My college chum Lisette waddles up and embraces me, pressing her hugely pregnant belly against my side. It always surprises me, how firm a baby bump feels. “Happy birthday, Eskimo girl,” she says.
My mother named me after a deceased family member, but friends always tease me about being named after the character in the Bob Dylan song.
“Thanks. And thanks for coming all the way from the North Shore. Aren’t you due in just a couple of weeks?” I helped decorate her French country home in Mandeville, including the bedroom of her adorable six-year-old boy and the nursery for the new baby, so I’m well aware of her timeline.
She nods. “Sixteen days.”
“Not that you’re counting,” I tease. Lisette and I lost touch after college, then reconnected when she’d read an article inNorthshore Living Magazineabout my design services and retail store.
“The promise of chocolate birthday cake lured her from nesting mode,” her husband, Luke, says as he kisses my cheek. “She’s forbidden me from keeping any chocolate in the house, but she constantly craves it.”
“I have no willpower around chocolate,” Lisette moans.
“Who does? And anyway, it looks to me like you have the perfect excuse to indulge.”
“It’s too hard to take off the weight afterward.” She rubs her stomach in the way that all pregnant women do—as if they’reunconsciously caressing their unborn babies. “I learned that with Ryan.”
“Where is the little guy?” I ask.
“My parents are watching him,” Lisette says. “They just moved to Mandeville to be closer to their grandkids and help us out.”
I feel a pang. Not only is Lisette blessed with a loving husband, a beautiful child, and another one on the way, but she also has caring, involved parents.
Do you have to come from that kind of family to create one of your own? Oh, I hope not. My own mom never had many maternal instincts, and the few she had disintegrated after the divorce. At least she remembered my birthday today, although I suspect it was a last-minute reminder by Siri or Alexa. I’d received a gift card online this morning and a brief phone call this afternoon from Dubai, where she lives with her oil executive third husband.
My father, as usual, either completely forgot or ignored the occasion. It no longer hurts very much, now that I know not to expect anything from him. When I was younger, it used to cut me to the core.
But I’m over it. I have a full life with a thriving career and great friends. Brooke, Lily, and Miss Margaret are my adoptive family. When Brooke took me home with her that first Thanksgiving after we met, her grandmother welcomed me like long-lost kin, and I’ve spent every holiday with them ever since.
Last year, for my thirty-fifth birthday, Brooke arranged a lovely girls’ night out, with cocktails at her house, dinner at Arnaud’s, and a boisterous French Quarter pub crawl. It had been high-spirited and fun, and for the first time since my breakup with Tom, I’d felt full of optimism for the future.
Thirty-five seemed a celebration-worthy age; thirty-six feels like a whole different story. I’m on the dark side of the decade now, closer to forty than thirty, without a romantic partner in sight. I’ve spent nearly two years spelunking the endless dark caverns ofinternet dating. My dreams of love, marriage, and a family are dwindling as quickly as my egg supply.
To commemorate my thirty-sixth year on the planet, I’d sat down at my desk at Verve! that morning and actually crunched the numbers. It was an exercise in grim reckoning.
Even if I meet my ideal man tomorrow, we’ll probably need to date for a year or two before we become engaged. An engagement will likely last six months to a year, and most men will want to be married for a year or more before trying to start a family. That will put me dangerously close to forty—an age when the likelihood of getting pregnant and having a healthy baby becomes terrifyingly small. Not for all women, of course—statistics are averages, meaning some women fare far better than others—but still, the odds are not good after forty. And since I haven’t dated anyone in all my thirty-six years who actually turned out to be marriage material, the cold facts are icily glaring me in the eye: Prince Charming is unlikely to arrive in time to help me create the loving family I’ve always wanted.
I try to push this disheartening realization to the back of my mind as I greet my other guests, but I can’t help but notice that almost everyone has a child or a husband or both. The uncharacteristic despondency that has dogged me all day now makes me want to run to my bedroom and bawl.
Instead, I drink wine, accept everyone’s good wishes, eat jambalaya and salad, and blow out a birthday candle.
“Thanks for a great party,” I tell Brooke when everyone has left, we’ve wrapped up the food, and we’re carrying some of the plastic containers of leftovers to her house, just a couple of blocks away. This part of New Orleans is so quiet it’s easy to forget you’re in a city. Tree frogs chirp in the large live oaks and night jasmine scents the air. Neighbors sit on their gaslit front porches and wave to us as we pass by. “It was wonderful.”
She shoots me a knowing look as she pulls out her keys whileLily skips up the porch steps. “I wish I believed you meant that. What’s wrong?”
Once we get inside and Lily heads to her playroom, I set the food containers on the kitchen counter and give Brooke the rundown on my come-to-Jesus about my prospects for marrying and having a baby. Her expression grows so somber that I find myself wanting to cheer her up.
“Hey, on the plus side, now that I’m thirty-six, I’ve known you for half of my life, so that’s definitely worth celebrating,” I say. “Half a lifetime officially makes us family.”
“But we’re already fam’ly,” Lily declares, wandering back into the room with Sugar Bear dangling by a leg from her fist. “You’re my aunt an’ godmother.”
They’re both honorary designations, but I fully embrace them. I embrace Lily as well. “And you’re my honey.”
“And you’re the sister I never had and always wanted.” Brooke joins in to make it a group hug.
“I want a sister,” Lily says as we break apart.
“One day you’ll find a special friend like Aunt Quinn,” Brooke says, picking up one of the plastic containers and opening the refrigerator.
