It was almost as if the moment I peed on the stick I got fat. Like literally as the plus sign appeared, my ass hit the plus-sized rack. I started to sense the telltale symptoms (tingling boobies, bitchiness) and went to Zitomer’s to buy the test. Holy fucking shit. I had to spread ’em and give birth. It was nine months away, but still. How to tell Harry? I was going to wrap the little urine-y wand in a box with tissue paper and tell my husband that way, but then it occurred to me that maybe it was too gross to hand him my waste products. We have this thing where we never ever have taken a dump with the door open. If someone starts to drop trou and hit the pot, one of us will yell “Romance!” (as in, let’s at least try to keep the romance alive) as a signal for the other to please shut the door. I remember that Sex and the City episode where Miranda’s one-night stand takes a fierce dookie, sending her cat sprinting out of the bathroom, Usain Bolt–style, with a tortured “RRRRREAR!” no doubt from the brown cloud he was just enveloped in.
So ixnay on the eestickpay. Instead, I walked next door to Zitomer’s (cue finger quotes) “Department Store,” i.e., glorified pharmacy. The same place I’d just bought the preggo test, incidentally. In their “department” for kids they had some little socks with lions on them, which were perfect since I call my husband LC, short for Lion Cub, because he in fact resembles a lion with his mane o’ locks. Don’t worry, he’s not, like, in Metallica; he just has a full head of curly brown hair.
I called his cell to see when he’d come out of the train so I could run and meet him on the street—I couldn’t even wait the extra few minutes for him to get home. He unwrapped the teeny socks and his jaw dropped. We hugged and promptly celebrated by hitting an Italian restaurant, where I might as well have duct-taped the plate of gnocchi to my thighs. No matter; I was knocked up!
Almost as quickly as my thigh girth increased, invisible antennae grew out of my scalp and I started to notice every single preggers woman on the street. It seemed like the whole world was in bloom! Suddenly, strollers of every style and color were ubiquitous, tempting me in a buffet of varieties. Little onesies cooed from their store window perches, shrunken Tretorns were purchased for the tadpole within, and every child’s name called out by mothers on the street hung in my brain for consideration like the crisp clash of cymbals; I like Ike! Cute as a little boy, hot as a guy, and cute as an old man again!
This would be fun, this mom thing, yay!
And then . . .
I ran into Patient Zero. No, not the Canadian flight attendant who porked his way into posterity. Her. The woman who would win the gold medal were name-dropping an Olympic sport, who answers, unprompted, “Valentino!” if you say you like her jacket, who weaves her colleges and clubs into every convo. It was like the Tourette’s syndrome of the insecure. “Yeah, in New Haven, you know, at Yale, and then in grad school in Boston, well, outside Boston, in Cambridge at Harvard,” etc. etc. So there I was, bump in blossom, when she spied me.
“What are you having? When are you due? You know my son got a ten on his Apgar test. Ten! And they usually only give nine. But he got ten.”
I’d been reading What to Expect and other tomes, so I was loosely familiar but not 100 percent sure. “Wait . . . aren’t those, like, whether your heart’s beating and shit?” I asked.
“Well, yes, but alertness is key. My son was sooo alert. The nurses said they’d never seen a more alert baby. Never!”
Ah, and so it begins: Apgars now, SATs later. Always a yardstick, ever a measure. Perhaps in Texas it’s cheerleading captain or in Alaska how many fish you spear, but in New York City it’s schools and social stuff and dough. Which many of these women had in the bubble of the Neo–Gilded Age—their husbands all put the “douche” in “fiduciary.” They all threw money at any issue, hiring consultants for walking, talking, peeing, pooing, and violin. No matter! I simply wouldn’t let it get to me. Or so I thought.
The next ambush came at my baby shower, where a whispering group of older moms told me a thing or two about a thing or two.
“Wait, you’re not having a C?” one gasped, incredulous.
“Um, I m-mean, unless it’s an emergency . . . ,” I stammered.
“So you’re doing it, like, natural?” another said, hand to chest in horror, accompanied by a grimace like the passed hors d’oeuvre she’d just sampled was a shit profiterole.
All eyes were on me.
“Well, no, not natural, I plan on having drugs, obviously,” I replied.
“No, but, like, you’re going to . . . give birth?” the first asked, face contorted. “No, no, no, no. Schedule a C. You get a blowout, you get your nails done, you go in, you get the private room, and you remain intact down there. Trust me, your husband will thank you for it.”
I left considering these whispered warnings. Was I so out of it? Did people think I was like some hippie mama going into the woods and shitting out my baby? Was my vagina going to resemble the Holland Tunnel?
Cut to: obstetrician’s office.
Me: I’d like a C-section. My husband will thank me for it.
Her: You’re insane. I don’t do that.
Me: But all these other doctors do it! Like Dr. S!
Her: Yeah, well, he slices around the Duke basketball schedule. I’m different. I let nature decide your baby’s birthday.
Unfortunately for me, and my vagina, my daughter arrived a week late, tearing through me like a bowling ball on its way to a strike. Except for instead of a flying-pin cacophony, it was my ear-piercing shrieks from hell. Because I was obeying the nurse who told us not to come to the hospital before the contractions were five minutes apart or we’d be sent home, I sat at home for hours like an asshole with a stopwatch timing my spazzing ute. At five minutes, I gathered my shit. By the time we got to our lobby, they were four minutes apart. By the time we scored a cab, three.
Wails. From the whale.
We stormed up to the delivery ward to find that there was a wait for the anesthesiologist so there was no epidural to be had. And get this! No birthing room available. My doctor was mortified and apologizing profusely as they wheeled my IV-harpooned ass into . . . wait for it . . . a supply closet. Yes. Stacked with boxes upon boxes of latex gloves.
“Um, I’m sorry, but am I in Ecuador?” I asked my husband.
I was later given morphine mid-pushes but I felt everything and was unpleased (read: RIPSHIT).
Oh, and by the way, my doc took such pity on me that for the next two kids I got my epidural in the fucking parking lot.
They took Sadie, demucused her, put her under that French fry warmer thing, and handed her to me in a blankie, pronouncing her Apgar a nine. (Boo! There goes Princeton!)
We brought her home in the “going-home outfit” soon to be splattered with doody, so why I didn’t just go with Old Navy I have no idea. The first four months I was underwater. Like Brooke Shields before me, down came the rain. Except I literally sobbed at fucking commercials. There was one for Volvo where the daughter is at ice-skating class and keeps falling on her tuches and then comes out and Mom has the Volvo running outside with the ass warmer on. Now that’s maternal love! Niagara Falls. I personally raised the stock of the parent company of Kleenex those first months. Especially because of the incessant pressure to nurse when the truth was, I didn’t like it. People adore the symbiosis of mother and child and the bonding, but the truth was I wasn’t breast-fed, and moms and daughters couldn’t be more bonded than I am with my mom. My nips bled, the pumping made me feel like I was hooked up to a Frankenstein machine or, worse, that fat albino’s below-tree-root death machine in The Princess Bride. I hated thinking of my baby as the Six-Fingered Man torturing me, so I bagged after six weeks. “Shame on you!” one beeyotch literally said to me, complete with pointer finger in my face. “You know it makes them smarter.”
I knew right then and there I had to block out all the sudden advisers. My kid was only two months old and already a battery of people had given me their lists of things I “must do,” from buy special toys we all somehow survived without to use $40 baby moisturizer. It was in this next year that my friends aligned in two camps—the ones who didn’t have kids (my real friends) and the new breed of Supermom whom I met through my daughter. It was from this element that I learned the countless ins and outs of parenting.
Comment: “You give her food from a jar? Oh. We only serve all organic; we boil down a butternut squash from the farmer’s market and puree it, and Allegra and Tabitha devour it!”
Accompanying look: As if I’m filling my kid’s bottle with Coke and feeding her fried dough.
Comment: “You cannot use a pacifier at eighteen months. No, no, no, no, no, too old. That’s lazy parenting. It causes speech delays.”
Accompanying look: As if my kid looks like Hannibal Lecter with an enormous sucky mask and will be mute for the rest of her life because of it.
Comment: “You must do this playgroup: we have a PhD in child psychology come and we meet at different people’s apartments, and it’s like three or four grand but the babies are so advanced and it’s worth it for the school process.”
Look when I politely decline: Incredulity that a mom could be so uncaring about her child’s brain development.
So I began to notice there was a breed of hypercompetitive type-A mothers whom I dubbed the Momzillas. I had my next book idea. Now I just had to get them to keep talking so I could harvest some material.
Cake.
I immersed myself in their scene, listening to diatribes on the choking hazards of nonsliced grapes or the merits of teaching Mandarin at age two. I lived my life gleaning conversational gems I couldn’t have dreamed up for fiction. In fact my editor said I might want to tone down some of the over-the-top scenes and was floored when I informed her that the ones she had singled out were all 100 percent true.
When I signed up Sadie for our first Mommy and Me class, she was tooling around the room with her diapered bum, unable to sit down. As the teacher walked in, all the other moms quietly assembled in a circle on the floor.
“Sadie, honey, come here,” I said, tapping the carpet next to me. “Come sit down Indian-style.”
Gasps.
Literally no fewer than three bejeweled hands went to their respective throats.
I felt that seventh-grade tsunami of panic that I was being talked about when I saw two moms whispering while looking at me, i.e., making the international gesture for “We’re talking about you.” But see, it wasn’t middle school, so I looked right back at them with a warm smile and said, “Is something wrong?”
They looked at each other. One grimaced and the other, caught off guard by my question, pursed her lips and leaned forward.
“Sorry, it’s just, no one really says that anymore. It’s not politically correct for the children.”
What, “Indian-style”?! You’re fucking kidding me. It’s not like my apartment is full of cigar-store headdress wearers and I’m sitting there in a Redskins jersey greeting people by holding up a palm and saying “How.”
The other mom leaned in, throwing me the parenting lingo life raft. “It’s called crisscross applesauce.”
Oh. Okay . . .
“Sadie, come here please and sit down crisscross applesauce.”
My husband and I had a good laugh that night about it, but not nearly as hard as we did the following week at a black-tie benefit for the American Museum of Natural History. Our friends Dana and Michael invite us every year, so we blow the dust off the tux and dress and hit the ’zeum in a glam night of people-watching and dining under an enormous whale. The cocktail hour, though, was in the main hallway, filled with life-sized dioramas of cave people with hairy boobs and animals about to pounce. I was click-clacking down the marble floor on my heels when I saw the Indians. Full feathers, drums, and a faux fire. They all sat around the sham flames with their legs crossed.
“Look, sweetie,” Harry said. “The Native Americans are all sitting around crisscross applesauce!”
In the end, I learned (and am still learning) to swallow the unsolicited instructions and comments made by the Experts (moms with older kids) with a boulder of salt. Because I have such an amazing mom, my instincts have generally led me in an okay direction and I feel aiiiiight. There have been a couple snags along the way, and I’m anything but conventional.
For example, at pickup one day when Sadie was three, the teachers, stifling a smile, informed me that my little smocked-dress-wearing daughter said the F word.
Mildly mortified, I asked for more detail.
“Well,” said the teacher, “Charlie told her that her dress was hideous and she told him to fuck off.”
“Oh, okay, well, she used it in the right context then!” was my reply.
I probably should have been way more horrified and punished her in some way but the truth is (shhhh!) I secretly dug it. My kid wasn’t going to take shit from anybody. So glad that apples don’t fall far from trees. Crisscross applesauce is so much more fun that way.