I Want To Steal Your Baby

I spend half an hour holding a gorgeous baby on a sunny Saturday morning. He’s ten months old but small for his age, and he’s all smiles, laughing as we play peek-a-boo with a book his big sister left on the dining table. “He doesn’t usually like strangers,” his surprised grandmother says to me.

“I’m the baby whisperer,” I tell her. Then, as we’re leaving, the baby is still tugging on my hair as I tell the room, “I’m totally going to steal him.”

We all laugh.

But I really, really want to steal that baby.

*

I love living in New York, because it’s a city of people with Big Ideas who have made Choices and have Opinions, and not always the popular, middle-America ones.

Many of the women I know in New York are in their 30s and 40s and beyond and don’t have kids. The assumption I make about them is that they decided they weren’t going to have them. They woke up one day - at twelve or twenty or thirty-two - and said “nope, kids are for other people, but they aren’t for me,” and they happily moved forward with their lives.

It’s the easy thing to assume. It’s the happy thing to assume, and these women look happy.

When I look in the mirror, I look happy a lot of the time. I joke and laugh at work. I go out to plays and long dinners with friends. I travel, carefree and kid-free, able to do a weekend in Vegas or Boston or Chicago without much notice.

Is that what people assume, when they look at me? That kids would hold me back? That kids don’t fit into my lifestyle? That I made a choice? I didn’t make a choice about kids.

*

I don’t have kids because.

I’ve been trying to finish that sentence for a while now:

because I never found the right partner;

because I can’t afford to do it on my own;

because I focused too much on my job, I didn’t give online dating a fair shake, I stupidly believed in ‘you’ll find The One’ and ‘things happen at the right time’;

because no one ever really explained how women’s bodies work, that I would hit 35 and start on a stark downward spiral of fertility, that at 40 my chance of getting pregnant even if I was trying really hard would be 20%, and at 45 it’ll be 5%.

It all boils down to “I wanted kids and I don’t have kids and I probably won’t be having kids.”

*

There’s a woman I’ve known for years at work. She’s tall and lovely, with a warm smile that makes her a favorite among our coworkers. “I notice you don’t have children,” I yearn to say to her. “Do you not want them? Has it always been that way? Or are you like me? Did you want kids but never found the right partner? Or maybe you tried and tried and tried, with a partner or without. Maybe your body isn’t built for having children. Maybe your heart isn’t built for doing it alone.”

I don’t ask these questions.

“Have you ever thought about just having a one-night stand from Craigslist, just to see if you could manage to get knocked up? You wouldn’t even need to know his last name,” I don’t say to the friend-of-a-friend who is over 40 and divorced, sitting at our favorite table in the back of our Thursday night bar.

“Have you ever wondered if having a baby alone would be easier if your mom moved in with you? Or is your mom a little crazy like my mom?” I never ask the brilliant woman with a PhD who is my monthly lunch date.

“How do you apologize to your dad for not making him a grandfather when you know he would love that more than anything?” I think to myself, sitting quietly with some of the other single ladies at a baby shower for my friend’s second kid. It’s going to be a cute kid.

They’re all cute kids.

Man, I really want to steal a baby.

*

I don’t ask these questions because no one asks these questions. In the women-can-have-it-all era of post-second-wave-feminism, it’s assumed that what a girl wants, she gets. We’re all active participants in our lives, after all. If we don’t have kids, we made the choices to get us there. The ‘childfree by choice’ movement has books and podcasts and blogs all telling women it’s okay to not want to be a mom. You won’t be less of a woman. The fabric of society won’t come tumbling down. And they’re right! If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have kids. That sounds like basic common sense. Go you, ladies who never liked babies, or who prefer being an aunt to being a mom! Do what you do!

But I’m not one of you.

And I bet there are people reading this who aren’t either.

But I can’t tell for sure, because no one ever talks about failing to become a mother. New Yorkers don’t fail at big life things like that. Women with great careers and advanced degrees are smart enough not to get to a point in their lives where they don’t have something they desperately want.

I know a bunch of you are rolling your eyes right now. “Why doesn’t she just have one on her own?” you’re asking and I wonder if you’ll lend me $18,000 a year to put my kid in a Manhattan day care. “You can adopt,” you say, and I barely refrain from sending you a dozen articles on how hard it is to adopt a baby as a single person. “What about fostering?” Well, that one I’m actually looking in to, but fostering a kid over the age of four (which most of them are) requires a free second bedroom in your apartment. Most single women in NYC would be dropping 60% or more of their paycheck on rent, if we all wanted to be foster moms.

A note to everyone, everywhere: all women who are in this boat have already asked ourselves these questions. We are still asking them, every day, just in case some miracle has occurred to give us an extra paycheck, or an extra set of hands to help with midnight feedings or a medical miracle that would save our failing bodies, would give us time to make plans or save more money.

Billy Joel is having a new baby this year. Billy Joel is 66. Fuck you, Billy Joel.

*

Besides, all of those options would still make me a single parent. Choosing to be a single parent is amazing and heroic, and I salute those of you who make that choice. But I have weighed it, back and forth, for years now, and it’s not the right choice for me, financially but especially emotionally. I want a family, I want support, I want to share the joy of being a parent with another person.

I spend a lot of time berating myself these days, worried that this no-kid thing is not a failure of body, but a failure of my heart. It’s a failure to make the connection that everyone in every rom-com ever made has managed with a meet cute on a train platform, or by awkwardly tripping over a stranger in a coffee shop. It’s a failure to be pretty enough, or thin enough, or smart enough. Or maybe I’m too smart? Should I talk less? More? Should I go out with everyone who asks me out, just in case, even if I don’t like them? What if no one asks me out? Why didn’t I settle for good enough years ago??

This is not a productive line of thinking.

Right now, my Truth-with-a-capital-T is that I didn’t meet someone, and I’m not old (I’m not even middle-aged), but I’ve pretty much run the clock down on the ‘partner + babies = family’ lifestyle I envisioned for myself. It sucks. I’d like to talk to someone other than my therapist about it. But other women don’t ask me if I’d ever intended to have kids, or if I’m sad that I don’t have kids, or if this was a choice or just circumstance, just plain bad luck. And they don’t volunteer that information about themselves. Why would they - no one likes to broadcast a failure. The consequence is that I often feel utterly alone in my childlessness, like one layer of loneliness dumped on top of another.

Maybe we’d all start talking about it if we all started stealing those babies. A national baby-stealing epidemic would open up this conversation for sure.