in three years of marriage, the first with the justice of the peace who performed our wedding ceremony.
Seriously, who does that?
Steve Beckley, that’s who. My husband. Now my ex-husband.
If I’d been advising me instead of being me, I’d have seen it coming a mile away. My whirlwind courtship with Steve was a parade of red flags, all flapping like crazy. But “do as I say and not as I do” is kind of a theme with me, the irony of which is not lost on anyone who knows me. Marrying Steve felt like my last chance for the life I wanted desperately. Too desperately.
Look, I understand that the events of my childhood definitely played a role in my less-than-wise decisions about Steve. But no matter what my therapist says, not everything about my longing for motherhood is tangled up with my family issues; there’s this little thing called biology, you know? The desire to procreate is a normal, natural, and powerful urge. I mean, it’s not like I’m the only mid-thirties single woman in New York who wants to get married and have kids, right? We can’t all be neurotic, can we?
The point is, I’ve done the career thing. I’ve even done the celebrity thing, albeit in a small way—I’m a D-list celeb at best, maybe even E-list—and it’s fine. I’m grateful for the opportunities that have come my way. But . . . it’s not enough. Being well-known to a lot of people who admire the person they think you are, the role you play, isn’t the same as being important to a few people who truly know you and love you anyway, even if you’re not perfect, or don’t have all the answers, or do as you do instead of as you say. That’s what family is: the people who love you anyway. That’s what I long for. Is that so terrible?
But when Steve left, he took my last chance at that life with him. Or so I thought, until Anne Dowling called.
I quit writing “Dear Birth Mother” letters almost a year ago. By then, it was obvious the marriage wasn’t going to last, and even I knew that bringing a baby into a family that was on the verge of falling apart wasn’t a good idea. I also knew that trying to adopt as a single parent would be even tougher, so I gave up on motherhood altogether.
But a few of those letters must have still been floating around, because after reading through a pile of “Dear Birth Mother” missives, Anne Dowling’s client, an unwed mother from Pennsylvania, narrowed the pool of potential parents who might adopt her baby down to three couples. Steve and I were at the top of the list.
A baby! After all these years, after the disappointments and dashed hopes, someone was actually thinking about letting me adopt a baby! At that moment, all the things that my therapist and I had agreed upon, the stuff about my desire for a child stemming from a deep-seated and probably unhealthy compulsion to recreate the family I’d lost, went right out the window. There was a baby and I wanted it. The therapist could just go pound sand.
But when I explained the change in my marital status, Ms. Dowling said, “Ah, I see. I’m sorry, Ms. Fairchild, but my client prefers to place the baby in a two-parent home,” and my heart plummeted back to earth and crashed onto the rocks. I was desperate, really desperate. To have the thing I wanted most in the entire world just inches from my grasp, only to see it snatched away because Steve was a pathologically adulterous, card-carrying asshat was unendurable. And so I did what I’d promised myself I wouldn’t: I played the Calpurnia card.
“You’re kidding,” Ms. Dowling said, laughing. “You’re Calpurnia? My mother loves you. She sends me clippings from your column at least once a month.”
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. I say the kinds of things people want to tell their adult children but can’t.
“Really? I hope you won’t hold it against me.”
Ms. Dowling laughed again, sounding almost giddy, which didn’t surprise me. Unexpected celebrity encounters, even when the celebrity in question is as minor as I am, fill people with a strange delight. I was counting on that response, hoping it would help tip the scales in my direction.
“It doesn’t seem fair to exclude you just because your husband walked out,” she said once the laughter subsided. “After reading your columns,