Beth Jones - Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood

Copyright 2010 by Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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First eBook Edition: April 2010

The names and identifying characteristics of some individuals in this book have been changed.

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The excerpt on page is from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

ISBN: 978-0-316-09661-4

For our families

Carey: Granted, six feet five is a little extreme.

Beth: A blond southerner who likes terriers and Fontina cheese isnt what I was looking for either. But I trusted you.

Pam: I trusted you, too. And that made my decision easier.

H ELLO?

The phone rang just as I happily settled into bed with a thick novel and a box of cereal. Once I freed myself from a days deadline pressure, nothing restored me better than eating while I read, or reading while I ate. But the airy bedroom of my Cambridge town house was no real refuge. The New York Times copy desk could still call with urgent questions about an article I had written for the next days paper, and I had to be available, always.

Hello? I said again. No answer. Hello?

Still no reply. Pressing the receiver harder against my ear, I made out the muffled voice of my boyfriend, a cosmopolitan scientist Id been seeing for nearly a year.

It had been on and off, with a start so strong that I swore we were in love by the third date, then a crash followed by a long limping. I was usually rational to a fault, but with him I couldnt seem to let go.

It slowly dawned on me that I was listening to a conversation between my boyfriend and a female friend of his, a doctor Id met and liked. I deduced that he must have accidentally pressed the Send button on his cell phone, and that it repeated the last number he called: mine.

So whats up with you romantically? I heard the doctor say.

Oh, he said, Im back with Carey, and its certainly not issue-free.

Why dont you see other women, then? she asked.

I dont want to hurt Carey I really dont want to hurt her.

Well, what do you think youre looking for?

First of all, he said, it would have to be somebody who really attracted me.

I felt my body start to shake, as it registered the depth of the rejection before my mind could absorb it. I would like to note here, in my own defense, that I am in fact generally considered attractive, and have occasionally even been called beautiful, but I am by no means to everyones taste. I am tall and cello-shaped, with high cheekbones, a broad, even smile, and thick dark curls or frizz, depending on the weather. (He ended up marrying a buxom redhead so petite she could wear girls-department clothes.)

I paged himhis cell phone was busy, obviouslyand broke up with him, my limbs shivering so hard that it was difficult to talk.

There are more where that came from. Rejections of me. Rejections by me. All leading to the moment when, the night before I turned thirty-nine, on assignment in a remote town in northern Maine, I lay alone in an anonymous motel room bed, staring at the ceiling, and faced the biggest decision of my life.

It was biological midnight, at least as I had defined it for myself. I was a professional success, Boston bureau chief of the New York Times, and a romantic failure, dating doggedly into middle age and still incurably single. Now, my self-imposed deadline had struck. If I really wanted to have a baby before it was too late, I would have to do it on my own. It was time to give up on romantic love, and try to become a single mother.

It was a bad, but not all-bad, moment. What had seemed like such a depressing thought, such a failure, for so many years, suddenly started to seem like something that was hearteningly doable, unlike the endless frustrations of trying to make love work. It was a decoupling of the desire for a man and the desire for children, and it carried sudden, surprising relief.

It was also sad, sad, sad to plan to become a single mother. It was standing against the wall at the biggest dance of all. I had not been chosen. I was not desired. Not loved.

For nearly seven years, I lived out my long-standing dream of working as a Moscow correspondent, reporting mainly for the Los Angeles Times right through the climactic years when the Soviet Union was collapsing. I could have stayed longer, but when I was thirty-four I came home to work for the New York Times with the very explicit idea of Getting a Life.

I was aware of having an agenda, painfully aware. I knew that some of my failed relationships, if given more time and less pressure, might have turned into love. But there was no time. No time. I had always been a goal-getter. But now, having the goal got in the way of achieving it. I analyzed the problem to death. What I want most in life now is to fall in love, marry, and have a family, but that is not the sort of thing you can make happen, I lamented to my best friend, Liz. You cant go to school for it. You cant get on a waiting list for it. You cant directly apply. You can try to prepare for it, but what else?

Time ran out before I could find an answer.

My own parents were separated before I was born. Their split was so rancorous that, family lore has it, my mother didnt want to allow my biological father into the hospital to meet me when I was born. He was a successful physician, professor, and author. He also had a violent temper, a two-pack-a-day habit, and the kind of superiority complex that led him to conclude, from personal experience, Remember, Carey, a man never hits a woman unless she makes him feel totally powerless.

My mother, a supremely warm and hilarious woman, moved back into her parents house and raised my brother and me on her own until I was two. Then, to our great good fortune, she married Charlie Ritz, the loving, wise, patient man who would become my stepfatherbut who was really my dad, my father in every sense of the word except genetics. He always said that he could not possibly have loved us more if we had been his own biological children. When a car accident left my mother in a permanent coma in her midfifties, my dad spent hours with her shell of a body virtually every day for nearly two years, gently watching over her as the hope that she could recover slowly faded. He held her hand as she breathed her last breath. To this day, he wears his wedding ring.

Perhaps I would have my mothers luck in late-found love. At least I could think about having a child on my own as skipping the ugly divorce.

Two days after my birthday, I told my dad that I had decided to become a single mother.

No matter what you do, Ill support you, he said firmly, sad-eyed. Im sure youll make a great mother.

I could see the crumbling of a vision hed had for me. On the other hand, I thought, my mother met him when she had a one-year-old and a two-year-old, so he couldnt think this was truly the end of all hope for love, could he?