Operating Instructions (10 page)

H
e’s two months old today, quiet and happy and alert. Pammy is coming for a pool party this afternoon. Actually, we’re just going to give him a bath and then take turns holding him while we watch TV. Maybe it’s not much of a life, but it’s our life. It’s all so absolutely amazing. I don’t remember what Pammy and I used to talk about before that day, December 27 of last year, when I walked into the bathroom to find the results of an at-home
pregnancy test and gasped out loud, there in the doorway, frozen for a while, just another woman staring fixedly at a blue-tipped stick.

E
mmy and Bill came by with some groceries. Big Sam asked with real concern, “Have you ever noticed how similar French and English are? Like ‘le drugstore’? ‘Le week-end’? ‘Le hot dog’?”

W
e walked into town late this afternoon with Pammy, and it was strangely thrilling to see how many adults got dressed up for Halloween. It was touching to see all these people who usually walk around in carefully constructed disguises, doing very impressive impersonations of busy adults, but who on the inside are secretly divas and pirates, clowns and heroes. All the stuff in their heads found
its way out onto the streets today—in the market, the banks, the drugstore. There were whiskers, glitter, slapshoes, blood. My head swam with wonderful memories of treasure hoarding and gluttony. The best thing is that you really feel that fall is here. There’s a tang in the air.

Sam was very funny all afternoon, so dignified and serious. “Dignity is very important, my darling,” I told him. “Second only to kindness.” He is so focused and attentive that one expects him to nod gravely. He struggles to get his thumb into his mouth, but it’s as though his arms were in a zero-gravity atmosphere of their own; they go flying through his field of vision like unsecured things in a spaceship.

Megan took him to the park for a couple of hours today, and I got a little bit of work done, taking some notes for a novel, getting down some of the raw material. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but this is always how my novels start. A few small visions, and then the story and themes begin to emerge, like a Polaroid developing. We are slowly running out of money. I am just going to try to stay faithful and get my work done.

My breasts were bursting with milk by the time Megan and the baby returned. Sam nursed for forty-five minutes, like he was at his own private keg party, then belched and passed out.

“Do you mind if I tell people you’re his governess instead of his baby-sitter?” I asked Megan.

“Of course not,” she said.

“Wouldn’t you think having a governess would almost make up for his not having a father?” I asked.

“Yes, I would,” she said. We sat for a moment in silence.

“Can you teach the child French?” I asked.

“I can try,” she said.

Megan is very kind and exquisitely competent and laughs at all my jokes. Today we compared notes on how hard it was to be such strange sizes in seventh grade. She was nearly six feet tall already—now she is six-foot-two—and I was about four-foot-two. I heard this woman speak a couple of years ago who talked about our bodies being our little earth suits, and I asked Megan if she thought it would have made any difference if we’d been able to think that way at thirteen. She didn’t know. But it helped me to talk about earth suits out loud because I hadn’t thought of them in a while. It’s so easy to be mean to yourself when you’re fat and your thighs continue moving after you’ve come to a stop.

I’m trying to be extremely gentle and forgiving with myself today, having decided while I nursed Sam at dawn this morning that I’m probably just as good a mother as the next repressed, obsessive-compulsive paranoiac.

I think we’re all pretty crazy on this bus. I’m not sure I know
anyone
who’s got all the dots on his or her dice.

But once an old woman at my church said the secret is that God loves us
exactly
the way we are
and
that he loves us too much to let us stay like this, and I’m just trying to trust that.

S
am sort of played with a rattle today, but he kept whacking himself in the eye. He has huge round saucer eyes. They make me remember a Pauline Kael review years ago where she referred to someone’s eyes as big blue headlights. Megan suggested that I should get Sam little grates to cover them so that things don’t fall in.

Yesterday I didn’t have enough milk. I nursed him at 10:00 in the morning, and there wasn’t enough, he was crying for more. Julie from upstairs suggested we try a can of soy formula, and he guzzled it down like John Belushi. So I panicked and decided that all these weeks he’s been starving to death on my sock-watery milk and that his body has had to cannibalize itself for him to stay alive. Plus, he’s had another head cold recently, and of course the logical conclusion yesterday was that he is a sickly baby. Also, an addict: I’ve been giving him
Robitussin as per the Kaiser nurse’s instructions, and he
really
likes it. I felt that if he could talk, he’d be saying, “Oops, oops, time for more,” even if it had only been an hour or so and that soon he would start lying in order to get it: “No, that wasn’t me you gave it to,” he’d say, “that was another baby.”

The La Leche League—they are breast-feeding specialists—saved the day yet again. They said simply to drink tons of fluids and nurse as often as possible, and today I’m a glorious Florentine fountain of milk, standing like a birdbath in the garden with milk spouting forth from every orifice.

I’m learning to call people all the time and ask for help, which is about the hardest thing I can think of doing. I’m always suggesting that other people do it, but it really is awful at first. I tell my writing students to get into the habit of calling one another, because writing is such a lonely, scary business, and if you’re not careful you can trip off into this Edgar Allan Poe feeling of otherness. It turns out that motherhood is much the same. I’m beginning to believe what I always tell my students, which is that someone, somewhere, is always well if you’re just willing to make enough phone calls.

He lies on his back for long stretches now, totally alert and totally spaced out at the same time, like he’s on acid or in the presence of God.

•   •   •

Last night he slept from 9:00 till 2:00, and we nursed for a while, and then he slept again until 6:30. He wakes up joyful and ready to go. Somehow he has gotten it into his head that we are busy, active people and need to get up early. I lie there nursing him with sand in my eyes, looking and feeling like a snake halfway through shedding her first skin.

Yesterday Mom and Aunt Pat took care of him for a few hours, and Mom asked how much he weighed. I didn’t know. So Sam and I got on Mom’s scale together, and when the scale weighed 149, I felt on the verge of hysterics because at Kaiser a week earlier I had only weighed 137. My mom said, really nicely, “But, honey, you’re still holding the
baby,”
which absolutely had not crossed my mind. I said, almost crying, “Mommy, I’m so tired.”

I wish I could get away with one or two glasses of wine or half a Valium, or even with getting to eat my body weight in Mexican food and chocolate every couple of days. I just desperately want to check out for a couple of hours now and then. I want a little relief. I have never been all that big on reality. I’ve had every single major disorder known to woman, from alcoholism to workaholism, anything to avoid having to feel my feelings. Everything in fact except gambling, which is probably right around the corner. Come to think of it, I’ve found myself getting overstimulated at the change machines in Laundromats. Sometimes I stand there compulsively putting
in dollar bills, feeling a bit of a rush each time the four quarters shoot out.

If I weren’t nursing, if I weren’t dairy-free, I’d definitely take to bed with the Häagen-Dazs today.

H
e laughed today for the first time, when Julie from upstairs was dangling her bracelets above his head while I was changing his diaper. His laughter was like little bells. Then there was the clearest silence, a hush, before total joyous pandemonium broke out between Julie and me. Then we both stared almost heartbrokenly into his face. I thought of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” verse five:

I
had a session over the phone with my therapist today. I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn’t good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I’d told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can’t get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can’t even pretend that you have, you shouldn’t show up. You should stay home, because it’s hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.

So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.

I
got out the miniature Snickers that the little no-necks didn’t get on Halloween night, and I ate at least a dozen, even though they are not wheat-or-dairy-free. Looking back, I think it was an act of rebellion, some kind of subconscious “Fuck you” to Sam. At the time I was so busy getting stoned on the sugar that I didn’t stop to figure out what was going on. I just wanted not to feel everything so intensely. Every time I went to get another one, though, I’d feel that Sam was giving me the eye. “Honey,” I’d say, “you gotta eat them, or they go bad. Look, they have
dates
on them.” He can look very stern. The awful thing is that he was sick and colicky by dinner. It is a huge struggle tonight to treat myself like a beloved relative. I’m so sorry.

H
is arms and hands still have wills of their own. They float erratically above him, suddenly darting into his field of vision like snakes, causing him to do funny little Jack Benny double takes.

Yet at the same time, he can now hug. He really holds on when we walk or rock. And he’s
very
alert, constantly sizing up the world and then babbling away in his native Latvian.

He got his DPT shot Monday, and we both cried. It was a mean trick, because he was in the best mood, kicking and making bubbles for me and Dr. James, and then some vicious, sociopathic nurse comes in and sticks needles into his leg. He was frantic. I wept and then said to the nurse, in a teary but jocular way, “Do most mothers cry the first time?” and she looked at me with puzzled condescension and said, “No.”

Pammy came over this afternoon with a soft Babar rattle for him. I heard her telling him conspiratorially, “I’m the one who didn’t take you in and make you get hurt.” She has confessed that she thinks of me as the womb who made it possible for them to be together. She and her husband have been trying for ten years to have a baby. I don’t know why I get to have Sam, but then, she gets to have her husband.

Sam cried a lot last night. I kept remembering my friend Michelle, who would go out in the field by her house and sit in a rocking chair while Dennis took care of their first baby, Katherine, who cried all the time. Michelle just sat out there in the field for hours, rocking miserably by herself, saying over and over, “This is not a good baby.”

•   •   •

No one ever tells you about the tedium. (A friend of mine says it’s because of the
age
difference.) And no one ever tells you how crazy you’ll be, how mind-numbingly wasted you’ll be all the time. I had no idea. None. But just like when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our dad, it turns out that you’ve already gone ahead and done it before you realize you couldn’t possibly do it, not in a million years.

H
e inches around the living room like a spy. He inched off the bed again and got wedged sideways between the bed and the wall. My friend Deirdre spent the night a few days ago and took care of us, and she watched him flailing around in his bassinet and said, “It’s so pathetic being a baby, wanting to walk and crawl and run,” and I said, “It’s like
‘Johnny Got His Gun,’
 ” and we watched him together for a while. I sort of felt for a minute like I imagine women must feel when they and their husbands watch their baby together. It felt really great, and then I got really sad. Now as I watch he’s inching all over the place, obviously trying to implement his plans for world peace.

His eyes are turning brown. Pammy and I went for a walk
along the salt marsh a few days ago. Everything was red with pickleweed, and even though his eyes mostly look blue, in the bright sunlight his pupils were so tiny that you could see that the ring of iris nearest the pupil was definitely turning brown. What a clever baby.

I
wish he could take longer naps in the afternoon. He falls asleep and I feel I could die of love when I watch him, and I think to myself that he is what angels look like. Then I doze off, too, and it’s like heaven, but sometimes only twenty minutes later he wakes up and begins to make his gritchy rodent noises, scanning the room wildly. I look blearily over at him in the bassinet, and think, with great hostility, Oh, God, he’s raising his loathsome reptilian head again.

When I go over to the bassinet to pick him up, though, he looks up at me like I’m Coco the clown—he beams, and makes raspberries, and does frantic bicycle kicks like he’s doing his baby aerobics. Then I feel I can go on.