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All of us can think of a co-worker who at some point in our professional lives has driven us crazy. Sometimes it’s a boss, sometimes it’s a desk-mate. But everyone can think of someone who made going to work more of an ordeal than a pleasure. (How are you these days, Myron?)
When we move on, we breathe a sigh of relief as we skip towards our future. At least we’ll never have to see him again, we laugh as we celebrate that night. Goodbye to her forever! And usually it is goodbye forever. But Carol Paik sent in a piece this week describing a situation in which forever recently came to an abrupt end. I’d like to know how her story develops in the months to come. Meanwhile, if anyone else has a tale of the co-worker from hell, send it to me at emma@thecomebackbook.com.
The last time I saw this person was 14 years ago. I was an associate at a small (now-defunct) law firm, and he was a partner. I disliked him immediately, but dislike rounded the bend into a powerful detestation one day when I was eight months pregnant with the son for whose sake I am now sitting in a history classroom. That day, I was wearing a green plaid poly-blend maternity jumper, and he and I were shouting at each other in the hallway, more or less as follows:
“Grow up!”
“No, you grow up!”
“No, YOU grow up!”
“No, YOU grow up!”
“I’m telling!”—and he turned and rushed up the stairs. As I stood there shaking and almost in tears, the only female partner hurried over. I had told her before that I could not work for this person. That it would not end well. She told me it would all blow over. Apparently, he was told the same thing, for from then on, when I would pass him in a corridor, he would offer a cordial hello. I would just stare at him.
Then I went on maternity leave and never came back.
These are the reasons I became a lawyer:
1) Desire to make use of my expensive education, large brain, and the open doors made available to me by the toil of the previous generation of women, not to mention my parents and my own years of study and work.
2) Desire to make a decent living.
3) Lack of better ideas on how to achieve No.1 and No. 2 above.
There are worse reasons. But wearing pantyhose and high heels made me want to die. I have a hard time sitting up straight in chairs, and a terrible habit of bouncing. At meetings, in depositions, in court, I struggled just to sit still. It has only recently occurred to me that these things said something about me that perhaps I should have heeded. I became a lawyer only by ignoring every possible sign post (a tendency to jiggle being only a minor example) and by shunning the things that came naturally to me, and if I had simply paid attention to the obvious I wouldn’t have ended up screaming at my boss while wearing a humiliating outfit.
I moved to the now-defunct firm because it claimed to offer reasonable hours, friendly colleagues, and a better chance at partnership than at the larger, more prestigious firm where I had started my career. But they had lied, and I hated it, and the worst part was this person: vague, argumentative, rude, irresponsible, and often unreachable. He would tell me I was wrong, even after I checked and rechecked my research. He left me in sole charge of a bankruptcy filing, although I had never even seen one before: "Ah, it’s just a couple of forms," he said before vanishing for several days. I came to assume that he never knew what he was talking about. So when he told me to find a statute regarding something or other, instead of figuring out what he actually meant or wanted, as a good associate would, I told him I couldn't find it.
The next day he called me in to his office to show me the statute.
"Have you ever thought of quitting?" he said. “Because you're no good.”
"Neither are you," I said.
I walked out of his office, and he followed me, and the shouting commenced.
So I loathe him for the following reasons.
1. ) He was an asshole.
2. ) He was right.
When my son was three months old I needed to make a decision about whether or not I was going to return to work. Here are the reasons I decided to stay home:
1.) I hated my job.
2.) I adored my baby and did not want anyone else to care for him.
3.) I was fortunate enough to have a husband willing to support me.
It was a straightforward decision, but the transition was not and has not been easy. It has been hard to give up the business card, work phone number, status, identity. It has been hard to know that I did not succeed, did not rise to the occasion. Yet every morning I wake up and think, “I don’t have to be a lawyer,” and that thought alone makes me feel happy and lucky for the rest of the day. I feel as if I have come to terms with the decision I made—but then, there are these chance encounters.
This person has given no indication that he recognizes me. It’s funny how it is possible to not look at someone who is sitting right next to you. Just don’t turn your head. The history teacher tells how she will be teaching internal histories and external interactions. The class will analyze issues from multiple perspectives, and will consider the validity of social, economic, political, and cultural factors in shaping the path of historical development. She offers a quote: “The justification of all historical study must ultimately be that it enhances our self-consciousness, enables us to see ourselves in perspective, and helps us towards that greater freedom that comes from self-knowledge.”
Class is over and we stand up and file out. I have managed to avoid an encounter. But this is only freshman year—at some point, I will have to acknowledge this person. When that happens, I hope I will be able to say: My son’s name is Jonathan. What’s your son’s name?
Carol Paik is a Manhattan-based writer whose work has appeared in Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Newsweek, Fourth Genre, and other publications. You can read more of her work at www.carolpaik.com
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There's been a lot of talk about fertility, pregnancy, single parenting, and adoption on this blog over the past few months, yet the one subject that hadn’t been touched on, until I got a slew of e-mails last week, was miscarriage.
Most women who are in the business of childbearing know the definition and the statistics—a miscarriage is a pregnancy that ends spontaneously before 20 weeks gestation. Between 10 percent and 25 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage.
Having had a miscarriage followed by a much later pregnancy loss myself, I was interested in the mail I received about this. The weeks and months after the loss are an intense, horrible time—as bad as anything I have had to endure. (If you are interested in reading more about my own experience, my husband wrote about it several years ago.) I remember all the books that I bought on the subject—and, sadly, there are a number—telling me that the best way to get over losing a baby was to have another one. As if it were that easy! I remember thinking it would never happen, could never happen, and even now as I look back on that time, I shudder with relief that it’s in my past. But the books were right. I did go on to have another child and the horrible months of 2000 are just a distant memory.
Which brings me to last weeks’ mail about pregnancy test results. There were so many miscarriages in the pile that I decided to make a few of them the focus of the blog today.
Jessica Timmons wrote:
After a few kid-free years, my husband and I decided to try for a baby. I tossed my pills, consulted with a doctor regarding whether I needed to wait any length of time to "clean out my system"—no—and sat back to enjoy the ride. Four weeks later, I took a home pregnancy test and gave my mother one hell of a 50th birthday gift. I spent that whole first week—the magical six-weeks pregnant—smiling and enjoying the glow of a new little life. And I told absolutely everyone. How could I not? I can't keep a secret to save my life, and this beat juicy gossip hands-down. I did manage to keep my mouth shut at work, except for the handful I swore to absolute secrecy.
And then I started spotting. Not a lot, not bright red, no clumps, nothing that really showed up in my frantic Google searches. But enough to bring my moony happiness to a screeching halt. As the days passed and the spotting continued, I started wondering how exactly it feels to be pregnant. Because my happy glow, my certain something that couldn't be named, it was totally gone. And without it, I was left feeling pretty damn normal. Minus the constant, minute, yet worrisome spotting.
I ended up at the emergency room on the Fourth of July at exactly 10 weeks. I bled through a pad, my underwear and my thin pants, close enough to the "soaking through two pads in an hour" miscarriage references the nurses had mentioned over the phone. It looked bad. And it was. The ultrasound my OB gave me two days later confirmed the worst—no baby. She said it was for the best, that miscarriages are natural selection at work, and that we should wait for a normal cycle and then try again. We went home and I was numb. I kept thinking of February, a dreary month that had held such promise just a week ago.
Three weeks later, I had my first natural period in years. And four weeks after that, I took a pregnancy test. It was negative. My husband smiled kindly at me, took my hand and told me not to worry. "I'm not worried. I'm pregnant," I told him. He said he believed me, but I think he needed to see those two pink lines—the ones that showed up bright and clear about three days later—before he'd let himself get really excited. I find it hard to put into words, what exactly I felt. I just knew I was pregnant, and no $10 test with its missing pink line could tell me otherwise. The feeling lasted until other pregnancy symptoms and wonders outshined it, until I held my newborn son in my arms the following April.
Brie sent this in.
I am now 26 weeks pregnant. We found out that we were first expecting in April, close to Easter Sunday. I took a test early in the morning, with my sister-in-law, two nephews, and one niece in the other room. I was so excited and ran in to tell my husband, with toothpaste still in my mouth. Both of us had tears in our eyes that morning, so excited that this time had finally arrived for us. We had to keep it a secret while driving all of these relatives to the airport, but we shot each other conspiratorial smiles along the way.
I miscarried a few weeks later, the day after I lost my job. The day I was laid off, my husband was traveling by plane to a high school reunion. As soon as I called to tell him that news, he took the next flight home. I recall my mom telling me not to worry about the stress of the layoff, that many pregnancies had survived much worse circumstances. I was incredibly grateful that my husband decided to fly home, as he was with me the next morning as the miscarriage began.
My husband and I decided to try again immediately. Since this was our first experience with pregnancy, we felt very sad and deflated after the miscarriage. Nevertheless, we went to his parents' house by the coast and "had lots of fun" as my midwife put it. It was hard deciding that I should test again at the end of the next cycle; there were all sorts of anxieties, including that I might not be able to carry a pregnancy to term. With the first positive pregnancy test, there had only been pure joy, so it was a bit melancholy to face the possibility of a pregnancy with anything but excitement. After delaying for a few extra days, my husband took me in his arms and reassured me until I took the test. It came back positive, and we've enjoyed many wonderful milestones since then.
The last e-mail comes from Dianne, who asked that I not use her last name.
To my knowledge, I have been pregnant three times. The first time I found out I was pregnant, it was a few days before my husband was scheduled to go for an infertility exam at a urologist’s (and you know what that entails). That was the reason I tested as early as I did and after an unusually short and light period. I was ecstatic and could hardly believe it, because I was in my late 30s and we had been trying for over a year.
My husband went for the exam anyway, and the doctor was very pessimistic about his chances of getting anyone pregnant—low sperm count and low sperm motility. My husband then told the skeptical doctor the good news, and the two of us later had a good laugh. We were all the more devastated, then, when the bleeding and cramps started a few days later, and my gynecologist told us that I had already lost the baby. There were complications as well, and I needed two D&C’s (dilation and curettage) to get things sorted out.
We heard three recommendations from three doctors as to how long we should wait to try again: 1 month, 2 months, and 3 months, so we took the average and waited 2 periods to start trying. I had heard that women are often very fertile after a miscarriage, but it had taken us very long to get pregnant. The date for my next period came and went, I started experiencing breast tenderness, breast enlargement, morning nausea and weird goings-on in my nether regions. I didn’t want to test, though, because I was afraid of having another early miscarriage. I would just rather not know. However, after almost two weeks of that, I thought, “Who are you kidding? You know what’s going on, and if the symptoms suddenly go away and you get your period, you’ll know that you had a miscarriage anyway.” So I peed on a stick, called my husband at work and made an appointment with my (new) gynecologist. My husband and I were excited and hopeful but also afraid. I was a complete nervous wreck through the entire pregnancy, especially since I had intermittent bleeding and cramps throughout the 1st trimester. However, they went away, and the result is now watching a DVD in the living room.
As you can see today’s stories, like my own, end with a happy birth. But believe me, the residual sadness and the feeling of what-might-have-been never entirely go away.
Photograph of woman by Digital Vision/Photodisc/Getty Images.
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What exactly is sexual harrassment? What are the rules and regulations for hiring a nanny? If I post-date a check, can it be cashed now? Do I have to pay tax on stuff I sell on eBay? At what point is my health condition considered a disability?
No, this isn’t a quick Monday quiz. It’s a sample of questions contained in a useful new book So Sue Me, Jackass! Avoiding Legal Pitfalls That Can Come Back to Bite You as Work at Home and at Play, written by the sisters Amy Epstein Feldman and Robin Epstein. (Amy’s the lawyer and Robin’s the writer.)
The two decided to put the book together after a year in which Robin wanted her sister to help her decipher a contract with a video-game company in London, then break her lease and get her security deposit back. She also asked what one friend should do about getting fined for a cell-phone infraction on an airplane and how another could get a restraining order against her mother.
"I get questions about speeding tickets, delinquent children, and nasty neighbor disputes. They ask about their office pools, prenuptial agreements, and household help," writes Amy in the introduction. "And while some are in real hot water and need independent counsel, others just want a better understanding of their rights and/or what to expect if they wind up in court."
I heard from Robin a couple of weeks ago, when I asked for sisters to write in, and I was intrigued to check out a book that can be a handy reference tool for women who need a quick answer to legal or financial questions. The pair covers everything from pet insurance to prenups ("I do or I don’t?") and they have done your research for you—no matter what state you live in. They explain your online rights, your tax breaks, your liabilities—they even help you with the dress code for office parties. ("Though they may be real and they may be spectacular, best to keep the boobs under wraps.")
It’s valuable to have a guide not just for the transitional periods of your life, like moving house, getting married, divorced,or changing jobs, but for the moments when you feel caught up by the system. If you’ve been busted for texting in your car, or someone got hold of your credit-card information, or your neighbor dislocated his shoulder when playing bowling on your Wii, then this could be the book for you.
As far as the prenup question goes, the answer is sensible and more detailed than the question suggests. I won’t reproduce it all here. If you’re interested enough, or you feel you need to ask, then go and buy the book.
Photograph of Amy Epstein Feldman and Robin Epstein courtesy of Amy and Robin.
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It’s funny how our perspective is kept in balance. This week, after Lara Bazelon’s piece on her surprise at finding out she was pregnant ran, a number of people wrote in with their own positive pregnancy result stories. (I’ll be posting some of those next week.) At exactly the same time, Shawnee Barton’s poignant account of trying and failing to conceive landed in my inbox. Shawnee’s experience will be familiar to many women who have experienced the hunger of wanting a baby and know the monthly sense of loss that comes with a negative test result. I think you’ll agree, however, that she has a unique and entertaining view of this situation, even if it remains extremely sad.
I first learned that Bai Yun, the only adult female panda at the San Diego Zoo, was pregnant again while listening to the radio on my drive home from the fertility clinic. My husband and I live in San Diego. We take the many friends and family who visit our lovely city to the zoo, so we know a lot about the way pandas live. These unique bears spend 10-16 hours a day eating bamboo, and when they’re not eating, they’re sleeping. In the wild, pandas live in complete isolation. At the zoo, every panda, even the youngsters, occupies a separate habitat.
This means that on a normal day, Bai Yun never sees her mate. She is alone, and either passed out or stuffing her face 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Still, Bai Yun managed to get pregnant, and I, frustratingly, can’t. Expensive hormones, an ovulation-predicting machine, acupuncture, an attractive partner in my bed each night, and fancy doctors with high-tech turkey-basters aren’t working.
Each month, I willingly turn myself into a hot-flash-prone, hormonal monster and make multiple visits to those dreaded cold, metal stirrups in my fertility doctor’s office. Then, two weeks later, at the moment I finally allow naïve hopefulness to settle in, I pee on a stick and find out that it was all for nothing.
After this, my doctor tells me that age is one of the most important factors in predicting fertility. Hearing this is comforting, but youth isn’t helping me. It also makes me angry that Bai Yun managed to do for free what I am paying thousands of dollars for. She is 18. In the wild, pandas live about 20 years. Nesting in a cushy zoo will likely give her five to 10 extra years, but by either standard, Bai Yun is no spring chicken.
The fertility gods clearly favor her and don’t like me. My medical records reveal that I have depleted ovarian reserve. Obsessive Internet research explained what this means—I have bad eggs. Women lose good eggs as they age. Eventually, when only bad eggs remain, menopause begins. For some unknown reason, I have the same number of good eggs, and years left to reproduce, as a 40-year-old woman. Since I am 29, this means I should have started trying to have kids back when I was an undergrad. Still, if a mature lady, like Bai Yun, can defy the odds, maybe I can too.
Frankly, it’s remarkable that she, or any panda, ever gets pregnant. Pandas can conceive on only 3-7 days of the entire year. We humans have a couple days each month when baby making is possible, which seems excessive in comparison. Knowing this makes me wonder how Bai Yun was impregnated so easily. You’d wonder too, if you could see the mating setup at the San Diego Zoo and hear the docent describe the process. It isn’t very romantic.
Essentially, mating begins when Bai Yun rubs her “business” up against a Plexiglas gate that looks like a prison door. When the zookeepers see her do this, they open the gate that separates the two pandas’ habitats. Bai Yun then waits to see if Gao Gao, the adult male, is interested. He may not be, since there’s a pretty good chance he’ll be busy sleeping or eating. But if the stars align, the pandas will make some black and white magic happen while crowds of gawking tourists with flashing cameras stand only a couple of feet away.
Fertility clinic baby-making isn’t very sexy either. First, my DH (that’s “dear husband” in infertility-chat-room lingo) watches out-of-date pornographic videotapes in a special exam room outfitted with mood lighting and a pleather couch. Once he’s “provided a sample,” I am called into the stirrup room. The doctor tells me how plentiful my husband’s sperm are and how wonderfully fast they swim. This is supposed to fill me with pride and hope, but it actually makes me more aware of my own inadequacies. Next, the doctor sticks multiple cold metal instruments inside of me. I try not to think about what he is doing down there and instead focus on wiggling my toes, which is somehow supposed to relax the muscles around my cervix.
Once the loaded catheter is nestled where it should be, the doctor does something that makes me realize that medical technology hasn’t advanced as far as one might think. He crosses his fingers and tells me to think good thoughts just before he pulls the trigger on the syringe. Finally, we both watch the ultrasound screen with awe as my husband’s superhero sperm shoots towards my fragile follicles.
All this fancy equipment hasn’t gotten me pregnant yet, but things have worked out surprisingly well for Bai Yun this year. Turns out she was carrying not one, but two panda cubs. This doesn’t seem fair, and I find myself feeling desperate to someday be half as lucky as a bear. I realize that it isn't normal to feel resentful towards an adorable panda, but my situation encourages irrational thoughts. I do feel resentment, just like I feel it when I log onto Facebook and see countless new baby pictures, or when I have to listen to my good friend, who recently got pregnant during the first month she tried, complain about tight-fitting pants and morning sickness.
I can't create a filter that blocks chubby-cheeked infants from appearing on my computer screen or tell my friend to shut up, but the next time I go to the zoo, you can be sure that I will head straight for the pandas. It’s going to be hard, and I’m sure I’ll cry a little (I’m crying right now for God’s sake), but I’m going to say some things under my breath to that bear that I will wish I could scream. It makes me inconsolably sad to know that even sleepy, hungry, loner Bai Yun managed to get herself knocked up in a stressful and unlikely situation, and for some reason I can’t do the same.
Shawnee Barton is an artist who keeps a blog on other people’s blogs. If you have a little nook of cyberspace and are open to welcoming a guest poster, please email her at shawneebarton@gmail.com. She will be grateful. To see where she is headed next, check out shawneebarton.com.
Photo courtesy of the author
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Yesterday we heard from Abigail Pogrebin on being a twin sister. Meanwhile, the mailbag on the subject of sisterhood was as compelling as anything I have received here. I am grateful to everyone who wrote in and am pleased to run three extracts of submissions today. The dynamic of being a sister seems to have a real push-me-pull-you quality to it. The competition can be agonizing, but nothing is as sweet as the support.
We’ll begin with Adrienne R., who wrote the following:
My sister and I are just under two years apart. It's just the two of us, and I’m the younger of the set. We were fiercely competitive as kids—there were the unavoidable comparisons of “Why can’t you do X like your sister?” We both loved dance, and my mother strove to allow us to be individuals. She enrolled my sister in jazz, while I did tap. We both loved to sing, but in our school choir, I begged our director to move me to the alto range (Sis is a soprano) so that we didn’t have to compete over who was the stronger or better singer. Sis did dance in high school, so my mother, ever trying to get us to be individuals, tried to get me into sports, which I loathed, and still do to this day. It was difficult to be just me when we were growing up, and I’m sure my sister’s side of the story is the same.
Once she went to college, our relationship changed, and we became closer than best friends. We’re each other’s touchstone and we check in with the other several times a week. I was her maid-of-honor at her wedding, and one day, she’ll be my matron-of-honor. I was there in the room when she gave birth to her daughter. I have so many special memories of my sister, and I’m so grateful to have her as a part of my life!
Unlike Adrienne, 25-year-old Jamie Letzring wrote from Minnesota that she found her relationship with her sisters has deteriorated as she has grown up.
I have two sisters, two OLDER sisters. Becky is 32, Jill is 30. Several things have framed our adult relationship in what I feel is a negative light. Everything was well and good until I became an adult: got married, got a job, finished my master's degree, had a baby, got a career, and started being a boss at age 25. Now things are getting shaky. I'm not such a little sister anymore. It makes other people feel old, perhaps? I feel as though they've been searching for a way to keep me down, or to remind me that I'm just the little sister. "Know your role" is what I imagine them saying when they are together discussing me. My mother knows how I feel, as the littlest one, the baby, who's never been allowed to grow up in the eyes of my sisters and isn't respected as an adult peer. She encourages me to speak up to them. I say it’s not worth it. Love them anyway despite their flaws, smile, and keep your mouth shut. That's what a real adult does.
Finally, Vesna Koselj wrote that being a twin sister can be a more complicated relationship than the one Abigail Pogrebin described.
I am one half of a fraternal twin set and struggled with my own identity in my early teenage years. My sister and I ended up going to a different high school (coincidentally, not on purpose to grow apart) but I always felt that that gave me a chance to develop a sense of who I am, outside of my relationship to her. I still believe it was very helpful for me to be able to develop relationships with people who only knew me for me and I have always expressed this as advice to parents of twins.
The reason I am writing to you, though, is this: I moved to another country some years ago and have found love in my new home. But my boyfriend often says I am still competing with my sister every day. He finds it quite amazing (and not always in a good way) how I need to compare lives with her I would describe myself as being very close to her—we talk to each other every day) and—the way he puts it—keep score. He finds my relationship with my twin sister to be something by which we both define ourselves and he notices that any changing of the designated roles seems very dangerous and scary to both of us. He thinks this is quite unhealthy. I don’t know—I don’t have the privilege of looking at it from above, but I would admit to the fact that this particular sisterly relationship is very important in my life—much more so than the one I have with our older sister.
Photograph of Ashley and Wynona Judd by Evan Agostini/Getty Images.
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Back in 1986, when I was in college with my twin sister, Robin, we were invited on the Today Show. Co-host Jane Pauley had recently given birth to twins and she wanted to talk to grown twins about what it was like to be one.
All I remember about the interview is that at one point Pauley leaned into us, her animated face seemingly enlarged by the TV lights and heavy made-up, and asked, "So one of you gets an A, one of you gets a B; how do you handle that?"
It wasn’t the most inspired of inquiries, but it distilled what most people always presupposed: that we were competitive. It’s true that identical twins are constantly measured against the other and confused with the other, so strangers assume we’re a species doomed to combat.
This honestly wasn’t the case with Robin and me. I won’t say our twinship was uncomplicated—it wasn’t and isn’t—but we were never competitive in the sense of feeling plagued or overshadowed by the other’s successes, or wishing each other ill. Her victories felt like mine, and similarly, when she struggled, it was hard not to experience her unhappiness.
Now that I’ve spent two-plus years researching a book about twins, and interviewing many other pairs, I know that my experience is echoed by most identical twins: They root for each other. True, they may feel spurred by the other’s skills or drive, and often strive to match each other—in athletics, for example, or academics—but there’s rarely schadenfreude.
That’s true even when twins opt for the same line of work, as Robin and I did. It’s no accident that identicals gravitate toward the same interests; our genetic blueprint is the same, which means our traits are similar, which sparks similar preferences, and choices.
As kids, Robin and I both loved theater and writing. We ultimately ended up both choosing journalism as a career, which could have been problematic– New York City is a hard enough town in which to claim some professional turf without having to worry about the person closest to you trying to make it in the same racket.
But here the ephemeral twin universe kind of kept things in balance for us: Robin went to print journalism (ending up at the New York Times), I went to broadcast journalism (ending up producing for Ed Bradley and Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes), and when she took a brief detour to my world—she spent a year producing for Peter Jennings’ documentary unit at ABC News—she found she missed the daily deadlines and returned happily to the Times.
The only awkwardness about our overlapping careers comes from other people: How many times have I been at a cocktail party when an acquaintance mixes me up and compliments my Times articles by mistake? I’m happy to accept the praise on Robin’s behalf, but the person usually looks stricken when I explain that the Times writer is my twin, not me; he or she will try to recover by quickly offering me a similar compliment. Except these well-wishers don’t necessarily know what I’ve been writing, and when they have to ask, they look worried about having hurt my feelings. Suddenly I’m in the pathetic position of having to recite my resume so that they feel better about having made me feel bad, which they truly haven’t. If they only knew how many times I’ve endured this particular moment; it’s fleeting but strained every time. So nine times out of 10, when someone compliments the Times articles I haven’t written, I just say, "Thank you," and head for the bar.
Robin and I may have selected parallel pursuits but they’ve always been firmly separate, and I’m sure that’s no coincidence. It’s that partition that has maintained our equilibrium, simplified our sisterhood, and allowed us to keep cheering each other on.
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There’s a saying that if pregnancy were a book, they would cut the last two chapters. But how would the story begin? Whether planned or unplanned, I think it’s fair to say that the realization of every pregnancy starts with a sense of shock and awe. Former trial lawyer Lara Bazelon (sister of DoubleX's Emily Bazelon) writes about this today in a piece that reminds me that sometimes we have no idea how our bodies work.
Tell me about how you found out you were expecting. Was it a planned surprise? Were you amazed? Incredulous? Or did you feel a Zen-like calm? Write to me at emma@thecomebackbook.com
It wasn’t an accident, and yet the discovery was completely overwhelming.
My boyfriend and I decided to start trying in July. Everyone—which is to say my sisters, my mother, my best friend, and the fertility book I read—agreed it made sense. I was 34, with notoriously irregular cycles. It could take a year, they all said, maybe longer. And that was assuming there were no problems.
The book stressed the helpfulness of simple measures designed to maximize my fertility, like taking my temperature every morning. A slight uptick would tell me when I was ovulating and most likely to conceive. My boyfriend and I would have sex during that time and, abracadabra, baby!
The ideal time to start temperature-taking, according to the book, was on the first day of my period. The problem was that in the four weeks since I stopped taking birth control pills, my period had been a no-show. Every day I awoke ready to break out the thermometer only to realize, with growing frustration, that the precipitating event had not precipitated.
The whole conception thing was going worse than I had expected. I thought I would fail at first, but failure was becoming all too familiar. Since moving to San Francisco to be with my boyfriend, I had quit my job and failed to get another one, left my friends and failed to make new ones, and submitted my novel to a slew of agents only to have it rejected by each and every one. Still, I hadn’t thought my incompetence was so colossal it would prevent me from taking the baby steps that were critical to making the actual baby.
A few days later I confessed my inadequacy to my pediatrician friend, Liza. When she asked if there was anything to report on the pregnancy front, I replied glumly, “I’m still waiting to get my period so I can start taking my temperature.”
Liza appeared to have difficulty following my logic. “What makes you think you’re not pregnant now?” she asked.
I snorted. “I have to ovulate,” I explained, “and that can’t happen until I get my period. Then I’m supposed to take my temperature”—I stopped. On the other end of the phone, Liza was laughing uncontrollably. “What? What’s so funny?”
“Plenty of people ovulate after going off the pill without getting a period,” Liza said.
I tried not to sound surprised. “Yeah, well, I’m not pregnant. I’m premenstrual. My chest hurts. I’m bloated. And—OK, this is weird—but sometimes I get this metallic taste in my mouth.”
Liza was laughing again. “You’re pregnant.”
“No,” I insisted, “I’m not.”
But when I woke up the next day, still achy, still puffy, and with my tongue tasting like I’d just finished licking the kitchen sink, I was less sure. Bladder full, I raced downstairs to find the bathroom door closed and the water running. It was Monday morning, and my boyfriend was getting ready to go to work.
I went to the hall closet and pulled out the remaining pregnancy test in a two-pack I’d bought several months earlier. Back then, I was convinced I was pregnant, but that was only because I didn’t want to be. I re-read the instructions in the box, which gave me two choices: Plunge the stick into my urine stream for five seconds, or submerge it in a urine pool collected in a sanitary receptacle.
I ran to the kitchen in search of a sanitary receptacle and opened the dishwasher, relieved that we’d remembered to run it. In desperation, I grabbed the glass bowl that had held last night’s brussel sprouts, pulled down my pajama pants, and squatted on the kitchen floor.
I placed the brimming bowl carefully on the kitchen counter, took out the test stick and submerged it, careful as I counted from one to 20 to say “Mississippi” after every number.
It took about five seconds for the stick to give me one-word answer. Countless thoughts flashed through my mind. I was having a baby. No, we were having a baby. Way ahead of schedule. I considered our lives. Unstable was the word that came to mind. We didn’t even know what we’d be doing or where we’d be living after December. We weren’t married yet. We fought too much. We weren’t ready. I shut my eyes and remembered how my boyfriend and I had put our faces close together when we’d made the decision to try. How the nuzzling had turned into kissing, which in turn had led to—well, the things that had the P-word on the stick. Whatever our problems, we loved each other. We would love our baby. We would be good parents.
I walked slowly to the bathroom and knocked on the door. My boyfriend opened it, his lower jaw covered in shaving cream, a razor dangling from his free hand. His eyes were still half-closed, and he looked, as he always did on Monday mornings, like the world’s unhappiest camper.
“What?” he said.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
I handed over the stick.
My boyfriend looked at it. I scrutinized his face for signs of panic but saw none. As usual, he appeared calm and thoughtful (good qualities in a dad, I told myself). I watched his chest rise and fall as he breathed, his Adam’s apple move up and down as he swallowed, then saw his hands reach for me. “Baby,” he whispered in my ear, “Baby, we did it.”
I pushed my face into his shoulder, heard the crackling of shaving cream in my ear. “I didn’t believe we could,” I whispered. “I didn’t think so.”
He held me tighter, and then we were kissing, gently at first, then frantically, the way we had in the very beginning of our relationship, when it seemed like there was only that moment we were living in and no other; nothing before, nothing after. And then he froze, eyes wide-open, a disbelieving china blue as he stared at something over my shoulder.
“Did you pee in the salad bowl?
Matt and Lara were married on October 4, 2008. Their son, Carter, was born on April 18, 2009. Lara’s still-unpublished novel, The Good Criminal, is about the relationship that develops between a young public defender named Abby and her client, Rayshon, who is accused of helping to carry out the murder of a DEA Agent in Los Angeles.
Photo of Lara and Carter courtesy of the author.
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I know a number of woman who love their exercise. My friends include spinners, swimmers, marathon runners, yoga and pilates enthusiasts, skiers—you name it. I love my exercise, too, and I agree with Mary Holt-Wilson, who writes today's piece, that it is a great escape from the daily grind. I'm far less ambitious than she is, though. All I do is take my dog for long walks. I don't work up much of a sweat, I don't set goals. I don't communicate with anyone else. But I know that taking Bella to the park or the beach for an hour a day is good for my body and soul. At the opposite end of the exercise spectrum, Mary, who turns 40 next year, is stretching her muscles and building up endurance I can only dream of. What do you do to stay fit? How does your exercise routine help keep you sane? Share your workout stories with me at emma@thecomebackbook.com. Don't be shy! We can't all be Marys, but we can admire her stamina and determination.
I had a massive case of Kona Fever last weekend, and it wasn’t because I was missing Starbucks. On Saturday, Oct. 10, 2,000 triathletes dove into the surf at Kailua-Kona, Hawaii and began the daylong suffer-fest known as the Ironman World Championship.
I wasn’t there competing. I was sitting on my ass in Massachusetts, watching the race on my computer. But I wanted to be there. And someday I will.
Competing in an Ironman, especially one held in the grueling heat and wind of Kailua-Kona, is viewed by most as rather nuts. It begins with a 2.4 mile open-water swim. If not pummeled by competitors or eaten by sharks, triathletes then transition onto racing bikes to battle the winds and heat for 112 miles. After that they run a marathon, packing ice into their thin tri-shirts in a futile effort to keep cool enough to avoid frying like bacon on the asphalt. To compete in Kona, one must complete an Ironman event in another part of the world, and place within the top 1 percent-2 percent of his/her age group. Trust me when I tell you that isn’t easy.
I’ve been a runner for much of my life, but completing freakishly competitive endurance events did not make it to the top of my must do now list until after my third child was born. At that point I became manic with the desire to train—to equal out the time I spent tending to my three kids, my husband, my job, my house, and my two hairy dogs with time spent on, well, me. I know it defies logic to try to squeeze twenty hours of training into each week while teaching full time, managing the carpool, helping with homework, making lunches, vacuuming ten tons of dog hair, and doing several loads of laundry a day.
But I needed it. I needed a goal, it needed to be big, and it needed to be pursued now.
As you might imagine, explaining my drive to complete Ironman races and qualify for Kona was, and remains, a challenge. Over the last few years I’ve come up with several colorful explanations.
1. Giving birth to a third child altered my brain chemistry such that I became unbalanced, unstable, and insane.
2. Training for Ironman provides me an excellent excuse to blow off temporarily postpone the incessant needs and wants of my otherwise adorable progeny.
3. My friend Ange just raced at Kona, and while there she swam with a pod of dolphins. The most I’ve seen while open-water swimming in the frigid Atlantic is one lousy seal.
4. My husband and I celebrated our 10-year anniversary last month, and we failed to do anything of note to mark it. After all the time neglecting him during my never-ending training, what better way to properly mark the occasion than to travel to Hawaii so that he can watch me race 140.6 miles in one heat-scorching day?
5. Competing to be the most esteemed parent volunteer on the PTO gets old. Competing with thousands of fit, gorgeous, scantily-clad triathletes in the tropics, however, never loses its appeal.
The thing is, none of these explanations really gets at why. For a long time, even I didn’t get it. Why do I have this visceral need, this unrelenting desire to work my ass off? At the peak of training, preparing for an Ironman event involves swimming at least 11,000 yards (much of it in the open water), biking 250 miles, and running 40 miles. In one week. This doesn’t include time spent stretching, lifting, showering, keeping equipment in good condition, competing in weekend-long events, and obsessing over what combination of carbs, lean protein and healthy fats to eat, before, during and after working out. Why must I do something that consumes so much time and energy, something that threatens to topple the secure, safe life I spent so many years working to build?
I’ve thought a lot about this (probably because I’m asked way I train so hard on a daily basis) and I’ve come up with this: At some point, while being the architect of my own life, I stopped being the main character in it. Like many women, I spent my young adulthood seeking out and capturing all I wanted to call my own. I wanted a good job, a good man, a good home, and good little tots who would love me and call my Mom.
And I got it all: my guy, my kids, my suburban nest. I felt relieved and satisfied.
Then I woke up one day and felt dead. And trapped. And helpless to do anything about it.
I drank lattes with friends and demanded to go grocery shopping on my own. I retreated into cheesy magazines, organized spa weekends. I went to bed early, took bubble baths, and played hooky from work. It wasn’t enough.
So I made a plan to get to Kona. I needed something huge and totally self-centered. Each day in training I could do battle. The ache I'd feel after in my muscles fueled me with possibility, power, and change. I'd be the main character in my life, the hero in my novel. I would not be the sideshow drowning in cappuccino, bubble bath, self-pity, and despair.
Now I force myself up each morning at 5 a.m. so I can tap into the raw pain of physical exertion, so I can stare down an impossible challenge, so I can reach beyond the roles I hammered out for myself so long ago, and attempt, even after all these years, to become. Because of my Kona dream, that stable place I built for myself and my family has stopped feeling confining—and instead just feels like coming home.
Mary Holt-Wilson parents, trains and writes in Westwood, Massachusetts. You can follow her training and racing exploits at www.tri-ingtodoitall@blogspot.com.
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Sundays used to find me reading the New York Times Vows column on my hand-me-down four-poster bed. The sunlight shone through the mesh and bars of my fire-escape-covered window, making a lacy pattern on my duvet that mimicked the gown of some quirky or blue-blooded bride. Sentimental tears inevitably flowed. People get married all the time, but those featured in the Vows column seemed especially to go through a portal into Happily Ever After.
I was a jaded and cynical 27-year-old who came of age in the swinging '90s of dot-com-boom Manhattan. But on Sundays, I reverted back to fairy tale, believing during those few minutes that love could creep in, in the form of a good and handsome man, and complete me.
I did meet and fall in love, within a matter of months, with a man who seemed the epitome of both good and handsome. My dad and my therapist both urged me to marry him, and what more did I need to hear? My eggs had begun to vibrate in my ovaries. They, along with my heart and my desire to walk down the aisle in a white confection, were telling me it was showtime.
When I finally co-starred in my own Vows Column, I was shocked at all of the people who called me, ecstatic by association.
On my honeymoon, I called my sister from a phone booth in Burgundy, cows grazing across the narrow road, so she could read it to me. I pumped francs into the slot as an old plump woman bicycled past, the morning’s fresh baguettes in her basket.
I was relieved to find that a quote from my husband’s pranksterish coworker, who'd drunkenly told reporter Lois Smith Brady that the groom liked to come over, get zooted on marijuana, and take all of his clothes off, did not make it in. And, luckily, half the column was not taken up by my mother’s overly frank reminiscences.
Yet it turned out we were really only happily married for a few hours. On my wedding night, my husband and I got into a fight in the taxi on the way home from our reception while the rain poured down and the chassis labored under the weight of wedding gifts. I don’t recall what started the argument, but I do remember that the new, impatient way he barked at me was both a surface hurt and one that sank underground and hollowed out our marriage’s foundation from the inside.
He was dear, charming, sweet, sensitive, tender, and thoughtful 98 percent of the time, but the lava of his volcanic anger, when it erupted, left ash and scorched earth all over our marital landscape. I staunchly believed that a couple should never go to bed angry. But that proved a luxury outside my grasp. Sleep quenched his rages, not rapprochement. The first time he went to sleep mid-argument I poured a cup of water on his head. He staggered to his feet, swearing. For a moment, I thought that he might kill me. He was lost, wet, and exhausted. I was desperate, grieving, lovelorn. He didn’t kill me, we did go to bed mad, and it was not the last time. I had to let go of that rule. It met its match in our dynamic. But breaking it still creamed us.
I put my energy into motherhood (two children) and throwing dinner parties. I breastfed on demand, kissed booboos, folded stacks of little undershirts, and cooked four-course meals.
He raged; I had crushes. I could keep my crushes a secret, and I also went a step further and kept his rages a secret. We probably should have brought both into the open, in therapy, for starters. I thought my crushes were harmless—the byproduct of monogamy. Keeping things spicy, sublimating desire. He thought his rages were harmless—that we were a married couple having arguments like every other married couple, and I was making a big deal out of nothing. As long as I felt like a nothing, that was a workable description. But I usually didn’t.
I started to realize that the only thing that was keeping me in this relationship was my fear of divorce. But that was like not eating my soup because I was afraid of having an empty bowl. There was no way around it. I had to go through it. As I moved out, I cobbled each day together miraculously and found it good. I was struck by the difference between how I thought I would feel, and how good I felt. I even felt OK about telling my folks, who cried. High on freedom, I took it in stride. Most of the people who asked, “How are you?” were told, “We’re living in two different houses now.” They reacted as if I had said that I’d found a lump. “But it’s fine!” I’d hasten to add. “It’s a good thing.” My son’s friend’s mom called up. “I hear things are ... awry,” she proceeded delicately. “No,” I rejoined tartly. “Actually, for the first time in years, they’re not.”
Divorce was complex, rich, a mixed bag, a windfall. It was multifaceted and infinitely layered. Divorce was rad in the sense of “affecting the basic nature or most important features of something,” “making changes of a sweeping or extreme nature,” and “excellent, admirable, or awe-inspiring.”
I thought that there must be other women out there having the same epiphany, and being an editor by vocation, I decided to put together an anthology. It just so happened that the publisher who fished my proposal from the slush pile had filed for divorce that very week. Within a few months, I had stories from a wide array of women. One had left a polygamous marriage. Another divorcée met a woman online, and moved to Finland to marry her. An artist in her 60s got married at a time when she couldn’t get a credit card without a husband, and a sassy twentysomething shared how happily she takes out her own trash—in red pumps.
There are indeed second acts in American lives, surprisingly lavish in their use of song and dance. When you’re told that you can’t get there from here, keep asking.
Portrait of bride by Stockbyte/Getty Images.
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Read Part 1 of Nina's Italian journey here.
I envy my bilingual friends, but I must admit my ugly-American monolingualism never really hindered me. I’ve traveled all over the Middle East and what I couldn’t understand there, translators could. We spent two years living in Paris, where I wrote a book about an Englishman. Nestled inside a bubble of expat Anglophones, I learned just enough French to amuse butchers and bartenders. Whatever else they say about Paris, most urban French know some English.
When we first came to Italy, I planned to exert the same minimal effort, with phrasebook and pocket dictionary. I quickly discovered that even the most educated Italians—lawyers, the ones I had to interview—spoke almost no English. After a frustrating month during which “pizza” “grazie,” “gelato,” and a winning smile didn’t cut it, I signed up for lessons at a language school in nearby Assisi.
For four hours on each of 20 long, hot August mornings, I sat among a half-dozen brown-robed Franciscan brothers from all over the world and a smattering of Chinese students, and got myself some Italian.
I hate school, and I whiled away the hours in my chair fidgeting, staring at the sandaled feet of the brothers, wondering why they all wear the same brand of sandals, noticing how the French brother actually wore sandal socks—socks with the toes cut off—and musing on how the young brother from Hyderabad, India, came to be a monk instead of a guru.
Rather quickly, I also noticed I was learning some Italian. Unlike the eliding French, whose language my flat Midwestern vowels and English-major pronunciation could never master, Italians actually pronounce every syllable of every word. If I could see the word on paper, I could say it.
The lessons also disinterred dusty memories of junior high school Latin. Suddenly the dead language was useful, just as predicted so long ago. Semper ubi sub ubi!
I rebelled, though, against memorizing the crucial Italian endings: Words are masculine or feminine, and one must remember a different vowel for each verb case. These niceties hinder my presto-quick, basic communication goals. I generally dispense with them, and find I can often get by simply blurting out a Latin root with an Italian flourish at the end. I’ve had a few problems with this. I called a fig a figa ... and Elio, our retired-Fiat-executive landlord, blushed to the roots of his gray hair, shaking his head and repeating “fig-OHH, fig-OHH.” Apparently putting the “a” on the end of “fig” is the Italian slang word for the female sex organ. That’s what I think he meant, anyway, but it’s not in my dictionary, either, so don’t try this at home, because I could still be getting the “a” and “o” confused right now.
Progress has been made. I revel in the bits of the language I can gain, the links that I, an English speaker, can easily make. A teacher is an insegnante, and a sign is a segnale. A teacher here, literally, is a “signer,” leading the little ones among the signs.
A crime is a delitto—to my ears, a little delight.
The word for wicked is cattiva—I imagine it related to captive, captivate, capture.
They call a car a machina. Simply, a machine.
The newspapers call the illegal immigrant a clandestino—person in hiding. To be angry is arrabiata—maybe holding within it the medieval memory of sword-swinging, beheading Arabs invading Otranto in the 1300s.
Italian is the language of music—piano, sotto, basso, allegro. It is not the language of commerce or force. Italians talk to their dogs in German or English, because the hard, Teutonic endings are better for giving commands.
I am an old dog learning a new trick here, and I know I don’t have the patience to follow through. I quit my lessons before we started learning the forms for future or past. I am trapped in the present tense, like a three year old.
“Yesterday I go ... .”
“Last year I do ... ."
There are days when I feel like I have it all figured out, when I chat by the iron gate with our man Elio about Berlusconi and I understand exactly what he is saying about the leader he loves to hate (“odio”). Then I go down to the grocery store and the disdainful clerk asks me if I have exact change, and I stare at her, uncomprehending, and the people in the long line behind me fidget and snort with annoyance.
I am just beginning to understand the Italian love-hate relationship with English. They do want to learn it, and many who say they don’t speak it actually understand it quite well. They hear it on movies and especially in American music.
That’s why it is surprisingly satisfying to occasionally drop an American f-bomb or, better yet, a stream of them. I realized this when I swore at a woman who cut me off in her car. She looked at me with a mixture of befuddlement and—I did not imagine it—admiration! In New York I would have been just another harried woman in need of a Xanax. Here the same wig-out elicits a measure of awe. Why? Because Italians hear these words on songs and movies, coming from the mouths of Hollywood actors and MTV popstars. They don't exactly know what they mean, but they sound cool.
For a brief shining moment, I speak and they hear the dulcet tones of Fiddy Cent.
Photograph courtesy of Nina Burleigh.
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