Case in point: actually being a working writer. That sounds pretty glamorous, right? Or at least fairly easy. You get up at noon, have your coffee, tell the world what observations you’ve made about your life. Very Carrie Bradshaw.
Unless you’re a screenwriter. In which case you get up at noon, go to a studio meeting or two, then hang out with your screen-writer friends in a coffee house or bar and talk about what you should be writing. Very . . . um . . . well, there are no famous screenwriters I can think of, but you get the point.
Most of my paid writing has been as a newspaper columnist. Which to most people conjures up a fantasy of traveling the world, putting one’s life in jeopardy while digging up stories, effortlessly speaking to the locals in any of the seven languages one is fluent in.
God, I wish. I am fluent in one language: English. And at seven in the morning, I wouldn’t even go that far.
Up until six months ago, I worked for a local Los Angeles newspaper. I was overworked and underpaid. I frequently worked for the Metro section, which meant I was the woman who showed up at City Hall early in the mornings, then wrote about anything from a contentious city council meeting to what was going on at the LAUSD to what zone ordinances were threatening the city’s water supply.
In short: I had the most boring writing job in the city. And I miss it every day. I worked way too many hours. I was paid so little that up until recently I was still living with a roommate. And I was constantly worried that my job was going to go away because people are more interested in reading about the sex lives of Jon and Kate than whether or not their local charter school license would be granted, or if the mayor would raise the parcel tax another hundred dollars annually.
Six months ago, during the third wave of layoffs in as many years, the company bought me out, and I was out of a job.
I was devastated. I was thirty-one and had spent the last ten years of my life building a career that was gone in a ten-minute meeting with my boss. And forget about going to another paper: circulation was down everywhere and no one was hiring.
So there I was, smack dab in the middle of a midlife crisis, at the ripe old age of thirty-one. I supposed I would die early.
I called Jason, who was, as always, perfect. He always knows when to listen to me vent, when to ask questions, and when I am emotionally spent and ready to listen to his advice. And that day was no exception.
“Okay,” Jason said calmly the morning I was let go, after listening to me monologue for at least twelve minutes straight. “How about if you take a few days off and regroup? You can come with me to Portland this weekend and think about your options.”
(Side note: Since Jason is an NBA assistant coach, he travels with his team on road games from October until as late as June. That weekend in February they were in Portland.)
“I have no options,” I remember whining to him from a locked bathroom stall. (I had gone to the ladies’ room to hide, cry, and use my cell phone to track down moral support.) “I don’t know how to do anything else.”
“The L.A. Tribune isn’t the only paper in the world,” Jason had said. “Why don’t you update your résumé and see what else is out there?”
“Nothing else is out there,” I said. “Circulation is down everywhere. And besides, I love you, and I don’t want to leave you. It’s not like I can move to Seattle or New York or anywhere else. You’re here.”
Jason proposed to me that night. And as far as everyone else knew, I chose to take the buyout from the paper because I wanted to plan my dream wedding, then get pregnant and become a housewife.
Everything sounded so perfect when I said “Yes.”
And, for the most part, it has been pretty damn perfect these past six months. Yes, I have been trying to get work as a writer (my latest botched attempt being this romance novelist idea), but honestly I’ve been a bit lazy.
The Politically incorrect thing is, for the most part I rather like being a house wife. I like not having to get up until nine in the morning. I like helping Jason’s girls with their homework during the school year, when they stay with us on weekends. I like having a maid come in once a week to clean the toilets. And I really like having enough money to pay my electric bill and my cable bill in the same week.
But I’m not so sure I’m going to like helping with homework every day, and I’ll admit I’m disappointed about Italy.
I pull the silver baby carriage out of my desk drawer and stare at it.
Babies. Motherhood.
When do you know you’re ready to start the rest of your life? How do other women know? And is something wrong with me that I’m so terrified of the thought of a person on this planet thinking my name is “Mommy”?
Everyone says motherhood is incredibly fulfilling. No one I know seems to have ever regretted having kids. Plenty of people I know regret becoming reporters. Why is looking at this damn charm filling me with such paralyzing fear?
I stare at the baby carriage. Is this my future? Is someone trying to tell me something?
Jason knocks lightly on my open door. “You working?” he asks me as he yawns.
I smile at him as I toss the charm onto my desk. “Trying,” I say. Then I turn to my computer screen and sigh. “I think you’re right. I’m not cut out to do romance novels.”
Jason smiles at me. “I’m not cut out to play point guard. That doesn’t mean I’m not a good basketball player.”
He walks over to me and gives me a kiss, then pulls me into a hug. “You’ll find your niche.”
“I found my niche,” I tell him sadly. “Newspapers. I just lost it.”
“You’ll find another niche,” he says, rubbing my back. He pulls away slightly to look me in the eye. “I really appreciated what you did earlier tonight.”
I smile at him, then give him a kiss on the lips. “It wasn’t a big deal.”
“It was a very big deal,” Jason assures me. “And it makes me love you even more that you’re acting like it’s not a big deal.” Jason notices the baby carriage and picks it up. “What’s this?”
I shrug and try to downplay it. “Oh, it’s just the charm I pulled at the shower yesterday.”
Jason’s eyes widen slightly. He smiles at me. “You got the baby carriage? I thought you wanted the work charm.”
“I did,” I say. “But I rigged the cake wrong. I got this instead.”
Jason looks at it. “Hmm.”
“Hmm,” I repeat. “What does ‘Hmm’ mean?”
Jason does some downplaying of his own. “It just means, ‘Hmm.’ ”
“No, it doesn’t,” I argue. “That ‘Hmm’ is fraught with subtext.”
Jason cocks his head, smiling at me in amusement.
“What?” I ask suspiciously.
