Operating Instructions (7 page)

Sam is so much bigger every day, so much more alert. It’s mind-boggling that my body knows how to churn out this milk that he is growing on. The thought of what my body would produce if my mind had anything to do with it gives
me the chill. It’s just too horrible to think about. It might be something frogs could spawn in, but it wouldn’t be good for anything else. I’ve had the secret fear of all mothers that my milk is not good enough, that it is nothing more than sock water, water that socks have been soaking in, but Sam seems to be thriving even though he’s a pretty skinny little guy.

I’m going to have an awards banquet for my body when all of this is over.

Once Peg said that she knew God had given her this marvelous brain but that unfortunately he had put her mind inside of it. That pretty much says it for me.

I wonder if it is normal for a mother to adore her baby so desperately and at the same time to think about choking him or throwing him down the stairs. It’s incredible to be this fucking tired and yet to have to go through the several hours of colic every night. It would be awful enough to deal with if you were feeling healthy and upbeat. It’s a bit much when you’re feeling like total dog shit. When he woke me up at 4:00 this morning to nurse, I felt like I was dying. I felt like getting up to pull down the shades and wave good-bye to all my people, but I was too tired.

He’s losing his hair, but his acne is definitely better. My acne is about the same, but on the other hand, my hair isn’t falling
out. At least that’s something. The way I’m feeling, it’s a miracle that my hair isn’t falling out in huge clumps and that I haven’t developed a clubfoot.

There was some famous writer, I think it may have been Tolstoy, who said you must be wounded into writing but that you shouldn’t write until the wound has healed. But I just want to keep typing up these notes from the middle of the hurt, although maybe they won’t amount to anything.

I am definitely aware of the huge wound that having a baby makes—in addition to the fact that your ya-ya gets so torn up. Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. Terminal cancer would certainly be a setback, but I actually thought I could get through it. And I always felt that if something happened to Steve or Pammy, if they died, it would be over for me for a long time but that I’d somehow bounce back. In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time
I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.

God, they sure shit a lot, don’t they? He pooped on my leg the other morning at church. Every diaper has that mustardy baby color to it. It’s almost all he does. It’s his
life
. Every twenty minutes, you hear him starting to go again. Pammy says he sounds like an aquarium.

We went to see Sam’s doctor at Kaiser again, Dr. James, whom we love more than life itself. It turns out that my older brother, John, landscaped his garden years ago. So James likes us already because he likes his garden. You nonreligious types think, Well, that’s a funny little coincidence, but we Holy Rollers say that coincidence is just God working anonymously.

I tried to get Sam to sleep all morning so he’d be in good shape for James, but it took two hours of rocking and nursing and dancing around to Joan Baez before he dropped off. I’ve heard that babies prefer higher tones. How did they find this out? Did they give them little questionnaires? Did they have specially trained social workers interview them in little baby-dolphin voices?

H
ave I mentioned how much I hate expressing milk? I do it nearly every day so there will be bottles of milk on hand for whoever comes by to take care of Sam, but I hate the fucking breast pump. It’s the ultimate bovine humiliation, and it hurts, the suction is so strong. You feel plugged into a medieval milking machine that turns your poor little gumdrop nipples into purple slugs with the texture of rhinoceros hide. You sit there furtively pumping away, producing nebbishy little sprays on the side of the pump bottle until finally you’ve got half a cup of milk and nipples six inches long. It’s so incredibly unsexy and secretive, definitely not something you could ever mention on “Wheel of Fortune,” nothing you’d ever find in a
Cosmo
piece about ten ways to turn on your lover—crotchless underpants and a breast pump. I sit there in the kitchen miserably pumping away, feeling like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
, pumping out a bottle of milk for the little infant Antichrist. Yesterday the refrigerator wasn’t working, so after I produced a small bottle of breast milk, I had to store it in a wide-mouth thermos filled with ice, like it was a severed finger that I was about to rush to the hospital to have sewn back on. It was too ridiculous for words.

•   •   •

He loves rocking in the rocking chair. He loves his pacifier. I tried his pacifier myself a few days ago, sat there sucking on it while I watched TV, and then I threw it down in fear, absolutely convinced, old addict that I am, that I’d get hooked immediately. By the end of the week I’d be abusing it, lying about how often I was using it, hiding it in the hamper.…

Dr. James said Sam is wonderfully healthy, nine pounds, twelve ounces, twenty-one inches long, and he was like a Gerber baby on the examining table. Here I was telling James how terrible the colic was, what a difficult baby he is, and Sam was being Stevie Wonder. James said that if the colic was severe, he would prescribe a drug that has a little belladonna in it. It isn’t
severe
, it’s just three or four hours of kvetching every night, but I was tempted to lie to get my son some drugs. Still, I said, “No, no, I don’t think so—you see, I’m an addict—it’s been three years that I’ve been clean and sober, and I just don’t feel okay about the drugs,” and he said to me very patiently, very gently, “Oh, but you see,
you
wouldn’t be taking the drugs—you would give them to your
baby.”

There’s a part of me that doesn’t trust that I would give him the right amount. I’d give him a bit more. I have never once in my life taken the prescribed dosage. I even abuse the kitty’s ear-mite medicine. If it says to spray in two little blasts, I’ll spray in three. At least I don’t use it on myself—yet.

W
e had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00
A.M
. What a joke. I feel like thin glass, like I might crack. I was very rough changing him at 4:00 when he wouldn’t stop crying. I totally understand child abuse now. I really do. He was really sobbing and the gas pain was obviously unbearable, and I felt helpless and in a rage and so tired and fucked up that I felt I should be in a home.

I can’t stop crying. I cried all night, along with the baby. Pammy came over and brought two sacks of groceries, and put clean sheets on our bed, and helped us both have a bath, and just in general talked me down as if I were on a window ledge. The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I’m in the bamboo cage under cold water in
The Deer Hunter
. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this must be what it feels like to be a crack baby. It’s a little like PMS on mild psychedelics.

Yesterday we took a fabulous Polaroid of Pammy and Sam. Pammy is holding him up under his arms, and he has this quintessentially alarmed but very game look on his face, as though he were some great little kid you were lowering into a seat on the Ferris wheel.

H
e just slept for four hours in a row. It feels like a small miracle. We nursed for a long time, and I liked him so much.

Then he was very wired and couldn’t go back to sleep. My vagina ached terribly. I kept trying to push his pacifier in, but his jaw was sort of gritted, the way you are when you’re coming down off cocaine. I just couldn’t get the pacifier in. I kept feeling like I was trying to push a bit into the mouth of a wild horse.

Y
ou won’t believe this. I tell you, I
will
be out there on Market Street wearing a sandwich board for Jesus. Because
the baby smiled
. It was his first real smile that wasn’t from gas. Pammy has claimed non-gas smiles for days now, but I’ve always just rolled my eyes at her. Yesterday she announced that he was smiling, and I looked up derisively at the ceiling, and then I heard her cooing to him, “It’ll just be our little secret.”

R
eal tears leave his eyes now. It is almost more than I can take. Before, he’d be sobbing but there were no tears. Now there are. It seems an unfair advantage. Between the tears and the cooing and his crazy drunken-old-man smiles, it’s almost unbearable. There’s so much joy and pain and love and wonder in my chest and behind my eyes that it’s like
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. It’s like Patsy Cline’s voice.

The Giants got into the World Series today; the A’s got in yesterday. The people in my family have been Giants fans for as long as I can remember. We hate the A’s. We can’t help it. I was explaining to Sam that Jose Canseco shouldn’t get to play because of the obvious steroid use, that there is something really wrong with the guy, something really off, like with Ike Turner or George Bush. Sam studied my face intently, seeming to hang on my every word, all but nodding, looking at me like I was the risen Christ. I can’t help it—I like that in a baby.

I just can’t get over how much babies cry. I really had no idea what I was getting into. To tell you the truth, I thought it would be more like getting a cat.

•   •   •

Now it’s midnight. I can’t believe I’m in such a good mood, because he has been screaming since 10:00 tonight. I am not speaking to him. He is on the futon having an episode. Every so often I pick him up and try to nurse him or walk him for a while until my yoni aches again, and then I put him back down on the futon. I’m annoyed with him. I don’t think he’s handling things very maturely.

I can’t believe I have a book coming out soon. After a lifetime of thinking of myself as a writer, I simply cannot imagine how on earth that book managed to get itself written. It seems like someone else must have written it for me, someone who does not cry all the time and have six-inch nipples. I am grateful to whoever that was. I got my first hardback copy the other day and flipped through it. It looks and reads like a real, functioning person was involved, and there is no one fitting that description at this address.

I can’t even get my teeth brushed some days. I found my toothbrush near the sink one afternoon with a neat stripe of toothpaste on the bristles from the night before, all ready to use.

Plus I no longer ever have any free hands. If I were going to write, I’d have to sit at my desk like Christie Nolan, with a unicorn stick on my forehead, my mother behind me pushing my head toward the keyboard so I could bang out letters with
the stick. But she’d secretly be wanting to play with the baby instead, and she’d stand there feeling all bitter and resentful that my Aunt Pat was getting to hold him more than she was, and then she’d end up being really rough with my head, banging out the letters too hard, like she was hammering a stake into the ground.

Last night I found a baby-sitter named Megan, a lovely young six-foot-two woman from Kansas who took one of my writing workshops a couple of years ago. I think she is going to end up being a kind of underpaid au pair for us. I am already beginning to think of her as Sam’s governess. Last night was the first time I’ve left him with anyone besides Pammy or relatives. Even though Megan looked very sweet and kind, by the time I had driven to downtown Mill Valley, four blocks away, I had decided that she was a hooker. By the Golden Gate Bridge, I had her pegged as a crack addict. But when I got home from my board meeting in the city, I was so profoundly relieved that Sam was still alive and wasn’t covered with hickeys that I gave Megan my Toyota so she could drive home. Then I spent the rest of the evening worrying that I didn’t know this person from Adam’s housecat; I became convinced at one point that I would never see her again, that she and her pimp had totaled my car and left town. This morning she brought me a bouquet of flowers she had picked from her
garden; she handed me the car keys and then rushed over to pick up the baby, while I stood there feeling like a complete idiot.

H
e is losing his hair in a perfect ring that circles his head, like the ring of Saturn. He looks like either a very young or a very
very
old Buddhist monk.

L
ast night I decided that it is totally nuts to believe in Christ, that it is every bit as crazy as being a Scientologist or a Jehovah’s Witness. But a priest friend said solemnly, “Scientologists and Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are crazier than they
have
to be.”

Then something truly amazing happened. A man from church showed up at our front door, smiling and waving to me and Sam, and I went to let him in. He is a white man named Gordon, fiftyish, married to our associate pastor, and after exchanging pleasantries he said, “Margaret and I wanted to do something for you and the baby. So what I want to ask is, What if a fairy appeared on your doorstep and said that he or she would do any favor for you at all, anything you wanted around the house that you felt too exhausted to do by yourself and too ashamed to ask anyone else to help you with?”