by Laura June
I’d been there, where he was, not very long ago, just trying to hold it together when every moment outside of home seemed like a potential or certain disaster. I’d held back tears as strangers said, “Maybe she’s hungry!” as I pushed a screaming baby down our street, pretending I didn’t care that she was making the most amount of noise that she was capable of.
My deflated feelings of inadequacy passed; I felt slightly puffed up and more confident in the moment. That’s how it works sometimes. The man with the stroller stopped at the table with the woman reading The New Yorker, the woman I now recognized as the mother of the screaming baby.
“I guess he’s not going to sleep,” she said to the man as he engaged the foot brake. “We should go then,” she said, glancing at me and my now-silent baby.
“How old is he?” I asked, sipping my glass of wine.
“Nine weeks tomorrow,” she said, smiling weakly.
“How old is she?” She gestured to Zelda, who waved, smiling a drooly smile.
“Just passed seven months.” I smiled back. Little old nine-weeks was still wailing, Dad desperately attempting to jam a pacifier into his mouth over and over. “Does it get easier?” he asked, looking up at me for the first time.
“Oh, we have our days,” I said.
“This seems like one of the good ones,” Mom said, jamming her New Yorker into the stroller.
“I guess so,” I said, shrugging and smiling at my baby.
They went home, and then we went home. I washed the apricots from Zelda’s face and put her in clean pajamas. I read to her and put her to bed, then showered off the dirt from my own body, standing in the hot water, not thinking about anything at all.
The next morning, I pulled a new book from the shelves. “Do you want to read The Secret Garden?” I asked, fumbling around. “Or . . . The Canterbury Tales?” Zelda was laying in her crib in a sundress, already dressed for the day. I’d laid it out the night before, knowing it was going to be very hot. The sun was already beating inside her room; the air conditioner was quietly blowing.
“Actually,” I said, looking at my watch. It was 8:00 in the morning. Josh wasn’t awake yet. “Let’s go out. The coffee shops are open at least,” I said. We went out. But eventually, we did read both The Secret Garden and The Canterbury Tales. She preferred the latter, I think.
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I never liked other people’s babies before I had one myself. It hadn’t occurred to me that sometimes you need to fly home for your grandmother’s funeral, and the baby still exists. The baby has to fly with you. I had spent much of my adult life being annoyed at them on airplanes and in public, never thinking about how important it actually was, and is, to take your babies out into the world as fast as possible, to make them unafraid and social, to teach them how to behave in a restaurant or a bookstore.
In the first half year of Zelda’s life, I decided to do just that: to take her with me, within reason, wherever I myself needed or wanted to go. I sought out cafés and stores when they were least likely to be busy, off hours and away from huge crowds, where we could give it a shot, where we could test her patience and give her new experiences. She wasn’t always in agreement; sometimes she cried. Once, we had to leave when the food took too long and she simply wasn’t up to waiting. But over those months she learned very fast how to fit into the world, and, rather than making Earth conform to her, Zelda, always a fast learner, always pliable and happy to wave to strangers, conformed to whatever was around her.
I learned to live and breathe sometimes without a personal sense of purpose other than simply being alive. It was scary to not have something mentally exhausting to focus on, to have to be present rather than distracted and lost inside of myself all the time. But I thought I was managing most days to turn what felt like boredom into a virtue of sorts. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was just different than I had been before.
And I learned to be more sympathetic to the screaming children around me. And the struggling parents. And of course I learned quickly to accept the people around me, often young but also often elderly, who simply didn’t like my baby or want to indulge her with a wave or a smile. We all learn a lot, not just from books but from engaging with the world around us. Zelda reminded me of that.
* * *
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The defining characteristic of the first ten or fifteen years of my life was that I was an unapologetic bookworm. I probably spent more time alone in my bedroom reading or hiding from kids on the playground with a book than I did doing anything else. I learned to walk while holding a book, up the street to Emily’s house or home from school. Occasionally, a car in my neighborhood would pull over so whatever adult was behind the wheel could tell me how dangerous what I was doing was. “You’ll get hit by a car,” the old lady who was so old she definitely shouldn’t have been driving, who lived five houses up from ours, cackled at me. I remember thinking she sounded as though she wanted to help make it happen. Reading was probably some form of escape from my reality, but that thought never occurred to me back then.
I got this love of books from my mother, who ate every book she ever picked up like it was actual food, and from my second-grade teacher, Miss Zimmerman. My mother never censored what I read; her library, full of classics and true crime and Stephen King, was sitting there, in the piles she kept by her bed and on the shelves in the basement, available to me whenever I wanted. I asked for books for Christmas and birthdays, and one Christmas, my grandfather built shelves to hang on the wall of my bedroom so that I could begin to amass my own tiny collection.
* * *
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It was in middle school that we met Vanessa and Ellen. Emily and I had plenty of other girls in our circle of friends, but never had we really brought others into the fold of our own weirdness before. Vanessa and Ellen were different.
If I am remembering correctly, I brought Vanessa, and Emily brought Ellen. Vanessa and Ellen, though, already knew each other. That was the deal going forward: Emily and I were a unit, and Vanessa and Ellen were one. Together, we were a dangerous Voltron of adolescent girlhood.
Sometimes, one of us (Emily or me) met another girl in school. We’d hang out with that new girl alone, perhaps at her house or our own and, if all went well, eventually we’d debut her to the other. No one really stuck until Vanessa and Ellen.
Vanessa was small and had long, flowing blond hair. She had already developed breasts, which was something none of the rest of us had done yet. Her family was from the Midwest somewhere, but she’d lived in McMurray most of her life. Ellen was exotically beautiful and nearly six feet tall. Vanessa and Ellen had gone to a different elementary school than Emily and me, and the four of us were dumped together starting in the sixth grade into the same middle school.
After that, from then until we graduated from high school, the four of us were a group package. And it was by way of there being a block of us, rather than just a pair, that we began to flourish into a really original group of human beings. Before, individually all of us had stuck out from the general crowds of kids. We weren’t exactly popular, but we weren’t really made fun of, either. I didn’t quite fit into any group of children, and though I was growing somewhat comfortable with that, even misfits need their cliques. So we built one.
Emily was always in some ways the most solid of us: she made friends with more popular people easily, whereas I was clearly a loner who was happy to recede into the background. She did the best in school and worried endlessly about her grades. By middle school, I already didn’t care. Although each of us had our own familial struggles that we talked about in pairs, whispering around one another to avoid being confrontational, we mostly kept our secrets safe within ourselves. For all our daring, we couldn’t quite divulge the things that our families did to fuck us up as a group. Not yet.
When my brother Daniel was sta
rting kindergarten, I took him on the bus the first day. He sat next to me on the front seat, him with his little red He-Man backpack strapped on his back. And without a word of complaint, he threw up all over himself, vomit dripping onto the floor of the bus. I was paralyzed; I didn’t know what to do. And more than anything, I felt anxious that other people would notice. The anxiety overwhelmed my worry about his well-being or my desire to help him. “How do I clean this up?” I wondered. The bus driver gave me a huge roll of those scratchy brown industrial paper towels, and we did the best we could. I remember Daniel crying a little bit and me trying to comfort him. “It’s okay,” I said. And he answered back, “It always is.”
Years later, in high school, when I was in eleventh grade and Daniel in ninth, I walked down the hall to see him randomly being made fun of by some bigger, older bully. I don’t remember what he said to Daniel, only that when I went over to him, Daniel said, “He sucks. I don’t care if he thinks I’m cool or not.” I’ve carried that comment with me ever since, because it rang true: Daniel, for whatever reason, decided very early in life never, ever to care what people thought of him, and it made him smarter than the rest of us, who worried over all the minor things that unpopular kids often worry over. The rest of my high school career, after that day when my younger brother taught me a way forward with a few tossed-off words, was more carefree than the previous decade had been.
But in middle school, I hadn’t learned that yet. I still cared, even if only a little, what people thought of me. It was clear that I wasn’t going to be a star student: I was flunking math classes every chance I got. I was bad at sports; I was bad at trying too hard, something that would stick with me, an unwillingness to try new things, not for fear of failure but simply because I had found the things I liked doing and wanted to do them. I was already, and would continue to be through even college and graduate school, the kind of person who cut classes to hide in the library reading.
But in this space of time, these middle school years, my parents began to recede into the background for me. They were in so many ways still all important: they had to buy me everything that I needed, and they needed to drive me from place to place if they weren’t walking distance. And yet, they became almost background characters to the tumultuous requirements of my growing social life.
In some ways, my mother ceased to exist for me in middle school. I wasn’t really interested in boys and didn’t need her advice on the Big Topics. I hadn’t gotten my period yet; I didn’t need to wear a bra. My entire social life basically revolved around school and after-school activities like dances, plays, and occasionally hanging out at the public library in the afternoon, secretly cutting photos of Madonna from Rolling Stone magazine.
Emily, Vanessa, Ellen, and I carved out a space for ourselves. We passed notes, which were often thousand-word-long letters, among ourselves in classes. We made fun of other students and teachers relentlessly. We were all in band together, and we tried out for dance competitions together. We went to school dances and drank tiny bits of alcohol or smoked stray cigarettes together, huddled in school bathroom stalls. We built a new family for ourselves, and it subbed in for the ones we were born into. In many ways, we were still privately unhappy; this is true of all kids approaching their teenage years. Parents and family still controlled almost every move we made. I didn’t have my own money; I couldn’t drive. My parents held all the power, and though I didn’t yet see them as enemies, I was starting to see them as foils at least. In this space, I think, my mother’s drinking problem became progressively worse, but if anybody noticed, they didn’t say much about it.
My mother was, I think I’ve strained to say, a very good mother. Sure, sometimes she didn’t show up. But she usually did. And because she continued to be a devoted mother in those years, I think her problem was simply glossed over by everyone around her.
I kept my home life and my social life separate. My friends didn’t come over to my house very much. That space was reserved for Emily, who I could keep in my room if my mother was acting erratic, but that mostly happened late at night anyway, when we were safely asleep. But I’m sure by then Emily knew exactly what was going on. My father seemed to be away for most of that time. I know that he wasn’t, but in my memory, he had receded a bit, probably the way fathers do for many adolescent girls.
At home, I read and hung out with my brothers; I visited my grandparents and went to church on Sundays. In this space reserved for family, my mother taught me to bake pies from scratch and how to properly fold towels. How to iron a shirt and how to sew. We kept reading together.
All alcoholics live lives that are divided into at least two lives: one where they are drinking, and one in which they are not. My life was divided too, and though the question of which life was the truer one for my mother troubled me greatly, the question of my own division seemed harmless to me. My own friends were experiencing, similar things to more or less the same degree: one life at home with family, one away with friends.
My mother kept drinking, was drinking more, in fact, but the drinking troubled me less somehow as I began to have my own personal life. I worried about her still, thought about her drinking constantly, but suddenly I had new ways of diverting my attention.
A kid that age shouldn’t have to feel bad for her mother, but there were nights when I’d pretend to be asleep and just lay there rather than read in bed next to her. Something about her made me sad. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. I didn’t fully rest it on the drinking, either. But soon, as I grew into a teenager, fighting with my mother over everyday things would become my primary way of interacting with her.
CHAPTER 7
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It’s incredibly weird to write a book about your child and not write about your marriage, when you’re definitely married. Zelda definitely has a dad, his name is Josh, and he’s my husband. He is absolutely not thirty-three Chihuahuas stacked in a trench coat. I assure you he is 100 percent real.
But I committed quite early, in the days of writing essays for public consumption about my life with my daughter, to not really saying anything about my marriage, simply because Josh, as a somewhat public person in his life as an editor and writer himself, never “signed up” for my project. He could have chosen to write about his experiences of fatherhood, but he didn’t. I’m sure his version would be much different than mine.
And there was something too dear and near to me in the thought of writing honestly about my relationship with him.
But also: I don’t remember that much of him in that first year. I have to try really hard to pull up memories of him sometimes, as if there was a finite amount of space inside me then for storing things.
I know this is more my failing than his absence. It was motherhood-induced myopia, where all I could or would see was myself and my daughter and the various threads that tied us back and forth to each other. It was selfishness personified, a biological reaction. Taking care of a child is so hard, so time consuming: it made sense that our emotions and needs would consume me and that in turn, three years later, I would have a blank space for a lot of where Josh should be.
But also: I did spend much of my time with Zelda alone. The weekends were family time, and they were necessarily less stressful, simply because there were two sets of hands, two people to manage the packing up and the setting off. We were happy some days and miserable others. But most of the time he wasn’t physically around. He was just getting mean, panicked, desperate, or even angry texts from me. It’s not that he didn’t suffer the emotional drain that comes with first-time parenthood, but he did experience a lot of it only secondhand.
And even though I did decide to leave him out of my writing largely, I feel I need to say something. I owe it to myself to be honest about how awful that first part of it really was.
Everyone who has ever had a child will say things like, “The first year is the worst,” or, “Good-bye to havi
ng sex,” really encouraging remarks that make you feel at once superior to them but also very sad for everyone. Sad, because it’s almost always, from other mothers I’ve talked to, true: that blank memory space for me is partly blank because I expected the relationship I had with Josh to be on hold while I kept the baby alive. I struggled, sometimes alone but often with him by my side, to keep the fucking baby alive. To seem happy around her even if I felt as though I were drowning in the monotony or from exhaustion or the repetition of each identical day. I struggled to teach her to sleep and to make sure she was clean and healthy and happy.
But I soon realized we were succeeding. Our baby was magical and fun and cute and happy. She flourished as we treaded water beside her, hoping that once the struggles passed we would still have a relationship with each other. That our love would tide us over in the dark times.
Which isn’t to say we didn’t have sex or intimacy or that we didn’t spend evenings together watching TV and eating bad takeout food. We did those things. But there were necessary changes, and it wasn’t hours we lost. We’d both always worked a lot, and Josh had always traveled on business several weeks a year, so we were used to spending a lot of time apart and on our own. It was, mostly on my end, an emotional loss of space for him. I stopped worrying about him in the same way; I stopped caring so much and empathizing with him.
I don’t believe the amount of caring we can produce is finite. But I do know, from the experience of having a child, that the first year of my daughter’s life meant that there was for a while a finite number of places I could spend my love and empathy. I simply had to focus on keeping us alive. And “us” usually meant the two of us. I had to hope that everyone else could wait for a while.
I don’t know why it was this way, only that it was and that I’m not alone, that other women have described similar paths in that first year or so.
