What My Daughter Owes Me

Callie's Tally: An Accounting of Baby's First Year
by Betsy Howie

When Betsy Howie became pregnant, she realized a frightening truth: She was about to lose control. So, she itemized her concerns: Can I physically handle it? Do I have the patience for the job? Can I have my career and take care of a baby? Will I be able to sidestep my own neuroses and negativity enough to raise an at least slightly healthy human being? And, of course: Do I have enough money?

Only the last question seemed answerable. "How much does a baby really cost?" she wondered-and began saving receipts. The result was Callie's Tally, the real-life, day-by-day diary of her daughter's first year of debt.

In this deliciously engaging and irreverent memoir, Callie's expenses-Pampers, formula, York peppermint patties for Mom's postpartum blues-mount as Howie searches for a tiny corner of order in a world otherwise lost to sleepless, timeless mayhem. Part Bridget Jones's Diary (after Bridget snags the boy) and part Operating Instructions (for the fiscally obsessed), this is a wickedly funny and fresh story of shifting relationships within a modern American family.

Calculating Interest

I am not one of those women who has always known.

In fact, they amaze me-those women. They fell in love with the idea of babies back when they were barely more than babies themselves. And then they stuck with that notion all the way through childhood, adolescence, college, dating, that first job, that first fiancé, the struggle for stability, the search for a mate, all the way through to that little pink "+" on the home-test kit. And all the while, they knew. This and this alone would complete their journey, make whole their person, lift them to that omnipotent place where choices are clear and decisions never second-guessed.

No. That wasn't me.

I've traveled toward and away from the idea of procreation many hundreds of times since my own birth, never convinced that I was meant to have a baby or that a baby was meant to have me. I waited a good long while-a really, really good long while-for that moment when the light would break across my brain and I would see the clear-cut road through the forest, the one that would lead me happily and unquestioningly to babyland.

That light has never appeared.

And yet, on July 4, after holding my nose with my thumb and forefinger, scrunching my eyes shut and diving into the deep dark hole of unprotected sex for several weeks, I got the news. I was pregnant; I am pregnant, with child, knocked up, in the family way. And there was no turning back, despite the fact that all these unanswered questions were still unanswered.

1. Can I physically handle it?
2. Do I have the patience for the job?
3. Can I still have my career and take care of a baby?
4. Will I be able to sidestep my own neuroses, negativity, and compulsions enough to raise a slightly healthy human being?
5. Do I have enough money?

And those are just the questions that break down into simple sentence structure. This biological-clock stuff really doesn't lend itself to grammar and syntax. It's more like one long anxiety-infested primordial scream that doesn't punctuate easily.

Even a year ago, if you'd asked me that dangerous question: "Do you want a child?" I would have taken a really deep breath and said something like this:

"How do you know I don't have a kid? Can you smell it on me? Is my fear of commitment so palpable that you can actually see it? I don't know! Why are you asking me? What? I can't hear you. My clock is ticking so loud I'm having trouble deciphering your words. No. No. No. Don't shout. It's no use. This tick is the kind of loud that makes little shake marks all around the hard edges of the sound. It reverberates through my whole body and most likely, past my boundary and into your personal space, for which I apologize but maybe you should just Back off!"

My old college pal Gale asked me the dreaded question not all that long ago. I politely informed her about the loud ticking and she said, "Oh, really? You have that? Hm. Mine's digital. I know it's there but I can't hear it."

Digital would be better because maybe the ticking syndrome doesn't signal an actual want for a kid. Maybe it's just some caveman DNA instructive that we've all grown way beyond. The procreational mandate is over, after all. Breeding now is just for kicks. But, on the other hand, maybe the ticking only happens if your subconscious knows better than you your actual wants and desires-and you really do want a kid. Maybe your deep, inner, untouchable self knows that a kid is just the ticket to tweak the whole structure of the universe and right its corners.

But ticking and biology have not been my only questions. I have not led my life in such a way as to bring me perfectly to this moment. My household is not ideal for family life and that offers up a whole other series of questions such as: What if I die and the kid is left with a father who is too old and too broke to take up the charge? Or what if he dies and leaves us all alone? Or what if I end up resenting them both because their existence has hemmed me into a life of bad writing and long commutes? What if the whole thing suddenly compels me to get married when the only thing of which I have finally become certain is that I never want to do that again?

Maybe I'm just too selfish. But here's the thing: My life has always been all about my career and I never thought it would take this long to get just one rung up the ladder. Professionally, as an actress, as a writer, I'm a nose above nothing. If what I have could even be called a career, it's only because it shows signs of forming and not because the actual hard-core matter that makes for a real career actually exists; finance-wise, stability-wise, opportunity-wise. I'm still at that point where I must make major all-consuming efforts to rise above the masses. And at the ripe old age of almost-not-thirty-something-anymore, there's no time for that kind of cogitation.

About four months ago, the boyfriend said, "People have kids for all the wrong reasons but if everyone spent as much time thinking about it as you do, we'd be extinct."

To which I replied, through a bunch of tears and snot, "See, that's the kind of support I'm looking for."

By the way, it is not lost on me, as I write this, that the questions I am presenting keep coming out in present tense. Even though I am presently tense with child and these things should have been resolved a long time ago.

At least I don't feel like there's a gun to my head anymore. Now that I have actually taken the dive, I no longer have to consider and reconsider the stirring words spoken to me by my gynecologist when I presented my ambivalent self to him and said I just wasn't sure how to answer the baby question.

He said in a strong yet calm voice: Fish or cut bait.

That was a strange thing for a gynecologist to say, I think. On the other hand, though, it was effective. I left his office that day nearly ready to shout, "Get in line boys, the first one to ring the bell wins."

But the fishing advice didn't stop the math-the constant numbers dancing in my head in syncopation with the ticking: 37 + 9 months = 38 - 9 months + breaking up = 38.5 + recovery = 39.25 (w/ mood-enhancing drugs) + hunting and drug withdrawal = 40 + dating and momentary blissful euphoria whereupon I lose all sense of time and believe that anything is possible + moving logistics = 41.4 + concentrated conception efforts (+ possible fertility experts and earning the money to pay for them) = 42.9 + 9 months = 43.

Or, stay with the boyfriend.

Those equations continued to assault my senses even after I pulled on the waders and tied my flies. The numbers just kept whipping by. This is why you need math. If you're in elementary school and you're reading this and you're a girl, this is why. It's also why you need to follow your heart at least as often as you follow your head because just maybe it would have been smarter to have a baby when you were twenty-seven, when you just couldn't see your way through the nuts and bolts of it. Or maybe smart just isn't what this is all about. But still, I would encourage you to study your math.

There were/are other numbers, too. The boyfriend is fifty-seven. Those calculations are pretty simple. You add twenty to everything and before you work up to anything too tricky, you're dead. That's a problem for me. And it's a hard one because I find that I get mad at him for being fifty-seven and, of course, it's not his fault. It's not like he's changed since I met him. He's always been very consistent chronologically. It's just that as things intensify, facts you knew from the beginning transform-their truth changes. Fifty-seven is really old to be having someone who is zero. He would be fifty-seven and the baby would be zero. That might be too great a distance.

Copyright © October 2002, J. P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Betsy Howie is a playwright, actress, and the author of the novel Snow.