Domestic Affairs (7 page)

So I bake cookies and stare for half an hour into the tropical-fish tank, watching a cobra-skin guppy circle a plastic model of a scuba diver, who endlessly raises and lowers a piece of plastic buried treasure. I fold laundry and sort old baby clothes, bury my face in the little T-shirts, remembering the one (my “middle child,” “the older brother,” people have already started calling my toddler son) who wore them last. And I read to Charlie the story of
Babar and His Children
—chronicle of the triple birth, to Queen Celeste, of baby elephants named Pom, Flora, and Alexander—and try to explain an illustration that shows Babar watering a flower and seeing in its center the image of a baby elephant. (Babar sitting down to read and seeing, on the pages of his book, a baby elephant. Poised over his royal stationery to write proclamations and producing a drawing of a baby elephant. I know the feeling.)

The strange part is what follows. That what this is, really, is the original calm before the storm. That as the full-term pregnant woman sits, face to the sun, in a calm tidal pool, staring out to a sea with not a whitecap in sight, suddenly, she never knows when, there comes a tidal wave. I have known plenty of women to dread the birth and afterward to curse the agony they went through. For myself, I look forward to the event with the anticipation of a passionate surfer. More accurately, with the anticipation of one who never could surf, or ski, or stay on a skateboard, even. The last one chosen for every school field hockey and basketball team she ever played on. Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in my gym class failures. And discovered instead that I’d finally found my sport.

My son Charlie was two days overdue the night a call came from Canada to tell me that my father, in a Victoria hospital with pneumonia, was not likely to live through to morning. Not much to be done about it: He couldn’t have heard me if I tried to speak to him, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I put down the receiver and told Steve, who had been watching the Boston Celtics play Los Angeles. Then I felt the sickest I have ever been in my life, and my legs began to shake so badly that I lay down on the bed and he lay across my shins to steady me. We had seen a baby of ours born, on that same bed, four years before, and still I didn’t recognize the symptoms I was feeling as the transition stage of labor. Just to be safe we called the midwife, a forty-minute drive away, suggesting that she come over. But things happened very fast then, and five minutes later I heard a sound in the room, coming from me, that I had heard only one other time in my life—when I pushed our daughter out into the world. Steve felt for the cord around the baby’s neck and guided him as he corkscrewed out—our ten-pound boy. The next morning when our daughter came downstairs to find the top of her brother’s head sticking out from under the covers of our bed, where he slept between us, what she said was, “My dream came true.” And the thing that always strikes me with amazement is how, in a house where there had been three people a few hours earlier, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.

I think of my children’s births—carry them around with me—every day of my life. Sometimes it will be just a fleeting image: My friend Stephanie coming into the room, the day our daughter was born, with a bagful of oranges I’d asked her to bring over; seeing them spill out in all directions on the bed. Steve holding out a towel he’d warmed on our woodstove to wrap around a baby who would be born before the towel had time to cool off again. Audrey’s thick tuft of black hair that I saw and touched before I even knew the sex of the still unborn person it belonged to. Her hands on her cheeks, like some vaudeville chorus girl pantomiming surprise, as she shot out. The feeling of a newborn baby’s skin. Eyes wide open, looking at light for the first time.

One more thing I want to say: If I had been unable to have babies myself, I would have grieved over never having known what it’s like to carry a baby, to feel movement inside my own body, and most of all I would have missed, terribly, watching my child born. But the world is full of adoptive parents and people who had their babies before the return of natural childbirth and the acceptance of fathers in the delivery room, and though I have heard some of those men and women speak with regret over having missed out on their children’s births, they didn’t miss out on their children. As for me, I will never know what it’s like to ride on a hang glider or execute a triple toe loop in Sarajevo. I love riding the wave of childbirth—love even how hard it is—and when the moment comes that I know I’ve done it for the last time, I’ll mourn. But birth is an experience and parenthood is a state of being; the one passes, the other never ends.

It’s happening again: that old baby-longing. And the fact that I already have three children doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that I’m so tired at the end of every day, I haven’t stayed awake through the end of a movie in months. Doesn’t matter that I have rubber bands on all my cupboard doors to keep Willy out, and that we have to hide the egg cartons in the back of the refrigerator, covered in aluminum foil, now that he’s discovered the joys of taking out and breaking eggs, a dozen at a time. It doesn’t matter that I also dream of taking off for a weekend alone with Steve, that I long to do a kind of serious, uninterrupted work that’s simply not possible for the mothers of young children. It doesn’t matter that we can’t afford another child—financially, emotionally, or physically. All I know is, last week my friend Alice had a baby, and when I hold her, I want one too.

I guess there are some women around who manage simply to give birth to the number of children that’s practical and appropriate for their situation, and then stop, with not a backward glance toward pregnancy, childbirth, and the world of newborn infants. Women who, given the choice between a bottle of Chanel No. 5 or the smell you find on a newborn’s head (and nowhere else on earth), would go for the Chanel. As for me, I don’t suppose I’ll ever reach the stage where the sight of a new baby no longer gives me pangs.

It’s irrelevant how many children you have: I could have a dozen, and still, if one of them wasn’t a baby, there’d be an empty place in my life, a vacancy. Because having children is not the same—simply not the same—as having an infant.

I’m not the only one I know who’s addicted. My friend Rachel—divorced, the mother of three marvelous children—waited three days before heading over to check on Alice’s baby. “I had to steel myself,” she said. “I knew once I picked her up, I’d never want to put her down.”

Then there’s my friend Sally, the mother of four children. Two complete generations of them, she has, with two daughters by her first marriage, in their early twenties, and two sons from her second marriage, both in preschool. And still, though she’s forty-four now, and though she runs a successful toy store, though her life is full and good, she longed for one more baby. Even after her miscarriage two years ago, she kept hoping. Even after the second miscarriage, she hoped. After the third miscarriage, when her doctor told her it looked as if she was simply too old to carry a fetus to term successfully, she had to try again. She’s six months pregnant now. By the time the baby’s born she’ll be forty-five.

As for me, I’ve passed on the maternity jumpers, but kept the one pair of stretch-front jeans that always were my favorites. I’m only thirty-two, I remind myself. We could hold off for seven years, and still there’d be time for one more baby before I’m forty. If it isn’t going to happen, I’d rather not know now—I’d rather harbor the hope for a few years, anyway, that I haven’t met all of my children yet.

You have to quit sometime. There’s no such thing as never having a last baby, it’s only a question of when, and which one. Because though the capacity for loving children may be infinite, the capacity for raising them has its limits.

When I was eighteen, I thought everything was possible: thought I could have a wonderful, successful career, an exciting, uninterruptedly romantic marriage, a perfect home, good food on the table every night with flowers from my garden, and six children too. I see it still in young women starting out today: that innocent belief not only in themselves, but in the world, too. Life will be kind. Money will be plentiful. Babies will sleep. In-laws will take the kids for weekends. The sun will shine. Every generation has to learn, all over again—as if for the first time, as if all the others hadn’t learned this already—just how hard it all is, and that along with all sorts of good things, every year also brings with it a narrowing of possibilities. Every month there’s a child who could have been born, who would’ve been loved—the one who might’ve been an artist, might’ve been a major-league pitcher—and there is simply no way in the world to give birth to every one of them. And even if you did manage to have every potential child, you’d lose something else—which is the time and space to know and savor them. And even if you managed that—to have the children, and to raise them right—there would be other doors closed. Books unread or unwritten. Trips not taken. A husband or a self not sufficiently tended.

“I want to be something else in life besides a dad,” says my husband, who is a very good dad, and doesn’t ever want to be a less good one. As for me, I rail all the time at the frustrations of taking care of little children. I wish I could swim clear across the lake in summer instead of doing my laps always parallel to shore, where I can keep an eye on my sons. But still, in spite of all that, I hold on to a little hand-knit blue sweater with a yellow duck on the front (size three months) and a pink rabbit-fur-trimmed baby hat, and even when I hand over to my friend Laurie a boxful of Audrey’s outgrown dresses, I say (trying to sound casual), “If you get around to it, you might give them back when Leah doesn’t need them anymore.” I don’t want to burn my bridges yet.

Today we had one of those mornings when I would have given my three best pairs of salt and pepper shakers (two china bananas, the miniature baseball mitt and ball, the plastic penguins), plus my entire freezer’s worth of frozen raspberries, my favorite eight-year-old pink chenille bathrobe, and our last jar full of homemade maple syrup, for a half hour more of sleep.

We stayed up late last night. Came home past midnight, fixed ourselves a snack, had (crazily) a cup of coffee. Got to bed around two
A.M.
(The staying up part is never what’s hard. What’s hard comes later.)

Six-fifteen
A.M.
A yelp from upstairs: Willy. And then a crash (he leaps out of his crib unassisted now, but you wouldn’t want to watch). Followed by: a few bars of “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah.” “Go-bots. More than meets the eye!”
Thump, thump, thump
on the steps. (He skids down, on his bottom, one riser at a time.) Then the familiar sound of footed pajama bottoms scuffing across the kitchen floor. The refrigerator door opening. (He gets his own bottles now, too.) The bedroom door opening. Little feet rushing across the floor. The sound of a toy chain saw, buzzing in my ear. (Directly overhead, in fact. And to think that last December, Steve and I actually went to five toy stores to locate this item.)

And finally, as he pounces on top of us, the words “I want my breakfast!”

Of course I prolong this stage, of being half awake but still at least prone and under my quilt, as long as possible. Willy brings me a book to read in bed (dumps it on my head, usually), and if I’m lucky it will be one I know so well that I can recite the words without opening more than one eye. At which point he will reach over to the night table for my glasses and put them on my face. Upside down, generally.

In my eight years of rude awakenings, I have developed a few tricks, of course. Feigning sleep is one. Sighing dramatically, then flopping onto my stomach, head under the pillow. Toddlers know how to handle that one, though: by sitting on your face. Particularly effective when the toddler in question is still sporting last night’s diaper.

I may give my child an errand to run, to the farthest reaches of the house. (“Go bring me a purple marker.” “Have you seen your bulldozer lately?”) Then he’ll—briefly—dash off. (More scurrying of footed PJs on floorboards, bumping back upstairs, rummaging in toy bins.) But now I know that my reprieve is only momentary; I get no peace: I lie there like a patient waiting for the dentist, who has stepped out for a moment only to return with the drill.

Sometimes I try to toss the ball to my husband’s court—a dirty trick, no question. “Dad will read you that book,” I say. “Go ask Dad to slice up your banana.” Feet scuffing around to the other side of the bed. Pouncing. The sound of book jacket hitting skull. Followed by, “Ask Mom.”

So I adjust my glasses on my nose—right side up—and open this morning’s selection, which, if I’m lucky, will be
The Pokey Little Puppy
or Curious George. And if I’m not so lucky, an ancient but well-loved comic book,
The Adventures of the Incredible Hulk,
or a three-year-old program from Disney World on Ice. I may, after the second reading, try my final ploy: “Now why don’t you read it to me, Will?” (Then I can close my eyes for two more precious moments.) But by now I know the game is up. Six-thirty finds me out of bed and in the kitchen, making coffee. Rounding up Charlie and Audrey. Packing the school lunches. Pouring out the cereal.

Now the truth is, even before I had children I was never one to loll around in bed till some scandalous hour like eight-fifteen. I always believed in getting a good early start on the day (and on the rare occasions when I’d sleep in, I invariably felt guilty). But nowadays, my fantasies turn not so much to desert islands, moonlit cruises, romantic interludes by candlelight, as they do to sleep. Unbroken sleep. Eight hours. Maybe even twelve. I can’t remember the last time I had a night like that.

As parents, we are always quick to point out to our children, “You’re overtired,” and remind them, “That’s why you’re cranky.” (Even now, a quarter century later, I can still remember the terrible frustration I used to feel, as a child, hearing my mother speak those words. “I AM NOT!” I would scream. “See,” she would say calmly, as I do now to my children. “That just shows what I mean.”) But nobody gets more overtired than the grown-ups (mothers in particular). I’ll bet it’s the number one occupational hazard of parenthood.