by Tim O'Brien
We blame ourselves, of course. This morning, I’ve been sitting here at my desk, listening to the baby-din, wanting to cry, and only a few minutes ago I found myself suddenly horrified by the thought that my own hot temper and occasional rages may have been transmitted to my infant son. More horrifying yet, I worry that during Timmy’s womb time he’d somehow absorbed the knowledge that for years prior to his conception I hadn’t wanted children. Did his biology know that Meredith and I had nearly broken up over that issue during our courtship days? Did the cytosine in Timmy’s DNA, or the proteins of his brain stem, somehow program resentment and disgust and outright fury in a kind of organic reaction to his father’s selfishness? The blame game is far-fetched, at least in one sense, but it’s painfully real in another. Meredith and I feel responsible. More than responsible. We feel guilt. We are older than most greenhorn parents, and although neither of us says so, we’re both chewing on the possibility that our crusty, over-the-hill chromosomes combined to produce Timmy’s wretchedness. (Would Jack the Ripper have been Jack the Ripper if his parents had not crossed genetic paths?) On her part, more practically, Meredith worries aloud that her type 1 diabetes may have infected her breast milk, or may have poisoned Timmy’s pancreas, or may have otherwise caused our son all this unrelieved unhappiness. Also, because she’s a type 1 diabetic, Meredith underwent induced labor. “Maybe Timmy needed more time inside,” she speculated yesterday. “Being forced to wake up—wouldn’t that upset anyone?” (I call this her premature ejaculation theory.) In any event, the blaming goes on and on. We page backward in memory through our health histories; we look for seeds of distress in our family trees; we beat ourselves up over that tiny sip of wine eight months ago and that mushroom soufflé consumed during our college years. Meredith has sworn off animal products. She has excised from her diet all broccoli, asparagus, beans, popcorn, cauliflower, prunes, artificial sweeteners, soda pop, citrus fruits, spices, chocolate, strawberries, pineapples, and caffeine. And the crying gets louder.
* * *
Last night, during my 2 a.m. baby duty, I hit on what appears to be a miracle. An imperfect miracle, a miracle in need of fine-tuning, but a gift from the gods all the same. It is the song “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Sing it in the dark, sing it in a rocking chair, sing it long enough—maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour—and Timmy stops crying. He sleeps. He sleeps without hatred on his face.
When I mentioned my discovery to Meredith this morning, she looked at me skeptically. “So you put him in the crib?”
“Well, no,” I said. “I tried, but he—”
“He woke up crying, right?”
“Right, and that’s where the fine-tuning comes in. But at least he settled down for a while. You could feel him unwind. You could feel all that tightness go out of him.”
“So now what?” said Meredith.
“Now I perfect it. Figure out how to get him into the crib.”
“Lots of luck.”
I nodded. She was right. Song or no song, his hatred for the crib was a problem, and there was also the fact that he continued to sleep for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. Moreover, there was an issue with the song itself. “It’ll drive me crazy,” I admitted to Meredith. “Last night it almost did. It’s short—only four lines—and it’s a goddamned round. Try singing ‘merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily’ for a whole hour.”
She shrugged. “Why not try some other song?”
“I did try other songs. He hates ‘Rock-a-bye Baby.’ He hates ‘Twinkle, Twinkle.’ He hates ‘Jingle Bells.’ God knows what we’ll do when Christmas comes.”
Tears came to Meredith’s eyes.
“Sorry,” I said.
* * *
It’s taken a few days, but I’ve made progress. Partly deletion, partly rewriting.
Among other things, I’ve tightened up the title. I now call the song “Row, Row.” I’ve deleted the merrily stuff. I’ve deleted the boat and the rowing. I’ve deleted the stream. In fact, I’ve deleted almost everything but the melody, and as Timmy and I sit in the dark, rocking in our rocking chair, father and son, I invent filthy lyrics to keep myself sane. True, I adore that final line, “Life is but a dream,” but it had to go. You don’t sing about a pair of horny pigeons and end with “life is but a dream.” It does not fit. Not with pigeons.
Tonight, I’ll branch out.
Buggering mice, maybe.
Although I haven’t written much since Timmy was born, I now sit in the dark and produce some of my best work in years. No pressures to publish. So far no bad reviews. I’ve finally found my subject.
Bleep, bleep, bleep like mice,
Gently up the bleep,
Verily, verily, verily, verily,
Firmly bleep the bleep.
* * *
As I mentioned earlier, Meredith and I had come within a whisker of calling it quits over our deadlock on the children question. She very much wanted kids. I very much did not. And so it happened that on a late night several years ago we exchanged heated words on the subject, each of us digging in, and eventually Meredith announced, wearily but bluntly, that there was no future for us. I was hurt by this. I asked her to leave, which she did, and for a couple of weeks we saw nothing of each other.
Now, singing “Row, Row” in the dark, I recall only bits and pieces from that period of silence and separation—mainly the word “crocodile” slithering through my head. I was appalled that Meredith could love something that did not exist, in fact the idea of something that did not exist, more than she loved me. It seemed cold-blooded. It seemed heartlessly reproductive.
In the end we met for drinks on neutral ground, in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, bar, and for several hours we learned a great deal about each other, not only emotional things but also the contents of our personal histories, the biographical facts that had brought us to this bar and to this impasse. Meredith talked about her mother dying. She talked about her father, a good man but sometimes a distant man, a man who too often seemed absent from her life. She talked about her sisters, one of whom had been institutionalized for decades with severe schizophrenia, the other of whom had twice attempted suicide (and would later succeed). She talked about the dream she’d been cultivating since she was a little girl, the dream of a happy, normal family life. “Maybe it’s a fantasy,” she said, “but don’t I get to hope for something?”
On my part, I opened up about pretty similar things. An alcoholic father. A father who often scared me and who sometimes didn’t seem to like me much. I talked about the tensions in our house, the late-night shouting matches between my mom and dad, the cruel words, the brittle silences that followed for weeks afterward. I also expressed, as best I could, my suspicion that I’d make a far less than ideal father. I was impatient, I told Meredith. I was stubborn. I was absent-minded. I was protective of my time. As a writer—a preposterously slow writer—I feared I’d come to resent the minutes and hours and days spent changing diapers and singing silly bedtime lullabies.
Meredith and I managed to work it out.
In that Cambridge bar, and in the weeks afterward, the realization began to stir in me that I too yearned for a happy, normal family life, even if I remained terrified of failing. There were no promises, exactly. But there was a prospect. Three years went by, and Meredith and I got married, and our son was conceived, and now I sit here in the dark, rocking my precious, life-hating Timmy to sleep, singing an unprintable new edition of “Row, Row.”
* * *
The miracle hasn’t panned out. In some ways things seem more hopeless than ever. Although “Row, Row” will eventually put Timmy to sleep, he continues to wake up screaming after a half hour or so, often after only a few minutes. He can’t tolerate his crib. He looks pale and angry. He’ll often cry while he eats, and without exception he cries immediately after he eats. The crying has become infectious. Meredith is crying—a lot. I’ve cried. All three of us are ragged with fatigue. If this is normal, normal isn’t nor
mal.
A dear and very generous friend named Anne Dolan has flown in from Paris to help out, mainly to spell us as we try to stitch our psyches back together. For three days and two nights, Anne endured exactly what we have been enduring. But on the third night—the night before last—she shook Meredith awake and explained that she was helpless, that she couldn’t take it anymore, and that our son would not and could not and probably never would cease crying.
And so once again we call the doctor’s office. Once again we hear the dreaded word “colic.” Once again we are informed of the astonishing news that “babies cry.” Once again we receive advice: babies need to be held. And the opposite advice: put him in his crib, shut the door, and let him cry himself to sleep. Once again we get instructions to check for diaper rash, to bathe him in lukewarm water, and—for the quadrillionth time—to place him in a basket atop the clothes dryer.
Alas, I’m back to “Row, Row.”
Not only am I exhausted beyond exhaustion, but I’ve also exhausted all possible combinations of dirty rhymes. I’ve turned to politics. By daylight, mostly in my head, I invent catchy verses that will carry me through the coming hours of night. I begin by seeking out a fruitful rhyming pattern, then later I devote myself to the overall artistry. Bush—tush. Rice—advice. Rumsfeld—beheld. Cheney—rainy. First names, I’ve discovered, are much easier. I have fun with George and Don. I have a shitload of fun with Dick. Condoleezza has proven difficult, but like my poetically minded friends, I have no scruples about cheating with near rhymes. Often, to keep things interesting, and also in the interest of poetic richness, I’ll combine my two genres, the political lyric blending into the dirty lyric, a hybrid that may represent a profligate new genre unto itself. My masterpiece is a version of “Row, Row” that I sang to Timmy just last night, a version in which every word but one must be redacted. It goes like this:
Bleep, bleep, bleep Dick’s bleep,
Bleepily bleep bleep bleep,
Bleepily, bleepily, bleepily, bleepily,
Bleep Dick’s bleeping bleep.
I am going mad, of course, but Timmy doesn’t notice.
For a few blessed minutes he sleeps.
And perhaps one day, if he survives his life-is-but-a-nightmare infancy, he will thank his father for this solid foundation in modern dirty-mouthed political discourse.
* * *
Two and a half weeks pass. Things have changed but not for the better. Our friend Anne Dolan fled back to Paris last Thursday. Timmy has lost a quarter pound of body weight. He blinks away tears as he eats; he chews more than he sucks; he vomits; he hisses at us; he hisses and he shrieks both at once.
Day before yesterday we received new advice from our pediatric nurse. We were instructed to secure the boy in his car seat, bundle him “loosely but warmly,” and drive until he settles down.
We’ve been driving by day and driving by night. We’ve clocked one hundred and sixty-eight miles.
For all but nine of those miles, Timmy has hissed and shrieked.
The hissing in particular, but especially in combination with the shrieking, has a wild-animal sound—an essential and irreducible beastliness—that chills me. It chills Meredith, too. We’ll sometimes glance at each other, neither of us uttering a word, and in that glance we’ll read each other’s terror. Meredith, I’m almost certain, lies awake wondering if our beloved baby boy has inherited the afflictions of her two disturbed sisters. The hissing and the shrieking reproduce the bedlam of a psychiatric ward in Connecticut in which her older sister has resided since Meredith was in tenth grade.
Inevitably, given what we know of genetics, the blaming has revved up a notch. The guilt has thickened.
I worry not just about Timmy, but equally so about Meredith.
I don’t think she can handle much more.
* * *
Though I try not to let on, I’m also concerned about the limits of my own tolerance. As I sing “Row, Row” in the dark, my thoughts seem to rattle around without content, or without objective and realistic content. I fantasize sometimes. I pretend none of this is happening. I pretend I’m teaching history to my son as I sing about John Wilkes Booth going merrily down the stream.
* * *
This morning I found Meredith sitting outside Timmy’s bedroom. She was trembling with . . . I don’t know what. She was trembling with all that has been and all that still is.
I had seen her weep before, but never like this.
Behind the closed bedroom door, Timmy was shrieking.
I didn’t decide anything; I just did it—loaded all three of us into the car and drove to an emergency room.
Seven hours later we departed with three prescriptions: Xanax for Meredith, Xanax for me, and a drug called Prilosec for Timmy. Our son was found to be suffering from acid reflux disease. His case was severe. We were informed that acid reflux can be difficult to diagnose, especially among infants, who are unable to articulate where things hurt or how things hurt or why things hurt or even that things hurt. They can cry. They can shriek and hiss. We learned today, along with a great deal else, that insomnia is a common symptom of acid reflux; we learned that the condition is caused by a relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter, which in turn permits stomach acids to drain into the esophagus; we learned that those acids can produce intense pain, especially in the sensitive tissues of a baby; we learned that the word “colic” (sometimes called “infantile colic”) is descriptive of a set of symptoms (frequency of crying, duration of crying) but is not a diagnosis of organic cause; we learned that we were not to blame; we learned that Timmy hated only the terrible pain, not the world.
All that was today.
Now it’s 11:17 p.m., and the house is bizarrely silent. The Prilosec did its magic—not instantly, but very nearly so.
The Xanax also worked. Meredith has been sleeping since late afternoon. I’m feeling extremely fine.
Until two hours ago I had been sitting in the dark with Timmy, even though he no longer needs me. He too is feeling fine. He sleeps peacefully. He is in his crib. In a few minutes I’ll get some sleep myself, but for now, as I scribble down these few words, I’m content to sit here listening to the all-is-well hum of our baby monitor, its soothing electric buzz coming from some unpopulated and distant galaxy. I’m riding the jet stream of Xanax, true, but I’m also feeling a kind of nostalgia, the sort of backward-looking, tongue-probing surprise one feels after an aching tooth has been pulled. I don’t miss all the horror, of course. But I do miss survivingthe horror. I miss our rocking chair. I miss holding Timmy in the dark. I miss “Row, Row”—enough to feel acutely what is missing. This sensation, whatever it is, reminds me a bit of what I’d once experienced in Vietnam after a firefight ended, when something that was so excruciatingly present became so shockingly absent.
I had been afraid my son would die.
I am still afraid. I will always be afraid.
It occurs to me that one day, when he is a senior in college, or maybe when he receives his doctorate from Stanford, I’ll have to let him take his chances out in the killer world. At that point—or maybe when he is elected to his second term as President—I’ll probably allow him to apply for a driver’s license and (if he’s very careful) use the family car to go out on his first dangerous date, though I’ll be singing “Row, Row” in the back seat.
4
Skin
Timmy is an infant. He is on my lap. My nose is pressed to the top of his head. My eyes are closed. I am smelling his skin. And the smell of skin—a baby’s skin—becomes, in the instant of smelling, the one and only thing in the universe. Nothing else exists. There is no yesterday and no tomorrow, only the smell of skin, no murder, no turpitude, no unhappy endings, only the smell of skin, for everything else is elsewhere, and the smell of an infant’s skin is the smell of light obliterating darkness.
5
Trusting Story
Timmy’s first fifteen months mostly evaporated for me. What I have in my hea
d, when I have anything at all, is a jumble of diapers and bottles and strollers and car seats and two or three near-death experiences. Timmy eats, or at least tries to eat, live electrical cords. He enjoys dirt for dessert. Last month I swatted a cockroach from his lips. I am not kidding.
* * *
* * *
But then an event occurs which I need to capture here, for Timmy’s sake, as a small record of his early days on our planet. Sometimes I chuckle at what happened; other times I get angry.
In July of this year, not long after Timmy’s first birthday, our family attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference up in the mountains of Tennessee, where I had been tasked with providing advice to people who sought to become better writers. Most often in such circumstances I can think of almost nothing to say: read widely, toughen up your psyche, ration the booze, and don’t forget to write a little. I want to be helpful, of course, but I don’t know how. I feel like an imposter. Occasionally, in my courageous or whimsical moods, I’ll offer to my students the tentative suggestion that fiction writers might do well to trust their own stories. Above all, I’ll mumble, to trust a story means to tell it—not to creep up on it, not to postpone the “good” parts, not to hint at it or cleverly foreshadow it or offer the reader periodic promises that a glorious tale will soon be coming. To trust a story is to conquer the fear of plunging headfirst into the surprises and contradictions of being human.
