I like when my friends get on me about not posting for a blue moon. So, thanks, ya’ll.
No, I haven’t lost my weak little mind or gone away permanently into my Morrissey corner. I was simply having one of those really, really bad days. It actually turned into a good one later on, but who wants to read extensively about someone's great day? Anyway; basta, pasta.

Baby, it’s cold outside.
The weather is like October’s supposed to be: brisk and truly chilly. Lentil soup weather. Leaves blowing around and sounding like Connect-4 plastic coins rattling down to the table-weather. And apparently, procreation weather.

In the last month, three (count ‘em!) of my female friends have told me that they’re either pregnant or trying. Frankly, I’ve been considering not writing about this here at all, for fear of looking like someone who’s saying, “She’s blissfully pregnant and her life is about to change forever. But, more importantly—How does this affect MEEE?” I am truly psyched for my friends; all three of ‘em will make wonderful mothers, their husbands, wonderful fathers - and I am really looking forward to watching the people I love become parents and all that goes with that.

It also makes me feel a little sad, a little left-behind. Already, my one friend has a lot more to talk about with our mutual friend who’s a mama than with me. That may sound whiny, but hey, it’s gut feeling.

blueprint.
While I know that having a child is not a necessary adult rite of passage and while I’m not sure it’s one I ever want to undertake myself, I can’t help but feel really wistful when I talk with people who are going through it. A pregnant woman becomes like a passenger on a canoe just tethered to the shore where you stand. Even when you’re spending time together, she is never really there, never really present. You’re shouting to each other across a gulf of understanding and hormones and preoccupation.

My sister told me that she is still careful not to get holier-than-thou with me on the baby-thing. Never have I heard a, “Just you wait. It changes everything,” from her; although I know it changes everything. I know it sets you apart. I’m 27. By the time my mother was this age, she was pregnant with my eldest sister. She’d been married for two years and she is married still, to the same man. My eldest sister was trying to get pregnant by the time she was my age. This is the blueprint I’ve always known: You get married in your 20s, then you have a baby and you own a house and you are stable. This has caused rifts with boyfriends who didn’t believe in marriage and rifts with my own damn self since I don’t really know whether I believe I want a baby.

And I know I don’t want one at this stage in life. I still like to go dancing, now and then. I think I’ll always go to rock shows, always listen to music, loud, in my car. Nor do I believe these traits to be evidence of some lack of maturity, some lack of character, some sign that I’m not ready for parenthood.

So Says the White American Lady.
What is the sign that I’m not ready for parenthood is simply that I’m not. It’s that knowledge and that knowledge alone. I’m more interested in devoting time to writing, to learning new things; hell, to having more than a thousand dollars or so in the bank. And of course, back in there somewhere, there’s the thought of What-Right-Have-I, with all we one-percenters squandering the resources of the other 99-percenters?

And of course I’m lucky, to live right now and right here in that this is even a choice for me. If I didn’t have access to the fullest range of birth control, I would have had at least one child already; there would be none of this, “But what about my writing??” business.

”You just do.”
So, how do you know, then? Thar’s the question, me’laddies and lassies. The They who know tell me it’s like a light, it’s like that episode of Laverne and Shirley where Laverne becomes a nun but can’t feel the Light of God and the other nun is like, “You just know,” and then at the end of the episode, the same beatific spotlight shines down on Laverne, too, and tells her to take off her nun-garb; she ain’t no sister of the cloth.

So far, I’m Laverne. Except not, because so far, I've received no word from God or my own instincts, either way.

"You just know." They tell me it’s like that, these mothers or mothers-to-be I know. They’ve always known they want to help a ten-year old with her spelling words, to teach a fifteen-year-old to drive. It’s supposed to be like that spotlight, something holy, not from you but from some mixture of the heavens and biology and personality type.

I’ve been told I’d make a great mother, but that’s not the same as knowing that’s what I want to do. I mean, I also have great skill at Super Mario Brothers, but you don’t see me doing that for a living. There are a thousand and one reasons, but it just comes down to: not right now.

Here is how it will be.
When you are standing in the grocery store, unsure of what to grab for a supper you should have eaten at least an hour before, they will be out of the only Progre**o soup you can palate anymore.

And this feels especially harsh and final-strawlike because tonight, you walked there not only for the utilitarian purpose of soup procurement, but for the walk itself, and for the activity of taking soup-can from shelf and then walking to the produce aisle to get some salad fixings to go with it, because you know what should go in a salad. You know what should go in a salad that tonight you will eat without thinking about how it tastes or whether it’s pleasing to you or just filler, after you’ve killed another ten minutes piling into your purple bowl the trimmed spinach plus arugula plus strawberries plus sliced red bell pepper. You know that’s the salad for you, and you know this is the soup, so you can operate in autopilot, although that makes your thoughts go back to where you don’t want them, back to the place of cliff-diving into nothing, into nothing to catch you. Into the Very Bad Recent Disappointment; that cliff all your friends recognized miles and miles before you did.

And then there’s no soup, at least not the right kind. And then what? Thirty varieties of mealy or lumpy or otherwise strangely-textured Wolf%ang Puck brand. Two hundred or so red and white striped Cam*bell’s. You are in a bad mood. A place where you feel like the absence of the soup (—just one goddamned can!) you wanted feels too cruel, like the injury that follows insult, but worse because you know you deserve it because you had these ridiculous high hopes. You feel self-punitive, so the whole situation feels fitting, but still shocking, like God is telling you you’re in fact so goddamned stupid you only deserve watery chicken with stars. And you’re crouched, knees bent, in that soup-grabbing pose you meant only to be momentary, and you’re saying in this silent screaming voice, Jesus, Powers-that-Be. Not. That worthless. Not that deserving of all this nothingness. Am. I?

But here’s what it is: when you are squatting there with that acrid lump in your throat, staring into the space where the Creamy Lentil should be, very much unable to move or make a single additional decision of any sort, the song playing will be "Dancing in the Moonlight."

Quick-!
Your ex is coming to town. What do you do with him/her/it?
Actually, there’s a handy, inverse equation we all can use:

The more you’re still caught up in the perhaps death-ray-like pull of your ex’s charms, the more intentionally cursory the planned activity.
So-!

Are you:

Over it? Politely interested, even, in hearing about the ex’s new stellar career, love of life plus baby, dog and charming cottage set on 20 acres of rolling farmland?

Activity: Long dinner and a carafe of Pinot Grigio. If you catch yourself nodding off, you can blame it on the wine.

Doing well and over the relationship, but still feeling the slightest twinges of sentimentality when you hear that freaking song?

Activity: Cheap beer and greasy fries at cozy booth in local noisy bar. Alternate: Beer and greasy fries, seated at crowded bar itself.

Doing fairly well, but absolutely secure in the knowledge that you are in no way prepared to hear a single “amusing” story about ex’s recent terrible date, let along ex’s more-recent hopeful date? Nor about his having learned pleasures of domesticity through remodeling the kitchen in his new house.

Activity: Iced Coffee at Quiktrip.

There’s a man on CNN right now who looks like a robot.
In a purple tie. It's true. But like, a robot from 1910, so more like an advanced marionette, held together with twine and strings and operated through some steam-engine contraption, and if I turned up the damned volume, you'd hear the toots of said-device between his herky-jerky spasms of speech. No joke.



I had a really good weekend at the beach and you didn’t.

Unless you did. More later.