After Birth (3 page)

I could barely move for days, let alone entertain rational thoughts about the soft, small bundle of bottomless need they placed in my arms later, when I awoke in the wrong kind of pain entirely.

We were sent home after the requisite, terrible bowel movement. In the shocking days that followed I saw the requisite awfulness: the baby harmed, the baby hurt, the baby suffering, the baby hurled to the ground, the baby’s head crushed against the wall, destroyed. Ongoing fever dream. In the grip of a kind of black magic for which I was entirely unprepared. Woke in a sweat from intermittent sleep to find him still—oh thank God, thank God—breathing.

He’s breathing okay he’s breathing okay he’s breathing okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I wandered too near the white-hot root of things. Flummoxed. Wedded now to a possibility of loss so extreme I could barely breathe myself.

The baby books said nothing about this. Days became nights became days became nights. The baby books said nothing! I held him tight, held him close. Would not let go. The harm that could come to him! The consequence of just one misstep! Unthinkable. Unbearable. What now? What next?

I’ll take him, babe
, Paul would say.
Give him to me
.
Try and get some rest.

My infected incision oozed, tight phony grin of a sadistic monster. The necessary course of antibiotics.

I had died, was dead, only a ghost, not fully gone. Watch him breathe: is he breathing? Hold him close. Move slow, wrap yourself around him. Easy, easy. Don’t hurt him. Careful. Is he alive? The world so hideously perilous and the baby a raw egg, only of its kind.

Paul’s mother in Ohio called every third day.

How are you doing? I don’t want to bother you.

How am I. I don’t really know. I don’t know how people are supposed to do this
.
I don’t know how to do this
.

New babies are a lot of work!

I need help
, I told her.
I can’t do this
. My voice was low. She’s good people. Retired secretary, grew up on a farm, hardcore quilter, loves her some sitcoms.

Don’t be silly. Of course you can.

A woman who’s known her whole life how to grow fruits and vegetables, how to can them in the fall, how to sew a dress from a pattern, how to knit a sweater, how to care for the sick. A master of the womanly arts. She was my best bet. Surely she would hightail it over here immediately, show me how. Demonstrate so I might learn.

This child’s mother needs to come and get him now
, I said.
Someone needs to come and get him. Everything hurts. I’m so tired.

How’s the weather out there
, she wondered.
I’d better let you go
.

A year later, now—happy birthday, moppet—and still I’m working hard to stand up straight, wearing pajamas all the time, avoiding the scar at all costs, suffering these surprise dunks in the rage tank. And occasionally people I barely know cheerfully wonder:
are you going to have another?

We’re not to rest until the raccoon is gone. The ways in which he might destroy our lives and house are many: chew through electrical wiring, piss and shit all over the insides of walls, lead others in. He could die and rot. He could have rabies. He could terrorize the baby. He could have babies with rabies who will terrorize the baby.

Will brings over two enormous wire cage traps and sets them up on opposite walls of the attic. While he’s at it he replaces our screens with storms, eliminates the draft. He stays for couscous and mushrooms, makes the baby giggle, tells us a story about a critter problem in a house a mile downriver. Something about a family of animals in a sealed-off wall, months later a HAZMAT crew.

But nah, don’t worry
, he says. He clamps Paul on the shoulder—
’night, bro
—offers me a sweet, somber salute from the steps. Will’s a smart guy. Not smart as in advanced degree; smart as in knows how to be.

Another Mina sighting this morning on the way to day care. She was lumbering up Crisp and Jer’s front steps, keys in hand. Couldn’t bring myself to approach her, so instinctively I labeled her a total bitch. That’s my automatic thing with women. They’re guilty until proven innocent.

Her pregnancy is surprising. She’s well north of forty, and the Internet offers nothing on the subject of a man. The Internet offers precious little in general, which of course is the only way you can remotely respect anyone: when you don’t find too much bullshit self-generated virtual PR.

Four days a week, so that I might “work on my dissertation,” I hand the baby over to Nasreen at day care. He wails
maaaa-maaaaa
all desperate, reaches for me with little clutching hands. Pure awful. Full-body apocalypse.

He puts on good show for you
, Nasreen says. She is Pakistani and has seven children, the oldest four of whom still live in Pakistan with her sister.
He is fine. You leave, he is fine
.

She shoos me out, rolls her eyes. These stupid mothers.

It’s like my heart’s being ripped out of my chest, and I’m supposed to walk away like no biggie. I hide on the other side of the door for two minutes until his wailing abates, then slink off like a criminal. Nausea, regret, darkness, light, relief, freedom, joy, ache, guilt, confusion, elation: all in equal measure, like your first orgasm.

When I am with my precious peanut, I itch to hand him over; when I hand him over, I itch to take him back and never let him go.

My dissertation is not happening.

Mostly I read celebrity blind items, stalk successful acquaintances, check the prep time for adzuki beans, look at headlines, make the bed, scroll through surreal early pictures of the baby, tiny terrifying thing. Generally waste time as though there are endless tomorrows.

Here’s Mina in a band photo circa 1988, wearing thrift shop clothes. Not fashionable thrift shop clothes, mind you—filthy, ill-fitting thrift shop clothes. Hair’s matted. They’re under a fire escape in an alley, brick walls close around. Kelly is squatting, cold. Stefani stands over her, arms crossed. Mina leans back against a wall, indifferent and apart, glancing over at the camera like it’s an unattractive stranger requesting a hand job. She would have been around twenty, then. The youngest. Cheeks like pillows.

A dimly lit video of a reading in a bar, her voice gravelly and worn. I love how she isn’t all toothy, doesn’t exclaim and prance and coo and spin that
do you like me gosh I really hope you do because I am very likable
shit, which seems in a lot of women to get only higher-pitched as years unfold. She doesn’t care whether or not you like her. She’s wearing an ugly T-shirt, her hair is dirty. She’s not worried about whether you think she’s pretty. She’s reading a poem. A good one. You can get on board or you can go fuck yourself.

And here: vaguely embarrassed in an interview with a preening blogger.

And here: forty-nine seconds of grainy footage from a club in Eugene decades ago. The sound is bad. She’s in the back, barely visible, playing her bass sideways, eyes closed. Like she’s trying to forget about the audience. Like the audience is a mild inconvenience. Stefani apes for the camera from behind the drums, and Kelly screams at the mic, attacking her guitar, disturbed and desperate. They never made it past those clubs, never moved beyond those small shows. But a lot of people who saw them felt transformed. Bootlegs circulated. One band formed in homage got pretty big.

Here: on a gray day in Maine, the author photo. Hair blowing across her unsmiling face. Muddy boots.

Okay. Enough. Something else. Recent study shows national 12 percent increase in male-fetus miscarriages during the month following the World Trade Center attacks. Scientists discover a type of stress hormone secreted in the brain while subjects surf the Internet. Some bitch on a Southwest flight smacks her baby for crying; heroic flight attendant immediately takes custody of baby. Woman updates her status with a brief, misspelled plea for forgiveness before driving herself and her four children off a bridge. The bees continue to disappear. At least 120 dead bodies lie frozen all along the peak ascent of Mount Everest. Woman with fake smile tells odorous tale of egg donors, gestational surrogates; accompanying photo showcases twin “miracles” trussed like holiday turkeys.

I stare at the screen this way for a while. Delicious, terrible inaction. And soon enough it’s time to get the baby from Nasreen’s.

Just want to sit here instead, in the fading light from the big window, in the sonic embrace of the speakers. Nasreen takes good care of him. Nasreen knows how. It’s good for him there. Better, even, probably.

There’s a curt email from Marianne about the dissertation. How’s the thinking coming? Any commitment to any particular focus?

Simultaneously I yearn for the sweet munchkin—what have you accomplished today you terrible wench why aren’t you with your munchkin don’t you know your munchkin needs you get off your fat ass and GO—and continue to sit here, precious peanut in someone else’s arms.

Does Marianne actually think I’m working on my dissertation? Does she think I give a flying fuck about my dissertation? It’s all I can do to bathe occasionally, keep the house reasonably tidy, feed us, launder, get some sleep. Literally: all I can do.

Like I give a shit about my dissertation.

Your creative energy is being utilized elsewhere
, a kindly massage therapist informed me as pregnancy wore on. Then she hugged me, did some acupressure, some Reiki.

So the dissertation thing is pretty much a lie. But you need an identity, some interest and occupation outside of having a kid, you just do. Otherwise the kid has to be your sole interest and occupation, and we all know how
that
works out for everyone.

Our house was probably owned by some terrible textile executive at the end of the empire. I imagine him depressed, insolvent on the cusp of the Great Depression. He shoots himself in the head, a letter on the desk for his wife (the second; the first died in childbirth) and one for his mistress (a scullery maid, perhaps?). The den must have been showered with blood and brain, the children screaming, the house cursed, any lurking unhappiness here simply the result. Places hold things; you have to be an asshole not to acknowledge that. Bodies, houses, earth: feelings, energy, spirit. Deny them if you must, they don’t care. Call them what you will.

It’s got built-in bookshelves and delicate gold-leaf floral wallpaper so old and faded it’s gorgeous once again. Before we moved in it had sat empty for three years after the very last of the maiden aunts died at ninety-seven in a nursing home. It’s got original windows and deep mahogany pocket shutters. The kitchen must have been state-of-the-art, a real point of pride back in 1920, when the future looked bright. The fledgling brood so full of promise, the young couple expecting their first child, laughing together, all life’s horrors still to come.

At the baby’s sixth-month checkup a pediatric nurse asked a series of robotic questions—
have you thought about harming yourself or the baby are there guns in your house has the baby’s father ever threatened you are you depressed in any way
. I didn’t say I imagined shooting myself twenty times a day. I didn’t say I took strange, enormous comfort in these visions. I said
there are no guns in our house
. I said
um I guess a little depressed sort of yeah
. She made a decisive mark on my chart, sent in the doctor. Nice guy, vegetarian, makes intelligent small talk while he does his exam, doesn’t try to sell us on all the vaccines all at once. Told me to get as much help around the house as we could afford. Told me to find a group.

No idea how to find help, but okay, a group. Drove up to Albany a couple times.

Lots of the women in the group had surgeries, too. They either didn’t speak of it or they spoke of it as perfectly normal, which, I guess, hey, it is. They spoke of Zumba, stroller recalls, nursery schools, new hibachi place out by the mall.

Who knew motherhood could be a mostly material experience? We’d sit in Starbucks rooting around in pastel-camouflage diaper bags for chew toys and muslin wraps while women without babies gave us endless dirty looks. Me and this one silent, dark-eyed woman the only ones breastfeeding; the others busy with chemistry experiments: powders, cold packs, bottles.

The poor babies were beside the point, like half-forgotten elderly consigned to our care. The girl babies looked like drag queens: ruffles and bows, a flower-and-rhinestone headpiece. One thusly adorned kept giving me a hilariously cranky look like
can you believe this shit?
She was cool. I winked at her like
sorry, honey, I know, but it’s not forever, I swear
.

One of the moms had elective surgery because she just
didn’t really like the whole unknown part
and
really wanted him to get here in time for his first Christmas
. Another, a marathoner with the calves to prove it, called childbirth
unnecessary
.

Drag queen’s mom said
I’m not that great with pain
and Dave was just grossed out by the whole thing, so we decided just get it over with
. She went on to tell about how she was administered a muscle relaxant by mistake mid-surgery. When she realized she couldn’t breathe, there was madness trying to get the baby out before
it
got dosed and she very nearly died on the table and the kid was in the NICU for a week but
we got a free room out of it and they were suuuuper nice ’cause Dave said they were worried we might sue
.

One was sent home two days post-surgery only to pass out cold in the bathroom in septic shock; they had to leave the newborn with a neighbor they barely knew while they got her to the emergency room with a nicked bowel.

One’s due date had been completely miscalculated, so when they dove in, the baby was underweight, couldn’t breathe on its own, spent three weeks in the NICU.