Mother's Day

What up, imaginary baby.

I'm sitting at the breakfast table, which in the last 36 hours has become coated in a thin layer of yellow pollen. You don't notice at first, until you actually put your hand on the table, and it comes up yellow. Such is the hallmark of spring in this tiny town in upstate New York, where I live on occasion.

If you ever want to confront how truly selfish and self-absorbed you can be, try throwing an afternoon party for all your friends who had babies since the last time you saw them, and do it while you're having your period after two years of total baby-having failure. You might discover that you are not as nice as you thought you were. Or would wish to be. Or something. Fortunately, you can fill your mouth with cake.

It might be a struggle to find things to say to these friends. After you exclaim over their babies hair/smallness/largeness/adorableness, they usually want to talk to you about epidurals. Epidurals are something I prefer not to talk about. In fact, they are something I prefer not to think about.

You might discover that you have nothing to talk about but your work. You can list your various accomplishments - this book is coming out now, and then that one is coming out later, and you're working on that other one - but they're bored, and so you gloss over it. You can't blame them. Babies are absorbing. And do they really want to hear about how you get to go to Paris for your book release? They surely do not. No one does. Even you find it kind of embarrassing to mention. Your privileges are many, but it's tacky to acknowledge them.

It's Mother's Day, and much will be made at your baby party of the people present who are mothers for the first time. You have spent much of the past two years caring for/nagging/supporting and otherwise mothering a teenager to whom you are related by marriage, but there is no such thing as Half-Sister-in-Law Day. You played Santa for your cousin's kids while their dad was deployed overseas, and they love you and you love them, but there's no First Cousin Once Removed Day, either. For women, motherhood is where it's at. Therein lies the value.

One of the attendees at your afternoon baby party might ask you in hushed tones if you're still trying, and you'll say yes, but it's been two years and no dice, not even a positive test. Not once. And she'll tell you about her friend who had to use both a donor egg and donor sperm, and she's due any day now.

You will find that discomfiting. Even vaguely eugenicist. Who would go to all that trouble and expense, when there are already extant children who desperately need a home? You reflect that you would become a foster parent before doing that.

Foster parenting actually seems like a pretty decent idea, if your mothering drive ever becomes intrusive. You could do some good in the world. It would probably be awful much of the time, but then, so is real parenting.

So here we are, at our polleny table, feeling disappointed in ourselves. We're not the women we thought we were, I guess. But that, of itself, is a big part of existing. Learning that what we think about ourselves isn't necessarily the truth.