I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(23)

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What I did know was that neither the cat nor the dogs were any good at keeping rats away. North Georgia wood rats are terrier-size, and they specialize in climbing trees and then jumping onto your house and eating a hole in your roof and going into your attic and then busting through your closet ceiling and having babies in the pockets of your winter coats.

We also had a mold problem, which we didn’t notice until the mold had crept silently up from the crawl space, through the wood floors, across the living room rug and up the side of a sofa. I can only guess that rats love mold, because both things lived very happily in our home alongside us without our knowledge for quite some time. Coincidentally, both required expensive extermination services.

I was looking over the bill from the mold remediation company and questioning whether homeownership was worth it one rainy Sunday afternoon when the neighbor called.

“Have you seen our cat?” he asked. “He’s been missing since yesterday.”

“Oh no,” I said. I didn’t like the dog-taunting little feline creep, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. I’d always been an animal lover, and the thought of the cat having encountered some danger softened me a bit toward our neighbors for a moment.

“Could I come check your crawl space?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s no way he could be in there,” I explained. “It’s bolted shut. No one can get into it without removing the door with a screwdriver.”

“Can I just look?”

Holy Dateline special, our neighbors thought we’d buried their cat alive. My heart hardened right back up.

“Fine,” I said.

John went out in the rain with his tools, and our neighbor held an umbrella over the bushes that obscured the two-foot-square wooden door that led into the dark underbelly of our house, a dank tunnel where the pipes snaked under our floors.

When he pulled the door away from the house, out bolted the big white ghost cat.

John stepped back onto a slick of oak leaves, knocking over a tightly packed leaf bag, which exploded like a bomb, shooting leaves into the air.



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We never figured out how that cat got in there, although we suspect he wandered in after a rat while the mold guy had the door off the crawl space the day before.

We did, however, eventually figure out why barking dogs are so upsetting to parents of young children. We looked back, after some years, and saw the gulf between where we were and where our neighbors were and how little we knew. I never apologized, but in the years that followed the births of our own babies, I spoke to our neighbors in the contrite tones of a person who is ashamed to admit, but knows without question, that she was wrong.





The Window


“Should I have kids?”

Several times over the past few years, I’ve been invited to lunch by younger friends who eventually push the chips and guacamole aside and get down to asking this question. I remember asking it—or a version of it—of a friend of mine years ago. I was twenty-five and she was thirty-two, and she’d just announced her pregnancy. “Why?” I asked (which, just so you know, is considered a strange response to a pregnancy announcement). I meant, “How did you know it was time?” and “What made you sure you wanted to?” and “Did you always know this would happen?” I wanted her to tell me something about my own future.

I’m now a woman in my forties and I have children, so maybe it looks like I have knowledge and perspective on this matter. But I know only my own experience, and if there’s one question that doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, it’s this one. No one is really qualified to give anyone else an answer, although that doesn’t stop anybody from asking.



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Here’s what I usually say: Have kids! You’re going to be great! I love my kids so much, I think my head will explode!

And if the other person starts to look terrified, I say: Don’t have them! That’s cool! You’ll have such a good life! Think of all you’ll do with your time and resources!

And if they sit through either of those answers and keep looking me in the eyes, waiting me out, I say: Okay, you want to know the truth? Having children made me wish for a time machine.

I explain it like so:

I knew I wanted kids, and I knew I wanted to be a young mother—partly because my parents had me in their twenties and that seemed like as good a model to follow as any, and partly because I have this “do the work first, have fun later” mind-set. Having kids seemed like a big job I needed to get started on. Luckily, we married young, so we were able to enjoy some childless married years before we started a family. Then, when we decided it was time, I didn’t get pregnant right away . . . or after a year . . . or another year . . . so we ended up jumping through fertility hoops. We were willing to put a lot of time and money and medicine behind the effort, because Mother Nature had worked her baby-wishing spell on us. Every fiber of my being longed to produce a tiny human made of half me, half John.

Our son arrived healthy and gorgeous about ten days before his due date, ushered into daylight via Caesarean section after trying to kick his way out feet-first. In the hospital, cross-eyed on Percocet, I squinted at his little face peeking out of a blanket in my arms. I tried to focus on his impossibly symmetrical eyebrows, a dozen tiny hairs each. When he opened his mouth to cry, tears spilled from the corners of my eyes. “What’s wrong?” John asked. “He’s crying,” I said, not realizing that I was, too. I wanted to heal my son’s pain, soothe his alarm, feed his hunger, do whatever he needed, if I could just figure out what it was. I wanted to do everything right for him.