Little Labors by Rivka Galchen

of course felt terrible for that secret child of Arnold Schwarzenegger who—I am presuming, I refuse to research the misery of others—had grown up for years either not knowing who his real father was, or knowing that he had to keep as a secret who his real father was—still I envied Schwarzenegger. I had considered envying men before—I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them—but this, the covert-baby-having thing, was the first real thing.
Baby girls and men
    On up until I was about thirty, I had a strong preference for men over women. I mean specifically as friends, as people to talk to. If a male and a female exactly alike were to enter a room, in my deformed perceptions the male was magnified into glory. It wasn’t until this primitive preference began to expire, for whatever reasons, that it began to bother me that it had previously existed. I didn’t blame my mother for this trait, but I did feel that I had inherited it from her. Despite my having a mother who is extremely intelligent and capable and giving, I still grew up with a sense that it was always nicest to be around men, and I decided that maybe this dated back to my mother’s father having died before she was born, and her mother then being alone, with two young girls, in the household of her in-laws, and there being no male taking his place, ever, and so this atmosphere of any room being short a male seemed to have been passed on to me, and then, when my father similarly was suddenly gone, this atmosphere thickened . . . until it lifted. Or at least lifted for me. Did it ever lift for my mother? When I saw how fully she fell in love with the puma, I felt that the both of us had fallen in love with a girl in some healthy, unprecedented way. My mother recently sent me a text that read: “I love the channels between 210–223. Amazing information/world views. They just said that Chelsea’s husband runs a hedge fund that lost 40 percent since he bet the wrong way on the Euro crisis, then they went on to bad-mouth him—you create a job for him and pour money into it since Chelsea was unable to get any better husband for herself.” Was this my old mother (and self)? Shortly thereafter my mother followed up this text with: “Doubt it is true about not getting a husband, she looks pretty good on TV. I think it was a malicious angry comment of the commentator.”
A friend who is not a close friend
    A friend who is not a close friend was trying to get pregnant, via in vitro fertilization, on her own. She had health issues that led doctors to tell her that her chances were low. I didn’t know whether to ask or not ask how it was going. I didn’t ask. Then she informed me and others, via e-mail, that she was six weeks pregnant, happily. I’m not very good with time, with noting where I am in it, or how much of it has passed, but time proceeded and I began to accumulate anxiety about still not having heard of a birth. I woke from a dream one night, a straightforward dream, in which I learned that she had lost the baby. I felt sure I had had a vision. But in real life she hadn’t lost the baby. Three days later I received an e-mail announcing that the baby had been born. The announcement came on the same day as one of the more important rulings in favor of gay marriage.
    This friend was not the only woman I knew who had decided to have a baby on her own. Within the span of a single year, five women I knew had deliberately had babies on their own, without a partner, or in one case, with a partner who was a friend who wanted to be involved, though there was no romantic connection. Prior to these five women I had known only one woman who had had a baby on her own, deliberately. This was an older cousin of mine, and for her it had been such a remarkable