“It takes a while. Just watch,” I told her proudly.
I must have had the world’s easiest pregnancy. I wasn’t nauseated once – unlike Patty, who used to constantly nibble furtively on crackers tucked into her handbag and then disappear into the nearest bathroom to barf. As I rounded out (for the first time in my life, I actually had round cheeks on my face and butt and spare flesh on my frame), I began to feel infused with some magical hormone that made me feel in harmony with the universe and constantly optimistic. I wrote a new children’s book, about a joey, a young kangaroo that loved to go places in his mom’s pouch, and I finished some of the illustrations.
“You’re way too bouncy,” my friends Megan and Jenny told me.
My energy started to flag in the eighth month. Carrying what seemed like a boulder between my thin hips sapped much of my drive. I’d spend what seemed like most of a morning setting up my easel and readjusting my frame into a chair, painting very little and tossing out most of what I managed to put on paper. My work was uninspired. I was too ungainly to hike to the river, since I could no longer trust my balance and the paths were too steep for me to take any risks. When I slept at all, which only happened after what seemed like hours of shifting and re-adjusting the pillows I massed around me so that some part of me wouldn’t ache, I dreamed of being thin again, of climbing a tree like an agile ten-year old, of playing dodge-ball, or swinging on a rope swing one of my parents’ friends had installed on a huge limb on the bank of the Yuba.
My friend Jenny rescued me from this despondency two days after I was due. I was so weary of carrying the extra weight, its own premonition of aging in my low back. Jenny took me to a swimming hole we didn’t have to hike to. I eased myself into the river at a tiny sand bar and discovered to my huge relief that in the water I could take the burden off my back, floating on my stomach in the slack current, kicking every few minutes to keep myself in place, and laughing when I tried to float on my back and the sheer gravity of my belly rolled me over each time. I was so happy that day, tired and happy and eager for the profound change coming.
I remember resting against a huge, smooth boulder, warmed by the sun, and closing my eyes. On the bank a small bird called, a single prolonged, descending note. The stream burbled around me. I opened my eyes. Not two feet from me, a single thistle whorl rolled across the surface of the water like a beach ball on sand, propelled by nothing more than its own lightness on an intangible breeze. The hairs radiating from its seed barely touched the water’s surface, each one grazing the surface only long enough to allow the next its turn. As if traveling with a goal, not once submerging into the river, it rolled across my line of vision. I blew a puff of air at it, and it accelerated, bound for the earth on the far side. I watched as it neared the faster stream, waiting for it to be caught and drowned. Instead, as if tripping, it lofted itself and floated away.
Dawn. That’s what I named her on the morning of her birth. Dawn was on my list of names, along with Ondine and Zoe and Iris, which I had obsessed over for months without being able to decide. I had a list of boy’s names too, since I had refused to be told what sex child I would have. “Surprise me,” I’d told the amnio staff, when they told me the fetus was healthy and asked if I wanted to know its sex.
Dawn. This is all about her, after all, not me or Abe or Patty. She has curly hair the color of persimmons. Most people would say carrots, but if you walk down a country lane in late fall, when the trees are barren and their leaves rustle underfoot, the air is gray and frosty, and all color is drained from most growing things - if you come upon a persimmon tree, you will know what I mean. On those dark brown limbs, against a gray horizon, hang the brightest balls of orange you can imagine. That’s what it’s like to come upon Dawn. She’s a bob of curly hair encircling a cheerful face on the worst of days, and she’s always in motion, the most curious child I’ve ever met.
I spent months of her first year just watching her discover herself, finding her fingers and her toes, tasting them, finding ways to make her fingers work to pick up cheerios and toys and pull my ears. It was like watching evolution in fast motion. While she napped, I sketched and painted. I quickly completed the illustrations for my kangaroo book, and my editor got me a publishing contract. I had an idea of writing a new children’s book about hands, and I compiled maybe forty different sketches of her baby hands, though I still haven’t been able to put it together.
I’ve always liked being around children. When I sit in a group of children reading to them, I watch for their reactions. I love the ones who interrupt to ask why the caterpillar has so many hairs or what baboon poop looks like. I worry about the ones who just sit there with no expression whatever. Dawn is full of questions. Like what made me so sad that she had to go live with Aunt Patty, and when could she come back home.
2
A few weeks after Dawn was born, I took her to see my mother. Patty offered to come with me, knowing this would somehow be fraught, and Doug stayed home with Sandra and Ian. Each time I walked up the path to Greenwood, a Memory Care Facility, while making some cruel play on the words of its title, I reminded myself not to expect too much (“Myrtle no longer remembers you are her daughter”), but each time was so variable, so treacherous, that I almost always began by draping my invisible gauze of hope around her head and shoulders, tucking in wisps of her fine hairs, searching for my mother in the recesses of her eyes (as always, the color of early morning), and that lovely gauze was almost always shredded, unraveled, tattered, or burnt to an ashy crisp by the end of the visit.
As each of us bent to kiss her (she still, somehow, smelled of lavender), she remembered us, by name. “Karen,” she said, with no question mark in her tone. She reached out for the baby with confident hands. I placed Dawn in the cradle of her elbow. I could see Dawn relax into the security of that nest and close her eyes. Mother stroked the tiny red curls that already marked her as different from the rest of us. She hummed a little, unrecognizably, and I heard Patty filling in behind me the lullaby Mother used to sing to us when we were little. Dawn lay contentedly sleeping in Mother’s arms for the remainder of our visit, while I told her about my labor starting as soon as I’d come home from a swim, how I thought it would never end, how grateful I was to sit in a hot bath for part of it. “Her name is Dawn, Mother. Can you say her name?” And she did; I could tell she was proud of herself as she said it. Patty told her how excited Sandra and Ian were with their new cousin. I didn’t correct her, but Ian had literally jumped with excitement when I brought Dawn to their home, while Sandra hung back frowning.
Patty stood up, as a signal that we should go. It had been such a perfect visit; I was reluctant to break the spell. I too got up and reached over to take Dawn from her arms, but Mother looked at me with a frown and, urgency overcoming the difficulty of speech, said “No.” I recoiled, then tried to regroup and explain that it was time for me to take Dawn back home -- soon she would be hungry -- whatever excuse I could muster. Mother turned to Patty and handed Dawn to her.
Patty’s eyes sought mine, seeking permission and apology, but I couldn’t even look at her. I slumped back into my chair and closed my eyes. I wanted to strangle Mother with that gauze mantle. She had always preferred Patty, didn’t know what to make of me. By the time I could get up again, Patty was outside with Dawn. She handed her back as soon as I closed the door.
“She has Alzheimer’s,” she began. I shot her a look.
“Don’t even try. Don’t go there. Don’t make any excuses for her. Even before Alzheimer’s, she could never imagine me as a mother.” I sat in the back next to Dawn in her car seat on the way home, my hand never letting go of hers. I said nothing. I couldn’t even cry. Patty didn’t know what to say to me. She knew the enormity of the sting; she knew what I said was true; she knew there were no words to comfort me.
I had managed to forget this whole episode, a temporary grace, until it flooded back at my deposition fi
ve years later.
“Cultivate being self-reliant,” Dad blurted. “You have what it takes.” It was the summer in high school that I worked in his office. We had just eaten a simple lunch on Broad Street and he had taken a different direction as we walked back to the office. I don’t remember saying anything at the time. His advice came with no preface and no context. I wondered then why he had said it, but he never explained. We were walking uphill, huffing slightly from the pace he maintained, and I can see now the fronds of the willow tree that I had to sweep out of my way as we passed underneath. The scene, complete with the sound of his penetrating voice, is like a video clip that keeps interjecting itself into the scene of my life, at unpredictable times.
I took his advice to heart, quite literally and proudly, until I became a mother. I had interpreted self-reliance as taking care of myself exclusively. The territory of being solely responsible for another -- tiny and completely dependent -- human almost undid me. Almost from the start, at unpredictable intervals, I felt overwhelmed. I’d wake up with fear in my gut, a steady clenching in the part of my body that had so recently been hard and swollen with its enclosed new life. Now she was outside and frail. The only predictable relief was when she was nursing. I could feel my milk respond to her suckling, its flow a miracle of nature, and her tiny hand would open and clasp the soft flesh around her busy mouth. My own contentment matched hers, and often we both dozed afterward.
But when she cried and I could find no way to soothe her, often in the early evening, I felt ignorant and sad and inept. I was an unnatural creature, lacking in the instinct of care. This doubt expanded within me like a cancer, and as she began to eat solid food, she nursed less and my source of comfort abated. When I visited with Patty, I asked her if she’d felt this way. She told me that Sandra had refused to nurse and had been cranky in her first six months, but that her doctor had told her some babies could not easily be comforted. She had ‘just got through it’ somehow. I asked her how long it had lasted but she couldn’t remember. ‘A few months,’ was all she said, and I was then in my eighth or ninth month of this dark cavern of self-doubt. It didn’t help that when she picked up Dawn to comfort her, Dawn would quiet almost instantly. It was my inadequacy after all.
I admit I was not a naturally gifted mother, but who is? During the first few months I was full of energy and resolve. I’d wake at dawn with the roosters (some neighbor raised chickens) and glance over at my sleeping daughter. I’d shoved my queen bed into the corner and let her sleep on the inside, with me on the outside. It gave us both plenty of room and allowed me to just turn over to nurse her at night, without having to get up. I was careful, of course, to put her back far to the inside, so that I could not roll over onto her.
Someone had given me a big, soft sling to carry her, and I took walks with her every day. Having her snuggled up to me was delicious, but by the time she was six months old, she became too heavy, so I reverted to the stroller Jenny had passed down to me.
I’d managed to complete the illustrations for the kangaroo book, all eighteen watercolors, by painting while Dawn napped in the afternoon. But soon I needed naps too, and the afternoon painting lapsed. I became dull-headed, and my book ideas about baby’s hands became too ambitious even to begin.
Megan and Jenny offered to stay with her, so that I could go to the gym or hike to the river, but I always said no. I wanted to be with Dawn all the time, didn’t want to have to pump milk and save it for her, didn’t even want to be out of sight of her.
Once when Patty came over and drove us down to Roseville to have dinner with her and Doug and their children, I fell asleep in the car on the ride down, and then again at dinner. I must have just dozed off in my seat. I didn’t drop my food or anything obviously embarrassing, but when I looked up, they were all staring at me. I apologized several times but Patty insisted that I spend the night. Since she had driven me down, I couldn’t refuse. She put me into the guest room, and Dawn into Ian’s old crib in his room. That was the first night we slept apart. I slept nine uninterrupted hours. When Patty woke me, she held a squirming Dawn in her arms and just handed her to me to nurse.
“It’s time to start weaning her,” she told me at breakfast. “You need the rest, and she will sleep through the night better.” Dawn was ten months old then. I nodded to Patty but didn’t take her advice. I was in the hospital when Dawn was finally weaned, at twenty months.
I think that night at Patty’s marked my recognition of how tired I was getting, how dull-headed my days were becoming. Being tired became being sad also. I mourned what I could no longer do: paint, hike, read, visit with friends…. I changed diapers, fed and dressed Dawn, shopped for groceries and made us simple meals, read to Dawn and played with her, following her around as she crawled and tried to pull open drawers and cabinet doors.
Megan and Jenny offered to take me out to dinner for my birthday in May, offering a babysitter, but I wouldn’t even consider it. I would have no babysitter, not even Megan’s daughter Sam, who had known Dawn since birth and liked being with her.
I didn’t know I was steadily sinking into the very dark hole that caused my hospitalization, but I remember that last, pivotal day.
3
On the day Patty had me committed, I slept late. I’d been sleeping later and later each day, it seemed, and my first conscious sensation that day was of Dawn’s foot on my bladder as she crawled over me to get out of bed. I must have thrown her back roughly because she whimpered before crawling out of bed from the foot end. Her side of the bed was still pushed to the wall so that she could not fall out. I heard her padding over toward the cupboard and the sound of a chair moving across the floor. I knew I needed to get up to get her breakfast, but my body felt so leaden I could barely move.
At twenty months, she was not tall enough to reach the cereal on the upper shelves. But I also knew she had a determined, exploratory energy, and she knew where the cereal was. I turned over in bed so I could see what see what she was doing. She had climbed onto the kitchen table chair next to the cupboard and was crawling onto the ledge below the cupboards. If I hurried, I could get there before she opened the cupboard door. But hurrying was something I could no longer do with my sludgy body.
I remember seeing her lose her balance as she opened the cupboard door toward herself. She tipped backward in slow motion, as if in a cartoon. Then she was on the floor, wailing, and I managed to get out of bed, stumble to her, and cradle her in my arms. Her wailing quieted, but I could feel a bulge rising on the back of her head.
“I was hungry,” she cried.
“Oh, honey, it’s all my fault,” and I started to cry also, even as I knew that my crying might make it worse for her.
“Let me put you on the soft bed and get some ice for your bump.” I lifted her with what felt like the last energy in my body and placed her on the bed, propping a pillow behind her so that she was sitting upright. I kissed her forehead and cheek, as much in love as I had ever been, at the same time as I knew, deeply, that I was failing, failing and falling off a ledge into an abyss.
I did fill a plastic baggie with ice cubes, crushed them with a hammer and propped them up on the pillow behind her head. I did cut up a banana, hand her half of it to help stave off her hunger and place the slices into a bowl of cereal with milk for her. I let her eat in bed that morning. I did change her diaper and clean her bottom properly and dress her. I gently examined the rest of her body and discovered she had a rising bump on her right hip as well as on the right rear of her head. Hoping her hip had absorbed most of the impact, I dressed myself, knowing I should take her to the doctor. But then I felt so depleted that I needed to lie down myself to rest before driving to the doctor. I thought of calling Patty, but I had called her so often lately and I could already hear what she would say. What is it now? So I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, I thought I had heard the doorbell. Patty was in the room, with S
andra. Where’s Dawn? I couldn’t tell if we all said it in unison or if the voices were in my head, but I got up quickly and looked around. It took only a moment for all of us to locate Dawn outside, in the garden, picking daffodils.
“For Mommy,” she said. Four daffodils in her tiny plump hand.
I told Patty that Dawn had fallen, without explaining how. Instantly, she was on the phone with Dawn’s pediatrician, who by now knew Patty as well as she knew me. I caught an eye-rolling, ‘not-again’ look pass between Sandra and her mother.
“She told us to take her to the ER for x-rays,” I heard from the back of Patty’s head, as she swept around the room efficiently collecting snacks, books, diapers and a jacket for Dawn, as well as one for me. We all piled into Patty’s car, already outfitted with an extra kid-seat for Dawn and headed to the Grass Valley Memorial Hospital.
“You rest here,” Patty told me in the waiting room, while she took Dawn in to be examined and x-rayed. Sandra followed them into the room rather than be stranded with me.
I have no concept of how long they were in there, and I must have closed my eyes, but the next thing I remember was a doctor sitting down next to me. Owlish eyes behind round glasses, and unruly eyebrows, a face in ordinary life I would love to have sketched. He looked at me kindly for a few seconds, then held out his arm to help me up.
“Follow me,” he said in a soft voice. I would have willingly followed him anywhere.
I found myself in an examining room, where he identified himself as Dr. Reuther. He asked if he could ask me some questions and of course I said yes. What surprised me initially was that all of the questions were about me, not Dawn. At first it seemed plausible, a family history, and that seemed relevant enough, but when he began to ask what medications I took, whether I used drugs, whether I had any history of depression, I became suspicious. When I asked why, he told me Patty had told him I’d been extremely tired and down lately, which was true enough, and I let him continue. He ultimately examined me physically, probing my throat and neck, taking my blood pressure, and ordering an EKG. Someone came in to draw blood. When he left the room, he told me to rest, that it would be a little while before he came back. I felt an odd sense of relief.
Raising Dawn Page 2