Genius Toiling in Obscurity

Just in Case You Thought I Ever Stopped Complaining

(By the way, this is the hundredth entry in this weblog.)

My first lover wanted a baby. I was about to turn twenty when we got together; she was a year older, and the relationship lasted about two-and-a-half years. The breakup was a good thing. I left the relationship with a powerful feeling that I had barely escaped with my life, and I suspect she felt something similar. We were pretty good at being in a relationship, actually, and had some of the same skills and values that I believe make my relationship with David work and last: we cared about each other's happiness, listened to each other carefully, and were willing to put aside other things in order to focus on our relationship when it needed tending.

We were also young and screwed up. I was a good ten years away from receiving the ultimately life-giving diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Obsessive-Compulsive Tendencies; when I was working on recovering from that, I recognized Joey in the literature on panic disorders, too. We were a lovely pair.

I have always thought it was a good thing we broke up before we had a baby, because it seemed infinitely better than breaking up after we had a baby. The first lesbians we knew to get pregnant by donor insemination did it while we were in college, and all of us young dykes thought they were radical, amazing, and worth emulating. It took only a few years, though, until they broke up and entered into a bitter and ugly custody battle in which the biological mom refused the non-biological mom any contact with their child. So much for all the rhetoric we used to embrace about lesbian relationships being inherently egalitarian, fair, and non-damaging.

Like many non-parents, Joey and I had many theories about child rearing. The memory of the long talks we used to have in the car about the right way to raise kids is a bit cringe-worthy, and has a lot to do with why I subsequently tried to avoid expressing parenting theories before I was an actual parent. But now that I am a parent I think we were not too far off the mark in a lot of ways. And I think we would have been the kind of energetic parents my kids will only be able to dream about. Had Joey and I had a kid, and stayed together, that kid would have been hauled from pillar to post, with "pillar" being a campsite in some medium-remote area and "post" being the latest gay and lesbian rights march in Washington, D.C., with stops at all points in between.

Of course, we would not have stayed together, and being hauled up and down the east coast by two moms with disorders on the anxiety-panic spectrum would have taken its toll, I'm sure. I sometimes think I find grocery shopping with a two-year-old fairly easy because one of the places Joey used to have panic attacks was Meijer. Likewise, I remember having to pull off the freeway to talk her through attacks. And she used to wake me in the night if she had a dream in which I cheated on her, and we would be up for hours while I tried to convince her that her dream was not my reality, that I wouldn't cheat in real life, and that we would really be better off sleeping. So now that I think of it, I was pretty well prepared for the tribulations of baby and toddler care. I should tell people that when they ask how life is with Eric: "Actually," I could say, "Eric is easier to shop with, drive with, and sleep with than my first lover! And he never makes me apologize for crimes I've committed only in his imagination! So it's been pretty much a piece of cake!"

It wasn't my intention to pick on Joey, though. The things that were wrong with our relationship can be marked up more to youth and inexperience than either of us being a truly bad choice. I wanted to say instead that sometimes I think it would not have been the worst thing in the world if we'd gone ahead and had a baby. We'd have done a lot right. And we'd have done it all with verve and style.

Perhaps I'm just dreaming about what it would have been like to become a mother at 22 because, at 38, becoming a mother is wearing me out. Every day I fall farther behind around the house and at my job, because even though I work past the limit of my energy I can't do everything that needs doing. And, although I have better and worse days, I never have that extra spark of energy that makes a person hop off the curb instead of merely stepping, or decide spontaneously to bundle a kid up and go sledding. I do good things all day, every day, but it's always an effort, because gestating a seven-months fetus is using nearly all my body's resources.

I try to remember I'm just pregnant. Before I got pregnant, I had plenty of energy. And after I'm done being pregnant, I will again. But the other day there was a young mom at playgroup, also with a toddler and with a due date just two weeks after mine, and, man, she was the definition of "glowing." Just lovely. And dressed so cute in an alternative kind of way! And full of smiles! And bouncing up and down off the floor to move with her son from activity to activity! While I, at one point, followed Eric from the puzzle area to the Land of the Plastic Animals by crawling across the room, because it seemed easier and more dignified than hauling myself laboriously off the floor and lowering myself again. I've got a four-day trip alone with Eric coming up next weekend, and I am looking forward to it for a thousand reasons (a long drive with friends, followed by three days with the best Quakers in the world) and dreading it for one: most mornings, David has to help me put my left sock on. What am I going to do when left to my own devices?

The young mom from playgroup is part of a cohort of young alternative-type moms I've met before at Open Gym at the community center. They are friendly to me when I see them. They chat with me about where I got my nose pierced and who did my tattoos. And they're good moms, too. Happy with their kids, good at both disciplining and playing with them. I wish I were one of them, sometimes. I yearn toward their youth, their energy, their beauty, and the glimpse they offer me into what life might have been like for me in a parallel universe.

When Eric was born, David said that having a baby made him feel old. I said, "That's funny, it makes me feel young, because I think, How old could I be if I've just had a new baby?"

The answer, it turns out, is: Pretty Darn Old.

Posted by Su Penn at February 7, 2004 10:26 PM | TrackBack