The Pussy Posse

One day, when I was complaining about a man I know who was being a bit vulnerable, possibly even a bit dramatic, my friend Mollie cut me short: "Women have pussies. Men just act like them." Mollie doesn't mix words; she's one of my Scorpio friends. And, though her theory doesn't always hold true, it did on that particular day.

Do you know that after a woman pushes another human being out through a very small opening in her own flesh, the people at the hospital tell her to "take a couple of Tylenol" for the pain? 

Tylenol. And I bet many women don't even bother.

That's what I need to talk about now that I've talked about Crazy Town: I need to talk about women. Or, as my friend Cathy would say, The Pussy Posse. Because, even though I love Sam, and even though he works really hard to be supportive, without the women in my life, I'd still be sitting in the trunk.

I am very lucky to have a wonderful and diverse posse. Some of the women in my life have been hanging around for a long time. Others are relatively new. A bunch showed up somewhere in between, but of course, that part is irrelevant; I am deeply grateful for all of them.

Girlfriends are the people who sit around in a church basement after your mother's funeral and manage to make you laugh. They call you up again and again and invite you to do things even when they know you're trying to sleep a year or two of your life away. Girlfriends bake your wedding cake for you, even though you were too young and too naïve to find a way to even get to their wedding. They come to your parties early, dressed up like they've been invited to some very posh affair, and equipped with incredible food they've prepared just for your event. Girlfriends each bring their own bottle of wine (or ginger beer), and they settle in, undistracted, for as long as the fire's going and as long as your husband is away.

Girlfriends laugh at you when you take yourself too seriously, they call your bluff when you're trying to cover something up, and they tell you to stop acting like an idiot when you are acting like an idiot. And if you're not the idiot, they are happy to join you in lambasting the person who is. Girlfriends walk past the screen door, hanging from just one hinge, and say, "We can fix that," and then they come in for a cup of tea. And they keep coming for tea even though you seem to be developing a habit of trying to demolish your front door.

Anyone who is lucky enough to have a good girlfriend, or two, or twelve, knows what I’m talking about. True friends rank as one of the very best aspects of being alive. As my friend Char says, "friends are the family we choose." And, when you find yourself pregnant, after trying to get pregnant, but horrified by the prospect of being pregnant nonetheless, you need these women friends…you need all the women you can get your mitts on.

You expect your sister to be there for you because she can't really escape you, right? And you expect all those crazy friends who had kids back in their prime to be there for you because frankly they've been trying to get you to join their club for years! Here's the part that surprised me: just about every woman you know, close friend or casual acquaintance, baby-lover or not…women all over the place come to your aid.

I didn't anticipate this. I thought I would be going through it essentially alone, missing my mother and paying for my own past failures to support and celebrate my pregnant friends. But, I was wrong; I had more support than I knew what to do with. One day I was visiting my dad and I sat crying at the kitchen table because I was more than halfway through my pregnancy and my baby-to-be still didn't have a single thing to wear. On cue, my dad's wife Louise produced a gift bag with a bunch of soft little nightgowns. From there, it was as if every woman in the universe heard my plea and the supplies started rolling in. First, it was boxes and boxes of hand-me-downs from friends in Colorado and Connecticut and Maine. Then our basement filled up with swings and seats and play stuff from a friend who, best of all, would need it all back when we were done! 

One night in July, my non-mom friends came to pick me up for a summer girls' night. It was Cathy's birthday that night, but still, they piled out of two cars in my driveway with armloads full of little frilly dresses, fuzzy blankets, hand painted onesies and, for me, wine and a gift card for a future dinner out. These friends, with beautiful bodies that have never been stretched, forced me to snap out of my self-consciousness and embrace my own bulge.

And my already-mom friends, the same friends I ran around Burlington with doing all kinds of things that I imagine laughing about someday, when our kids (all but one of whom are girls) are grown enough to sit around and tell those tales to...

…well, those friends bought me all the gifts I didn't want but they knew I would eventually need. And I did need them.

And when I really just needed my mom, my friends even shared their moms. Carol, who bought some of Quinn's most adorable outfits and accessories, called me from North Carolina after Quinn was born and kept me company on the phone for a very long time while I struggled through the early days of nursing. And Wendy, who filled Quinn's room with more wonderful stuff, including her first pair of cowboy boots, has also continued to fill my inbox with just the kind of encouragement my own mom would provide if she were here…even though Wendy has, at the same time, been watching her own mother struggle through the ailments of her old age.

Then there were the neighbors, who sent sleds and beautiful silver bowls and more outfits…the same neighbors whose husbands have had to come out in the wintery dark to pull me out of ditches. And there are the friends from school, and the parents of students from school...who knitted hats and sweaters, and sent books, and little gardening tools, and fuzzy unicorns.

I can't even catalog all the stuff, and all the kind gestures…it would take way too long. Suffice it to say, Quinn is six months old now and I am still writing thank you notes.

My point is this: women are extraordinary, whether they are sisters or friends or acquaintances…they have a sixth sense that detects what other people need. And they provide for one another. They help each other get ready for the big events, and then they help each other recover after the big events. They take your calls and give you the information you need. And, after you confess your insanity to the world, lots and lots of them take the time to write you an email and tell you about the times they went to Crazy Town too.

I can't even really express how humbled I am by them, and how grateful I am for them. And I keep thinking about how I might have been a better girlfriend myself if my mom had been around to coach me in my twenties, and so, as Quinn naps next to me on the bed—our new weekend ritual: she sleeps and I write—I'm trying to figure out how to be sure Quinn gets this coaching, whether I'm here to provide it myself or not. 

So that's what this entry is about: it's about jotting some things down for Quinn to read someday when she is older, and it's about saying thank you…Thank you for the stuff, and the support, and the empathy, and the encouragement and all that magical estrogen. Thank you for being in my posse. A million times and for the rest of time: thank you.

Payback

I don't like babies. I did not get pregnant because I liked or wanted a baby, but rather because I wanted to someday have a teenage kid in my life, who would continue to grow up from there and become, hopefully, more and more interesting. When we were contemplating having a baby, I really just wanted another puppy, but I knew I'd have to invest in that future teenager and there appears to be no other way than to start small…literally.

So, getting pregnant became a goal and I am a goal-oriented person. In the first month that we didn't succeed, I was ticked off. Not because that put me one month further away from a baby, but because I had failed to achieve the goal.  In the second month that we didn't succeed, I was psychological: What if I'm too old? What if I can't? As soon as I imagined being told that I was incapable of reproducing, I of course wanted to even more…again, not because of a desire for a baby, but rather because I absolutely bristle at being told what I cannot do and then I go forth Braveheart style on a mission to do that very thing.  The third month was November and Sam was away so instead of worrying about the goal I hosted the annual Scorpio Party for all of my sassy Scorpio and Honorary Scorpio girlfriends. (I'm guessing you're not surprised to learn that I'm a Scorpio).

It was December when the goal was finally reached and I thought, "Oh shit! Now I'm pregnant!" 

It was on the night of the 30^th when I was waitressing at Egan's and I first started to sense it. I was serving chicken fingers to a bunch of obnoxious kids who were being ignored by their obnoxious parents who were busy sending me back and forth from the kitchen for one friggin' thing at a time. For years, waitressing had been great birth control. Why would I ever want to have kids after seeing kids who were allowed to behave badly in restaurants? My Scorpio and Honorary Scorpio girlfriends and I would sit around at Table 8 after hours drinking wine, talking about all those condescending people from New York and New Jersey and think, "Ha! Joke's on you, people! You and your obnoxious kids, schlepping all the way up here for a brief respite from your insane life, and we live here, in the mountains, without kids, playing every day instead of once a year!"  But that night, as I walked back and forth to the kitchen from the stupid booth that's built out of a car, that all those friggin' kids want to sit in, to fetch another fork, or a bit of ketchup, or some other thing that the kid or the parent was screaming for, I walked back and forth gripped by the growing realization that I was suddenly in danger of living that very same insane life…not to mention getting very fat, very soon.

Sam and I had friends visiting for New Year's Eve, so I waited until New Year's Day when everyone cleared out to go upstairs and take the test. The damned thing confirmed my worst fears: I had just cashed in my free & independent, healthy & fun life for fatness and chaos and servitude. I called my sister Amy before I told Sam. I was in a full-blown panic. And, as she had done when I wet my pants playing Hide & Seek in the fourth grade, she laughed at me, though admittedly with a bit of empathy this time. But she did laugh, and she laughed because she suspected that my panic would subside and I would eventually come around to the fact that I did, after all, enter into this project willingly.

This same issue of my own culpability came up when I went to my first doctor's appointment: "Congratulations," said the doctor. "How do you feel?"

"Horrified!" I told her, thinking this was a normal response. She looked puzzled.

"Is this a planned pregnancy?" she asked. When I said yes, she was really confused. And when I saw the little peanut-shaped creature on the ultrasound screen, and heard the heartbeat for the first time, so was I. My doctor sent me home with a handful of business cards for therapists she recommended.

I never called them because I had Amy. My sister gets me. And she knows how to help. She listens, she validates, she comforts. She doesn't judge, she doesn't get impatient, and she inherited from our mother the ability to give a very good pep talk. 

Someday I'll forgive her for making me stand up next to her
as her Maid when I was 4.5 months pregnant wearing a
moo-moo and she looked like this!

I'm pretty sure Amy knew all along that I would eventually fall completely in love with whatever offspring I managed to produce.  So, when I started leaving her voicemail messages to the effect of "Now, when I sneeze, I pee myself! Call me back," well, she called back, every time, and she helped me to laugh and to exhale and to get through my pregnancy one very long day at a time. Don't get me wrong; I had an easy pregnancy. The only thing that wasn't easy was me. I worry a lot, and have a hard time anticipating big changes. And, I don't like to share…at all. I don't like to share my chocolate, or the blanket, never mind my blood supply! 

Frankly, I probably never deserved to even have Quinn given this melodramatic explanation of her arrival. But, I did have her and of course I now understand what all my crazy mom-friends were trying to tell me all those years…it really is different when the baby is your own. But this entry isn't meant to be about Quinn; it's about Amy.

Amy is different than me in many ways, but she too is a Scorpio (albeit a kindler, gentler one), and she is also goal oriented. And even though she actually loves babies, all of them—babies in all shapes, sizes, colors and constitutions...

...she too gets worked up about simply achieving the goal. So, while she's trying to do that, I'm trying to remember all of the things she did for me to help me through the process. The trouble is that I'm not always a good listener. My way of "comforting" is often to offer unsolicited advice, and when my advice is not embraced, I tend to get impatient. (Yesterday, driving home from my dad's house in Massachusetts, Sam and I listened to an old cd of Men Are From Mars. Women Are From Venus. If that guy's information is accurate, I'm embarrassed to say that my outer Tom Boy isn't just on the outside and I'm not always a very good Venusian.) But here again, I know I have to rise to the challenge.

We are motherless women, Amy and I, and we have to stick together. Sure, our mother shows up in dreams now and then, but believe me—it's not the same as having her show up on the other end of the phone! So, I owe Amy, and I need to show up on the other end of the phone a bit more often.  And for the days that I don't, I hope she'll come back to this entry and know that I'm trying to be half the friend to her that she has been to me. 

And if no one else comes back to this blog ever again, now that I've revealed rather plainly some of my more abhorrent shortcomings, well, I won't blame you.  But if you do come back, I promise I'll reward you with some glass-is-half-full stuff, and a long entry about the broad Society of Women that I am deeply grateful for…it includes my sister, and my Scorpio and Honorary Scorpio friends, and my crazy and not-so-crazy mom friends who are all light years ahead of me in their maturity and their wisdom.