That place was filled with the costumes and props from a play that would never open, starring my girl Harper and me.
Since the day I found out I was pregnant, I only saw this baby as a girl, dreamed of her daddy clumsily tying her hair in pigtails as she beamed up at me, fantasized about what I was sure would be our lifelong bond.
My girlfriend Cassandra, who is also pregnant with a boy and a few months ahead of me, is thrilled to be having a boy. “Girls? Why would you want a girl? They just get eating disorders. They’re moody and bratty. Think of how we were as teenagers,” she remarked, as we sat at an outdoor café drinking iced tea and eating cheese fries.
“Don’t care. They’re just so cute. And a girl would be your friend forever,” I said.
“Wait,” she paused, mid-cheese fry. “Don’t you not talk to your mom?”
Oh, right. That.
And I guess I was kind of a moody teenager with an eating disorder, but still, that’s the beauty of placing the responsibility for fixing your fractured childhood on your unborn baby. It doesn’t have to make sense.
As facile as it seems, I think somewhere in my mind was this Barbie toy chest full of healing that would magically burst open when I did everything so much better than my mom did with me, when I taught Harper how to shave her legs and showed up to her recitals, when I bought her gauzy skirts and said things like, “I know you must be sad right now,” instead of “Don’t you dare manipulate me with your tears,” when we wore matching Halloween costumes and had our own secret language, when she confided in me about her crushes as we sat at the kitchen table late at night, sipping hot cocoa.
Life with a daughter would be one long therapeutic spa day.
Cassandra ripped an article about “Gender Disappointment” from a magazine and gave it to me the next time I saw her. Suddenly I discovered the bargaining part of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief, after the shock, denial and numbness. The bargain I made with myself, with fate, was that I could get a girl
next
time. If I really needed to have a daughter, I could slip a few greenbacks in the hand of fate and give it a wink. The article covered everything from sleeping with a lime-soaked tampon to foster girl-friendly vaginal pH levels to sperm-spinning and even in vitro fertilization with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a procedure during which only sex-identified embryos are implanted. I could have another baby, I could throw money and science at the problem, and I could have a girl. This was comforting. This is what I held on to for a week or two.
It was nice to not feel alone—most of the women quoted in the article also wanted girls—but on the other hand, these ladies made me not want to be part of their club, using their real names and often posting their suicidal boy-dreading thoughts on message boards with tips about eating kefir, berries and low-salt sesame paste to promote X sperm survival.
Clearly, I’m not one to keep my neuroses to myself, but these ladies were going on record as not being happy with their boy babies, a sentiment the grown-up boy babies could easily Google in years to come. Just as my mom thought her story about buying “It’s a Boy” cards was a hilarious nugget, these girl-wanters seemed oblivious to the concept that publicizing their distaste for boys was akin to saying, “I didn’t really want you. Your very existence bums me out.”
So why am
I
telling you this?
Much like a robot would have to be programmed to convey normal human emotions (cry or frown when sad, crinkle eyes with big smile when happy), I have to be told how to maintain normal human boundaries, how to know the difference between revealing an embarrassing weakness that might make for a compelling story and telling a hurtful secret that would cause irreparable harm. My impulse has always been to tell, tell, tell my ass off and hope that someone will relate, and maybe empathize, and maybe like me a little more for my brokenness and candor.
In this case, my therapist recommended that I not talk about it on the radio or write about it in my blog. She straightened me out the way a parent explains to a five-year-old that it isn’t nice to announce to the fat lady on the bus that she’s fat.
“Yeah, you should only talk about this in here,” she warned. “Your son might find out, and that’s bad.”
“Really? Oh, right. Right. Okay. That would be bad. Thank you,” I said, nodding and vowing to stick to the phrase she gave me, even in conversations with friends, the one that isn’t a lie but doesn’t tell the whole truth: “A girl would be nice eventually, but I’m really excited about
this
boy.”
The more I say it, the truer it becomes. And I wouldn’t be writing about this now if the longing for a girl hadn’t lifted, or maybe just passed through me like a nasty flu.
The girl craving that peaked that day in the boutique and threatened to undo me is gone, and I’m not really sure how it dissolved so completely other than the phrase “my boy.”
I just like the sound of it, the vision of me walking through my front door after work and asking, “Where’s my boy?” This vision extends to me showing up at day care to pick him up and asking, “How did my boy do today?” It branches into imagining the family gearing up for a road trip, me asking my husband, “Have you packed up the boy?” The boy. My boy. Our boy. All three are starting to sound right to me.
What really sings to me is this idea, possibly revolting in its cheesiness: I will be referring to my son and his father as “my boys.” I’ll phone home from the freeway to ask if “my boys” need me to pick anything up for dinner. “I need a hug from my boys,” I’ll announce on a Sunday morning, over coffee and the paper.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome. I have fallen in love with my little captor because I have no choice: This fetus has a penis. Either way, I am so good with this boy thing right now.
Boys grow up to carry their mother’s luggage (not the emotional baggage I was hoping Harper would tote, but actual Samsonite). They give gangly boy hugs to their mothers. They fall asleep with toy airplanes in their hands because they don’t want to put them down, want to dream about flying. They shyly ask their moms advice about girls. Or maybe my boy will like other boys, and original-cast albums of Broadway shows, and that will be fine, too, because maybe my girl would pull a Chastity Bono on me anyway, and not strictly adhere to the gender clichés, hating ribbons and bows and begging to watch the guy at the hardware store make a key.
This idea tickles me more than that rack of boas would: I may have accidentally started being a decent parent already, because I’ve already stopped counting on this boy to make it all better. I don’t know which way he’s going, but I’m squatted down with a low center of gravity, ready to go any direction, ready to follow his lead. I’m ready to love the hell out of this boy, not for what he can do for me but for how fun it might be to get to know him.
The more I think about that magazine article, the battier and crueler those women seem, and I’m flooded with relief. The feeling didn’t pass because I’m superior, or because I did anything magical to get rid of it, or because I’m destined for maternal greatness. It just passed.
I still don’t know much about boys.
I just know that this one, my boy, is crowding my diaphragm, lungs and stomach, while simultaneously making room in my heart. I hate that I even wrote that sentence, but the pregnancy hormones are robbing me of my ability to be cynical sometimes. I have to do crazy shit like talk about my fucking heart, but at least cursing makes me feel less vulnerable and stupid about it. Fucking heart.
People I Want to Punch: Great Sleeper People
G
reat sleepers can sleep anywhere, and they can’t shut up about it.
Here’s what you sound like, sleepy-heads:
“I sleep in the car! I sleep standing up! I sleep on a pile of coats at a party! I sleep while operating a jackhammer! I fall asleep on the toilet sometimes! I sleep in the break room at the office! Does coffee keep me up? Heck no. I enjoy a strong espresso after dinner every night and I nod right off. Sometimes, I actually hit my head right on the tiny mug. I just love sleeping. I could sleep eleven hours a night. If I don’t get at least eight hours, I’m a mess. If you’re tired, why don’t you just take a nap?”
Sleepers can’t grasp insomnia. As well rested as they are, you’d think they would have ready access to empathy. Instead, advising us to take naps is like telling a depressive to just “cheer up.” They’re simply not tuned in to those of us with psyches that refuse to let us relax.
If your brain has an on-off switch, mine has a choir. The altos sing a to-do list, the tenors are belting out words to an e-mail I shouldn’t have written, the sopranos are reminding me to think about cutting out dairy, the bass provides a steady thrum of self-doubt, la la la, self-doubt, la la la, while the soloist sings, “Are we the only mammals who know that we die?” In the mind of the easy sleeper: old-school slow jams or a medley of Celtic harp music. While we have a crescendo choir of assholes we can’t turn down, you might even have total silence, or an internal Sharper Image white-noise machine set on ocean waves. Explaining chronic insomnia to great sleepers is like explaining Thomas Pynchon to a toddler. He isn’t going to grasp
Gravity’s Rainbow
. That’s why great sleepers, instead of learning an important lesson called Nodding Sympathetically While Saying, “I know this must be hard,” suggest herb tea, sleep masks and naps.
Naps
.
You don’t just sleep—you make a spectacle of your repose by snoring, drooling, looking extra cozy and sleeping in the most awkward positions imaginable. You doze without a blanket in a chilly room, your bare feet mocking my need for ideal sleep conditions. You sleep with your head mashed against a scratchy couch, pressing a tweed pattern into your cheeks. You snooze through fire alarms and earthquakes. You siesta peacefully after getting fired or dumped, and you have no trouble falling immediately into a deep slumber the night before taking a big exam, starting a new job, or getting a kidney transplant.
As far back as I can remember, sleeping was something I knew normal people did with ease and regularity.
Little girls with pink rooms and white wicker beds whose mommies tucked them into bed with warm milk and animal crackers, those little bitches put their pigtails on the gingham pillowcase and it was
nighty-night
. I had been to enough slumber parties and sleepovers to know that little worried freaks like me with freaky thoughts were probably the only ones awake in the middle of the night.
Even as a seven-year-old, I would get in bed and stare at the ceiling for hours, my mind racing. I remember worrying about whether I had cavities, concerned that at my dentist appointment in three months the hygienist would narc me out for eating sugar, which my hippie parents didn’t allow me to have. They would just know I had been eating SweeTarts and fun-size Charleston Chews from the look of my tooth enamel, and I would have some explaining to do about all of my lying. This is the kind of issue that seemed so pressing that I had to imagine the many ways it might play out, just as I had to imagine the multitude of angles from which the bogeyman could strike, causing me to gnash my surely rotting teeth.
While other children were enjoying sleep, one of the most basic of human needs, I would reenact conversations with the girls at ballet school that hadn’t gone well, or consider the odds that my grandpa would have a heart attack and drop dead before I could apologize for spilling nail polish remover on his tax returns.
As you can imagine, once caffeinated beverages and puberty entered the picture, it only got worse.
When I think about college, I think about watching Charlie Rose interview various obscure notables on my tiny black-and-white television propped up on a milk crate. When “The Star-Spangled Banner” came on, I would switch to news radio. Traffic, weather, news, traffic, weather, news, trying not to check the clock, checking the clock, endless calculations about how much sleep I would get if I just fell asleep
now
. Or now. Or now. Or within fifteen minutes from now. Or this hour.
Under ideal conditions, when the temperature is moderate, the bedding clean and fluffy, the room neat and the life situation calm, I still have to read or watch television before falling asleep. Pregnancy, with its attendant physical discomforts and emotionally charged future projections, is me teaching a master class on insomnia to Mr. Sandman.
Good sleeper people, you mean well, but you all seem to think if you can’t get a good night’s sleep, you should just nap. You never shut up about the merits of goddamn napping, as though somehow it’s easier to sleep in the middle of the day.
Here’s you:
“You should just nap. I love naps. Just a twenty-minute snooze makes me feel so refreshed. I just put on my sleep mask and out I go.”
Just the thought of you in REM as I struggle to find a position that doesn’t squish my swollen boobs or jostle my constantly full bladder, just the idea of you logging a full night of rest makes me jealous and resentful. Good sleeper people, especially those of you who are also pregnant and should really be spending the wee hours flipping through pregnancy books to see what symptoms you can expect every week until your due date, you are as irritating as the red numbers on a digital clock flashing all night long.
On top of the usual strain of being awake when the world has stopped, I now have to worry that I am stressing out my tiny fetus with my insomnia and the worries that cause it. I have a new pastime as I readjust my pillow for the forty-seventh time: Instead of counting sheep, I count the ways I want to punch you good sleepers, and put you to sleep for a good long time.
First Trimester Box Score
H
ere is my current pregnancy stat sheet.
Just remember, not everything is in the numbers. This pregnancy has big upside potential. Lots of hustle. Maybe I’ll get scouted to deliver in the minors.
STRASSER’S ROOKIE SEASON
ON THE BABY BREWERS
2 hemorrhoids
2 bladder infections
39 years of age
3.6 emotional breakdowns
5 missed work meetings and therapy appointments due to pregnancy confusion, or “baby brain”
3 instances of locking myself out of the house in my pajamas
2 bra cup size increases
67 times I’ve Googled the word “miscarriage” in combination with various behavior or symptoms
4 sonograms
1 first-trimester screening
1 CVS test
2 genetic disorders found in my DNA
3 full bottles of Cherry Mylanta consumed
1 bottle Zantac prescribed (useless)
1 bottle Zofran prescribed (useless)
5 baby names in the running, none really grabbing me
1 shaming yoga teacher who announced, “This should be your last regular class. Prenatal yoga is on Tuesdays.” Namaste to you, too, m-fer.
1 extreme full-body acne outbreak
12 containers Fage yogurt consumed between hours of twelve and three a.m.
9 cups frozen grapes consumed between hours of twelve and three a.m.
16 hours of
This American Life
downloaded for listening pleasure in the bathtub during the dark, scary nighttime hours
4 tubs powdered organic bubble bath used
27 spins of the Talking Heads song “Stay Up Late.”
Little pee-pee, little toes.
17 proclamations about my future boy, including, “He is going to love reading. And hate binge drinking.”
2 moments I stopped cold walking on the sidewalk. Paused. Had to stand still to really consider: What have I gotten myself into?