In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free Page A

subtle, more psychologically nuanced and enlightened; latter-day critics of the state are thinking, of course, of what is best for the children, what is the healthiest environment; they are not opposed to extramarital philandering per se, but there is still underlying everything the same unimaginative approach to family, the same impulse to judge, the same sexual conservatism and herd mentality. The single mother traipsing up the subway steps in heels with her Maclaren is not as many worlds away as you would think from Hester Prynne.
    One day one of my colleagues, noticing that I was pregnant with my second child, ducked into my office and said: “You really do whatever you want.” He meant it as some variety of compliment and I took it as such, but I was beginning to get the sense that other people were looking at me and thinking the same thing; it seemed to some as if I were getting away with something, as if I were not paying the usual price, and if the usual price was takeout Thai food and a video with your husband on a Saturday night then I was not, in fact, paying that price. James Baldwin once wrote, “He can face in your life only what he can face in his own.” And I imagine if you are feeling restless or thwarted in your marriage, if you have created an orderly warm home for your child at a certain slight cost to your own freedom or momentum, you might look at me, or someone else like me, and think that I am not making the usual sacrifices. (I may be making
other
sacrifices, but that is not part of this sort of calculation or judgment.)
    Before I have the baby one of my friends politely suggests that it may be “hubris” to think that I can make up for the fact that the baby’s father would not be in the house, and not even in the city most of the time. He tells me that I am too confident in my own powers. This worries me, sometimes late at night, because I wonder if it’s not true, and there are times during the baby’s first year when I wish the earth would stop spinning so that I can get off for a moment and rest. But it also occurs to me that this may be the good and useful kind of hubris.
    The submerged premise here is that there is something greedy, selfish, narcissistic, or antisocial about having a baby on your own. But is there? It seems to me that if anything a baby born inthese conditions is extra-wanted. The fact that having that baby is not necessarily the obvious or normal or predictable or easy thing to do at this particular juncture in life makes it all the more of a deep and consuming commitment.
    At lunch I mention to an editor that I am thinking of writing about single mothers and the subtle and not-so-subtle forms our moralism toward them takes. He says, “That’s a good idea. And I say that as a guy who looks at single women and thinks what’s wrong with her? How did she fuck up?”
    It’s spring and I am invited to give a talk out of town. I am on the phone with a friend who is a psychiatrist, and I ask if she thinks the baby will be okay if I leave him for a night. He is one and a half, and I have never left him for a whole night. I should mention that I am not here thinking of leaving him in a nightclub. I am thinking of leaving him with the babysitter who has been with us for eight years, and has been taking care of him his whole life. “Do you think he’ll be all right?” “Probably,” she says. “Of course, it would be better if you had a husband in the house.” I say that I may not be able to get one by Wednesday.
    My friend Sonya, a very beautiful Indian woman who works in fashion, had her daughter on her own when she was twenty-eight. She got married a year later to another man, and then left him, and is now on her own with her daughter. She says it’s almost worse when hostile or complicated comments come from her liberal neighbors in Brooklyn: “Who are they to tell me I’m hindered or handicapped in some way? They are all invested in keeping up appearances. Some