My responsibility now was for another human life, and fucking up was not an option. Because Maddy was still so tiny, the NICU doctor had placed her on a strict feeding schedule. Every three hours she got a bottle of formula and a diaper change, day and night. I thought about all the times Liz would yell at me for forgetting to stop and eat while she was out of town, and how it wouldn’t go too well for Madeline if I forgot to feed her.
Sensing my fear, or perhaps trying to assuage their own, Tom and Candee, now back in Minnesota, called to tell me that they had worked with a few of Liz’s friends to track down some assistance for me. The memorial fund that Sonja and Josh set up had brought in well over sixty thousand dollars since Liz’s funeral, and Tom insisted that the best use of the money was to pay for some help.
“You have enough money for round-the-clock aid for at least a month, and that’s exactly what this money is for.”
He was right, but all I could think about was the future—how we were going to continue to live in our house, and how we were going to make it without Liz’s income. But I looked at the memorial fund as an emergency reserve, to be used only in the direst of circumstances. I didn’t want to dip into it to pay someone to do a job that I saw as a labor of love. I got on the phone with Tom.
“Matt, good news. We found a postpartum doula who’s willing to donate one night of her services for free,” Tom said. “She heard about your story and wants to help.”
I had no idea what the hell a doula even was, but I remembered Liz telling me that some of her friends had them before and after their pregnancies.
“Great,” I said, as I looked up the definition of the word.
I was hopeful that a doula was some sort of baby sorcerer, ready to impart upon me secret child-rearing knowledge that had been passed down through generations of doulas before.
“Now, if we could find another 365 like her, you and Maddy will be just fine.”
“Maybe. Hey, Tom?”
“Yeah?”
“Did you know that the etymology of the word doula is from the Greek doule, meaning ‘female slave’? I’m pretty sure I don’t really want a slave, even if she’s only gonna be here for one night.”
Tom spent the next few minutes convincing me that this woman wasn’t really a slave at all, just a kind soul willing to volunteer her time to help someone in need. I really wanted to just start this parenting thing on my own, but after the long day, I didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. I agreed to allow a doula into my home to help me with Madeline. Besides, getting a good night’s sleep wasn’t the worst idea.
When my hoped-for savior arrived at the front door, I instantly concluded that a doula was more like a hippie-nanny hybrid than anything else. We spent most of the night sitting on the couch, talking about the kind of things strangers discuss. She shared with me her strong opinions about natural birthing methods, natural medicine, and, naturally, raising a child. She picked a parenting book up from the coffee table. “You may as well throw this in the trash,” she declared.
Now, I probably would have agreed with her a few weeks earlier—I was a firm believer that most parenting books are useless. Humans have been raising babies for over two hundred thousand years, and during most of that time there were no doctors, doulas, books, or websites to help them figure it out. But at that moment, her pronouncement left me seething: the book she held above her head, the book she suggested was garbage, was the last book Liz ever held in her hands, and she saw it as her parenting bible. I didn’t say anything to the doula because I knew she hadn’t intentionally tried to piss me off, but I took it as my cue to exit and try to get some sleep.
A little while later, I woke up to silence and walked from my bedroom into the living room to find her still sitting on my couch. I looked around and was surprised to see my house a little cleaner than it had been when I went to sleep. Even more surprising was that I’d only slept for two and a half hours, and I had missed just one of Madeline’s diaper change/feeding cycles. If this doula had generations of baby knowledge, she sure didn’t share any of it. She didn’t suck at what she did, but I’d had such lofty expectations for her that she was never going to live up to them. She did teach me an alternative swaddling technique that was rather impressive, but otherwise I found her services basically useless.
The next night’s slave wasn’t a slave at all. In fact, she was an extortionist. This second doula was at our house for twelve hours and things went pretty much the same as the night before. In the morning, before she was to leave, she informed me that her services cost sixty dollars per hour. “US dollars?” I asked, only half kidding.
She didn’t think I was very funny. As I tried to multiply 12 times 60 in my head, she blurted out “Seven hundred and twenty dollars.”
Seven hundred and twenty dollars for supposed help that paled in comparison to the actual knowledge I had gained from the doctors and nurses at the hospital.
But the doulas did do one thing for me: they gave me confidence. Confidence that lack of sleep wasn’t as big an issue as everyone told me it would be, and confidence that at sixty dollars per hour, my emergency fund would run out far sooner than we had anticipated. Most important, because the doulas didn’t provide any precious advice or information, I was confident that I would be able to take care of my child on my own. I still didn’t really have all of the answers—or even know the questions, necessarily—but I now felt sure that I could become the great parent I wanted to be. Besides, Madeline seemed pretty easy, just eating and requiring a diaper change at regular intervals. In the hospital, she had been a fragile doll in an incubator, wires attached to her body, feeding tube in her nose. But after two days at home with her all of that seemed to disappear—she was simply my kid. I knew I was never going to be perfect, but I was going to try my damnedest.
I made a check out to the doula while she used a green Sharpie to write her name, address, and phone number down on the back of a receipt I found lying on my desk. “Give me a call if you’d like me to come back.”
I told her I would, but I already knew she’d never hear from me again.
Chapter 13
i can’t help but
think that
madeline
lost the better of
her two parents.
I knew that I was going to have to learn to live alone with Madeline, so I figured the best thing to do was to jump right in. As the sun went down on our first evening alone in the house, I sat on the top stair of our front porch. Madeline was cradled in my left arm, and I was staring across the small valley that separated our hilltop house from the next, trying to keep from thinking about what should have been. As hard as I tried to focus on the distant sounds of birds, the thoughts just kept creeping back into my head. Liz should have been sitting here next to me, just under a month to go until her due date. I should have had my left arm around her, my hand gripping her shoulder, while the other, placed firmly on her belly, waited to feel our unborn daughter’s next kick. We should have been making fun of the annoying couple in our birthing class and talking about when she planned to start her maternity leave. Madeline shouldn’t have been here, not yet, anyway. And sitting there alone with my daughter, I tried my best not to completely lose my shit.
I was emotionally exhausted, and I knew that I should go to sleep because Maddy would wake up in a few hours, ready for her next diaper change and feeding. I walked through the house turning off the lights, careful to leave one on in the living room just so any potential burglars would know that someone was home, which I’d been doing nightly since the incident last January. I went into the bedroom, my bare feet sliding over the silk rug Liz had purchased during our trip to Nepal. I placed my tightly swaddled baby faceup in her bassinet and climbed into my bed still wearing jeans and a T-shirt. No sense in getting undressed, I figured, since I no longer had any idea of whether it was morning or night. I lay there, watching the ceiling fan spin above me and listening to the analog clock on Liz’s dress
er tick away the seconds. I don’t know how long she’d had it, but this was the first time I had ever heard it. Suddenly I felt a pulsing in my head that was beating in time with the clock. I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples, just like they do in those commercials for Tylenol, trying to massage away the pain.
I reached for the television remote on my nightstand, hoping to find a new episode of Robot Chicken on the DVR to make me laugh without having to think. There were some shows that Liz had recorded but hadn’t had a chance to watch: a few episodes of The Hills, three hours’ worth of A Baby Story, and some other pieces of supreme television shit. I hit the menu button on the remote and moved the cursor to Delete, but then I paused. I had no desire to ever watch any of this trash, but I couldn’t get rid of it. By deleting Liz’s shows, wouldn’t I be deleting part of her? I let out a mixture of laughter and tears as I thought about how stupid that was, and decided to turn off the TV and read a book instead.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been asleep, but the sound that awoke me sent a wave of panic through my body; it was the same noise I’d heard come from Liz the day that she died. I jumped from the bed and found Madeline with vomit coming from her nose and mouth, choking and gasping for air. Independent from my mind and the rest of my body, my arms reached for her and my hands lifted her from the bassinet.
I didn’t need to remember what I’d learned in the baby CPR class I had taken in the hospital—I just started doing it. I flipped Madeline over, her stomach on my leg, her head hanging over my knee. I firmly smacked her back, hoping I’d be able to clear her airway. It didn’t work. My baby cradled in my arms, I ran to her room and with my free hand, searched through the mountain of unopened baby products piled in the corner. Frantic, I found what I was looking for: the booger sucker, as it had been known in my house while I was growing up. I ripped open the package and placed my thumb on top of the bulbous blue rubber thing, with the stem between my index and middle fingers.
I had never actually used a nasal aspirator before, but I didn’t think it could require too much instruction. I thrust the skinny end into her nose and pushed my thumb down hard on the round part. Madeline started coughing and squirming harder. Fuck! I forgot the one and only rule for using the thing: squeeze all of the air out of it first. I removed the aspirator from her nose, scared to death that I had done some permanent damage to my daughter by forcefully blowing the vomit further into her nasal passage, but I knew I had to try it again—no one else was going to, certainly. I reinserted the aspirator, this time correctly. When I took my thumb off, I heard a sucking sound, indicating some form of success. I emptied its contents right onto the wood floor of her bedroom and repeated the steps.
By the third round, it sounded like Madeline was breathing fine, so I stopped trying to clear her airway. Mentally exhausted, I dropped the aspirator, lay down in the middle of the now-dirty floor and cried, holding Madeline to my chest and gently rubbing her back.
I couldn’t help but think how different things would have been if Liz had been here to help. I would have been freaking out, and she calmly would have dealt with our choking baby. Or maybe it would have been the other way around. But no matter what, we would have been able to responsibly handle the situation together, instead of it being just me, alone with our child, in pieces. My confidence was shaken a bit, but I was pretty damn impressed how well I handled the crisis in the end.
I spent a great deal of those first few weeks in tears. Often they would come upon me suddenly; I was as overwhelmed by the ordinary as I was by the inconceivable. I couldn’t help crying, but I worked very hard to avoid doing so in front of Maddy. It’s not that she would have necessarily known that I was sad, but I wanted to ensure that she didn’t feel my pain. Happy father equals happy baby, right? So as soon as she was comfortably sleeping, her tiny chest rising and falling, I’d sneak out to the garage to cry over old photos of Liz and me. Or I would shower, not to get clean, but to hide behind the green and white curtain, letting the sound of the water drown out my bawling.
But even in the depths of my grief, when Maddy was just a few weeks old, there had to be laughter and I had to have a sense of humor, because it was fucking awful to keep thinking about Liz dying. It’s not that things were necessarily funny—I just made light of certain situations. An avalanche of greeting cards steadily flowed into my mailbox, usually with two cards from each sender: one congratulating me on the birth of my daughter, the other offering condolences on the death of my wife. I found this to be as absurd as it was comical. I was baffled that friends and family didn’t have the words in their minds or their hearts to be able to say both things at once. They had to buy two cards at Target and get two fucking stamps. I understood the sentiments were difficult to express, and I did appreciate that they made the effort to let Hallmark say it for them, at least. If I hadn’t been able to find the humor in it, though, I would have lost my mind.
As much as I joked about the incongruity of the cards, I know it was this type of support that got me through those first impossible weeks. Being alone with my baby and without my wife, support was what I needed the most, and my personal community stepped up to the challenge with grace—and generosity.
Countless local friends stopped by the house with gifts for Madeline, and on most occasions they’d arrive with food and beverages, too. Liz and I had cooked together all the time, but now that she was dead I just couldn’t do it. Friends would try to make me feel better by saying, “It’s hard to cook for one,” which was valid, but the real difficulty for me was actually entering our kitchen. Every drawer I opened contained some item or another that we had been given for our wedding, and I couldn’t take the reminders constantly transporting me back there. Liz had such a great time opening up these gifts and stocking the kitchen with them, and I had an equal amount of fun laughing at some of the stupid shit we’d registered for.
“What the fuck are we going to do with this crack torch? Neither one of us smokes crack, I don’t think.”
“It’s a crème brûlée torch, you ass.”
“I hate crème brûlée,” I said.
“It’s my favorite, so you better learn to make it.”
During the day it was easier—a phone call from a friend would distract me long enough to dig through the cupboards to find all of the pieces of Maddy’s bottle. But the anxiety was especially bad at night. There were no visitors. No calls. No support. Still no wife. Everyone was asleep or up late dealing with their own crying babies. The quiet darkness brought out my weakness and anguish. Things got so bad, I tried so hard to avoid going near that pain, that I moved a supply of bottled water, powdered formula, and a bottle warmer into the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to make up Maddy’s bottles in the kitchen.
At first I had been pretty much unable to eat at all—the feeling of perpetual nausea had followed me home from the hospital. I probably dropped twenty-five to thirty pounds in the first few weeks after Liz died. I was a fucking skeleton. The unmistakable look of grief emanated from every part of my body. I was destroyed, and a mess. My eyes looked as if they had been shoved two inches back inside my head; my face was ashen and expressionless, except when I was crying. I’d lost so much weight that I looked like a little kid wearing clothing stolen from my father’s closet. I was pathetic and visibly not okay. But I had to hold it together for my daughter.
I was learning as I went and making adjustments as needed. Madeline’s very strict schedule for the first few months of her life of course meant that I was on a very strict schedule for the first few months of my new life, keeping me from completely falling apart and withdrawing from the world. Despite multiple warnings, I broke the one rule that every parent shared with me: sleep when your baby sleeps. I found it nearly impossible. I was never much of a sleeper, but when Maddy first came home, I only slept for three or four nonconsecutive hours per day. She kept me regimented, but I also needed ways to keep myself busy while she slept. Too much alone time led to thinking and overthinking and usual
ly breaking down. I did all the chores around the house that I had actively avoided while Liz was alive and asking for my help, simply because they kept my mind occupied. Wilco’s “Hate It Here” repeated over and over in my head: I even learned how to use the washing machine, but keeping things clean doesn’t change anything. The lyrics seemed written specifically for my situation.
I also used Madeline’s sleep and feeding times to keep up with the things I used to do before. I’d sit in my office in front of my computer, reading record reviews and catching up on the news while holding her in my arms. After a while, I had a general sense of how long it would take her to drain a bottle. She was drinking maybe four ounces at a time over the course of fifteen minutes. One night I put a bottle in her mouth and propped it up with a blanket under her chin so it could rest stably while she drank. That way I’d still have one hand free to maneuver the mouse and keyboard. I started typing, and it couldn’t have been more than twenty seconds till I heard the schlshh, schlshh sound of sucking air. I looked down and saw that the bottle was empty. There was a little bit of milk around her lips, but I definitely didn’t see it all over her or anything else. What the hell?
Fuck, I realized, the nipple had a giant hole in it. My daughter had just done a beer bong out of her bottle; she’d just sucked it down like the drunk wannabe sorority girls with whom I went to college. Oh shit. I was starting to panic. I had no idea if I should I induce vomiting or call the hospital or something. I grabbed for my phone to make the call, but as I watched her, she seemed completely fine. And right then, my panic turned to self-loathing—Liz would have known exactly what to do, because it was probably covered in one of those fucking parenting books that I made fun of her for reading.
Two Kisses for Maddy Page 11