In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free Page B

of them are like, I’ve sucked up my crappy marriage, why haven’t you sucked up your crappy marriage? And then there is a kind of strange fascination. Likesomeone I barely know will ask me if my daughter’s dad pays child support. And I am like, Is that any of your business? Do I ask you if you paid your taxes last year?” I know what she means. When you are pregnant, strangers feel like they can come up to you and touch you; when you are a single mother, strangers feel like they can come up to you and ask you anything. It is as if you have somehow given people who barely know you permission to say something intimate or invasive simply by having a baby without a man in the house.
    Sonya remembers a single mother friend of hers warning her not to wear a certain dress to a garden party full of couples, but she puts it on anyway, and digs out a pair of stilettos. When she walks into the party, there are a bunch of women clumped around the bar in the kitchen, and hardly any of them will talk to her or look at her, and later she leaves feeling as if she has spent the last four hours sitting in a traffic jam or waiting in a doctor’s office, instead of going to a party. Should she not have worn the dress? “I am at the point where I am not going to apologize for myself,” she says. “But it’s exhausting. It takes a lot of energy.”
    In spite of our exquisite tolerance for all kinds of lifestyles, we have a wildly outdated but strangely pervasive idea that single motherhood is worse for children, somehow a compromise, a flawed venture, a grave psychological blow to be overcome, our enlightened modern version of shame. It malingers, this idea; it affects us still.
    The power of this view is that it very easily gets inside your head, it resonates with every children’s book you have ever read about little bear families, with all the archaic visions of family that cohere in the furthest reaches of your imagination: It’s hardto free yourself. It’s hard not to interrogate your own choices, hard not to offer up elaborate excuses or explanations.
    I notice the tendency in myself is toward jokes, toward a kind of hard, protective mockery. I find that I am very deliberately not apologizing for the baby by embracing the most ridiculous, tabloidy words for him, like “love child.” I hear myself spinning a caricature of my semi-bohemian household when I run into someone at a party I haven’t seen in a while: “Yeah, two babies, two different dads. I somehow ended up with the family structure Pat Moynihan was complaining about.”
    In fact, by now I have spent so long outside of conventional family life that sometimes when I spend an afternoon with married friends and their children, their way of life seems exotic to me. The best way I can describe this is the feeling of being in a foreign country where you notice the bread is good and the coffee excellent but you are not exactly thinking of giving it all up and living there.
    In the weeks after the baby was born my sense of family was burned down and clarified. I began to see that some of the people related to me by blood were not my family, and some of my friends and ex-flames were. In some way the definition became very basic and pared down, like the person you can call to drive you to the hospital in the middle of the night is your family. My family was suddenly voluntary, elective, chosen: a great thing I came to late.
    The baby refers to his sister’s father, Harry, as “My Harry,” as in “My Harry is coming!” It seems to me the exuberant, unorthodox use of pronoun gets at the conjuring, the act of creation, the interesting magic trick at the center of the whole venture: his family will be what he makes it.
    Leo is two, but he chooses his own people. He picks fatherish figures, including his own father. I notice people often find little ways of telling me that
it’s not the same thing
. And of course it’s not, but it seems a bit narrow-minded or overly