Page 39 of The Librarians
Jo-Ann’s proposition punctured her bubble instantly.
“No,” she said. “I’m not ready.”
She was only twenty-five and had a year left in her master of library and information science program. She didn’t want to have a baby while she was still in school, nor did she want to become a mother immediately after getting a job.
Jo-Ann, across from her, smiled indulgently. Her skin, the color of myrrh, glowed in the candlelight. “I didn’t sayyouhave to give birth. I have a perfectly good uterus, too.”
Sophie threw up her hands. “Right. And you’ll then quit your high-power-attorney job to look after this kid.”
“Neither of us has to give up our work. Together we’ll make enough to hire a nanny.”
Sophie would be lucky if she made a quarter as much as Jo-Ann. She’d feel terrifically impoverished if she had to contribute a half share toward the cost of a nanny. But she might feel even worse if she contributed only 20 percent, as if she had only a 20 percent stake in this child.
“And what if the nanny doesn’t work out for some reason? What if the nanny gets sick or has to leave for a while to look after her own family? Then who looks after this baby?”
“Then we get another babysitter. They have services now that’ll have vetted, experienced childcare providers in people’s homes in the blink of an eye,” said Jo-Ann breezily.
Her confidence was one of Jo-Ann’s most attractive qualities. That same damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-ahead attitude was also, at times, her most exasperating trait. Sophie was not a damn-the-torpedoes kind of person. She needed to carefully map out the locations of all the pitfalls, then engineer a path to avoid every single one.
Jo-Ann’s blitheness struck her now as not only inappropriate but wildly irresponsible. Fine, never mind the money—in a relationship like theirs, with a personality like Sophie’s, it might always be a bit of a sore point that she couldn’t be an equal financial contributor. But this was about a lot more than their domestic arrangement. They were talking about a baby in a world hostile to same-sex parents.
“You’re a lawyer. Have you taken a proper look at current law—and the legislations that are brewing everywhere in this country? What ifsomething happens to you? I will have no rights to make any decisions for this child.”
“Not after you adopt the child.”
“But that is not an instantaneous process. What if something happens in the meanwhile? It’ll be your mom who becomes the kid’s legal guardian.”
At last some of Jo-Ann’s cheerfulness drained away. Night was falling. The wind picked up. The candles flickered and cast shadows across her face.
Timemagazine had published an article only a few months ago, asking if Jamaica was the most homophobic place on earth. Jo-Ann had pooh-poohed the clickbait-y hypothesis, but she had not disputed her homeland’s entrenched homophobia. And Jo-Ann’s mom was the most homophobic person Jo-Ann had ever met.
“Nothing will happen to me,” Jo-Ann declared, but she sounded a little shaken.
“You don’t know the future,” Sophie pointed out, pushing away her still half-full plate.
“Don’t you see?” Jo-Ann reached across the glass table and took Sophie’s hand in hers. “That’s why it would be better for you to have the child. Then my mother will never be able to take it away from us.”
Sophie had always loved the warmth and care of Jo-Ann’s touch. But she was annoyed enough to pull her hand away. “Aha! Now we come back to that. And I already told you I am not ready to have a baby.”
“And are you ever going to be ready to have a baby?”
The sadness on Jo-Ann’s face made it impossible for Sophie to be sincerely angry. It was true: Sophie might never be ready to have a baby.
Maybe someday her biological clock would tick like a B-movie nuclear bomb with a flashing countdown. But even so, would it ever out-glare her internal chaos meter, which always judged the world as too threatening, too unstable, and too inherently untrustworthy?
“I’m thirty-four, Sophie, and every day I get older,” pleaded Jo-Ann. “I mean, I don’t feel older, but I also don’t want to be having my first biological kid at forty, for both my own sake and the kid’s.”
Jo-Ann’s drive to have everything right here right now accounted for much of her success, but it was also the reason Sophie held her own plansclose to the chest: They’d just moved in together and she was already talking about a baby next year.
Of course Jo-Ann had wanted to move in together by the end of their second date, but Sophie held out. And she believed that a good five years should elapse before a relationship passed the durability test to undertake the addition of a baby.
At which time she, though not naturally inclined to having kids, would be much more open to persuasion.
But not now. Not when she hadn’t finished school, found a good job, or reassured herself that she and Jo-Ann would be able to stick it out through thick and thin.
“Can we please not discuss this any further today?” Her head was beginning to throb.
Jo-Ann rubbed her own arms, as if she felt cold. “Is this going to be one of those things that no matter when I bring it up, it will always be the wrong time?”
