Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney - The Nest

“Yeah, that’s what they all say,” the farmer said, grinning. “Then the kid starts walking and talking. Soon he won’t sit in your lap anymore and before you know it”—he gestured toward her middle—“you’re cooking number two.”

“Hmmmm,” she said noncommittally, holding a palm out for her change.

She’d listened to her pregnant friends complain for years about the invasiveness a protruding belly engendered, how even in New York where you could stand inches away from someone’s face on the subway secure in the tacit but universal agreement that nobody (sane) would engage with you, ever, all bets were off when you were pregnant.

Boy or girl? First one? When are you due? (Stephanie always heard When are you due? as What do you do? Always.) So she had been prepared for the annoying questions, but the thing she found most infuriating was how everyone needed to talk not only about the baby she was gestating, but also about her unplanned, unwanted future children. It was so odd. As if only wanting one child was already undercutting the motherhood that hadn’t even officially begun. As if these strangers had something at stake in the process. As if having one baby, alone, was some kind of halfhearted gesture, a part-time commitment. ( Oh, they’re just jealous, Pilar, mother of one astonishingly charming and erudite nine-year-old son, told her. They want to make sure you’re going to be knocked back on your ass as soon as you’re sleeping all night. Misery loves company, my friend. )

“So do you know what it is?” the farmer said, counting out her ones.

“It’s a girl.”

“Got your name.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling thinly. “But that’s my secret.” She’d learned to keep her counsel on baby names the hard way. When she started mentioning names she was considering, before the obvious one occurred to her, everyone had an opinion based on logic so subjective and personal that it was utterly bizarre: “My first wife was named Hannah and she was a cold bitch.” “My daughter has four Charlottes in her class.” “Natasha is kind of cold war, no?”

It also seemed to Stephanie that like so much else surrounding parenting, naming had become a competitive sport. Some dude in her childbirth class couldn’t stop talking about his Lotus spreadsheet for baby names. “We have three priorities,” he explained to a bored Stephanie and a bemused childbirth instructor ( she’d seen it all). “The name needs to be unique, it needs to reflect the ethnic background of both my wife and me — a little bit Brit, a little bit Jew — and”—he paused for effect—“it needs to be mellifluous. Pleasing to the ear.”

“I know what mellifluous means,” Stephanie said.

“Sophia is the type of name we’re going for,” his wife added in her clipped BBC accent, “but it’s much too popular these days.”

“It’s popular because it’s pretty,” Stephanie said. “A classic old-fashioned name.”

“ Too popular, I’m afraid, and the classic tips to trendy,” the wife said, putting a sympathetic palm on Stephanie’s arm, who she clearly thought was hapless and uninformed.

“In addition to the top three priorities,” the husband continued, “we have subset qualifications.” He ticked off the items on his fingers. “What happens when you Google the name? How many syllables? Is it easy to understand over the phone? Is it easy to type on a keyboard?”

The last one was too much; Stephanie burst out laughing. The couple hadn’t really spoken with her again.

“Good luck,” the farmer said, waving his hand as she walked away. “This will be the only quiet Mother’s Day you have for a long time. You let your husband pamper you.”

This was another thing that surprised Stephanie, although she supposed it shouldn’t. How everyone assumed because she was pregnant that she was also married. She lived in New York City, for Pete’s sake. Not just New York, Brooklyn ! She wasn’t the first fortysomething woman to have a baby alone, but even if she was having the baby with someone, who said she was married? Who said her someone wasn’t another woman? She wasn’t only offended by the near unanimous conventionality of everyone’s automatic assumptions, she was unsettled because she knew her daughter would eventually face the same kind of cavalier reasoning about a father who — well, who knew what the story with her father was, what it might be when the baby was old enough to ask.

Stephanie redistributed the shopping bags so her shoulders and arms were evenly weighted and started to walk home. It was downhill from the park to her house, thank goodness. Her legs felt strong, but her center of gravity was shifting and her back hurt if she walked too far while carrying packages. She should get one of those shopping carts on wheels, but she’d be pushing a stroller soon enough.

Stephanie was still annoyed about the farmer’s husband comment. There wasn’t much about having a baby alone that stymied her except what to tell people about Leo— whether to tell them about Leo. Her closest friends and coworkers knew the story, sort of. They all knew about Leo and their past, how he had briefly resurfaced and that she’d been surprised but happy to find herself pregnant and now he was no longer in the picture.

It was harder with the casual acquaintance or the out-and-out bold and nosy stranger. Many people were stopped with a curt, “I’m a single mom.” But many weren’t. She was going to have to come up with something specific enough to shut everyone up but not intriguing enough to encourage questions.

She also hated the looks of pity and concern that accompanied her deliberately upbeat clarification that she was having the baby alone. Pity was such an absurd sentiment to be on the receiving end of because all she felt was lucky. Lucky to be having a baby, lucky to be forming slow but encouraging bonds with Leo’s siblings and their families, which she was doing specifically for her daughter so that she would have a sense of her extended family.

Stephanie was the only child of a widowed mother who had died years ago. She’d loved her childhood and her doting, accessible, smart, and funny mom. The only regret she had about not having a baby sooner was that her mother was gone and her mother would have been an amazing grandmother. But Stephanie had been lonely sometimes as a girl, too, so she hoped the Plumbs would embrace her and Leo’s baby and so far, they had.

If Stephanie was perfectly honest with herself, she knew that the particular family configuration hers was about to take was her preferred configuration because it was what she knew. If she was being scrupulously honest, one of the reasons she’d never had a kid was because having a father in the picture was something she didn’t know what to do with. It wasn’t really something she’d missed. Her mother and her cousins and summers in Vermont with her beloved uncle satisfied her craving for family. In the middle of the night, in the dark, where nobody could see the satisfied smile on her face, her hand on her rising belly, she recognized that although this baby hadn’t been premeditated (it hadn’t, Leo had shown up at her door), the night of the snowstorm she didn’t insist on a condom, something she had, quite literally, never done before — not during the most inebriated hookup, not during the most spontaneous erotic moment.

She hadn’t planned the pregnancy ( hadn’t), but she hadn’t prevented it and if she was being brutally honest, deep in the night in the privacy of her room, her room, hand on her belly gently rising and falling with the undulating motion of her rolling, kicking, hiccuping baby, listening to the quiet of her creaky house under the duvet arranged exactly as she liked, she could admit the truth about the night of the snowstorm: that she’d let a tiny aperture of possibility open to something that was of Leo but wasn’t Leo. And that she liked it that way.