Signs of Life

by Natalie Taylor

  The more contact I make with other mothers, the more I realize I’m not the only one who is trying to balance something unbalanceable. The challenges of my days seem monstrous. Getting a baby and two dogs loaded into the car, remembering the leashes, the food, the collars, the stroller, the extra outfits, the diaper bag, my purse, cell phone, and car keys all while the dogs bark and Kai screams and I try to carry three other bags out the door—all this just for one night at my parents’ house. Or in the middle of the night, nursing Kai, then rocking him to sleep, then an hour later he finally nods off and then poops, which goes through his diaper, pajamas, blanket, bassinet mattress cover, all the way through to the plastic bassinet mattress. I only sleep in three-hour increments max, and usually when he sleeps during the day I have to do things like empty the dishwasher, throw in a load of laundry, shower, urinate, put on deodorant, get dressed, or clean up the kitchen. All of this, however, is strikingly similar to the lives of women everywhere—only many of those women do what I do with two, three, four, or five children. “One kid and two dogs,” I can hear a stressed-out housewife say. “Gimme a break. I could do that in my sleep.” And it’s true.

  Now I am a part of this club of motherhood. I know what it feels like to wear the same outfit for three days straight. I know what it feels like to not run a brush through my hair for an entire week. A few days ago around five o’clock in the afternoon, I realized I hadn’t brushed my teeth all day and I couldn’t remember if I had brushed them the night before. But as my tongue grazed across my bumpy front teeth, I realized I really didn’t care. I was completely indifferent to my own personal hygiene. But this is not a unique feeling. I am not different from the average mother because I do not have a husband.

  You do what you have to do to make it work. That’s the anthem. The weeks before Kai was born I panicked about having the dogs and a newborn. How would I make all of this work? How would I be able to handle the dogs and all of their demands and take care of a baby who couldn’t possibly come in second? But now that we’re all here, somehow we make it happen. My friends and family come over all the time to hold Kai while I walk Louise and Bug, and although we’re still not perfect, we still try as often as we can. It’s not always pretty, but we try to make it work.

  “You’re going to surprise yourself,” my Fairy Mom Godmother says from across the room. She is slouched in the rocking chair with one foot on the ottoman and one foot on the floor. “You’ll figure out ways to do things that you never thought possible.” I can only hope she is right.

  • • •

  Everyone comes to town for Thanksgiving. My parents, Hales, Deedee, Ashley, Chris, Ads and Ellie, Moo and Dubs. We call David “Dubs” because when Moo was in college, before she started dating him, she had a crush on him and referred to him as “D.W.” (his initials) to her friends. After they had been dating a while, she confessed that she had a code name for him and she sort of resurrected D.W. We (my brother mostly) shortened it to D-Dubs and then just Dubs. The nickname fits him perfectly. He’s a tall guy with broad shoulders and red hair. He’s from Canada and he’s Jewish, so as a red-headed Jewish Canadian, he’s pretty unique. “David” just doesn’t suit him. Also, Dubs is kind of an oaf. He can be clumsy and sometimes he says the wrong things without thinking. The best part about Dubs is that he thinks he is hilarious. He is always telling us about the latest “bit” he’s been working on. Recently he told us aboot (about, Canadian style) his theory that only when people are flying on airplanes do they enjoy tomato juice and Sudoku, but never when they’re on the ground. “I mean, right, nobody ever orders tomato juice in a restaurant or a bar. But on planes it’s so popular!” Dubs is a good person to have around during potentially painful holidays. He either makes us laugh because he tries to lighten the mood, or he tries to be serious and say something sentimental, which usually comes out wrong, which makes us laugh harder.

  This is my first major holiday without Josh. I am relieved my family is all here, but surprisingly the day itself hasn’t seemed to stress me out. Something else, however, has been sitting like a rock in my stomach. I’ve been consumed in thinking about one teeny-tiny moment that may rip me to pieces: saying grace.

  Every Thanksgiving since the history of our family, my dad has said grace. We are not a grace or prayer-at-dinnertime family throughout the year, but we always say it at Thanksgiving. My dad always says it. I don’t know how it started that he was the grace-sayer, but in previous years, it has always been him. He usually says something short but very touching. Something like “Dear Lord, thank you for this beautiful table of food, but thank you more for the people surrounding it. Bless those who are not here to join us. Amen.” While he says it we all bow our heads, and although I don’t know this for a fact, I bet everyone in my family closes their eyes. We have never been a very religious family. Our church experience mostly consisted of playing tic-tac-toe and hangman on the Steeple Notes during the service. Traditional prayers have never really been our thing. But when my dad bows his head at Thanksgiving dinner, we stop and listen. That’s the kind of grace it is; even if you don’t believe in anything, you close your eyes during my dad’s grace. Most times my dad gets choked up after saying grace. Although we never press him on it, we all know why. He cries because he really is thankful for the people at the table. As a dad, there is nothing, literally nothing, in the world as wonderful as having all four of his adult children in the same place.

  But this year I can’t imagine hearing my dad say grace. I’ve worried about it for weeks. I know he won’t be able to get through it. I can’t imagine what he would say. What kind of thanking can you do when your daughter has been turned widow and mother in a few short months? There is a newborn baby and lost husband. How can you articulate a Thanksgiving prayer around that?

  The other element is, it is so hard to watch my dad struggle. All my life, my dad has been the strongest, toughest, smartest guy in the world. He has two artificial hips and plays hockey three times a week. At fifty, he took up the hobby of windsurfing on Lake Michigan. He always knows the answer to every question. All of the children in our family know this. If your car doesn’t start, you call dad. If your check bounces, you call dad. If you’re stuck in traffic on I-75 and you don’t have a map of the back roads (even though Dad told you to put one in your car), you can call him and he’ll safely guide you home.

  He has spent thirty years doing everything in his power to protect his children from the torturous forces of the world. He has done everything to give us a happy and healthy life. He has done things I’ll never even know. But tonight, he can’t say grace because it will remind him that he, my father, is not enough to protect his children. Now he has to look at me and admit he has no answers. He can’t make a phone call, he can’t pay a bill, and he can’t wrestle anyone to the ground. So no, he can’t say grace. Because for the first time in his life he doesn’t know what to say to one of his children.

  We all sit down at the table. As everyone sits down, it starts to get quiet. Minutes before, there had been three different conversations going on, but when we pull our seats out from the table the air in the room seems to deaden the chatter. Suddenly we have nothing to say, we’re all just waiting to get through the moment. In the awkward silence I have a flash that I should’ve just talked to my dad about it earlier, but I knew a conversation about it would be worse than enduring it. So I don’t say anything. My dad doesn’t make a move. My mom says something like “Everything looks great, guys,” but no one picks up their fork. I can feel my throat tighten. I can sense everyone else’s throat tighten too.

  Finally, someone says through a mumble, “Should we say a prayer?” and at the same time someone wants to refill her glass with water and the pitcher is sitting by Dubs, so she says, “Can someone pass the water? Dubs, hey Dubs …” Dubs, however, hears these two lines at the same time and thinks he is being asked to say the prayer, in response to which he puts his head down and turns bright red. After figuring out that he
is not being asked to say the prayer, we all burst into laughter at the thought of Dubs, the Canadian Jew, saying a prayer at Thanksgiving. And then Dubs of course grabs the awkward moment and turns it into comedy. He launches into an amalgamation of all of the prayers that he would have said. “Oh, baby Jesus,” he begins. “Thank you, God, for the food, the baby Jesus.” We eat.

  Later that night some time after eleven o’clock, I have another strange experience. I have just put Kai down after his last feeding. I am the only one awake and the whole house is dark. I go into the bathroom (which I only do twice a day), and on my way out, I go to turn the light out. I pull the switch down, but only one light goes out and the second light stays on. I turn it on and off again. Same thing. One light stays on. Immediately, an odd person zips into my brain.

  When Josh’s grandma Margaret was at home with hospice in February, there was a nurse named Nancy who was there most of the time. Nancy the nurse never really did anything medical—there was another nurse who was in charge of that stuff. Nancy would just float around the house and talk to people and tell her stories. I found Nancy to be incredibly irritating. I know it sounds horrible that I would find a hospice nurse irritating, but the woman drove me nuts. She basically made herself a self-proclaimed member of Margaret’s family. Once she found out I was pregnant, she told everyone about it. I remember Josh calling me from Margaret’s house and telling me that Nancy the nurse told Mrs. Mansfield—the neighborhood mom who is basically the walking version of Us Weekly for southeastern Michigan—that I was pregnant. When Margaret passed, I remember we all stood around her in a circle and held hands while her minister said a prayer. It was me, Ashley, Deedee, Mary (Deedee’s sister), Mary’s sons David and Scott, Chris, the minister, and Nancy the nurse. Nancy was sobbing.

  In the aftermath of Margaret’s death, I knew that I could always make Josh laugh by bringing up my annoyance with Nancy the nurse. He thought it was hilarious that I became so fed up with her. “The burial plot looks really nice, Josh,” I said to him on the ride home from the cemetery. A few of us had stayed to watch Margaret’s casket placed. It was a gray February day. “Yeah,” he said quietly, staring at the road. I could tell he was having a rough time. “I just wish Nancy the nurse could have been there,” I said. I saw a smile creep across his face.

  But on Thanksgiving night Nancy the nurse floats into my brain for a very different reason. Nancy the nurse, as you would expect, had been in the presence of death too many times to count. She often shared her experiences with us. She told us stories in a soft, serious voice about connecting with spirits, and I would sit on the couch and think to myself, Don’t they screen people before hiring for this kind of work? She told me that she had several experiences where a spirit or soul of someone who has passed away sort of “comes to” the family. She said the spirit almost always came in the form of a light of some sort. One time she remembered a family lost their daughter, a woman in her twenties with a little boy, to cancer. Shortly after she passed, Nancy saw a blue light stream through the house. Right, I thought. Do you believe in vampires too, Nancy?

  On Thanksgiving night, however, Nancy’s ridiculous, unscientific observation comes back to me. I remember right after Josh died I was at my parents’ house and the same thing happened with the light. I hit the switch and it didn’t go off. Immediately, I thought it was Josh just saying, “I’m here. I’m right here.” I asked my mom about the light (obviously not telling her my theory about how it was my dead husband reincarnated into electricity) and she just said, “Yeah, sometimes that light does that.” Sure enough, every now and then the light will stay on. It hasn’t done this in a long time. I can’t even remember the last time it stayed on, but on the night of Thanksgiving that light stays on. I know how ridiculous I sound. I sound as ridiculous as Nancy did. But that light makes me feel a little better. I really think it’s not just an electrical quirk. I think it’s a little reminder that he’s not as far away as I think. Weird. The bathroom light. Who knew.

  december

  Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

  Balm of hurt minds, great Nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

  —MACBETH IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MACBETH

  even though I’m on maternity leave, I still think about my students and my job. I think about how they are treating my sub. I wonder if they’re still trying hard or if they’re having more fun without me. Right now they are starting Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth takes place in eleventh-century Scotland. It’s a fictional story, but historians say that Shakespeare got his idea for the play because he had done some research on that period in Scotland’s history and found that it was an incredibly violent and ruthless time and place—perfect for a dramatic storyline. Macbeth is about a guy (Macbeth) who starts off noble and then after getting a taste of power (he gets promoted to Thane of Glamis), he gets hungry for more. He ends up killing his king (Duncan) and his bff (Banquo) and a list of others. The body count is pretty high by the end of the play. There are a lot of factors that push Macbeth to turn to the dark side; three witches give him these prophecies of his future, and his wife is out for blood before Macbeth even starts to think about killing anyone. By the end of act I, Macbeth and his wife have set out to murder in their hunt for the throne.

  But Shakespeare is tricky. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth engage in some pretty horrific foul play. If you know anything about Shakespeare’s tragedies, then you know that the main characters always end up dead in act V. But for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, their real torture happens long before they die.

  Right after Macbeth kills his sleeping king, he claims he hears a voice. He runs out of King Duncan’s bedchamber, and says, “Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! / Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep.” And there we have the ultimate tool of torture for Macbeth and eventually his wife. They can’t sleep. If you think Shakespeare is going easy on these two, then you’ve obviously never been sleep-deprived for an extended period of time. Because Shakespeare knows that if you really want someone to lose their fucking mind, you take away sleep.

  In act V, Lady Macbeth starts to sleepwalk. While wandering around at night, her servants hear her confess all of her crimes. I always picture her bumping into furniture, walking around with the cartoon swirls in her eyes. I used to think she lost her mind because of her guilt, but now I realize that’s not it. Girlfriend can’t sleep. Everything I do on a daily basis is from this same Lady Macbeth sleep-deprived state. It’s not just that I’m tired. We’re not just tired. We are coming completely unraveled.

  For example, everywhere I go I see the same set of snowmen. In the aisles of Target, in the pages of Garnet Hill, in the Pottery Barn window, on television, in advertisements, it’s the same three snowmen. There’s the dad, the mom, and the little baby snowman. Everywhere, it’s the perfect little snowman family. Mom, dad, and baby. They terrorize me. One day at the mall, I am going to go nuts on the three-snowmen display. One of these days, I am going to be walking through the mall, with all of the parents and their kids standing in line to see Santa, and I’ll hear some kid say, “Mom! Look at the cute snowmen. It’s just like our family, you, me, and dad,” and something will come over me. Weeks of staring at this perfect little snowman family, weeks of being mocked by this snowman family will get to me, and all of the sudden I will lash out at the snowman family right in the middle of the mall. I will start punching the big dad snowman, but not any normal punch, more of a frantic, almost deranged swing. Instead of my arm coming through the middle of my body, like you would see a boxer throw a punch, my fist comes over the top of my head, like a crazed stage mom. I swing at the daddy snowman in an uncoordinated manner; first I knock off his black top hat and then on my second swing I miss and throw myself off balance and fall onto the mommy snowman. Then, in a rage of frustration, at myself and the snowmen, I start thrashing my body in
all directions, hoping to take out all three at once. Think Orson Welles in Citizen Kane when he trashes Susan Alexander’s room at Xanadu after she walks out. He tears the place down, but he’s so old he can hardly pull the shelves off of the wall. You kind of feel bad for the guy, but at the same time you know he’s losing it big-time. That’s me, only with three oversized snowmen. “Mommy,” the little boy says as he tugs at his mother’s coat sleeve outside of Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, “why is that crazy lady hurting the cute snowman family?” The Somerset mall guards drag me away as I kick and scream.

  The best part would be they would haul me off and throw me into some holding tank where they keep the mall perpetrators until the cops arrive. Some small cell with one plastic bench and a gross tile floor that never gets cleaned. But by the time the cops get there, I’d be asleep. Not even on the bench. I’d be asleep on the floor. Some cop would roll his eyes and say, “All right, ma’am, you can go. Your family is outside waiting for you.” And I would wave my hand and in a groggy voice say, “Ten more minutes, jus’ gimme ten more minutes.”

  At Dr. G.’s today, I feel inclined to discuss how angry I am. I leave out the part about the snowmen. This is the first time I’ve seen her since Kai was born.

  In the midst of our conversation, she says something about bitterness.

  “I think I’m bitter,” I say.

  “You do?” she asks, with this weird look on her face. “Who are you bitter toward?”

  I think about this. I am not really bitter toward anyone specifically. Battersby recently got engaged to her boyfriend, Paul, and I am actually very happy for her. I found myself being able to participate in conversations about weddings much easier than two months ago. Everyone around me is getting married—my friend Janna from college, Battersby, Terrah, Toby and Nikki, but I don’t feel bitter toward any of them. I am bitter toward the idea of romance. I am bitter at the couples in the mall who are Christmas shopping at Gymboree. “Oh, honey, look at this, isn’t this adorable? We should get it for Nolan. He would just love it,” the mom says, full of Christmas cheer. I want to shove these people and say, “Ya know, some of us are trying to grieve around here! Would you mind keeping your happiness to yourself?” Finally, I figure out who exactly I am most bitter toward. Everything can be summed up in two words.