Me Without You

”I put it off having children as long as I could. So long that my husband warned me that we would have ourselves a geriatric pregnancy if we didn’t get on with it soon.

But it was a conversation with Caroline that caused a shift in my understanding.

We were sitting in a neighborhood tavern near her home in Sag Harbor. She ordered food, with her usual vodka with tonic on the side. She ate little but drank the vodka, leaving the tonic where it was - on the side. She asked me why I hadn’t had children—I’d been married for several years and my husband and I seemed solid enough.

’I don’t know…’ I evaded, uncomfortable with the subject. ’I’m not ready.’ She was right if she thought that I never would be. It would have been unkind and provocative for me to have said that I didn’t want to have children because of her.

’Don’t wait too long,’ she said. “Can you imagine me without you?’”



Evgenia Citkowitz about her mother Caroline Blackwood. Excerpt from ’Learning to Love a Famous Mother’ inThe Daily Beast, May 8, 2010.