new tooth, every aspect of the process? If I were to capitulate and do what Becker wanted, tie the knot and move in with him, ditch the conference and concentrate on motherhood to the exclusion of all else, including my work and my independence, would that guarantee a healthy, well-adjusted child? Would the child’s mother then become a faceless wife, an acquiescent brood mare? Okay—I know that those are extreme notions, and quite unfair to Becker, but I’m only telling you what I was thinking. Chalk it up to hormones. The fact is that while I had decided to have the baby, I was determined to have it on my own terms, and my fight with Becker had finally clued me in to the hard fact that I couldn’t do the motherhood thing entirely by myself. There was one all-important factor that had only just registered. The baby itself. Himself? Herself? Whatever—no woman is an island. At least, no pregnant woman is. She’s an archipelago.
Whatever decisions I made in the next seven months had to be made with the understanding that for the next twenty years or so, my choices would be affecting two of us. Three, perhaps, if I loosened my hold on the reins enough to let the child’s father have a vote, but those choices could no longer affect just one person only. This hit me with such profound force that it took my breath away.
I patted my belly. “Sorry about all that,” I said to it. “I’ll try to make sure that doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, how ’bout another piece of pie?”
Before it could answer one way or another, the automatic baby, forgotten in the corner, started howling again. Sibling rivalry is a terrible thing.
Five
Nearly every new parent feels exactly the same way you do. A baby changes everything, from your lifestyle to your schedule to your desire level. But you can get the old magic back with a little attention and some tricks from other parents who’ve been there.
-From Big Bertha’s Total Baby Guide
We were having the weirdest winter on record—ridiculously mild, with hardly any snow to speak of. Oh, we were blessed with a couple of inches of the white stuff at Christmas time, a kind of cosmetic icing that fell thick and wet and broke tree branches with its weight, but it disappeared under a warmish rain by New Year’s Day. In the second week of January we had a thaw (which was redundant, as there was nothing to melt) that made it feel like March, with blue skies, a lemon-yellow sun and enough warmth to fool the trees into setting leaf buds. George said he’d never seen anything like it, and the weather-gods must have arranged it in order to make things easy for me, pregnant and barefoot up in my cabin.
And truly, the lack of snow and mild temperatures did make it easy. It was quite cold enough to need the woodstove, of course, but there wasn’t that feeling of being in danger of freezing to death overnight. When the temperature drops to more than twenty below zero Celsius, some of us get that tight, back-of-the-throat fear that makes you stuff the wood box before bed, then worry all night that the wretched thing is going to overheat and fry you in your sleep. There was none of that—the red juice in my thermometer rarely fell below minus five Celsius. Because there was no snow, the travel along the hill path from cabin to farmhouse and driveway was no trouble at all, except that I found that my centre of balance had shifted. Walking on a slope, even a gentle one, with some recently gained frontal poundage put everything a tad off-kilter, which meant that when going downhill, I had to lean back very slightly, as if I were carrying a heavy basket of peaches.
A couple of days before Christmas, Becker took me out to dinner before hopping on a plane to Calgary to spend the weekend with his son, Bryan and his ex-wife, Catherine. He said he had stuff to do concerning his father’s estate, and initially, I felt no jealously about this. I hadn’t seen much of him since he’d returned from the funeral, anyway, as he was spending most of his time in Toronto on his airport security assignment.
We’d gotten together for meals and the occasional movie when he was in town, of course, but the distance between us was growing as quickly as my belly was, and we hadn’t made love since I’d told him about my pregnancy.
“I feel like you don’t want me near you any more,” he had said to me in early December. “It’s like you’ve got a part of me inside you now, and that’s all you want.” I could have replied with a similar remark—that I felt he didn’t want to touch me any more, now that my body was preoccupied with knitting together the cells of his progeny, but I didn’t say it. Anyway, I was frankly not interested in sex—so maybe it was my fault after all. The more remote we became, the less we talked about it.
George, Susan, Eddie and I would be celebrating the holiday together, as we had done since Eddie had come to live with Susan. We were all able to steer more or less clear of the Christmas imperative that makes some households vibrate with tinsel and tension from November 1 to December 25. I’d had trouble choosing a Christmas gift for Becker, though. I thought about a book to begin with—books are the best presents, in my view, but Becker wasn’t much of a reader, except for computer manuals and the occasional Stephen King horror novel. He kept a bunch of magazines and comic books in the rack in the bathroom, and Bryan’s room in his apartment (kept kid-like for when the boy came to visit) boasted a small bookshelf full of Becker’s old childhood classics, but he really hadn’t acquired much in the way of reading material since he was a teenager. I wandered around the mall for a couple of days before Christmas, grinding my teeth at the ruthless, piped-in music blaring over the speakers, which I was convinced had a subliminal track running through it—”buy, buy, buy, you pathetic creatures, buy lotsa stuff to prove you love somebody.”
I found myself in the Big Chain Bookstore but couldn’t face actually spending the forty-odd bucks on the new Stephen King hardcover, which Becker might have read already, for all I knew. I checked out the health and family section and considered (for one very brief moment) giving him a copy of Father to Be, but I didn’t think he’d get the joke. I was feeling a bit dazed by then, the mall having worked its evil magic upon me, making me consider quite seriously the purchase of a package of shiny, seasonal decorations—the kind of thing you gaze at in surprise when you get home and say “I don’t remember buying that.” I was surrounded by junked-up, frantic, jingle-bell-frenzied moms and kids, and more than a little aware of the fact that soon I too would have to learn the balance of can-have and can’t-have. I’d have to learn the language of momhood: “Don’t touch that, you little brat, or Santa’s not gonna leave you nothing.”
As for Santa, I figure he must have a hell of a time trying to decide what, precisely, to give all the bazillions of little children who expect him to cough up the goods every year. It’s hard to buy for somebody about whom one knows little except their naughty-or-nice scores. I knew Becker’s, sort of, but I bet Santa had a better handle on him than I did, even though I was the one carrying his baby. I was still wearing Becker’s engagement ring on a chain around my neck, and I was so used to having it there that I barely noticed it any more. It had been a long time since I’d taken it off the chain and tried it out on my finger. Anyway, my fingers were too swollen (a pregnant lady thing) for it to fit by then.
The elegant kitchenware store had a lot of nice glass and pottery and culinary doo-hickeys, but I felt that if I gave him something like that, he would take it as an indication that I wanted to move in with him, or that I was thinking in domestic terms. Too much like a wedding gift, too much like an answer to the ring question.
I ended up getting him a CD, the latest Barenaked Ladies album (which was a safe bet, as he had one or two by the same band already in his truck) and a pair of locally-made leather moccasins. Yes, I know. One step up from a tie, but I was desperate.
When we finally got around to making that curiously formal exchange, he admitted to having had a hard time as well, when it came to choosing something to give me. He’d settled on a book—a For Better or Worse comics anthology, and a large box of expensive chocolates, which we both knew I would eat compulsively, all
