by Jana Casale
That night she lay in bed with John and told him that she wanted to start a family. Nearly seven months later she was pregnant. She hadn’t waited till her early thirties after all, but she was never sorry that she hadn’t. It was a feeling so strong in her that the rest of her life just seemed like a blur of stupid pursuits and empty ambitions. Wanting a baby was as close as she’d ever come to wanting something real. It’s as close as she’d ever come to God.
CHAPTER 35
Annabelle
Annabelle was born two days after a blizzard. She was a small baby with thin, rich, dark hair. She was contemplative and judicious and only laughed if something was really funny. She was named after a character in a book that Leda had read many years before, and her hands were small and clasped closed on most occasions, and until she was born Leda hadn’t known that everything in her life had always been clasped up in those little hands. She hadn’t realized that it was possible to feel instantly in love, instantly high off of another person’s existence. The love she had for John or her parents or even herself all seemed wistful in comparison. She held her baby, and she just didn’t care about anything else. There was her baby and really that was it. Life suddenly had a purpose that was actually visible. And not only just visible, it was in her arms. The depths of happiness were suddenly infinite. It was real to be alive.
Originally Leda thought that she’d take a few months off from work and then start back up. When she was seven months pregnant, she’d gone to visit a local daycare center with the plan to secure a spot for her baby once it was three or four months old. She walked around and looked at all the bright plastic and the little table and little chairs. The classroom seemed so shiny. It seemed, at the time, that you would want to have your child in among shiny things like that. As soon as Annabelle was born she realized that wasn’t what she wanted at all. She called the daycare and canceled her spot, happily losing her deposit. She told John she wasn’t going back to work.
“We’ll cut back on cable or sell the couch. I honestly don’t care. I want to be home with her.”
John agreed. Somehow they managed the finances. Leda started cutting coupons and looking for sales. John sold some stock he’d been holding on to. It wasn’t easy, but it felt right. She didn’t worry about when she’d start writing again either. She just didn’t care. And what was more, she didn’t care that she didn’t care.
Leda woke up in the morning as John was getting ready for work. It was his first day back after three months’ paternity leave. She looked at her phone. It was nearly 6:00 a.m. Annabelle had only just dozed off a little after 3:00. She counted out the scattered hours of sleep she’d gotten throughout the night. It was less than four. I just want to count the hours I sleep and be able to count them on more than one hand. Just for a day. I just need a day of it and then I’ll be a person again. John was pretty good about helping out through the night, but since she was breast-feeding there was only so much he could do. Generally, even the things he could do she would prefer to do on her own. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but John was just never able to do as good of a job as her on pretty much any task. Whenever he’d change Annabelle’s diaper he’d always manage to get poop on something. Or if not that, he’d put the diaper on too loose, and when she would poop it would be all over her. It was amazing how incapable he could be at things that seemingly took so little effort.
“How is it that men ever survived anything?” Leda asked as John struggled to get the sheet off of the crib mattress. “And somehow we’re the lesser sex,” she said, leaning over and unzipping it.
She knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep that morning. Annabelle was still sleeping beside her, her little chest rising and falling. Leda got up carefully so as not to wake her. She wanted to kiss her, but she didn’t dare.
She went down to the kitchen to make coffee; a few minutes later John joined her. He talked about something at work as he fixed himself toast.
“You talk too much in the morning.”
“Do I?”
“Yes, please stop talking until I can feel my face.”
Annabelle woke up about an hour after John left. Her cry was soft and fairly quiet. It always worried Leda that she might not hear her if she were in another room.
“Her cry sounds like your cry did,” her mom told her. “It trails off in the same way.”
“I always thought babies’ cries were loud.”
“Not all babies.”
Leda leaned down and picked her up. “You slept in, pretty girl. Mommy wishes she could have, but Daddy is too loud. You and I need to kick Daddy out of the house.”
Annabelle looked at her with big, soulful eyes and smiled slightly, but she didn’t laugh because it really wasn’t all that funny.
Leda changed her quickly and sat down to feed her. Breast-feeding had proven to be considerably more challenging than she could have ever imagined when Annabelle was first born, but now that both of them had gotten the hang of it she really enjoyed it. She thought it had been one of the few things she’d really mastered as a new mother. At first it took some getting used to, producing food from her breast like that, right out of her side like a cow or some kind of street cat with a row of kittens. Her body was no longer her own in the way it had been. It had become something hearty and admirable, almost a separate entity from herself. Before she’d gotten pregnant she’d worried about stretch marks she’d had along her thighs. Now that she had a baby the fact that her body was pretty much covered in them didn’t really bother her.
“You can try cocoa butter if you want,” her ob-gyn had said once in passing. “Some women say they have luck with it.”
“For what?”
“For stretch marks.”
“Who gives a fuck about stretch marks?” Leda hadn’t meant to say “fuck,” but she hadn’t slept in two days and there was a screaming infant waiting for her at home.
Her doctor paused thoughtfully and then burst out laughing. “Well, I sure as hell don’t,” she said.
Now that her body had made this transition Leda very often ate gummy bears throughout the day. She still cared about being linear, but she didn’t obsess like she had in the past. Her body was no longer the kind of living tableau she’d fancied it before. It had grown and birthed a child. It sustained life. It was more important than a bikini, and it damn well deserved some gummy bears.
Leda leaned back in the rocking chair and almost dozed off for a moment. Indulging in every peaceful minute of breast-feeding that she possibly could was important. It was her only dependable respite from the child crying.
When Annabelle was first born, every other mother Leda knew asked her if she was a “good baby.” It seemed that there was this GOOD BABY label that all parents were after.
“Emma was a good baby. She’d sleep through the night at two weeks old.”
“You could take Joshua to a restaurant and he’d never make a peep. He was a good baby.”
“Paige could just sit and stare and do absolutely nothing for hours on end. She was that good of a baby.”
Leda was afraid that somehow she’d have one of these bad babies who didn’t sleep through the night and wouldn’t go to a restaurant and wanted more than to just sit and stare. She’d hoped and prayed that she too would be blessed with a good baby who wouldn’t interfere with her life any more than a demanding house cat. As soon as Annabelle was born she realized that she did not have a good baby. Annabelle had a really hard time at night. The first four weeks she woke up nearly hourly.
“Is this for real?” Leda asked John once as the two of them pored over the screaming child after changing her clean diaper for a second time.
During the day things weren’t much better. She had to carry her around constantly to keep her happy. She and John would have never even considered bringing her to a restaurant.
Leda didn’t know what she was doing wrong
. Every day seemed like a battle with the child in finding some sense of solace. As a result she’d been worrying about John’s first day back to work since her daughter’s birth. How she’d handle all the crying without moral support was something she was unsure of. She looked down at Annabelle, who was still quietly nursing. Her expression was serious and busy. She closed her little palm tight.
“Why don’t you nurse all day and not cry?” Leda said as she kissed her little fist.
Seven and a half minutes later Annabelle was crying. Leda walked around with her and put on music. She tried changing her and burping her again, but she wouldn’t let up.
“I just put my Kierran on his side and he stops crying,” her cousin once posted on Facebook. “He’s the best baby!”
She texted John, “It’s not even 9 a.m. and she’s already been crying for twenty minutes straight, and I have no idea what she wants.”
“I’ll be home soon,” he texted.
“You’ll be home soon? You aren’t going to be home for eight hours.”
She put Annabelle in the swing and turned it up all the way. Annabelle paused. She seemed to be considering what was happening to her, and why all of a sudden she was rhythmically flying through the air. She started crying again. Leda sat down next to the swing. She tried to imagine what another mother might do in this kind of situation, but nothing came to mind. I can’t even imagine a mother, let alone be one. She lay down on the floor and watched the swing rise up and fall back. Somewhere outside she could hear an ambulance. Come and take me away, she thought.
It occurred to her that maybe the baby was cold. It had been a cool night and the house felt chillier than normal. She got up, went back upstairs to the bedroom, and grabbed a hat out of the dresser. It was a little knit hat with ladybugs all over it. She had yet to get any use out of it, as it had been too big for Annabelle until recently.
“Here you go, princess,” she said as she pulled the hat over her head.
As soon as the hat was in place Annabelle screamed harder than Leda had ever heard her scream.
“What is it?” she said, and pulled the hat back off.
The child soothed a bit, but continued on crying as she had before. Leda looked at the hat. She stretched it and pulled it on her own head. It felt itchy. She looked at the label.
“Little Wonders 100% wool,” it said.
She hadn’t remembered where she’d gotten it. She’d bought so much when she was pregnant; there were droves and droves of hats and onesies and cute little dresses that she hardly even had recollection of buying. Something about the label seemed familiar, though, and then it hit her. She leaned down and pulled one of the little pink socks off Annabelle’s foot and looked at the label. “Little Wonders 100% wool,” it said. She quickly pulled off the other one, and as if she’d just let water out of a bath, Annabelle started calming and seconds later wasn’t crying at all.
“It was the fucking socks?!” she screamed in delight to Annabelle and to herself and to the imaginary mother who seconds ago she couldn’t even imagine. She left Annabelle swinging peacefully and ran back to the dresser drawer. For whatever reason she’d unwittingly bought loads and loads of Little Wonders socks. Virtually all the socks the child owned were Little Wonders. She pulled out the drawer and brought it back down to the living room to sort through the sock collection. Annabelle was still in the swing, mild in her manner, looking thoughtfully up at her mom. Leda held the drawer up high and dumped the socks on the floor.
“Your nightmare has ended, my love,” she said. And Annabelle laughed because it really was funny.
Leda leaned down and picked up her daughter. She pulled the child in close and smelled her sweet infant smell. In the brevity of the moment she was certain her own destiny was embedded in her baby. For the past three months she’d misunderstood her daughter’s personhood, and for that she felt a fierce sense of self-loathing. And then, right there, she made a promise to herself, not in words or silent prayers, or some personal ideology, but in something greater. Something that ran from her body past each stretch mark through her breast, fed her baby and sustained life. Her daughter would be bigger and better than she had ever been. Her daughter would know a life more beautiful and more her own. She’d get what she wanted, whatever that might be. “Never ever be a good baby,” Leda said, and she took a giant breath in the shared airspace between herself and her child. Little could be divided between the two of them then. It was real to be alive indeed.
CHAPTER 36
Other Mothers
From the minute Leda gave birth to her daughter, some kind of unspoken race began between herself and every other mother on earth. She’d figured that having a baby would grant her an immediate support system, but it hadn’t been like that at all. Motherhood seemed to provoke a crippling anxiety in the majority of women. Certainly on the surface the other mothers would commiserate about diaper rashes and colic, the cost of daycare and the dangers of plastics, but underneath it all there was always the lingering competition, a vague hatred fueled by developmental milestones.
When Annabelle was very small, most of Leda’s contact with the outside world was through Facebook, and it was there that she first noticed it. Her friend Ruth from high school had a baby boy named Noah. Ruth generally posted one or two pictures of Noah a week and had been doing so since the day he was born. Leda tried to “like” all of them to be supportive of Ruth as a fellow new mom, but she found the majority of the pictures unsettling. Every single one of them had a filter and a perfectly coordinated backdrop. There were no quick candid shots and nothing was ever a little out of focus. At a certain point Leda came to the conclusion that Ruth was self-conscious of her son, that she thought he was ugly. It was bizarre and it was tragic. Poor Noah, Leda thought. There won’t be any baby pictures of him with his natural skin tone.
Around the time Noah was six months old Ruth posted a picture of him with the description: “And we’re mobile! What am I going to do now?? #mobilebaby.” Virtually seconds after it was posted, nearly a dozen comments lit up underneath. At least seven different mothers chimed in to brag about their own children in relation to Ruth bragging about hers.
“Mobile already? My Nettie started walking at eight months and it was the worst .”
“Uh oh! Preston didn’t walk till he was thirteen months which I was glad about just for this reason! He was such an early talker though. I prefer that! I feel for you .”
“Too soon!!”
At a certain point Ruth had to jump in to clarify that she hadn’t meant that Noah was walking yet, but just that he’d started to crawl. “But I’m sure he’ll be an early walker at this rate,” she said. All the other mothers seemed to take a collective sigh of relief. The comments stopped being catty and started being overtly complimentary.
“What a smart boy! Just like his mama!”
“Can’t wait to see this little guy in person!”
“You go, Noah!”
The day of his first birthday Ruth posted a video of Noah “walking” where the child screamed as he wobbled between parents. His little arms were reaching up in terror for a hand to catch him. “Taking his first steps on his first birthday!” the description read. In the months since her original #mobilebaby Ruth wasn’t about to lose with her ugly baby. He would walk by age one. He would be a mobile baby and he would win, even if it meant forcing him across the lawn in tears. Yikes, Leda thought, and liked the video.
As Annabelle became a toddler, the competitive cattiness of the other mothers became considerably more difficult to avoid. On Wednesdays Leda would walk her down to the park to meet with a group of the local mothers and their children for a makeshift playgroup. The playgroup had originated with just two mothers, Jean and Audrey. Leda had never met either of them but frequently heard their names bantered about in conversations among the other mothers on the playground. Jean and Audrey stood for all that was right
in the world of parenting. Leda heard that Jean had heroically saved a child from a bee sting and Audrey supposedly made homemade yogurt. Very often she tried to imagine what exactly these two women looked like and who they were, but she could never envision a clear image of what their faces would be. All she could think of when she thought of them was the silhouettes of two women standing side by side in high-rise jeans with their shirts tucked in tight. Sometimes one of them (Leda figured this was Jean because Jean seemed more like the type to do this from what she could gather) would be clapping and saying, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”
