joycemaynard.com - Parenting

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Parenting: MY DESIRE
by Joyce Maynard
In compilation, Desire: Women Writers Write About Wanting, edited by Lisa Solud

It’s not a man, though I have loved my share of them, and do still. No hunger ever gnawed at my belly, from the inside out, like the longing for a baby. It was true when I was twenty, and though I gave birth to three of them in the end -- all in their twenties now, long gone from home -- it’s not all that different for me now, at fifty-three.

Some women (the lucky ones, maybe) outgrow the yearning. A few never suffer it in the first place. The sensible part of me, the brain that can assess my life and recognize what I’ve had in abundance, and what I’ve missed, would say here that the time has come (a little late in the game, even) to shower the kind of tender care I gave to my children on my own self now, or the larger world, and give to other projects the kind of passionate, probably obsessed concentration and focus I gave, so long, to child-raising.

Now I can devote myself to work, undistracted by the noisy appearance of little boys slamming doors and looking for snacks, as they show up off the school bus. I don’t stay up late in tearful battles with my daughter, or drive hundreds of miles to take my younger son to a tennis tournament, or his sister to check out a college, or his brother to a Michael Jackson concert, or to the emergency room to get his appendix out. More than the physical demands of all that -- not to mention the financial ones -- what I’m released from now is the emotional preoccupation: the worry that someone was unkind to one of my children, that one of their hearts might get broken, that one of them has a dream in need of nurturing. Whatever issues they suffer over now, they take care of, by and large, without me.

I am free (good news). I am free (bad news). So now what?

Except, of course, being a parent never ends. The children grow older, grow up, cease to be children at all eventually, and still, you remain their parent always. It is a state of being that endures -- like religious faith, or shrapnel embedded in flesh, like fear of heights, an incurable illness, like the need to breathe and eat, like love. Terrible and wonderful, source of the deepest potential pain and the greatest potential for joy, it’s as much a part of my daily life, as much a part of who I am as breathing. A person doesn’t graduate from parenthood, or leave it behind.

What does leave is that fleeting stage -- seemingly endless while you’re inhabiting it, that you look back on later like a moment in a dream -- when your child was a baby, and the whole world lay in your hands. A baby touches down in your life for only a little while, creating this strange, otherworldly state of being where time barely exists, night and day merge, and all there is in your universe, practically, is this one fact: baby. And all that matters to you is making sure she’s happy and safe.

That’s the part that disappears, and though what replaces it may bericher, deeper, more complex, and ultimately more satisfying, , there will never be anything like it again.

Twenty-three years have passed since I last gave birth. At the time, I didn’t know he’d be my last child; I was just thirty, and though this was my third baby, placing me above the national average already, I believed another one or two remained in my future.

Over the years that followed, I kept my eye out for the moment when the opportunity for another baby might arise. (Oh, I did way more than keep my eye out for this. Divorced at thirty-five, I assessed future suitors, for years to come, with an eye toward their fatherhood potential.) I held on to the prospect of some future baby like an unopened present. There were all those eggs inside my body still, waiting for their release into the womb, their chance at fertilization. Never mind that I was short on money, short on time, short on patience, not to mention short on a partner. I had a case of baby love the size of a minivan.

I loved everything about babies, even the parts people make a fuss about. I didn’t mind the messiness. I didn’t mind diapers particularly, or the way a baby keeps wanting to be picked up all the time. I loved the feeling of a baby in my arms, a baby on my lap, a baby pressed up against my chest, not to mention, nursing her. Those first few months were exhausting all right -- a time when my whole life was occupied with virtually nothing but baby care. But the other part was this: I maintained an utter assurance that whatever my child needed, I could provide. Whatever was wrong in her world, I had the power to fix. Maybe this wasn’t really true, even then, but that’s what it felt like, and the sense of contentment and assurance, the clarity about my role in life at that point was more than I had ever known before, or ever would again.

Parents of babies often complain about having to get up in the night for them, but I never did, because I kept them in the bed with me. They were always within reach of my arms, my breasts, The connection we had in those days was so primal, I didn’t even fully wake when one of them needed me; I just reached out and held whatever baby it was against my body. There was no feeling better than the warm, faintly damp little package, making soft snuffling sounds and fitting itself into the curve of me. My babies’ father was there, too, but really (and maybe this is telling), the love affair at that moment was between the baby and me.

From the moment a baby’s born, though, she begins to leave you. First she leaves your body. Then your arms. Then she leaves the breast, departs from the bed, sets out on her own two feet (even before then, she sets out crawling). If a mother does her job right, the direction her babies move in is away, out into the world, where they will find new loves: baseball, or dinosaurs, or fashion design, friends, a bass guitar, a beat-up Toyota, a political cause, a boy, a girl. Grown-up babies still love their mothers, and if we’re lucky they even come home to visit now and then, but our role diminishes, as it should, and what remains is no longer as simple as food, clothing, warmth, love. When problems arise -- as problems invariably do -- they aren’t the kind that can be solved by holding your child, feeding her, putting her in dry clothes, singing a song.

So, even as I have grown in my appreciation for all the stages of parenthood that followed that first one, I carry this nostalgia for the one that began it all. Looking, now, at a photograph of my young self holding my infant daughter, or one of my infant sons, I can hardly keep from sighing out loud. Those babies didn’t die. We are lucky people; nothing tragic occurred. Still, the people in the photographs might as well have emigrated to Australia, they are that far away now. I mourn them. Miss them. Want them back.

It’s almost a physical ache, this longing to hold a baby. It comes to me at odd moments, watching a young mother in a restaurant, struggling to eat her meal and feed her baby at the same time. And I -- with my hands free to cut my own chicken and lift my fork without danger of dropping a piece of spinach on an infant’s downy head -- would rather get up from my table, abandon my plate, if she would let me take her baby while she had her meal. What do I care about a gourmet meal if I can hold a baby?

Sometimes I even offer. Now and then, the young mother accepts. (This happens on airplanes too, on occasion, especially if there’s a young mother traveling alone, and looking overwhelmed, and the flight is long, and the baby’s fussy, and at some point the mother -- whom I will have been studying, though I try not to be too obvious about it -- will look as if she’s at a loss for what to do now, or maybe she just needs to go to the bathroom, and I ask, with more of a tone of casualness than I actually possess: “Would you like me to hold your baby for you?”)

The first thing I do, when I get a baby in my arms, is walk off someplace with him. When I get a chance to spend a little time with a baby, I like to get him away from the distraction of his parents, number one. I want him to myself. I want to lay him out on the rug, study his toes, whisper in his ears, sniff his head, stroke his soft pink palm, feel his fingers curling around mine. Maybe I dance around the room with him (no chance we won’t be perfectly in step). I may sing, and if so he doesn’t look fazed when it’s off key.

Maybe what I appreciate most about this baby love of mine is how uncomplicated it all feels. (I doubt I even need to point out how different this is from love of a man. Or love of a grown child, or an adolescent one, or even a three-year-old.)

With a baby, there is no need to talk about anything. No need to analyze. I don’t have to discuss with a therapist what’s going on between us, or read a book to know what to do, or check in with an expert. When a baby comes into range, I become an animal woman. A woman in love.

I have this belief that I can make any baby stop crying, no matter how upset she may be. There is some basis of reality in this conviction, though there have been some rare exceptions to my record. I don’t think it’s that I have some magic power, but I think babies sense in me (babies being all about sensing things, because feelings are all that exist in their world so far) that they are in the hands of someone who feels, with them, the way Pinkas Zuckerman might, picking up a violin. Familiarity. Supreme confidence (mastery, even). And love. Babies know when a person is nervous, or scared, or ambivalent, and when she is not. So they tend to recognize me as someone who won’t be thrown if they spit up or cry or do any of the other things babies like to do, that I don’t mind, because they’re all part of babies. A baby, passed into my arms, is likely to sense how happy I am to be with him. Which is a nice feeling for a baby to have.

Over the years, I have tried to tone down this baby thing of mine. I thought maybe if I hung out more with other people’s babies, I’d remember all the bad things about babies that I’d forgotten, and stop wanting one all the time. But increased exposure to other people’s babies -- like increased exposure to crack cocaine, maybe, not that I know this personally -- just made me want the object of my own particular addiction that much more.

I was getting older, meanwhile. The eggs kept dropping into the uterus, regular as clockwork, but their quality had to be declining sharply. Still, it was never pregnancy that interested me most, or the notion of passing down my own genes, or looking down into my arms to see a face, looking up, that resembled mine. So my obsession, focused originally on the notion that I might one day conceive and bear another child, simply shifted to adoption, where I encountered a vast number of women, my age or close enough (though not so likely to have had children in their twenties, as I did), who were embarking on motherhood in their forties -- in their fifties, even. The way some people might track the adventures of teen idols or sports heroes, I read stories about these aging mothers and their babies, imagining whether I could ever be such a person myself.

Around this time -- for reasons having nothing to do with my feeling about babies, though, it could be said, there may be no place on earth where the babies are more irresistible -- I bought a house in Guatemala and started traveling regularly there. Invariably on these trips, one sight that would occupy me would be the adoptive parents at the Guatemala City airport, heading home with their new children, usually around six months old. Mostly these were married couples, where I remained single, and mostly they were younger than I. Still, I would find myself standing in some line at the airport, so utterly lost in the act of watching these couples with their babies that the person in line behind me would have to poke me and say (maybe in English, maybe in Spanish), “It’s your turn.”

They were talking about checking my bags, of course. Though for me, the words seemed like an invitation.

I was carrying on with my life during these years, mind you. I don’t mean to suggest that the yearning for a baby in my arms so utterly distracted me that I didn’t pay attention to the three very real and present offspring I had already raised. In all kinds of ways, they are the ones in my life who offer the tangible gratifications of parenthood, whether they’re home visiting (a rare event) or checking in long-distance.

My daughter is twenty-nine now, my sons twenty-five and twenty-three. It is not so far fetched to suppose that sometime within the next few years, one or more of them may become a parent, making me a grandparent, of course. At which point, if I am lucky, I may once again have access on a semi-regular or at least occasional basis to a baby or two. I resist the impulse to raise this possibility with my children, though they know me and my feeling about babies enough to know, without my doing so, how I will feel about that. And I will know, too, the danger of being too overbearing in my thrill over their babies. Their babies, not mine.

I don’t want to suggest that I am one of those desperate, baby-crazed types who steal infants from maternity wards and head out on the lam with them. When my children have children, I will keep a lid on my besottedness, and behave. I hope.

But in truth, there is nothing moderate or measured in my feeling about this baby love of mine. I am a greedy woman when it comes to babies. I am a crazy woman, about babies. Drunk with desire. Put that baby in my arms and for a rare, brief time, nothing else matters but the feel of that baby, wrapped up in my arms, and for that moment at least, the whole rest of the world disappears, and there are just the two of us, and for that moment, life is perfect.