“Zelda,” I repeated, my cheek brushing her ear. I thought back to my parents’ indecision about my name, the three-month period in which they each fought for their own relatives to be immortalized, my identity changing on a daily basis. I grabbed Jon’s fingers, warm, giving. “My little Zelda.”
Then I prayed that like her namesake, my baby would grow up with the confidence to save herself when she needed saving.
• TWENTY-ONE •
CODE BLUE
New York City, 2011
It takes four generations for trauma to pass through a family. I thought of this again. I imagined a diagram like the evolutionary monkey-to-man but instead with bespectacled Jews showing increasingly good postures and golden tans. Then again, how could it be linear? The generations react to and against one another, compensating and overcompensating, sometimes instituting more trauma in their attempts to avoid it. The first generation survives, I figured, the second suffers survivor’s guilt, the third becomes hyperaware, sensing both the dark past and the light at the end of the trenches. And now, the fourth.
“It’s strapped in,” Jon said. “You don’t need to hold it.”
I nodded, and gripped the car seat even more tightly.
Holy shit, I thought. I was doing it. I was a mother. I was sitting next to a car seat. There was a person in it. I made it. It was OK. I was OK. This thing that had been in my stomach was now in a cab listening to Jimmy Kimmel, stuck in traffic on Fifth Avenue.
Nothing made sense.
“Take Seventh!” my husband called to the driver, as if we were in a huge rush to get home—to begin the rest of our lives.
But I smiled gratefully as the taxi approached our building, my haven. It had been a hectic week in the hospital following our near-loss and emergency surgery. Now I clutched my warm, healthy daughter—my double miracle—as Jon pushed open the door to our apartment. The white walls, white carpets, and white counters, smooth geometric lighting and large windows made me feel grounded and calm. Lord, I’d been aching for this serenity.
“Welcome home, Mom,” I whispered to myself. “And daughter.” Then I proudly added to my new roommate: “Welcome to your peaceful palace.”
But mere seconds later, entering Zelda’s nursery, my former home office, my mental sanctuary, I grew faint. Next to a half-assembled crib and changing table, there was a stroller, brightly colored hats and snowsuits, a laboratory of breast pumps and sterilizers. My breath quickened as I scanned hospital-grade first-aid kits, towels with fuzzy lion tails. At the baby humidifier shaped like a frog, I felt sweat drop from my hairline. I stared at the unruly piles and touched my bandaged-up stomach. The doctor had explained that to save my daughter, she’d needed to reopen an old surgical wound. Now, I thought, here was my interior really becoming unraveled.
I hugged Zelda closer into my chest and thought about our Montreal house strewn with my mother’s used Kleenex, the cobwebbed credenzas, the unopened bargain board games, the closet doors that were blocked from shutting so that the automatic lights stayed permanently on like an eternal flame, the chaos in which bank statements were lost forever, buried by the full stable of My Little Ponies, the descendants of Bubbie’s cheap dresses and purses. All the junk that formed physical and emotional barriers between us. What festered in my daughter’s genetic code? What colors and moods would it express?
I took a deep breath into Zelda’s clean white snowsuit (yes, on my registry I’d listed not the traditional pink, antitraditional blue, or even yellow, but ridiculously impractical white infant clothes), placing her tiny hand around my finger so its teensy nails lined up along my knuckle. I forced myself to remember that I’d combated it all, engineered another life, a new lineage. I’d run away, become a professional neat freak working in galleries, found a husband who understood that our baggage affected those around us and allowed me to adorn this open-plan apartment with a clear backsplash, uncluttered shelves, room to breathe and clear jettisoning rules. Until now.
“Look what I bought at the Chelsea Crafts Fair.” Jon excitedly displayed a hemp bag from which he pulled out an elephant made of recycled sweaters, a turtle in a Pac-Man sweatshirt, and a Korean sock puppet. With a mini-iPod.
“How could you do this to me?” I cried. “It’s taken me years to accumulate all this nothing.”
“Shopping for her is fun,” he said, tickling Zelda’s feet.
I sat in the enormous new glider (four times my size, even postpartum) and tried to breathe. Calm down, I scolded myself. He’s a great dad, wants to be involved, has the right attitude. And here you are, your knee jerking madly. Besides. You’re a mother. A mother. Hum a lullaby, for God’s sake.
“Schlaf, mein kind,” came out instinctively. “Sleep, my child” were lyrics from an old Yiddish tune Bubbie had sung to me. Now it felt right, all of it, Zelda’s warm body, our nuzzling, rocking. “In Dachau iz dein tateh . . .” Wait. Dachau? I was singing a song about Dachau to a six-day-old? Man alive, I was going to have to work harder to escape my past. Every time I thought I’d made it through, I hit a new wall.
I slowly stood up and walked over to the room’s large windows. While Kildare was hidden in a cul-de-sac, my adult home was in the middle of Manhattan, on the seventh floor, offering views of the clear perpendicular streets, of the world outside. I’d survived this foreigner who’d invaded my interior. I’d taken care of things my whole life. I could do this.
I would not be a mother blocked from her baby. I would not let her report cards disappear in domestic maelstrom, nor fill her shelves with useless bargains. I would love her and see her and touch her. By being organized.
I handed Zelda to Jon. Despite doctor’s orders not to lift anything, I collected all my strength to do what was most important: clean up.
• • •
BUT STUFF KEPT coming. Cousins I hadn’t seen since my bat mitzvah arrived with “gifts.” I stood speechless as they wheeled in their used goods: two travel cribs, a Jumperoo the size of my bedroom, a six-by-six-foot gray play pen(itentiary), and an Elmo collective. A colleague passed on a tote filled with old nursing bras. My neighbor popped by with several pairs of her niece’s baby UGGs. A friend from Ithaca called me before visiting: “I know you’re sensitive about clutter, so I just wanted to make sure it was OK to bring you two garbage bags full of summer dresses and an electronic swing?”
“Thanks very much for your kind gesture,” I said, “but if you bring plastic bags into my house I’ll use them to suffocate myself.”
Then there was Zelda’s own growing social set. I was keen to host baby playdates and invited my mommy group over. But while I scurried around providing lactation tea and diapers, I caught glimpses of horror scenes: drool puddling on the edge of my sofa cushion, a used wipe tossed into a corner. My apartment was becoming a lost-and-found for teethers, a repository of overflowing formula powder. Stuff, mess, and dirt. “That’s the last time Jackson comes over,” I whispered to myself, wiping mango streaks off a giant Stitch, recalling the hundreds of Barbies that had attracted a kindergarten crowd who used me for my toys.
After cordially waving good-bye and softly tucking Zelda into her crib for a rest, I collapsed on her tainted carpet. Sheer exhaustion didn’t help my anxiety. Having to get up every two hours, even for a dedicated insomniac like myself, felt like a whole new layer of torture. And even when she didn’t cry, I awoke in a sweat, convinced I was suffocating her in my blankets, even though she was in another bed. Not to mention that Zelda would settle only when I held her while standing and dancing to baby calypso (punishment for my sins). My body felt like it had been through a nineteenth-century war.
Fortunately, however, my expectations for motherhood had been so low, that I wasn’t disappointed. For nine months I’d completely forgotten that to balance all the stress was the fact that I’d have an adorable baby, a mini-human to ogle and cuddle, soft like the velvet of my bright pink robe that
Jon had bought as a joke, with the word “fabulous” spelled across the back in rhinestones—if you’re going to provide the boob buffet, no need to do it blandly. I’d forgotten about the amazing creature I’d be creating, this thing that went from blob to person, each day literally seeing more of the world and expressing her sentiments with more ferocity. (And passing more solid bowels. Who would have thought that so much of my existence would be run by someone else’s gas?)
And so, buoyed by each new movement and form of eye contact, each reach for the giraffe teether (I’d become one of those parents), I pushed on, at times a collapsing sack of bones and flesh, at others, hyped from the physical and emotional shifts of my round-the-clock existence. I tried to relax, to go with flows, but every time a new round of shopping was done—now we needed teethers, and ice teethers, and vibrating teethers—I blanched. How could six pounds of person come with six tons of equipment? The proliferation seemed endless. I needed to get ahead of it.
Between frantic doctor visits (was Zelda’s labored breathing emphysema, asthma, tuberculosis, asphyxiation, anaphylaxis, suffocation, lung collapse, respiratory arrest? No, just excess snot), I installed open shelving units so all objects could be stacked and seen. I purchased cream-colored bins for stuffed animals, and marked off an area of my sink for the PBA-free bottles, giving Zelda’s feeding its own section of the kitchen. When my daughter napped, I tucked items into their place: short-sleeve onesies on one side, long-sleeve on the other. I made sure that there were clear vistas across the apartment, and clean, straight lines always in view.
I managed. Until one afternoon. I sat down to nurse and felt something wet slithering down my side. Milk had seeped through my shirt, staining a new chair. Then the pump leaked across my kitchen counter, wasting precious ounces, traces of blood appeared on my arm (where from?), and I found suspect curdled matter tucked under one of Zelda’s many chins. For how long had the crusty schmutz been embedded in there? For how long would I have to stand in the hot shower scrubbing my milk-strewn corpus? I flashed to what was to come—years of cereal in crevices, yogurt congealed around chair frames, wafting smells of rotting pulverized broccoli emanating from undisclosed, indiscernible sources. Spinach stuffed up nostrils, mash flung with abandon, sweet potato chunks lodged in my sweaty bra. Unruly mixes of saliva, seafood, milk. Cheese-and-fish concoctions running down table legs, rice crackers crumbling in crevices, graham crumbs rotting under chair legs, in cupboard crannies. Sticky residues of unidentifiable liquids gracing my previously pristine surfaces. Mini-straws in the bath, banana-shaped toothbrushes in my purse. How would I handle it all?
My phone buzzed: a text from Melissa. “Are we on for tomorrow at seven?” I hadn’t seen her since before Zelda’s birth. I’d left the house alone only a handful of times, usually to buy more breast supplies. I’d been enchanted by the thought of meeting a friend uptown for coffee, but now I didn’t know how I’d do it. I’d have to arrange child care from six to nine if I included travel time, then pump enough milk just in case, which could take hours. There was no longer such a thing as just “meeting for coffee.” I had a child, and every minute of her life had to be accounted for.
“Sorry. Can’t,” I texted back, for the first time sensing the rift, the shift from not-parent to parent, the feeling that nonparents did not understand. Of course they didn’t. A few weeks earlier, I hadn’t either. It was just as I’d feared: I no longer controlled my space, or my time. My fingers shook as I typed.
That night, I asked Jon to put Zelda to bed. He sat on the glider, gave her a bottle, changed her, burped her, and rocked her, while I scrubbed the floors—by hand.
• • •
FOR THE NEXT few weeks, I spent every night frantically dousing the floors with disinfectant wipes and putting each bottle part in its place. I needed to go to sleep knowing that I could create calm. As my cleaning became more intense—every room, and with a new Dustbuster to boot—so did my admin, as I created triple layers of to-do lists and daily schedules for both Zelda and me.
Until one evening when I was using wet wipes and an old toothbrush to loosen some hardened yellow substance that had caked between the wooden floorboards outside Zelda’s room. Her light was dimmed and through the partly open door I heard her daddy sing and shush her, the model of intimacy and warmth.
I knew so many special songs, Yiddish ones Bubbie sang to me, folk tunes Mom had hummed, Canadian children’s classics she’d been sending me, copied from CDs from her local library and her own decades-old collection. The lyrics came back to me as if thirty years hadn’t passed at all. Motherhood meant a loss of control over my time, but also, time warping in weird ways, my past bloated in my mind. At every tired instant, memories of Raffi and giant puppets, clapping games and Chinese jump rope, inundated my synapses. Archived recollections of lyrics to lullabies about various Polish ghettos, the soundtrack of my own babyhood, seeped into my everyday mental terrain.
Singing, soothing, connecting—that’s what I should have been doing, what I wanted to be doing. I’d been so busy removing obstacles to seeing my daughter that I barely had time to look at her. In my desperate attempt to not-be my mother, I ended up only repeating her behavior. She’d tried to make up for her childhood by filling her home with objects; I tried to make up for my childhood by ridding them. But both of us could be blind when it came to our children. I looked at the rag in my hand. “Jon, can I have a turn tonight?” I asked, getting up from the floor.
He handed Zelda to me, and my warm daughter melted into my arms where she fit perfectly, the most natural embrace. I couldn’t believe I’d ever been ambivalent. I began to sing “Oyfn Pripetshik” and “Tumbalalaika.” There were good things I could pass down from the women of my family, like Bubbie’s and Mom’s love of music, art, singing. “A shteyn ken vaksn an regn,” I sang. “Libeh ken brenen oon nit aufhern, a hartz ken vaynen an trern.” (A stone can grow without water, love can burn without being extinguished, a heart can cry without tears.)
I rocked and she cooed, sucking her fingers. Then I noted a turquoise blanket on the floor. It bothered me, that splash of blue in her white room, but I told myself not to fixate, that I would put it away tomorrow. I could manage domestic mayhem through a mix of toy bins, organic cleaning sprays, and chilling out. But, no matter how much I tidied, I could not control the disorder of motherhood. I could never clean up for good.
Which was OK. A bit of clutter was a small price to pay for closeness.
• TWENTY-TWO •
LOOKING AFTER YOU
New York City, 2012
We traipsed up the stairs of the Park Slope subway station, Zelda’s three-month-old body snug against Jon’s hairy chest in a carrier, me drenched in diaper bags filled with fifteen changes of outfits just in case (and that was just for me). We were headed to Saul’s first birthday party; Zelda’s first any party. On the tree-and-row-house-lined Brooklyn street, we passed couples with strollers and toddlers bouncing on saucerlike apparatuses running into intersections with flustered dads chasing behind them. People whose lives revolved around ketchup stains and preballet classes, bruises and calamine lotion. “We’re one of them now,” I said as a mother and daughter dressed in matching retro parkas passed by.
“You’re gonna be even worse.”
“I know.” I imagined Zelda and me, holding hands in vintage red tailored coats, fluffy beige scarves, oversize handbags, but I had to block the thought because it was too good. Dreaming still made me scared it would never happen. Zelda’s newborn stage, the fourth trimester, was officially coming to an end. Soon this being would no longer be attached to my boob, but would connect to me in a more complicated, less concrete way, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it properly. At three months, I’d been told, babies can learn—to sleep, creep, act. Would I know how to teach?
“Much worse,” he said.
It was hard to believe that a year ago we’d made this same walk on the
way to Saul’s bris. I’d drunk decaf because I’d gone off the pill a few days earlier, but it was just a token gesture, a getting-used-to the idea of sacrifice rather than actually anticipating conception. I didn’t know—despite my bursting into tears during the otherwise uneventful ceremony—that I’d just been impregnated. Now Jon and I were reentering this same apartment as parents. As people who assessed the availability of stroller-parking.
Zelda made her entrance. At the front door, Jon unsaddled her from the carrier, and we were met with adoring fans. “How old?”
“Fourteen weeks,” I said proudly, feeling like I’d been doing this forever. I propped her up in the way I’d already grown accustomed to, so her purple polka-dot dress draped over my forearm and she was able to look out at the world behind me.
“Can I hold her?” the mom of the birthday boy asked. Zelda was the youngest child by several months; a desirable cuddle. It must be an amazing thing, I thought, to be the center of so much attention and physical affection. I badly wanted time to freeze—I wanted to be the one with the cutest, docilest, adorablest daughter forever. How could she, this warm calm ball, turn into one of those running, sticky, bodily-fluid-drenched, sonically deranged explosions? Sunrise, sunset.
“I want to hold her first!” a tall, silver-haired professor father-in-law declared.
“All right, but I get in after,” the mom agreed.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to give her up to a semistranger. Nor that she wanted to go. But there he was, checked sleeves outstretched, a massive smile, telling me how much he missed newborns.
“Well, we’re starting to think about hiring a nanny,” I joked, hesitantly handing over my daughter. “Let’s see this as your ‘trial.’”
White Walls Page 28
