Non-pregnancy, parenting, and what I learned from Jane the Virgin
I didn’t watch Jane the Virgin at first. The premise — a virgin woman gets accidentally artificially inseminated and pregnant — was too absurd for me to bother trying. The show is, on nearly every front, far-fetched, ludicrous, and unrealistic. But this over-the-toppedness is what got me hooked after I decided to give it a shot: I had wanted to watch something a little mindless (so no The Wire or Breaking Bad), but unfamiliar (so no The Office or Parks and Rec) and the show’s rare Latina lead and great reviews were hard to ignore. In the years since I started watching, I assumed if I ever wrote about the show, I’d focus on documenting the ways I love Rogelio de la Vega (#rogelioismybrogelio), and compare his harmless, charming self-centeredness with Michael’s (#teamraf) abuse of his role as a police officer for personal gain. Or, I’d geek out and write about how the show plays with new media, intertextuality, and multimodality. Instead I’m here writing about Jane, non-pregnancy, and parenting because of a dream I had while procrastinating on writing about another show.
I don’t often tell people this, but I decided not to go to Northwestern University (from where I have my masters’ degree and I’m now working on my PhD) as an undergraduate because of a dream in which I had a bad feeling about Northwestern University. I threw away the little card I had filled out and was meant to send back to declare my acceptance; I went to Tulane University instead. I don’t often tell people this because it sometimes feels silly to say out loud that I quite literally follow my dreams. (Except the one where Lance Bass from NSYNC asked me to call him. I knew that one was just random brain synapses firing as soon as I woke up and couldn’t recall the details of his number).
When Mixed Company first agreed to write about television, I planned to write about Fresh Off the Boat, a television show I watch and love, despite my Taiwanese and Chinese friends having told me represents them in a stereotypical, damaging, and racist way. Usually, I stop consuming media when people from the culture(s) being represented tell me it’s problematic and hurtful. But I love the show because I see my family in the Huang family and the mom’s skepticism and disdain automatic dishwashers. Also because it’s the only show where I see not-so-subtle remarks at the expense of white people (who are, according to the grandmother on the show “the cruelest race”). For characters on this show, white culture is foreign and requires work to understand. And DMX and Shaq have had cameo roles. One time the characters, all despairing for their own reasons, begin singing Boys II Men’s End of the Road over their lunches. The show is hilarious. I relate to it. It’s worth writing about.
This essay is not that piece, though. I had a revelation that writing about Jane would demand I write about something I have been avoiding: about not getting pregnant and becoming a parent. In my dream, after watching a new episode from this on-going season, I saw myself writing this essay, connecting specific episodes to specific emotions and experiences I’ve had on my journey to motherhood.
I’ve hesitated to tell this story.
Unlike Jane, who becomes pregnant despite doing nothing that leads to pregnancy, I have had some difficulty getting my womb to do what it was built to do. I have not wanted to write about it because I suspect other people will think this (infertility? I don’t know; I didn’t bother getting diagnosed) is something they should feel bad for me about. They’ll think that even though I say it doesn’t bother me that it does actually bother me but I’m being dishonest. I think a lot about what y’all readers think I think.
Recently, my daughter asked Neema, my husband, and I what we did before she and her sister joined our family last year. This was as we were adjusting the seats their new bikes and fixing to spend an evening outside enjoying the early spring. He and I looked at each other and laughed because I think she expected that we had some free-flowing, fun-filled adult lives doing grown-up things that we don’t do anymore. I told her we slept late into the afternoons and watched a lot of TV.
When I started watching Jane, two or three years ago, I was ready to be a parent. My husband and I had been married for years at that point. Our evenings were spent, overwhelmingly, side-by-side on our battered, light green suede couch, watching something on TV or working on our laptops. It’s the only couch we’ve bought together. As it aged, I’d say to myself, “We need a new couch.” But as it got even older, more and more frequently, I’d look at him and say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone squished on this couch between us?”
When we did leave the house, we’d take long meandering strolls on the beach, and I’d wave at every little baby and child nugget who’d accept my attention. I’d be a little overwhelmed at all the pregnant women and calmed by extended families picnicking together. On the couch, on the lake front, my imagined future. On the television, a show I did not relate to.
Jane Villanueva, Jane the Virgin’s titular character about whom spoilers are forthcoming, is raised by her mother (who had Jane as a teen) and Venezuelan-American grandmother. Jane is gorgeous with perfect hair and clothes, lives in sunny Miami, and dreams of becoming a romance novelist. She is in love with her boring police officer boyfriend when she is accidentally artificially inseminated and begins carrying her dreamy, super-rich boss/former crush’s child. She eventually gives birth to that child, who gets kidnapped immediately because of course he does.
I, too, am a member of an immigrant family full of formidable women. But, my grandparents stayed in the motherland and both of my parents raised me. They own and run a motel in a small town in Kentucky; my dad is not a telenovela star whose identity my mom kept hidden for decades. My hair is a weird but unique mess, and I live in cold, bleak Chicago wearing the same 3 pairs of leggings, and dream of writing this essay. I have been married basically forever and parent two daughters. And I have never been pregnant, despite a couple years of getting acupuncture and drinking herbal concoctions whipped up by a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, a kind White guy with a hipster beard.
I relate more with Chinese-American middle schooler Eddie Huang working at his dad’s business, his terrible dancing, and love for early 90s’ hip-hop than I did with Jane.
A friend of mine who watched the first season of Jane the Virgin while pregnant told me the show accurately hits all the emotional and developmental milestones she was experiencing. Finding out the baby’s sex, deciding on childcare and a name, choosing colors for a nursery, and fretting about both the baby’s baby health and future values. In the second season, Jane balances her creative writing masters and her job with parenting — wondering if she spends enough time with her growing baby, if her decisions to pursue her writing dreams will irreparably damage her beloved son.
I watched all this sitting beside an emptiness on my couch, in my womb, and filling out paperwork to become a foster parent. I loved the show Jane but I kind of jealous-hated Jane, her effortless beauty, style, and pregnancy.
I want to be clear: Neema and I discussed adopting kids well before we got married. We both just knew it’s how we would build our family. We were naïve about adoption, did not check our savior impulses, and know better now — what we didn’t expect is how much and how impatiently I’d eventually want a bigger family. We decided to pursue children both through pregnancy and fostering-to-adopt concurrently. I’m saying this not because my personal family or health choices are your business, but because I’m worried your assumptions about my decision to pursue my parenting dreams may irreparably damage my beloved daughters.
In my impatience to parent, I began praying for children. I asked that they be brought into my life whenever it was best for them, despite it feeling right for me immediately. What happened immediately was neither a placement nor a pregnancy — it was premonition. I woke up morning after morning having dreamt of being a mother to a child that I knew, somehow, was mine but not mine. My inability to conceive ultimately wasn’t something that bothered me or led me to pursue other options. My dreams told me clearly I’d be a foster or adoptive mom and I’d just have to complete the paperwork, take the training classes, get approved, and wait wait wait wait on a placement.
Unlike Jane, who has nine months to fret over and prepare for her child, I had years to fret and a weekend to prepare. I watched Jane research birthing techniques, medical issues, preschools, nannies, and parenting approaches, while I researched adoption laws and adoptive experiences. We bought a crib and toddler bed, and bland IKEA sheets to show a social worker that we’d be prepared for a kid. We felt sick and conflicted that they’d only be of use if a child’s home situation became unacceptable and unbearable.
Almost none of that proved useful when I received a call on a Thursday that two girls would be joining my family sometime that weekend. They needed neither a crib nor a toddler bed, or my emotional rollercoaster. As I frantically picked out new, decorative (and highly gendered…) bedsheets for their room, I remembered the Jane episode where she’s nesting. I hadn’t heard the term before, but apparently expecting mothers sometimes hyper focus on building their baby’s nest: preparing their homes and nurseries, their toys and their clothes. Jane spends an episode — the course of several days at least — overwhelmed at the task of making sure her bedroom, in her childhood home, is appropriate and ready for her son. I got my nesting done in one afternoon at Target, unable to think clearly through the barrage of pink bedding options.
As I’ve become accustomed to parenting, I’ve thought back to past Jane episodes and they’ve been unexpected supports. I don’t have many close friends with children, and often the stresses and anxieties of parenting are lonesome. When I worry I’m working too much, I remember Jane thinking her focus on school led to her son’s flat head syndrome. When I’m overwhelmed at the possibility my children will grow up spoiled because my husband and I can afford all sorts of material stuff my parents couldn’t or didn’t buy me — I remember Jane coming to terms with her son’s father being a millionaire. I don’t think knowing Jane went through similar things makes me worry less about my parenting, it just makes me worry less about my worrying. If some scriptwriter thought the experience was realistic enough for the only realistic aspect of an over-the-top mostly English-language telenovela-inspired-telenovela-parody, then at least I wasn’t alone in being concerned about my concerns.
The current season of Jane has been unexpectedly special for me to watch. Not just because someone (cough-crooked cop-cough) is finally out of the picture, but because a three-year time jump means both Jane and I are parenting energetic, adorable, loving preschoolers. And so is Jane’s baby daddy’s ex-wife, Petra, who secretly artificially inseminated herself and became pregnant with her ex’s twins.
Jane and Petra have opposite parenting styles and different children: Jane patiently negotiates with and seeks to understand her son’s difficult behavior and emotional outbursts at school and at home; Petra’s daughters are perfect angels to her strict discipline. Given my upbringing, my default mom stance is as a Petra — other than her also being super into Raf, it’s the only thing we have in common. I want compliance, no discussion or questioning, and predictable structure; my kids, because we’re still new to each other, need a Jane-mom who takes time to hear out their perspective and who can go with the flow. Sometimes what I perceive as misbehavior is just an unfamiliar-to-me habit, and most times it’s their way asking a new person for help. Although Jane is more of a natural at talking about feelings than I am, I can relate to her wanting to give her child space to grow and learn as an individual while feeling frustrated at the slow pace and obstacles that process presents.
I am comforted, though, that both Jane and Petra realize, despite their differences, they are jealous of one another and feel guilty about their own approaches and shortcomings. When I’m folding laundry on the floor and watching Jane after bedtime, I’m less likely to critique myself or replay some mom-mistake I made earlier in the day. Instead, I’m laughing at Jane’s mom-mistake and feeling a bit less fraught about myself.
I’ve been avoiding writing about parenting in part because I’m afraid I’ll reveal too much about my kids but also about myself. I write about myself all the time. But something about myself as a parent feels a little raw to put out there. When Mixed Company decided to write about television, I didn’t expect the piece I completed to bring me here. What’s so compelling about TV, though, is it brings you to unexpected places but also underscores your familiar experiences. Fresh Off the Boat shows me that my immigrant family isn’t weird. Mad Men and Breaking Bad take me inside the minds of despicable men whose sense of entitlement I sometimes covet. The Walking Dead and Lost remind me I have no practical skills. Jane the Virgin, with Jane’s accidental artificial insemination and Petra’s illicitly turkey-basted twins, is a reminder to me that my mothering journey doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s to be real, full of love, or relatable. On Friday nights, my family squishes together on the now-covered-in-marker, battered, light green suede couch. And I wonder what I could possibly have done with my time before this, what I might possibly dream of next.
