She poured us each a generous serving of an expensive-looking California cabernet sauvignon in glasses with bowls as big as the babies’ heads. We sat down on the floor next to Phoebe’s elephant play mat, on a white rug as thick as a mattress. Red wine, a white rug, and two squirming babies seemed like a recipe for disaster to me, but Vanessa looked unconcerned.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask her—if she’d heard anything about Isabel, first of all, and if they’d really been as close as her nanny had implied—but I knew I needed to ease in. I couldn’t come in as hot as I had with Selena and risk angering Vanessa, turning her off from opening up to me.
I figured I’d start with something unrelated to Isabel: Phoebe’s birth story. Every mom I’d met loved talking about this, probably because giving birth feels like a superhuman feat; women understandably enjoy bragging about it, and have earned the right to. Forever. It was actually weird I hadn’t already heard it at one of our meetings; I knew all the gory details of Kira’s second-degree tearing and Selena’s arduous C-section recovery.
“So, remind me”—playing it safe in case she had told me before—“was Phoebe born in DC or New York?” I took a sip of my wine. It was velvety perfection.
“DC. We moved up here not long after she was born.”
“Was she born on time?”
“She was about a week late. I was so ready for her to be born. I was just so excited to meet her, to confirm that she was actually real, you know? It was a smooth labor. I mean, you know . . . as smooth as it can be,” she said laughingly, as we both knew that “smooth” entailed contractions that made you wish you were dead, the feeling that a broom was stuck in your butt when it was time to push, the moment of tearing, and the blood, oh, the blood. Smooth, indeed. “What about Clara?” she asked, sipping her wine demurely.
“She was born here in the city, at Mount Sinai West. She was also a little late. I was induced, which was not so pleasant,” I said, the biggest understatement I’d ever made. I’d endured thirty-six hours of contractions with an epidural that only worked on one side, vomiting throughout most of it. “That must have been such a crazy time to move! I can’t imagine moving with an infant. I could barely move from my bedroom to my bathroom for a while there.”
“Yeah, it was a little nuts,” she said, laughing lightly. “But I had a great opportunity to join this amazing practice that I’d admired from afar forever, and plus the whole situation with Phoebe’s dad, which I mentioned to you the other day. So it felt like the right time to have a fresh start elsewhere. It’s so much better for me to be in a dermatology practice with a predictable schedule—my schedule at the hospital in DC was crazy. I was always working. And obviously, that’s a lot tougher with a kid! Especially since I’m on my own. And we’re loving being in New York, so far.”
“And you’re already back at work. Is it hard to be away from Phoebe? I can’t even imagine being at work right now. My brain still feels totally like mush. I’d probably, like, forget to wear a shirt or something.” I wanted someone to tell me how great it was being back at work. How everything clicked back into place upon returning. Maybe if I heard more of that, I could actually start to gear up to do it myself.
“Well, I kind of have to work, but it hasn’t been bad so far.” My cheeks flamed. Of course she had to work. She didn’t have a spouse with an income taking some of the pressure off her. What was wrong with me? She softened and retreated quickly, looking embarrassed, too. “But I’m lucky to have a lot of help. I had a night nurse, and now my amazing nanny. So it’s manageable. I miss Phoebe when I’m at work, though. But we’re right next door, so I can pop over and see her sometimes between patients and feed her.” Perhaps this wasn’t an implication of breastfeeding at all, as I’d once thought. She was talking about togetherness, not logistics. She cleared her throat. “To be honest with you, I wasn’t sure I would have kids—Phoebe was a surprise. The best kind of surprise. So now, when things are hard, or I’m exhausted, I just remember how grateful I am for Phoebe, and everything else seems suddenly trivial.”
Her attitude toward being a mom was something I could probably stand to emulate. Sometimes I felt like all I did was feel sorry for myself, when I knew deep down how lucky I was.
“Well, Phoebe is lucky to have you as her mom, too. Do you have any family close by to help?”