Southern Lady Code: Essays(6)

I did not want my gynecologist to get me pregnant. Or be pregnant in my forties. Or work at it.

Friends of mine were working on it and it looked like hard work. They got shots to increase their fertility. They got shots to maintain their pregnancy. They got IVF. They miscarried. They got IVF again. They froze their eggs. They hired surrogates. Their surrogates miscarried. Babies were born prematurely. Multiple babies were born. Some babies had “issues,” which is Southern Lady Code for anything from a lazy eye to no eardrums. Postpartum was crippling. Marriages suffered.

I didn’t want my marriage to suffer. We had it pretty great, my husband and I. No debt, little stress, we had our health, we loved each other. We worked well as a pair. And me, I didn’t want to suffer either.

I am a woman who grew up during the seventies feminist movement. Marlo Thomas and friends gave me life anthems with the album Free to Be…You and Me. Rosey Grier told me it’s all right to cry. Diana Ross told me when I grow up, I don’t have to change at all. And Marlo assured me that “Mommies are people, people with children.” But why did there have to be a song reminding folks who you are after you become a parent? That song had stuck with me. If I had children, would I cease to be me?

All my life, I’d thought of having kids with the seriousness that I’d thought of taking a ceramics class. When I finally took one and came home with three beautifully glazed but warped bowls, my husband said: “You’re not going to turn into a lady who makes pots, are you?”

I was not. I kept the bowls and display them proudly—one holds fruit, one batteries, one loose change—but I had no interest in making anything else.

I called Mama and asked her if she’d be disappointed if I didn’t have kids.

Mama said: “Helen Michelle, I didn’t have children to have grandchildren.”

And with that, I gave myself permission to let the idea of having kids go.

My husband and I had had fun playing with the idea. We’d picked out names: Kid and Mary Alice. Kid for a boy or a girl. Mary Alice for my husband’s mother and grandmother. We’d thought about adoption and scrolled foster care sites, where kids’ pictures are posted along with one-paragraph descriptions. You can sort them by age, sex, and race. You can refine your search by what issues you think you can handle. We’d felt a connection to a pair of siblings—a hyperactive six-year-old and a nontalkative four-year-old—named Star and Devlon. But we didn’t reach out for them. And when I knew I was ovulating, we didn’t have sex. And my husband never pushed me. Because it turns out, “If it happens, it happens” is Southern Lady Code for we don’t want kids.

Not having children is one of the nicest surprises of our lives.

We do what we want, when we want. We do for each other. We do well for ourselves. We enjoy life’s little pleasures. For my husband this means playing softball for six hours every Saturday and Sunday like he has since he was twenty-one. For me, it means sitting uninterrupted on my toilet every morning and working the New York Times crossword puzzle until I fill in every square or my legs go numb.

See, I always knew I wanted to fall in love and be married, I just wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids. Or maybe I was sure. Maybe I knew that we didn’t need to start a family because the two of us are a family. And maybe I knew that I didn’t need children, because I already have it all.





A ROOM


            OF ONE’S OWN


            (THAT’S FULL OF


            GAY MEN)





When my friend Carmine asked if I’d like to be the sole lady at his bachelor party, my exact words were: “Sweet God in heaven above, yes.”

I’d been waiting twenty years in Manhattan to receive an invitation like this. And, at forty-two, I’d finally gotten it. Carmine and his longtime beau, Bernard, were engaged and I couldn’t wait to help celebrate. Some girls dream of moving to New York City to be a big star, but my dream was to be the only woman in a room of gay men.

Growing up in Alabama, there were no gay men.

In my high school graduating class of 1988, certain boys were “shy” or “respectful.” “Artistic” or “sensitive.” Some “kept to themselves.” This was all Southern Lady Code for something, but at the time, we girls weren’t exactly sure what. We thought of these boys like brothers. Or backup plans. I personally had secret alliances with a few. If we weren’t married by the age of thirty, we’d marry each other. I married at thirty-one. All of my backup plans married women and had kids straight out of college.

Plan A had been to save myself for Michael Jackson, George Michael, or Boy George because these men were different. Two out of three had dated Brooke Shields, so they were obviously marriage material. Would I like to wake up every morning to the dulcet tones of an angel or shop for Day-Glo shorty-shorts? I most certainly would. Did I have a poster of Culture Club over my bed because I thought the lead singer with his Karma Chameleon braids was the man for me? I most certainly did. I copied his kabuki makeup. I thought, When we go on our honeymoon, we’ll share a Caboodle.

The cliché Southern man is a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing redneck who rides a tractor like an inflatable pool toy and slurs racism like Carol Channing slurred her way through Hello, Dolly! But my favorite kind of Southern cliché is a fabric-book-carrying, mint-julep-sipping mama’s boy who knows all the words to Julia Sugarbaker’s “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” rant and doesn’t need to be asked to give you his opinion on anything. Especially Patsy Cline. Or personalized note cards.