A book is not a baby...

and your body is not a bar

Sep 12, 2023

When I was 41, my youngest kid started Kindergarten and I was bereft. I had spent more than a decade raising small children and now it was over. It felt like getting fired from the only job I’d ever been good at.

It was 2014, and I’d been writing for a few years, about my kids mostly. In 2010, I’d started a blog called “Days Like This”—as in “Mama said there’d be days like this”—about funny things my kids did. It was the heyday of the “mommy blog,” and I was convinced it was my ticket to fame and fortune. It wasn’t: my posts usually attracted a dozen or so readers, most of whom I was related to. After about a year, I shuttered “Days Like This” and started a new blog, “Half a Cow,” about my attempt to cook half a cow, or 187 pounds of grass-fed beef. For several months, I documented the meals I made from the meat I stored in a deep freezer in my garage. It was awful. When Hurricane Sandy knocked out power on the East Coast six months into the experiment, I was ecstatic because it meant I got to throw the rest of the meat away.

So I guess you could say I was writing, but in a way that was extremely marginal, by which I mean exactly that: it fit into the margins of my life, nestled around preschool and snacks and playdates and episodes of Paw Patrol, which were the requirements of my “real” job. I liked it that way. Since writing wasn’t my real job, I didn’t have to be that serious about it. I didn’t have to be that good. I didn’t have to admit how badly I wanted it. But now with all three of my kids out of the house all day, I needed to decide if I wanted to move it to the center. It was that or take up tennis.

Instead, I contemplated having another baby, something I wrote about in an essay I published that year called “Last Call,” as in last call for drinks at the bar before it closes. (“Last Call,” in case you missed it, was a metaphor for my body which I believed was shutting down, closing up shop, going out of business. One more baby for the road?)

Looking back at that time now, I can see that I was grappling with two things: one, a fear of growing older and losing the currency that accompanies fertility, especially for women. And two, a fear of what came next. Choosing to commit to writing was scary and unknown. Choosing to have another baby, for me at that time, felt like safe, well-trodden territory.

My husband, bless his heart, understood this. “This isn’t about another baby,” he said. “It’s about fear.” He was right: I was afraid of stepping boldly into my own life so was clinging to a power I knew how to wield, that I had experience wielding. I didn’t know what it meant to give that up. I won’t lie and say it was easy, but then again I didn’t really have a choice. At some point youth slips from our fingertips no matter how hard we try to hold onto it.

People sometimes call their books their babies, and it kind of makes me want to barf. My book is not a baby—a book is not a baby. Only a baby is a baby. (I wonder if men ever refer to books as their babies… but I digress.) A book—or any act of creation—has its own value. It doesn’t have to be a baby to enrich your life the same way I didn't have to have a baby, or be capable of having one, to have value.

TL/DR: I didn’t have another baby. I did keep writing. When “Last Call” was reprinted on a different website in 2017, my bio mentioned that I was working on a novel. “Write that novel,” wrote one commenter, herself a mother of four. So I did.

My book is available in Spanish! Friends traveling in Argentina spotted it and sent along these photos, which I loved.