Allison Pearson - I Don't Know How She Does It

At the thought of Jack undressing me, my whole being feels like a stocking silkily descending a leg.

“Kate, are you OK?” Momo is back with black coffee and the British papers.

“No. Terrible. Anything in the news?”

“Just the Conservative Party killing each other. And working mothers all cracking up. It says that 78 percent would give up their job tomorrow if they could.”

“Can’t be accurate. Those of us who are really stressed out don’t have time to fill in stupid surveys. What are you thinking, Momo?”

She is doing that cute wrinkly thing with her nose. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to have any. Kids. I really don’t know how you do it, Kate.”

“Compartments, that’s how. They go in one compartment, work goes in another, and you have to stop them leaking into each other. It’s tricky but not impossible. Anyway, you must have children. You’re beautiful and intelligent and there are enough gruesome morons reproducing out there.”

Momo shakes her head. “I like kids, I really do, but I want to go on with my career, and you said yourself how the City sees mothers. Anyway,” she says coolly, “I’m overeducated for looking after small children.”

How to explain to her? So many women of Momo’s age look at the likes of me, driven crazy by our double lives, and decide to put off having kids for as long as possible. I’ve seen it in my friends. They get to their mid-thirties, panic, pick the wrong guy — any sperm donor will do by then — find they can’t get pregnant and embark on IVF: painful and ruinous. Sometimes it works; mostly it doesn’t. We think we’ve outwitted Mother Nature, but Nature isn’t called Mother for nothing. She has her way of slapping us down, making us feel small. The world is going to end not with a bang but with a woman staring through a glass panel at her frozen eggs and wondering if she’ll ever have time to defrost them.

I try to shut out the noise of the airport and think of what Emily and Ben mean to me; then I gather what remaining strength I have and let Momo have it.

“Children are the proof we’ve been here, Momo, they’re where we go to when we die. They’re the best thing and the most impossible thing, but there’s nothing else. You have to believe me. Life is a riddle and they are the answer. If there’s any answer, it has to be them.”

Momo reaches into her bag and passes me a tissue. Is it the thought of the children that’s made me cry or the thought that last night I didn’t think of them at all?

8:53 P.M. FLIGHT FROM NEWARK TO HEATHROW. Adrenaline always gets you through a job, but on the way home the fact that I’ve been away kicks in like a hangover. Home. I feel both vital to it — how will they manage without me? — and painfully peripheral — they manage without me.

When I’m abroad, I sit in my hotel room in front of the laptop and call up my e-mails using Remote Access. You hear it dialing a long way off, somewhere at the far end of the universe. It takes a few seconds of bronchial static, then the bips do a tap dance off a satellite and come bouncing back. Remote Access. Isn’t that how I communicate with my children, dialing them up when I need to but otherwise keeping them at a distance? If I’m ever with Emily and Ben properly, for a few days and nights, I’m always struck by how shockingly alive they are. They’re not the shyly smiling girl and boy in the picture I just showed Momo, the one I keep in my wallet. Their need for me is like the need for water or light; it has a devastating simplicity to it. It doesn’t fit any of the theories about what women are supposed to do with their lives: theories written in books by women who never had children, or had children but brought them up as I mostly bring up mine — by Remote Access. Children change your heart; they never wrote that in the books. Sitting here in the front row of Club Class, nursing a large gin, I feel that absurd organ inside my chest, swollen and heavy as a gourd.

Momo is right next to me. Since the tears at the airport my assistant has been anxiously attentive; unnerved by this wistful stranger talking about the meaning of life, Momo wants normal Kate service to be resumed as soon as possible, and I’m pretty keen to get it back myself.

“Kate, I’ll swap you my Harvard Business Review for your Vanity Fair .” She offers me a supplement with a sober gray typeface.

“Does it have any pictures of Johnny Depp?”

“No, but there’s a terribly interesting article on the Do’s and Don’ts of Kinesthetic Presentation. Guess what point one is.”

“Undo two more blouse buttons than is strictly respectable?”

“No, Kate, seriously. ‘Ensure that your physical moves signal your intentions to the client.’”

“Like I said. Two blouse buttons.” (Why do I feel compelled to relieve this lovely solemn girl of her illusions? Perhaps I feel it’s better I get in first, before the men take them away.)

Across the aisle from us, a harassed brunette in a baggy pink sweater is trying to quiet a yelling baby. She stands up and jiggles her. She sits down again and attempts to pull the baby’s thrashing head into the cave of her shoulder; finally, she opens her shirt and tenders a breast. The suit in the neighboring seat takes one look at the mammary boulder and makes a bolt for the toilet.

There is a little-known Universal Law of Infant Crying: the greater the mother’s desperation and embarrassment, the louder the volume. Even without looking round, I can gauge the effect the mechanical howling has on my fellow passengers. The cabin crackles with the static of resentment: men who are trying to work, men who are trying to get some rest, women who may be savoring their last few hours of freedom and don’t want a reminder of what they can get at home, women away from their own kids and pricked by guilt.

The mother has a look on her face I know all too well. It’s two parts manic apology (“Sorry about this, everyone!”) to three parts defiance (“We’ve paid for our seat, just like the rest of you and she’s only tiny, what do you expect?”). Baby can’t be more than two or three months old; a pre-hair furze, fine as dandelion down, forms a corona around a skull that has the tensile strength and beauty of an egg. When she screams, you can see the pulse jump in the blue hollow at her temples.

“No, Laura, no, sweetie, that hurts,” the mother chides as the infant tugs furiously on her long dark hair. I get a sudden deep pang for my Ben. He does that when he’s overtired too: a baby’s frustration at not being able to enter sleep is that of an alcoholic locked out of a bar.

Momo looks on with a twenty-four-year-old’s horrified incomprehension. Under her breath, she asks me why the woman can’t shut the kid up.

“Because the baby wants to go to sleep, but the pressure in the baby’s ears is probably really hurting her. The only way you can equalize the pressure is to get her to drink something, but she won’t latch on to the breast because she’s too exhausted to suck.”

At the word suck , Momo gives a fastidious little shudder inside her Donna Karan gray wool and says she finds the whole idea of breastfeeding deeply weird.

I tell her it’s the opposite of weird. “In fact, it may be the only time in your life when your body makes perfect sense to you. I sat there in the delivery room and Emily rooted around and the milk started flowing and I thought, I am a mammal!”

“Sounds gross .” Momo does that wrinkly thing with her nose again.

“It wasn’t gross, it was comforting. We spend our whole life overruling what remains of our instincts and this one — how does that Carole King song go? ‘You make me feel like a nat-u-ral woman.’”