Instincts or Not, There’s No Turning Back Now

Even eight months into it, I still get a shock each time I look into the mirror. Is that big-bellied person with swollen ankles really me? Sometimes the panic hits. Oh no, what have I done? How will I cope?

I’m about to become a mother.

The great irony is that less than two years ago, I wrote a story in these pages about waiting vainly for my biological clock to go off. It seemed that no matter how many plump babies and cooing mothers I saw, my maternal impulses stayed as dormant as a tulip bulb in December. Children were adorable all right, but I felt no Pavlovian quickening of the heart, no aching desire to switch places with those moms.

I still don’t.

But, I’m having a baby anyway. I’m 36. My husband and I figured that if we waited for my fickle feelings to kick in, it might never happen.

This wasn’t a decision we made lightly. As recently as one year ago, it was hard to even entertain the idea of motherhood. How would an infant fit in with our plans to kayak in Tonga, learn Esperanto and write that million-dollar script?

But slowly we got up the nerve to talk about it. We asked ourselves whether we saw children in our future, say, 20 years down the line, and conceded that yes, especially in the abstract, we surely did.

On the other hand, babies have always scared me. They’re an 18-year commitment. And they’re so tiny. When I last held an infant in early adolescence, back when I baby-sat for 75 cents an hour, I was too young and naive to be terrified of the awesome responsibility cradled in my arms.

I know the topic hits a nerve, because all sorts of letters and comments poured in the first time I wrote about parenthood, and they were pretty evenly split. One woman said motherhood was a big con. She exulted in her freedom from dirty diapers and formula, penning her missive to me while floating on a raft in her pool, soaking up rays.

Couples without children wrote, describing fulfilling lives dedicated to their church, each other and careers. One of the saddest letters came from a woman who had been pressured by her husband into having a child and now regretted her loss of freedom.

“Take it from me,” this young woman warned. “Don’t let anyone talk you into it if you’re not ready. I love my daughter, but it can be really hard, and sometimes when I think about the way my life was before she came, I wish I had stood my ground with my husband.”

Those letters were balanced with more encouraging takes on motherhood, especially from friends and colleagues. One woman assured me that it was perfectly feasible to balance a nursing infant on one knee and an Edith Wharton novel on the other.

An e-mail acquaintance wrote that after putting her 2-year-old to sleep one recent evening, she invited over a girlfriend for a chips-and-red-wine gabfest just like she used to have before her toddler came into the picture.

A third confessed that her biological clock hadn’t gone off either but she went ahead and had a baby and cherished her son, so everything had turned out just fine.

This was a revelation to me. I thought that if you didn’t go soft and fuzzy at the idea of children, it was best to avoid them entirely, as you might lack the mothering gene. Now I had a third possibility to contemplate.

A few months later, I had the daring idea. Why not stop intellectualizing the whole thing and throw our future to fate. My husband agreed. It wasn’t a bad time to try. We might have more money in a few more years, but we would also have more expenses.

Besides, with all the corporate downsizing going on, we might have less. Neither one of us could count on staying at our current jobs forever. Life was kaleidoscopic, with the most meticulous plans sure to go astray.

So we decided to take the plunge. That’s the thing about getting pregnant. You never know until you’ve crossed the Rubicon. What if I had congratulated myself smugly for not getting pregnant all those years, only to realize that I couldn’t?

We figured that if it happened, it happened. If not, well, then at least we wouldn’t rue not trying. Perhaps in the back of my head, I assumed it might take a few years.

It took a month.

Thank goodness that human beings, unlike cats or fruit flies, gestate for nine months. It gives women some very necessary psychological time to acclimatize to the idea of a child. As for the nuts and bolts, my sister has generously offered to let me practice changing her toddler’s diapers so I’d be a pro by the time our baby arrives.

For me this has been a lush, dreamy period during which I’ve been able to take stock of my life, rearrange priorities and retool my career to work at home. Those long stretches of serenity have been punctuated by bouts of unalloyed terror during which I wonder how I will ever make it through motherhood and an income that varies with each project I undertake.

But then I look at my sister, at numerous friends and relatives, at my own mother, and realize that if half the world can get through it, then I will too.

It would be disingenuous, however, to pretend that pregnancy has turned me into some radiant Earth mother who feels totally groovy about the changes taking place in my body.

Frankly, it’s a bit daunting, as well as amazing, to feel life growing inside of me. Depending on my mood, I feel anxious that all will go well, content to enjoy the moment or eager to get this baby boy born. In any event, I realize that things are pretty much out of my control now, quickening like a tulip in spring.

He’s kicking again, as I write this, and my husband is working late. Maybe I’ll go put on Debussy. That will calm us both.