Willa, Ethan, and Shep battle-royale one another in my brain.
Shep’s fingers in my hair, our foreheads together.
Ethan charging into the woods at the word free. His face half lit by sunlight, his desires clearly torn in two.
And most of all, Willa. Willa and her pain that was a million times bigger than I even knew. And her warning: Please don’t wreck my brother.
I’m a loopy, dazed mess until Monday after work when I head to Lower East Side Partners in Obstetrics and Gynecology to get updated on my vaccinations. I’m absurdly disappointed when it’s a nurse I’ve never met before who administers the shots. I’m holding the cotton ball on my arm when I ask her, “Is Nurse Louise working today?”
“Yeah. If she hasn’t gone home yet.”
“Is there any chance I could see her?”
“Oh.” The nurse gives me a slightly annoyed look but nods. “Let me check.”
A few minutes later there’s a tap-tap on the door of the exam room and Nurse Louise is poking her gray-brown head inside. “Ms. Hatch.”
“Nurse Louise!” I swear, one of the first things I’m gonna do when I’m postpartum and back on my feet is jump straight into Nurse Louise’s arms.
She steps into the room and I see she’s got her purse and coat over one arm.
“Were you just leaving? I’m sorry.”
She sets her things down and puts her hands on her hips. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I just…” I don’t know where to start.
Instead of answering, she opens a drawer and pulls out a plain Band-Aid for my shot. But she reconsiders and trades it out for a Sesame Street Band-Aid and hands it over to me. She clearly gets me. “How about we get a cup of coffee?”
She guides us to a little twenty-four-hour diner half a block down from the clinic and we slide into a booth.
She orders black coffee for herself and gives a little smile when I order a tall glass of grapefruit juice. “Are you craving a lot of citrus right now?” she asks.
“Yeah. For a long time, I couldn’t have any because of heartburn. But right now, it’s all I want.”
“I remember that part.”
It’s the exact segue I need. “Can I ask a question about when you were pregnant?”
She leans back in the booth, a friendly frown on her face. “Sure.”
“When you told people you were pregnant, what were their reactions like?”
She purses her lips and studies me. “Mixed, I suppose. Some people have a lot of baggage around it.”
“Hm.”
She thanks the waiter when he brings us our drinks and then, to my complete surprise, dumps about four packets of Sweet’N Low into her coffee. “I take it you had some lackluster responses to the happy news?” she asks, eyebrows raised over the brim of her cup as she takes a long draw.
“Yeah. A lot of the people I told…most of them, actually, their immediate reaction to the news was basically What does your pregnancy mean for me?”
She nods, like that’s expected.
“Even my best friend,” I say.
“Well,” she says with a little shrug. “No best friend is perfect.”
“Of course, of course. Including me. Because I totally missed this huge thing…At first I thought the news was hard for her because she’s had a lot of fertility struggles and she really wants to be pregnant. It’s just that…when I first found out…I really, really needed help and it threw me off when she went all cold on me. But then I come to find out that, well…basically there was a lot going on for her that I didn’t know about and me being pregnant…I think in some ways it prevented me from seeing her pain. I was only thinking about myself. Because…I think I felt like the only one who really was thinking about me? If that makes any sense? So, if I didn’t put me first, then no one would?”
I think for a minute about all the people I’ve told, and Nurse Louise waits patiently. “I had one friend at work who was genuinely happy for me. She ran out and bought me a pregnancy basket of goodies that very afternoon. But for most other people at work it was so awkward. My family was a bit of a mixed bag. The father of the baby…he’s required a lot of…spoon-feeding. I just got so many not-exactly-happy reactions!”
It feels awkward to say all this out loud. Oh, poor, poor Eve. She needs more people to tuck her feelings into bed at night. But also it’s true.
“I think it’s okay that you didn’t see your friend’s pain right away,” she says eventually. She takes a deep breath and looks out the window at the street. “You were in your first trimester. It’s only right to think about yourself first in your first trimester.” She turns back to me. “It’s the way it works. It’s all about you at the beginning because, for everyone else, your life changes once the baby is born. But for the mother, your life changes as soon as you find out you’re pregnant. And for a while, you’re the only one who really gets it. Because it’s happening to you. So yeah, don’t be too hard on yourself for putting yourself over your friend at the beginning…Besides. That all changes, doesn’t it? Putting yourself first? I’m just gonna take a guess and say that somewhere in the second trimester, the baby started wiggling around and kicking and you stopped thinking so much about yourself and a lot more about the people around you?”
I blink at her. “How the heck did you…?”
She shrugs. “I’ve been there. Three times, in fact. Pregnancy is a bell curve. You think about yourself at the beginning a ton. Then you think about the baby and other people for most of the rest. And then right at the end, when birth is looming, you start thinking about yourself again. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone, but most of the moms I’ve talked to have felt that way. Must be biological or something. Pregnancy hormones are the strongest force on earth as far as I’m concerned.”
Nurse Louise is studying me, her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed. “So. Have you? Gotten any help from anyone?”
“Oh. Well. Yes, I have. My best friend has really tried, even though it must have been so hard for her. And that’s more meaningful than I can even realize, I think. And I’ve gotten some help from one of my brothers. And then a lot of help from this one other person in particular.”
“Your inopportune crush,” she guesses immediately.
“How’d you guess?”
She looks at her own reflection in the bottom of her coffee cup. “Him? Her?”
“Him. Shep.”
She gives a little smile at whatever I do with my face when I say his name. “What’s he like?”
“Um. He’s tall and kind of floppy. I’ve known him forever. But recently…Let’s see. He cares about if I have food in the fridge. And gives me foot rubs I don’t ask for. When I told him I was pregnant, he was happy for me. He…wants me to be okay. Sadly, I don’t think he has a selfish bone in his body. If he did I wouldn’t be so worried about him putting me first every time.”
“There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time. You want to hear it?”
“Of course.”
“Well,” she says, twisting her coffee mug one direction and then the next. “Most people are self-centered. And I’m not talking about selfishness. I mean it literally. Their center is their own self. Like yours was in your first trimester. They understand the world only through their own experiences. Whatever happens around them, they ask, What does that mean for me? But then there are a select few who are other-centered. And when things happen around them, they ask themselves, What does this mean for everybody? And that sounds like Shep. It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve come to have a crush on someone who considers you.”
I feel dizzy.
“Can I ask something?” she asks after a beat.
I clear my throat. “Shoot.”
“That woman at work, the one who was happy for you, who brought you the pregnancy basket. Is she a mother?”
“Oh. Yeah. She is.”
“I figured.”
“You figured she’d be happy for me because she’d been through it all before?”
“No. Because of my self-centered versus other-centered theory…It’s not just the pregnancy bell curve. It’s a lot of what motherhood is too. Moving from being self-centered to being other-centered. A huge chunk of motherhood is realizing that your children are little bits of your own self out there eating cereal straight from the box and learning to pay their own taxes and wondering whether or not now is the right time to adopt a cat.”
I laugh at her examples and wonder exactly how old her children are.
“You’re saying that as a mother you think of your kids before you think of yourself?”
She pauses. “Not a hundred percent of the time. But yeah, part of becoming a mother, for me, was coming to terms with the center of my world being something that wasn’t my own self. It’s harder than you might think.”
“Sounds terrible.”
She laughs. “Can I tell you a story?”
I nod vigorously.
“Snow Boot Day,” she says. “Was an annual holiday in my household. Sometime in the fall, I’d drag my kids up to the outlets in the Bronx and I’d buy each of them one perfect pair of winter boots for the year. And we’d make it a whole event. Coke slushies and soft pretzels and a matinee action movie before we came home. It was…” she reflects, “a hemorrhage of money.”
I smile. She’s gone soft talking about the past. About her children.
“The kids loved it, of course. All that sugar and a movie in the theater. But do you know why I loved that day so much?”
I shake my head.
“Because I worked full time for that money all year long. And then I got to buy these perfect warm boots that would keep them comfortable all season. There was nothing better.” She’s smiling into the past, her fingers wrapped around her mug.
I smile too. “I’ve heard parents talk about that before. That your children are like your heart walking around outside your body.”
“For me, at least, it wasn’t just my children. Motherhood changed my view on the entire world. At first it was just other children, the kids who’d play with my oldest at the playground. You see the grown-ups who push them on the swings and you realize that each kid is someone’s whole entire heart. Soon it was the middle schoolers. And then it was the high schoolers. And then, eventually, it was the middle-aged people and the older people too. Once I started seeing the web, I couldn’t stop seeing it, all the people who love all the people.”
And here I thought Nurse Louise was sandpapery when really she’s all unexpected Sweet’N Low.
“So…” I think about what she’s just told me. “That’s what it means to be other-centered? To see the web? To treat everyone like they’re somebody’s favorite person on earth?”
“In part.”
“Oh, God.” I groan. “That makes so much sense. I think I’ve really been an ass. You know how much time I’ve spent thinking about myself all my life?” I cover my eyes for a moment. “I’ve got such a long way to go.”
She lifts her hand and requests the check. “It hurts to realize that the world is so much bigger and more complicated than you thought it was. It’ll always hurt.” She sighs and pushes my grapefruit juice towards me, wanting me to finish it. She points dead center at my belly. “And all you can really do is be there. And wipe your kid’s face. And try. And learn from your mistakes. And once a year, there’s an absolutely perfect day, where you get to buy them boots that you know, you know will keep all ten of their perfect toes warm and dry. And that’s the good stuff. It truly doesn’t get better than that.”
The phone rings. I know he won’t answer. But I have never left a voicemail for him before and I figure now is likely the right time.
“Ethan, hi, it’s Eve. I hope you get this. I just…I want you to know that it’s okay to be confused. I’m confused too. All the time. So, I get it. I really do. And…just because this has all been a lot for me doesn’t mean that I don’t have sympathy for you. I know this is a lot for you too…Look, I want to say this at least once. And I hope you can believe me. But I’m actually gonna be okay. I am so unbelievably lucky. I’ve got a family who is mostly stoked about this. I’ve got friends, I’ve got…I am just really, really not alone. So, you don’t have to worry that I am. This isn’t…all on you. If you can’t be here. You can’t be here. And I’ll be all right. Just, be well, okay? I wish you all the best. I really do.”
I hang up the phone and the tears I’m expecting don’t come. In fact, I feel relieved. I actually have no expectations for Ethan. Which means that he is not currently disappointing me.
I barely know him, if I’m being honest. And I can’t say whether involvement or not in the baby’s life is a good idea. All I know is that I’m lucky enough not to have to depend on him.
I am not the girl he loves so much he cried on the sidewalk. And that’s…okay.
I’m not the center of Ethan’s world. And, actually, I’m not the center of my own world either. It’s an oddly light feeling.
It’s like I’ve been focusing on a tiny script for years, the words all repeating me, myself, I, me, myself, I, me, myself, I, but now I’m sitting back and letting my eyes relax and luxuriating as I sink down into the blissful blur. This isn’t all about me. It isn’t all about Ethan, or Willa, or Shep, or even the baby. It’s a web and—God, what a perfect system because—each of us is somebody’s favorite.