Nesting and Nosediving

Last weekend marked it - the last month. The due date is less than a month away - August 9th. The birthing class has been attended. The shower has been had.

Today, in a fit of nesting, I coerced my mother (who should have been working on an article for a journal) to help me put together the Tummy's playpen, changing table, and hamper. It was weird - assembling and arranging these nursery things with no nursery. Placing furniture in a house that's not mine.

And it really started messing with the giddy mood I've been in, looking forward to the birth and everything. It hit me over the head, like a hardbound copy of the Moynahan Report.

I am a single mother.

And all the cutesy, couple-y things that you see new parents doing on commercials and in romantic comedies ... I'm not going to get the chance to do.

I realized - as I folded, unfolded, and refolded all of the tiny, adorable clothes stacked up around me, as I contemplated bringing my baby back from the hospital to her roomful of pretty pink things - my baby had everything she needed - stroller, changing table, bassinet - except a day-to-day daddy.

The thought really took the shine off my pleasant afternoon.

Though I didn't plan my pregnancy, I hoped that it might make my boyfriend and I into a family. And I'm really, really hurt that it hasn't.

I'm not saying I want the shotgun wedding, but I guess ... I thought that my boyfriend and I would do this thing together. It's what we talked about, even if the scheduling is off. And though he's been around, I still feel like this is happening to me and me only. I still spend five out of seven nights alone in my apartment with fear gnawing at me, and it makes me think ... What have I done?

The baby kicks, and I am thrilled at the prospect of meeting her, raising her. She punches, and I am terrified that I have made her into a statistic, doomed her to a life of attachment and abandonment issues.

And we won't even get started on how deeply the prospect of single motherhood has tapped into my own absent father, stepchild issues.

I recently joked with my mother that because the baby and I are going to be living with her and my father (until I get another full-time gig), the baby is going to call her Mom like I do, call my father Dad like I do, call me Mikki like they do, and call her dad "that negro" like my mother does. It was funny when I said it, but thinking on it now, it makes me blue.

I don't devalue the single parent thing. My mother was a single mother for the first, formative years of my childhood. Her mother was essentially a single mother (grandpapa was a rolling stone). Her mother was a single mother. I think that they were all wonderful parents, and I can only hope to do as well as they did.

I even, in my modern woman, feminist arrogance, thought that I might choose to have a baby on my own. Take control of my own reproductive destiny. Unplug the biological clock and close it up in the junk drawer.

Yet, I have ended up like a million other women before me. I guess I had that ridiculous notion that the pregnancy would act as a linchpin in my relationship. So stupid. So ... just ... stupid ...

Makes me wonder if I have any business becoming a mother at all.