Given Up for You

by Erin O. White

  For months we tried to get Grace to sleep without us, letting her cry for ten then fifteen then twenty minutes, letting her cry until even Ferber himself would have picked her up. Grace was a beautiful baby, but she cried a lot.

  And so she slept on us, because we needed the peace and quiet when and how we could get it. I often slept while I held her, or occupied myself by picking the cradle cap out of her hair, rubbing away the rivers of lint that gathered in the deep creases of her palms. I also read the New Yorker, mostly because its columned pages required only infrequent turning. But Chris read books while she held Grace. That first year she read Tolstoy and Dickens, historical biographies and political commentaries. And in the beginning, when the colic was at its worst and we would split the particularly bad afternoons into thirty-minute shifts, Chris spent her thirty minutes off in the attic drinking beer and reading the 9/11 Commission Report, while I spent mine reading Dr. Sears and watching the Happiest Baby on the Block video. I saw Grace’s crying as something to fix; Chris saw it as something to escape.

  Our different experiences of Grace’s colic were born of many things, but none of them as formative as our vastly different hormone levels, and the way mine turned me, always and entirely, toward Grace. It took me a long time to understand that Grace’s crying didn’t sound the same to Chris as it did to me. Yes, it was exhausting and agitating, and yes, she wanted it to go away, but the basic—and maddeningly complicated—difference was that it did not fill her breasts with milk, milk that would either be accepted as succor or—more often than not—rejected and left to swell and leak.

  Which brings us, as something surely must, to the new differences between Chris’s and my body. When we were leaving the hospital the day after Grace’s birth, we passed a woman who was getting a tour of the birthing center. “You look amazing!” the woman said to Chris, who was carrying Grace in her infant car seat. “Thanks,” Chris said, “but I didn’t give birth, my wife did.” The woman looked at me then, in my blue velour yoga pants and flip flops, and she was clearly worried. At the time I thought her concern was funny. I had given birth less than twenty-four hours before and I felt like a rock star, like a goddess. I felt bad for anyone who hadn’t done what I did, including Chris. But later, when that pride and pleasure faded and I could not believe the state of my body, it was harder to see Chris so unchanged. I watched how she got up from the couch without using her hands, how she ran until sweat streamed down her face and dried on her cheeks. How she drank a beer at five o’clock every afternoon and ate half a block of cheddar cheese for lunch. Because, why not? It was her body after all. It belonged only to her.

  We spent Grace’s first Christmas with my family in Colorado Springs. My parents lived in an old neighborhood of wide, tree-lined streets, and Chris and I walked them with Grace, marveling at the sun’s heat, the sidewalks free of snow. Some afternoons we walked through the campus of Colorado College to the downtown shops and cafés of my childhood. The city where I grew up was relatively large, but my neighborhood was insular, and so when we were out walking we often ran into people I knew. “Looks like you’ve got news,” an old high school friend called out when she saw us walking toward her on the street. Chris was wearing Grace in the Bjorn. Wearing Grace had become like driving, something I never did when Chris and I were together.

  “I do,” I said, hugging my friend. “This is Chris,” I said, putting my hand on Chris’s arm, “and this is our baby, Grace.”

  Chris and my friend shook hands, exchanged greetings. Had my friend known I was married to a woman? If she were surprised, she didn’t show it.

  “How old is she?” my friend asked.

  “Four months,” Chris said, leaning down to kiss Grace’s head. Kissing Grace’s head had become an unconscious gesture for Chris, like brushing hair from her own forehead or turning her watch around her wrist.

  “I had her in August,” I said quickly. I often went out of my way to tell people that I was the one who had given birth. Surely Chris must have noticed me doing this, but she never said anything about it, never asked me why I felt the need to clarify. She just let me do it.

  In early February, Chris went to Germany on business. The morning she left she rose early, put on her long underwear and Carhartts, and went outside to stack wood. When Grace had worked her way through her baby circuit training system (approximately one contented minute in a swing, saucer chair, floor gym, and doorway jumper), we went outside to check on Chris.

  Chris loved stacking wood. She loved everything about our woodstove; she didn’t even mind going outside in zero-degree weather to dump the ash pail. I also loved the woodstove, or at least I loved the heat it threw, how it warmed our house in a way no radiator ever had. But I didn’t like the work of it. I didn’t like coming home in the late afternoon to a cold stove, having to leave Grace to cry in her car seat while I got the fire going again. I suspected that Chris loved the tasks of stacking wood and splitting kindling and dumping ashes because they were a way of taking care of Grace without actually holding her. Lately I couldn’t see the point in any living situation that involved such labor. I fantasized about co-op living, about having a super, a maintenance man.

  “Is this going to be enough?” Chris asked. She had filled both wood holders on the porch. I stood between them, dancing with Grace, who was fussy and slippery in her down snowsuit.

  “We’ll be fine,” I told her. “Although I can’t believe you’re going. Why do they need you to go?”

  “I have to go,” she said, not really answering my question. “I can’t make that mistake again.”

  She was referring to an out-of-town hearing she had missed two weeks after Grace was born. She had explained she was on a maternity leave (though she had not been pregnant) and that her baby was too young to leave. But still people had not been happy with her. “A man would’ve gone,” Chris had said when she told me about her boss’s cool response to her decision not to go. “And a mother who had given birth would have still been on paid maternity leave,” I had pointed out. “Which might have been even worse,” she had said. “Who knows?”

  So this time there was no question that she would go, although I was still not entirely sure why this meeting couldn’t be postponed, or why she couldn’t do it over the phone. But I didn’t say that. Instead I told her it seemed we had more than enough wood for the week, and would she mind taking Grace for a little while, so I could also get a few things done?

  I didn’t want Chris to go to Germany, and yet I knew I could manage. And it wasn’t as though Chris wanted to go, which made my protests more unreasonable. Lately it seemed she liked her job less, and that she worried about work and money more. Grace was only six months old but Chris often talked about college and how we would pay for it, about the cost of insurance premiums and how many good earning years she had before retirement. She talked about how she was already looking forward to retirement. When we were in Colorado and out for brunch (our first date since Grace was born), Chris told me she had sent away for an application to the Kennedy School of Government.

  “Really?” I asked, with perhaps a bit too much surprise in my voice.

  “I’ve always wanted to go back to school,” she said. “I’ve been a lawyer for a long time.”

  She had been a lawyer for twelve years, which didn’t seem like a long time to me, but since I had never had the same job for more than three years I was in no position to question.

  “I’m thinking of applying next year,” she said. “They have family housing.”

  I saw the three of us in some cold and teeny one-bedroom apartment in Cambridge, Grace and I in the basement doing laundry while Chris was in class.

  My face must have betrayed something of my horror at the image, because Chris said, “You think it’s a bad idea.”

  It is a bad idea! I wanted to say. But I didn’t. “No, no I don’t,” I said. “I’m just not sure about the timing.”

  “I’m not getting any younger.”


  This was another thing Chris was always saying now that we had a baby. She wasn’t getting any younger. “You’re only thirty-seven,” I would say. Although secretly I thought thirty-seven sounded really, really old.

  When we got back to my parents’ house and Chris went upstairs to take a nap, I told my mother about Chris’s plan. “She wants to go to graduate school! At Harvard!” I shrieked. Grace, who was nursing, popped off my nipple and looked up at me with alarm. I smiled at her with a don’t-you-worry-everything’s-fine smile, and gently pushed her back on.

  My mother laughed. “When you were two months old your father felt compelled to get his scuba certification. So every Tuesday night he went to the high school pool for scuba training, then he got certified at a flooded quarry.”

  I vaguely remembered this story, remembered taking my father’s flippers and scuba mask with its tempered glass lens on our California beach vacations.

  “It’s what they do,” my mother said. “It’s a lot of pressure, providing for a child, for a family. She sees a long road ahead of her. Don’t get in her way; let this run its course.”

  I felt better after talking with my mother, but I wasn’t entirely certain that Chris’s professional restlessness and my father’s scuba dream were the same. I wanted them to be, wanted Chris to devote herself to something rewarding, something that would help her to feel free and young and independent, all while still keeping her job.

  While Chris was away, Kelly and Gaby invited me over for dinner. Kelly was a fantastic cook—she moved in the kitchen with the same brisk confidence with which she had run the Sisters Inc. board meetings. Because Gaby was always on kid duty (their son, Emmet, was a toddler) when Kelly was making dinner, she could devote herself to cooking the delicious versions of the comfort foods of her southern childhood. Tonight it was pork roast with apples, which she served on a table set with perfectly mismatched antique china plates.

  “I just don’t know how she can be away from Grace!” Kelly said as she cut the pork roast into small pieces, quickly blowing on one and then another, putting them in front of Emmet. Whatever Kelly’s philosophical objections to motherhood had been, she appeared to have traded them for a close adherence to her and Gaby’s fully equitable parenting arrangement. Fifty-fifty everything was their motto. Kelly did half the weekday childcare and half the bedtimes, half the gruesomely early mornings of hot cocoa and two episodes of Miffy. She was vigilant in her care of Emmet, and often critical of what she saw as Chris’s less engaged nonbiological parenting. She often referred to Chris as Dad, which, obviously, she did not mean as a compliment.

  “She had to go,” I said. “It’s her job.”

  It was late when Chris returned home from Germany. There had been a storm and her plane was delayed; the roads home from the airport had been icy and slow. She was tired, and so was I. But unfortunately Grace was not. So I made Chris some scrambled eggs, which she ate standing up, with Grace in her arms. The trip was good, she said; she was glad to have gone. “But it was so hard to be away from you,” she said. And I knew she meant Grace, or that she meant the me that was Grace’s mother, not necessarily the me that was her wife. She told me that there had been one night when she hadn’t been able to reach me, and, not wanting to keep calling and risk waking Grace, had lain awake until dawn, in her quiet luxury hotel, worrying.

  We went into the living room and Chris unpacked the gifts she had brought back: some small wooden toys, a soft pink sweater with flower buttons, a picture book in German about the Alps. I would like to tell you what Chris brought me but both of us have tried and tried to remember and we can’t. “I remember how late we slept the next morning,” Chris said when I asked her about the gift. Again with the sleep. But honestly that was what I remembered too, sleeping away the first full morning of her return. I was exhausted from a week of only half-sleeping until Grace’s first night-waking. Usually Chris brought her to me then, and often I didn’t even hear her cry, but because Chris was away I had to get up from the warm bed and fetch her myself, and the anticipation of her waking kept me up. Then while she fed I lay awake, wondering how the rest of the night would go, worrying about how tired I would be in the morning.

  When Grace woke on that first night Chris was back, Chris didn’t hear her and so I jumped up and got her myself—more out of a newly formed habit than consideration. I brought her into the bed with us, tucked her in beside my bare breast and listened to the two of them—Chris nearly silent in her jet-lagged sleep, Grace and her rhythmic sucking, and I could bear my wakefulness and I could bear the thought of morning; I could feel my breathing and my blood slow, I could feel sleep roll over me like a nearly holy fog.

  13

  Florida

  In the years between my Catholic confirmation and Grace’s birth, my church attendance grew increasingly sporadic, but I never missed a Holy Thursday service. It was my favorite night of the liturgical year, and had been since that first Holy Thursday when I woke up with Chris in my apartment and a gold cross around my neck. That night I went down the block to St. Patrick’s in the rain, walked up the slick stone steps, pulled open a carved wooden door, and entered the brightly lit nave.

  I didn’t know what to expect but took my seat and read the unfamiliar prayers, enjoying their novelty. Before the Mass was performed, before the long and—even to me—overly dramatic priestly procession of the Eucharist, I watched Father Dowling bend on one knee to wash the bare and bright feet of three nuns. The nuns, old and sweet-faced and a bit stooped, were dressed in full habits. In turn they leaned down to pull off their black shoes and black socks and lower their feet into the metal basin. When Father Dowling finished washing the last woman’s feet, she put her hand on his shoulder and he reached up to hold it.

  That night, after the service, Chris had met me on the stairs of St. Patrick’s, her gym bag slung over her shoulder. I stopped on the stair above her, laughing as I bent down to kiss her cheek. She laughed too, but took me by the hand and led me down the stairs. “I don’t kiss girls who are taller than I am,” she said. We went to dinner then, at a dark café around the corner from the church, and I remember we sat next to an open window; I remember there was a small, square planter of grass on the table. I remember that I believed, for the entirety of that dinner, in the possibility of my impossible life.

  In the years that followed I looked forward to Holy Thursday even when I was trying to keep my distance from everything else about the Church. Holy Thursday was irresistible. It was that row of nuns’ feet, that man kneeling with his basin of water. It was the Last Supper in all its drama: anxious disciples in an occupied city, a beloved and tired Jesus, that holy and human swirl of love and betrayal and good-bye. And then, the last hours of his body and his voice. What could be more thrilling?

  But the year that Grace was born I forgot all about Holy Thursday until nearly midnight when I was standing at the bathroom counter decanting shampoo into travel-sized bottles, preparing for an early morning flight to Florida. My heart sank when I remembered the day. I could have washed Grace’s feet! How lovely that would have been, how sad to think I had missed a chance to make a simple offering, an acknowledgment. But an offering to whom? To God or to the self I was supposed to become? And what exactly did I want to acknowledge? That I still cared about the Last Supper? That I still felt Jesus near me, felt his quiet and loving companionship? I did not. And this is what I couldn’t admit then: I did not miss him. And this absence of desire—never mind his actual absence—made me feel like a failure.

  So I had turned my face to another sun, which despite all the work and worry gave me extraordinary pleasure. And while I was not a perfect mother to Grace and these were far from perfect months, she was clearly the miracle I was getting right.

  Grace and I were flying to Florida to see my nana, who was eighty-five years old when Grace was born. Nana had a stroke a few weeks before we were scheduled to arrive. It was a small stroke; she suffered no lasting impairments. My mother had he
ard she was recovering well, but when we got to Nana’s house she didn’t greet us at the door. She called out a tired hello to us from the living room, where she was resting in her recliner. My mother, who had flown in from Colorado and met me at the airport, looked at me. We both knew this was not a good sign. Perhaps the stroke was not so little after all. We leaned down to give Nana long hugs and kiss her soft skin, brown and freckled from twenty-five years in the Florida sun. She cried when we hugged her, which she had never done before.

  Nana’s face had changed since I last saw her. At first I thought it was only the passage of time, but that wasn’t really it. It was more of an emptying. “It’s so good to see you, Nana!” I said, over and over. “So good to be here.” I wanted to put my head in her lap, wanted to feel her long fingers in my hair, the cool metal of her rings against my forehead and cheeks. But Grace was in her lap now, her head between Nana’s freckled hands.

  After a few minutes Grace began to squirm, so I scooped her up and sat her on the floor in front of Nana’s chair. I gave her a pile of blocks to knock down and Nana clapped for her. We ate a small dinner together on the sunporch and I fed Grace a few teaspoons of pureed squash from a jar, then read her My First Book of Sushi. My mother and Nana finished eating, both of them laughing at how I knew the cardboard pages with their absurd rhymes by heart. I was glad for the chance to make Nana laugh.