You'd Be a Great Mom
By Laura Jeannerette
I have never felt at ease around babies and for years it was a source of secreted shame. I held the belief that some intuitive, innate connection must exist between women and infants, though it seemed to be absent within me. In first grade, I remember bringing a girlfriend home to the horror of my mother breastfeeding my brother in our den, fully exposed on the couch, and the mortification that filled me from head to toe. I don’t remember anything beyond the shock of the image and its subsequent heat. This was the same couch, in our mid-1970s den, where I had interrupted my parents during one of their rare, affectionate unions. Prone to nightmares, I had gotten up half asleep and sought them out for comfort. I did not find them in their bedroom, adjacent to my own on the third floor, so I ventured down two flights and, well, interrupted coitus. Again the hot shame was unbearable though I doubt I had any idea what was going on. They were naked and their reaction was brusque, surprised, wildly dismissive, shielding their own embarrassment. I fled up the steps, pajama-footed, hair tousled and clinging to my wet lip, and hid in my bedroom. My only other recollection was of my mother coming upstairs to explain or perhaps comfort me some time after the encounter. I only recall that her underwear was on backwards.
Our home, for me, was an embarrassment of embarrassments. I do not have concrete memories of my youth prior to ages five or six. The birth of my brother, five and a half years my junior, was the landmark event from which I base all childhood recollections. Other than bringing him to show and tell in kindergarten and protecting him—during our parents’ alcohol-fueled battles—I have little memory of him as an actual baby.
One summer my mother offered me up as a babysitter at our swim club, to watch over a woman’s stroller-sized child so they could play cards undisturbed. She gave me and my friend Leslie money for the snack bar to watch this boy for a few hours. Leslie had regular gigs watching children, both at the club and in people’s homes but, other than my brother, this was new terrain for me. The cash for the snack bar was alluring. What started as free french fries nearly ended in life-altering tragedy when, in line and waiting to pay, each of us thought the other was watching the baby. When we turned around the stroller had disappeared. I took off toward the seating area and spotted the stroller down a grassy hill. The boy had been on an incline and we must have forgotten to affix the brakes. That moment changed me. Leslie, seeing he was fine, made some jokes and picked him up to quell his understandable tears. The incident went undetected, unreported, likely forgotten by Leslie. But in my mind I saw the boy, again and again, rolling wildly down the hill, smashing into the chain link fence, thrown bloody and critically injured onto the pavement in front of the cabanas. I can still envision it today.
Perhaps from the fraught moments sheltering my brother as his “surrogate” mother, I’d had my lifetime’s fill of being responsible for a baby. Memories of the swim club incident may have solidified that stance. To me, babies were accidents waiting to happen. Unlike the durable and rollable puppies I grew up with, babies had soft spots that needed to be protected, and floppy parts that needed to be supported. A puppy could take a header down a flight of winding stairs and pop up at the bottom like a comedy sketch actor. Puppies were all props and pratfalls, navigating their large, unbalanced heads, far too big for their growing bodies, in the most entertaining and adorable ways. I tumbled with puppies, utterly unselfconscious, and they became the heroes of my early stories. Books and dogs have been my two greatest companions for as long as I can remember. In the tales I wrote as a child, our family dogs starred as the superheroes: Our mutt, Sneakers, became a famous baseball player and Thor, our German Shepherd, defeated nefarious wrongdoers with courage and ease. The stories were awful, and I loved them.
Babies, by contrast, seemed needy and alien. Their helplessness was troubling to me and so I avoided, whenever possible, the deliberate handling of infants, as well as their care and maintenance. I could play the part when holding a dear friend’s newborn or, later, my own nephews, but I held my breath, praying non-religious prayers, that the infant would not begin to cry. I was sure that, instinctively, babies could smell fear, much the way dogs could, and I did not want to attract the judgment of those around me. It felt unlucky and suspicious, stigma-inducing. I mean, who doesn’t like babies? I don’t, I thought. Fuck babies. Babies could break. For some reason, as I grew older, it felt like people looked to me as a “natural” and when a baby was confidently thrust into my reluctant hands, I bucked up and did fine, but it was time-limited and took all of my attention and focus to execute.
My husband and I decided not to have children early on in our marriage and never looked back. He had a near-miss as a younger man, well before we met, and I had matured through the magical thinking of becoming a mom with a past partner who, in hindsight, would have been more content fathering the cannabis plants he grew in his closet. This divine dodge was one of the greatest blessings in my life. My family did not inspire procreation. My childhood within an alcoholic household left me shell-shocked, with a medley of fears and what-if scenarios constantly brewing in the forefront of my mind. The most damning and damaging consequences centered around trust and relationships. I am sure that a child with that former boyfriend, and others before him, would have all but replicated the childhood of my youth. This is more common than not and I have several divorced friends as proof. I emerged among an ancestry of addicts, though my mother’s side clearly held genetic dominance, embracing it, primarily sober, within recovery programs. My father’s side, steeped in denial, sadly and ineffectively hid scotch bottles behind toaster ovens, while pointing judgmentally at the low hanging fruit on my mother’s side. The total lineup included gamblers and enablers, replete with hand-me-down behaviors, innate as instincts, and from what I’d witnessed, it seemed wisest to end my genetic line with me.
Periodically a friend or stranger would remark, “I’m surprised you don’t have kids.” They’d see me out and about, always with rescue dogs in tow, and declare, “You’d be a great mom! Just look at how you are with those dogs!” I was always polite in my response, but my brain screamed in horror, Really?! If these individuals viewed my demeanor with dogs as indicative of what kind of mother I would be, it was no surprise how readily they must have embraced their own abilities to parent. Sometimes they seemed to indicate that I was selling myself short, they assumed to know me better than I knew myself. I had no doubt that the comments were coming from a place of kindness, were even complimentary, but they’d still catch me off-guard.
My husband’s broad-muscled baby maneuvers were far more endearing. He appeared ten times more natural than I ever felt in those moments. I wondered more than once if he had deprived himself of something he’d truly desired, or downplayed the importance of, until the passage of time did the rest. Fast-forward to our seemingly unchecked world of weaponized politics, climate catastrophes, plagues, and conjured conspiracies and I dismiss those concerns. We share an open relief for not having to shelter our imaginary children from a multitude of novel situations we would’ve never envisioned in our lifetimes. In retrospect, we had been naïve about many things. Racial and political divisions, along with bitter skepticism toward science and government, have insidiously transformed our country, and now our neighborhood, in ways we could not have predicted.
The parents of my youth eschewed seatbelts, smoked serenely above the heads of infants, and brought the occasional unfinished beer on quick trips to drop us off at softball practice or swimming. We seemed to live as if we were unbreakable. The parents we see now, around the neighborhood and in the park, often feel peculiar and exotic. They do wear seatbelts as they chauffeur their wildly overscheduled children from place to place, event to event. They vape from a distance, scrolling monotonously on their phones. When we see the occasional child walking unaccompanied up and down our dead-end street, they convey the impression of a pet on the loose. Gone are the streetlight curfews, kickball, and assorted games of tag; in our neighborhood, collecting fireflies appears to have been replaced by setting off fireworks, for months on end, with or without adult supervision.
My father coached me and my friends in softball and could often be spotted on the furthest periphery of the field, having been ejected from the game for arguing with the umpire. He was typically ousted after adding his trademark summation of events: “THAT’S HORSESHIT!” Looking back, I can now find the humor in his repeated inability to manage his emotions. But back then, as his daughter, that passionate behavior left me cringing with embarrassment every single time. I wonder if today’s kids feel a similar level of shame and embarrassment. There are parents who proudly usher their children to practices and events in SUVs sporting nefarious and divisive bumper stickers. If someone feels comfortable enough to openly display their stick figure family aside a decal that reads—”Fuck Your Feelings”—the disdain for “others” must be profound.
My brother was scarred by our upbringing as well, but still managed to fully embrace fatherhood. Our mother’s alcoholism, an overly critical father, and me, the improvising other-mother older sister, impacted him in deep and lasting ways, but those are his stories to tell. He married his middle-school sweetheart, made mistakes, hit home runs—or as he would say “strikes and gutters”—and they gifted me and my husband with two amazing nephews. His children are wonderful and imaginative. The older child is a laid-back, artsy observer; the younger is a terror on two legs and a born entertainer. At times they have almost made us question our decision not to have children. Almost, but not quite.
Over the years I’ve developed a reputation as a “little-kid magnet” in social situations. I attribute it to my love for silliness and innate longing for the fun I believe I’d missed out on as an actual little kid. The lifestyle I inhabited back then, not by choice, turned me into an inept, adult-like six year old. Sometimes I feel as if that’s never changed. Perhaps this silly side is what people saw when they commented on my fitness as a mother. It was not unlike the style of parenting my own mother employed—more a friend, than a parent. I know firsthand the deficits this leaves behind.
The only time within our marriage when I can recall a moment of hesitation, specifically on the part of my husband, was after watching the film The Bucket List. My husband turned toward me, hand atop a dog’s head, earnest-eyed, and genuinely asked, “But who’s going to take care of us when we’re old?”
I responded gently, “I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to have kids.” I loved him so much in that moment.
This reflects my attraction toward the non-obvious gifts in life—the small, good things—as Raymond Carver called them. I find great solace in the sound of dog day cicadas, the sunset on an autumn day when everything, for a moment, looks backlit and glowing, and the familiar scent of a dog emerging from a warm nest of winter blankets.
Growing up with my husband—learning to trust, to put another person first, including myself—was more than I could have envisioned once upon a time. We share a genuine gratitude that, although not parents ourselves, we are free to assist others in whatever capacity we can and however we would like. Whether students, coworkers, nephews, or neighbors, we can be a source of support that not everyone has. So far I haven’t missed the worries of parenthood and am now of the mindset that I will not miss what I’ve never had. The choice still feels like the correct one. Maybe next lifetime.
I’ve had people say to me in an accusatory manner, “All that freedom must be nice.”
Actually, yes, it is.
Laura Jeannerette is a writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her flash fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction can be found in Gone Lawn, Otoliths, Good River Review, and upcoming in Drunk Monkeys. She describes herself as a dog in a woman's body and credits humor, books, and her fellow dogs as the recipe for a happy life.