Dating Big Bird Read Online Free PDF Page A

boyfriend of yours?”
    “Jonathan? It’s a long story. What about you? Any potential—”
    “Sperm donors? No. Not really. It’s a long story, too.”
    “I’d like to hear it.”
    “Well, we should get together sometime,” I said. “Form our own Imaginary Mommy Group.”
    “I could get a sitter.”
    “Or we could just double up on your nanny.”
    She laughed and reached into her bag to get out her date book. “This is a bad week, though.”
    “For me too,” I said, flipping through my ten-pound multilayered multitiered multitabbed color-coded-insert date book. “And the next two weeks aren’t much better: I’ve got two weddings and a baby shower.”
    “I’ve got two baby showers and a briss.”
    Then, after going through about twenty-three possible lunch-drinks-dinner dates, we finally settled on one—dinner, on a Thursday, three weeks hence.
    “By the way,” I said, “do you like your job?”
    “No. Do you?”
    “No.”
    We smiled, then exchanged business cards.
    I had a feeling we were finally going to become close friends.

4

    Not that I needed any more friends, really.
    I had quite enough already.
    Or so I thought.
    And yet in retrospect I see that the ones who were single or childless had been dwindling steadily for years without my really noticing.
    First there were the recent couplings:
    Lisa:
Engaged
.
    Katie:
Engaged
.
    Nicky:
Engaged
.
    Then there were the semirecent betrothals:
    Susan:
Married six months
.
    Jill:
Married one year
.
    Cathy:
Married two years
.
    And then there were the ones who had been quietly building families for a while now:
    Julia:
Married six years. Two children: five and two
.
    Anne:
Divorced twice. One five-year-old
.
    Rachel:
Not married. No boyfriend. Sperm bank baby on the way
.
    And of course, my sister:
    Married five years
.
    One Pickle
.
    I had only three close female friends left who were single and childless—Francine, a friend from Michigan who was now a high-school English teacher in Los Angeles; Jana, a fellow copy writer from Young & Rubicam I’d bonded with my first day there; and Renee, my best friend at work—four now, if you counted Amy. So since she was the only one who wanted children, her appearance, or reappearance, was rather fortuitous, not to mention comforting, given the eerie similarity of our Familial Infant Envy Disorder pathologies.
    In the weeks between the time Amy and I had run into each other, I found myself worrying about our upcoming dinner—not because I was nervous but because I was afraid of disappointment. I’d felt such a spark, such a rush of instant camaraderie when we’d started talking—a kindred spirit, someone who understood that the raging lunacy of Familial Infant Envy Disorder wasn’t really raging lunacy at all but merely the visible manifestation of our normal natural biological urges to procreate and to connect with someone outside of ourselves. While my other friends—those with children and without—and even my sister—accepted this part of my personality and didn’t attempt to talk me out of it (wanting to mother was a positive urge, after all, unlike, say, wanting to snort heroin), I never mistook their acceptance for true understanding. Until Amy—until that moment on the sidewalk when she tried to lie about her niece being her daughter and we both came clean, finishing each other’s sentences in the process—I’d always felt more than a little bit crazy.
    In the three weeks before our dinner date, I tried to convincemyself that people did change—especially after seventeen years. After all, it wasn’t like Amy had been carrying her field hockey stick or wearing her varsity letter jacket when we’d met—though in my elephants-never-forget geekdom-is-forever mind, she might as well have. The assumptions I’d made, the snap judgments based on that brief vision of her on the sidewalk in front of me
—she was married with a child, and therefore happy, and therefore also winning
—were nothing