The Bright Side of Disaster

by Katherine Center

  “How’s your daddy?” she asked.

  “He’s okay,” I said. Then I added, “Nurse Martha says all the nurses around here have a crush on him.”

  My mother just snorted a laugh and paced the baby around the room.

  Later, after my mother went home to get some rest, Meredith showed up with a requested spread of sushi takeout for dinner. I gobbled down California rolls while she watched with distaste, reminding me each time I held out a piece to her that she didn’t “do seafood.”

  “Hey,” she said when I was about halfway done, “can lactating women even eat sushi?” I was not the first friend Meredith had watched walk down the baby path.

  “Opinions vary,” I said. “But I’m going with ‘Yes.’”

  She was holding the baby while I ate. The baby was so asleep, she might as well have been a throw pillow.

  “She’s not so bad, huh?” I asked, gesturing at the baby with my chopsticks.

  “No,” Meredith said, thinking about it. “They’re not too bad when they’re sleeping.”

  Meredith handed her back as soon as I was done, reminding me that I needed to get some sleep. She gave me a little kiss on the forehead as she headed out. Then, at the door, she stopped and said, “I have a present for you, by the way.”

  I said, “You got me a baby present?”

  “It’s not for the baby,” she said. “It’s for you.”

  “Well, hand it over,” I said.

  “Soon,” she said. “It’s not quite ready.”

  She blew me a kiss, and then she left, and it was quiet for the first time all day. But just as I was settling my head back, and just as I started to feel the aftershock of exhaustion start to hit me, the baby woke up. Really woke up. I guess she’d had enough sleep. And, I learned that night, whenever she was awake, she was crying. Meredith was probably already in the parking lot when it started, but the fussing was so loud, she may have even heard her.

  The crying made me nervous. I’d nurse her and she’d get quiet for a while, and then she’d doze off, but she’d wake up and cry again a short while later. I was all alone, and I started to worry that something was wrong with her.

  I pressed the NURSE button on my bed.

  Nurse Martha showed up, and I said, “Why is she crying so much?”

  Nurse Martha looked like she felt very sorry for the baby. “She’s just hungry,” she said.

  “But she’s been nursing all day!”

  “But you don’t have your milk yet,” she explained. “So there’s not much for her to eat.”

  I knew about this. Before the milk, there was a thing called colostrum, which Betty had said was very nutritious, but was only doled out in drops.

  “Why don’t you let me take her for a while so you can get some sleep?” she offered.

  “No!” I almost shouted, as if she’d suggested selling the baby on eBay. “We’ll be fine. Thank you.”

  That had been in my unread birth plan, too: “rooming in.” The baby was to sleep in my room, and in my bed, with me—not with all those sleeping babies (who, looking back, also had sleeping mothers) in the nursery. Hell, no. We were better than that.

  And so the night began. I knew that having a baby involved sleep deprivation, and a friend with kids had even described it as “brutal,” but I wasn’t at all prepared. We were up every few hours, all night. She’d wake, and cry, and then nurse back to sleep.

  During one of her wake-ups, she didn’t fall back to sleep easily. I panicked—until it occurred to me to sing her a lullaby. That’s what lullabies had been invented for, after all. But at that moment, with the pressure on, I couldn’t think of any. A million lullabies in the world, and I could not come up with one. The only song, in fact, that came to my mind was “I Will Survive.” So I ran with it. In a hoarse whisper, I started to sing.

  That seemed to get the baby’s attention, so I kept going. I stroked her head and sang the words as softly as a person praying. It occurred to me that this song should be my anthem. Gloria Gaynor had been dumped—but look at her now! She was kicking ass! But even though that song was all about triumph when it came from Gloria’s mouth, with my broken little middle-of-the-night voice, it just sounded kind of hopeless. By the time I was singing the lines “Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?” my voice was faltering so much I had to stop for a sip of water.

  I spent that whole night with the baby in the bed with me, my arm asleep, my whole body hurting. I was afraid to take pain medication in case it might get into my not-yet-arrived breast milk and hurt her, so I left the pill they’d assured me was safe on the nightstand.

  My stubbornness was, perhaps, some kind of half-dead-with-exhaustion, hormone-induced attempt at self-esteem renewal through mothering. I was going to be the best, most perfect goddamned mother in the history of the human race. I was not going to do one thing that would harm my baby, even if doctors said it wouldn’t harm her anyway, like take pain medicine. I wanted to do everything better than right.

  Around three in the morning, I gave up and took the pain medicine. The whole space between my belly button and the tops of my thighs hurt so badly it felt like I was being crushed in a vise, and, needless to say, I couldn’t get comfortable. In the bed, I moved and twisted and rearranged constantly, repositioning the baby each time, terrified she’d wake up.

  I was going to need a name for this girl. She wasn’t going to be Dean Murphy, Jr., anymore. I’d have to come up with something beautiful and feminine yet strong and fierce. Something appropriate for a tiny person of seven pounds, eight ounces, but also right for an adult woman out showing the world how things are done. Something distinctive to her (I spent my childhood as “Jenny Harris”—pronounced like it was all one word—or “Jenny H.”). Distinctive, but not trendy. Although, of course, lately, according to the baby-name books I’d read, being distinctive was trendy. I didn’t want to call her Catelyn or Ruby or Olivia, only to have those names fall out of fashion before she hit kindergarten.

  Dean Harris Murphy. It had been an easy name, a perfect name. We were going to call him either Dean or Harris, depending on his personality. Boys were easy to name. Girls were harder. It seemed to me that I ought to do something to honor my mother, who had put up with so many of my crises. My mother’s middle name was Maxine, and that seemed like a good middle name for this little one. And the first name should be something sensible, intelligent, classic. As the painkiller kicked in, I ran through names in my head, and as I finally started to drift off, I settled on one: Elizabeth. And no nicknames, either. She would be Elizabeth Maxine Harris. And she’d go by her full name, Elizabeth.

  “You may call her Elizabeth,” said Meredith, who brought me breakfast the next morning. “But everybody else is going to call her Maxie.”

  “They’ll call her whatever I tell them her name is,” I said.

  “No,” Meredith said. “They’ll take one look at her and call her Maxie.”

  And so, over breakfast, she became Maxie. In the light of Meredith’s absolute certainty, it was easy to give in. And people loved it. “Her name is Elizabeth Maxine,” I’d tell them. “But we’re calling her Maxie.”

  Talking about her name was a great distraction for the visitors who came on Day Two asking about Dean. By the end of the day, I was liking the name so much, when people saw her and said, “And what is your name?” I just tilted her toward them, like a ventriloquist, and said: “Maxie.”

  14

  The next day, a nurse wheeled Maxie and me to the curb. We waited with my mother for the hospital valet to bring my car around. I had installed the car seat at around Month Six and had been driving around with it, empty and waiting, ever since. I’d researched all the brands thoroughly and then bought the one that matched the interior of my car. As my mother and Maxie and I stood on the sidewalk in the mild sunlight, I felt confident that I was prepared for the ride home at least.

  But after we’d tipped the valet and my mother had put my bag
in the back, I realized I had no idea how to get the baby into the car seat. Here’s where I panicked: Should I leave the basket in the car and slip the baby into it? Or should I take the basket out, snap the baby in, and then pop the whole thing back inside? The choice was paralyzing. She was so tiny, and her head seemed like it was attached to her body on a macaroni noodle. I had no idea how to get her in.

  “Don’t ask me,” my mother said. “We didn’t even use car seats when you were a baby.”

  Finally, I popped the basket out and put it on the sidewalk. Then I arranged Maxie in the seat, clipped all the clips, lifted it by the handle, and used every bit of strength I had in me to stretch across the backseat and snap the basket into the base. Days later, when I was no longer taking pain medicine, I would discover that doing this actually hurt quite a bit.

  By the time I got her in, she was all slumped over—almost folded in half—and I didn’t know how to reposition her without starting all over, so my mother drove and I sat in the backseat holding Maxie’s head up and hoping for the best.

  Every bump on the drive home gave me a jolt of adrenaline. Maxie seemed far too small and far too precious to be out in the world, zooming along at thirty-five miles an hour like this. How could I protect her from anything out here? We were sitting ducks! I was also terrified that she was going to start to cry, and I’d be helpless to soothe her until we made it home. The sound of her crying made me absolutely frantic to stop it. It was like I had an emergency siren going off in my head, with a blinking sign that said HELP THE BABY! When she cried, I could think about nothing else.

  But Maxie fell asleep and stayed that way for the drive.

  My mother pulled into the driveway a bit too quickly for me, but then we stopped moving, and Maxie was still out. I’d half expected to see Dean’s Explorer parked out front, in part because I was just used to seeing it there, and in part because I could not believe he was missing all this. But there was no Explorer. No sign of him at all.

  My mother started to open the door, but I stopped her.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She knew what I meant. There was no rush. Soon enough, we’d be inside the house and catapulted into a whole new life. Maxie had given us a few minutes to take a deep breath, and it seemed crazy not to take it. I was in the backseat, and I watched my mother lean her head back against the headrest.

  “Are you going to stay with me?” I whispered. And then, before she could answer: “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “You won’t be alone. You’ll have the baby.”

  “Okay, that’s worse than being alone.”

  I had never changed a diaper before. I had never babysat or been around children. Any confidence that some simian knowledge of what to do would just rise up in me when I needed it had blown out the window on the drive home.

  “I will stay with you,” my mother said. “Until my allergies get too bad.”

  “What is the definition of ‘too bad’?” I said. This was not a time to let some sniffles get in the way of doing the right thing. This was a real emergency. This was life or death.

  “Well, I’ve got a whole package of Benadryl in my purse, so I’m planning to stay at least a week.”

  A week. That was something.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I whispered, just as a car with racing stripes and no muffler came tearing down the street. The vibration was so loud, I could actually feel it pulsing against my skin, and though it didn’t wake Maxie, it startled us enough to decide to go inside.

  Getting out of the car was painful in a way that I hadn’t noticed on the way in. I hadn’t had an episiotomy, but I had ripped, as Nicole put it, “from stem to stern.” She had sewed me back up while I cuddled the baby, and I was now under strict orders to take at least two warm baths a day to help myself heal. I took things slowly, and I let my mother pop the infant carrier out for me and head up the walk with Maxie.

  The house was my house, and everything about it was the same. I was different, though, and so it felt like a whole new place. It was like someone had tinted everything a slightly different color. Not a bad color—just not the one I’d been used to before.

  Dr. Blandon greeted us at the door by rubbing all over my mother’s pant legs. She set sleeping Maxie on the floor in the living room and headed to the bedroom with my suitcase.

  “You’re just going to leave her there?” I whispered.

  “She’ll be fine,” she said. “Keep an eye on the cat.”

  It was true. Maxie was at cat level. And spider level and lizard level and cockroach level. I lifted the basket up and set it on the dining table, coming eye to eye with the warning notice, standard on all baby equipment, that detailed in yellow and black the many ways in which that car seat could maim, mutilate, torture, or kill my baby. DO NOT LEAVE CHILD UNATTENDED IN SEAT! it read like the voice of God. DO NOT PLACE SEAT ON ANY SURFACE HIGHER THAN FLOOR. INFANTS CAN BE KILLED IF SEAT FALLS TO GROUND.

  I moved her back to the floor. I had to pee, but I was afraid to leave her there alone. How on earth could that seat fall off the table? The cat could knock it off, I decided. The table leg could dislodge. A great gust of wind could come along. An earthquake. None of these things was likely, but all were at least possible. And I was not taking any chances, so I finally took the baby into the bathroom with me, peed, and didn’t flush.

  When the phone rang, I was afraid Maxie’s eyes would pop open and I’d soon hear the cry that sent me scrambling to appease her. When she didn’t stir, I had another jolt: It was Dean. I could feel it. I couldn’t wait to forgive him and tell him the great news that we had a girl, of all things, and tell him we’d named her Maxie.

  I was close, but it wasn’t Dean. It was his mother.

  “We heard the awful news about what our son did to you,” she said, without saying hello or identifying herself. “Dean’s father and I want you to know that sometimes that boy is a stupid idiot, and after you have the baby—”

  “Mrs. Murphy,” I interrupted, “I had the baby two days ago.”

  There was a silence. Then she said, “Is it healthy?”

  “It is!” I could feel myself starting to gush. “She is! It’s a girl! She’s a girl! And she’s perfect and absolutely gorgeous!”

  The next words from her mouth sounded almost dreamy. “A girl,” she said.

  “Seven pounds, eight ounces!” I announced.

  “That sounds fat to me,” she said. “Is she fat?”

  “She’s not fat! The doctor says she’s perfect.” Dean and I had agreed months ago not to tell her about the midwife.

  “And what are you calling her?”

  “Maxie,” I said.

  “That’s an awful name,” she said. “The kids at school are going to call her Maxi Pad.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Well,” Mrs. Murphy said, seeming eager now to end the digression about the baby, “I was calling to let you know that Dean’s father and I would like to help you and our grandchild out financially. Since our son has left you in the lurch, we’d like to send a little something every month to cover your expenses. We know you had hoped to stay home with the baby, and we hope this gesture will enable you to do that.”

  A thousand responses ran through my head, including “Hell, no” “Are you fucking crazy?” and “I can always eat my fat baby if I run out of food” but the words that came out of my mouth, despite any other instinct I might have had, were “Thank you.”

  “You’re so welcome,” she said, sounding oddly affectionate. And just as I thought she was hanging up, she said, “About the last name. Is it Murphy?”

  “It’s Harris,” I said. “Elizabeth Maxine Harris.”

  “Of course,” she said, and the line clicked dead.

  15

  My mother had started boiling water for pasta, a food she insisted on calling “noodles.” She poked her head out from the kitchen.

  “Who was that?” she said.

  “You’re never going to believe i
t,” I said.

  But then Maxie woke up, and I couldn’t concentrate on any conversation until I had nursed, changed, nursed, rocked, nursed, held, nursed, and sung to her, then nursed her back to sleep.

  By then I was tired, too, and I figured I’d nap when she did. I closed my eyes. Seventeen minutes later, she was up again.

  “It seems like she should be sleeping longer,” my mother said, pulling her out of her bassinet.

  “The nurse says she’s hungry,” I said.

  “Well, where is your milk?” she asked.

  “It’s coming!” I said. “It takes two to four days.”

  “So any minute now,” she said.

  “It’ll probably be in by tonight,” I told her. “That’s what the books say.”

  But the milk didn’t come that night, or the next night. Maxie was frantic, and she couldn’t sleep. And neither could I. She nursed like a piranha, and my nipples became so sore I couldn’t wear a shirt or even pull up the flaps on my nursing bra. My gentle nipples, for whom I’d always had such affection, were so raw they looked like they’d been in bad contact with a cheese grater. Every time Maxie latched on, her wet, toothless mouth felt like it was made of razors. I had to squeeze my eyes closed, make a fist, and count to twenty before it subsided. And she wanted to latch on constantly. Because she was hungry. My newborn was hungry, and I had no milk.

  We called a lactation consultant named Rhonda, who on Day Three of the Milk Watch suggested a phone consultation. She was, it turned out, all booked up for the week. She could squeeze us in after supper that night, but only for thirty minutes.

  My mother took dictation while I prepared a list of questions to use our minutes effectively. Topping the list was “Why do my nipples have scabs on them?” and just underneath it, competing for top billing, was “Where the hell is my milk?”

  The phone call was quite hurried. Regarding the mauled nipples, she suggested many tips for a better baby “latch-on.” Regarding the milk itself, she stressed it was important “to get the milk flowing.” I resisted the urge to tell her that there was not one single person in my vicinity who did not understand that simple fact. Instead, I wrote down her list of instructions for making it happen: First, and most important, we had to rent a medical-grade breast pump from a breast-feeding specialty store. We had to pump at least five times a day. She warned us that it was the frequency of the pumping that brought the milk. I couldn’t just hook myself up, watch Oprah for an hour, and be done with it. She told me to pump during every spare minute.