Bang Bang

This week, my agent delivered memoir feedback that finds me adding more backstory on who I was before I became a wife. 

I’ve hauled out the journal from my West Hollywood years.

Laughed and cringed and cried my way through the last relationship I had before Alberto.

In 2003, I had fallen in love with an Egyptian lawyer named Amoun.

Five months later, he ended it suddenly.

I did not take it well.

I crawled into a bottle of vodka and when I came out a week later, I was less than calm.

I may have “decorated” his Santa Monica backyard with 96 rolls of toilet paper.

I may have taken a picture, added a bitter caption and emailed it to our friends and relatives.

But in the year between the toilet paper incident and meeting Alberto, I worked through a few issues.

Here’s the freshly written excerpt of how an ex-boyfriend and Quentin Tarantino prompted a rather life-altering realization.

* * *

In the sobering sunlight of my parents’ backyard, I remind myself that I made my peace with Amoun five years ago. In fact, if he hadn’t ended our relationship over the fact I did not want children, I may not have evolved into the girl who Alberto wanted to marry.

A dozen days after Amoun stood on my West Hollywood porch for the last time, Kill Bill 2 was released. We had watched the first installment together and on one particular  night, made love in his kitchen to its soundtrack after he showed me how to shoot a BB gun.

Bang bang / My baby shot me down.

With or without my baby, I was resolved to see the movie. I had walked to the ArcLight expecting affirmation in the form of an angry, sword-wielding Uma Thurman, but the sequel to Tarantino’s revenge film did not end the way I hoped.

Yes, there was revenge. Yes, she killed Bill. But the climax of the film took me somewhere I did not want to go.

The movie ends in Mexico—at a resort that looked not unlike where Amoun and I spent New Year’s—with Uma’s character reuniting with her young daughter.

The movie ends as mother and daughter drive into the sunset together.

The movie ends with me sobbing in a dark theatre.

I had come for female empowerment but I left wrestling with my motives and reasons for not wanting children.

Why don’t I want to drive into the sunset with a daughter?

What is wrong with my wiring?

When did I decide this?

As I walked home, tears sliding under my sunglasses, I start retracing the trajectory.

Did it start at 18 years old? When I found myself six weeks pregnant by a man I’d already broken up with? When I made the choice to move out of California and give my unborn daughter up for adoption?

Was it confirmed the day after I gave birth and was forced by a judge to admit that I was an “unfit mother” in order to legalize the adoption?

Was it solidified nine months later when the shock of my brother’s death sent my parents into a cloud of mourning that still hadn’t lifted?

At the corner of La Brea and Fountain, the epiphany comes quickly and without mercy: did those two events produce a defense mechanism within me?

At 19 years old, had I unconsciously decided that if I didn’t have kids, I would never have to lose them?

Whoa.

This is no longer about Amoun.

It’s about me. And my fear of loss.

When I am steady enough to cross La Brea, I start discarding.

Discarding my sense of shame for being unable to care for a child at 18.

My belief that I am an unfit mother.

My worry that I might outlive any future children.  

By the time I reach my porch, I am no longer crying.

I am no longer carrying 11 years of motherhood fears.

It would be another year before I am actually grateful to Amoun. 

A year later, I found myself sitting on the floor of Alberto’s bachelor pad in New York, admitting that my last relationship ended because I didn’t want children. That the break-up forced me to re-examine my reasoning.

And what did you conclude? Alberto had asked.

If God’s plan for my life includes motherhood, then I should be open to it. So I am.

Good for you, he said.

And in case you’re curious, he paused. About where I stand on the subject of kids—

I leaned forward, holding my breath.

Do I want them? Maybe.

Do I want them now? No.

Do I believe in nannies? Hell yeah.

I exhaled.

Once again, I was falling in love.

Once again, I was having the kid conversation with someone on a second date.

But for the first time ever, it involves neither sweeping deal breakers nor compromises.