I know so many people who spent years trying to get pregnant. Vanessa and Jay wound up with triplets after taking Clomid. Kate ended up going through in vitro, twice. Darren jokes that when he sneezes on me, I conceive. I smile when he says that, but I don’t find it funny. It makes me think of the Birthmothers in that book The Giver I read in high school, where getting pregnant over and over again was their assigned task, their only use in society.
Not long after we got married, Darren started talking about having kids. He thought we were the perfect age to start a family. The same exact age his parents were when they had his oldest sister. Even though Kate had just told me that she was pregnant, I wasn’t so sure he was right. The triplets had been born a week earlier, prematurely but remarkably okay. Vanessa and Jay had a nanny and a night nurse—and Vanessa’s mom, who stayed with them for the first six months—and even still, when Jay called he sounded like a zombie. That first week, he rang me from the lab while I was still at work.
“Can you talk?” he asked.
“I’m at the office,” I answered, cradling my cell phone to my ear. “Is everything okay?”
“Humans weren’t meant to have three babies at once,” he said. “Am I a terrible person if I don’t want to go home to them?”
“You’re not a terrible person, Jay, you’re just tired,” I told him. “It’s understandable. Give yourself another thirty minutes, but then you have to go back. Those babies need you. Vanessa needs you.”
“I can’t even tell them apart,” he said. “Unless they’re wearing clothes.”
That one gave me pause, but not too much. Sometimes I wonder if my brother would recognize me if he saw me on the street, out of context.
“Think about them like you do different viruses,” I told him. “Pay close attention. Notice their differences, not their similarities.”
I hoped that would help. I felt bad for Jay. Three babies at once was definitely more than he and Vanessa had thought they would get.
He took a big breath and let it out. “Like hydrogen loves oxygen,” he said. “I’ll let you work now.”
“Love you too, Jay,” I said, before hanging up.
So after that, after the triplets, I wasn’t completely convinced a baby was something I wanted to add to my life just then. But Darren was sure. He reminded me that parenthood was on both of our bucket lists.
“And besides,” he said, “it’ll probably take at least a year, if we go by Vanessa and Kate.”
It took a month.
There were a few weeks of absolute exhaustion, going to sleep before nine p.m. Then way too many weeks of nausea, the kind where I would run out of meetings, sure that if I didn’t, I would hurl all over the writers’ room and the scenes they were revising. Then, once that mercifully passed, there were months of having to pee approximately once an hour.
It took me about four months of being pregnant to be okay with it. To come to terms with what my life would be like once the baby arrived. But once I did, I was excited. I didn’t think I would react this way, but I spent my lunchtimes at the office looking at baby clothes and nursery furniture. I read articles about breastfeeding and water births and when the ideal time was to introduce peanut butter into your child’s diet. I became baby obsessed.
I even started wondering if having a successful career really was all that important to me, or if being a mom trumped that. I wondered if I’d come back after maternity leave. I know, after everything I told you about not wanting to be defined by my role as a wife or a mother and hoping to make a difference in the world with my work—how my main complaint about Darren was that he didn’t understand that part of me—the fact that I was considering quitting might seem crazy. It felt crazy to me—like I was turning into someone else, an alternate Lucy whose priorities morphed and changed. But it was truly how I felt. Being pregnant did that to me. And Darren really wanted me to stay home too. He said that no one would take care of our baby better than I would, and I was starting to think he was right.
• • •
DARREN WAS DOING incredibly well at work. The deals he closed had impressed his bosses so much that they made him a director, and his new salary blew my mind. He was earning more than five times what I was, and I wasn’t doing all that badly myself. With all the extra income, he wanted to buy a big apartment in a great neighborhood.
“Let’s move to Manhattan,” he said, one morning, with the New York Times spread across his legs and Annie at his feet. “Maybe the Upper East Side.”
But Manhattan was our borough. Yours and mine. And ever since your phone call five months before, I’d felt more aware of that. Even though Darren and I had gotten married in Manhattan, we’d never really claimed it. Brooklyn was our place.
“I like Brooklyn,” I told him. “How about Park Slope? Or Brooklyn Heights?”
Even married with a baby on the way, I was thinking about you. I was making life decisions based on us. But I truly thought it would stop—that you’d fade from my mind again, the way you had before. And that turned out to be more or less true. But at that point, you were still there, front of brain, guiding my thoughts.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “P.S. 6 is a great elementary school.” Then he shrugged. “I guess we could always send the baby to private school.”
“So Brooklyn?” I asked him.
He was already looking at the Brooklyn Heights listings.
“I found one!” he said a few minutes later. “Listen to this: four bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, two floors of a brownstone on Love Lane. How could we not live on Love Lane?”
Then he pulled me over and kissed my stomach before he kissed my lips. I kissed him back. “Do we need four bedrooms?” I asked him.
“We might one day,” he said with a smile.
I knew he wanted a big family, like his. I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about that, but I wasn’t ruling it out either. “How about we check it out?” I said.
We went to the open house. I’d never seen an apartment that big in the city before. There was a formal dining room, an eat-in kitchen—what am I saying, you know all these things. Obviously. You’ve been there.
Once we bought the apartment, once we moved in, once we started decorating the nursery, once all of that happened, I felt like a mom for real. I couldn’t wait to meet my baby.