My mother-in-law was a classic southern matriarch, and I was just generically bossy. We were still negotiating which one of us was in charge of her youngest son’s life when she fell ill. Cancer trumped me. I surrendered him, and hated myself for not being able to do so more graciously. He turned to the band to escape us both. I hoped she would use her leverage to make him quit, but she sighed and forgave him, which just made me feel meaner. I felt like the hysterical female in a Tennessee Williams play. I said terrible things to my husband. I wrote tear-stained apologies to the baby in my pregnancy diary for my poor choice in marriage, for the fighting and crying jags I was sure were poisoning the womb. Welcome to the warm world of the Sunshines.
I look at those entries now, and wonder what the hell I was thinking. I wouldn’t give them to my son for a keepsake any more than I’d subject him to his birth video. That seemed like a necessary bit of documentation at the time, too, but I’ve since come to think we aren’t supposed to witness our own primordial chaos. You can know too much.
Some of my underlying complaints about Patrick were justified, but all of it was hormonally amplified and distorted. It’s true that his attentions were divided, but he was far from uninvolved. He came dutifully to doctor and midwife appointments, willingly attended birth class, and nodded appropriately as I read aloud from my books. But I wanted more than that. I wanted him in it with me. When I reproached him with that, he had no idea what I meant. “I am in it,” he’d insist, “I couldn’t be more in it.” I’d dissolve into tears, because I didn’t know what I meant either, except I felt terribly, unbearably alone, and none of the books told me to expect it.
Halfway through my term, I found a slim paperback tucked among the pregnancy and childbirth guides at the bookstore, called Operating Instructions. I could use a set of those, I thought, and took it home. When I came to the passage where Anne Lamott described pregnancy as a “holy darkness,” I wept with gratitude and relief. Now I knew. This was what to expect when you were expecting: the utter, unavoidable loneliness. Because no matter who’s there standing by, pregnancy is a place you go all by yourself, just as my mother-in-law was going somewhere all by herself. Both of us moving deeper into the darkness, deeper into the holy. Not two doors to the hallway after all, but the same door, opening out and in.
I decided I wanted a home birth. People thought I was brave, if crazy, but the truth is, I fear and loathe hospitals. My only reservation was that our bedroom at home might be less than sterile.
“Compared to a hospital room?” the midwives asked. “Are you kidding? Just think about everything that’s been on those beds and floors.”
I preferred not to. I had a weak stomach when it came to things that oozed, spewed, or were extruded from other people’s body cavities. So much so, I could hardly utter the words “snot,” “puke,” “poop.” I hoped I’d be inured to my own baby’s bodily emissions, but I seriously worried I might not. I had way more confidence in my ability to handle labor pains than I did in controlling my gag reflex during a diaper change.
The first signs that I might not be cut out for the sensory reality of motherhood went back as far as my sister Emily’s birth in 1973, when I was four. Throughout my mom’s pregnancy, I’d been led to believe I was getting a real live doll to play with on demand. When the baby came home, and wasn’t immediately turned over to me, I felt robbed, like an expectant adoptive parent whose surrogate had, at the last minute, changed her mind. One early morning, when I heard Emily stirring in her crib before our parents were up, I decided to go claim that which was supposed to have been mine.
I crept in, and hoisted her out of her crib.
“I’ve got you,” I reassured my sister, who smiled at me with total confidence. My baby. “I’ve got you now.”
I set her on my hip, expertly. From here, there was nothing I couldn’t handle. I would dress her, take her downstairs, get her breakfast, raise her to adulthood. Our parents could sleep for a hundred years. I was the mommy now.
Something smelled bad.
“I’ve got to change your diaper,” I told her. I’d seen it done a hundred times. How hard could it be? You unsnapped her pajamas, pulled this tape away here, and that tape away over there, and . . . ewww. I left her for my mother to find.
As a little girl, I assumed I would grow up and have babies someday, but I saw them as accessories. Motherhood was a “look,” like superstar or beach bunny was for Barbie. I pictured myself as a glamorous mother, a swish of skirts and a cloud of perfume, benevolent but remote. When I watched The Sound of Music, I rooted for the elegant Baroness, not goofy Maria, who was warm and funny like my own mother. My imaginary adoring children didn’t have runny noses, or stinky diapers, or heaven forbid, throw up, as my sister did anytime she rode in a car for more than fifteen minutes. Whenever her motion sickness forced us to pull over, I slid to the window farthest away from her and covered my ears, but retched anyway, just from the idea of it. Particles of dry vomit were permanently embedded in the fake weave of the vinyl that covered the backseat of our Volkswagen Beetle, and when the summer sun warmed it, a faint sour smell was released that nauseated me. My stomach hadn’t strengthened with age. What was going to happen when my own baby vomited? How was I supposed to care for him if it made me gag myself? I hoped that evolution had it covered.
It did, not only through the provision of a bonding instinct that overrides squeamishness, but through the act of birth, so messy it leaves the mother no room to wrinkle her nose afterward at the natural bodily functions of the person who emerged through it. Patrick assumed—mistakenly—that the amnesty also extended to him. A few days after I delivered our son while squatting naked on our bedroom floor in front of him and three midwives, he cheerfully ventured to say that he supposed we could now dispense with the need for personal modesty, and ease my strict prohibitions on sharing the bathroom.
“Not on your life,” I growled. “Get out.”
It’s pretty much impossible to describe the experience of falling in love with your child without sounding like a dope. I once showed up late for a college party where everybody was already tripping on magic mushrooms, and they were all compelled to provide me with running commentary on their altered state, which consisted mainly of profundities like “Wow.” I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I know it’s got to be as tedious to endure someone like me going on about how having children changes—no, really changes—everything.
I expected to love my baby, of course, but I didn’t know it would be crazy, over-the-moon, in-love love, the kind that turns every song on the radio into a dedication. I wept the first time I heard Aretha Franklin sing “Natural Woman” after I become a mother. My soul, too, must have been in the lost and found, I thought, to feel so redeemed. “Heaven, I’m in heaven,” I crooned, as I danced him cheek to cheek around the house, to Fred Astaire. At nap time I gazed deep into his eyes, and held his little starfish hands, and was love struck. I was the crazy girlfriend who watches her man at night while he sleeps. If my son had had to withstand the full intensity of my adoring focus for the rest of his childhood, it probably would have screwed him up badly, but I was pregnant with his brother the following year.
The circumstances around that conception were considerably less dramatic than the first—there were no signs that time, unless you consider Saturday-morning cartoons a sign. We considered it an opportunity, and seized it. A few weeks later, the stick displayed the international litmus sign for “Told you so.” Our second son was born two years and four days after our first. How the third got past us, we still aren’t sure, but he arrived the year before the oldest started kindergarten. In a little over five years, I gave birth to three children.
At my high school reunion, a classmate told me that she’d heard about the first baby, and assumed it happened by accident. She couldn’t believe I’d gone on to have two more. “No offense,” she said, blatantly astonished, “but I never saw you as the maternal type.”
I laughed,
and told her no one was more surprised than than I was. She’d be even more astonished to see me with my kids. In spite of all expectations to the contrary, I am a good mother. Having easygoing children helps. Paradoxically, so do those same low expectations. In a culture that makes impossible demands of mothers, they’ve served to my psychological advantage. I figure I’m doing all right as long as I keep my babies free of mold and bugs. Everything exceeding that standard can be regarded as a personal triumph; success building on success. My boys flourish and thrive, and know they are beloved. If they are occasionally without clean socks, they understand it is a failure of planning, not feeling.
I still don’t think of myself as “the maternal type.” I like children in general, and love some in particular, but I don’t want to mother any but my own. I don’t beg to hold new babies, like some of my friends do, though I will cheerfully hold my arms out to receive one, if asked. But it doesn’t naturally occur to me to shake baby feet, smell baby heads, or talk baby talk. I was initially taken aback when other women expressed those urges toward my baby. The first time a stranger came up and smelled my son’s head, I thought she was nuts. We were at a party, back in the days when we just had one baby and were the people who took the baby everywhere. All the women wanted to hold him, and this one practically inhaled him.
“It’s been years, but it’s like I can feel my milk letting down,” she gushed.
I was revolted. Not by her phantom milk production, but by the idea that this stranger was responding physically to my baby. I snatched him back, violated, as if I’d just seen her shove her tongue in my husband’s mouth. I regarded it as an attempt at possession. Smelling is acquisitive. The sweet breast-milk smell of my newborn was mine. The smell of my sons’ salty necks when they are bent reading and I crane in to kiss them, that’s mine. The smell, layered and tannic, of the inside of my husband’s robe when I pick it up off the bed in the morning: mine.
All mine.
I spoke a half-truth to my mother that day outside the ice cream parlor. I am selfish. But as it turns out, that’s a good thing. It’s easy to give the best of me to mine.
3.
Attach and Release
Let me get your number,” I said to the woman as the dinner party came to a close. We had been discussing additives in food, and I was interested in hearing more of what she had to say about it. She obviously knew her way around a nutritional information label. I fumbled through my diaper bag for paper and a pen, and came up with a crayon. She handed me a small card.
“Thanks,” I said, automatically flipping it over to the blank side, crayon poised. “Now, what was that number?”
She looked at me strangely. Then reached out and turned the card back over.
“It’s printed on the card,” she said. “Right there.”
I stared at it in wonder. So it was. Along with her name, title, and place of employment.
“I remember these!” I blurted, like a demented person having a lucid breakthrough. “I used to have boxes of them. With my name on them.”
She extricated herself while I was still studying the card, lost in reverie, as words like “memo” and “payroll” breached my consciousness. Words in a language I spoke once, but had not used in years and had all but forgotten. Cubicle. Break room. Boardroom. Stamps on an old passport buried deep in a drawer.
I never did call her. She was, according to the embossed lettering on her card, a degreed professional with a job title, an office, and regular working hours. I was a baby-wearing, co-sleeping, breast-feeding new mother; in essence, a marsupial. She probably took a shower every morning and put jewelry on before going to work. I was dressed for success if I could uncover a nipple in less than a minute. She had children who slept through the night and went to school during the day. From where I stood, that sounded like an urban legend, something I heard happened, but not to anyone I knew personally. Getting together would require us to project the movement of our days and plot a future point in time where our lives would intersect again, like astronomers predicting the next eclipse. I didn’t see it happening for at least ten years.
I was then, and am still, for lack of a better word, a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t intend to be. That wasn’t what little girls who grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore were expected to become. I thought I would have a career. If I had a baby, I would take maternity leave and resume my career once that project was launched and running smoothly. But that idea was based on maternity benefits as they existed in Canada, and children as they existed in my mind. Having real children, in the United States, was a different proposition. There was no career to interrupt or resume. I barely got my U.S. work permit before I got pregnant, and then I worked temp jobs, none of which came with benefits or paid enough to make day care worthwhile. Even if I had a permanent position that paid well, I couldn’t wrap my head around the meager American maternity leave of six weeks. It takes me that long after having a baby just to start thinking about personal hygiene again. The notion of myself as a briefcase-carrying mom, with a steady salary and a freezer full of breast milk, was the first of many maternal illusions I’d come to forsake, and probably the easiest one to let go. I was a college dropout who had always been able to talk my way into jobs that exceeded my education and maturity. But with no degree, and a foreign résumé, I was going to have to move my marker back to start. I was just as glad to sit out.
Patrick’s paycheck covered our car payment and the rent and utilities for a two-bedroom apartment. Being at home afforded me the time to be creative with our resources and frugal with our money. I breast-fed and cloth-diapered, shopped with coupons, and cooked in batches. I studied parenting and nutrition books, joined Internet forums, and went to La Leche League meetings. I threw myself into domesticity with reckless abandon. I was zealous, idealistic, and probably quite tiresome, but it takes a certain fervor to get through the baby years. It helps to fall in love with your captors. The infatuation anesthetized the pain of separation from the person I was before: rested, unfettered, accessorized.
Some new parents struggle with abandoning normal. They wait for its return like castaways watching for smoke on the horizon; go slowly mad waiting for sleep, sex, and privacy to come back for them. I found it easier to face facts. Normal wasn’t coming back. I moved deep into the interior of mothering, and forgot I’d ever known anything else.
Human beings have been keeping infants and young children within arm’s reach ever since we had fur they could cling to. But in twenty-first-century middle America, that tradition is considered an alternative lifestyle. Fortunately, even in the suburbs, there is subculture, and it didn’t take long to find kindred oddballs. Wearing a baby sling in public is like going out in a Highland kilt. It identifies you to your clan. I was taken in, and embraced, by a small tribe of mothers gathered under the umbrella of attachment parenting, a name popularized by Dr. William Sears’s Baby Book. We met for weekly playgroup and monthly potlucks, and I looked forward to those times with an eagerness formerly reserved for romantic rendezvous. I was twenty-nine years old, and though I thought of myself as a feminist, and had grown up with a loving mother and sister, two splendid grandmothers, an abundance of aunts, and assorted female elders, for the first time in my life, I fell in head over heels in love with women.
How could I not? These were smart, passionate, funny, and fiercely independent women. Some were young moms, barely out of their teens, with tattoos and piercings; and some were routinely mistaken for grandmothers. There were those with advanced degrees and impressive résumés; and there were those who had become mothers before they had a chance to try their hand at anything else. Some were transplants, like me, and some had never left their hometown. They were all very brave. It takes guts to trust your own authority in the face of disapproval—and sometimes, harsh judgment—from doctors, relatives, and total strangers. Even within the group, eyebrows were sometimes raised at the mothers who were furthest off the grid: breast-feeding not just through but past todd
lerhood; adopting controversial positions on education; or taking the concept of natural parenting to such an extreme that their kids were half feral and terrified all the rest. But our experience was common at the core, if not at the fringes. We could sympathize with each other’s sleepless nights, aching backs, and cracked nipples without feeling defensive. We could joke about not being able to pry our attached kids off our bodies, and laugh at our mothers’ concern that we were having sex next to our babies in the family bed. As if we were having sex, we said. We laughed harder at that, and then we cried. We reminded each other, over and over, that it was all such a short, sweet time; that our children would one day wean from our breasts, sleep through the night, and be independent. We were raising a healthy, emotionally intelligent, free-thinking generation to be a light to the world. We were all on the same mission, mothers-in-arms. I’m not going to pretend it was a utopian matriarchy. It wasn’t. We could be unkind, sanctimonious, and petulant. But it was a sisterhood. And to me, it was oxygen.
Identifying myself as part of a movement not only provided me with an instant community, it made it seem like I had a plan. I adopted it like a new religion, with all the proselytizing and intolerance of the recently saved. I didn’t just disagree with formula-feedings, disposable diapers, day care, and baby-schedulers, I had contempt for them. I pretended compassion for parents who were at their wits’ end, but I really thought those who spanked and made babies cry themselves to sleep were child abusers. Yes, I was that asshole. I didn’t make allowances for circumstances other than mine. I secretly judged working mothers for choosing a paycheck over the emotional well-being of their child. I conveniently forgot that I needed help learning to breast-feed at first, and had been lucky to have a midwife who could guide me. Those who chose not to nurse had to be uncaring or ignorant, and those who quit hadn’t tried hard enough, obviously. It was difficult to fathom how other people could have their priorities so backward. I was both baffled and irritated when I was told by a neighbor, “You have to get away from your baby sometimes.”
Planting Dandelions Page 3
