In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas

Author:Susan Gregory Thomas [Thomas, Susan Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-58836-946-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

Everything was different now. Cal’s prediction that day in the park was beginning to materialize—but so, I thought, was mine. This new reality, for me, called up a particular combination of love and terror. As open and wonderful as the world had become with my child’s presence, it was simultaneously more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. My nearly unmanageable love for my baby made me almost frantic. Even considering that she might somehow be taken from me by the forces of nature or fate was unfathomable. I was so insanely attached to Zanny that I couldn’t let anyone other than Cal take care of her for nearly a year. I knew it was crazy. I knew I was crazy. But picturing someone taking her away from me even into the next room—never mind out of the apartment—sent waves of pure white fear whipping up my spine. It wasn’t until she was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatrician and the books referred to “separation anxiety,” it was meant to describe the baby’s psyche, not mine.

I knew that there was no way I would be able to leave her to go into an office; my neurosis would flower into a full-blown psychotic lifestyle. This realization snapped into stark relief when Zanny was three months old. I got a call from a producer at a major television network who was revamping one of the flagship news shows; he asked if I was interested in a position as an anchor. At the time, I had already resigned from my full-time job and was freelancing, doing the kind of writing a person can do while babies nap. I certainly wasn’t back to anything resembling a twelve-hour workday. I had neither employed nor made plans to employ a nanny or day-care center. As the producer described the job, I became aware, in almost an out-of-body kind of way, that had I been listening to this just three months earlier, my only challenge would have been to keep quiet until he had finished talking so that I could chirrup, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” like Molly Bloom at a job interview. But now, everything was different. It didn’t sound like a great job at all, or at least it didn’t sound as though taking that job would equal a great life. It sounded like the kind of exciting and exhausting work I’d done for fifteen years, albeit played out on the stage of national prime-time television. Which meant that I would be working a million hours a day. I looked down at my sleeping bunny rabbit. And I said no. Instead, I ramped up my freelance work—and later, got my first book deal—so that I could work from home.

Boring—to loll around with a baby all day long? Are you nuts? The only question was why no one had told me about this sooner. I would lie in bed next to my firstborn as a newborn, watching the slide show of

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