Love at the Speed of Email (2 page)

Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Christmas is a glorious
ideal. I love almost everything about it – tiny lights gleaming through a dark
and spiky green, the smell of warm sugared cinnamon, the way life slows down
and gifts us time with family and friends. I love how the compass of Christmas
can point us toward what’s truly important in our lives and how the dawning of
a new year directs us to consider whether we are living up to our own hopes.

And the music … How can you hear
O Holy Night
sung with passion and not be stirred?

A thrill of hope, the
weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a
new and glorious morn.

Fall on your knees! O,
hear the angels’ voices!

O night divine…

There is something divine about Christmas – in good years,
anyway. But perhaps the very glory of the ideal also risks overburdening the
actual day. For if Christmas doesn’t quite live up to expectations, you’re not
just having a below-average day you’re having it
on Christmas
, which is ten times worse. It makes you guilty of not
only having woken up on the wrong side of the bed but also of transgressing the
Ten Commandments of Christmas. For, as we all know, the first of those Ten
Commandments is:

Thou shall feel all
happy and holy on Christmas morning. Thou shall definitely not sit on the floor
in front of the Christmas tree feeling grumpy and a bit jealous that everyone
else has someone to cuddle when all the extra warmth you have is a cup of
coffee.

But there I was, guilty as charged and about to be put to
the test with regard to another of the Christmas commandments:
Thou shall at all times remember that
presents are not the point of Christmas; people are.
 

That cold Christmas morning, my little brother was selected
as first present-elf. Matt pointed at me, laughed, and pulled eighteen rolls of
toilet paper out from where he’d hidden them behind the couch.

“Sorry they’re not wrapped,” he said.

Considering I’d just been gifted
toilet paper
, it wasn’t exactly the lack of wrapping that bothered
me.

“They’re a stand-in present,” Matt said. “Something else is
coming, but it didn’t get here in time. And, you know, you didn’t actually
have
any toilet paper in the house when
Lou and I stayed with you.”

He had a point. When Matt and Louise had stopped in L.A. for
a visit ten days earlier, I’d been out of toilet paper and, thanks to long days
at work, remained so for three days.

 
“Paper towel works
just fine if you rip it up into small enough pieces,” I said, repeating the
argument I had used then.

Lou laughed.

“No,” Matt replied, smirking, “paper towel does not work
just fine.”

When my turn came around again, my parents were next. The
package they handed me was soft. I opened it to find a T-shirt from my favorite
clothes store in Australia. There was only one problem: it was huge.

“This is an extra large,” I said, confused, after I checked
the tag.

“I
told
you she
wasn’t an extra large,
Merrilyn
,” Dad said.

“Oh?” Mum said. “I just thought that looked about the right
size.”

I held the shirt up against me. It came halfway to my knees.

“What size do you normally wear?” Mum asked.

“Medium!”
I said.

“Really?!?”
Mum said, “I would have
thought you were at least a large.”

“
Merrilyn
!”
my father hissed, kicking her.

I was zero for two, but my sister was next. Michelle is very
thoughtful and often keeps an eye out for ways to put people at ease, so it’s
perhaps understandable that I failed to take due notice of the grin she wore –
one part naughty, one part proud – as she handed me her present. But even if
I’d recognized it as such, I’m pretty sure I still wouldn’t have been able to
figure out what my younger, married, pregnant sister had wrapped for me so
gaily.

It was a book.
The complete
book of international adoption: A step-by-step guide to finding your child.

“What?” Michelle said into the stunned silence that preceded
laughter all around the family circle. “You’ve always said that if you don’t
get married you’ll think about adopting kids. Now you know where to start. And
it was on sale for five bucks!”

Los
Angeles, USA

I laughed in that moment on Christmas morning. The funny
factor outweighed the sting I felt, sitting there in my flannel pajamas,
looking around at everyone else neatly paired up with someone. But by April,
when my early-morning phone alarm reminded me of my July wedding in Australia,
it was getting less funny. I was beginning to worry that Michelle’s Christmas
present had set the theme for the entire year, for just a week earlier I had
also been blindsided by the solitary present I had to open on the morning of my
thirty-first birthday.

My birthday started early. Sadly, this was not because of
excitement related to piñatas, upcoming parties, or trick candles adorning
strawberry cheesecake. It was because I had to drive a friend to the airport at
5 a.m. after a weekend spent celebrating Robin’s long-awaited wedding.

I hadn’t planned anything to mark this birthday – I’d known
my California crowd would be all partied out after spending most of the weekend
at various wedding-related events. So I had fully intended to get up early, do
the airport run, and come back and get straight to work on the final draft of
my first novel. I’d already been working on rewriting the novel for a year, and
the final copy-editing deadlines were looming. But when I got back from the
airport at 6:30 a.m. that Sunday and looked between my desk and my pillow, it
wasn’t even a close call.

I was so going back to sleep.

As I climbed back into bed I ripped open the padded yellow
envelope that had arrived four days earlier adorned with stern instructions
that it was to be saved until my birthday.

Inside that envelope was another book, posted to me by one
of my best friends from Australia,
Tash
.

The title of
this
book was
Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady
Explorers
. On the cover was a small brunette. She was wearing a white lacy
dress buttoned to her chin and a pith helmet. She was shading this unlikely
ensemble with a parasol and stepping daintily through the jungle.

“What spurred so many Victorian women to leave behind their
secure middle-class homes and undertake perilous journeys of thousands of
miles, tramping through tropical forests, caravanning across deserts, and
scaling mountain ranges?” asked the back cover. “And how were they able to
travel so freely in exotic lands, when at home such independence was denied to
them?”

This scintillating manifesto on international singleness was
still lying on my bedside table five days later when my phone woke me with its
shrill commands to get engaged, and while I wasn’t amused that morning, by
dinner that night I’d regained some of my sense of humor.

“I want to write an essay about this whole topic of being
single at thirty-one,” I explained to my
flatmate
,
Travis, from where I was sitting on a stool behind the kitchen counter while he
made both of us dinner. “But I don’t want people to wonder whether I’m just
putting a brave face on acute psychic pain.”

“They won’t. They’ll just think you’re being a drama queen,
as usual,” Travis reassured me. “But while we’re on the topic,
are
you putting a brave face on acute
psychic pain? I mean, I’m thirty and single and I’m just fine with that. But I
think this whole topic is harder for women. There seems to be something about
turning thirty that freaks women out. And, let’s face
it,
I can still have children when I’m seventy if I want to. You can’t.”

* * *

My first instinct was to issue a quick and emphatic denial
in response to Travis’ question about pain.

Sure, being single at thirty-one was not exactly how I had
imagined my life playing out when I was in high school. When I was fifteen I
had this all sorted. I wouldn’t get married at twenty-one as my parents had.
Instead, I’d leave it daringly late and marry at twenty-four. I’d have my first
baby at twenty-seven. And I would somehow manage to do all this while being a
trauma surgeon and living in Africa.

According to that plan, I am now both off-track and way
behind schedule.

But there have been some very good things about my teenage
plans’ being turned on their head. If I had married at twenty-four – just after
finishing six years of study to qualify as a forensic psychologist – I would
not have been free to ring up my parents, confess that I wasn’t that keen
anymore on working as a psychologist and ask whether I could come live with
them for a while and try my hand at writing novels while I looked for jobs in
the humanitarian field.

When one such job opportunity arose, I probably would not
have been able to take off on twelve days’ notice to move to Croatia.

After living for a while in the Balkans, I might not have
been able to accept a scholarship to spend a year doing another master’s degree
in peace studies just because it sounded like fun. Or relocate to California
afterward simply because it seemed like a good idea to take a job in Los
Angeles as a stress-management trainer for humanitarian workers – a job that
keeps me traveling at least one week out of four and sometimes for weeks on
end.

I may never have finished my first novel, which I wrote on
weekends, when I was beholden to no one but myself.

I would not have had nearly as much time to invest in a
wide, rich friendship network that encircles the globe.
 

All of this I knew, but there was no denying that there had
been something about turning thirty that was profoundly unsettling.
 

* * *

Right up until I was 29 years 8 months and 14 days old, I
thought turning thirty was no big deal. Then I noticed I was preempting the
question.

You
know,
that
question.

“How are you feeling about the big three-0?”

I’d started answering this question before the other person
had even finished asking. I’d pull a bland adjective out of thin air –
fine, good, great
– and deliver it with
breezy unconcern.

Then I’d let it sit there.

The other person would usually pause, waiting for me to fill
the silence with bright protestations about how I
really was
fine with the fact that I was turning thirty and still
single, with no prospects of popping out babies any time soon, and how it’s all
been worth it because I love my job and I wouldn’t trade all the experiences
I’ve had in the past ten years for anything. All this was true, but I didn’t
like being expected to say it. And when I didn’t oblige with the culturally correct
dialogue, the conversation usually moved on.

The day I turned 29 years 8 months and 14 days old, however,
the conversation didn’t move on. I looked up to notice that the person who had
just asked me the question was staring at me with rather more puzzlement than I
thought the answer warranted.

“What?” I said.

“Fine?”
she
repeated.

“Uh-huh.”

“I ask you how you’re feeling about the situation in Somalia
and all you have to say is
fine
?” she
said.

Oh.

This was when I started to get annoyed. I didn’t want to be
one of those people who have a crisis about turning thirty. Even now, a year
later, I still can’t figure out exactly what might be unsettling me, given that
I don’t think the ticking of my biological clock is anywhere near becoming an
imperative.

I know it’s possible that I am subconsciously worried about
this inexorable biological countdown, but despite offhand comments to family
and friends about how I plan to adopt kids if I never get married, I really
don’t think it’s my major concern.

When I look at other people’s children, no matter how cute,
I still mostly just feel relieved that they’re not mine. This was only
underscored by a conversation I had recently with my boss’s wife.

“Oh, little Sam’s getting over his first bad cold,” she
said, exhausted, when I asked her how the kids were. “He’s not really sick
anymore, just miserable. He’s been hanging off my leg, whining, wanting to be
held all the time, and I can’t get anything done.”

“Gee,” I said, “that must make you want to bend down and
tell him, ‘Get used to it, buddy, that’s life. You’re going to feel crappy
sometimes and people can’t put everything on hold to pay attention to you every
time you’re grumpy. Deal with it.’”

“
Ummm
, no,” she said, clearly
making a mental note never to ask me to baby-sit. “It makes me want to pick him
up and comfort him.”

No, I don’t feel ready for kids yet. I don’t have that
powerful soul-deep hunger to be a mother that I hear some of my girlfriends
talk about. I’m not sure I ever will. But I
am
starting to catch myself wondering sometimes, in a much more abstract fashion,
whether I’m going to miss out altogether on those beauties and struggles
peculiar to parenthood or on learning how to be genuinely vulnerable in a way I
suspect that only the bond of marriage allows. And whether, if I do, I’ll wake
up in fifteen years and still believe that it was worth it – this choice that I
have made again and again throughout my twenties to pursue adventure and
novelty and helping people in faraway lands rather than stability and
continuity and helping people in a land I claim as mine.