke up to the blurry handheld camera of my life, looked at the snoring heap next to me, and wondered, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” It used to be that if the cervical cap snapped off or the condom broke, I panicked. Monthly menstruation was not a curse, but a blessing.

Rejoice, girlfriend, rejoice. You are not pregnant.

Fast forward to me at forty: Monitoring and measuring my body, day in and day out. Charting my luteinizing hormone surge, body temperature, and menses as if they were the stock market on a rally or decline: up, down; up, down. It was so weird and clinical and lonely. Suffice it to say, the only person looking at my vagina at that point was me. Like some kind of gynecological Shiva, I managed to injure myself one day inserting a speculum with one hand while holding a mirror and flashlight in the other, trying to decipher the exact texture of my cervical mucus.

After months of military-like preparation, however, I was finally ready to launch the field operation. I had three hours to drive to Silicon Valley, pick up nitrogen tanks with the frozen vials, and arrive back in San Francisco in time for my insemina-I m m a c u l a t e C o n c e p t i o n
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tion. On the hour-drive back, I got caught in traffic and the storage tank fell over as I slammed on the brakes. Nitrous oxide curled up like a big ball of burning incense in the backseat.

I made it to the hospital frazzled and panicked. I went to my room. After decades trying to not get pregnant, there I was, legs in the stirrups, cold steel speculum ratcheting an opening into my cervix as I waited for the type of syringe used to impregnate cows to knock me up. A midwife had advised me to replicate the actual physical act as much as possible. Right. It was just me and my vibrator and a buzzing backdrop of fluorescent lights.

But at that point, I’d have done anything to get pregnant. For months I had not let dairy, sugar, or wheat touch my lips. I chanted to hippo-shaped goddesses and even entertained the possibility of fertility drugs. So why not stand on my head, as some advised? Gravity has very little to do with getting pregnant, but since fertility is part voodoo, I went upside down against the door. Unfortunately, the nurse opened it, knocking me down and damaging my sciatic nerve.