Allison Cundiff

Baby Love 

I told my girlfriend I was ready to be a mother over a stack of pancakes. We were sitting at a crowded IHOP before work, her heavy arborist’s gloves laying on the table beside her coffee.
As I said the words, her fork froze in the air above her plate, the line in between her eyebrows suddenly deeper.
“But you’re so young,” she said, never taking her eyes off mine.

She had a point. I was in my early 20’s, waiting tables to pay for graduate school. It wasn’t the best time to procreate. But I had carried this longing for months. It started with a dream, always the same one: a little girl around three or four, hoisted on my hip. One day I saw a picture of a child in pigtails, her mother holding her in her right arm, the two of them looking as though they had always meant to be standing there. This is what she could look like, I thought, and clipped the photo from the magazine, tacking it to the wall beside my bed.

Most young women have photos of their crushes. I had photos of babies.

Motherhood wasn’t in my girlfriend’s plans. She was moving to Portland and wanted me to join her. She humored me, though, making jokes about turkey basters on our walk back to the car, her arm slung over my shoulders. I laughed with her, but inside, the deeper longing lay unmoved. I knew what I wanted. It wasn’t Portland. I just needed to find a father.

I found him at the server station at work. Before I knew he would be the one I’d choose to be the father of my child, he was my trainee. One Saturday that summer, the waiters all crowded together to check the schedule our manager had posted when we noticed the name of the new hire:
“Gandhi?” Eric had asked out loud.
“Who is Gandhi?” I echoed.
“Hi,” he waved, leaning across the bar to peer in at us.

On his first shift, he joked that as the only one of Indian descent among us, he would be in charge of teaching the team chess. He earned our trust by completing the team’s side work that first weekend. He pleased me by being a quick learner. He stood tall and a little willowy as I reviewed the software we used to enter orders, nodding his head and jotting down notes as I provided details about the Osso Bucco and the two Barolos that paired nicely with it.

The second night of training he injected small talk as we polished the wine glasses:
Did I like to play chess?
So, I was left-handed too?
How long had I been working there?
Was it true what the manager had told him? That I was dating a woman?

I looked up at him then. He was watching me with a half-smile.

“He told you that?” I picked up another wine glass.
“I mentioned I thought you were pretty.”
A pause, and he looked down. “He told me I shouldn’t waste my time.”

I laughed. My girlfriend was the first woman I had ever been in a relationship with. She was a logger with strong hands but kissed softly. I thought I was in love with her.

But it was not to be. She left for Oregon a month later, her truck packed high with her things.
I immediately missed her lean body, tired after a day at work. Two weeks later she mailed me a one-way ticket. I sat on the end of my bed, turning the ticket over and over in my fingers, my heart wild against my ribcage. On the other end of that flight waited one kind of love. But waiting inside me was the longing for another: motherhood. A sort of home within my body.
A child to carry.
I chose the latter.

If love wasn’t a current possibility, at least a baby could be. You didn’t need love for that, did you?

Time passed. I noticed children everywhere I went, pulling their parents to the swing set, their voices like bells in the air. When I met my friends for coffee and the kids in the booth beside us arched in their mothers’ arms, my friend Beth scoffed.
“You really want to do this?” Beth asked.
“I can’t think of anything I want more,” I answered honestly, feeling it in my bones.

Procuring a donor was not easy. My neighbor suggested a sperm bank, but I couldn’t afford that. Plus, the list of donors felt too much like the old Sears catalogs that would come to our house when I was a kid, leaving me breathless and overwhelmed by options. Bruce from work knew what I had been planning. He was broad shouldered, blue-eyed, and gay. He offered to submit a deposit and be the cool uncle. He was the one I was most strongly considering until one day, Gandhi asked me to meet for a drink after work.

He and I had become friends in the past few months, playing chess behind the bar on a small magnetic board, running to pick up each other’s dry cleaning. I learned his bright disposition was a consequence of marrying too young, quickly divorcing, and living as a single dad.

After the shift ended, I folded up my apron and walked next door to meet him. He was sitting alone at a corner table and stood awkwardly when I walked up. I noticed he had changed from his server shirt into a nice sweater.
“Is this a date?” I joked, and he blushed. He ordered us gimlets, mine like he knew I liked it, and he leaned forward across from me with his hands crossed, his dark eyes serious.
“I want to talk to you about something,” he told me.
“Are you dying?” I asked, earnestly confused.
He shook his head, his expression steady.
“I’ve been thinking about how I’d really like us to be–” and he paused here before continuing. “Closer.”
“Closer how?” I asked.
He told me he wanted a partner. He had been acting out in some way or another for as long as he could remember, and he wanted to harness himself to something more reliable. Like a grown-up life. A grown-up woman. I was his friend, and he trusted me.
“And you’re pretty,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“I’m not sure that’s grounds for a relationship,” I said, feeling the echo in my heart. We had the spark of friendship, but not much more.
Another pause.
“Bruce told me you wanted a baby. That you need a donor,” he said.
I nodded, not surprised the men at work had been chatting about my predicament.
“You know, I could be the one to give you that,” he said, his face even.
“But you’re already a father,” I said.

“I can offer companionship. And a sibling for our baby. You know, if you choose me.”
I looked his face up and down, suddenly liking the idea. It would mean a world less lonely for the child if there were built-in siblings. It would mean making a family with my friend. I considered his features beside mine.
But then one last convention flashed before me.
“But we aren’t even in love,” I told him.
“Maybe we could grow into love,” he countered quickly.

I told him I needed to think about it.
I went home that night and lay back on my bed. Would love need to be at the center of a relationship? He needed stability, I wanted a baby. Would those be enough without romantic love? I looked over beside my pillow where the photograph of the girl in the pigtails hung.
My heart surged a bit in my chest. I had an opportunity before me, and I wanted to take it.

The next day at the start of the shift he was sitting stirring sugar into his coffee. I sat down beside him at the bar.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Had a lot on my mind.”
“I thought about what you proposed.”
“And?” he said, his face eager.
“My answer is yes,” I said. He leaned over to hug me, spilling his coffee on the bar. Through our hug, in the mirror behind the bar, I could see that it had started snowing.

The next parts came fast. A Saturday night together.
Christmas.
A positive pregnancy test.
A baby born after. A girl. We named her Camille. A family name on his father’ side. Also one of my favorite authors.
Just like my dream.
And with her, the birth of bliss. Her photograph replaced the magazine cutout on the wall.
Whatever I had missed from the lack of romantic love was filled completely with baby love.
Any of the duties: missing sleep, nursing in the middle of the night, changing diapers– I loved all of it. Loving her felt like home.

A life fell into place. A house that we fixed up. A dog. Bills to pay. Gandhi’s daughter from his first marriage was over every weekend, her little sister toddling around behind her, my heart alive at the sight of them. He got his stability; I got a family.

We went to school, got jobs, traded in the old Volvo with the leaking sunroof for a sensible

Honda. The kids learned piano, got braces, played soccer. And beside all of this, our marriage tagged along with it all, a sort of social experiment built on mutual hope. The years strung together, like steps taken in a direction whose mileage you don’t notice until the race is nearing over, our relationship tugged behind us, an afterthought. My heart held room for him, surely, but it mostly felt like he was on the outside, looking in.

Like a seed that never really took off in growth, Gandhi and I lacked the bedrock of longing, the deep solar plexus ache felt between two people in love. He felt it too. Apart from the children, there was only quiet lacking. And that quiet was loud.
At times, it screamed.

So, fourteen years later after that conversation over gimlets, Gandhi and I split up. Nearly the same time of year as when we first conceived our child. It was a quiet sort of breakup. Not like the movies showed it when I was a kid. No screaming or kicking. Just the sound of the zipper on the suitcase on a Sunday morning, the sun still shining in the sky.

Right before Christmas we met at the little Thai restaurant around the street to sign the papers. The waiter smiled at us, seating us at the table where the four of us always sat, where our daughter would sit in a highchair gumming glassy noodles. It wasn’t easy. Divorces are always hard, no matter how uncontested.

“Are you afraid?” I asked him.
“A little,” he confessed. “You?”
“Maybe,” I said, a knot in my chest.
He tapped his fingers against the table and looked at me hard, the Christmas lights twinkling sadly behind him.
“You know, no one will ever be able to give you what you needed the way I did,” he said.
I nodded, knowing he was right. But just because something was ending didn’t mean it was never good.
“To new adventures?” I said, raising my glass to his.
“I sure hope so,” he said, maybe a little sadly before signing the papers and disappearing into the cold night.

Packing up his things later that week, I thought more about Gandhi’s final words to me. No one would ever be able to give me what I had wanted most, what he had provided for me through our daughter. Home.

When she was packing up for her first year away at college, Camille heard the full story. For years she’d drop a question here or there about her parents, wholly convinced she had been a surprise conception that I had elaborately covered up with a tall tale about star-crossed lesbians and a dramatic wait staff.

“It’s okay if I was an accident,” she said, looking at me sideways.
“I know. But you weren’t,” I told her. “I was clipping pictures of what I thought you would look like out of magazines and pinning them to the wall beside my bed.”
She scoffed. “What 21-year-old wants a baby?” she asked, her hands on her hips.
“Me,” I told her honestly, considering her face, its parts I had dreamed of. “I did.”