Eat the Damn Cake

I was thinking about therapy the other day. My therapist and I have drifted apart over the past six months or so. We had been doing phone sessions, which was great because it allowed me to eat while talking to her, and also load the dishwasher. But eventually, even those became complicated, with her new job schedule and my relentless morning sickness. And, without any formal farewell, we became unhooked and slipped apart.

The dishes have suffered. I’ve been trying to decide if I should make an effort. If I should reach out to her, or find a new therapist.

It’s often hard to explain to myself exactly why I maybe should, because therapy is often vague like that. I used to get annoyed at listening to my own problems. And then I’d have to talk about that. Which is awkward. The whole thing is awkward. Once my therapist said to me, laughing, “Kate, you overthink everything!” I liked her for that.

But when I think about therapy now, the part that frustrates me is really more about storytelling than anything else. Actually, a friend of mine who is a successful storyteller, like, as a thing, not just as an expression, said something about how in therapy she feels aware of the things she has to leave out to tell a certain story about her life. There are all of these contradictory, complicating details. There are all these details that are really the beginning of a totally different story or interpretation.

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The truth is, we all need to tell ourselves stories about our lives all the time. It keeps things manageable. We get this sense that we have some idea of who we are. We sort out characteristics and assemble something that comfortingly resembles a personality. People, like dogs and chimps and probably caterpillars, too, like the reassurance of identifiable patterns. We pat ourselves on the back for being a person who consistently hates the taste of licorice—it’s a clue! Have you ever notice how proud people sometimes seem of their little weirdnesses? Oh, I NEVER wear periwinkle! It makes me nervous about buying people gifts, because what if I am forgetting one of their major quirks? What if I get them something in periwinkle by accident?

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“She was always a natural mother, even when she was a girl,” said a relative, describing one of Bear’s cousins. Everyone agreed. I agreed, too, knowing her a little. I could see it.

Some people are natural mothers. They get down on the floor with other people’s kids, and they know just what to say. They like kids, naturally. They have a certain ease, an automatic knowledge, a comfort with their own bodies that allows them to be silly in all the right ways, at the right moments.

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My face still feels awkward to me, from just behind it, where I live, even though I’ve been wearing it for so long. I catch myself thinking, “Am I making the right expression?” I think this is what it means to be awkward—to think like that. Even if it doesn’t show. I know it doesn’t always show. I know plenty of people don’t think I’m awkward, actually, but it doesn’t even matter, because I am. Those girls and women who have quick, gigantic smiles and who touch everyone with friendly effortlessness have always seemed gifted and a little magical to me. I think I associate that with being a natural mother.

No one would describe me as a natural mother. (Except Bear, who is loyal like that.)

What bothers me a lot right now about being pregnant is that there’s a chance I’m not that interested in children. And it’s almost definitely true that I’m not good with them. Especially not really little ones. Often, I forget to even notice them.

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I tried to remember what I’ve done this past year. I would like my accomplishments to be big and obvious, like trophies on a mantel, each one a little shinier and more prestigious than the last.

I remember my twenty-sixth birthday. It was a bad day. I was so afraid of not being enough. Of not getting ahead. I am always so afraid of that. It’s an old and boring fear, even to me.

The truth is, it’s not just the past year, I can’t really remember what I’ve been doing for the last decade. I mean, I did things. Some of them were the big things that people are supposed to do at those ages. College, grad school, figured out a career. I wrote pieces I was proud of and some of them got published in places I was proud to be published. Sometimes someone I knew would tell me that someone they knew had sent them a piece I’d written, and they’d been like, “I know her!” And I would feel successful for a minute, and I’d think that I needed more of that, sort of like a drug. And also like a drug because afterward, I felt bad because I wasn’t getting it anymore. And I’d feel jealous because someone else got a big deal agent or an NPR interview or whatever.

I love to write. If I could somehow take that feeling of working on a book and strain it through a magical sieve and leave behind the chunks of ambition and everything money related and my insecurities about getting ahead that have been carded into the strands of my inspiration over the years—that would be liberating. Sometimes I can. It makes me want to write forever.

But the best thing I’ve done over the past decade is decide to spend my life with Bear.

And the best thing I did this past year was start to feel like maybe I was already doing enough.

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Giveaway winner results are at the bottom of this post! 

The baby was upside down inside me on the ultrasound screen, looking towards my spine, hands up. The technician kept trying to take facial measurements, but it was impossible. She tried for a long time, poking me, shaking my belly. The baby wriggled and squirmed, but wouldn’t turn. The technician, I’m going to call her Lana because I think that was her name, had a lilting Scandinavian accent, and it was clear that she liked babies. “Beautiful,” she said, of my baby’s kidneys. “Just beautiful.”

She was very good about not using gendered pronouns, since I’d asked her (less awkwardly than I’d expected) at the beginning to write the sex in an envelope. That morning, looking for a plain white envelope and card, I’d found this handmade card with a picture of a mama and a baby bear on the cover. I bought it for someone else, years ago, and forgot to send it, because I’m a bad friend like that. They had a boy, and there were lots of pink hearts on the back of the card, which I hadn’t noticed before. Not that it matters, of course. But I’m oblivious.

I was nervous, but I also knew reflexively that my baby was healthy. I was fascinated by the details. The delicate neck, the blurry organs, the long, steady femurs, this whole complicated organism with its tiny relentless heart. Surreal.

The whole time, even as I squinted intently at everything else, I was secretly scanning for the penis. It was a very dedicated secret penis hunt. “Wait…wait…” went my brain. “There! That’s the penis! I found the penis!” It appeared to be located somewhere in the stomach cavity. It was a foot. It was part of the spine. I was so sure the penis was there, somewhere. I had been calling the baby by his perfect name. I sang this song to him a lot, in Hebrew, that began with his name. I love that song. So I knew. But everything was fuzzy and gray and smudged on the screen.

Lana told me after a while to get up and walk around and maybe the baby would move. But when we regrouped, the baby was in exactly the same spot, resilient and stalwart, protecting the face.

Lana called the doctor in, and he tried his hand at convincing my baby to pose for the camera. Nothing. “Everything is fine,” he said, finally. “Everything looks great. We’d just prefer to get clearer shots, but sometimes that can’t happen. Sometimes the baby won’t let us.” And then he got up and shook my hand and then Bear’s hand and left.

“You’ll remember to write in the envelope?” Bear said, a little anxiously, to Lana. She remembered.

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When I started writing personal essays on the internet, I was half embarrassed, half proud. Even though I grew up in a generation that’s supposedly all about oversharing and facebooking and nonstop blabby social connectedness, I’d still learned that privacy is a virtue, modesty is preferable, and you shouldn’t air your dirty laundry. But I also wanted to talk about things that felt relevant but had been kept quiet. And I wanted to share those things with other women, because I had a sneaking suspicion that I might be facing some of the same challenges that girls and women all over the world deal with, even if those challenges at times felt intensely, well, personal. Even if they felt too small and mundane for the news. I came into personal essay writing open-minded, scared, and determined.

And then I read the comments.

But it wasn’t just the comments. Someone (who kept him or herself anonymous) tried to get me fired from my synagogue job after reading an essay I’d written about a complicated romantic situation. The message was clear: no one who works at a religious institution should write about her love life. I was a whore, wrote commenters. I was never going to be happy. Never going to find love. I was going to ruin every man who came near me. Personal attacks were the result of personal writing. Afraid and humiliated, I apologized to the synagogue president and cried all night.

That was years ago. Since then, I’ve watched critics and commenters alike chastise personal essayists for their vulnerability, their supposed self-centeredness, their apparent fame-mongering. Even as the personal essay as an art form becomes more popular, its detractors are ready with scathing criticisms that suggest it is worthless, superficial, and, god forbid, easy. And it’s interesting that most of the criticism is lobbed at women. Often young women. Because more often than not, it is young women who write personal essays.

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Pregnancy is so interesting. Immediately and constantly, people keep telling me that everything is all about the baby. I think that means I’m supposed to stop asking questions.

They said that when I was really sick for months, and I got a little depressed about not being able to get out of bed. “Just think of the baby!”

(I think this is the baby they’re referencing. source)

They said it when it looked like I might have gestational diabetes and I argued that I should monitor my blood sugar and take the accurate finger-prick A1C test instead of the standard fasting test with the 100 grams of pure sugar when I was throwing everything up anyway and it seemed to me that if there’s concern about diabetes you shouldn’t give someone a lot of sugar to drink on an empty stomach. “The point is just having a healthy baby! Just take the test and don’t worry about anything else.”

“Don’t provoke your doctor,” people told me. “Be agreeable. They know what to do, and your baby will be fine.”

They say it, I’ve noticed, about birth, in general. “Well, I had a TERRIBLE time, but they got the baby out and that’s all that matters!”

They will probably say it about motherhood, later.

But I find myself caring about the in-between moments, before the baby, surrounding the baby but not necessarily touching the baby, and yes, myself, my body, my experience of everything. Selfish.

That is selfish, I hear. Because I am now no longer one person. I am two people. And this other person, the tiny one who is poking me insistently from the inside as though trying to catch my attention, this is the one who matters most. That is being a mother, I guess.

But it can’t be. There must be more to the story. I find myself disagreeing automatically.

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Someone left a comment on my first pregnancy post that went “Oh good, now you’ll never have to get a job. Perfect.”

I’d been waiting for it.  I deleted it quickly, as though I could unsee it. And then I sat, paralyzed, and tried not to cry.

My biggest immediate fear about this baby is that I won’t be able to work for a while afterward. Or, more confusingly, that maybe I won’t feel the incessant push to work.  I’ve had a regular job since I was fifteen. Before that, I babysat a lot and ran this summer day camp for little kids with my friend Meg (our schedule was DETAILED). I tracked every dollar I earned in a journal with a shiny blue cover. The first serious purchase I ever made was a giant purple trampoline from Sam’s Club, when I was ten, and it was very upsetting when our dog bit holes in the tough, black fabric, in her desperate effort to participate in the fun as we bounced.

(I kind of miss it now…source)

So many people my age are not doing what they think they should be doing with their lives. I know lots of people who are working a job that isn’t a “real job,” yet, and they’re unhappy. I am not exactly sure what I should be doing, but I am usually sure I’m not doing enough. That I should have more to show. I have this urge to apologize to the world for not being far enough along. For not being obvious enough in my successes. You know, like Lena Dunham. We writers and creative types are always talking about her. She’s so conveniently successful! We all want to be her a little, so that we can relax. We imagine that we could relax at that point.

There’s lots of talk about women “having it all” or not being able to “have it all” these days. Arguments back and forth about what that even means, and if it is indeed possible, and for whom it’s actually possible if it’s at all possible. Really, I think we’re expected to do it all, whether or not we have it all.

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