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by Vicki Glembocki
I push faster. She keeps crying. I hum The Alphabet Song. She keeps crying. I shift the angle of the canopy, in case the sun's shining in her eyes.
She keeps crying. I reach down the back of her neck, under the cotton blanket she's swaddled
in, under her lavender one-piece body suit with the yellow butterfly
on it so I can finger the tag, in case there's a plastic, price-tag
holder sticking out of it. Or an open safety pin. Or a pickax. There's
nothing. She keeps crying. No matter what I do, she keeps crying. What I should do is turn the stroller around. I should not be
in public. I should go home. But I can't go home. Because, a block away,
there is a Laundromat, and in that Laundromat are the quilt from our
bed and the afghan from our couch, tumbling in an industrial dryer,
a task that was on my "List of Things To Do Before The Baby Comes"
because the quilt and afghan-too large for our washer and dryer-had
fused with zillions of sharp, blonde, burrowing dog hairs, discarded
by Levi, our 80-pound Lab, hairs that I was certain would break free,
lodge in the baby's throat, and choke her. I need to finish this job.
I have two hours between each nursing so there's time to finish this
job. I feel along the sides of the baby's swaddle to make sure her fingers
aren't bent the wrong way. I tuck the blanket under her feet, in case
her feet are cold. She keeps crying. What am I doing wrong? I pull out my cell phone and dial Thad's office line. "I can't do this," I say, before he even says "hello." "What happened?" he asks. I hear the wheels on his office
chair roll across the floor and his door close. I tell him about the
afghan and the Laundromat and the crying. About how I can't stop the
crying. "Is she hungry?" "No." "Is she wet?" "No." "Maybe you just tried to do too much, sweetie. Maybe you should
just go home," he says in his new mellow tone, the one he's been
using in the middle of the night for the past two weeks, every time
I nudge him awake and declare that I'm certain the baby is dead. "She's not dead," he always says, calm and patient, just
like he was when I woke him up with the same worry roughly 13 seconds
before. "How do you know that?" I always ask. "I know." "How do you know?" And Thad flips the covers onto me, staggers
over to the Pack 'n Play at the foot of our bed, and leans over so his
cheek is next to Blair's tiny mouth, waiting until he feels a few bursts
of warm air. "She's not dead," he whispers, climbing back into bed. I
always lie there for a few seconds. Then I get up and check myself,
resting my hand lightly on Blair's chest, swaddled so tight I wonder
if the receiving blanket is the only thing holding her fragile body
together, until I feel it rise, up and down, up and down. Now, though, in the light of day, his soothing "everything's okay"
tenor makes me clamp my teeth together, as if he didn't just suggest
I go home, but instead told me to do the very opposite, to suck it up,
to finish the damn bedspreads and then make a meatloaf. "I can't go home, Thad," I yell. "The bedspreads are
in the fucking dryer and I am on the fucking street behind the fucking
pizza shop and the baby won't stop fucking crying and I'm losing my
fucking mind!" There's a long pause. I know what Thad's doing. He's calculating the
exact right thing to say, believing that there is a right thing to say,
not understanding that nothing he says will be right. Because what he
wants to do is solve the problem. But he can't solve the problem. Because
the problem is me. Mothers are supposed to be able to stop their babies
from crying. Mothers are supposed to know what to do. I don't know what to do. Wasn't that whole maternal-instinct thing supposed to stick around
after that first night in the hospital? Wasn't some maternal gene supposed
to switch on and keep me all stoned on bliss and beaming at this child
like she is pure light? Like she is the sun? Like, by having her, my
life has finally begun and I am finally complete? Isn't that what everyone
says at the end of A Baby Story? Isn't that what my mother meant
when she told me labor was "wonderful pain?" Because I'm not
feeling wonderful. In these two weeks since we left the hospital, my
emotional range seems to have collapsed in on itself, trapping me in
a hole where I feel only overwhelmed. And frustrated. And afraid. I'm terrified, really. Terrified that Thad and I have made a horrible,
terrible mistake by having this baby. And I want to tell this to Thad,
to explain it to him. But that scares me, too. He won't understand.
How could he? He's too busy wondering where his wife went. Where is
the woman who was so tickled when the plus-sign showed up on the pregnancy
test that she immediately wrapped it in blue tissue paper with a red
bow and express-mailed it to her parents? Where is the woman he lay
beside in bed with every Saturday morning, propped up on pillows, listening
as she read to him the latest chapter from Your
Pregnancy Week By Week? Where is the woman he took a photo of
less than a month ago as she sat at a card table in the kitchen, carefully
hot-gluing little plastic toys to a mirror frame to hang in the baby's
room, her sweatshirt pulled up to reveal the expanse of her belly? Where
was she? "Am I supposed to take the wet bedspreads out of the dryer?"
I shout before Thad has a chance to speak, knowing that I'm getting
angry at him to keep myself from getting angry at the baby. "Seriously?
Is that what you're telling me to do?" "Do you want me to come home?" he says. Oh God, yes.
Yes, I want him to come home. I want him to come home more than anything
in the entire world. I want him to rescue me. Actually, I want him to
come here, to the street, and pick up the baby, and take her home so
I can go back to the Laundromat and finish my job. I know I'll feel
better if I can accomplish something, and if it's not stopping the baby
from crying, it's washing the bedspread and the afghan. It's getting
rid of the dog hair. I need to complete this one task to assure myself
that I can do at least one thing right. Of course, Thad can't come home. He started a new job as a training
manager for pharamceutical reps less than a month ago and his boss already
gave him a week off when Blair was born. Plus, he has a 40-minute commute
each way. Plus, by the time he'd get here, the laundry would be done
anyway. "I'm fine," I say. "Are you sure?" Thad asks. "Yes, I'm fine," I say, again, as if saying it again might
make it true. "Just come home as soon as you can." I flip
the phone closed. Just then, the train whisks by above the bushes where the street dead
ends. It's the train I took every morning to get to work. Eighteen minutes
from the Westmont station in New Jersey, over the Ben Franklin Bridge,
to Center City, Philadelphia. I listen to it pass, the hum of the rails
on the track rising in pitch as it picks up speed. "I wish I was on that train," I say, out loud. A Ford Explorer
drives by, the driver watching me talking to myself as I stand next
to a vacant lot with a baby stroller and gaze longingly at the train
track. He probably thinks I've escaped from an asylum with all this
stringy brown hair clumped in a nest on the top of my head, my body
hidden in extra large yellow sweatpants, Thad's blue and grey checkered
flannel that I've not taken off for four days, and a pair of light blue
sandals that I bought at Target the day after I came home from the hospital
because my feet had swelled two sizes from the fluids they pumped into
me for the epidural that wore off 10 minutes before Blair came screaming
out of my body. And, now, she's still screaming. I grab the pacifier out of the stroller's
cup holder, the same pacifier the baby has refused to even drool on
for the past 14 days of her life and that I've been carrying around
like a talisman, praying on it, please, for the love of God, just
put this thing in your mouth for five minutes, just shut up for five
minutes. She lets the pacifier rest on her tongue, opening her mouth
wider to scream around it. I pick her up, and she cries even harder,
fiercer, as if there could be nothing more upsetting to her than being
held by me. I feel tears running down my cheeks, though they don't feel like my
tears and they don't feel like my cheeks. I look at the clock on my
phone-there are 17 minutes left on the dryer cycle, which means I have
17 more minutes to kill. I slide Blair back in the stroller and start
pushing again. I make a right down another street, past a cute house
on the corner with a sign in the front yard that reads "Welcome
to the Nut House." I wish I were on that train. * * * "How much is she eating?" Dr. Weidner asks, seconds after
walking into the exam room on Friday to find me there nursing Blair.
He's looking kind of embarrassed that he found me nursing Blair, even
though it's happened every time we've been to his office so far. And
we've been to the pediatrician a lot in the three weeks since she was
born. Blair hadn't been gaining enough weight. She needed to gain weight,
she needed to eat more, because the more she ate, the faster the bilirubin
would flush out of her bloodstream. I didn't know exactly what bilirubin
was, only that she had too much of it and that it made her tiny body
all yellow with jaundice and sent us to the hospital every morning during
the first two weeks of her life to have blood taken from her teeny tiny
heels, leaving them dotted with red pimply scabs. Every three days,
we'd go to the doctor's office for test results and a weight check.
All had been going okay. She'd been gaining. Slowly. But gaining. Until today. Today, when I carried her naked body to the scale in the hall, the
nurse made a tsk-ing sound. Blair had lost 1.5 ounces, an alarming amount
when a baby weighs only 6 pounds. Something is wrong. "I don't know how much she's eating," I say to Dr. Weidner,
looking down at the floor. This is my job. I'm supposed to know these
things now. I'm at least supposed to be able to nourish this child,
my boobs are at least supposed to produce enough milk for her. "I
don't know how I'm supposed to know how much she's eating." "Hmmmm," Dr. Weidner replies, his tall, lanky frame looming
above Blair as he pokes at her stomach on the exam table, peering through
his wire-rimmed glasses as if half-expecting letters to bubble up, Exorcist-like,
under her skin: "Help me." I glance at the ceiling, scanning for a magic breast milk calculator
up there that will spit out a number for me to say. How much
is she eating? Compared to whom? Compared to Thad? Compared to the dog?
Compared to the other three-week-old babies I'd spent time with in all
of my 33 years, which is a grand total of zero? I don't know how much
she's eating because she is eating from my boobs! She is sucking milk
out of my boobs! Or I think she's sucking milk out of
them, at some point after the hour it takes me to convince her to even
latch on, which has been our routine ever since we left the hospital
and she apparently decided that my boobs were covered in Mad Dog and,
thus, should be avoided at all costs. Now, instead of latching, she
wails, while I frantically try and position myself for nursing, piling
throw pillows under my arms, then pulling them away, then lying down
on my side, then sitting up, then tilting her head a few degrees one
way, then the other, then stopping, then crying to myself for a few
minutes. Why is this so hard for me, I wonder? Why can't I do this one simple
thing that women have been doing for bazillions of years? Then,
when I notice her mouth is open huge, mid-wail, I'll grab the back of
her head and squash her mouth into my breast as if the pressure alone
might suction her on. But even once she's there, how would I begin to
determine how much she's eating? Do I weigh my boobs? Before and after?
Can I do that? Is there a special scale? Do they sell them at Babies
R Us? Would I have to remove my nursing bra to use it, because it took
me 28 minutes to figure out how to put it on and I'm never taking it
off again. Ever. "Ohhhh…" I say, because I have to say something to the
doctor. "She eats every two hours. More or less twelve times a
day. Anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour a time." "No formula?" "No formula." "Hmmmmmm." I envision what Dr. Weidner is writing in that
manila folder of his: Mother inadequate. Bad boobs. "Besides the weight, everything looks okay with her,"
Dr. Weidner says, though I'm not sure he really emphasized the word-her.
"Do you still have that supplemental nurser?" I stare at Dr. Weidner's face. He raises his eyebrows, his way of asking
the question again without verbally asking it. But I can't answer him.
I just stare, as if he's just asked if I still have the placenta. As
if he expects me to pull a Ziploc out of my diaper bag and hand it to
him. Why yes, doctor, I have that placenta right here… I still have the supplemental nurser. A lactation consultant gave it
to me while we were still at the hospital. Not every nursing mom gets
one, but not every nursing mom has a baby with jaundice. The nurser,
she explained, would add some formula to my breast milk to ensure that
Blair got more food, enough to wash out the bilirubin. If we supplemented
with a bottle instead the baby might develop "nipple confusion,"
she explained, dropping her voice forbiddingly, as if the only thing
that could be worse for a newborn would be bubonic plague. So every
two hours, every time Blair needed to eat, every time she stuck out
her tongue and puckered her mouth and cried that desperate bleating
inconsolable cry that made me question, again and again, if she was
human, I would first heat up a five ounce bottle of formula. Then I'd
screw the bottle, upside down, into the supplemental nurser-a holder
with a tube attached to it that clipped to the strap of my nursing bra.
I'd tape the tube to my breast, careful to make sure that the end of
the tube was perfectly aligned with the tip of my nipple, which usually
took about seven tries. Then began the hour-long latching ritual, while
also making sure that the teeny tiny end of the skinniest tube in the
known universe was in Blair's mouth so, when she sucked, she got both
my breast milk and the formula. I hated the supplemental nurser. Not because it leaked. Not because
it kept plugging up with air bubbles, which meant I had to take it apart,
rinse it out, and start over again. Not because I was the only one who
could set it up and coax Blair to use it, every two hours, twenty-four
hours a day. I hated it because it reminded me, every time, that I was failing at
this mommy thing. That this poor child had been cosmically paired with
the only woman in the world who didn't have any maternal DNA, who didn't
instinctually know what to do with a baby, whose body parts didn't even
function the way a woman's were designed to when she had a baby, who
couldn't stop her baby from crying, who couldn't keep her baby from
starving, who couldn't look at her baby and feel anything but dread.
Especially now. Because everyone has gone. My in-laws had driven the
four hours home to central Pennsylvania the day we were discharged from
the hospital. My parents left two days later, driving three hours further,
all the way across the state. Thad had gone back to work. And now it was just me. And Blair. And the supplemental nurser. Everything depended on me. It was all up to me. Which was why I'd been so relieved on Monday, three days ago, after
the bilirubin levels had gone down and the weight had jumped up, when
Dr. Weidner told me I could stop supplementing. I actually considered
kissing him. Blair and I could be normal now and nurse the normal
way, the way all moms did. As soon as we got home, I plopped down on
the couch with her. I unbuttoned my shirt, then coaxed her on, without
really even having to coax her, without turning on the TV like I always
did, hunting for a Lifetime movie that would numb my brain to keep me
from dwelling on how much I hated this. This time, for the first time,
it was just me. I relaxed. I decided Blair relaxed, too. We locked eyes. We looked
at each other. And, just for a second, I sensed the anxiety that had
been suffocating me since Blair was born lift off of me. And finally
I felt capable, adequate. I felt like a mother is supposed to feel.
Blissful, even. And I'd felt that way, on and off, for the past three
days. Until today. "Yes," I say to Dr. Weidner. "I still have the supplemental
nurser." I swallow hard. Suddenly, all the joy is gone. Suddenly,
I'm right back where I started except, now, I'm even more worried about
her weight. "Oh, Blair," I say, lying her down on the examining table
so my back is to the doctor, re-tucking her swaddle so it looks like
I have a reason to turn away. She starts to cry. "I told you to
stay away from that Billy Rubin. I told you he was bad news." "Bilirubin…that's funny," Dr. Weidner says, laughing
freely like a man who can leave this room and not even have to think
about Blair until our next appointment, a week away. Seven days away.
One-hundred-and-sixty-eight hours away. Eighty-four feedings with the
supplemental nurser away. "It's great that you have a sense of
humor about all this." When I get home, I let the dog out and leave him in the backyard while
I look for the supplemental nurser, clawing though drawers in Blair's
room, through the closet, as if this is Thad's workshop in the basement,
not the bedroom we painstakingly painted two shades of purple before
finding the perfect color that contrasted the red crib sheet and matched
the rainbow striped valances and dust ruffle my mother had made. I find
the nurser on a shelf, under the stack of burp cloths. I carry Blair
to the family room and sit down on the couch, belting the My Brest Friend
nursing pillow around my waist, so stiff that it sticks out in front
of my stomach like a shelf. I turn on the television. I unbutton Thad's
flannel shirt which I'm wearing again, and unsnap both cups of my nursing
bra so both of my boobs hang out. I hook up the nurser. It's upside-down,
attached to my left bra strap. I tape the end to my nipple, then snake
the tube over my very full rock-hard boob while the other sticks straight
out like a missile. The baby is half on the pillow, half in my arms.
After nearly 45 minutes of false starts and screaming, she latches on. Then, I hear the dog bark. He is barking as if four men carrying sickles have just scaled the
fence and are circling him. I suspect he is barking at my neighbor,
my new neighbor, who decided to start building a new house on the lot
next to ours five days after Blair was born. Over the past week, the
contractor-who Thad nicknamed Pompadour-has been ringing my doorbell
at least two times a day. Can you move your minivan? Can the concrete
guys use your driveway? Can they stand on your garage? Pompadour
doesn't seem to comprehend that this is not a community project. That
I don't care. And, now, here he is. Again. This time, at the back gate. The dog is distracting me. He is distracting the baby. He must be stopped.
I stand. I walk to the sliding glass door. I drag open the door. I step out onto the deck. I glare down at the man standing at the gate. "What the hell do you want from me?" I scream. "Can you…um…can you call your dog?" the man asks,
looking at the dog, at the sky, at the ground, anywhere but at me. "We
need to get the branch." It is only then that I realize that the man standing at the gate is not Pompadour. The man is from a tree-cutting service hired, I presume, by the couple who lives behind us to remove the enormous tree branch that fell into our yard during the wind storm two nights ago. I look out into the yard. Yes, the branch is there. Also there are three other men from the tree-cutting service, staring up at me. And My Brest Friend. And my baby. And my boobs. You can purchase The Second Nine Months: One Woman Tells the REAL Truth About Becoming a Mom. Finally. at Amazon.com! |
