by Rebecca Johnson

I am good with babies. Well, ok, who isn’t? Nature designed them to be cute so we wouldn’t smother them when they are annoying but even so, I have a talent. On planes, I don’t mind when the baby in front of me cries. In college, my friends made money by bartending but I preferred babysitting.

Once, I got a rare gig for the middle of the day. I arrived to find a nervous woman dressed in the career suit of the ‘80’s—aggressive shoulder pads, sensible pumps, blouse with a bow. Clearly, it was her first interview post-partum. I’ll never forget the expression of shock on her face when she arrived home a few hours later to find me sitting on the floor, playing smile face games with her child. Someone could actually have fun with an infant? That was a woman who was not good with babies, though who knows? Maybe she was gangbusters with teens.

Despite my affection for them, having a baby was never particularly high on my list of things to get done in life, which is why I did not get married until I was 36. A few weeks before the wedding, I stopped using birth control and got pregnant within weeks. “Well aren’t you the fertile Myrtle?” my friends who had grappled with expensive IVF treatments grumbled.

I hadn’t been walloped by any kind of maternal instinct; instead, I’d been fighting a creeping moral malaise. If my doldrums had a theme song it would have been Peggy Lee asking “Is That All There Is?” Truthfully, I was shallow as a puddle. Everything was about me. My career. My body. My social life. My vague discontent. As my friend, the late humorist David Rakoff, used to mock me— “And now, Malcontensia will play for you on her mandolin of rancor.” I laughed along with the joke to be a good sport but, truthfully, it hurt my feelings. During his funeral after his death from cancer at the age of 44, I kept thinking, why do I feel so blank? And then I remembered, oh yeah, Malcontensia.

Mind you, I understood none of this at the time. As Kierkegaard says, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” To instill a deeper meaning in my life, I spent a small fortune on therapy, but that was just more me, me, me. I tried volunteering with an organization to mentor underprivileged children. Once a week, I’d spend a few hours reading to those restless, damaged children. I liked it okay but I knew I was a mere pebble thrown into an abyss. If my rock ever landed, I’d be long gone before I could hear the splash. A mere hour after my shift started, I’d start watching the clock, wondering when I could go home.

As soon I was pregnant, everything changed. My ambivalence—a seemingly life long scourge—suddenly evaporated. I hesitate to call the feelings for my unborn child love, it was more an unequivocal, overwhelming, ineluctable sense of certainty. When I hear soldiers talk about their sense of duty to their country, I usually feel a prick of scorn. How can you dedicate your life to an abstraction? But that is exactly how I felt towards my growing fetus. Duty. Honor. Responsibility. I sound like a right wing lunatic, but there you have it.

The other bad personality trait that went away with motherhood was jealousy. I once envied so many things! Wrap around porches, trust funds, functioning fathers, slim ankles, film options on novels. The minute that blastocyst imbedded on the uterine wall, all that envy miraculously melted away. Malcontensia became Contensia. I gave my kids life, but they also gave it to me.