“I don’t have any spare minutes,” I said to her.
“If you want to breast-feed, you’ll have to find some.”
I did want to breast-feed. I loved the idea of the closeness, the skin-to-skin contact, the cradling. I loved the novelty of being a source of food for someone. And, of course, I had read all of Betty’s handouts about the differences between breast milk and formula. Breast milk seemed to be a kind of miracle juice. It was free and always available. It required no washing or sterilizing. It changed its taste depending on what I had eaten, so Maxie was less likely to turn out to be a picky eater. If she got sick, my breasts would know it and produce extra antibodies for her to help fight the infection. And, mainly, it was just part of my plan. Looking back, it was crazy to think that. Spewing milk out of your nipples has little to do with how much you love, nurture, cuddle, or treasure your baby. But at that moment, the idea that I would not be able to breast-feed was enough to bring tears to my bloodshot eyes.
And so I decided to pump. My mother drove across town and returned with a carload of equipment: sterilized bags, tubes, bottles, nipples, instruction books, and a compact, square suitcase that was, she informed me, the pump. She had to take the baby out on the porch while I read through the pamphlets and tried to figure out which tube connected to what, because I could not concentrate on anything with the baby near me. Only when I was alone could I clear my fuzzy brain enough to do tricky things like read.
I got it all set up and then I spent some time trying to decide which breast was less likely to actually bleed. It was a toss-up. They both looked ghoulish. I picked one and pressed it delicately into a clear plastic funnel that was hooked to a tube connected to the machine. I hesitated before flipping the switch, and then I closed my eyes and pushed it with my toe. The swoosh! noise that it made popped my eyes back open just in time to see my sweet, innocent nipple being sucked down into the funnel, elongated in a way I had never imagined possible, and then released to pop back into place. I had not recovered from the sight when it did it again. Swoosh, and there it went, the delicate bud that had over the years given me so much pleasure. It was not painful as much as it was humiliating—I could not for the life of me imagine why the inventors of this contraption decided to make the nipple-funnels see-through. No one could possibly want to see her tenderest parts treated in this way.
Nothing came out, by the way. I sat and watched for a good twenty minutes, mesmerized like a rubbernecker at a pileup. But no milk ever came.
Then there was a perfunctory knock at the door.
“Sweetie,” my mother said. “Can I bring in a visitor?”
There I was on the sofa, my raw breasts hanging out of my unfastened nursing-bra flaps, as they had been day in and day out since the baby was born. My unwashed hair was flat and stringy. My face was speckled with postpregnancy acne. I was wearing the clothes I’d worn the day before. I had a foot-long, full Maxi Pad in my underwear that I’d not found the time to change. I wasn’t sure if I’d brushed my teeth that morning, or the morning before. And my eyes were so puffy you’d think I’d had them collagen-injected.
“Hell, no!” I shouted, dropping the pump and grabbing for something to cover my boobs with as I watched the door opening wider. All I found was a cloth diaper with pink ducks on it.
My mother poked her head in. “Not receiving visitors?”
“Didn’t I just say, ‘Hell, no’?”
She looked at me, and her face confirmed that I looked as bad as I thought I did. She said, “Well, sweetheart, yes, you did.” She disappeared and shut the door behind her.
Rhonda had also told me to start eating almonds by the truck-load, drink as much water as I could force down into my belly, get plenty of rest, and imbibe a licorice-smelling tea from the health food store called Lactation Delight.
The water and almonds were pretty easy, and the tea I could get down about twice a day with a great exertion of will, but the resting was simply not possible. Even the idea of rest was like a mirage. The baby just cried all the time. Whenever she was awake, she was crying. And every time I heard her cry, I was jolted out of whatever I’d been doing—eating, going to the bathroom, trying to sleep—and raced to her side as if possessed by a mothering demon.
I was not eating anything I could not swallow by handfuls while holding her. Dry cereal, grapes, raisins, and, lately, almonds were it for me. Utensils, plates, condiments—all were things of the past. As well as sitting down. I had not sat down to a meal since before Maxie arrived. My mother was helping me as much as she could, but I was triaging my time. What was essential? Sleeping always ranked first. Tending to my stitches was up there at the top of the list, as well as brushing my teeth, showering, and changing into clean clothes. Food was way down.
But I could pump, and I did. We figured out a way to prop the baby up on one boob and the funnel on the other, and I pumped like heck. On the morning of Day Five, when there was still no milk in sight, when the baby was unable to sleep longer than twenty minutes before waking to suck at my empty breasts, when I had developed a mysterious, all-over body rash that had me scratching uncontrollably and later turned out to be an almond allergy, I lost my composure.
The specifics of what I said to Rhonda on the phone are a blur to me now. I remember her answering the phone and me shouting her name in the way a drowning person might shout up to a passing ocean liner. I remember tears coming out of my eyes and a Woody Woodpecker–ish laugh coming out of my mouth. I remember saying something along the lines of “I have not been hauling these breasts around my whole life for nothing.” And I remember the tone in her voice after I finally fell silent, when she said, “You know what? I’ll be right over.”
I was shirtless and sobbing when Rhonda arrived. Rhonda, who was about sixty and had the leathery skin of a tennis player, took one look at me and said, “Ouch.” She did not hesitate to sit herself down next to me and take a good gander at my breasts. “Well,” she said definitively, “this is just bad latch-on.” But I’d read all the books and followed her suggestions. I couldn’t fathom that I could be trying so hard and failing so miserably. “It’s fixable,” she said, and set about giving me a hands-on demonstration of proper technique. “Doesn’t that feel better?” she said, after we got Maxie hooked up.
“Actually, it hurts like hell.”
“Just be sure her mouth is open like a baby bird before you stuff your nipple in. You want her to get a big mouthful of breast every time she eats.”
“‘A big mouthful of breast,’” I said. “It sounds like a pop-up book.”
About the latch-on, she was confident. I could fix it. I just had to pay attention.
The milk, or lack of milk, was a little trickier. “It should be here by now,” she said. “This baby is hungry. You’re going to have to supplement with formula.”
Betty had warned us about the evils of supplementing. It’s the sucking that tells your body to make the milk, so if your baby is sucking on something other than you, like a bottle, it becomes a vicious cycle. The more formula you use, the less milk you make. A troubling rule of thumb for me, since I wasn’t making any milk at all.
“Supplementing is bad!” I said.
“There’s really no choice here,” she said. “Her health can go downhill after this long.”
They had given me formula at the hospital, “just in case,” and I’d lectured my mother about the evils of psyching women out so that they were set up to fail at breast-feeding. And here I was, failing at it.
“You’re not failing,” Rhonda said. “Your body’s just taking its time. Let’s help out your baby in the meanwhile.”
My mother found a bottle of formula in my bag of hospital freebies. She shook it up and screwed a nipple onto the top. Then, as Rhonda looked on, I let Maxie drink. Her eyes closed after swallowing two and a half ounces, and she fell deeply, limply asleep.
Rhonda looked at me. “What’s the longest stretch of sleep you’ve had since the baby was born?”
“An hour and a half?”
“Go get in bed,” she said. “You need to do many things to get your milk going, but sleep is the biggest one.”
“I can’t sleep,” I said, looking at Maxie. “She’ll be up in twenty minutes and want to nurse again.”
“I’m betting she’ll be out for hours,” she said. “Milk is like a sleeping potion.”
“It’s not milk. It’s formula.”
“Close enough,” she said.
I did what I was told. I rolled into bed and slept for five glorious hours before I woke, as I always did now, to the sound of crying Maxie.
I scrambled out of bed and was standing in the living room, shirtless and still rubbing my eyes, before I realized that while I had slept my breasts had filled up with marbles. My mother was holding Maxie, but was not able to comfort her. “I think she’s hungry,” she said.
“I think my milk came in,” I said.
My mother stared at me. “It’s either that or you’ve sprouted some pretty aggressive tumors.”
I couldn’t take my hands off my breasts. “Toss me that baby,” I said. I latched Maxie on as best I could and then watched as she drank furiously. When she was done, the marbles in my breast were gone. I switched her over and she began doing the same thing on the other side.
And so we were breast-feeding! It was amazing. I’d had these breasts for years, and they’d never been able to do anything like this. I was mesmerized by Maxie, and the little swallowing sounds she made. This was a whole different thing from the raspy, dry nursing we’d been doing before. Before the boob was drained, Maxie fell asleep again in my arms, her mouth still attached.
“She just finished sleeping!” I said, looking up.
My mother was blowing her nose with a tissue. “That’s what they do in the beginning. Eat, sleep, poop. You just had a rocky start.” She looked up then, and I saw that her eyes were bright red and puffy. Her whole face looked pink, actually.
My mother saw me noticing and said, “I think I’m hitting my allergy threshold.”
“Did this just start?” I was shocked.
“No, sugar, it’s been like this for days.”
And that was it. She was leaving. She had put Dr. Blandon out on the back steps (where he’d been sitting at attention for days, waiting to get back in), but even the residual fur and dander was enough to take my mother down. She’d been taking the Benadryl at night, but in the day it made her too sleepy. So she was just struggling through. Apparently, during my breast-feeding crisis, she’d discreetly gone through three boxes of Puffs without telling me.
“Headaches, too?” I asked.
She nodded.
I couldn’t make her stay. The rational, adult part of me knew it was time to send her home with a grateful hug. The rest of me was catatonic with fear at the prospect of facing all of this by myself. And facing my life, my new real life, without Dean. My house, without my mother or a good postpartum drama to distract me, was going to feel pretty empty. Even with one and a half people living here, the fact remained that there was no longer a couple.
“I’ll keep my cell phone on at all times,” she said, “and I’ll come by morning and evening to check on you.” She was already setting her red rolling suitcase by the front door. She headed into the bathroom to get her toiletries.
“You’re leaving now? Right now?”
“I’ll be back in the morning.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” I said.
“Honey,” she said. “Look at me. Look at my face.”
Her things gathered, she stood by the door with her purse over her shoulder. I was paralyzed on the sofa, afraid to move and wake Maxie. I couldn’t give a grateful hug. Not even a wave. All I could do was let her go. I met her gaze. “Thank you,” I said.
And then my mother was gone. I was alone in the house. Alone with my sleeping daughter, who had still not let go of my nipple. This was what I had hoped to avoid. My whole life, I had nurtured friendships, carefully maintained relationships, and called my mother once a day, hoping, in the end, to avoid just exactly this kind of being alone. And here I was in the middle of it. Pinned to the sofa by a sleeping baby, unable even to lift my arm to grab the cordless phone.
I watched Maxie for a bit, and then I put my head back, too, and, for a little while, we dozed.
16
People told me before I had Maxie that I would not be able to manage a shower once I had a newborn. At the time, I did not believe that could really be true. I figured, in my cocky, childless way, that if I really, really wanted a shower, I’d be able to find a way to get one.
The truth is, after my mother left, I did not take a shower for five full days.
I’d take Maxie into the bathroom and put her in the bouncy chair, get her all strapped in and hit the vibrating button, cover her with toys, and before I could even get my clothes off she’d be wailing with such desperate abandon that I’d abort the mission and take her back out.
The first time my mother came to visit, I went to my room to nap, but only after reminding her to wake me if Maxie started to cry, to take a blanket if they left the house, to use the brakes on the stroller, and to look both ways before crossing the street.
She took the baby, pushed me toward the bedroom, and said, “It is a wonder you survived your own childhood.”
“It’s a different world these days, Mom,” I said.
“It’s exactly the same world,” she said. “You’re just the mother now.”
And so went Life with Baby. Betty had warned us in class that motherhood was a process of “immersion and reemergence.” But I wasn’t so much immersed as obliterated. I ate, drank, and slept motherhood. That was the thing about it. It was so unbelievably hard, and the learning curve was so steep that there was no way to do anything but figure out how to do it.
I thought about explaining all this to my father when he came for a visit about three weeks after the baby was born.
“How are your nipples?” he asked as I opened the door.
A question, needless to say, I’d not been expecting.
I stared at him, Maxie’s sleeping head on my shoulder, trying to figure how not to give an answer.
He shrugged and said, “Your mother told me about it.”
“You and mom are talking about my nipples?”
“Among other things,” he said.
“What other things?” I said, gesturing him in.
“Um,” he said, crossing the threshold, “how much she hates me, how much I still owe her for my remainder of the wedding that’s not happening.”
“Not my fault,” I said.
The wedding had been planned for this weekend. I hadn’t even noticed. I remember my mother dealing with it some during the breast-feeding crisis. She’d argued with Rosita Rosenstein over her invoice. She’d released the sculpture garden to the O’Gorman wedding, which had been wait-listed. She’d organized a telephone tree to let people know not to come, specifying that folks use the word postponed instead of canceled. I remember trying to apologize, and my mother was appalled at my attempt. I was not, she said again and again, the person who should be apologizing.
Much of what my parents had spent was just plain lost. At this late date, there was nothing to be done. The down payments on almost everything: vanished. I think my mother donated the flowers to a retirement home. The cake and the food were also done deals, and they went to a homeless shelter. No one ever picked up my gown. As far as I knew, it was still hanging in a closet at the dressmaker’s. Perhaps she had a special closet for these types of dresses, the ones that were forgotten.
My mother didn’t give me too many of the details. With her usual poise, she just handled it. My parents were out many thousands of dollars, a vast quantity that had seemed outrageous even when it was paying for my safe passage into the future. And now, with not even a wedding to show for it, the money had disappeared, as if it had been dropped into the ocean and scattered among the fish.
Now I was just making it through each day, one sore nipple at a time.
“I guess Mom told you Dean left,” I said.
“The florist did, actually,” he said.
I nodded.
“I never liked him,” my father said.
“Dean, or the florist?”
He wrinkled his nose at me. “Either,” he said.
“Did you ask Mom out yet?” I asked.
“I’m waiting for my moment,” he said.
“But you guys are talking on the phone?”
“A little. It seems to take her about a week to call me back.”
“She may not be too eager to talk to you,” I said.
He nodded. “But I’m going to change that.”
I just looked at him.
“There’s something there,” he said. “I can feel it.”
“I think it’s bitterness. Or anger. Or possibly thoughts of violence.”
He thought about that a little.
“This place is a mess,” he said, looking around. “Don’t turn into me.”
The Bright Side of Disaster Page 11
