To say I had reservations about this plan, however glittering, was a vast understatement. Sanjay and I had known each other for almost a decade and had been together for seven of those years. All that time he had been a seed—ripe with potential but drifting unsown on the wind. How could a man who spent hours watching documentaries about Jimi Hendrix and reading Charlie Parker and Chet Baker biographies believe that yet more schooling would magically transform him into a person who was passionate about physiology? Why couldn’t he accept who he was and find something useful and well paying to do with his real interests, which were music and the arts and—well, not medicine? Didn’t he see that there was a reason he had gone to work at a cultural magazine instead of attending med school after graduating from college?
And yet. Being a doctor was what his parents wanted for him. Expected of him. Moreover, his fulfilling this plan would provide a good, stable life for the family he and I had just started. While I harbored no fantasies about being a doctor’s wife, I did not loathe the idea of being able to go to the grocery store and buy what I wanted without thinking about how much it would cost, nor the possibility of taking vacations with Sanjay and Stevie without running up credit card debt that would take years to pay off, if we ever did at all. Maybe later down the line, I thought, I could even take a whole year off just to write children’s books.
Even so, my short-term worries far outweighed any hopes or fears about how the rest of our lives would unfold. As I looked around the table at Alex, Harue, Jon, and Malcolm—people we had known for almost a decade, four of the six of us having met at Hudson —I felt an aching, preemptive loss.
Alex and Malcolm had been with me in the Hudson break room on 9/11, glued to the television with horror as we learned our city was under attack. Despite her vocal distaste for children, Alex had held my hand as I caterwauled my way through Stevie’s birth. And when Sanjay and I broke up, Harue had been the first to tell me I was a fool to leave him—a tragedy of sorts that she had retold as a comedy when toasting us at our wedding.
“You’ll be back,” said Harue. She drained her wine, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, having had so much to drink that manners were a distant memory. She added, “You’ll be back, because you’ll miss us too much, and you’ll run out of things to do there.”
Harue was right, I thought miserably as I drove past the forests and fields of Pennsylvania, through the flat expanse of Ohio, and north to the Michigan college town that was to be our home. We were making a terrible mistake.
That first year I quickly discovered she was wrong on one count: a dearth of things to do would never again be a problem. My husband disappeared into his coursework, I started a new job, and Stevie became mobile, revealing that the first year of parenting was not the hardest, after all. Then one December morning I threw up into my wastebasket at work and realized—with a horror that still fills me with shame—that I had gotten pregnant during the sole occasion Sanjay and I had slept together that fall.
I was lonely, though. Cripplingly so, and the email chain I kept up with Alex and Harue did little to ease the feeling that I had been marooned on a landlocked Midwestern island. I had taken a midlevel fundraising position in the university’s medical development department, and to my surprise I liked the work well enough—if only because I was good at it. But most of my coworkers were younger than me and childless, and those who were the same age or older were bachelors or men who behaved as though their children were hobbies. Even before I was pregnant with Miles, no one seemed to understand why I really—no, really —couldn’t grab a cocktail after work or join the development association’s golf league. As I would quickly come to realize, having a child—and then another—was a professional liability for a person like me, which is to say a woman.
I tried going to moms’ groups on the weekends, but I always felt awkward and out of place. When a brute of a toddler in the music-with-mommy class repeatedly played the role of Little Bunny Foo Foo to Stevie’s field mouse while his mother cheered his innate leadership skills, I decided I would have to get comfortable with going it alone.
Then I met Jenny.
It was a Saturday, or maybe a Sunday. I had recently had Miles and was still oozing from too many places, but I had used up my maternity leave, which meant Sanjay had already dropped out of medical school and I was adjusting to life as a working mother of two. (This consisted of overparenting at night and on the weekends, and thinking self-defeating thoughts while huddled over a breast pump in a bathroom stall scrolling through photos of my children’s life without me several times a day during the workweek.) I was pushing Miles, who was screaming his head off, in his stroller through a nearby park. I had just wheeled past a play structure when I came upon a woman with a baby in a sling, bouncing from one foot to the other with the kind of energy I had not had since before Stevie was born.
Of course, this woman was Jenny and her baby was Cecily. For whatever reason, I paused in front of them.
“Sounds like your little man’s not too happy,” said Jenny with a warm smile.
I shook my head. “Nope. He’s been like this for weeks. I’ve tried everything short of an exorcism.”
“What about probiotics?” said Jenny. She looked down at Cecily, who was the sort of pretty, peaceful infant that triggered ovulation in unwitting women. “That worked wonders for Cecily’s colic.”
“I haven’t tried that yet.”
“Get the drops—it’s practically a miracle cure. Your first?” she asked, nodding in Miles’ direction.
“Second.” I pointed at my waist. “Hence my two spare tires.”
“Don’t say that. You look fantastic.”
“For someone who’s six months pregnant,” I said.
She laughed. Her laugh was throaty and bright; it was easy to imagine her cast as the ingénue in a romantic comedy. “Cecily’s my first.”
She was awfully chic for a new mother, I thought, taking in her caftan-style dress, long sweater coat, and highlighted hair, which was artfully piled on top of her head. Even more than her clothes, though, she seemed like a parenting pro. But she probably had a mom who had shown her what to do. Nick was four when my mother left; I was six. I’d been winging the mothering thing ever since.
“How old is your daughter?”
“Three months,” she said. “This little peanut won’t let her mama sleep more than two hours at a time.”
“Miles is four months,” I said.
The corners of her mouth shot halfway across her cheeks as she grinned. “Practically twins!” She stuck out her hand, which I shook, not without noting that the paint on her nails was worn but most definitely the work of a salon professional. “By the way, I’m Jenny Sweet.”
“Penelope Ruiz-Kar,” I said. “But you can call me Penny.”
“Jenny and Penny,” she said, still smiling. “We should be friends.”
And so we were. Almost as soon as Jenny came into my life, things took a turn for the better. There is something about seeing someone like you thrive that helps you to do the same. It was true that even then, Jenny and Matt were financially comfortable in a way that Sanjay and I were not. They were, well, polished—whereas Sanjay wore T-shirts and track pants most of the time, and though I tried to make an effort, I inevitably found a Cheerio stuck to the back of my pants hours after I had sat on it.
Yet Jenny, like me, was a mother in her early thirties. While I longed to return to New York, she pined for San Francisco; she and Matt had uprooted after he took a position with a financial firm run by a former business school classmate. Though she stayed home with Cecily, hiring a sitter only when absolutely necessary, she had recently started a website—though back then it was just a blog, sans sponsors and professional-looking photos—and worked constantly.
As for my loneliness, Jenny quickly put an end to that. She seemed to know everyone, even though she and Matt had moved to our town six short months before we had, and she was eager to connect me. Here was a hairdresser who knew how to turn the frizz on my head into a sleek chestnut bob; there was a yoga teacher who could fix my postpartum back problems. She also introduced me to Sonia and Jael, who were also relatively new mothers, and soon the four of us had a standing brunch date on Sundays.
“You have a crush on this woman,” remarked Sanjay as I applied tinted balm in front of the mirror one Sunday morning in preparation for brunch, which had become the highlight of my week.
“Isn’t that how all friendships begin?” I asked before pressing my lips together to even out the color. “With some degree of platonic infatuation?” What I did not say to him was that it was not so much infatuation as deep relief at having a friend in the thick of it with me—and who seemed to hold the answer to my heart’s hidden question: how to be a good mother.
Sanjay looked at me quizzically for a moment. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “But you seem good lately. Happier.”
Happier wasn’t what he really meant. At peace, maybe, or at least accepting of my lot in life.
A few days after dropping out of medical school, Sanjay had surprised me by offering to become a stay-at-home dad. He would write during the kids’ naps or whenever he could find an opportunity, he explained. If all went well, by the time Miles was ready for preschool, Sanjay would have figured out the next step of his life.