In Praise of Messy Lives (3 page)

One morning, Violet and I go to look at our new house, which is a construction site. There is a layer of dust over everything, the honey-colored, wide-planked floors, the white-marble fireplaces, on which one of the workers has doodled elaborately in pencil:
dragons and math problems. There are boards with nails coming out of them, paint flaking off tin ceilings, and an old, rusted refrigerator sitting in the middle of the parlor. There is a hole in the wall between the windows where a mirror has been taken down. From somewhere, our contractor has unearthed a tricycle. Before I am able to prevent it, Violet is on the tricycle, speeding through the debris. What will happen in these rooms? Violet rides over to me and is still for a minute as we look out the window at the red maple against the darkening sky.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I was aware that there were many ways in which I was not prepared to take care of a baby on my own, but that awareness didn’t unduly influence or affect me. What I thought to myself was “The universe will rearrange itself for this baby.”

I often hear people refer to other single mothers I know as “crazy,” and I assume that when I am not standing right there they refer to me that way too. I have thought about this word, especially in relation to one single mother I know who seems to me more sublimely functional and sane than anyone else I know. I began to realize that what people mean by “crazy” in this context is “romantic.” They mean that she is not influenced by the practical news on the ground, is listening instead to another story that is in her head. She is drawn to things that are, according to the dictionary definition of “romantic,” “impractical in conception or plan,” and is in thrall to the “heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious or idealized.”

This is a common thread in the single mothers I know: they go for vividness over calm, intensity over security. One was embedded
with the American army in Afghanistan when she was six months pregnant, another somehow floats with her toddler between Los Angeles, Paris, and wherever her French rail pass will take her. Others with more pedestrian professional lives simply decided to have a baby while their romantic lives remained complicated or turbulent or a work-in-progress. I can see why this is “crazy” in relation to conventional, settled life, but is it crazy? And, more important, is the term “crazy” one of our few acceptable ways of passing judgment on something different or unusual or uncommon in a culture that is technically not supposed to be passing those judgments?

A few months ago I came across a Pew poll showing that a large majority of Americans still view single motherhood as unacceptable and, in the colorful words of the poll, “bad for society.” Which somehow didn’t surprise me. Caitlin Flanagan wrote in
Time
, “Few things hamper a child as much as not having a father in the home.” This is perhaps a little unsubtle for nice, progressive New Yorkers, and yet they think and recycle polite, modified versions of this same idea.

To be clear, I am writing here about myself and the handful of other single mothers I know. These are specifically women who conceived children in some sort of relationship that they are no longer in, and had the baby: a tiny, arguably privileged subset of single mothers. (It is worth noting, though, that nearly four in ten babies in this country are currently born to single mothers, and a rapidly growing percentage of those mothers are adults. It’s also worth noting that 53 percent of babies born to women under thirty are now born to single mothers, so it’s arguably time to stop viewing this as an exotic, or even a minority, family configuration.)

Someone who was trying to persuade me not to have the baby said that I should wait and have a “regular baby.” His exact words were “You could just wait and have a regular baby!” What he meant, of course, was that I should wait and have a baby in more regular circumstances. But I had seen the feet of the baby on a sonogram by this point, and while he was pacing through my living room making his point, I was thinking: This is a regular baby. His comment stayed with me, though. It evoked the word “bastard”: “something that is spurious, irregular, inferior or of questionable origin.”

Someone said something similar to a friend of mine when she found out that she was pregnant. He said that she should wait and have a “real baby”; and someone else referred to the children her baby’s father had with his wife as his “real children.” As if her baby were unreal, a figment of her imagination, as if they could wish him away.

Such small word choices, you might say. How could they possibly matter to any halfway healthy person? But it is in these choices, these casual remarks made while holding a glass of wine, these throwaway comments, these accidental bursts of honesty and flashes of discomfort, that we create a cultural climate; it’s in the offhand that the judgments persist and reproduce themselves. It is here that one feels the resistance, the static, the pent-up, irrational, residual, pervasive conservatism that we do not generally own up to. Hawthorne called it “the alchemy of quiet malice, by which [we] can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

One warm spring night my friend with the unreal baby goes to a big sprawling dinner party with children running around, at the house of some friends of friends she doesn’t know very well. Toward the end of the evening the host pulls my friend aside and
says that he just wanted her to know that the baby is “always welcome in our house.” No one would ever say about a one-year-old with two married parents, “I just want you to know Finn is always welcome in our house.” Because of course why wouldn’t a one-year-old be welcome in their house? I am quite sure the man who said this sincerely felt he was being warm and hospitable and open-minded.

A novelist I know is sitting on a sunny bench in the park with his wife and two sons. He peers into the stroller at my five-pound newborn, Leo, and says, “How did
that
happen?” He smiles radiantly: It’s a joke! But my six-year-old, Violet, is standing next to me, and I feel her stiffen because she senses something in his tone, something not quite nice. I say, “The usual way.” But I have a feeling that if I were married he would have said something more along the lines of “congratulations.”

It’s around this time that I begin to see that
The Scarlet Letter
is in fact a fresh, modern commentary. One might be under the impression that tolerant liberal New York bears no resemblance to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s windy Puritan New England town, but one would be wrong. Our judgments are more polite, more subtle, more psychologically nuanced and enlightened; latter-day critics of the state are thinking, of course, of what is best for the children, what is the healthiest environment; they are not opposed to extramarital philandering per se, but there is still underlying everything the same unimaginative approach to family, the same impulse to judge, the same sexual conservatism and herd mentality. The single mother traipsing up the subway steps in heels with her Maclaren is not as many worlds away as you would think from Hester Prynne.

One day one of my colleagues, noticing that I was pregnant with my second child, ducked into my office and said: “You really do whatever you want.” He meant it as some variety of compliment and I took it as such, but I was beginning to get the sense that other people were looking at me and thinking the same thing; it seemed to some as if I were getting away with something, as if I were not paying the usual price, and if the usual price was takeout Thai food and a video with your husband on a Saturday night then I was not, in fact, paying that price. James Baldwin once wrote, “He can face in your life only what he can face in his own.” And I imagine if you are feeling restless or thwarted in your marriage, if you have created an orderly warm home for your child at a certain slight cost to your own freedom or momentum, you might look at me, or someone else like me, and think that I am not making the usual sacrifices. (I may be making
other
sacrifices, but that is not part of this sort of calculation or judgment.)

Before I have the baby one of my friends politely suggests that it may be “hubris” to think that I can make up for the fact that the baby’s father would not be in the house, and not even in the city most of the time. He tells me that I am too confident in my own powers. This worries me, sometimes late at night, because I wonder if it’s not true, and there are times during the baby’s first year when I wish the earth would stop spinning so that I can get off for a moment and rest. But it also occurs to me that this may be the good and useful kind of hubris.

The submerged premise here is that there is something greedy, selfish, narcissistic, or antisocial about having a baby on your own. But is there? It seems to me that if anything a baby born in
these conditions is extra-wanted. The fact that having that baby is not necessarily the obvious or normal or predictable or easy thing to do at this particular juncture in life makes it all the more of a deep and consuming commitment.

At lunch I mention to an editor that I am thinking of writing about single mothers and the subtle and not-so-subtle forms our moralism toward them takes. He says, “That’s a good idea. And I say that as a guy who looks at single women and thinks what’s wrong with her? How did she fuck up?”

It’s spring and I am invited to give a talk out of town. I am on the phone with a friend who is a psychiatrist, and I ask if she thinks the baby will be okay if I leave him for a night. He is one and a half, and I have never left him for a whole night. I should mention that I am not here thinking of leaving him in a nightclub. I am thinking of leaving him with the babysitter who has been with us for eight years, and has been taking care of him his whole life. “Do you think he’ll be all right?” “Probably,” she says. “Of course, it would be better if you had a husband in the house.” I say that I may not be able to get one by Wednesday.

My friend Sonya, a very beautiful Indian woman who works in fashion, had her daughter on her own when she was twenty-eight. She got married a year later to another man, and then left him, and is now on her own with her daughter. She says it’s almost worse when hostile or complicated comments come from her liberal neighbors in Brooklyn: “Who are they to tell me I’m hindered or handicapped in some way? They are all invested in keeping up appearances. Some of them are like, I’ve sucked up my crappy marriage, why haven’t you sucked up your crappy marriage? And then there is a kind of strange fascination. Like
someone I barely know will ask me if my daughter’s dad pays child support. And I am like, Is that any of your business? Do I ask you if you paid your taxes last year?” I know what she means. When you are pregnant, strangers feel like they can come up to you and touch you; when you are a single mother, strangers feel like they can come up to you and ask you anything. It is as if you have somehow given people who barely know you permission to say something intimate or invasive simply by having a baby without a man in the house.

Sonya remembers a single mother friend of hers warning her not to wear a certain dress to a garden party full of couples, but she puts it on anyway, and digs out a pair of stilettos. When she walks into the party, there are a bunch of women clumped around the bar in the kitchen, and hardly any of them will talk to her or look at her, and later she leaves feeling as if she has spent the last four hours sitting in a traffic jam or waiting in a doctor’s office, instead of going to a party. Should she not have worn the dress? “I am at the point where I am not going to apologize for myself,” she says. “But it’s exhausting. It takes a lot of energy.”

In spite of our exquisite tolerance for all kinds of lifestyles, we have a wildly outdated but strangely pervasive idea that single motherhood is worse for children, somehow a compromise, a flawed venture, a grave psychological blow to be overcome, our enlightened modern version of shame. It malingers, this idea; it affects us still.

The power of this view is that it very easily gets inside your head, it resonates with every children’s book you have ever read about little bear families, with all the archaic visions of family that cohere in the furthest reaches of your imagination: It’s hard
to free yourself. It’s hard not to interrogate your own choices, hard not to offer up elaborate excuses or explanations.

I notice the tendency in myself is toward jokes, toward a kind of hard, protective mockery. I find that I am very deliberately not apologizing for the baby by embracing the most ridiculous, tabloidy words for him, like “love child.” I hear myself spinning a caricature of my semi-bohemian household when I run into someone at a party I haven’t seen in a while: “Yeah, two babies, two different dads. I somehow ended up with the family structure Pat Moynihan was complaining about.”

In fact, by now I have spent so long outside of conventional family life that sometimes when I spend an afternoon with married friends and their children, their way of life seems exotic to me. The best way I can describe this is the feeling of being in a foreign country where you notice the bread is good and the coffee excellent but you are not exactly thinking of giving it all up and living there.

In the weeks after the baby was born my sense of family was burned down and clarified. I began to see that some of the people related to me by blood were not my family, and some of my friends and ex-flames were. In some way the definition became very basic and pared down, like the person you can call to drive you to the hospital in the middle of the night is your family. My family was suddenly voluntary, elective, chosen: a great thing I came to late.

The baby refers to his sister’s father, Harry, as “My Harry,” as in “My Harry is coming!” It seems to me the exuberant, unorthodox use of pronoun gets at the conjuring, the act of creation, the interesting magic trick at the center of the whole venture: his family will be what he makes it.

Leo is two, but he chooses his own people. He picks fatherish figures, including his own father. I notice people often find little ways of telling me that
it’s not the same thing
. And of course it’s not, but it seems a bit narrow-minded or overly literal to think that love has to come from two parents, like water from hot and cold faucets.