Girl Walks Into a Bar (21 page)

What if my partner lives in California and is just trying to do the right thing by preparing to be a good dad and we don’t quite know yet where we stand with each other and he isn’t here to take me to the latest damn Anne Hathaway flick? Or worse yet, what if I were a woman whose partner had skipped out and wanted nothing to do with his child and so that “list of baby things to do that’s getting longer” can’t be sweetened by a partner one evening a week or any evening ever? Because there are women out there who are reading that Web site who are in that situation, and ain’t no Anne Hathaway flick gonna solve that.

I was feeling scared. Anne Hathaway wasn’t going to help.

Giggles and Tears

Now I was the one
who was pregnant and
I
was about to be the perpetrator of my very own shower on innocent victims. I hoped to make it as painless as possible. My shower would be coed and in the evening, so I hoped it would feel just like a regular gathering with only a small time allotted to look at tiny pants.

I didn’t know the first thing about what a baby needs or what items would be necessary to make my life infinitely easier, but I had to create a registry. So I brought in the experts: David and Russell. Maybe because they felt lucky to have won the adoption lottery, or maybe because they actually had to pass the test of being “worthy” of being good parents (unlike the rest of us), but whatever the case, they had done more research on infant care and more preparation before they became fathers than any other parents I knew.

At the insistence of David, we did not meet at the Babies “R” Us right near my apartment but rather on the Upper West Side at a store called Giggle. This is high-end, gay-worthy baby stuff
we are talking. I had just seen the documentary
Babies
, which features the lives of happy babies in Africa and Mongolia, so absolutely all of the store items were looking particularly unnecessary right now to me anyway, and I just wanted to register for some sticks, a few goats, and a swarm of flies to create a truly happy and adorable child.

The second I walked into Giggle, I started to feel a ball of anxiety taking over my body. I could see it appearing on the horizon, getting larger and larger, but I was trying to wait to acknowledge it until the process was over. The anxiety was “Oh my God! I could be doing this alone.” My sunshiny outlook, which I had carefully fed and cultivated for five months, was faltering at the sight of the brightly colored Happy Town I was entering. Each toy with googly eyes seemed to stare me down with a challenging expression: “Aren’t you happy? Aren’t we cute? This is the moment you’ve been waiting for. IS THERE ANYTHING BETTER THAN THIS?”

We started off in the stroller area. “Do you want me to walk you through how this works?” asked the clerk. Aaaand … Brain Shutdown. White TV Fuzz. I knew I would not absorb one thing she said, let alone remember it four months later when the baby finally arrived. I was too busy fighting the fear. “No, let’s save that to the end,” I said. We moved on to the next department, the Breast Area.

“Oh, Lord. No, no, cannot compute, no, no, no.” I could not handle learning about the mysteries of breast-feeding right away. Yes, I planned on breast-feeding, but all I could think was “Not now. Please, not now.” I had recently seen Maya Rudolph at our
SNL
reunion show and she was pumping breast
milk in an office. I had never seen this before. Believe me, it looked like a damn horror show. I didn’t know nipples could stretch that far. “Um, can we save Breast Town for later too?” This was only the second department we had approached and the second thing I was asking to save for later. I knew that whatever department came next, I would have to face it. It’s like if you taste wine at a restaurant and it’s really bad so you ask to try another wine, but then the thing is, you have to like that second one or you are just being a pain in the ass. Sometimes the second one is even worse, and I’ll choke out through a grimace, “That’s great. Yes, that one.” Notice how I’m turning to a wine analogy for a baby store. Is that a bad sign? Well, it’s what I knew. I knew wine. I did not know nipples.

We moved on to the cribs. I could handle cribs. I peered into a high-end crib that had cute padding around all the sides. “Now,” said David, “some people are against this padding that goes around the sides, because the baby can roll over and get their face pressed up against it and they can…” He trailed off and made a face of “and you know what happens next.” I filled in the blank for him. “She dead.”

He nodded and continued, “But if you take the padding off of the crib, they can hit their heads on the bars.” OK. So this crib poses the question: With which method do you want to kill your baby?

From here on in, each item came with a cautionary tale from David about how each thing you “had to have” could easily turn into a death trap if you weren’t very clear on the instructions. Car seat? “If you put them in the car seat,” said David, “make sure to not just buckle the strap that goes across
their chest. You also have to fasten the strap that comes up between their legs. Some people don’t do the strap between the legs and then the baby can slide downward and…”

I filled in the blank for him. “And … she dead.”

Baby slings? I had just read about a recall of certain baby slings. You don’t get the right kind … she dead. You had to know the instructions. Side note: I never read instructions. Not on my BlackBerry, not on my camera. I am probably missing out on hundreds of functions just because I shut down when reading instructions. So I don’t know how to use the zoom function on my camera. But it’s not going to
kill a baby
!

We moved on to the socks section. I breathed a sigh of relief. “Ahhhhh! I know socks. I can handle socks.” I even doubled back to Breast Town, feeling I could finally tackle it. I had waded around in the pool and was ready for the deep end.

I left the store feeling accomplished. I had done it. I had registered. There was so much more to do, but I had gotten over the first hurdle. I said good-bye to David and Russell and thanked them profusely. I was going to meet my friend Ricki to see a play, and as I started to walk, I had the nagging, tugging feeling that I was going to cry. Not tears of joy. Not tears of “You did it! Good for you. What a big step!” Tears of straightup fear. I
was
alone. I could be handling all these things alone. I didn’t know if I was up for the challenge. I felt a complete lack of confidence expand and take over. I didn’t cry, though. I got on the subway and met Ricki. We sat in our seats in the theater and waited for the lights to go down.

“How’d it go with David and Russell?”

“Good,” I said. “They were really helpful. But I feel like…”

“What?”

“I feel like I might cry.”

And then I did. Sitting in the seat, surrounded by other theatergoers, I felt tears start to form in my eyes and run down my face.

“Ohhh,” said Ricki, a mother of three kids with a fantastically helpful and involved husband. “It’ll be OK.”

Something deep within was telling me it would be OK, but for now this was Fear Day, and I guess I just had to let it happen. This stuff had to come out at some point, I suppose. It’s weird that it happened at a place called Giggle.

A few months
later
, Ricki ended up throwing me my version of the perfect shower: It was at night, it was coed, alcohol was served, and to spare others the pain of all those hours I had logged over the years, I raced through the gifts in record speed.

I have a confession, though. I did receive some baby jeans from the Gap. In spite of my previous convictions, upon opening them, I did say, “Awwww!” and got a little teary over the cuteness of those tiny pants.

We Are Thrilled to Announce the Birth of … Hercules!?

Three months into the pregnancy
and I was sure it was a girl. I have always been right in guessing the genders of my friends’ kids in the womb, and the second I found out I was pregnant, I just knew it was a girl. I was thinking only about girl names, so sure was I. I did want to find out the gender ahead of time because I already had enough uncertainty about so many aspects of the whole process, though to me, with my self-proclaimed psychic powers, this was just a formality. I went in for an ultrasound one day and the nurse said, “Do you want to know the sex of your baby?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s a boy!”

All the springs in my head went
boioioioioioioioingnngngngg
. The nurse kept talking, but my brain was just a blur. I had this
girl vision comfortably settled in my head and now that had been turned upside down. I realized as I was absorbing the news that maybe I had made this baby a girl in my mind to make myself feel more at ease. I’m a girl. I
know
girls. I know what they like to do, and if it was just going to be me as a single mom, I could picture that. Something about having a boy and possibly not having his dad around made me more nervous, even though that may have been an irrational thought. I called up John to tell him the news. He seemed freaked out too, like he may be having the same irrational thought.

At some point in all of the proceedings, I think when I was about six months along, though I never outright requested it of him, John told me he was planning on moving to New York. He said he couldn’t imagine going through his day in California, knowing he had a child growing up across the country. Luckily, with his job, he could work from anywhere. Again, we still hadn’t figured
us
out, but I was imagining having to explain to my child why his dad wasn’t here when many of the other kids’ dads were, so I was relieved to know that my baby would have his dad in his life. I’m still going to have explaining to do since I don’t know that we will be a conventional family, but luckily, I live in New York City at the moment, capital of the unconventional families. For now, the plan was that John would find an apartment near me and sublet his place in California. There were the basic logistics of space concerns with my one-bedroom apartment and John working out of his home, but also, given the short amount of time we had dated, we both just felt more comfortable playing it safe. Yes, putting us all in the same tiny apartment would work for the romantic
comedy version of the story, but as we already learned in chapter one, I ain’t a leading lady in a rom-com.

Since this baby was now officially our mutual concern, we could bring up the topic of names. For boys, I loved all the Old Testament names. I made up a list with names like Caleb and Levi. I even threw in some more odd ones, one of my favorite odd ones being Zebediah, because I thought Zeb sounded cool. John liked the traditional name of Jack. He also liked Hayden. When he said that name, I burst out laughing in spite of myself. “What’s so funny?” he said. I couldn’t stop laughing, mainly because Hayden is exactly the name I would think he would pick—so him and so un-me. We were still tossing around the same few names we had managed to agree on a few months later. One day, I texted him simply “Zebediah? Just keeping it in the mix!”

He texted back: “In the mix? Try putting it in the blender.”

Just a few months into the pregnancy, I had a dream about a little boy named Hercules. When I woke up, I called John and told him. We chuckled about it, and I began referring to the creature within as Hercules. It soon lost its comic-book, jokey image as a name and actually started to sound really cool to me. “How’s Herc doing?” John would call up and ask. I started to really like the name Hercules. Like for real. There were a few problems with the name, though. One: If I told my mom I was naming the baby Hercules, her head would fall off. Two: Every time I would tell someone his name, I don’t think I could face the derision and “WHAT?! HERCULES?” that would come my way. I don’t have the strength to weather that every day. Also, in my dream, Hercules was saying that his
father wouldn’t hug him or kiss him—he seemed sad: my not-so-subconscious concerns about raising a child whose father might not live in the same town and—at the time I had the dream—whose future level of involvement was a complete unknown. Oh, and finally, if I had any job other than actor, Hercules might actually fly. But people would think I was just picking a weird name because I’m a crazy actor instead of that I had the dream. (Add Hercules to Banjo, Pilot Inspektor, Kal-El—we all see
US
magazine.) In spite of these strikes against the name Hercules, we still called the baby Herc right up ’til the end. One day we were walking in the West Village and saw a business plaque on the side of the building:
HERCULES KOSTAS, CPA
. “Look!” we exclaimed. “Someone actually named Hercules!” See? It can be a real name! Yes, this man was probably Greek, but so what? we chuckled. The next day, we were watching the World Cup. We noticed a player on the US team was named Herculez (with a
z
) Gomez. “What!? Another Hercules? It’s a sign!” we thought. “OK,” we said, “if we see one more sign of Hercules in the next twenty-four hours, that’s the Universe telling us we are supposed to name the baby Hercules.” That night, we went to Shakespeare in the Park and saw
The Merchant of Venice
. Out of nowhere, one of the characters looks skyward and cries out to the heavens and ye gods on high, “Go, Hercules!” John and I whipped our heads toward each other, wide-eyed, and chuckled to ourselves in disbelief as the play continued. Even when the baby was a few days old, I still thought of him as Herc, but I ended up letting go of the name. I have a hard enough time fending off the negative input that can come your way when you put yourself out there
to be an actor. I didn’t need the added unwanted input every time I told someone my baby’s name.