Eat the Damn Cake

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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So I’m pregnant. I have been for a while, but I was being all traditional about it and waiting until the second trimester to say anything. And here we are! God, I can’t believe I made it. I have been SO SICK. So sick. Holy shit. I can’t even describe how unprepared I was.

I am like an alien creature that earth scientists have locked in a cage and injected with horrible viruses and I have been plotting my escape this entire time. I’ve been keeping myself sane by imagining, over and over again, what I will do when I am free. First, I will kill my captors. And then I will eat fried chicken. I will eat at all of the restaurants recommended by Serious Eats in their email newsletter. They have taunted me for too long. For too long, I have been unable to properly feed.

This whole thing is crazily weird. Apparently, there is a baby inside of me. It wasn’t there a few months ago, and now it is, and I am still myself, I think, but I am going to be a person who is a mother. It’s like there is a gap between my complicated, full thoughts and my ability to express them, even to myself. And in that gap, there’s a baby.

So let me start again. This is the story of when I found out I was pregnant. Because I write to calm myself down when I’m freaking out, I wrote it as it happened:

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I keep not publishing this piece because it’s really just a big list and I’m a little embarrassed that I wrote it. But I wrote it anyway, and now I’m sharing it, because it’s the new year, which is about change, and I want to know how wherever you live changed you and didn’t change you. 

Things that people apparently do a lot in NYC, and I still don’t: 

See celebrities on the street (This is supposed to happen to people all the time. It happens to people even when they don’t live here and are just visiting for the day. I have lived here for over four years and I only JUST FINALLY saw Anne Hathaway in my grocery store. And that’s only because I go there a lot and so it was probably only a matter of time.)

Go to clubs where there are celebrities (I went to a club when I was 21 and I danced with a guy who was there with his parole officer. I told him my name was Ari Gold, because I thought that was the sexiest name a hot Jewish girl could have. Or, you know, a fifty-year-old Jewish guy. I think the hot clubs in NYC might be in the meatpacking district, but that’s only because one person told me she went to a club there. That’s how much I know)

Know the names of chefs  (I will get there. And then I will be cultured, at last. As far as I can tell most of them start with “Daniel” or “David.”)

(one of them founded Shake Shack and changed my culinary life forever in doing so. I should know. source)

(I basically just take every opportunity to post this picture. source)

Work out a lot and maybe even have a personal trainer (Yeah, that just doesn’t seem to happen for me. Here’s a post about it.)

Go to lots of parties, sometimes in some really rich person’s penthouse, sometimes where there are models (Maybe I just don’t get invited….Although I was once at a book party looking really out of place I’m sure and like halfway through this group of models came in and then they stood in the corner together looking uncomfortable and tall and shiny. I think that someone maybe paid them to come? Or something? But that was the only time. I actually ended up talking with one of them, and she had this thick accent– Swedish? Danish?– and she had to bend down to talk to me. She was nice.)

Get hit on on the subway (Once a guy on the subway said to me, “You Jewish?” and I said “Yes,” and then he said that he was Puerto Rican but his sister married a Jew, and he was OK with it, and we nodded to each other in kinship. But I don’t think he was hitting on me)

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I couldn’t write anything yesterday except for poems about Sandy Hook. I couldn’t stop reading the articles. And today, instead of writing about that, because I don’t feel able, I’m writing about something else entirely. 

I finally read “Marry Him,” by Lori Gottlieb. She’d written that big Atlantic piece a while back, and then the book, which is an argument in favor of settling for a good-enough man (if you’re straight and want to get married, otherwise she’s not writing for you), because you’re probably not going to find a perfect one.

(source)

I don’t know what made me want to read the book. No, I’m lying—I’m remembering now. It was a comment under her recent piece in the Times Magazine about therapy branding. Someone said something like “EYEROLL! Like I’m going to believe anything from the woman who single-handedly convinced women that they were nothing without a man and should marry the first lame guy who came along so that they didn’t have to die alone. Thanks A LOT, Lori.” Or something to that effect.

And I was curious, because single-handedly convincing women that they are nothing without a man sounded sort of impressive for one book. And I’m sick. So my brain sucks right now.

So I read it.

And I’m still not exactly sure what I think, which is why I’m writing about it.

Basically, Gottlieb argues that when women are in their twenties, they reject everyone, all the time, because they’ve learned that a better guy will come along and they will eventually settle down with him. But even when great people come along, these women continue to reject them, because there might be someone better out there. And then, all too soon because time is so fickle, the women are almost forty, and the good men are taken, and now the women have to either learn to make compromises, or they can just up and die alone, forty-five or so years later.

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Louie CK does a bit about cookies at a party- he keeps sneaking back to take another, pretending to “rediscover” them every time. “Oh, look! Cookies! I should probably have one…” Bear said it reminds him of himself. Brenda said it reminds her of herself. It reminds me of myself, too, so I don’t know who all of the other people at that party are. The ones who aren’t taking the cookies. But I wanted to share a story about a time when this happened to me.

It starts during the time when I still didn’t know what I was going to be when I grew up.

When I went to grad school, my plan was to grab the Master’s degree on my way to the PhD, and head straight through to the end, where I’d be a professor in a foggily half-imagined future full of diplomas and a sense of quiet security. But then, a few months into grad school, I realized that no, I’d gotten the whole thing wrong, I wasn’t going to become a professor, ever. I wasn’t cut out for it. I didn’t have that drive that the other students had—that urge to burrow into a text, that finely honed focus. I wanted to talk in broad swaths, and I couldn’t ever make up my mind. I wanted to study big, wide-open topics, and I didn’t care if I never read in the original text. And worst of all, I was bad at theory.

So, with only half a year of my Master’s left, I had to scramble to figure out the rest of my life. Or at least a viable beginning for it.

My thesis advisor said, “Maybe you should try to write,” but before I listened to her, I decided to go to cantorial school.

I had been a lay cantor at my synagogue in NJ since I was a teenager, so I knew I liked it, and actually, I’d once been so sure I’d become a fulltime cantor that I picked my college for its music school and proximity to my synagogue, so I could work all the way through. I started college as a vocalist in the music education program, because I’d heard that a music ed degree was desirable in cantorial school. And then I was miserable. And I sat in a practice room after music theory class crying and writing a poem about the grand piano with its comforting bulk and its sharp, punishing teeth, or something. At juries, the voice faculty told me that my voice was not “bel canto” enough. I googled it. It meant “beautiful singing.” It was beautiful singing enough for the congregants, damn it! I thought bitterly. Then I went on a bitter walk in the rain.

“The cantorial influence is too strong,” said my voice instructor, an enormous, barrel-chested man with a red beard who sang with the New York City Opera and told tales of his own grandeur. “You have to give up singing at your temple if you want to be a true classical singer.”

I didn’t want to be a true classical singer. I wanted to sing haunting, ancient Jewish melodies. That was the whole point.

(singing Jewish music makes me feel mysterious and sexy, like this. source)

So an academic year after I arrived, I stood up and walked out of a piano test.

“I’m done,” I said to the panel of judges. “I quit.”

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I guess I’m not often really happy. I am satisfied and glad and stuff, but occasionally I get this burst of happiness, like a whale erupting through the water’s surface, and it’s sort of shocking and I wonder what I did to deserve it and why I can’t feel it all the time and if I’m depressive most of the time and if I should be on anxiety medication and if I’m actually totally fine and I’m just being a crybaby and since I can feel this happiness I can probably feel more of it, more often.

Anyway, I was really happy the other day. I had all this sudden energy, maybe in part because I’ve been walking every day, like a champ. (To the guy who commented arrogantly under one of my old posts that I have the wrong attitude about health, IN YOUR FACE, I’m totally exercising and you don’t know anything about me!) I was bouncing around, being all thankful for stuff. We’d gone out with another couple and everyone got along really well and it’s so damn hard to find other couples to hang out with. I got some work done ahead of time, even though it was the weekend, and next week was going to be awesome because my friend Brenda was coming to visit and we were going to have the best time ever.

I went to bed early, because my sleep schedule has been better recently and I feel deliciously tired in the evening, instead of vaguely bored and confused about what I should be doing and thrown off by the fact that it’s dark so early.

And then, in a haze of sleep, Bear was standing by the side of the bed, trying to tell me things in an urgent, miserable voice. Something about the freezer and the front door. My brain pushed his image away, trying to burrow back into dreams. But he wouldn’t go away. Disoriented and foggy, I half-thought, “No, but today was so happy…”

And then I was mostly awake and he was telling me, “I think I killed Minute.” (My tiny orange cat.)

It started with the meat freezer.

We have one now. It’s new. We have it because we bought an eighth of a cow.

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I have three deadlines today, so rather than write a whole post, I am sharing this list of things that people do in movies and on TV but not in real life. I’ve been adding to it on and off for a few weeks now, mostly while watching TV, so that I can feel like I’m being productive. Disclaimer: I don’t really need TV to be realistic, I just need to comment, because it’s funny. And also because sometimes I think that real life and TV start getting mixed up in our heads, the more we watch. I sometimes catch myself beginning to believe that I can run in heels. 

Here are some of the things that people do on TV/movies but not in real life:

Yell at each other from three inches away. Do everything at this distance.

Change expressions a lot while hugging. And then slowly pat the hugger’s back.

Type expressively. Say the words aloud as they are typing.

(source)

Schedule a time to discuss something important while they’re standing right there with the person who they want to have the discussion with, discussing scheduling.

Drive a lot of miles because they suddenly changed their mind and actually are in love with someone, even though that person is now with someone else and about to get married.

Change their mind about a potential romantic interest for the millionth time. (By then you would know.)

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