Dating Big Bird Read Free

Mickey Mouse?”
    “No.”
    “Do you have … Teletubbies?”
    She stared at me, then shrugged her shoulders with her arms outstretched at her sides.
    “Then
what
do you
have
?”
    “I have nothing,” I exhaled, now thoroughly deflated and humiliated, not only by the naked horror of the word that had seeped out of my mouth but by the look in the Pickle’s eyes when I’d uttered it:
    Pity.
    “Auntie LaLa needs something to have.”
    And before I knew it, she was climbing down out of the bed and heading over to the pile of stuffed animals Lynn had brought with them. When she turned back to me and handed me her Big Bird, it was with a child’s absolute conviction that loneliness and sadness could be made to disappear—just like that.
    “Big Bird,” she said, “to sleep with Auntie LaLa.”

2

    I did not always want to have a child.
    For a while, the idea of procreating and reproducing and all that came with it was completely unappealing:
    The stretch marks and weight gain and exhaustion and complete lack of privacy. And freedom. And time.
    The mysterious pod-person personality-replacement that transformed previously normal women into Spalding Gray–type monologuists, carrying on at cocktail parties or in supermarket aisles about vaginas and episiotomies and effluvia of every sort and variation without any visible signs of embarrassment. Or irony. Or stopping.
    The Jeeps and minivans and Portacribs and strollers and enormous shoulder-strapped survival bags stuffed with toys and dolls and stickers and puzzles and hundreds of little Ziploc Baggies filled with every imaginable contingency cereal and cookie and candy and fruit to prevent—or at least contain—public tantrums since all the new parenting theories seemed to denounce the previously accepted concept of
no
.
    The desire to recognize traces of myself in a child’s face, to be reflected in a child’s eyes—to be reached for, cried for, needed at all times of the day and night—did not haunt me—did not occur to me, even—until three years ago. Before then, my vision of love and absolute connection and bliss—a man and me, frozen in time and space, in mid-breath, in mid-sentence, in mid-kiss—had always been the same.
    My vision had never included a baby.
    Or was the baby.
    With or without a Big Bird.
    That vision took longer to appear.
    It took until I grew tired of myself and wished for the relief of distraction.
    It took until the nights became too quiet and too lonely to bear.
    It took until I laid eyes on my niece.
    That’s when I knew.
    When I knew I didn’t want to live without one.
    Nothing had prepared me for what I would feel for her, that enormous wave of rapture that came over me the first time I laid eyes on her right after she was born.
    Paul had called me at three in the morning from the hospital pay phone to give me the news, and while I was excited to be a first-time aunt, I had no idea that my life would be so completely changed.
    What it was about her that captured me so, I’ll never know, since she had a big head and no hair and looked far more like my brother-in-law than my sister—or me—she had a round face instead of a long and narrow one; blue eyes instead of brown; white skin instead of olive—but capture me she did, right then and right there, that first time when I lifted her out of my sister’s arms and carefully draped her over my shoulder and felt her short shallow breath on the side of my neck.
    Maybe it was because I finally had someone I could lavish attention on and love without restriction.
    Or maybe it was simply the benign narcissistic thrill of being part of a child’s growing consciousness, of feeling that you are becoming and will remain a permanent fixture in their universe. Of needing to affect someone, to make a difference in someone’s life, to prevent the secret wound of loneliness and sadness from ever existing in them the way it exists in you. Whatever it was, my attachment to her became a