How Not to Calm a Child on a Plane (5 page)

  
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CKNOWLEDGMENTS

one

A PREGNANT PAUSE

I
t's a gorgeous August day in Southern California, the kind that makes you think you've just stepped into a 1980s music video by the Go-Go's. I am at a beach barbecue, surrounded by people in skimpy swimsuits. This being Manhattan Beach, we're not talking Average Joes here; we're talking the most perfect human specimens ever to have evolved from an amoeba with six-pack abs. My usual response to finding myself in a place like this would be to pluck my eye out with a spoon and/or cut off my dangly bits with a steak knife. But not today, because today I am CWC: Chubby With Cause. Today I am six months pregnant.

Six months: the sweet spot. Big enough to show, but not so engorged that I feel like a billboard for
Alien 5:
This Time It's Serious
. The second trimester has been kind to me, and I am feeling all of the things the books say I should feel: powerful, feminine, and intuitive, if maybe a little gassy. But most of all, I am in a state of perpetual emotional ecstasy. I spend the majority of my waking moments thinking about, talking about, and fantasizing about my future perfect motherhood with my future perfect baby, and when I do it's always in soft-focus, with lots of drapey material, dappled sunlight, and James Taylor music. I feel so happy, I could puke a friggin rainbow.

I'm sitting at a picnic table with some friends—some single, non-incubating friends—when a woman in a bikini walks over and asks if she can borrow a bottle opener. She is friendly, attractive, and very fit, except for her very exposed tummy, which is taut yet full; there's no mistaking it, this is a belly full of arms and legs. Sizing up the bulge, I take her to be four, maybe five, months along. Then again, she's in such great shape, she may be deep into her third trimester. For all I know, she's fixing to squirt that kid out in the next ten minutes.

I smile and give her a knowing wink; she smiles and gives me a knowing wink back. You know that wink, the wink that is shared between Mac owners, Volkswagen drivers, Canadian tourists, and closeted gay rugby players. That wink that says, “Hey, you. . . . It's me! We're members of the same tribe! . . .” (in our case the pregnant-sister-goddess-life-givers tribe). “. . . And aren't we fan-friggin-precious-tastic?”

So we're smiling and winking and squinching and basking in our perfect pregnant goddess-ness, when finally I
touch her hand and lean in to speak, but this time with actual words.

“How far along are you?” I ask.

She tilts her head, blinks, and says, “I'm not pregnant.”

You might think that the force of my sphincter rising up into my throat would have rendered me speechless, but no, not so. In fact, before I can stop and take a moment to either (a) slam my head into the lifeguard stand or (b) throw myself into a smoldering barbecue pit, my mouth opens to let yet another ingenious question flop out:

“Oh!” I say. “So, did you just
have
a baby?”

Exactly like that
.

“Did you just
have
a baby?”

With added guttural emphasis on the word “have.”

“Did you just
HAVE
a baby??”

Bikini Lady looks so intensely into my eyes, so deeply into my being, that she makes contact with my dead ancestors and shames them for having contributed to my gene pool.

“No,” she says. “I did not. Just.
HAVE
. A baby.”

“Oh,” I say and then feel a sharp pinch on my leg. It is one of my friends, who, in addition to having just welted me, is mentally recording this moment so that she can remind me of it on a monthly basis, apparently until the day that one of us dies. Her talonlike grip inflicts a bolt of pain that wakes me from my moron trance, at which point the verbal tripping begins: “I'm sorry, it's just that . . . you're so fit . . . and gorgeous . . . I just thought . . . you're so fit, except for the . . . you're just so gorgeous and fit!”

Bikini Lady says nothing. So in order to fill the awkward silence, I reach into myself and pull out the last tool left in my useless, rusting tool box: “I'm sorry, I don't know what I'm saying.
I'm drunk
.”

Bikini Lady looks at me like I have just sprouted a testicle on my face. She uses the bottle opener to crack the beer that was in her left hand all along,
^*
then walks away, kicking up sand with her perfectly pedicured, unpregnant feet.

Now, I've done stupid things in my life, but nothing in recent memory that compares to the blatant douchebaggery of this moment. And, while I do believe that Bikini Lady led me on during our “we-are-the-pregnant-world” wink-a-thon, even a brainless jellyfish knows you never ask a lady if she is “with child,” even if said child is bungee jumping on the end of an umbilical cord that's dangling from said lady's lady bits. But no, I couldn't even stop there; I had to travel the extra creepy mile of accusing her of having just birthed a baby, as if that were the only reasonable explanation for the remarkable potbelly on her otherwise perfect bod. For all I know, she has a tumor the size of a volleyball growing in there . . . Then again, maybe she just has weak abs; maybe she's eight weeks into a twelve-week workout regimen, and next week she's going to start working on her core. Or even worse, what if she is/was/is trying to get pregnant? Oh, God, I can't even go there . . . And then to try to skate out
of it with the old “I'm a pregnant alcoholic” excuse? Wow. Now
I'm
embarrassed for my ancestors.

As I sit in the suddenly way-too-hot California sun, I take a moment to contemplate my grand mal faux pas. Just moments ago, I was basking in the glow-y image of myself as an intuitive, benevolent, patchouli-scented earth mother. And now—approximately eight minutes and one throbbing leg later—I'm a jackass who makes bad decisions, speaks without thinking, and has an annoying need to be right all the time.

In other words, I am still me, only fatter.

Now, several years later, I have grown strangely grateful for my beach-blanket blooper, and even though it causes me to sweat profusely just thinking about it, I am compelled to tell the story again and again to anyone who will listen. I think it's because that was the moment I realized that nothing about parenthood would conform to my expectations. Sure, pregnancy and parenthood may have changed me, but not in the hippiefied, wind-chimey ways I'd expected. I was no more intuitive, serene, or feminine as a pregnant person than I was before I reproduced. Other than being a few sizes larger, in the most essential “me” ways, I was still the same dopey “me” I'd always been. And most days, that's an oddly comforting thought—though probably not to a certain bikini-wearing lady with weak abs and bad posture, who just wanted to enjoy a cold beer on a hot day.

*
Because apparently, I'm not only insensitive but legally blind as well.

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