Mama's Got a Brand New Job

by Janis Powers

  23

  The holidays were an absolute blur. I remember that before Christmas, Dale’s parents came for a visit. We had ventured to the David Burke Townhouse for brunch. I didn’t eat much of my meal, since I kept leaving the dining room when Henry got fussy. I was told I was being over-sensitive; I just wanted to crawl into a ball and sleep for a month.

  Christmas itself was less stressful than usual. Because of my overwhelming maternal obligations, I was able to recuse myself of all holiday responsibilities. We spent the day at my parents’ house and enjoyed an excellent crown roast of pork, prepared by my mother. Dale watched Henry while I helped my mom tidy up, which may or may not have been an even trade, since I had to use a Brillo pad to clean out the roasting pan.

  Once New Year’s rolled around, all of my sleep reserves had been depleted. The last thing I wanted to do was tart myself up for a New Year’s Eve party. Nothing fit anyway. Nursing was supposed to help me lose weight, but I wasn’t sure what could be done for my newly splayed hips. Pelvic reconstructive surgery with a bonus tummy tuck seemed more appealing by the day.

  Even though I didn’t feel like socializing, I knew it wasn’t fair to deprive Dale of the opportunity. He went to Mike Simonson’s annual New Year’s Eve party alone. It was just as well since Henry and I were asleep by 10:00 pm. At 2:00 am, Dale stumbled through the doorway, totally smashed. Ordinarily, I would have been angry with him for disrupting my slumber, but Henry had already beaten him to the punch. While Dale pounded water to hydrate before passing out, I carried out my function as resident milk maid. Happy New Year to me.

  I soon came to realize that my life existed at the pleasure of the infant. If he was hungry, I fed him. If his diaper was dirty, I changed him. If he cried, I picked him up. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without validating his well-being first.

  As a rational person, I reminded myself that the rest of my life would not be this inhibited. I discussed this issue at length with the only other mothers I trusted, my own and Paola. Both encouraged me to try to venture out of the apartment with Henry. The entire island of Manhattan was at my disposal; all I had to do was figure out how to navigate it and its almost two million inhabitants, with an infant.

  When I considered the myriad issues to be tackled just to leave the apartment, I began to realize why people had live-in nannies. I had to take pen to paper to map out all the factors impeding my freedom. The nursing schedule. Henry’s burgeoning nap schedule. Rush hour traffic and the associated frenzy of pedestrians crowding the sidewalks. By the time I was done, I had identified only two twenty minute windows during which Henry and I could leave the apartment without potentially being trampled.

  So, as I had been trained by NYC Baby Prep, I followed this schedule faithfully. For a while, it worked perfectly. But I knew it wouldn’t last. Something would alter the plan; I just lay in wait, wondering what it might be. A power outage or a fire alarm in our building would do it. Or maybe Paola would have some sort of childcare emergency that I could actually handle, now that I was at home. But alas, the source of the first major schedule disruption was far more mundane than a building malfunction or a desperate friend. And it was far more disgusting, too. It was poop. Baby poop.

  Henry had a bowel movement that could only be described as epic. Inexplicably, I had used the last baby wipe to clean off his face. No back-up wipes were in the changing table. I tried toilet paper to clean him up, but the soft tissue disintegrated upon contact with the poop. I moved to the next paper product, aptly called “Bounty.” After an aggressive wipe with one of those quilted sheets, Henry let out a wail unlike anything I had heard before. For a moment, I wondered if he had been permanently scarred by the shrieking lady in the L.D.R. across the hall from me at Lenox Hill.

  It was 5:30, in the thick of rush hour, but all I had to do was get across the street to Duane Reade so I could buy more wipes. The first order of business was to unshackle the accordion-like apparatus known as the stroller. Forget saving a few square feet of floor space in the co-op; I was never closing that thing again. I got Henry all situated, threw on my coat, and made a break for it.

  Half way to the elevator, I realized I had forgotten my purse. I attempted to turn the stroller around but wound up banging on the walls, scuffing the hallway drywall. The co-op board was going to love that. Somewhere there was probably a camera that had recorded my inadvertent act of vandalism. I didn’t care. The board could bill me.

  I ran around my apartment frantically looking for my purse. It wasn’t on the kitchen counter, where I usually left it. I ran to my bedroom, threw around some of Dale’s laundry, but found nothing except a shoe that had been missing for a week. I ran into Henry’s room and from there, I saw my purse on the couch in the living room.

  Relieved, I set out to depart again. Henry’s face was red with hysterics, so I picked him up to try and calm him down. As I put my hand on his bottom, his blanket felt soggy. I looked at the stroller, and to my horror, a light brown stain covered the seat. I ran as quickly as I could to the changing table to survey the damage.

  I opened the blanket. There was poop everywhere. Henry’s cute little outfit was officially broken in with markers on every layer. As I unwrapped him, I started to stress about the need to switch diaper brands, because whatever I was using had failed miserably. Or maybe I had the wrong size. When I finally uncovered him, I found the real source of the problem: I hadn’t put a diaper on him at all.

  Since I didn’t have any wipes to clean him, I wound up giving him a bath. And when I finished that, I made sure I put a diaper on and dressed him again. This time, I put him in his crib while I cleaned up all the soiled clothing. Amazingly, I was able to detach the messy pad from the stroller. I stain-treated everything and put it all in the washing machine on the sterilize cycle. Then I sprayed air freshener in the entire apartment, in the hopes of getting rid of the stink.

  With the stroller inoperable, I wound up lugging the car seat to Duane Reade. I made it in and out without incident. I felt like I had just passed some hazing exercise for new mothers. With the episode behind me, things had to get easier.

  But when I opened the door to my apartment, it still smelled like poop.

  By mid-January, New Yorkers had just about recovered from their holiday season hangover. Those in Hong Kong, many of whom had not been pre-occupied with celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, had been working steadily over the past few weeks. Which meant that the McCale HKI team, with the exception of me, had been working steadily over the holidays, too. I started checking my work emails and voicemails every day so I could find out just what was going on.

  Most of my inbox was filled with Nancy Lallyberry call-to-action emails, all of which I deleted. I had to balance the opportunity for sleep with the need to chime in about what fonts Nancy thought the team should use for the international briefs. I was pretty confident that she could handle that one on her own.

  Occasionally, I’d receive a draft or final document for HKI, but that was only when the entire team was copied on the email; none of my input was requested and more disappointingly, required. I considered contacting Deirdre Morgan directly to glean some more information, but she had encouraged me to stay off email and voice mail and to, “Enjoy whatever maternity leave you may need.”

  Still, as the days dripped by, I felt like I was falling farther and farther behind. I was too exhausted to return to work, but I did have some pockets of free time while Henry was napping. I opened a container of Nutella and re-evaluated the term “free.”

  Whenever Henry took a nap, I was either napping myself or doing chores around the apartment. Most days, I could barely get myself dressed. I felt like I had free time, but that was because the majority of my day (and night) was spent on borderline menial tasks which required a bare modicum of intellectual capability. Yet for some unknown reason, I spent whatever free time I did have on mindless activities like sleeping, tidying up, or watching the Discovery Channel.

  Pao
la had warned me about this syndrome. She called it “motherhood.” She had coped with it by attending a peer group called “Even Moms Can Learn.” The group held regular meetings in the basement of a nearby public school. It was run by Blythe Kasselbaum, an acquaintance of Paola’s from Penn. Blythe also wrote a popular blog about parenting, which obviously gave her all the qualifications she needed to lead a monthly meeting on the topic. Paola encouraged me to attend.

  Initially, the thought of sequestering myself in an underground space with a bunch of griping mothers sounded like a horrible idea. It was at this point that I wished I had joined a book club, or some other social outlet at which I could discuss something other than my child. But then I remembered my calamitous trip to Duane Reade, and I realized that maybe I could benefit from the years of experience of other, more seasoned mothers.

  I went to Blythe’s blog and checked the meeting schedule. The next session was set for mid-morning, this Saturday. I described the group to Dale, and he thought it sounded like a bunch of griping mothers in a basement. Then I told him that I was planning to take Henry with me. Suddenly, my attendance seemed like the greatest idea since the launch of Inter-Tech.

  By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I was a basket of nerves. I still hadn’t mastered the art of leaving the apartment with Henry, and I was running way behind schedule. I had to ask Dale for help. It was risky, since more often than not I had to help him with whatever I needed him to do, thereby negating the value of his contribution. It was frustrating for the both of us, since I think Dale would have liked to help more with the baby. Unfortunately, Beat the Boss was more important than Pat the Bunny.

  “Hey, I’m running late,” I declared, an explanation of why I needed help. “Do you think you could dress Henry?” I lifted my elbow and released some of the clothes I had collected for Henry from my armpit.

  “Yeah. Just let me watch this segment.” Dale was lying in a half propped up position on the bed, his eyes locked on the TV. He was wearing a workout t-shirt, which was caked with dried sweat from a morning basketball game. He had made the monumental effort to “change” by replacing his gym shorts with clean boxers.

  “Can you just do it?” I put Henry on his back in the middle of the bed. His head was right near the remote, which I snatched up and used to put the TV on pause.

  “Hey! What are you doing?!”

  Henry lay there gurgling on the bed. I pointed to him and then ran off to dress myself in the bathroom. I heard Dale get off the bed and go into the living room. When I heard the TV go on in there, my heart started pounding.

  “Are you just going to leave him there on the bed?” I demanded, pulling a shirt over my nursing bra.

  I could hear Dale crack open a soda as he sauntered back to the bedroom. “I’m here, right? Chill out. The kid’s not going to roll off the bed.” Dale put his drink down on a newspaper that was hanging off the bedside table. It looked perilous up there, but I didn’t have time to move it. He rubbed his hands together and smiled at Henry. “O.K. So what am I supposed to do here?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dale couldn’t even dress himself. No wonder he was struggling with Henry. I slipped on a pair of stretchy pants and some socks, surveying the situation from the safety of the bathroom.

  Dale picked up the onesie I had laid out. He had the sense at least to unzip it, but it was downhill from there. First, he made the mistake of putting Henry’s arms in first. I think he realized the foolishness of this approach when he tried to get Henry’s legs into the outfit. Henry kept kicking, his legs eluding Dale’s grasp. That, coupled with the flailing arms, led both parties to extreme frustration. Henry cried. Dale gulped his Coke.

  I grabbed some boots and took them into the bedroom. Dale put his arm up. “Don’t say anything.”

  I really wanted to give him some advice, but I resigned myself to let him deal with Henry. He’d have to learn how to dress his son sometime. I put on my boots and wondered whether Blythe Kasselbaum ran a class called “Even Dads Can Learn.”

  24

  “Your first time here?” The words came from a woman wearing a gold track suit with running shoes too clean to ever have been used for jogging. Two inch gold hoop earrings hung from her ears. Three gold necklaces hugged her collarbone. Her brown hair was wavy, cut in layers from her bangs to her shoulders, and heavily but professionally highlighted. Like me, she was holding a car seat with a baby. I looked down at the one thing we seemed to have in common.

  “Yes, it’s my first time here.” She was staring at me. “Is something wrong?”

  The woman tapped her head above her right ear, just where my Blue Tooth earpiece was propped. “You’d better take that freakin’ thing off before the mommy police tackle you.” I immediately removed the device, wondering if I had missed the memo about over-exposing infants to toxic radio waves.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said.

  She smiled cordially. Her teeth were bright white and perfectly straight. Maybe she was a dental hygienist. “Angela Perretti.” She reached out to shake my hand.

  I shook back. “Maxine Pedersen.”

  We both took a few steps down into what must have been a shared classroom space during the school day. Faux wood paneling covered the lower half of the walls, the remainder of which was painted a municipal gray-green. On the floor was a matted brown carpet so filthy I was grateful that Henry didn’t crawl yet.

  Then I realized that if I didn’t start planning, he might very well wind up in a school like this. I had no idea how good the schools were near the co-op Dale and I had just bought. Why hadn’t we looked into that? “Are you O.K.?” Angela asked. “You gonna hurl or something?”

  “Maybe.”

  Angela winced.

  “Figuratively.”

  Angela looked perplexed.

  “No,” I confirmed. “But is there an Even Moms Can Learn session about schools for kids?”

  “Oh, my God,” she laughed. “That’s a totally different group. Most people join when they’re pregnant.” She looked at my belly, still distended, but with fat, not another baby. “You’re probably not too late though. I’ll hook you up after class.”

  I could tell that Angela was totally wired into the Manhattan baby scene. A friend like that would be priceless. I followed her into the room and sat down next to her.

  “O.K., everyone! Please find your seats. We’d like to begin this month’s session of Even Moms Can Learn!” The rest of the moms sat down, slowly revealing a heavy-set, white-skinned woman with jet black, shoulder length hair, squinty eyes and a thin-lipped perma-smile.

  “That’s Blythe Kasselbaum. She’s organized this whole operation,” shared Angela. She sat transfixed, admiring Blythe’s every move, listening intently to every word. I couldn’t tell what all the fuss was about. And whatever esteem I should have had for Blythe dropped about two notches when I saw the typo in her PowerPoint presentation. The title on the slide master, which was highly embellished with frills and sundry baby motifs, read “Even Mom’s Can Learn.”

  I leaned over to Angela. “Mom’s?” I asked, drawing out the word and furrowing my eyebrows. “With an apostrophe? Come on.”

  She looked at the overhead and then gave a revelatory smile, leading me to assume that she had never noticed the error. “Are you an editor?”

  “No.”

  “Writer?”

  “Nope.”

  “Lawyer?”

  I nodded.

  She looked at Henry. She looked back at me. “How old is he?”

  “About eight weeks.”

  “So you’re still on maternity leave?”

  “Yeah. I head back in a couple of weeks.”

  “Well, good luck with that. Working with a baby is a bitch.”

  Terrific. That’s just what I wanted to hear. “And what do you do?” Maybe she was in one of those pyramid-scheme sales groups where all the members were coerced into selling products that they all reluctantly bought from e
ach other. And this “other group” about finding schools for kids was just an excuse to get me to come to one of her new-member hazing meetings.

  “I’m in H.R.” She paused, and for clarification she said, “Human Resources. I do part-time staffing.” I knew what H.R. meant. I just couldn’t believe that any company would hire her to manage its staff. Angela was just full of surprises.

  Blythe pushed a clicker in her hand which magically started her presentation. “This week’s topic is ‘Getting Our Kids to Sleep through the Night.’ But before we begin, I’d like to go around the room and have each of us quickly introduce ourselves and tell everyone the names and ages of our children. I’ll start. As you know,” she chuckle-snorted, “I am Blythe Kasselbaum . . .”

  As the introductions progressed, I learned that about half of the women had at least two kids, and that, along with Angela’s daughter, Gina, Angela also had a three-year-old son. With the introductions complete, Blythe began the presentation.

  She started out by giving us some high-level pediatric health information, the sources of which were sketchy and very well could have been her imagination. According to her, infants should be able to sleep through the night at approximately four months old. Given her timetable, I would have to endure another two months of Henry disrupting my nights. How was I going to work in such a sleep-deprived state? If there was any way to get him to start sleeping longer, sooner, I needed to know.

  “Would anyone like to share a success story about your child and his or her sleeping habits?” asked Blythe. Several mothers—the ones with more than one child—offered their opinions immediately.

  “Well, I found that if I kept Marcie up super late—like ‘til about midnight—she’d sleep until at least six in the morning,” said Mom #1. The majority of the circle nodded in respect for the idea. Encouraged, she continued, “Then, each week, I’d put her to bed earlier by fifteen minute intervals. I’m a really anal person, so for me, I really needed the structure.”