T A B L E_ T A L K

Do you trust your gynecologist? Discuss your relationship with that most intimate of doctors in Table Talk's Mothers area

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R E C E N T L Y

Turtle time
By Anne Lamott
Salon welcomes back Anne Lamott after a six-month hiatus, and she announces she has overcome Linda Tripp, an expanding waistline and her compulsion to keep writing books
(10/15/98)

Time For One Thing: Acupuncture
By Lisa Moskowitz
My muscles relax. My eyes close. There is no real pain, just the apprehension of pain
(10/14/98)

Wild Things: Strange brew
By Polly Shulman
Love and art are the twin redeemers for the hipster heroes and heroines of Francesca Lia Block's young adult novels
(10/13/98)

School girl
By Thylias Moss
I thought all girls -- regardless of color -- were heading toward vast opportunities. Then I learned the truth. An excerpt from "Tales of a Sky-blue Dress"
(10/12/98)

The gracefully aging boys of summer
By Joan Walsh
Is it merely a coincidence that the playing years of the major leaguer correspond to the period of peak fecundity of the American woman?
(10/08/98)

BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BEAUTIFUL DREAMER | PAGE 1, 2
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When my second son, Roger, was born three years later, I was in second-hand mode. Everything he used was a hand-me-down from his brother or from a friend, although I refused to use the Aprica again and it stayed in the basement until my suburban nephew inherited it. I borrowed a different MacLaren model called the Buckingham from a friend, which worked fine although it didn't have the élan of the Dreamer. The Buckingham is a cushier version of an umbrella stroller, with a backrest that offers more support and can be lowered until completely flat. But it's no Dreamer.

Five more years passed, and my husband and I were contemplating, with great ambivalence, the Optional Third Child: Was our family complete, or might we still consider expanding? Although we couldn't really decide, we agreed to begin trying. I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment each month when I got my period. Then, one Sunday I volunteered at a tag sale to benefit Jacob's school, and there it was: the Dreamer of my dreams. It looked brand new, and in fact, it practically was. The woman who donated it had bought it for her second child, but after three months, he had refused to ride in it. (I wondered: How does a 3-month-old express his refusal to sit in a particular stroller?) She had tagged the Dreamer at $50. If the model were still available in retail stores, $200 would be a conservative estimate, but MacLaren stopped manufacturing the Dreamer several years ago.

All morning, as I sold books for 50 cents and secondhand children's clothing by the pound, that stroller haunted me. I still wasn't pregnant after six months of trying, so would it be bad luck to buy the Dreamer now? Before Jacob was born, I was too superstitious to have the Aprica delivered until he was safely home from the hospital. How would I feel if I failed to get pregnant and had to face the stroller in the basement, gathering dust? When I left to take a lunch break, the stroller still hadn't been sold. That's when I realized what this obsession was really about: If I bought the Dreamer, I was buying the dream of a new baby, choosing to make a commitment to conceiving, carrying and raising another child. If I passed it by, I would have to admit to myself, and my husband, that my heart really wasn't in it.

When I returned to the stroller, it had been marked down to $30 and someone else was seriously considering it. "I'm buying it," I blurted out. I thought I'd said it to myself, but it turned out I'd spoken aloud. The other mothers all looked at me with interest. Some of them had openly wished they could have an arrangement like I have, as a freelance writer with 5- and 8-year-old sons already in school. No one had suspected I might consider trading in my freedom for a chance to add to my family. I paid for the stroller and clumsily fumbled with its folding mechanism so I could put it in my car. Then one of the fathers at the sale came forward unsolicited to demonstrate how to collapse it. Obviously it had been a long time since I'd handled one of these things. I walked it to my car feeling self-conscious. My 5-year-old son, walking at my side, didn't ask a single question.

The Dreamer sat in my basement for a few months. I found myself mentioning it a lot to my closest friends, describing the acquisition as a metaphor for my indecision about a third child. As the months passed and I still wasn't pregnant, I began to be unnerved by the way the stroller caught my eye every time I went to the basement for a roll of toilet paper from the storage closet. So I offered it to a friend. Her baby, a third child himself, was already a few months old, but none of the strollers in her large collection were right for him. He has Down's syndrome, and with his floppy muscle tone, he needed a stroller that cradled him cozily. The Dreamer's bucket seat was just right. My friend was thrilled with the stroller, and I loved seeing her son snuggled inside. I began to feel less possessive of my Dreamer.

Even so, I continued pursuing the dream of a third child, though I felt less and less optimistic. We had decided that we were not willing to pursue the various high-tech approaches to infertility. I had never had trouble conceiving before, but perhaps my body, at 38, just wasn't interested in doing it again. After 10 months of trying, I was a little surprised, in March, when my period didn't arrive. On day 27 I began to feel curious, and on day 30 I broke down and bought a pregnancy test. These items have improved since my last pregnancy and I was amazed at how clear the result was. It was positive.

After the initial wave of panic subsided, after I called my husband with the news, I thought of the Dreamer. When my baby arrives in December, my friend's son will be big and strong enough to sit in a regular umbrella stroller. I'll reclaim the Dreamer and push my baby around the neighborhood, tucking all my bags underneath in the roomy basket. And when baby No. 3 outgrows it, I'll pass it on to a deserving and decisive friend.
SALON | Oct. 19, 1998

Lisa Kleinman, a freelance writer, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband and children.