JENNIFER BAUMGARDNER
the summer of 2007, when my son Skuli was almost three, I flew back early from a trip to Fargo so I could attend a party for Jenny and Sara Jane, two friends of mine who were celebrating their five-year relationship. Jenny and Sara Jane were a decade younger than I, Smith graduates with great style and even more beautiful politics. I was excited to go to their ceremony, which struck me as risky and brave. Their families weren’t always comfortable and on board with their daughter’s sexuality. Having everyone convene for this celebration of a gay relationship was, to my mind, a big deal. I was hungry for examples of alternative family-making, having logged nearly three years as a single mom by choice.
I was used to traveling alone, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant when things went awry. Skuli was easy, but it wasn’t like I had another adult to carry the bags, figure out the missed connection, or help clean up the milk vomit after the bumpy flight—things which happened with annoying regularity. It was a blazing hot July afternoon when we arrived at JFK after a long flight. I threw our bags in Skuli’s Sit ‘n’ Stroll, a car seat/stroller combo that I used in airports like a wheelbarrow when I traveled with him. Carrying him on one hip, I slogged out to the long-term parking lot. Our car, a 17-year-old red Honda Civic, shimmered in the heat. This isn’t good, I thought, heart sinking, because one of the many quirks of this vehicle (passed down from mother to sister to me) was that it wouldn’t start when parked in direct sunlight. I fastened Skuli’s car seat into the cauldron of the backseat and turned the ignition, praying it would turn over. Nothing. I waited two minutes. Still nothing. Again—
“We should call someone to help us,” Skuli offered from his microwave oven perch. He was good at intuiting our next step.
I called someone (JFK Roadside Assistance, maybe?) and soon a young guy arrived to jump our battery. “It’s not the battery,” I said, wishing I had thought to pack snacks and a water bottle for Skuli. “This car doesn’t start in heat. I have to wait until sundown.”
“It’s the battery, Ma’am,” the car guy said. After ten more minutes of needless jumping, hope, and disappointment, he offered to drive us in his tow truck to the nearest garage. Feeling a familiar financial panic, I mentally calculated the cost of this crisis—$60 for tow, $50 for car service home, God knows how much to “fix” the car (i.e., let car come to room temperature)—and wondered if witnessing Jenny and Sara Jane’s commitment was worth the expense. I decided it was. We got home in time for me to shower and change, drop Skuli at his dad’s for the night, and head to the party.
On a Brooklyn rooftop that night, drinking restoratively, I met Sara Jane’s mom. A former nurse with great bone structure, frosted blonde hair, and a mini dress, her whole body vibed, “Be surprised that I have two adult daughters.” She was a former single mother, and as we continued to drink and listen to the iPod playlist Jenny and Sara Jane had selected for this night, she prodded me for stories about my life. After each story, she’d shake her head and say, “Be selfish, Jen. You’ve got to be selfish.”
I was used to getting unsolicited advice about my life, especially from people I considered to be less than knowledgeable. Some of it I gratefully accepted, like the offers to come over for Sunday dinner, and the used baby equipment my friends were always finding for me. Sometimes, though, I sensed not so much helpfulness but pity. I mean, I felt bad for some of them, what with their unhappy marriages and wilting sex lives, but I got the feeling that they used me to feel better about their own lives. “I know it must be so hard,” these friends would say, flattening me into a stereotype with their sympathy faces (furrowed brow, lips pressed into a droopy frown) and their “Does Skuli have male role models? Is his dad, you know, involved?” concerns.
The truth is, it was hard. I woke up in the middle of the night worried about bills, anxious that I’d have coverage for Skuli while I was working. I brought him to parties with me not because he loved hanging out at adult’s houses at 11:30 PM, but because it was that or never socialize. But . . . I was happy. I’d never felt so much love and independence at once.
Back at the party, I attempted to respond to Sara Jane’s mom. As a single mother, I was not selfish—that suffix “ish” connoting something gross or halfway. It’s more like I was self-full. It was definitely a time in my life in which I had to rely on myself more than ever before, and yet my life was very rich with other people: Christine dropping by on the way home from work because I’ve conveyed that friends are always welcome, saying yes to spontaneous invitations to the Bronx Zoo because Skuli and I don’t have to negotiate anyone else’s schedule, New Year’s Eves with Amy and Peter, sleepovers at Gillian’s because we only need one bed.
The nuclear family, I noted, was a more closed home, electrons orbiting around the nucleus of the dinner table, ordered primarily by the schedules of its members. In my single-lady status, my home was open. I controlled the doors and I wanted people to come in. My friends and family showed up for me all of the time. My sister Jessica, happily married and also a mother, marveled at how much help from friends and family I marshaled. “I guess I’m not afraid to ask,” I said, attempting to analyze the discrepancy. “And people assume I need it, of course, which is kind of humiliating.”
“Not as humiliating as needing it even though you have a partner,” Jessica responded.
Clearly, Jessica wasn’t one of the condescending types, but I gravitated toward single parent friends after Skuli was born. We were the ones who always dropped our kids late at school and got stern, condescending looks from the teachers. We brought our children to cocktail parties and readings, because it was that or we couldn’t go. The single moms had scuffed shoes; our roots grown out from a little too much time between hair appointments. Superficially, we were more bedraggled, but we were also a really sturdy, actualized crew. Alan (as a man, an honorary single mom) was a poet, professor, and art critic who kept a perfect house for himself and Sophie. Sixty-something Merle owned the largest abortion clinic in the country and became a self-made millionaire before adopting Sasha from Siberia. Liliana had left Poland, escaped her abusive husband, and was raising Anna and Alex while working full time and going back to school. Sally wanted the baby but not the bad-boy baby daddy, and was raising her son exactly how she wanted—with organic food, no sugar, and lots of travel. Lorraine had three children, two exes, three enormously successful salons, and, in spite of being dyslexic, had written a book. We shared a common currency—the bracing combination of independence and terror. The independence was precious—“I get to write three nights a week,” as Alan would often say—but it was the terror (Food on table! Clothes on kid! Insurance! Tuition!) that kept us motivated.
I felt lonely some days—the obvious ones, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day—but the other days I felt this magical self-reliance. “Trust thyself,” as Emerson wrote, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.” I had ample opportunity to learn to trust myself, and maybe opportunity (also known as necessity) is just what one needs. Single parenthood was good for me, but people tend to feel bad for the children of single mothers, too, I noted. The assumption was that boys needed a role model and girls needed to know their dad would love and protect them. Heading into the subway one day, I was struggling with the stroller (Skuli in it and heavy) and my bags. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a teen thug walking toward me with a menacingly blank look on his face and his pants drooped. He leaned over, picked up my carriage and, without a word, carried Skuli down the two flights of stairs to the subway platform. I sputtered a thank you. He looked me in the eye and said in a soft voice, “I was raised by a single mom, Ma’am.”
My friend Amy was raised by a single mom. When she turned thirty, her friends made a book for her, each of us taking a page to extol her work ethic, dance ability, and generosity. Her mother’s page had a snapshot of the two of them, taken when Amy was about five and her mother was in her young twenties. The photographer was behind the two. Her mother is pointing at a flower right in front of them, showing it to Amy. And Amy is pointing up and away, to something that her mom can’t even see. She wrote that it wasn’t the most flattering photo of the two of them, but it was a good example of their relationship. The caption Amy’s mother wrote was “We make a good team. We make a good team.”
The fact that she wrote it twice slayed me, but I was most struck by seeing my tough, confident, sunny friend cry as she read the words. I think Amy knew that thing that I know and that Skuli knows and that all of the single moms know: the joy, beauty, and hard-earned satisfaction of being a good team. Days before that awful moment at JFK when my car wouldn’t start, we visited my cousins at their lake cabin in Minnesota. Their house was crawling with kids and my cousin and her husband appeared to have an attractive, invitingly healthy relationship. The kids swam and hunted for minnows and played with toy cars. When it was time to leave, Skuli threw himself on the ground and cried, “No, I won’t go! I belong here.”
He had done the same thing a few weeks earlier at Amy’s house, at which there was the same appealing constellation of happy and fun parents, cool toys, and siblings. Both times, I felt a chill course through me, because his response struck me as maybe true and certainly insightful. Not that he needed to have two parents, but there was something about the joviality and regularity of that home that either vibrated with what he knew about other people and missed in his own life—or it just felt right in some meaningful way that his three-year-old self needed to assert.
To me, it hurt, because I knew I belonged with him but I didn’t belong there—and I wanted him to believe, as I did, that we were lucky that things had worked out as they did, that our lives were unique and wonderful. Was I just being selfish?
“Be selfish”—these words echoed in my brain the summer Skuli was three. What did it mean? Was it selfish to stay a unit of two, because Skuli would have to shoulder the burdens of my aging alone? Or was it selfish to have a love life when I had a young child who needed me? I could see it both ways and many more.
It may have just been a coincidence, but after that “selfish” conversation, I got my mojo back. By mojo, I mean my sexual self. I began dating again later that month, and within a few weeks I met the man that would become the father of my second child and, later, this same man—BD—became my husband. Skuli has thrived in our nuclear family, stricter and more constant than what he knew before. I wonder sometimes if he remembers our former way of being. Will he know to help a struggling mom with her stroller in ten years?
“We don’t spend as much time together,” Skuli told me one day, while walking home from school. We were holding hands and he had been telling me about his life in an alternate universe he calls Boneland. “You spend a lot of time with BD now.”
I squeezed his hand.
“Remember when we were just the two of us,” Skuli asked, “and we’d sleep together in the same bed?”
“I do remember,” I said. “We made a good team, Skuli.”
We made a good team.