What We Have (9 page)

As a hypothetical, the job had seemed appealing. But as a reality—

Be careful what you wish for
, I was thinking now. Applying for the job had made more sense in September, when I could still get up and down stairs without hanging on to the banister. The baby was due in three weeks and three days. How was I possibly going to make it to an interview in another city the week after Christmas?

They were nice, the people from Boston. They understood there was no way I could make it to the convention. But what if we set up a telephone interview next week?

My situation, the chair pointed out, was not insurmountable. Of course, if I ended up getting a callback interview . . . her voice trailed off. I knew the chances of that were slim. That wouldn’t be until late January or early February, she said, and by
that
point—

“Oh, by
that
point,” I agreed, matching her low chuckle. I could certainly make my way to Boston by
then
. If, of course—

Late January seemed as far off as the moon.

I was mulling all this over, Sunday night in bed.

All weekend, Jacques kept finding ways to sneak in the virtues of Boston, and it was starting to grate on me. What happened to “wait and see”? Where was this newfound desire to plan coming from? I found myself shooting back all the advantages of the District. Short winters! Friendly people! It wasn’t just Boston versus DC, I realized now, shifting uncomfortably. It wasn’t even the prospect of the job—it was everything. The more I thought about our dinner with Dave and Lori, the worse I felt. Lori seemed so sure of herself, so experienced. What was I going to do? I had no idea what babies ate or how to get them in or out of their various pieces of equipment or what you did when you spent time alone with them. Sara and Julie were the ones who’d babysat during high school—I’d taken a job selling handbags at B. Siegel instead. Before Christmas, all sorts of nice middle-aged men would come in and open the bags up and look inside them, bemused, and after a lot of deliberations, they’d say,
OK, I’ll take this one
, and I’d ring them up and gift wrap, and then, the day after Christmas, the women themselves would come and wait in line to return them. “Things just fall
right
to the bottom of this!” one cried, shaking the bag at me like I was the harebrained designer. What a waste of time. I could’ve been learning to diaper and soothe.

I had no idea what to do with a baby. I had a vague plan to work on my book while the baby slept next to me, but I got the sense from Lori that might not be realistic.

“You’re really planning to work from home?” Lori had asked. She’s a prize-winning reporter; their ten-month-old was on a schedule; they had a great nanny. But Lori didn’t even try to work from home. Too many distractions, she said, not meeting my eye.

“Are you going to have help?” she asked, when I mentioned my writing plans.

Trust me, I’ve never been a hero when it comes to doing things on my own. I use full service in the gas station. I get things fixed at the dry cleaners. If I get a flat tire, I call AAA. I’m happy to delegate any and all tasks, it’s just that taking care of the baby hadn’t quite registered yet as a task. I stammered something: “We’ll play it by ear,” with a “flexible schedule” and “work from home” and another Jacques-ism or two thrown in for good measure. When I wasn’t looking, Lori and Dave exchanged the knowing glances of people who have been to the Dark Continent and barely survived.

Now I was thinking this over. “We may have to reconsider the nanny issue,” I said, and right as I said it, I became aware that something wet was whooshing out of me in unbelievable quantities. All over my side of the bed. It was like a bathtub had been unplugged. What on earth—?

I began shaking Jacques’s arm. As I did, I guessed what had happened—my water had broken. But—it wasn’t time yet! I still had more than three weeks left!

Twenty-four days, as a matter of fact. The due date was right there in my day planner—six days after Christmas. In ink.

For once, I wasn’t ready. Truly not ready. I hadn’t packed yet. I wasn’t done grading blue books. We didn’t even have the crib!

This was the last inhospitable act of my inhospitable womb. It was like ushering a guest to the door while dessert was being served.

Sorry to rush you, little one. But it looks like it’s time to get going
.

 

I’M SURE EVERY PERSON’S EXPERIENCE
of labor is different. For us, it started by arguing over where to park the car. “How long do you think we’ll be?” Jacques asked, squinting up at the parking rates at the entrance to the hospital lot. I shrugged. I hadn’t had a single contraction yet. That might mean days. On the other hand, Dr. Weiss was meeting us. We were being taken care of. “Go for the short-term lot,” I advised. Ignoring me, Jacques headed to 24 Hours or More, carefully trolling each level for the optimal spot.

Jacques wasn’t the only one taking his time. The people in Labor and Delivery were all moving in slow motion. One woman behind the desk was on an interminable phone call, her back to us. “I know! I know!” she kept saying, her shoulders shaking with suppressed mirth. Another was sleepily riffling through paperwork. Yawn, riffle, yawn. After what seemed like forever, she jackknifed a clipboard in my direction.

Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork. So many forms to fill out. Mother’s maiden name. Mother’s social security number—“social,” as it was cozily abbreviated by the woman at the desk through another yawn. State of birth? Date of birth? Allergies? Next of kin? Primary care physician? Ob-gyn? I signed and stamped and addressed and authorized, wondering why this never happens in the movies. Finally Dr. Weiss came in, snapping on a natty little blue jacket with OR efficiency.

Dr. Weiss, at least, was ready for action. “So,” she said when she saw us. “What have you two decided?” No preliminaries, not even a hello.

The baby was still breech, and Dr. Weiss wanted to know how I felt about trying “version.” “Turning the baby gently while we monitor all its vital signs in the hope that we can maneuver the baby into position” was how the process was described, which two months later we learned Blue Cross considered elective and charged us for. A thousand dollars a minute, and I didn’t even enjoy it.

Dr. Weiss warned me version wasn’t easy, but I was game. I had that little thrill I’d gotten when I signed up for Honors Latin in graduate school instead of the one for people who can’t learn languages. We moved into one of the brand-new birthing rooms, and I lay on the table while Dr. Weiss got things ready. As she connected me to the monitor, it occurred to me Honors Latin hadn’t gone that well.

It’s impossible to describe what version felt like. “Breathe and relax,” Dr. Weiss instructed me—easier said than done—as she and the nurse proceeded to grab onto my belly and twist with all their might. It was like having my head rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. I screamed. This seemed like the kind of thing that might have happened in the sixteenth century, in a dark back room of the Tower. Dr. Weiss glanced at the nurse, frowned. “Again!” she instructed. The second time, knowing what to expect, my entire body tensed before they could get near me.
Version unsuccessful
, Dr. Weiss scrawled on the form the insurance company duplicated and returned to me two months later with Payment Due attached.

I’d failed version. Our options were narrowing—water broken, baby breech. We needed a C-section, Dr. Weiss announced.

A C-section. That was real surgery. Weeks of recovery. I grabbed Jacques’s hand as they prepared me for a spinal and mouthed the phrase that had long been linked in my mind with this possibility:
baby nurse
.

Dave and Lori had had one. Her name was Annette, and she was a model of starched decorum, shooing away pesky visitors while swiftly scooping up gifts and casseroles, imposing only so often to bring their baby in, spanking clean, to nurse. She stayed for three weeks, and I wanted her.

“Don’t worry about that now,” Jacques murmured, looking down at me with tender eyes. “We’ll figure that out later.”

Later
. A core word in Jacques’s philosophy. I was about to explain why
later
wouldn’t work this time when the orderlies came and wheeled me into the OR. Everyone flew into action. They hung up a sheet to separate my lower half from my shoulders and head and pinned my arms to my sides, which I hated, but they explained it kept “the field” sanitary. At least I was conscious and there was no pain. This wasn’t how I’d imagined childbirth, but there was something sweetly egalitarian about the fact that Jacques—he looked good in scrubs, he should’ve been a doctor—could hold my hand and we could both approach the whole thing from the same vantage. We were partners in all of this—what a good omen! Of course, as I reconsidered, we weren’t
literally
in the same position—I was actually lying on the table, my belly swabbed with Betadine, and Jacques was standing in scrubs and a mask next to my head—but still. We
felt
close.

One thing nobody ever mentions is how long it takes to actually reach the baby during a C-section. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. What were they doing? How much was there to get through down there? I had gained forty-five pounds, was that the problem? We talked, we paused, we waited, it was awfully quiet, and finally there was this funny tugging sensation, like my belly was a suitcase and someone was trying to pull out the rolled-up pair of pants way underneath all the other stuff—tug, tug, tug—and then Dr. Weiss said, in this marveling Addison-from-
Private-Practice
kind of voice—“Well! You have a beautiful baby girl!”

Jacques and I stared at each other, trying to assimilate this.

Sacha
, we said to each other in unison, trying it out. Her birth certificate name would be Alexandra, but Sacha was her real name—the name we knew her by the minute we saw her. The Russian diminutive for a name our grandfathers shared.

Maybe it was partly the hormones and the euphoria of delivery. Maybe it was the perfection of Sacha’s tiny body, her little fingers and toes, her wide, alert eyes. The agony of months of worry evaporated, and holding her, I felt something close to grace.

She was healthy. She was perfect, perfect, perfect. And she was
here
.

I kept saying her name. Whispering it, crooning it. Sacha. Sacha-la. Sachabelle. Bellie. Belle. Named, she was immediately nicknamed, as if there were no degree of closeness close enough for this one noun. No one name special enough. Each layer of nicknaming made her more completely and identifiably
her
.

She’d inherit the best of both of us, I assured her. Jacques’s optimism, his keen ethics, his sense of the possible. His parents’ warmth. My parents’ humor. My love of detail and discipline.

Alexandra was a big name for someone so small. Sacha, on the other hand, fit right from the start.

 

OUR WEEK AT COLUMBIA HOSPITAL
for Women was the week of big babies. Ten pounds. Nine pounds eleven ounces. Eleven pounds nine ounces. Big baby, big baby, big baby, and then there was Sacha: five pounds six ounces, curled up like a shrimp, red faced, scowling, insanely bright lights in this place, can’t a baby get some
rest
? I scrutinized her with the anxious eyes of a soccer mom whose child has been left all season on the bench. “Yours is so tiny,” the woman outside the nursery said sympathetically, like I’d drawn the short stick on a desert island. “She’s
early
,” I said, ready to defend her to the death; early, ahead of herself, on the ball—not like those chunky, laggard babies! Premature.
Pre
. Ahead of herself! Two days old and already there was competition. What is it about having a child that is so instantly and profoundly comparative? I couldn’t help it, I was already eyeing the other babies and worrying about their disproportionate strength and acumen. Already comparing Apgar scores as I trolled up and down the hallways tethered to my IV pole. Sacha was so tiny, so ruddy, so crustacean-like. But the splaying of those miniscule fingers put me in a trance, she was dazzling, the others were bruisers and ours a pearl!

She wasn’t due for another three weeks and already I’d thought and felt half the things I’d always sworn were beneath contempt.

I loved my five days in the hospital. There was a system in place. The babies were lined up in Lucite boxes on small wheeled carts in the nursery, swaddled in waffle-weave blankets with an air about them of utter calm. I had a crank on my bed, up, down, in between, and meals that arrived with shrink-wrapped condiments, everything the same soothing shade of taupe, and a buzzer to push for more Percocet, and in one pile at my left I had the last of my blue books to grade, and baby catalogues with pages folded down, things I’d never even known existed—baby-wipe warmers! Nostril suctioners!—and the phone numbers of three baby-nurse agencies, and on the other side intermittently Sacha herself arrived, tucked up by the nurses into nursing position A.

Ah, nursing.

There was a whole science to it. There was a hotline you could call for help—the La Leche League—and within twenty-four hours I discovered nothing I’d learned before was as important or as gutwrenchingly hard.

Nursing seemed to take at least four hands, if not six. First, there was the positioning of the breast (block-hard, enormous, so painful that the whoosh of the hospital gown against it caused agony). Then the unclamping of Sacha’s groping mouth.
Grope, clamp. Grope, clamp
. Chomping at the air like a desperate thing. The holding of Sacha, so tiny, so unable to hold any part of herself airborne on her own. The excruciating pain of her chomping mouth. Nothing came out of me, I was sweating, Jessie—my favorite nurse, seven AM to three PM shift—was sweating, Sacha was sweating; we switched positions, named them (the underhand, the overhand, the underdoggy, the overdoggy); we tried chemical heating pads, ice packs, massage; by day three my breasts filled the entire bed, the entire room, the chomping and stapling hurt so much tears sprang to my eyes at the very sight of Sacha, mitered in her onesie. Why was there so much combat in this very first act? I was ready to give up, ready to do anything but this, ready to sign on for a wet nurse, bring us bottles, we are starving! Then suddenly, on day three and a half, in the middle of the night, wincing against the sweet sting of her clenching jaw, milk spewed out of me, hot, sweet, sticky. And this was all we did anymore. We were a remarkable pair, a perfect duo of supply and demand. I filled up the minute I saw her; I heard her cry and milk spilled down the front of my hospital gown. We fit together beautifully, I was all breast and she was all mouth.