Accept that the man you love was unfaithful to you. Accept that a woman you once held in regard treated you with disrespect. Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.
Just writing that to you makes me feel better, Mourning and Raging. Do you feel the shift? Acceptance has everything to do with simplicity, with sitting in the ordinary place, with bearing witness to the plain facts of our life, with not just starting at the essential, but ending up there. Your life has been profoundly shaken by these recent revelations. It’s not your task to immediately forgive those who shook you. Your spoken desire to forgive the woman who betrayed you is in opposition to what you feel. Forgiveness forces an impossible internal face-off between you and a woman you hate.
Acceptance asks only that you embrace what’s true.
Strange as it sounds, I don’t think you’ve done that yet. I can hear it in the pitch of your letter. You’re so outraged and surprised that this shitty thing happened to you that there’s a piece of you that isn’t yet convinced it did. You’re looking for the explanation, the loophole, the bright twist in the dark tale that reverses its course. Anyone would be. It’s the reason I’ve had to narrate my own stories of injustice about seven thousand times, as if by raging about it once more the story will change and by the end of it I won’t still be the woman hanging on the end of the line.
But it won’t change, for me or for you or for anyone who has ever been wronged, which is everyone. We are all at some point—and usually at many points over the course of a life—the woman hanging on the end of the line. Allow your acceptance of that to be a transformative experience. You do that by simply looking it square in the face and then moving on. You don’t have to move fast or far. You can go just an inch. You can mark your progress breath by breath.
Literally. And it’s there that I recommend you begin. Every time you think I hate that fucking bitch, I want you to neutralize that thought with a breath. Calm your mind. Breathe in deeply with intention, then breathe out. Do not think I hate that fucking bitch while you do it. Give yourself that. Blow that bitch right out of your chest. Then move on to something else.
I have breathed my way through so many people who I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn’t change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I’ve breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. Sometimes I haven’t been able to muster anything beyond the breath itself, my mind forced blank with nothing but the desire to be free of sorrow and rage.
It works. And the reason it works is the salve is being applied directly to the wound. It’s not a coincidence that you describe your pain as being lodged in your chest. When you breathe with calm intention you’re zapping the white rage monster precisely where it lives. You’re cutting off its feeding tube and forcing a new thought into your head—one that nurtures rather than tortures you. It’s essentially mental self-discipline. I’m not suggesting one deny negative emotions, but rather that you accept them and move through them by embracing the power we have to keep from wallowing in emotions that don’t serve us well.
It’s hard work. It’s important work. I believe something like forgiveness is on the other side. You will get there, dear woman. Just try.
Yours,
Sugar
NO MYSTERY ABOUT SPERM
Dear Sugar,
I am a woman in my late thirties and still single. I never imagined this would be me at this age. I’ve had several relationships where I thought I had found “the one,” only to have the rug pulled out from under me.
The most devastating of these ended about five years ago, at the age when most of my friends were getting married or having babies. My boyfriend of three years, with whom I lived, was divorced with a child. He abruptly decided to go back to his ex-wife just as we were looking to buy a house. This was after he had spent a fair amount of time in therapy at the beginning of our relationship to reach the conclusion that he was certain he wanted to build a life with me and have children with me. What a fool I was. When he left me, he assured me that it was only for his child, who was struggling, and that I was still his true love and he knew that once she was off to college, he would come back and we’d live happily ever after. She was eight. Apparently I was supposed to wait ten years, getting old while he finished up his other life.
I spent a couple of years wrecked and jaded over that relationship. I pulled myself together as best I could and dated a few people casually. Last year, I met someone I connected with. Unfortunately, he was even more jaded than I, and he didn’t want to take a leap of faith with me. We split up a couple of months ago.
So now I find myself watching the end of my fertility looming. I always wanted to experience pregnancy and birth. I’m now considering becoming a single mom. I’m not even sure I know how to go about that, but I’m aware that time is running out, and even though I would prefer to raise a child with a partner, I don’t have much faith in that happening anymore. Even if I met someone now, he’d pretty much have to want to have a baby right away, and that’s not likely. Yet, I’m struggling with letting go of the idea that I will find love and have a baby with a partner. I’m paralyzed. It’s hard to let that dream go. If I take this step, I am deciding definitively that I will not get married and have a child like I watched most of my friends do. (Did I mention the burning jealousy every time I see their happy family pictures on Facebook, the photos from the hospital where Mommy smiles with baby on chest, the congratulations I write, accompanied by a feeling like I’ve been sucker punched?)
How can I move forward and let go of that dream? Should I start calling sperm banks? I just can’t believe that this is how my story ends.
Signed,
M
Dear M,
I’m of the opinion that there are some things one should never advise another to do: marry someone in particular, not marry someone in particular, pierce one’s clitoris or cock, oil one’s body and run around naked at a party wearing a homemade Alice B. Toklas mask, and have a baby.
And yet, I cannot help but say that it seems apparent to me that you should seriously consider having a baby. Not because I want you to, but because you want to.
Oh, the dream. The goddamned man + baby dream. Written by the High Commission on Heterosexual Love and Sexual Reproduction and practiced by couples across the land, the dream’s a bitch if you’re a maternally inclined straight female and not living it by the age of thirty-seven—a situation of a spermicidally toxic flavor. Of course you want to bring out your six-shooter every time you see another bloated mom hoisting up another pinched-faced spawn on Facebook. You want the dream too!
But, M, you didn’t get it. Not yet. Not quite ever, perhaps. That doesn’t mean all is lost. This is not “how your story ends.” It’s simply where it takes a turn you didn’t expect.
I don’t mean to downplay your sorrow. Your disappointment is justified; your paralysis understandable; your conundrum real. But please remember that the dream you have of finding a long-term romantic partner and having a baby is not just one dream. It’s two. The partner dream and the baby dream are so intricately woven that you can be forgiven for thinking they’re one. It’s lovely if it is rolled up into one. It’s more than lovely. It’s convenient. It’s conventional. It’s economically advantageous. It’s hella good when it’s good.
But it isn’t what you have. So let’s see what you’ve got.
You have the strong desire to be a mother by biological means coupled with a deep regret that you aren’t currently involved with a man with whom to reproduce. The only thing you need to make a biological baby of your own is sperm and luck. Getting sperm does not mean that you are “deciding definitively” that you “will not get marrie
d and have a child.” Life is long, darling. Who knows what’s going to happen? You could meet your Big Love tomorrow. You could meet him in ten years. You could have a baby on your own now and another with him when you’re forty-two. You don’t know. The question about who you will love and when you will love him is out of your hands. It’s a mystery that you can’t solve.
There is, however, no mystery about sperm. There are vials to be had at banks for purchase. There are possibly friends or acquaintances willing to give you some for free. The time to answer your question about whether you want to try to conceive a baby on your own is upon you. The window of your reproductive viability will soon close. I agree with you that you’ve reached the point that it’s reasonable to assume that your choice is between having a baby without a partner or having no biological baby at all. Which scenario makes you sadder? Which are you going to be happy you did when you’re fifty? It’s time to do the emotional and practical work you need to do so you can make a decision. The website of the organization Single Mothers by Choice is an excellent place to start.
I can’t tell you what to do. No one can. But as the mother of two children, I can tell you what most moms will: that mothering is absurdly hard and profoundly sweet. Like the best thing you ever did. Like if you think you want to have a baby, you probably should. I say this in spite of the fact that children are giant endless suck machines. They don’t give a whit if you need to sleep or eat or pee or get your work done or go out to a party naked and oiled up in a homemade Alice B. Toklas mask. They take everything. They will bring you to the furthest edge of your personality and abso-fucking-lutely to your knees.
They will also give you everything back. Not just all they take, but many of the things you lost before they came along as well.
Every mother has a different story, though we tend to group them together. We like to think that partnered moms have it good and single moms have it rough, but the truth is that we’re a diverse bunch. Some single mothers have lots of child-free time because their kids are regularly in the custody of their fathers. Some seldom get a break. Some partnered mothers split child-care duties with their spouses in egalitarian ways; others might as well be alone. Some mothers of both varieties have parents, siblings, and friends who play active roles in their children’s lives in ways that significantly lighten the load. Others have to pay for every hour another person looks after their kids. Some mothers, single or partnered, can’t afford to pay anyone for anything. Some can and do. Others can and won’t. Some are aided financially by parents, or trust funds, or inheritances; others are entirely on their own. The reality is that, regardless of the circumstances, most moms are alternately blissed out by their love for their children and utterly overwhelmed by the spectacular amount of sacrifice they require.
What you must answer when you delve into this question about whether to have a baby alone, honey bun, is what the landscape will look like for you. Not what it looks like for “single mothers by choice,” but how it will actually play out in your own life. How will you need to restructure or reconsider your life if you become a mother? What resources do you have, what resources will you need, and how will you get them?
Knowing what I know about having babies, three of the four big questions I’d have if I were considering parenting a child without a partner are surprisingly the same questions I asked myself when I—with my partner—pondered having a baby. They were
1. How the hell am I going to pay for this?
2. Who the hell is going to take care of the baby so I can work?
3. Will I ever have sex again?
So let’s start with those.
You don’t mention financial matters in your letter, but I presume you have to earn a living. Kids cost a fortune, especially if you have to pay someone to take care of them so you can work. My kids are now four and six. Preschool tuition over the past few years has nearly bankrupted Mr. Sugar and me. Literally. When our kids were babies we hired a part-time nanny and juggled child care between us the rest of the time—we both make our living as artists, so neither one of us has what’s called a “real job.” The nanny cost us $15 an hour. We hired her for twenty hours a week. When the nanny came, my husband and I would go into our shared office in the basement and ignore each other so we could each do our thing (at which point our children would invariably settle down for a long nap, strangely able to discern when we were paying someone else to look after them). Every hour that passed I’d think, “Did I make $15? Did I even make $7.50?”
Often enough, the answer was no. Which is a long way of saying that questions number 1 and number 2 are inextricably bound. More so than the man + baby High Commission on Heterosexual Love and Sexual Reproduction dream. Especially for you, since you’ll be the sole breadwinner.
Many partners are great for watching the baby while you work or shower or make phone calls that go better if a small beast is not shrieking in the background. You won’t have one—the partner, that is. You’ll have only the small shrieking beast. What will you do? Do you have any support in the way of free child care? Do not believe all the sweet friends who say, “Oh, M! Have a baby! I’ll totally help you with the baby! I’ll be, like, the baby’s auntie!” Those people have good intentions, but most of them are bons vivants who will not take your baby. Or they might take your baby once when it’s spring and they get the urge to go to the zoo because they want to see the elephants. You need someone to take your baby every Monday and Wednesday and Friday from nine to three. One thing I’ve learned since becoming a mother is that most adults aren’t willing to spend much time with other people’s children unless there is some direct benefit to them—namely, money or the promise that you will someday return the favor and take their children.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some grandparents long to play a significant part in the lives of their grandchildren. Do you have an essentially sane, remotely physically fit, non-daytime-drinking, baby-loving parent or two who lives nearby? A sibling or friend who genuinely wants to commit to pitching in? If you don’t have that sort of support, what will you do for child care and how will you structure it and how will you pay for it?
Next, we come to the question of whether your post-child life will be a dreary, sexless hell. There will probably not be too much action for a while. But worry not: this has little to do with your partner-less status. Mr. Sugar and I joke that the only reason we opted to have our second child was so we’d have sex at least one more time before we died. You’ll be exhausted, hormonally altered, and perhaps vaginally or abdominally maimed by the baby, and thus not thinking about sex for a while, but eventually you’ll come around and be interested in dating again. Some men won’t be interested in dating you because you have a baby. Others will be fine with the baby and you’ll date them and maybe one of them will turn out to be “the one.”
Regardless of what happens with the men, you’ll have a baby. An amazing little being who will blow your mind and expand your heart and make you think things you never thought and remember things you believed you forgot and heal things you imagined would never heal and forgive people you’ve begrudged for too long and understand things you didn’t understand before you fell madly in love with a tiny tyrant who doesn’t give a damn whether you need to pee. You will sing again if you stopped singing. You will dance again if you stopped dancing. You will crawl around on the floor and play chase and tickle and peek-a-boo. You’ll make towers of teetering blocks and snakes and rabbits with clay.
It’s an altogether cool thing.
And it will be lonely too, doing all that without a partner. How lonely, I can’t say. You will hold your baby and cry sometimes in frustration, in rage, in despair, in exhaustion and inexplicable sorrow. You will watch your baby with joy and laugh at the wonder so pure and the beauty so unconcealed that it will make you ache. These are the times when it’s really nice to have a partner, M. What will you do? How will you fill the place where the man you’ve been holding out for would have been?
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That is your hard question for me—the one I didn’t ask myself when I decided to get pregnant and become a mother, though of course it was naïve for me to think I didn’t have to. Not a single one of us knows what the future holds. The unexpected happens even when we’ve got everything mapped out. My friend A lost her husband in a car crash four days before her daughter was born. My friend B’s husband died of cancer when their son wasn’t yet two. My friend C’s husband left her for another woman when their baby was six weeks old. My friend D’s partner decided he wasn’t all that into being a dad a few months after his child was born, moved across the country, and sees her once a year. I could go on. I could work my way all the way down the alphabet. Even if you get the dream, you don’t know if it will stay true.
It works in reverse too. What you fear might not come to pass. You might decide to have your baby and find true love in the midst of that. You might search your soul and realize that you don’t want a baby after all, not if it means going it without a man.
What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that.
Yours,
Sugar
THE MAD SEX CONFESSOR
Dear Sugar,
My elderly father is coming to live with me in a few months. My mother passed away about three years ago. My father is going to be living with all of the rest of my siblings as well—he’ll move from one place to the next every four or five months. He enjoys traveling, so we thought moving him around would make him feel more active and independent. I hesitate to say that I am my father’s favorite since I do not particularly relish the idea of that, nor has he ever been a demonstrative or involved parent, but I will say that he depends on me slightly more than he depends on my other brothers and sisters. Recently that has become an emotional dependence as well.