Baby Love Read Free Page A

Glen had to calm me down. All I could think was that a problem must have showed up on the last blood test and Dr. Lowen didn’t want to tell me on the phone and give me heart failure.
    Glen drove me to the hospital, and then tried to distract me in the waiting room with bad jokes and blueberries. I kept asking him what we’d do if the baby were ectopic, if I lost the baby before I even had her. How is it possible to feel so attached so soon? By the time the technician called my name, I was sure it was all going to end in tragedy. She poked and rubbed and scanned and prodded my uterus for about twenty minutes, looking for the tiny cluster of cells and shaking her head until I was convinced the whole thing was a fluke. At that exact moment, when I squeezed Glen’s hand and said, Well, maybe we don’t have a baby after all, the technician pushed the button on her mouse ball and drew a line from one point to the other. Got it.
    So now it’s super-duper official. I’ve got a baby growing in my uterus. It’s really the most surreal, ridiculous, amazing thing.

April 15
    Rushed around, getting ready to fly to Minneapolis to speak on the importance of mentorship in young women’s lives at the Minnesota Conference on Adolescent Females. Usually I like going to Minneapolis, but today I am just so tired. I can’t imagine getting on a plane and then turning around the next day to come back. It’s only three and a half hours each way, but at the moment, Minnesota may as well be the North Pole.
    I was up all night consumed with anxiety about money—mine and every other mother’s. By most standards I am well off, but now that all I do is think about the stuff I am going to have to pay for, like the college education that’s going to cost two million dollars in eighteen years, I don’t know. I remember my mother making endless calculations on brown paper bags and blank pages in her journal when I was a child, and my father sitting at the dining-room table writing checks out every month, his brow furrowed and intense. They must have felt the same way, going over the numbers again and again, wondering how it was all going to work out.
    I woke up feeling guilty for even thinking about all this. Most people in the world raise their children with far less than I have. But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Even when you have enough money to pay for nonessentials like organic produce and designer toothpaste, there is still the yawning fear of not having, losing everything, living in deprivation.
    I definitely thought about money long before this baby moved into my womb. I worried about how we were going to send my ex-girlfriend’s son, Solomon, to boarding school. I worried about the cost of health insurance, and how little money I put into my IRA. But now my thinking has a frightening urgency. I find myself wondering how all the other pregnant women and mothers and fathers manage what basically boils down to sheer terror in the face of so much responsibility. Religion suddenly makes a lot more sense. So does workaholism. And Xanax. And back-to-the-land movements that emphasize doing more with less.
    I bolted out of bed this morning to research the Voluntary Simplicity movement. I read dozens of entries by people named Sinnan and Marigold who grow their own food, wear only three pairs of pants, and make their own soap. I learned that an American baby consumes two hundred times more of the earth’s resources than a baby from Eritrea.
    By the time Glen woke up, I was deep in my closet, figuring out how many pairs of shoes and sweaters I could transform into fossil fuel in order to justify having an American baby. When he asked what I was doing, I snapped that I was freaking out about money, wasn’t that obvious? He sat in the big chair in our bedroom and put his feet up, watching me. I mean really, I said, how are we going to put this baby through college?
    He paused. There are always student loans. Student loans? I said, lifting my