Hey, everybody! I’m Jenn, from over at Breed ‘Em and Weep, and I am thrilled and honored to be taking over here for the wonderful Kristin (and the lovely Trace of Sweetney, who was supposed to be taking over) at Single Mom at Work. I am still officially single enough to get to write in this space each week, pretending like I know what the heck is going on, while in actuality, I’m really quizzing you nice folks in hope of gleaning some wisdom.

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I really hated being pregnant.

I can say this four years after the fact, with a twinge of embarassment, knowing that there are so many women that struggle to conceive, that want nothing more than to brew a new life inside of them.  But I’d be dishonest if I said that I was a glowing, radiant pregnant lady.  The fact is: I was a cantankerous, beligerent, swollen and crotchety preggo, counting down the days until I could just. Get. The. Baby. Out of me.

Part of it was vanity: I’d been slim almost my whole life and my ballooning body parts simultaneously horrified and astonished me.  I didn’t expect the back fat, the swollen feet, the giant hips.  Superficially again, I was disgruntled that men no longer even glanced my way: I felt asexual and totally unsexy.  And finally: I was uncomfortable: gaseous, nauseous, and perpetually headachy.

But.  The moment of my son’s entrance into the world has etched itself into my brain and soul and there has never been a more profound, beautiful, perfect moment in my life.  Suddenly, my heart was outside my body and I felt a love so perfect, sharp and exquisite that it made me gasp, crumpled me, reduced me to overflow capacity with joy.  And in the almost-four years since, I’ve realized that there is nothing more important to my being, than my daily joy, than the fact that I am my son’s Mom.  I’m now forgetting the drudgery of pregnancy.  I’m thinking more about whether I want to have more kids.

***

I am hurtling toward my mid thirties, and realizing with uncomfortable clarity that each day, my fertility declines.  I’m in a fresh relationship, one that is bursting with promise.  If I’m honest, and if you read me elsewhere, you’ll know that I am pretty sure that the man I am with now might be man I end up with.  I’ve fallen pretty hard.

We talk a lot, about everything, and even though we’re only a month and a half into our relationship, the subject of kids has come up, randomly.

People tell us we look alike, my new man and I, and so we were talking lightly one night about whether our potential offspring would look like us, too.  My tone, I think, was blase, but my heart was racing.  Crap: this is no longer an obscure “maybe one day…”   It’s now a real possibility.

And the other day, when my monthly cycle arrived with its prompt efficacy, he jokingly made a remark: “No little munchkins, then.”

“No,”I laughed, and though the chances of that physically were very remote, and though I want nothing less than to be pregnant right now, I sighed a little inwardly.  I only have a few years left of fertility: if I am going to have another baby, I’d better do it in the next three years or so.

My boyfriend has been married and divorced, but he doesn’t have kids, and I can’t imagine denying him that, if it’s what he wants.  But if I do ever have another child, my own son will be at least 6 or 7 years old - and his sibling would be a half-one, and the rammifications of both of those make me sweat a little.

Plus - there’s my career in corporate digital ad sales -  I love it, and I don’t want to pause it when I feel like I’m on my way up, immersed in a career I love.  And really - my cut off is age 37.  I don’t want to try and have babies after that.  I was tired with a newborn at the age of 30 - how much harder would it be seven years later, with a seven year old used to seven years of exclusive attention?

I wonder - do you have a “cutoff” age for additional children? Do you agonize about this as much as I have been?

I sat at the desk near the front entrance to my small, mildly dilapidated little home. The late winter sun was harsh and unrelenting and hurt my eyeballs from the outside in.  I remember: the dust on my computer monitor, the piles of tear-stained kleenexes littering the top of my desk.  Paper in disarray and files scattered, a two-day old plate of untouched toast near the monitor.

“You’re not coming home, ever, are you?”

I’d whispered it into the phone but I already knew the answer and though I had asked him to leave, though I needed time, I wasn’t sure that I was ready for the consequences of the inevitable permanent divide.

“I don’t know.  No, I don’t think so.”

I thought about our son: not even 2 years old.  I thought about the past four years: Amsterdam, concerts, beer nights and snowboarding.  I thought about the shrill fighting, alcohol, money, responsibility, pettiness.  I thought about myself: at 30 years old, a single Mom, disengaged, struggling.  A statistic.

Two years ago I’d been engaged to a beautiful man, a baby growing inside me.  Outwardly we were so happy: young, employed, laughing.  The fragility of that glass castle amazed me, and I remember putting my head down on the paper, the tissue, the hardness of the desk, to cry.

***

I worried about my son, of course, about the adjustment to a one-parent home, about a life with a half-time Dad.  But I also stressed about my future.  I foresaw in my bitter glass ball: chinchillas, maybe a few birds, a puffy pink housecoat and a grimy abode.  Maybe, I thought, I’d get lucky and one of my friends would end up solo too, in older age, and we could cook each other feta cheese and pickle sandwiches and lie about the fact that our butts had dissolved into dimpled pancakes.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking about men.  I didn’t want to feel the pain of heartbreak ever again and the thought of it being my son and I for the next 30 years was all right for me.  Painful.  But all right.

But as the years dripped on - one, two - I started to “see” men again.  I started to miss their companionship, humor, and unabashed appreciation for soft clothes and a homemade meal.   But I really believed that I was a pariah - that my son was a breathing indication of the fact that I’d had successful (not to mention unprotected) sex with another man.  What man wants to see that, every time he looks at his woman?  I understood that biologically, and intrinsically.  It made me wistful.

***

I’ve now been juggling work, dating, and my son for over a year and a half.  What I have discovered is this: a child is not necessarily “baggage” to the right man.  In fact: Nolan’s presence in my life has negated the necessity for me to weed out the bad eggs.  Men who are willing to take me on must be willing to take my son on, too - and it serves as an automatic filter, of sorts.

I am attracting a different kind of man these days than I used to - better and kinder and I think my son is the reason.  These men don’t see my son as a manifestation of another man - but rather as a sweeter, more naive extension of me.  The good ones - the awesome one I’m with now - is as eager to be liked by my son as he is by me.

It amazes me that our darkest days often represent the beginning of the pivotal climb to the brightest ones. 

I used to fancy myself as a bit of a world traveller.  I’ve trekked deep into the hills of Northern Thailand to learn about rural tribes.  I’ve negotiated solo train trips from Portugal back up to the Netherlands.  I’ve delighted in the lights of Paris, the unexpected beauty of Budapest, the history of Dublin.  I used to believe firmly that when I became staid, placid in my home - that was the time that I really needed to travel.  From the ages of 22 through 29, I experienced and learned from the people of more than 30 countries.  From the age of 29 to now, I’ve only traveled to the United States.  For work.

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I attended the pirate party of a 4-year-old classmate of my son on the weekend, a fete filled with Spiderman face painting, sickly sweet ice cream cake, and pint sized hooligans with eyeballs rolled back in ecstatic delight at the prospect of manic, unbridled carousing with other small humans.

I never know whether to drop my son off or hover at these events, and since I didn’t know the hosting Mom outside of vacant “hello’s!” at daycare drop off, I folded myself awkwardly into a chair on the sidelines of the gym and set to work inspecting my Blackberry, social pariah style.

Another Mom soon plopped down beside me, and I recognized her as the Mother of Oliver, a sweet-natured kid who always has a smile and a hug for my son. She’d been at a previous birthday party with me, and we’d exchanged pleasantries about our careers, lives, hobbies.

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I was baptized in the Catholic church, and though my Mom tells me I attended Catechism, I only have vague memories of a mothbell-smelling, cramped school room on rainy Tuesday nights; a gravel-voiced teacher with a long, perplexing hair sprouting from her chin mole.

My Dad didn’t accompany us to church when I was very young: my Mother curled my hair in embarassing sausage curls and forced my scabbed tomboy arms through the holes of a frilly pink dress.

“Woo hoo!” my Dad would whistle as he stood next to a rake or a broom, tending to our yard as my Mom and little brother squeezed into the Honda Civic to leave for church,”You look like Farrah Fawcett!”

“I hate church!” I yelled back.

I did hate church.  I hated the repetitive motion and the strange slack-jawed people with lifeless eyes who dead-panned everything back to the priest, who I could never understand.  I hated fiddling in the pew, lining up for the Significant Cracker, pretending to sing along to the hymns.  But all kids hate church, don’t they?  By definition, it’s just boring.

As my Mom got older and hit a rough patch in her personal life, she turned to a more… hardcore Church.  These people weren’t messing: there was talking in tongues and crying and swaying in aisles and my Mom bought me books about Teenagers and Accepting Jesus Into Your Heart and oh, my crap, I freaked.  It didn’t feel right.  Something felt brain-washy and shrill and wrong about it all and other than for funerals and weddings, I haven’t stepped foot in a church since.  I have a spirituality now, a belief in a bigger picture and a purpose for life, but I am certainly not religious.

My ex, Nolan’s Father, was also raised in a Catholic church.  But he also attended Catholic schools, and though he does not adhere to any of the “rules” of Catholicism, he has a tie to the religion and would like his son brought up to “be” Catholic.

We had a bit of a battle about Nolan’s baptism: he wanted him baptized, I argued that we were not practicing Catholics and that I didn’t understand the necessity of “saving” a baby from hell by putting him through water and a ritual.  I did not belong to the class of people who believed that an unbaptized baby would go to “limbo” (that theory, incidentally, is currently being “re-evaluated”.)

Nolan’s Father would prefer that his son attend Catholic school as a child.  I am somewhat ambivalent: I don’t think it will do our son any harm, and ultimately I want him to choose the religion (or lack thereof) that feels best for him.  In truth, I think that if one parent is religious - and the other is not - perhaps the religious parent’s viewpoints should reign.  Unless one parent happens to be “passionately non-religious” (which I am not.)

What do you think?   Who decides the “religion” of a child?  Is it OK for a child to practice religion in half time (ie church with Mommy but not with Daddy?)  This is a doozy, I know, but based on the insane back-and-forth of my last post, I figure it might be relevant.

I’m a bit of a pacifist. It takes a lot to get me red faced and spluttering things. If I’m going to freak out, it’s usually passive-aggressively, and only inside my head and whoa, I can come out with some doozy rebuttals at 3:00 in the morning (about 8 or 9 hours too late.)

I rarely comment on the politics or religion of anyone beyond my immediate family because I am reserved and fairly polite by nature and I’d rather walk into a posh restaurant wearing nothing but brown knee-highs and a fanny pack than get in a fight with anyone.

That said, I had to wait a few days to write this column because I was so infuriated by Ann Coulter’s recent declaration that Single Mothers are to blame for most of society’s evils (including rape and murder) that I thought I might start involuntarily dropping f-bombs if I started writing about it. Single Moms are singularly responsible for creating the psychopaths that are crusting our prison cells? I call bull on that, and I’d be willing to do it wobbly bodied, in just my socks.

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I often wonder, when I contemplate writing about child support and its murky tangled forest of politics and sensitive emotions and the righteous indignation that often surrounds money issues, whether it’s a topic that I should leave well enough alone.

But the truth is - if you’re a single Mom - and maybe especially, if you’re a single working Mom who prides herself on independence and not needing anyone (hmm - projection, much?) — you’ve almost certainly had to deal with child support issues.

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