Ann Friedman - Transcendent Pickle Juice

I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. This is Part 7 of a serialized essay. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6.

As the weeks creep by, I become so distracted by physical discomfort, by fluish aches and gnawing hunger, that I don’t even notice the joy of indecision has drained away. Perhaps because I realize my body may have made its choice. By the time the scan is a week away, I am pretty sure I’m still pregnant.
 
This is not what the dream foretold! Oh, shit.
 
My parents arrive for a long-planned visit. I don’t want to tell them—I don’t want to tell anyone, really—while my body is still choosing. But I’m so bone-tired, as if each of my cells has a tiny anvil tied to it, that I can’t maintain the illusion that everything is normal for five full days while they’re staying with us.

So I tell them I am pregnant. I explain that Will and I are NOT assuming we’ll be parents, that we are NOT treating any outcome as likely. We are just taking it day by day, treating this more as a medical issue than a future child. My parents nod along, through bright grins, and seem to understand.
 
“I have just one question,” my mom says. I brace myself. “Are you happy?”
 
Oh, I think, I am so happy. I love my friends, I love my relationship with Will, I love my work, I love where I live, I love the time I spend alone. I love my life.
 
I know this is not what she means.
 
So I tell her I don’t know yet. When I have more information, then maybe I can say if I’m happy to be pregnant.
 
I refuse to read about any potential future—no novels about a childfree path of worldly adventures and no essays about parenthood as “the greatest love you’ll ever know.” I take refuge in Michelle Tea’s pregnancy memoir, Knocking Myself Up, particularly a passage about the first-trimester pleasure of pounding a jar of pickle juice: “It is, easily, the best-tasting, most cosmically satisfying thing I have ever ingested in my life. I feel like there’s a halo of light radiating from the crown of my head, surrounded by sparkling, pickle-green stars. It was as if every desire one had ever had in one’s life was satisfied at once.”
 
I think about Michelle and her psychedelic jar of Vlasic for weeks. It comes to represent joy in limbo, and helps me focus on the present.
 
As week 8 turns to week 9 turns to week 10, I am no longer thinking of the nihilist smoking dream-baby in a black turtleneck, I am thinking more and more about myself with a living, breathing infant. It might be happening. It might be real. And in the deep-night when I’m lying awake, or when I’m zoned out in gridlock traffic, I think: I am not excited enough about parenthood to get through the difficulty of it.

Many of my closest friends are parents; I know too much about how hard it is. I worry that I won’t feel an immediate burst of unfathomable love, that I will be dogged by regret as I toil through the tough early years of mothering before eventually making an uneasy peace. I worry about the fact that other people’s babies do not inspire an “awwww!” reaction in me, which means I have no maternal impulse—I’ve just found myself here on autopilot because I couldn’t make peace with aging, or because I finally gave in to what society always wanted for me.
 
Maybe I just don’t want this enough.

Enough, enough, enough.
 
A friend is 8 months pregnant after years of trying to conceive. Another friend is sifting through the emotional wreckage of learning that, despite her deepest desires, she’ll never grow a child in her body. An acquaintance is crowd-funding adoption fees. Even my pickle-juice icon Michelle Tea was so sure in her drive for motherhood that she did all the things queer people have to do to get here. These people want it, I think. They deserve it. I am not an imposter, exactly, but I don’t have the claim to parenthood that they do.
 
I remind myself that I have never desired a baby; that desiring a baby is different than desiring a child, an experience, a certain kind of relationship. I remind myself that I have vowed not to think about this until all of the genetic tests come back clear. I remind myself to stay calm and to remember the thrill of not choosing for myself, the knowledge that I’ll be okay either way. Just take your vitamins, drink your Coke, and click “Next episode.”
 
Years ago I read Cheryl Strayed’s advice to someone who was undecided about having kids, and one of the details lodged itself in an alcove of my brain where this question hid out, unaddressed. Lately I have pulled it out into the open, where it’s playing on a loop. The passage is about how unsure she was about parenthood, and the overwhelming sureness she felt when holding her child for the first time. About the moment when the switch flipped.
 
When I find the courage to re-read the essay (why does it take courage to re-read it?), there it is: “My son’s body against mine was the clarity I never had. The first few weeks of his life, I felt honestly rattled by the knowledge of how close I’d come to opting to live my life without him. It was a penetrating, relentless, unalterable thing, to be his mother, my life ending and beginning at once.” I cry so hard my face is too squinched-up to finish reading the essay.
 
The knowledge of how close I’d come to living my life without him. In that line, on that line, all of my hopes and fears. I cannot even imagine this level of certainty. Instead, I imagine the alternative: What if I don’t feel that way when I’m holding a tiny baby against me?
 
In that same alcove of my brain lives a memory from a barbeque, years ago now. I was standing under a kumquat tree talking to a friend who had recently become a parent, and I asked him how the transition was going.

“Your life before kids is like an ornate, beautiful vase you’ve spent a lifetime painting,” he replied. “And having a kid is like smashing that vase into a million pieces on the ground.” This terrified—terrifies—me because the metaphor does not contain an “after” vision. There is only a “before” and its destruction.
 
What if the sureness I felt for most of my childfree 40 years was right, and the rest of my life is now wrong?
 
I’m on leave until early March, which means I will not be reading replies to this newsletter. However, it will continue to arrive every Friday. Next week, Part 8: Congrats on Moving to Tokyo.

"Never rush the sweet, delicate time between what’s now and what’s next.” -Jillian Anthony