Baby Love (7 page)

It reminded me of the
Sex and the City
episode when Miranda volunteers to frost her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s birthday cupcakes, and she calls Carrie in tears. Carrie’s like, Why are you doing that? and Miranda kind of flops around, not knowing what to say. Then Carrie gets serious and tells Miranda to step away from the cupcakes.

After trying to talk me down three or four different ways, Glen finally told me to get out of the store. And even though he was three thousand miles away, and just a bunch of little sound waves coming through a piece of plastic, I did.

Spent a few hours today having my portrait taken by Marion Ettlinger, who has taken so many amazing author photos. She took the image of Lucy Grealy I like so much, with the bird on her shoulder, and the stunning portrait of Jhumpa Lahiri. Marion was great, warm but not overly so. We talked, but her eyes did most of the work, quietly taking me in. Her studio felt like a writer’s study in Paris circa 1920, very Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, all dark velvet chaises and antique wooden side tables, thirty-five-millimeter cameras and natural light.

While she was shooting, we talked about getting married. She loves her guy and wants to tie the knot, but feels she’d be selling out her feminist roots. I laughed and said, It’s official, female ambivalence has reached an all-time high, it’s an epidemic! I told her about how long I’ve wanted a baby and how scared I am. I told her that the only way I’ve been able to do it has been to choose my persistent, irrational, very human yearnings for closeness with other human beings over admittedly valuable feminist ideology that wasn’t born of my own experience. I asked, If the relationship is healthy, is there ever a reason to let ideology keep us from committing more deeply to the people we love?

I can’t say I have the answer, but I do think it’s a legitimate question.

When we were done, I headed downtown to my friend Trajal’s dance performance. Afterward, a bunch of us went to dinner, where the baby and his name were the main topics of conversation. The response to “Milarepa” was lukewarm, but people liked “Tenzin,” after the Dalai Lama, which I’ve been throwing around for the last few weeks.

Tenzin Walker, our playwright friend Brooke said, that’s strong. Trajal took to it right away, and started to include Tenzin in all our future plans. Well, when Tenzin is born, we’ll have to have a party, and, I can’t wait to go to Paris with Tenzin.

Paris with Tenzin!

I felt like the belle of the ball. Even though it was Trajal’s night, being pregnant makes every night my night. Not long ago I heard Dr. Christiane Northrup speaking about yin wisdom, and how the egg waiting for the sperm is full of it. The egg just calls out to the sperm and then waits, knowing the whole school is going to come calling. I feel like that. For the first time in my life, being is effortless. My job is to sit and glow. All I have to do is wait and the whole world, the whole big life experience, is going to come and land right at my feet.

Tenzin Walker!

Met with John Vaughn today for lunch. He’s directing a project for the Twenty-First Century Foundation called the Black Men and Boys Initiative, focusing on the status of African-American men in our culture and what can be done to change it. The statistics are disheartening. Forty percent of African-American men drop out of high school. One in every four is incarcerated. I can’t help but think of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X. The dissolution of the Panthers through COINTELPRO. The marginalization of African-American men in every segment of American culture but hip-hop, jazz, and sports. How few African-American men I see at universities where I speak, supermarkets where I shop, restaurants where I eat. How rarely I see an African-American man on a plane.

Because they are so rare, I know most of the African-American men succeeding in corporate America. Richard Parsons at Time Warner, Kenneth Chenault at American Express. Russell Simmons, important because he has managed to make his millions without wearing a suit and tie, without forfeiting ownership, and without becoming unrecognizable to the people he grew up with, or to himself.

It is as if, in response to the leadership African-American men have displayed, they have been targeted for annihilation, or at least total subordination. It is as if, in response, African-American men have chosen to keep their intellects undercover, or not to develop them at all. Flipping through channels late at night and searching the shelves at the bookstore, I can’t believe the glaring absence of African-American intellectualism. But being a brilliant black man can be dangerous, can put you in the crosshairs.

There are the academic superstars: Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates. Michael Eric Dyson. Across the Atlantic, Paul Gilroy. But where is the W.E.B. DuBois, the Frederick Douglass, the Dr. King of our time? The Bayard Rustin and James Bald-win? What happened to credible voices having the power to elucidate, to inspire and inform masses of people? How is it possible that so much of this work of social uplift is left to rap artists who have just barely escaped gangsterism? How is it possible that the African-American intelligentsia seems to have evaporated into the corporate media conglomerate, rarely if ever to be seen or heard providing cogent commentary on the state of affairs? Where are the translators, the people who deconstruct the news to the populace?

Listening to John, I got the feeling they are all in jail. And then I thought,
If I have a boy, how on earth will I protect him?

Went to a screening of Spike Lee’s film about a man who impregnates lesbians to make ends meet after being fired from a lucrative biotech job. I have to give it to Spike: He takes risks. The film was a little messy, but I don’t think people appreciate how far Spike took the discussion within a conservative mainstream context that doesn’t want to look at the possible obsolescence of the adult male. Reduced to sperm donors for rich, sexy lesbians? Come on, how easy could that have been to get funded?

I especially liked the scenes in which our hero feels objectified, used, and demoralized during and after sex, a trope usually reserved for women on-screen. It takes a lot of courage to reveal that men have these same anxieties. As they lose a sense of power and control at work and in their personal relationships, their psyches struggle to make the adjustment. I also found myself identifying with the women’s intense quest for motherhood, and I appreciated how our hero ultimately partners with two of the women he has impregnated.

It was good to see people I haven’t seen in years. Everyone patted my growing belly and seemed genuinely excited for me. Of course I had to pee like a million times and was sweating like I had my own personal sprinkler system hidden beneath my clothes. Have I documented that new side effect? That I get these raging hormonal surges that make me hot and flushed, and dripping with perspiration? It’s quite attractive.

Went out to dinner with friends afterward, and then walked sixty blocks back to the apartment. I must be feeling better because my energy is way up and my brain seems to be clear and firing for the first time in weeks. Maybe, just maybe, I am coming out of this damn first trimester into what is supposed to be the fun part. I feel calmer, back to myself, not quite so hysterical and on edge.

Or maybe it’s just New York. And the extra dose of the antidepressant Marie prescribed back in San Francisco.

Either way, I talked to Glen as I walked, my boots clicking against the filthy New York pavement, smiling and imagining walking the same city streets with him and the baby.

Heartbeat!
Oh my God. The most outrageous thing I have ever heard. I went in for my second prenatal with Dr. Lowen and, as usual, it was in and out, but the “in” included hearing my baby’s heartbeat. Dr. Lowen was completely unimpressed, and she’s allowed, considering she hears a gajillion baby heartbeats a day. But I was completely, totally, stupendously overwhelmed. I was floating all over the office. It was all I could do to keep myself from grabbing the Doppler ultrasound and holding it to my stomach for hours.

I am happy to report that the heartbeat is absolutely perfect. Strong, fast, well paced. I took this as another sign that I really do have a baby inside of me. This isn’t some vast conspiracy to trick me into believing something that isn’t true. In six more months, a real live baby is going to come out of my body and make me a mother. I know, I know, it sounds crazy. But it’s true.

To add to my growing distaste for the whole doctor vibe, on my way out the receptionist handed me my “complimentary” diaper bag. It was full of formula samples and coupons for several other baby products. I could take the appreciative and noncynical tack, but I can’t believe doctors allow themselves to be the middle-men and -women for these companies. In the intimacy of my doctor’s office, where I am, by design, vulnerable and open to her suggestion, seeking it even, I am being marketed to. Am I being too sensitive? It’s like commercials at the movies times a hundred.

When I gave the bag back to the nurse, declining politely, she looked at me like I was crazy. Just keep it, she said, you might need it. I just put it on the counter. I don’t think so, but thank you so much. Then I worried for an hour that I had come across as an arrogant, ungrateful bitch.

Glen continues to think I should find another OB. He was over Dr. Lowen when we went in for the fertility consultation and she made a remark about men getting bent out of shape when women, “who do so much,” ask them to “do a little thing like take a motility test.” He felt the remark was insulting, considering all he does, and insensitive, considering the societal mandate that “real men” be virile in the same way that “real women” should be fertile. Even though it isn’t a big issue for him, he thinks it is callous for a doctor to miss the fact that motility can be a sore spot for men.

He’s right, of course. He totally clocked one of those gynic moments that make me cringe. Moments in which women intent upon “claiming their power” do or say things that belittle the men they say they love.

I mostly agree with Glen about finding another doctor, but the idea of starting the search makes me want to go take a nap. I have been seeing Dr. Lowen for a few years and, I tell Glen with a grin, she’s got biracial kids. Glen has accused me of being a sucker for the parents of mixed-race kids more than once. I project noble qualities onto them and make excuses for their bad behavior.

Glen shakes his head. He’s not happy that the criteria for staying with the gynecologist who might deliver our baby is her biracial children, but he doesn’t revisit the highly contentious discussion we’ve been having lately about how all of the big baby decisions seem to be made exclusively by me, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the respite.

Had a long discussion with my lobbyist friend Rachel about how many women rely on the samples given to them by their obstetricians because, unlike most developed nations, America has no social support system to speak of for new parents. Paid parental leave, which can be up to two years in countries like Sweden and Denmark and divided between two parents, is virtually nonexistent here, with American women getting only six weeks, if they’re lucky. High-quality public child care for preschool-aged children is also the norm in countries like France, but completely unavailable in the United States. New parents have to work long hours to even have a shot at affording excellent child care.

It’s hard to understand why our country, one of the wealthiest in the world, seems to care so little about its children. Even from a purely capitalist point of view, you would think that well-looked-after, well-educated children would ensure a competent workforce and stable populace. And studies show that women are able to be more productive with this kind of support, so it’s not like we’d lose half the GDP. Rachel thinks it has to do with the low expectations of families in America. Women have been getting six weeks to three months for so long it seems normal, an unquestionable standard.

But I think it also has to do with our cultural ambivalence about the role of biology in women’s lives, and how it has been used to suppress and control women. For generations, women have been portrayed as the weaker sex, more emotional and less physically capable than men, and so biologically unsuited for positions of power. In response, women have said no, we aren’t biologically anything at all. Shaped more by culture than anatomy, we can be anything we want to be. Tactically, this was a smart move. If women are inherently the same as men, we deserve equal treatment under the law.

Women gained a lot of access using this strategy, but on some fronts, it may have backfired. Case in point: If men and women are inherently equal, and men don’t get “special treatment” like extended paternity leave and on-site childcare, why should women? A question that leaves most infants in the arms of hired caregivers instead of their mothers. This strategy has also left women somewhat ambivalent about maternal desire. Is it a biological yearning that should be denied in the name of sameness and women’s empowerment? The whole polemic puts women in the ridiculous position of wondering whether wanting a baby is proof that women actually
are
the weaker sex.

I think that parental, rather than maternity, leave is a good way of negotiating this point in the public sphere. We avoid the potentially divisive and ultimately unknowable question of whether women are fundamentally different from men by saying that both parents need and deserve to take care of their children.

But what if we are fundamentally different? Before I got pregnant I would have vehemently rejected this idea. Now I’m not so sure. Now I might try a different tactical approach: Do men and women have to be the same to be treated equally?

I left Rachel’s house thinking about what it really means to cut taxes in this country. It means that the bond between parents and children is not supported with programs like extended parental leave, and children’s psychosocial and intellectual development is neglected in the absence of decent child care. It also means that many people can’t afford to have children at all, let alone provide them with what they need to succeed.