by Heidi Wicks
Cait, 33, Maisie, three-weeks: Both of them, laying on the bed, positioned like mummies in a tomb. “You both have the exact same position when you sleep,” Jake said. He snuck secret photos of them sleeping, all the time. If someone takes a photo of you while you’re sleeping, it’s somehow more intimate than a regular photo.
During those early days with Maisie, their red Gower Street row house was an intense and torrid ecosystem of love and angst.
“Why don’t you just breastfeed instead of pumping and breastfeeding? Seems stupid to do both.” He’d stand over her as she held the baby. Maisie’s sharp gums, like dull blades, sank into Cait’s nipples. It hurt so much Cait thought she might vomit. She looked nothing like the breastfeeding ads, where mothers stared peacefully into their infants’ eyes, bonding, connecting. Deep in her guts was a voice, her own voice, telling her she was a failure.
“Because it hurts like hell is why, Jake.” There were times when she wanted to stop breastfeeding altogether. Stop her marriage altogether. “And I’m afraid she’s not getting enough. This way I can measure how much she’s getting.” Cait would bark it at him. Furious. Wounded. Bloated and broken, throbbing with fluid and hormones that weren’t normally there and she didn’t know what to do with. The hot, salty tears would spill from her eyes and the milk would leak from her nipples as she’d wash the bottles and attachments of the breast pump under the tap, Jake at her shoulder saying, “Make sure you get all the milk out so it doesn’t get moldy,” until she’d melt into a puddle of sobs on the kitchen floor in front of the sink and Jake would ask why she was crying, like she was being silly. “Why don’t you fucking wash them?”
The nurse who visited the house after she’d gone home from the hospital said, “Don’t you worry, my dear, you’ll be able to hang yourself up by the nipples when you’re done with all this, they’ll be that hard.” She rubbed Cait’s back, and Cait sobbed and laughed, laughed and sobbed, because that’s what the hormones did.
Trying to sleep-train Maisie, Jake insisted on letting her cry it out for hours.
“That’s it, that’s enough, Jake. I’m going in there. You can’t keep me from soothing my child.”
“Cait, if you go in there, I am never helping you with this baby again.”
“She has been crying for two hours. This is cruel. I am going in there and I don’t give a fuck if you don’t ever help me with her again. Go fuck yourself.” And Caitlyn marched out of their bedroom, her eyes burning and leaking, her face red with fury, her breasts hard and huge and shiny with milk. She scooped Maisie out of her crib, and they swayed in the rocking chair. Four o’clock in the morning, Caitlyn sang “Baby Mine,” the song from Dumbo, about a mother wanting to protect her little baby. Rest your head close to my heart, never to part, baby of mine.
A constant trickle of tears down her cheeks.
But then, there’d be times when Maisie actually was happily sucking away, making eye contact, just like in a magazine ad. During those magical moments, Cait glowed from within. Jake didn’t mean to pressure Cait, she thought sometimes. He didn’t mean the things he said as an insult. To him, he was just being factual. Trying to help. He was just worried about Maisie, and Cait understood that immense swirl of responsibility and love and weight that all parents feel when their child is born. Neither of them knew what they were doing.
Cait, 35, Jake, 37: On top of Telica volcano in Nicaragua. Sweaty, worn out, fatigued, spent. Done. It took six hours to hike. They fought the entire way up. Cait stormed ahead, smug because she was in better shape than Jake, getting him back for all the times he stomped ahead of her, disregarded her, made her feel like nothing. At the top, the volcanic crater vaporized sulphur. Deep beneath them, the lava bubbled, pop-pop-pop and the hellish orange glow from the lava down in the volcano, which could erupt again at any time, was never out of their periphery. But then, on the way back down, things had calmed and they even joked with each other. If there are still good times, when is enough enough? She’d wondered it so many times, until the last time she threatened to leave, when she actually did leave.
Now, outside in St. John’s, waiting for the moving truck, it’s a March snowstorm. The truck is delayed because of the weather. Cait and Jake sit on the bottom of the wonky stairs of her soon-to-be-ex house. Cait drops her forehead into her palms and her eyes leak, more salt water, dripping onto the wooden steps. She is so tired of the tears.
Jake puts his arm around her shoulder. “Why are you so upset?”
“Why the fuck do you think I’m upset, Jake?” She lifts her head and spits the words through sobs. He’s so insensitive sometimes. So thick. “Look what’s in front of us!” She sweeps her arm towards the boxes and hits her fingers on the rails in the process and the pain of it on her fingernails feels like a stab to the heart. “Our entire life is about to be dragged away into a shitty fucking snowstorm.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do. I’ve tried to comfort you through this and you tell me to back off. You are so defensive, all the time. I stay away and give you distance and you’re pissed off then too! Jesus Christ, Cait!” He bolts to standing position and starts pacing.
“I don’t know. I don’t fucking know what’s right anymore,” Cait spits the words.
“We’ve been through this so many times,” Jake heaves.
“I know,” Cait sighs.
“We’ll get through this, just take it one step at a time,” Jake sits next to her again and rubs her back.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” Cait drops her forehead into the palm of her hand, her elbow resting on her knee.
She leans her head onto his shoulder, nuzzles into his neck. His pheromones still poke her heart. These things don’t just turn off on command, as if the heart automatically listens to the brain. He still smells like home. That’ll fade, eventually, she guesses, she hopes. When her brain catches up with her heart, and it’s confirmed that this relationship has, in fact, run its course. But that time has definitely not even come close to arriving. His head, perched on hers. He kisses her forehead. She presses her lips to his neck. They work their way to each other’s mouths. Yank each other close. The kisses become deeper, more desperate, and their clothes are off and they’re on the couch, tugging at shirts and belts and jeans. Pulling, desperately, tearfully, angrily, longingly. The same fire that kept their relationship going, but also killed it. The heart triumphs over the brain, wrongfully as much as rightfully.
She lays on her back and the tears stream down her cheeks, dripping onto the hundred-year-old hardwood.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you needed.” Jake kisses her cheek when it’s over.
“I’m sorry too.”
They lie there, holding each other. Outside, the snow turns to ice pellets, and when the moving truck finally pulls up, they drag themselves upright to move onto the next step. One foot in front of the other.
atom heart mother
2016
“There’s a raisin up his nose!” Dan’s yelp echoes and bounces off the marble floor and cavernous skyscraper ceiling of the museum gallery.
Jess’s mom-hearing becomes needle sharp and she’s ready to backstitch. “Sam. Come with me right this second, your brother is in trouble.” She grabs his hand and strides across the floor, away from the crafts table, towards the stage, towards her husband and her youngest child, her baby boy, who, at the moment, has a raisin lodged up his left nostril. CBC kids-show mascots, their giant heads teetering against gravity, try to ignore the commotion and continue their attempts to entertain their short-attention-spanned, easily distracted audience demographic. Pint-sized angel-monsters. Half the families in town have come to the gallery to see these characters. It’s Beatlemania for toddlers.
“Mommmm, but I wanna—” Sam whines, looking longingly towards the crafts table.
“NOW.” She bores her eyes into his, hauls him, drags him across the floor.
There is no time for bullshit toddler reasoning right now, Jes
s chews viciously on this thought as she slides across the glassy, sparkling black floors of The Rooms. No time for the new-agey, mom-blog dialogue.
Your child is a person, too. With emotions. If your child is acting up, try addressing them as you would treat another adult, or your own inner child: “It’s okay, sweetie, I know you’re upset, but it’s important that we go help your brother right now, okay? Am I making sense?”
No, barks Jess in her head, as if she’s venting about some jerk parent at school. If another adult or her own inner child was acting this way, Jess would tell her to stop being such an asshole. There is a raisin lodged up her boy’s goddamnedable nose. Luckily, the floor is as slippery as a St. John’s sidewalk in February, and she skates, it’s faster than a walk, faster than a tromp, pure adrenaline, like a gazelle, like a Mall Walker, floating through the crowd, fierce intention, on a mission, Sam swerving on his knees behind her. Her heart thumps, ka-kunk, ka-kunk, like a Pink Floyd intro, “Breathe,” with each stride-glide. Parents and their children scramble out of her way.
Liam is squealing in terror, like a pig about to be slaughtered. He’s on his dad’s lap, Dan’s arms wrapped around his son’s flailing arms and heaving chest, clamping him in place, trying to keep him from lodging the raisin even further up the canal. Their matching curly brown hair, sweat soaked, wet on their foreheads. Faces, flushed and pink.
“I don’t want it out! Don’t! Want! It ouuuuuuut!!” Liam pounds his light-up sneakers against the sparkling black floor, the red lights in his shoes a screaming pediatric ambulance. The crowd starts to disperse at the shrillness of Liam’s squeals. Jess is terrified he’ll start hyperventilating and suck the raisin back and choke. Parents whisper, their brows furled in concern. They’re backing away, wondering if there’s anything they can do to help, or maybe it’s better that they just stay back. As a parent, it’s never clear whether the possibility of touching a child who’s not your own will be welcomed or shunned in these blaring-red situations.
Dan is so relaxed with the boys, notes Jess. Always. “It’s okay, buddy, we aren’t letting anything happen to you. You’re ohh-kay.” He holds Liam. He’s braced there tight, but his voice is so level.
Jess and Sam finally reach them. She slips to a stop and drops to her knees. Thump, thump, her heart’s in her throat, Pink Floyd soundtrack at top volume, like the idiosyncratic climax of the Atom Heart Mother suite. She plunges her hand into her bag, departing land and descending into a psychedelic abyss of oceanic life: Lip gloss. Tissues that may or may not be blotted with lipstick or boogers. Forgotten Happy Meal toys. A God-knows-how-old granola bar. Time is simultaneously warp speed and sloth slow. Finally, she fishes tweezers from her bag. “Keep him pinned there, Dan.” She stares Dan in the eyes, and he meets her gaze. He is her equal. Her teammate. They will not, can not let each other down.
“Noooo!” Shrieks Liam.
“Jess. I mean, it’s way up there.” Dan mumbles from the side of his mouth so that Liam doesn’t hear.
“Lie him on his back,” she whispers, sharply, her gaze flitting towards Liam to make sure he’s not hearing her. “You hold his shoulders, I’ll straddle him and sit on his legs.”
For a split second, Dan looks like he doubts Jess. But he shakes his head and focuses on the moment, the task. He nods at Jess. “It’s okay, buddy.”
“Should we go to the hospital for this?” He hisses back at her.
She glances at Sam, watching his brother there on the floor, the chaos of a tornado spinning around them, and she recognizes the same panic in his face as she felt in herself as a child. All the time. She looks back to Dan, “It’ll take too long.” She moves Liam’s body into position and straddles him, leaning most of her weight on her knees. He squirms. Man oh man, does he ever squirm, she thinks. “It’s okay, baby,” she leans down and kisses his clammy little forehead. “We’re gonna take good care of you, okay?” She whips her neck up to face Dan. “Do not let him move, because if he pokes or hits me I could drive the tweezers up too far.” People are gawking, agog, horrified. The Rooms now looks like a warzone, or a bulldozed farm. Pipe cleaner and googly eyes and glitter and construction paper and kiddie scissors have been swept off the crafts table by curious children fleeing towards the action. Mascots stand and lumber around awkwardly, occasionally making lame attempts to regain the children’s attention.
“Nnnnnnoooooo! Mommmmyyyyy!” Liam’s teeth are clenched, his lip quivering. He’s red, he’s grunting, he’s crying. But Jess has the long, lean, mighty runner’s thighs of a gazelle and he’s braced there.
She leans close to his little face and looks right in his eyes. “Liam? Liam. Listen to me, okay? I want you to listen to me.” He stops crying and the big wet pools in his sad beautiful eyes break her heart and for just one split second, her bottom lip spasms and she swallows back her own tears. “If you stay still, especially your head, and you have to keep your head still—this will not hurt you and you can have a big treat after we get the raisin out. But if you keep moving, I could accidentally hurt you and we’ll have to go to the hospital. You don’t want to go to the hospital, right?” Her own mother used to hold her by the shoulders and do breathing exercises, staring right into her eyes, telling her to just concentrate on her breath.
He nods his head and sniffles and her heart, oh her heart, she loves him so much it hurts her whole chest and she feels the love pin-prickle all over her skin.
“You are so brave, Liam. I’m so proud of you.” Mom blog, pfft. I’ll show you mom blog, she thinks. She zones in, her eye pulling focus to take a macro photo of his tiny nostril. She squints to sharpen her vision. It’s only in the last couple of years, her late thirties, she has had to squint to see. “Keep your head nice… and…still….” She floats the tweezers up there, so nervous, terrified she’s going to jab him in the brain. “Okay…” Kids from their school are watching, hands clapped over their mouths. Somewhere in her own brain zoom a zillion thoughts.
What’ll I make for dinner? Is Dad okay? What is Dad doing for dinner? How lonely is he today on a scale of one to one hundred?
But in this moment, filling her cerebrum and cerebellum and brain stem is just one thought:
Please do not kill or permanently brain damage your youngest born.
The tweezers become a cross-stitch needle on one of the towels she used to make as a kid, to focus, to help her calm the anxiety.
“Look at Mommy, boys, she’s a star.” Dan holds Liam’s head. Dan knows Jess, knows she needs confidence boosts sometimes, as silly as that seems, because to him, she’s a superhero. Liam’s chubby little fists are clenched tight, his knees whip-straight. Saucer-eyed, Liam locks his eyes onto his mother’s.
Focus on the nasal cavity. Expert precision. Like a surgeon.
“Can you feel it yet?” Dan’s voice is only slightly wobbly.
“I think…,” she feels the gushy, wrinkly skin of the raisin and sinks the tweezers in until she feels the sharp ends pierce through, “I got it!” She carefully, oh-so-carefully, withdraws the tweezers. The raisin is coated in thick green sludgy snot and she hoists it into the air. “I got it!” The whoosh of relief springs tears to her eyes and pound-pound-tha-thud-tha-thud goes her heart and she’s on her way out of it, out of the impending panic and doom. Thank Jesus that’s over, she thinks.
She gathers him up and he flings his arms around her neck, burrows his little face into her collarbone. Hot wet tears and snot and sweat soak her skin and t-shirt and her mother’s old dusty-rose cashmere cardigan, which may be ruined but she doesn’t give a shit and her mother wouldn’t have given a shit either. Mom’s boy. She loves her boys but there’s something about the youngest. The one you know is your last. His little heart beats so fast through his stripy t-shirt.
“It’s like Ernie’s from Sesame Street,” he’d said when she put it on him that morning.
Then Dan and Sam are also hugging Jess and Liam and they’re all saturated: nerves and adrenaline and the sweat and the tear
s and the boogers and she can’t tell what wet comes from whom.
“I love you so much and you were so, so brave.” She wants them all to stay there forever, wrapped around her. They’re like a little ball of rubber bands that’s so soothing to hold when you’re stressed out or anxious.
Her day reverie breaks when her phone vibrates from her purse’s deep abyss. While fishing for the phone, her fingers brush the lid of the Tupperware container, it’s orange with grooves in it that look like rays of sunshine, probably from the ‘80s or maybe even the ‘70s. The container holds the last of the chocolate-chip cookies her mother had left in the freezer.
Extracting the phone from her bag, the screen says Dad, and there’s a picture of her parents, at the cabin, his arm around her mother, her mother’s arm on his chest, claiming, “This one’s mine right here.” Laughing. They were always laughing, just like her and Dan.
“Hi, Dad, how are ya.” How many times in the run of a week does he call her? How many times does she call their house, when she knows her father is out for his daily walk, just to listen to her mother’s voice on the answering machine? “I know, Dad. I miss her too, so much. Why don’t you come for supper with us? We’re leaving the museum now. We had a bit of an incident.”
Pause. She shouldn’t have said that. Her father is sensitive like she is. He’s going to worry over this now, she knows he is. She quickly adds, “Yes, Dad, he’s totally fine, don’t worry. We’ll see you soon, ok?” She jabs the screen to off. Drops the phone back into the abyss. “Okay, boys,” she sniffs, “let’s get out of here. There’s treats for the car. And we’re gonna see Pop-pop.”
