Bridget Phetasy

There’s a lot of rumbling about American polarization these days. Sometimes it takes the form of people advocating for a national divorce or dire warnings of a forthcoming civil war. A national divorce seems impractical and America is too fat for a civil war. Better evidence that the country is already fracturing is the talk of the “parallel economy.” We’ve come a long way from the 2016 moment of self-awareness about needing to get out of our echo chambers. By 2020 it seemed everyone wanted their own. Now we’re redecorating the walls of the echo chambers. Adding some throw pillows.

When I was about eleven years old my favorite Barbie was Midge from the California Dream collection. Barbie’s BFF, she had auburn hair and freckles. Midge came with roller skates and a blue visor and I loved her. My sister had California Dream Barbie and we would pop in the Beach Boys Greatest Hits cassette tape and pretend we were living in California for hours upon hours, day after day. We wore that cassette tape out, screaming the lyrics to “California Dreamin’” on cold winter days in Connecticut. I imagined Midge was me, cruising down the boardwalk with the wind in my hair and the sun on my cheeks. My dreams of being a California girl began in those afternoons lost in fantasyland.

I’m an idiot. Because only an idiot decides to seriously pursue stand-up comedy at thirty, which is when I began. Stand-up is something dumb you start doing in your twenties, like drugs or believing you can change the world. It’s for when you’re full of youthful idealism, energy and collagen. It’s not something you begin when you’re approaching midlife crisis, feeling insecure about your poor life choices and uncomfortable with your aging body in an industry that worships youth. Stand-up is undoubtedly the hardest, most unforgiving performance medium on the planet. Although I grew up memorizing comedy albums, it seemed like something only geniuses and lunatics such as Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Robin Williams got to do.

Upon opening Louise Perry’s new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, I’m moved to tears by the dedication: For the women who learned it the hard way Unlike many other people who have read and reviewed Perry’s work, reading her book wouldn’t be some academic exercise in contemplating how liberal feminism has let women down. It wouldn’t be evaluating what those poor sluts over there have endured in the wake of the sexual revolution. Reading her book was personal. I’m one of those sluts. I’m a case study for her thesis. A cautionary tale. I knew this book was going to be difficult. And it made me realize it’s time to finish this essay — one I’ve been trying to write for four years.

I’m here to apologize to my brothers and sisters of color — my white daughter’s pale skin has brought me nothing but shame. I have failed as an ally. For if whiteness is the root cause of systemic racism, then what does that make me for having a white child? How can I extol the virtues of anti-racism and dismantle white supremacy while simultaneously birthing another white person? These two seem incompatible. If I were truly honoring my commitment to decolonizing white spaces, I would have had my tubes tied or had myself euthanized and done the BIPOC community and the planet a favor. I’m such a coward. My therapists will have their work cut out for them this week. “Love is love,” unless you fall in love with a cishet white male.

I’m writing this from a place outside time, day, night or sleep. It’s a place filled with magic, milk and boobs on constant display. I’m writing from the Newborn Bubble. My baby, Matilda, was born a month ago and my brain is mush. So if this column ends up being little more than disjointed images and memories, incomplete sentences and trains of thought that get started but never leave the station, know that I am in a postpartum daze. I’ve started to write this piece literally dozens of times: my current view is a baby who passed out looking at her high contrast card. Her onesie is stained with spit-up. Is she breathing? My current view is a sleeping baby in a dock-a-tot, it’s 10:33 a.m. I should be sleeping because she is — but I can’t. Is she breathing?

My husband and I recently attended the virtual childbirth classes offered by the hospital where I am registered to deliver our first child. We are classic first-time parents. We have no idea what to expect. Excited and terrified, we’re aware that no matter how much we prepare, there is really no way to. So we signed up for the six-hour class on a Saturday, hoping to get some sense of what labor would be like and the standard procedures at the hospital. The three nurses who taught the class had been bringing babies into the world for well over a decade. They seemed funny and capable. However, it wasn’t long into the training before they started referring to us as variations on a theme of pregnant: “pregnant people,” “pregnant persons,” “birthing persons.

I’m twenty-seven weeks pregnant, which is technically the last week of my second trimester, and shit is getting real. Apparently, this is also the “longingly and obsessively scroll through Instagram travel pages” phase of pregnancy, so of course Facebook took it upon itself to remind me that nine years ago today I was in Sri Lanka. The algorithm is tormenting me. I’m wanderlusting. Wondering if I’ll ever travel again. Reminiscing about the good ol’ days. As I scroll through my photo albums on Facebook, I am reminded of how often people would comment, “You’re so free!” The people who said this to me over the years had “real” jobs and mortgages and pets and kids.

We hear lot of talk these days about anti-natalism: the ethical view that procreation is morally wrong. Young women and men are choosing not to have kids and, in extreme instances, choosing sterilization in their late teens. “I got my uterus thrown out voluntarily at 19!” a young woman boasts on an internet forum devoted to this topic. Climate anxiety often tops the list of reasons cited by contributors. Call them the “baby doomers.” When I went down the rabbit hole to read what these young folks are saying, they sounded exactly like me in my twenties. My climate anxiety peaked in the early 2000s (thanks, Al Gore). The inconvenient truth is that I loudly told anyone who would listen that I was never having children.