"I devoured this book. Passionate, angry, honest and intelligent, the
antidote to What to Expect When You're Expecting, it's one every pregnant
or planning-to-be-pregnant woman with a modicum of ambition would do well to read."

--Cathi Hanauer, editor of The Bitch in the House: 26
Women Tell the Truth about Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood and Marriage

Excerpt from Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life

"I began to fantasize about being in a house with a man and a child when I was twenty-three. It was an ambivalent fantasy, in terms of motherhood; I wasn't sure if I was the child's mother. I was the man's lover, that much was clear, and the child looked like him. Maybe I was the live-in mother, or maybe I was a frequent guest and sex partner who went home to her own bachelorette pad in the city.

The fantasy opens with me in the foreground, working at a computer beside a large glass window. It's dusk and a purplish-blue tinges the sky. I can see the ocean just outside the window and over a cliff--wild, angry, gorgeous. To my right at an open kitchen area, an attractive blond man is de-veining shrimp for the paella he‘s preparing while listening to Miles Davis. The music is low (out of respect for me), and as the man has anticipated, it doesn't bother me. I like the sad and lovely trumpet drifting my way. At once, I feel relaxed and incredibly focused on work I love doing.

Between the man and me on a clean and bare floor, a blond four-year-old plays with wooden trucks. He loads tiny logs into the truck beds, then takes them out and splays them on the floor like a fan. He's happy without ever being loud, and he doesn't get up. He simply sits and plays.

Meanwhile, I keep working. There's no reason for me to stop. My work is going well, and paella takes a long time to cook. Eventually, when the sky is dark, I do stop, and we--meaning the man and I--eat at a table beside huge windows that face the sea. We drink red wine, and there are candles on the table, the kind that bob in oil inside clear glass cylinders.

I never see the child when I imagine our meal. Maybe he continues to play quietly into the night, or maybe he has already put himself to bed. I never see it in my vision, but surely the man must have placed a bowl of apples, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a piece of shrimp from the paella beside the child at some point. I might even have given him a mug of milk. Pouring luscious whole milk into a cool blue mug, bending down once to place it on the floor--I could do that. I could do it and still be myself. "


© 2003 by Faulkner Fox


Read More Excerpts:

from The Mothers Movement Online

from HipMama