Accidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made

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Overview

At thirty-nine, movie critic Mary Pols knew she wanted to have a baby. But never—not in a million years—on her own. To take on the physical, emotional, and financial challenges of motherhood without a perfect soul mate/husband would be absurd, kind of like not bothering to use a condom during a one-night stand with an adorable but jobless guy ten years her junior.

Pols spends the ensuing weeks despairing over everything, from the financial nightmare of single motherhood to the end of her hopes for a traditional life. Not the least of her worries is finding the right way to drop the bombshell on loved ones, including her five siblings and ...

See more details below

More About This Book

Overview

At thirty-nine, movie critic Mary Pols knew she wanted to have a baby. But never—not in a million years—on her own. To take on the physical, emotional, and financial challenges of motherhood without a perfect soul mate/husband would be absurd, kind of like not bothering to use a condom during a one-night stand with an adorable but jobless guy ten years her junior.

Pols spends the ensuing weeks despairing over everything, from the financial nightmare of single motherhood to the end of her hopes for a traditional life. Not the least of her worries is finding the right way to drop the bombshell on loved ones, including her five siblings and eighty-four-year-old father, who has a German temper and an Irish Catholic attitude toward babies out of wedlock. Yet faced with the frightening, lonely truth that this might be her only chance at motherhood, she plunges ahead with the pregnancy and an Odd Couple version of a co-parenting relationship that looks like one more disaster in a long line of romantic disappointments. But even as she tries to give her son's young father a radical makeover, she realizes that his devotion and love for their child matters more than his spotty résumé or his inability to remember to put oil in the car. With humor, insight, and compelling honesty, Pols reveals what it means to compromise in the name of love and to find joy in an accidental life, suddenly brimming with purpose.

Editorial Reviews

BookPage
“… a well-written, emotionally honest memoir of Pols’ journey to motherhood and increased maturity…. She details with wit and humor her efforts to juggle her many challenges…”
Cookie Magazine
“Much as Pols’s story resembles the Judd Apatow movie, it is distinct in its heartfelt description of a woman who has come up against the edge of youth and expectation.”
More Reviews (8) Fewer Reviews
Diablo Magazine
“Amid joy and heartbreak, Pols grows from a self-absorbed and judgmental whiner into a self-aware adult and loving mother. It’s her transformation that makes this memoir an unforgettable read.”
Elle
“It’s funny, intimate, wise, and real, and we get to root for forty­something Mary, her twentysomething coparent, Matt, and their little son, Dolan, now four.”
Entertainment Weekly
“[Pols writes] with humor and grace. . . . It’s rare to find such honesty, even in an account so personal. Grade: A-”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Her writing is mesmerizing and lyrical. I laughed and cried and shook my head at some of her choices, but I rooted for her and her son the whole way.”
New York Observer
“Ms. Pols is a charming and insightful storyteller, and her memoir is both engrossing and endearing ...”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Sharp, witty and slightly self-deprecating, she alternates clever, camera-ready one-liners with intense self-revelations about parents, children, love and family….”
Publishers Weekly

First-time author Pols fashions an earnest, endearing memoir about how she hit her late 30s without a mate, but still managed to beat her biological clock. Finding herself pregnant at 39 after picking up a cute 29-year-old named Matt at a Bay Area bar, the author, the youngest of a large Catholic family from Maine, resolved to make a go at single motherhood. A successful film critic, if not exactly rich, she nonetheless figured out (with the help of her devoted circle of friends and family) a plan to live and raise the baby, including residing for a spell in a friend's trailer while pregnant. She barely knows her "baby daddy," whom she portrays as sweet, if mostly directionless and unemployed. Her book good-naturedly traces some of the early hurdles of her experience, such as "telling the Grinch" (her father), finding out the sex of the baby and trying to sneak into a film screening with her infant. Candid and unaffected, Pols provides an important lesson about not being willing to compromise herself, and that being brave can bring the richest rewards. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews
Bay Area film critic Pols chronicles her unexpected pregnancy and journey into not-quite-single motherhood. On the brink of her 40th birthday, the surprised author discovered that she was pregnant. Knowing that her fertile years were approaching an end, she decided to have the baby even if it meant doing it alone. Decision made, the next step was to contact Matt, the 29-year-old father-to-be. He was a good one-night stand, but Pols figured he would freak out when she told him the news. On the contrary, he was immediately supportive. "Everyone wants a child," he insisted, and so this unlikely couple embarked on a journey to unconventional parenthood. (Matt stayed involved, but they did not resume their relationship.) The author is droll and exceedingly honest about bouts of morning sickness, her search for bigger, baby-friendly digs and her son's birth, which is described in graphic detail. She airs perfectly legitimate annoyances with her co-parent, as well as her eventual coming to terms with his character. Matt may have had trouble being a responsible adult-at the time of their fling he lived in a hovel and had no job-but he proved to be a sensitive, caring father. Pols's habit of recounting past love affairs quickly becomes tedious, though at least she keeps sentimentality at bay. Emotions do surface at times, but raw expression of feeling seems appropriate when describing her deep grief over the loss of her parents, which coincided with her foray into motherhood. Glimpses of her professional life enliven the text, and it's too bad there aren't more of them: Her accounts of trying to write Marlon Brando's obituary on a day off without childcare and of a failed attempt to breastfeedduring a screening of De-Lovely are far more interesting than her frequent assessments of Matt's self-esteem. A page-turner by someone who stopped waiting for Mr. Perfect. Agent: Henry Dunow/Dunow, Carlson & Lerner

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061256929
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 6/3/2008
  • Pages: 288
  • Product dimensions: 8.50 (w) x 5.70 (h) x 1.04 (d)

Meet the Author

Mary F. Pols is a longtime movie critic and freelance journalist based in northern California. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Self, and Gourmet, and her film criticism appears regularly online at MSN and Time. A former Knight Fellow at Stanford, she is an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read an Excerpt

Accidentally on Purpose
A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made

Chapter One

The Trojan on the Floor

I stood in a backyard hung with streamers, trying to talk myself into a good mood while I waited for my hamburger to cook. This was my friend Dave's fortieth birthday party. I ought to be cheerful. There were balloons, for God's sake, and a homemade cake, and I was surrounded by plenty of people I loved and others I liked and others I imagined I'd like if I knew them. But while it wasn't even my fortieth birthday—not for ten months anyway—I felt each and every one of Dave's years. I was almost middle-aged. Ancient. The damp, foggy wind that is the specialty of a San Francisco summer whipped through my hair, and I could have sworn it whispered Spinster in my ear.

The passage of time was evident on all our faces and bodies. There was the former playboy novelist, grown thick around the middle; his boyish good looks were finally going to seed. He looked happy, though, chasing his young son around the backyard. An old flame of mine, the one we thought would never settle down, stood with his arm wrapped protectively around his vastly pregnant wife. My friend Kir joked about her crow's-feet, yet her oldest daughter stood nearly level with her shoulder, green-eyed and beautiful. Milestones seemed far less traumatic when you were bringing new life to the party.

The hamburgers were still raw in the middle. The cute orthopedic surgeon my friends had promised would be there had been called into surgery and wouldn't be coming. I went inside to the bathroom and stared into themirror. My hair was frizzy and the gray was showing, although, sadly, not in a glamorous Emmylou Harris kind of way. I felt so left behind. I was the same person I'd been for the last fifteen years. I could be counted on to be fun, wry, and sarcastic. But I was also chronically lonely, sick of myself, sick of my sad stories, and even sick of my funny stories. I contemplated going home to soak in my sorrows. I'd put Kieslowski's Blue in the DVD player and break out my bottle of Irish whiskey. The cats would comfort me. The wind whistled up through the cracked bathroom window to add a fresh taunt: Cliché, it hissed.

I decided to go to Liza's house instead. She'd recently separated from her husband, Hugh, and he had their two young sons for the weekend. Liza and her brother John would cheer me up. I'd known them for more than half my life. As college students, we'd worked together at a funky old summer resort in Maine, the kind of family-style place that liked to hire waitresses and busboys from liberal arts schools with names the guests recognized. Twenty years later, there wasn't much we didn't know about one another.

We made pasta and discussed our various romantic plights. John thoughtfully stroked his goatee and nodded sympathetically. He was single, but Liza and I assumed it was only a matter of time for him. He sold wine, bought French soap, baked bread, and was nice. He was a catch. Not for me—he was practically my surrogate brother—but for someone, someone lucky.

I found myself prowling the house after dinner. I wanted to wash away the gloom of birthdays and the absent orthopedic surgeon. Usually it was easy to persuade Liza to set out on an evening's adventure. Up until the last few years, she had been fairly demure. Always elegant, but hidden away in baggy jeans. All that changed when she and Hugh moved to San Francisco. Her jeans got lower and tighter as her spirits grew higher and the marital bonds looser. Now that she and Hugh were apart, John had moved into their flat to keep Liza company.

"Just one beer," Liza had said finally, shrugging into a suede coat.

When we got to Finnegan's Wake, she flatly refused to advance past the first empty barstools. She was wearing a kerchief over her impeccably maintained blond highlights. She looked as though she'd rather be scrubbing the tub than going out for a pint.

"I'm Hagrid," she kept saying. Her older son was deep into Harry Potter. "I don't want to be seen."

So John and I perched at the end of the bar with her. The walls were brown and there was a pool table, and that was about the extent of the decor, the perfect blank slate for an evening. If we didn't run into someone we already knew at Finnegan's, we could usually count on making some new friends. A doughy middle-aged guy on the adjacent barstool had instantly perked up at the sight of us. But between Liza's charwoman headgear and John's barely suppressed yawns, I doubted it would be a late night.

I looked out the window. A guy in a baseball cap smoking a cigarette caught my eye. Cute, I thought. Really cute. Young, though. Maybe thirty-five, probably younger.

The cute guy flicked his cigarette to the ground and walked into the bar. He sat down beside us, taking a coaster off the top of a half-drunk beer. He knew the doughy guy, who had been attempting to engage Liza in conversation from the moment she sat down. This often happened when we were out. When it came to men, it was almost as if Liza emitted one of those whistles that only dogs can hear.

She sat up straighter in the presence of the cute guy. He had an infectious smile and wide, sexy eyes. Within minutes Liza had got him to lift off his green A's cap, revealing short, dark blond hair and a receding hairline. I could tell she was doing age calculations in her head based on the hairline. I was doing them too. She asked his name. It was Matt.

"Now, how old are you, Mr. Matt?" she asked. "Because we're quite old."

Accidentally on Purpose
A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made. Copyright © by Mary Pols. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Sort by: Showing 1 – 7 of 5 Customer Reviews

  • Posted May 15, 2009

    proselytising single mummery

    The nature of this book, as I can understand it without buying and reading it myself, is its title: "Accidentally ON PURPOSE: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made", which says it all.

    The message is: get pregnant using a one-night stand from a low-status jobless male with-low quality genes and fulfil yourself as mother, when you get tired working for a living.

    Matt, the "babydaddy", Mary Pols' words, sounds like he is not the brightest bulb in the box. He was described as 29, "rather clumsy conversationally, as if he were new to the flirtation game. On the way to his apartment, he confessed he didn't have a J-O-B. The fact that he needed to spell it, rather than say it, led me to believe that he would be only a fleeting presence in my life."

    Sounds like he wasn't even that keen to bed Mary, or wasn't clever enough to know that this would be when any non-slag and slapper would back out. Maybe out of a sense of decency he was trying to tell her that a girl like her was slumming it a bit with him and should look in better places, even if it was just a one-night stand. Maybe he was just trying to see how much you were gagging for it.

    I just feel sorry for Mary Pols' father, a Catholic. I suppose he didn't think to disown or disinherit her? I know what I would do to any daughter of mine who gets knocked up by some low-life dimwit.

    So, now, to earn a bit of money, she has written a book telling other women that it is OK to do this, and in fact ENCOURAGING them?

    No doubt I will be rounded on for being illiberal and intolerant for saying what I have just said.

    But then some civilisations sometimes get a collective death wish and deserve everything they get that's coming to them.

    1 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

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  • Posted May 22, 2009

    more from this reviewer

    J.O.B.

    Perhaps the 29 year old babyfather explains that he doesn't have a J.O.B - spelt out like that - because he has that 1990s dance track in mind, 'Ain't nothin' going on here but the rent.'

    The lyrics go 'you gotta have a J.O.B. if you wanna be with me. Ain't nothing going on here but the rent.'

    Having no J.O.B. is his way of explaining he actually ain't up to scratch.

    The mother should have borne this in mind and started her search much earlier for suitable husband material.

    What a shameful tale. A disgraceful example to set to young people - that children should be denied the stability of decently married parents who are able to provide for them properly; that the state of illegitimacy should be encouraged and even promoted as a kind of ideal.

    0 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

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