Not a mom

On living with roommates in your thirties while all your friends are getting pregnant.

My roommate Madeline and I walk to the coffee shop. She’s wearing her cervical collar, leopard print pants, and furry pink Birkenstocks. I’m wearing an oversized political tee shirt, bike shorts, and black Birkenstocks. Madeline and I are like those two houses in Santa Monica. My perfume smells like hinoki; hers smells like purple flowers. My Stanley cup is olive green; hers is lime. I am beloved by our derpy boy cat; she by our long-haired sexy girl cat.

We both spend all day in the apartment, so we have no reason to get dressed. I work from home and she is on medical leave from her job as a flight attendant. She used to fly to Seoul for 36 hours and come back bearing fistfuls of Laneige. But since her accident, she mostly lies on the couch with her heating pad. In the morning she sits on the couch staring into space like a Victorian woman suffering from consumption. I don’t really know what consumption is, but Madeline looks like she has it. I usually sit at my desk in my room doing my 900 jobs and worrying about her. Sometimes we take breaks for me to read Yesteryear aloud to her as if she were my child, and then I’ll make us both an elaborate meal while Madeline tells me that I’m the tradwife. We are both trying to define what’s happening here, because there isn’t a shorthand for when your roommate gets a concussion and you become her de facto caretaker. Three years ago, Madeline was just some flight attendant moving to the city looking for a roommate on Facebook. Two years ago she was my roommate who became a really good friend. Now she’s basically my next of kin.

She sits down on the banquette and when they call her name I bring the coffee to her. I look around at all the Bernal Heights moms with their toddlers and then I look at Mad in her collar. When we look especially bedraggled, it exaggerates our differences such that I feel especially like the shabby mother of a teenage girl. Even now, she’s prone to wearing hot pink and acrylic nails, afraid people won’t be able to see she’s still hot and blonde. I’m on the prettier side of plain-looking, the human equivalent of a Honda Civic, and a little older than her. Before, we were just two girls who came in different flavors. Now, with the cervical collar and the servitude, we are a weird pair.

“I wonder what kind of kink relationship everyone thinks this is,” I say as I bring her a wooden stir stick. “Maybe they think I’m Cheryl and you’re Clee.” But Madeline hasn’t read The First Bad Man. Since her concussion, she can only read a few lines of text at a time, with the little frames the vestibular therapist gave her held up like opera glasses.

While we’re waiting, I remind Madeline that she needs to call the UCSF Primary Care line as soon as they open. She is annoyed at me, because she is sick of calling doctors, especially since they never know what’s wrong with her.

“But it takes three months to get an appointment, so every day you wait, it’s three months plus one day,” I say, even though I know she knows this.

“GOD, you’re SO MEAN!” she says. Then, after she’s settled down a little: “Is this making you want to have kids more, or less?”

“Less,” I laugh. I actually think about this a lot lately. I have increasingly begun to suspect I don’t want kids, and my caretaking has somewhat confirmed that hunch. But it’s not because I feel resentful of Madeline. I think I just don’t want kids.

If everyone around me wasn’t having kids, I would never, ever think about it. I have never once yearned to hold my own child. When I think about being on my deathbed and not having published a book, my stomach drops, but when I think about being on my deathbed and not having a kid, I just feel…nothing. Every so often I start dating someone I really like, and then I think I would maybe do it with them, if they really wanted to. After all, even a broken biological clock is right twice a day. But other than that, any drive I have to procreate is just a fear of being the only person left without kids when I hit my forties.

Is that okay????

I’ve been having the realization that I probably don’t want kids just as everyone else around me is getting pregnant. It’s not uncommon that when I’m catching up with a friend, their update is that they are pregnant, and mine is that the biggest drama in my life is Madeline’s injury. I haven’t perfected the art of delivering this information.

When I say that the doctors seem to agree that Madeline will get better eventually, I worry people will think it’s weird that I’m so affected by something that seems like it’s not a big deal. But when I say that she’s really debilitated, people look disturbed and think it’s hopeless when it’s not. I often don’t even attempt to say what I really want to say—because I’m afraid it makes me sound like one of those moms who want their kids to be sick—which is that it is kind of hard, but Madeline and I are still having fun. We are actually having so much fun that I can’t believe no one told me about this option when I was growing up and my sister and I were planning out the age at which we would each get married and have kids. When I was taking on debt to go to college, my dad always said, horrified, that if I did, I’d still be living with roommates at 30. Now I’m 35 and the debt is gone and I’m living with roommates because I want to. Because I don’t think the pinnacle of success is living alone in a box, and I just haven’t found anyone I want to marry yet.

Like in a marriage, the thing about living in a community is that, in a good one, you get back what you put in. I worry about Madeline and go with her to her doctors appointments and pull her out of the deep dark hole she can sometimes fall into on Reddit, and she tells me the food I cooked is restaurant-quality and then does the dishes and sits on the couch psychoanalyzing the cats ad nauseum with me. We share a French press every morning and take turns taking out the trash and she tells me when the shorts I bought online to try to look like Billie Eilish look like ass.

Every day Madeline makes a smoothie and brings me a tiny glass of the leftovers that won’t fit in her cup while I work at my desk, watching the hummingbirds in the tree outside. We get along so well that anyone in my life can call and I can put them on speakerphone and I am not worried about them spilling something I’ve said about Mad behind her back. Everything we’ve had conflict about, we’ve said to each other’s faces. We don’t have passive aggressive roommate tension because when one of us annoys the other we just fake-yell at each other about it and then laugh and stop doing the thing we do that is annoying, or the other person gets over it because we remember that we love each other.

“I’m pregnant” is so much easier to convey than everything I just wrote. In lieu of an equivalent shorthand, when people ask me how I’ve been, I usually just say that I’m great except that Madeline is really sick and I’ve been trying to help her a lot. “Make sure you’re taking care of you,” they always say. This is the correct thing to say based on the probably overdramatic things I have shared, and I would say the same thing if I were in their shoes. People want to make sure that I’m not forsaking myself for this uncategorizable relationship that doesn’t even come with a tax break. But I think it’s also important to remember that sometimes it’s okay to forsake yourself for someone who would also do it for you, because that’s what real friendship is. Isn’t this the “community” so many people on the internet have been saying we’ve lost? Isn’t this kind of the ideal alternative lifestyle, if it’s looking like you’re not about to get married anytime soon?

While we’re sitting there in the cafe, one of my closest friends calls to tell me she’s pregnant. Madeline hears the whole conversation, and when I get off the phone, we both say, “That was weird timing.” She asks me how I feel, because we both feel left out whenever someone else gets pregnant, but for different reasons. Madeline is worried she’s missing her window and I’m worried everyone is going to leave me behind.

“I actually feel really happy for her,” I say, and I mean it.

As we get up to leave the coffee shop, Madeline takes her neck brace off.

“I’m going to try walking back without the brace,” she says. I look at her with an expression I know is flat and condescending. She never wears that brace and looks for every excuse to walk without it, then feels sore later.

“What?” she says.

“‘Trying’ would be putting the brace on,” I say, and she rolls her eyes but puts it on. We walk home in silence in the sunshine. We don’t say anything. We don’t really need to.