Some Assembly Required (3 page)

“Tom totally stayed out of the energy. He just stood there as if he was basically uninterested, but then when you and Trudy left, he held a space for me to really go off on you guys. Then he pulled me back in, to just him and me, once I was finished. He said: ‘Breathe. Keep it simple. My mother has driven me crazy for sixty years.’”

It has been high energy at my usually dull, quiet house. Jax; Sam and Amy, who sometimes bicker, and who are vaporous and otherworldly with fatigue; Trudy, on a mattress in the kitchen nook; and the two big dogs and the cat, who is bitter. Jax mostly sleeps, nurses, poops, blinks at you with black goggle eyes, pees on you while you are changing him, passes out. Amy’s mom is social and talkative, which is hard for me because I am usually just with myself all day. Trudy and Amy don’t always get along. It is a pretty typical mother-daughter situation. Amy and Sam have huge needs for food, laundry, sometimes companionship, often isolation, but don’t always know which, so it is exhausting to tiptoe around if they are not getting along, or to get dismissed, even when I am in my loveliest, least intrusive, most saintly mode.

It is crowded and fraught here sometimes—as if everyone has PMS at once, including Jax, and tiny Amy with these now gigantic 36G breasts, often exposed, and I get sick of seeing them, as she is frequently topless in their room because Jax nurses so much and her bra hurts her nipples, and under stress, I become
National Geographic
–averse. I don’t even especially like Sam’s going around without a shirt on. I want to shout, “Everyone must have clothes on when he or she is in my hut! And please use the forks, which you’ll find in the basket in the center of the table.”

Other times, it’s easy village living, Trudy and I happily doing housework together a lot, Amy nursing the baby every two hours, all of us changing these truly disgusting mustardy diapers from the black lagoon. I remember thinking when Sam was newborn: How can this magical precious being produce such
filth
? I used to wonder if Sam was doing this out of baby spite, taking my glorious milk and turning it into such a foul product. And how could such voluminous waste come out of such a tiny vessel? It would be as if a newborn kitten shat a whole haggis.

Yesterday I was walking around the house with Jax, who was sleeping in my arms, and we really were the ultimate portrait of what heaven will be like. But when we came into Amy and Sam’s bedroom, they were fighting about whether to separate or not. Just then I wished I had a gun so Jax and I could shoot our way out of this messy situation, and then I remembered: Oh, wait—
they’re
the parents. Rats.

So I transformed myself into Red Cross Field Station Management Nurse, and mobilized Amy, Trudy, and Jax for his first stroller walk to the redwood park. That was lovely, and great for Sam to have a little space, but I felt the burden of the fight and our exhaustion. The small children on the structures at the park looked like linebackers and Slavs compared with Jax.

I sneaked out that night, to be alone in the car, with the radio off and a bag of medicinal chocolate, although I had already gained four pounds in the hospital cafeteria during
our stay, and felt like a fat old granny. When I got back home, Sam was mean to me because I had forgotten to buy cereal, and Amy was mad at Trudy for talking too much, so Trudy and I sat on the couch together, with blankies and my leftover chocolates, and binged on legal shows.

Through it all, though, the ups and downs, Jax shines like a pearl.

Looking at Sam’s and Amy’s faces when they hold him, so madly in love, and watching Sam changing poopy diapers all the time nearly brings me to tears. My wild son, who like most boys smashed and bashed his way through childhood, with branches and bats and wooden swords, who shut down and pulled so far away as a teenager that sometimes I could not find him, now taking tender care of his own newborn, a miniature who is both unique and reflective. Sam is still every age he ever was, from the fetus to the infant to the adolescent to the father. And Einstein would probably say that Jax is already every age he will ever be, but in such super-slow motion relative to our limited perspective that we can’t see the full spiral of him yet, only this tan bundle of perfect infanthood with a blue butt.

One night I ran away from home and told everyone I was going to Bible study at St. Andrew, but instead I went to Macy’s. I tried to shell out money on something really meaningless and bourgeois, like blusher or overpriced Peds, but I was too screwed up mentally. Or too well; I’m not sure. Couldn’t find one thing to buy, so I sat in the parking lot,
enraged, bereft, empty, fit to be tied, watching the bad movie in what my spiritual mentor Bonnie calls Theater B. Theater A is where we see goodness in everything, beauty and generosity or, conversely, someone’s need for love. Theater B is where I watch a movie about how this exquisite baby could ruin Sam’s academic career, if the baby even lives, and how Sam would end up at the rescue mission and so on.
Finally
I thought to pray—it had completely escaped me that I believe in divine mind and comfort. I’d forgotten that if I said the Great Prayer—Help—I would experience that God was with me, that, as Muktananda put it, God dwells within me,
as
me. And that Mother Teresa would have seen me as Jesus, in His distressing guise as OCD Grandma, worthy of tenderness. So I broke bread with myself, with a health food oat biscuit I had in my purse, and a paper cup of water from an earlier stealth binge at Taco Bell. I called my dearest male friend, Doug, who lives in Chicago. He made cooing sounds as I described how hard it could be at home right now, and he reminded me of his new battle cry:
Lower the bar of expectations!
I’d forgotten. After we got off the phone, I flew home, in love again with my peeps.

My baby brother Stevo turns fifty today. He is six-foot-three now, so I am not able to hold him and lug him around as I did until I was ten and he was five. My memories of holding
him when my parents brought him home from the hospital are as sharp and clear as can be. I have an old photo of me holding newborn Stevo on the couch of our little coffee-colored house, sitting with our older brother, John, and I am crying. I remember that my parents were exasperated with me for crying on this happiest day, but now I think I felt heartbroken because at five years old, I understood what this baby boy was in for. Fresh, and doomed, to be born human at all, let alone into this miserable marriage. He has been my great secret advantage ever since.

Ray arrived today at one from North Carolina for a four-day visit. I’ve met him before, for dinners and at events to celebrate Amy’s graduation from cosmetology school in San Francisco. He is in his mid-sixties, close to six feet tall; spiritual and outgoing, he works out and is a health nut, but always tan—which to me, the daughter of a man who died of melanoma, is a contradiction in terms. He’s bald on top, with the sides buzz-cut, and he seems like a farmer type from the South. Amy once described him as “ruggedy.” I think she meant “rugged,” but she perfectly captured his rugged raggedyness. His glasses were duct-taped the first time we met, and Amy tells me that duct tape and Gorilla Glue are his two favorite products. He Gorilla Glues his shoe soles when they start to go.

He describes himself as having been a preacher, teacher, cop, and monk.

My favorite Ray story is that when Amy went to visit him
last year, he came to the breakfast table without his bottom dentures. When Amy commented, he blew it off, saying, “Oh, we’re in the South. No one cares.”

I would love to see this guy at church for an hour every week, but having him and Trudy, Sam, Amy, and Jax in my house is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Everyone absolutely rose to the occasion, but Amy and Trudy rubbed on each other’s nerves in such small quarters, and Ray prepared a salad big enough for a hundred people, which under the circumstances made me want to hit him—you’re using up ALL my salad vegetables, Mr. Gorilla-Glued Soles. Amy hid out in her room most of the time, often without her shirt on, still needing to feed Jax every two hours. Sam was in basic catatonia, begging for errands to do so he could get in the car and leave.

Trudy and Ray were calm and uncomplaining about living so far from their grandson, even as it was obvious that this would be hard for them. I noted and appreciated this. Half the time we were lovely together, the six of us—SIX of us, wow. And that was some kind of miracle, that we pulled it off at all, the three grandparents tending to this marvelous baby and the two erratic young parents: keeping healthy meals coming, laundry washed and folded, sobbing baby swaddled and walked and rocked to sleep. Trudy and I moved beyond
Law & Order
, which turned out to be a gateway drug to an even more addictive new legal series on TV that we
hooked into obsessively, sometimes watching two or three episodes a night. We also walked the dogs. We used them as an excuse to leave every few hours and go up the old fire road to the shady glade nearby. The poor dogs lost weight, and maybe got blisters, for all I know.

I was so exhausted by having to have long small-talk conversations with everyone all day that I sneaked from room to room like an agent for Mossad, just trying to find a moment’s space, just trying to find, as Ram Dass put it forty years ago, my heart cave. I tiptoed past the bedrooms, through the living room, then, like Rubber Girl, stretched around the corner from the dining room, past Trudy and Ray’s bedroom in the kitchen nook, to my office.

The six of us had a sweet last morning together. I was in a great mood, because we had pulled it off.
(And because they were all leaving.)
While everyone packed up, I held Jax, and tried to memorize the smell of his skin, that alert face, the dark stub of his umbilical cord. It’s a tiny, pumpkinish stem.

They headed to Sam and Amy’s apartment on Geary, except for Trudy, who will fly back to North Carolina. The silence and space here are lovely, like a redwood forest—and I miss everyone already and have no purpose in life. I guess things will return to normal, whatever that means now.

Sam surprised me by bursting into church alone, right as it was starting, in a religious fever of needing to escape from Amy, Jax, and Ray, who was leaving on the red-eye that night. Our pastor Veronica made a big fuss from the pulpit about Sam’s joy, and the arrival of our newest brother, and Sam promised to bring him and Amy next week. About fifteen minutes into the service, he started missing Jax in that aching physical way, almost like a nursing mother. He is so doomed. So he went and snagged Isaiah, who is a year older than Jax, and whom Sam and I refer to as his training baby—he has been holding him every Sunday for months, and watched his parents, Kim and Dominick, diaper, burp, and cuddle with him. They have promised Amy and Sam all of Isaiah’s hand-me-downs.

Sam held Isaiah so differently from how he did even a month ago, because his hands have become the hands of a father.

I heard him whisper to Isaiah, “Cool shoes, dude,” and then he leaned over to me, waggling his eyebrows conspiratorially, and said, “Jax will look
great
in these.”

My heart was broken today in the best way, watching people cry with Sam about his blessing, having held him and fought for possession of him nearly twenty years ago. This church has prayed us through everything—his birth; his worst
asthma attacks; starting school; meeting his father, John, at age seven; then all those scary visits to see him in Vancouver; puberty; and the hard teenage times when we nearly lost it some days. There are fewer of us now at church, fifty or so most Sundays, but it is pretty much as it has been since Sam was born. It’s a kitchen church, not a church-on-display, all these black and white and brown people who need and want to be here. And it is the same as when I first came in, twenty-five years ago, hungover and bulimic, weighing twenty pounds less than I do now, when I could stay because they didn’t rush me, like a sorority, or try to get me to believe.

The people saw that I was in pain, and they let me be; and they let me be with them, and let me find Him the best I could.

Today people shuffled in, happy and relieved to be there, disappointed that Sam hadn’t brought Jax, but crowding around me during the Passing of the Peace to see the photos on my cell phone—my screen picture is of Sam holding Jax and staring into his brand-new face. At St. Andrew, there are all levels of shyness and grand public display during the Peace, but somehow every one of them is a hug of recognition, which is all that most of us need or want, in a kind of churchly square dance, hand to hand to hand.

The hymns are bigger than any mistakes; you fumble around with the hymnal and sing the wrong words—sometimes I’m on the wrong verse—but the hymn expands to make room for each voice, even yours. We speak as a
body; we have set the intent together, so rather than individual shrill cries or drones of one crazy person, it’s a braid.

Me in general

Hi, Mom. Here’s the skinny on the fam: Jax’s fingernails have gotten long again; we clipped them just last week. This is already one of our least favorite things to do. Since last night, he’s managed to scratch his face a couple of times badly. A new development is that now when we pick him up, even if he is swaddled, he flails his arms in the air, instead of lying passively in baby burrito mode. His hands now open and close, and because he is armed with claws, he scratches everything—including us.

Between feedings last night, he was trying to stay awake with us, which was throwing off our schedule, because he
needs to sleep, we need to rest, and then he needs to eat again often, every three hours. It’s like a perpetual motion machine. We loved it at the time last night, because it was so cute to just look at him. Now, however, we are all wasted.