“Do we have to stand up?” I whisper-shouted to the woman sitting next to me. She shot me a weird look.
“You don’t have to do anything!” she said, and then she quickly jumped up and tossed her baby into the air, laughing with what appeared to be real joy. I sat there feeling self-conscious, trying to muster an excited face to make at my kid, who was too busy being sensory-overloaded to notice me. This is hell, I thought. My armpits got hot and tingled and I screamed in my head, feeling like a teenager again or like a child in gym class. I felt new. I was new.
When the story ended, it was time for all the kids to play together. Of course that was impossible; our babies were newborns, stuck flopping around on our laps. Playtime was for the moms to interact, to make polite conversation. When you are the mother of a new baby, however, polite conversation is typically a desperate grasp at information: How does your child nap, how does he eat, what brand of diapers do you use? The trick is to answer questions honestly but be ready to disavow whatever you do if, compared to the other person’s routine, it’s too strenuous or too laid back. The fantasy is meeting another parent who does the exact same things you do so you don’t have to question or defend any of it.
In the library basement, I found no one like me. No one hated it enough. No one else felt suicidal, desperate for a drink. One woman—wearing glittery slip-on shoes and bright leggings that showed off her still-round tummy—was clearly the leader. She asked for my e-mail so that she could add me to the group. “Look at that neck control!” she shouted over the din, pointing at my baby. I panicked. Her own kid was a lump, falling sideways. “How many weeks is he?”
I fought the urge to lie and say he was older. I didn’t need any of these women resenting me for my son’s advanced motor skills. “How is he sleeping?” she asked me.
“Terribly,” I said, hoping to make up for the neck thing. When someone commented on how cute he was, I caught myself pointing out how he didn’t have any hair. I was self-deprecating on behalf of my baby. Not yet four months old and he was already a victim of my insecurity.
When the ringleader excused herself to go talk to someone else, I found myself sitting alone with the baby on my lap. I looked around the room without making eye contact with anyone, lonelier than I’d been before I’d gotten there. I sat there feeling ugly, and embarrassed, a gray stack of flesh in cotton jersey. My body I’d expected to be a crime scene, but even my face looked bad lately. My hair was the color of dishwater and I put it up, still wet, in a ponytail every morning. Even when I wore makeup, I looked, and felt, like I’d had the life drained out of me. I tried to seem busy, playing with my own baby while I listened to the women around me hungrily interrogate one another. They were explaining their daily schedules in precise detail. How long does she nap? Does she take three naps or just two? Does she nap in the stroller or in your lap or in the crib or the carrier? Does he drink three ounces of pumped milk at a time or four ounces? I mean, I don’t even know, I exclusively breastfeed. Were you going to go back to work at six weeks or eight? I don’t think I’m going to go back to work at all. I have to. I love that onesie. Isn’t it perfect. Is it from Carter’s? Carter’s for Target or Carter’s-Carter’s?
I felt as hungry for the minutiae of their circumscribed days as they were but I was also filled with self-loathing for caring at all. We sounded so desperate, we moms. So boring. Can you believe this is what our lives have been reduced to? I wanted to say. Remember when we were real people? Remember feeling in charge of your life?
I looked around one last time, then, feeling overwhelmed with sadness, I clipped the carrier around my waist while balancing the baby precariously on my lap, zipped up his tiny hoodie, nestled him onto my chest, and put my arms through the straps. I kissed his head. He’d ruined my life but I loved him. I didn’t hold it against him.
I looked right, looked left, and darted up the stairs. The library was full of regular people reading books and doing work. I hurried past them and out the door. I just wanted a baby, I thought. I don’t want to be a mother. I want to be a writer. I want to be taken seriously. I want money. I want more time. I want to lose weight. I want to be beautiful. I want a day completely to myself, though I don’t even remember what I used to do with them when days to myself were a thing I had.
When I got home I collapsed onto the bed to feed the baby while Dustin orbited around the fixed point of us. “Hi, family!” he said, with extra emphasis on family. Was that what we were? He gathered us in his arms and I groaned. Just as I was not a mother yet, we were definitely not a family, not to me. The word felt corny and forced. I wanted to kick it away and claim the word for myself only when I was good and ready. When I was in a better mood. When I felt more worthy of it.
“So?” Dustin said, searching. “How was it?”
“You know. Dumb,” I said.
“Aw, come on. I think it’s nice! The lady that does the songs—”
“Yeah, you didn’t tell me there was singing involved. Jesus Christ.”
He laughed and got back up to finish making dinner.
“Do you talk to anyone when you go?” I asked him.
“No. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t not talk to people. I just hang out with our guy here.”
“You mean you didn’t meet the moms? Oh my God. It’s such a scene.”
He laughed, admitted he had no idea what I was talking about. I envied him that. No one suggested he make dad friends. He got to demolish low expectations of fatherhood while I got defensive. I feared being eaten alive by motherhood, being completely subsumed. He seemed light-years away from me right then. Even his love for me was confusing. I didn’t feel worthy of that either.
I wanted to arrive by our new happiness honestly, without trying to, at some later date. I wanted it to be undeniable, to take us by surprise. A mother, a father, a baby, a family. I would be happy despite myself. I would wake up before my family and go for a run. Before that, though, I wanted someone to come along and agree that yes, everything was shit. I so wanted that person to be him.
Instead, he came back over to sit on the edge of the bed and make joyful noises at us, kissing my cheek, my neck, my ear, as I stiffened against him and begged him, in my mind, not to say it. He did anyway: “My family!” It occurred to me that, oh, maybe he already was happy. Maybe the trying was what did it for him, what made parenting click for him so much sooner than it did for me. Maybe it was that he had the freedom to try, to make an effort, to choose to show up.
Whether it was working or not, I could see that he was trying for me—for all of us. He was grabbing at the good parts of what we had and hanging on. Maybe he knew we couldn’t both fall apart. Maybe he could see that I needed it to be my turn. I needed to be able to fall apart. I needed to come to all of it in my own time. And until then, someone had to make dinner.
Maternal Instincts
For the first few weeks I was always expecting to catch the baby, somehow, mid-death. If Dustin wasn’t watching me, I sat on the edge of our bed staring, my breath stopping when the baby’s did, my mind counting the seconds until he gasped, his tummy like a small balloon, filling up. I hovered over him, vigilant, while he slept, watching the reassuring rise and fall of his chest. During the day I puttered around the apartment, inventing reasons to walk by his bassinet and confirm he was still alive. It felt like this was what I was born to do: save my son just as he was slipping away forever, shake him awake before he left us and fell back to wherever it was he came from.
When we left the house with the baby nestled on Dustin’s chest in one of those elaborate fabric baby wraps, I would stop Dustin every few minutes to peek in, check he hadn’t suffocated. When we took the baby to lie on a blanket in the park, I knelt next to him, my eyes darting left and right, watching to make sure a bird or a squirrel didn’t swoop in and attack his face. I knew I was being ridiculous by any objective standards, or so went some paternal voice in my head, some superego mix of Dustin and a stern pediatrician.
/> The human body is a miraculous thing. Babies are resilient! He’s fine! He’s fine! He’s fine!
At night, whether he was crying or not, I woke up every hour or so with a gasp and shone the light of my phone over his face, put my fingers under his nose to feel for breath.
I knew that if the unthinkable—which is to say, the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about—happened, I would regret not staying awake all night with a flashlight pointed at his tiny chest, watching him breathe. My vigilance would seem worth it, unquestionably. Was this not my responsibility? My role? My body had built his body cell by cell by cell, spent almost a year putting him together in the dark, and now I was supposed to sit back and tend to him, keep him safe and alive with my milk but also—impossibly, it felt—trust that his body would do its work, that he would keep breathing all on his own.
I think it must have started in the hospital. In order for me to be discharged after the baby was born, there were a few things we had to accomplish. Forms to sign. Pamphlets to read. Hospital surveys to fill out. Dustin’s paternity to declare, since we weren’t married. I was supposed to take a shower, take a shit, be able to walk around on my own.
Then, last of all, there was the SIDS video. “Did you watch the video yet?” the nurses kept asking me, a little apologetic. “They make us tell you to. There’s a quiz you have to take.”
Sudden infant death syndrome. The leading cause of death for infants and a catchall term for the rare but distinct and haunting possibility that your child could die at any moment for no discernible reason. Everyone said there was no use ruminating on it because you couldn’t ever fully prevent it, you couldn’t control it, but then you were told not to co-sleep, not to put blankets in the baby’s crib, not to let him sleep on his stomach, as if to remind you that although you couldn’t guarantee that your child wouldn’t die—in fact, he surely would one day, as would we all—you were responsible for doing everything you could to make sure he didn’t. You couldn’t prevent death, but you could contribute to causing it. It might be your fault. Especially if you broke one of the rules from the video.
“Oh,” I said, caught off guard. “No, I haven’t done it yet,” I said, “but I think I know the gist,” which was a vast understatement. I could have given a lecture on SIDS to the National Institutes of Health, though all of my findings would have been horror stories posted on various internet forums that I’d sought out and read in the middle of the night just to torture myself.
Of course I aced the quiz, which went over the central tenets of the Back to Sleep campaign, started in the mid-1990s to encourage parents to put infants to sleep on their backs. The quiz had trick questions like “What kind of blanket should you put in the crib?” Answer: None, because the blanket could cover his face and he could suffocate. No pillows either. No loose clothing. The baby should sleep in the same room as you but not in your bed or on your chest as you’re rocking him in the middle of the night, only half awake yourself. Pacifiers help lower the risk of “dying in infancy of an unknown cause,” which was another way to say SIDS. Breastfeeding helps too. Maternal smoking is a risk factor for SIDS. As are pregnancy complications and premature birth. I had the list memorized but still Googled it on occasion to feel a sort of selfish reassurance that we would be spared. As in: Phew, my baby loves his pacifier, so it will be someone else, some other poor parent. As if there were a quota of babies who would die and mine was not one of them. At least for now. Not yet.
Even now, when I think of the term SIDS and look up the statistics, I hold my breath without meaning to, start to feel dizzy. I think of all the parents who do everything right and whose babies still die mysteriously in their cribs, on their backs. And I think of the parents who do the wrong thing, whether out of desperation or ignorance or defiance. I think of one family whose story I read in the middle of an anxiety-fueled night: We do not believe our son died because he was sleeping on the couch with his dad, one mother wrote, or something like that. Then she added that, while there was no way to know for sure, they had chosen to believe that their child would have died that night anyway, and they took comfort in the knowledge that he hadn’t spent his last moments alone. I think of all the times I fell asleep with the baby on my chest without meaning to. You just get so tired.
The Back to Sleep campaign has decreased SIDS deaths by 50 percent in the decade-plus it’s been around. It’s been a success, undeniably. But taking the quiz felt like touching the void. It made the truth impossible to ignore or repress: Death was inextricable from life. Our real task was not-killing a small, precious thing.
The macabre was everywhere, once I started looking. Breathability was advertised on all the baby products we bought, a word that used to mean fabric that didn’t cause a yeast infection but now referred to the lifesaving mesh in the sides of the bassinet or playpen. The baby’s crib came with a big warning about keeping it away from window blinds to avoid strangulation. I read it and froze where I was standing, visions of my baby, stiff and blue, flashing through my mind. Which I guess was the point. Thank God it was summer, so the omnipresent receiving blankets were all thin cotton. Even so, they were treacherous, like every other object. I imagined them falling into his crib in the middle of the night, inching up around his mouth like pythons as he slept, taking him from us in an instant.
One afternoon I was playing peekaboo with the baby, one of the blankets over my face, and Dustin caught me making a covert attempt to see if I could breathe through it. Just to test it.
“What’re you doing?” he said.
“Nothing! Whatever.”
“I did it too,” he admitted. I exhaled. Dustin was my standard of normalcy. I’d always harbored an obsession with death, or a too-keen awareness that it was coming for all of us, so I didn’t really trust my own brain. “Ever since you were a kid,” my mom would say, shaking her head. “I have no idea where you got it from.” I used to convince myself that my mom would get murdered on one of her long morning runs. Or that there was cancer hidden somewhere in my body. Or hers. I would lie in bed writing the story in my head, preemptively feeling guilty for all the bad things I wrote about her in my diary.
When I got older I imagined getting hit by a bus. Thrown onto the subway tracks. A brain aneurysm. Then once I met Dustin, or once I fell in love with him, my death fantasies transferred to him. Anytime he didn’t pick up his phone, he was obviously lying dead on the side of the road, run over by a semi while he rode his bike. Attacked when he left work late at night. Or he’d slipped and fallen while he cleaned our kitchen floor, been impaled by the mop. I guess I should have seen the baby-dying fear coming.
But even now, in hindsight, my fear seems rational to me. Infants lack the solidity of grown people, the layers of years lived and personality accrued—all the trappings that distract you from the horrible vulnerability a baby arrives with: a neck that bends in just a way to remind you of the arteries, the critical nerves, inside it; a nearly bald skull covered in nauseating blue veins, visible and running over the tops of the ears. The baby’s soft spot right at the crown of his head, no hair to hide the place where the skull has yet to fuse together, and—the worst part—it pulses with his heartbeats at odd intervals, as if to scream, I am just a mortal body, over and over.
Dustin thought the pulsing soft spot was funny. “It’s doing the thing again.”
“Ugh!” I couldn’t look away even though looking made me feel ill. I would do an exaggerated shudder, trying to shake off the horror like a dog shakes off water.
The more that people, especially Dustin, dismissed my fears, the less I trusted them. Babies do die, I wanted to say to everyone. I felt like sending them links to tragic blog posts. Don’t you see what we’re dealing with here? I would tell them. You think this is all elephant onesies and hooded towels, but it’s a matter of life and death!
It’s no one’s fault, people would have said if it had happened. But they might not have meant it.
I knew I wouldn’t have believe
d them. If the baby died, I’d have to answer to everyone, answer to myself as a mother. It was knowing that I would feel culpable forever, no matter what, that took my breath away. I tried playing out the worst-case scenario in my mind, hoping that confronting it would sap some of its power (nope). I’d push the stroller around the neighborhood thinking, Okay, so we would be very sad. Broken. Our lives would be defined by tragedy, just like the lives of all the people I’d read about on the internet, the ones whose babies had been born with severe birth defects or had been in terrible accidents or hadn’t survived birth. But eventually my life would go back to what it was like pre-baby. We’d travel. Sleep late again. I’d write about it. In a way, the baby dying was more fathomable than him living. That we were falling deeply in love, that the stakes were higher than they’d ever been before, and we would have to live with it, with loving like this—that was harder to take in than the possibility of a great tragedy.
I read a story on a parenting forum around this time that described my dark fantasy to a tee. A woman was at a parade with her children. She had her newborn in a stroller covered by a thin blanket so that the baby could nap in peace while she tended to the rest of her family. Suddenly, or so she wrote, something came over her, some intuition, and she rushed over to the stroller, flung off the blanket, and crouched down to stare at her son. She squinted at him, watching his chest for movement, and saw nothing. Without stopping to think, she reached out to him and shook him awake. As she told it, this caused him to startle, open his eyes wide, and gasp for air.
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready Page 12
