We’ve been to the doctor several times since his birth for regular checkups. Each time he is pronounced normal. Each time we ask about the crying.
“Colic,” says our pediatrician, a round, bearded guy who wears cheery ties featuring paintings of teddy bears. Colic, he explains, is a catch-all term used to describe intestinal distress or abdominal distress or gastric distress. In other words, distress.
“What causes colic?” we ask.
“Nobody knows for sure,” he says.
“What can we do?”
“Not much,” he says with a chuckle, like we are all in on some big, private joke. There is nothing funny here. I want to strangle him with his stupid teddy bear tie.
He presses his stethoscope against Elijah’s chest, pushes into his stomach with a hairy-knuckled finger, and rotates his legs. In this position Elijah looks like a Cornish game hen. The doctor checks his eyes and ears. Of course, now that he is being manhandled by a stranger and has a legitimate excuse to cry, Elijah is calm. He’s like a car that only acts up when the mechanic is not around. It’s embarrassing. God, I hate my baby.
Dr. Teddy Bear finishes his exam and once again pronounces my son normal. Colicky, but normal.
I suppose most parents would be thrilled with this diagnosis. Not me. I’m pissed off. He can’t be normal. He is obviously abnormal. Because we cannot handle this kind of normalcy. There has to be something wrong with him. Nothing too serious. Certainly nothing a series of painful shots won’t cure. Maybe rickets. Do babies get rickets?
“What are rickets?” I ask the doctor.
“When will this end?” Martha wants to know.
“Hopefully, soon,” he says. He tells us colic almost always resolves itself and we just have to ride it out. Easy for him to say, the quack. He wishes us good luck and leaves the room for his next appointment. As soon as he is out the door, Elijah begins to cry.
We seek advice from every available resource. It turns out there is a whole “Difficult Baby” cottage industry. Hucksters are making millions off desperate people, like ourselves, who will pay any amount for a single moment’s rest. Why do none of these people have infomercials on at four o’clock in the morning when they would be most useful?
We buy difficult-baby nutrients. We buy difficult-baby books. We watch difficult-baby videos. We swaddle. We unswaddle. We let him cry. We don’t let him cry. We try everything, but nothing helps except jiggling and the boob.
The only other thing he likes is to get out. Away from home, he drinks in the world, watchful and silent. So we take him out as often as we can. To the supermarket, to Starbucks, and for rides in the car where the rhythm and noise conk him out. Often when we are pushing his stroller through another interminable lap around the mall, people stop to tell us what a beautiful and easy baby we have. “Fuck you,” I say. (I don’t really say, “Fuck you” to these people, but I want to.)
It would help if we had grandparents nearby, somebody to help us shoulder the burden. But my mom is in Florida, and Martha’s parents are in Minnesota. There are only the two of us versus this tiny, irascible thing. Two against one. We outweigh him by over two hundred pounds. We are taller and fitter and smarter. And we are losing.
The only respite I get is my job. I am acting part-time on a TV show. Sometimes my days run long, twelve or fourteen hours. Often when I return from work, Martha has not even gotten dressed. Her hair is greasy and tangled and dark winter shadows have settled under her eyes.
“Here,” she says, holding the baby out to me like a bag of overripe trash. I take him. She marches upstairs. I hear the bathroom door slam behind her, the sound of shower water running through the pipes.
“Hi, baby,” I say, bringing him close. He cries.
All my fears about not measuring up as a father are coming true. Elijah seems to instinctively know I am not to be trusted. He senses that I am somehow going to screw up his entire childhood, the way an animal can detect an earthquake before it arrives.
The rational part of my brain understands that of course Elijah prefers his mother. After all, until recently she was the only home he ever knew. Plus, she supplies most of his food and smells good (at least when she showers, which isn’t that often these days). Babies should gravitate toward their mothers; this seems natural and right.
But the emotional part of my brain feels betrayed. Doesn’t he know how amusing I am? How good I am at Scrabble? I want to tell him that if he will just give me a chance I will do right by him. I will push him in his baby swing and give him the last piece of pizza and help him with his homework and talk to him about girls (or boys, if it comes to that), that I will spring for guitar lessons and teach him how to skateboard. I want to tell him that I will always buy him the correct baseball mitt.
Instead, I say the only thing I can think of to say in this moment: “Please, please, please shut up.”
Is he occasionally cute? Sure. Like all parents, we marvel at him when he does his amazing baby tricks. He wriggles and coos and does all the de rigueur baby things. He breaks into wide gummy smiles when I splutter kisses against his tummy. He likes bouncing in the filthy plastic saucer we stole from the town dump.
We tell ourselves his crying jags probably indicate unusual intelligence. “Of course he’s crying,” we say to each other. “He’s smart. He needs constant stimulation.” When I research this topic online, I do not find a correlation between colic and genius, although I do discover a study from the University of Iowa that shows a relationship between “early fussiness” and “later psychiatric problems.”
There is nothing to do except tell ourselves we will get through this. It is the only lie we have left.
One night, we put him into his crib around ten and race each other into bed because we know he will be up soon. I fall asleep and awaken, as always, to his cries.
“Your turn,” Martha says.
I open my eyes. Something is wrong, although I cannot immediately place the problem. Then I realize: it’s the sun. I can see sunlight. I look at my bedside clock: 5:24 a.m. My God, it’s morning. He slept through the night. Seven and a half hours of uninterrupted sleep. Oh my God, I just got a full night’s sleep.
Scooping him from his crib, I rush downstairs, swirl together a bottle for him, and plant him in his grubby play saucer. I make eggs. I do jumping jacks. I punch the air in celebration. A car drives by. Other people are awake! My kid slept through the night. He is the best baby in the world. I love my baby.
The next night, he wakes up fifteen times.
Even so, it feels like a fever has broken in our home. If he can sleep through the night once, he can do it again. Over time, he does. A night here, a night there. After about eight months, he is doing it on a more or less regular basis. 5:24 a.m. is still a barbaric time of day, but compared to 3:47 a.m., it actually looks pretty good.
Several years later, the Abu Ghraib torture scandal explodes. Reading the accounts of the abuse toward prisoners, it strikes me how much the experiences of the Iraqi prisoners mirrored my own in those days. Consider what the prisoners were made to endure:
• Sleep deprivation
• Stress positions
• Unceasing, annoying sounds
• Intimidation by dogs (Our hyperactive puppy, Lily, a yellow Labrador retriever, is a constant drain on whatever stores of energy the kid has not already sapped from us. I hate my puppy.)
• Humiliating photographic evidence of abuse
There is a picture Martha took of me during this time in our lives. I am in our backyard raking leaves. Elijah is strapped to me in a BabyBjörn, his fat little body dangling from my sternum. My hair has the rangy texture of a feral cat. My complexion is sallow, jaundiced. I hold a rake in my hand, surrounded by leaves. Leaves everywhere; I look as if I have been photographed at the beginning of an impossible task. Elijah and I stare at the camera, the same blank, expressionless look on our faces. His face looks like that because he is a baby. Mine does because I am dead.
&nbs
p; I look just like those guys in Abu Ghraib. Am I honestly comparing being the parent of a newborn to being a tortured prisoner of war? Obviously not. Being the parent of a colicky newborn, I am convinced, is worse. I am never, ever doing this again.
CHAPTER 11
baby jail
We’re having another baby.
This was not the plan. I mean, yes, it was the plan in the sense that we were trying to make another baby, but it was not the plan in the sense that I did not expect us to succeed so soon. The first time, it took six months of sustained effort to impregnate Martha with Elijah, back when we were childless and had nothing to do all day but engage in clinical, unappealing lovemaking.
Now we have an eighteen-month-old child who demands every second of our attention. There is never a moment in the day when we are not tending to him in some capacity. Elijah is up on his feet, stumbling through each day on chubby legs, endlessly seeking ways to cause his own destruction. It seems like a mistake of nature that children learn to walk before they learn to speak. The words “Don’t put the electrical cord in your mouth” mean nothing to him. We are in a perpetual state of high alert, always on the balls of our feet, arms forever outstretched in his direction, attempting to anticipate his next suicidal impulse.
By the time we get him into his crib each night we are both wiped out. Less so now that he sleeps through the night, but enough so that the last thing either of us wants to do in our free time is to expend more energy on something as frivolous as creating a new life. But we need to try now because we want our children to be close enough in age so that they can be playmates. This will be fun for them, but more important, it will be fun for us, since it will hopefully mean we have to play with them less.
Playing with kids, even your own, is a bore. Children are terrible playmates. The games they play are no fun and neither are the rules they invent. If at any time things are not going their way, they change the no-fun rules into even-less-fun rules that favor them. It’s tedious. I only enjoy playing with my own kid for five minutes at a time. I defy any adult of normal intelligence to play peek-a-boo for longer than that without experiencing irrepressible fury.
I am no more ready to make Baby #2 than I was with Baby #1. I console myself with the belief that I’ve got a good six months or more ahead of me before pregnancy becomes a reality. It took that long the first time around, and now that we have less time and energy to do the deed, it will almost certainly take even longer.
During our first month trying to conceive, we only manage to have sex a single time. Having sex once a month is bad even if a couple is not trying to make a baby. For a couple attempting to transform egg to embryo, it’s terrible. Maybe subconsciously we are trying to minimize the chance that Martha will actually get pregnant. Or maybe we are just not attracted to each other right now. Whatever the reason, if we’re going to have any hope of getting this thing done before Elijah graduates from high school, we’re going to have to get our numbers up.
A couple of weeks later Martha walks into my office, where I am working at my new desk, and says, “I’m pregnant.”
“No way.”
She holds up a pee stick. Two lines. She’s pregnant.
“I’m so happy,” I say. I am not happy.
Shit! I thought we were just having warm-up sex! The first month is batting practice. That’s when we’re supposed to get out on the field and take a few practice swings. That’s it! I didn’t even think it was possible to make a baby the first time up at bat. Obviously, yes, I know that health teachers everywhere warn teenagers that they can become pregnant their very first time having sex, but I always figured those were just scare tactics.
What happened to my lazy, unmotivated, good-for-nothing, shiftless sperm with unimpressive motility? Now, suddenly, my sperm are up-and-at-’em? C’mon guys, let’s try to all get on the same page here!
Her pregnancy is worse the second time around. She is nauseous all the time, except that now she cannot just go lie down when she feels bad, because we have a toddler who demands her full-time attention and he does not give a shit about Mommy’s “throw-up time.” He wants his Cheerios and his ba-ba (bottle) and his Thomas the Fucking Tank Engine and he wants it all tout de suite.
Martha shows earlier this time. Her tummy pops out and she makes me touch her stomach every time the baby does anything. There is something unnerving to me about touching a creature living within my wife. I didn’t like it with Elijah and I don’t like it with this new thing.
“That’s a foot,” she says, as a little lump percolates up from her torso.
“Okay, I get it,” I say.
Like with Elijah, we decide to wait to find out the baby’s gender. I don’t know why, but it feels more organic or something. When people ask me what I’m hoping for, I have a standard joke: “I don’t care what sex it is,” I say, “as long as it’s gorgeous.”
Nobody ever finds this joke as funny as I do.
Although my attitude is better this time around, the further into the pregnancy we get, the more scared I become. Last time I was scared because I did not know what I was getting into. This time I’m scared because I know exactly what I’m getting into. What if we have a second colicky baby? How could we possibly survive that?
Everybody tells us that won’t happen. “There’s no way,” they say.
We tell each other the same thing. It seems so statistically improbable as to be meaningless. Having another baby as difficult as Elijah would be like being in two plane crashes. Granted, a much higher percentage of babies develop colic than airplanes develop catastrophic engine failure, but still, we’re not that unlucky. “There’s no way,” we tell each other.
You’re probably thinking, I bet their second baby was just as bad as the first. But you would be wrong to make that assumption. Our second baby is not as bad as Elijah.
She is worse.
Ruth Maxine Black is born in May of the following year after a comparatively easy delivery. A little IV, a little epidural, some Pitocin, and bang! Baby. Martha is so relaxed, she actually asked for a mirror to be held up between her legs so she could watch the delivery. We watch her head emerge, her shoulders and back, and finally her fat marshmallow butt before she wriggles free. “It’s a girl,” says the doctor.
“Are you sure?” asks Martha, which strikes me as kind of funny because it seems that one of the first things they would teach students at medical school is how to tell boys from girls. If he isn’t sure at this point, he should probably consider another profession.
We’re thrilled to have a little girl. When she comes home, she sleeps a lot, just as babies are supposed to do. We congratulate ourselves for having such an easy baby this time around. We have made two perfect children, one of each sex. We are amazing parents.
Two weeks later the colic bomb goes off. It’s the same deal as with Elijah, only worse because now we have this shitty stupid two-year-old who doesn’t understand what the hell just happened to his life. Why is there a baby in his house? Why isn’t Mama giving him as much attention? He pouts through his days, sullen and prone to tears.
I feel terrible for my son and try to give him comfort. We go out together to do guy stuff. Guy stuff means going to the local Barnes & Noble where they’ve got a Thomas the Tank Engine train table set up. I sit there for hours as he runs Thomas, Edward, Percy, and Henry across the Isle of Sodor. If that sounds boring, let me assure you that it is.
One upshot of this go-round is that I am regularly getting a full night’s sleep because we agreed that I would sleep in the guest room for the first couple of months. Martha takes Ruthie during the night. At dawn, I take her and Elijah together so that Martha can grab a few hours of uninterrupted sleep before starting her day. The system is working out better for both of us, but a better version of terrible is still terrible.
The fatigue reawakens all the scary fantasies I used to have of harming my child. One morning, I am so frustrated and angry when Ruthie refuses to take her bottle th
at I whip it across the room as hard as I can, splattering formula everywhere and creating a satisfying divot in the drywall. Scarier still is the fact that I don’t love this new baby. Not even a little bit. Not now, not when she is a lumpy and hateful annoyance who won’t let me hold her, cries when she sees me, and generally likes me even less than Elijah did when he was born. Some people would probably make the argument that love is a two-way street, and that the reason Ruthie doesn’t react better to me is that she can sense my resentment and antipathy toward her. To those people I would say this: Shut up.
My early emotional indifference, I think, must be common among new parents, although nobody wants to talk about it. There is an assumption that all parents fall head over heels in love with their kids as soon as they emerge from the womb. Not me. I didn’t with Elijah and I don’t with this new one. Maybe mothers are more likely to bond with their kids right away; actually growing a kid inside their bodies and carrying it around for months must create an emotional bond to accompany the physical one. I understand; whenever we plant carrots during the summer, I feel far more affection for the carrots we grow than the ones we buy. Same thing with kids.
Ruthie will not stop screaming. Any good feelings I had about this child right after her birth, the lovely scene where I was in the delivery room with my wife, tears trickling down my cheeks, aflush with all that miracle-of-life hooey, all those feelings are gone. Now I am up at dawn with a crying newborn and a restless, mopey toddler. That awful feeling of sleep deprivation has returned and settled deep into my limbs, making them heavy and unresponsive. I feel like I am living in a big pot of cauliflower-and-dick soup.
My only consolation, if there is one, is that I have already experienced this once with Elijah, so I know, somewhere in the back of the reptilian part of my brain that I depend on for survival, that this too shall pass. Ruth will eventually sleep through the night. She will eventually stop crying all the time. She will. Right? I have to cling to this hope because hope is the only thing sustaining me right now.
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