What do you do if he wakes as soon as you put him to bed or a little later? I think it’s better to assume first that if he has nursed for 5 minutes he’s had enough to keep him satisfied for a couple of hours, and try not to feed him again right away. Let him fuss for a while if you can stand it. (Section 127.)
The baby carriage turned out to be an unexpected aid in stopping traffic. “Pedestrians have the right of way!” I roared indignantly from the middle of Sixth Avenue, and for once even the long-distance haulage trucks stopped for me. But it was still a good half hour between whimper and feeding—a half hour that took months off my life and left yellow milk-stains on my nursing bras.
It may start leaking from the breasts when you hear the baby beginning to cry in the next room. This shows how much feelings have to do with the formation and release of the milk. (Section 102.)
If I had stayed home with her instead of going to the park I could have put her to suck the instant she woke, forgot the clock and the dangers.
The treatment of fretfulness seems clear to me. … The baby should be allowed to nurse as often as every 2 hours, for 20 to 40 minutes. (Section 122.)
But I so wanted everything to be right for her, and the park was the preferred milieu. Constant feeding was contraindicated. If my breasts were never more than partially emptied, which could result from putting her to suck too often, then they would not be properly stimulated to fill up again and I would dry up with no comfort for my helpless daughter.
If the breast-milk supply is insufficient at all feedings, you will need a bottle at all feedings, whether you give the breast first or not. (Section 126.)
I knew I shouldn’t be offering her bottles yet, but how could I risk starving her? Her life was in my hands. I nursed her around the clock every two hours for half an hour at least, watching her tiny fists clutch spasmodically at my long hair and her toes curl in the joy of sucking, until she fell asleep at my breast; then gingerly I tried to roll her onto her stomach without waking her.
There are two disadvantages to a baby’s sleeping on his back. If he vomits, he’s more likely to choke on the vomitus. Also, he tends to keep his head turned toward the same side. … This may flatten that side of his head. It won’t hurt his brain, and the head will gradually straighten out, but it may take a couple of years. (Section 248.)
During the mornings and late afternoons, when I had the diapers and laundry, the bottles and bedding to do, I let her sleep on our bed between feedings. Does a tree falling unobserved in the forest make a sound? Does my child live without me there to see her? I carefully slipped rubber padding between her diaper and our sheet, sometimes leaving her bottom bare to help her diaper rash. (“Jesus, Sasha, isn’t there anything else you can use on her diaper rash besides Desitin Ointment? It smells worse than shit; our bed stinks of it,” said Willy.) But at night, when I longed to share with her my brief interludes of sleep, I couldn’t risk keeping her in bed with me. Even if Willy hadn’t protested her little body coming between ours, it was a dangerous place for her. A carelessly flung arm could snuff out her fire like a breath a birthday candle; not to mention the
chance that he may become dependent on this arrangement and be afraid and unwilling to sleep anywhere else. (Section 250.)
No; better to follow (Section 251) the doctor’s
sensible rule not to take a child into the parents’ bed for any reason (even as a treat when the father is away on a business trip);
better to suffer now than pay later.
The conspiracy of silence about motherhood was even wider than the one about sex. Philosophers ignored it and poets revered it, but no one dared describe it. The experts who wrote articles for magazines (“Ten Steps to Restore Muscle Tone”; “Before You Call Your Pediatrician”; “Take the Time to Stay Interesting: Six Shortcuts to Keeping Informed”) spoke in euphemisms; as to the real dangers, their best advice was to consult still other doctors. Why didn’t the women speak? Evidently they were too busy.
“Roxanne!” I cried. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“But I did, Sasha. I told you everything. I honestly thought you knew.”
By summertime Andy sat up unsupported and charmed us with her laugh.
“Boy or girl?”
“Girl.”
“Oh. What’s her name?”
“Andrea.”
She purred and giggled as I suckled her. She had her preferences, did my daughter, and when something made her cry she broke my heart with her great stores of tears that flooded her enormous green eyes and overflowed their thick banks of black lash like swollen rivers. How, I wondered, could Willy bear to be away from us? Why did he leave us promptly every morning and return late every night?
“Sasha,” called Willy, “she’s started crying again. I was just sitting here with her and she started screaming for no reason.”
I dropped the spatula and ran to the living room, oblivious of Spock’s warning to parents who
always anxiously pick him up when he fusses: … the more they submit to his orders the more demanding he becomes. (Section 282.)
“Give her to me, Willy, for God’s sake, don’t let her cry like that!”
If your baby is sensitive about new people, new places, in the middle of his first year, I’d protect him from too much fright by making strangers keep at a little distance until he gets used to them, especially in new places. He’ll remember his father in a while. (Section 348.)
I took my baby in my arms and walked her, patting her perfect back the way I had when she was a newborn. The sound of her crying was always absolutely unbearable to me.
Many mothers get worn out and frantic listening to a baby cry, especially when it’s the first. You should make a great effort to get away from home and baby for a few hours at least twice a week—oftener if you can arrange it. … If you can’t get anyone to come in, let your husband stay home one or two evenings a week while you go out to visit or see a movie. (Section 278.)
The trouble was, Willy didn’t get home most evenings till eight or so and couldn’t have helped me then if he’d wanted to. Oh, he was thoughtful in many little ways. He telephoned the Diaper Service from his office to yell at the delivery man for me when the fouled-up deliveries drove me to phone him, sobbing, at work; he was comforting in emergencies. But he too had changed when Andy was born. A family man now with responsibilities, he buckled down to work.
“Honey? I’m in a meeting now that I just can’t leave. Better eat without me.”
His work and ego prospered—for us, he said. But how could he possibly learn on Sundays the intricate rhythm we had established during the week? How could he relieve me if he left us in the morning and returned late at night, or if he were away, as the omniscient Spock had divined, on a business trip?
“Hold it—” said Will, opening his lens on us.
I tried to hold it.
“Okay. Relax now.”
Us at the fountain in Washington Square, us lying naked on the bed, us playing pat-a-cake, us arty under the Brooklyn Bridge.
“You have no idea how breathtakingly beautiful you are with that child,” he said, holding the negatives up to the light for scrutiny. “You’re going to love some of these.”
He kept us like a credit card in a window of his wallet and blown up splat on his office wall. As I sat in the doctor’s office waiting Andy’s turn or stood in line at the checkout counter, I liked to think of us on Will’s office wall silently watching him work, decorating his life. Our sepia eyes followed the viewer all over the room. Hector had a penchant for pretty clericals from good colleges, and I wanted our presence felt in that place. Not that I mistrusted Will, but I remembered how far I could have been trusted as an unattached clerical. Overnight, it seemed, I had switched allegiances: suddenly I found myself siding with wives and parents against insurgents. Marxists were right: we follow our class interests.
Once every two weeks I hired a daytime sitter and tore myself from Andy as Spock advised. I planned to
slip off to the library and read a book or arrange to meet a friend at the Museum of Modern Art. But somehow the hours were too precious to use up on personal frivolities, and instead I took to dropping in on Will for lunch (as in the old days), doing everything I could to live up to my photographs. Flat-stomached supermother uptown between feedings. “Please tell him Mrs. Burke is here,” I said with authority to the current receptionist. Not for nothing had I insisted on living in Manhattan.
I took more care dressing for those office calls than when Will wrenched me away from Andy at bedtime to accompany him to the movies or a party at Hector’s, where I watched the world go spinning on as though babies were a recent invention. Couples stood in line at movie theaters holding hands, oblivious of the consequences; old friends gathered at Hector’s with new girlfriends to exchange news of charter flights and recent books, as though Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care had not been written for them. “How’s that baby?” asked informed singles. And when Will proudly displayed the latest photos of me and Andy he had carefully enlarged on weekends in the darkened kitchen, they saw no prophecies, heard no warnings. “I told you; I thought you knew,” Roxanne had said, yet not even I had caught the message. Then how could these party girls be expected to understand what was in store for them? I was not about to admit exhaustion or plead anxiety to them, waiting like harpies for just such a signal that Will was carrion. Nothing provokes attack like the smell of defeat. Instead, I joined the general snicker at the profession of housewife and kept a careful eye on Willy. And determined to do stomach-muscle exercises if I could steal the time.
That first summer I took Andy to the crowded playground every day, carrying her up the slide and sliding her down on my lap.
“Wheee! Andy,” I said; and she after me, “ee.”
I strapped her into the baby swings, swinging her, singing to her, anything to hear her delicious laughter.
I had a silver nut tree, nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear.
The King of Spain’ s daughter came to visit me
And all for the sake of my little nut tree.
From the tilt of her head, her sounds, the way she held out her hands to me, I knew which songs she loved, which games she wanted. We spoke in a secret code. Her laugh and cry was the pitch pipe by which I tuned my days.
I skipped over water, I danced over sea,
And all the birds in the air could not catch me.
From a park bench I watched her at my feet intently tearing up a leaf, her mouth open and brows knit in concentration, her pudgy fingers moving with careful grace. Though I always took a book to the park I didn’t dare read for the dangers; couldn’t read for the distractions. Anyway, most books were now irrelevant. Instead, I searched around to see which of the other mothers, multiparous and knowing, could tell me things about my daughter I ought to know. Some of them were limber and accomplished, some foul-mouthed and acne-scarred, no doubt with mean lives and husbands to match, and I wondered as I watched them fitfully sunning themselves on the benches—their skirts or dungarees pulled above their knees to reveal legs laced with varicose veins and stubble, their hair in rollers on Fridays, their hips spreading, their ankles puffed with edema—I wondered that some of them had ever managed to land and hold husbands at all. I listened to them entranced. Their complaints were auguries, their advice oracular. I hung on every casual comparison they made of Andy with their own like revelations. My daughter’s life was in my hands.
“Slow down, Willy!” I screamed as we rode the bumper of the car ahead. I yelled for Andy, and all the others Willy was bound to kill, it was only a matter of time. He was surely the most reckless driver in New York City. Always rushing to make the turn, pass the car ahead, get into the tunnel first, make it through the light on yellow, as though restraint were defeat. I half wished he’d crash and get it over with. (“There, you see? Now you’ve killed our baby!”)
With a certain acumen he labeled my criticism “disloyal,” and forbade it. “I’ve told you: this is the way I drive. If you don’t like it, then don’t drive with me!”
I couldn’t fault his position. But aware of Andy asleep in her carcrib in the back seat, I couldn’t control myself either. Her enemy was my enemy.
“I’m sorry, Will. I mean, please slow down. As a favor. I don’t know what I’ll do if she wakes up now.”
He threw me an exasperated look and dropped a few feet behind the car in front before pulling out fast to change lanes. I clenched the armrest and closed my eyes. “Oh please, Willy,” I pleaded.
He stopped the car short in the parking lane.
“You’re impossible! If I’m going to creep, I have to be in the slow lane. Why don’t you drive?”
But I had long since given up driving except in emergencies.
“I’m sorry, Willy. Go on. I’ll keep quiet.”
I dreaded angering him. My stomach had knots enough. If we continued to break faith with each other we would turn sour like any other couple, and then—. The mere thought of Andy fatherless could make me panic.
Will started the car again, his mouth set against me. There was never time any more to talk things out as we once had done. Misunderstandings lingered. I always seemed, he said, to be pushing him away, when what I needed was to bind him close.
I was more helpless than ever in the passenger seat. Yielding to nature’s temptations had put me in Willy’s power as surely as it had once put me in Joey Ross’s. Only this time I couldn’t escape by moving out of town.
I began each day solemnly with resolutions:
Today I will make myself lunch; I’ll brew myself a cup of tea between breakfast feeding and diaper delivery.
I will not pick her up whenever she cries today.
I will be calm when she spits out her food.
The horror of my predicament was: everything counts. Each tiny mistake I made was destined to reverberate through all eternity.
The first time I yelled at Andy she looked at me unbelieving; betrayed. Her chin puckered, her lip trembled, then tears gushed from those green eyes all over her hands. I sank into a week-long depression. (Only a week and I had damaged her forever! More than a week and who would have fed her?) The weeks became records of my guilt, the months stages to weather and survive. No wonder my poor mother blamed herself for all my foolishness: I felt responsible for all of Andy’s. Willy was pissed at my state of mind; I wasn’t the carefree woman he had married. I lived by the tick of a clock not the beat of a pulse.
It’s possible that you will find yourself feeling discouraged for a while when you first begin taking care of your baby. It’s a fairly common feeling, especially with the first. You may not be able to put your finger on anything that is definitely wrong. You just weep easily. Or you may feel very bad about certain things. One woman whose baby cries quite a bit feels sure that he has a real disease, another that her husband has become strange and distant, another that she has lost all her looks. (Section 16.)
Exactly as I had once imagined but forgotten, when my child was born my fate slipped through my fingers into the bay. I was hers now.
If you begin to feel at all depressed, … go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get yourself a new hat or dress. … (Section 16.)
A new locale, a new hair style, could solve nothing any more. We swam around sifting plankton, hoping for some huge uplifting wave to come along and carry us high and wide; but there were only the usual ripples and currents and erratic seismographic disturbances to be recorded on the precision instruments of oceanographers. It all went down somewhere in a book; caprice was a memory. Even Roxanne had been stuck until Sasha began school. At least until Andy reached puberty, I noted, I was no freer to kill myself than a barnacle.
Notes in a Baby Book:
December 14: First smile. More delicious than the sneeze.
January 2: She discovers her thumb.
April 5: I laid her down on her stomach and picked her up on her back. Ergo
: she has learned to turn over.
June 21: First tooth through. Though not yet visible, I can hear it clink against her spoon. At last an explanation for her fretfulness as good as Will’s hypothesis that I am overprotective.
August 17: She learns to stand.
Thinking her still asleep in her crib at naptime I had gone next door to borrow some diapers from a neighbor. When I returned, I heard her screaming in her room. (Was it my fault? “Look, honey,” Willy had warned, “this is the third time you’ve run out of diapers. What happened to the emergency supply I got you? You need better planning. If you won’t increase the regular order, you’ll just have to use the ones you have more sparingly.”)
An accident? Had I forgotten to raise the side of the crib?
A baby, by the age he first tries to roll over, shouldn’t be left unguarded on a table for as long as it takes the mother to turn her back. (Section 349.)
I rushed to her room to find her standing in her crib clutching the bars terror-stricken, her fat knees buckling.
“Standing! Look at you!” I cried. She sobbed with exhaustion and victory. A star!
I unhooked her fingers one by one from the bars and scooped her up into my arms, my bumblebee, pressing kisses all over her shining face. “You can stand. You can do anything.” I rejoiced. When she kicked to be put back again, I sat her down in the crib; then up she climbed on her little legs once more, crowing with pride.
She had learned to stand not for a moment or a day, but for all time. I knelt before her crib. She looked so much tinier upright than sprawled across her mattress. She was one of us now, though she didn’t come up to my knees. As I knelt adoringly before her, trying to kiss her nose through the bars, she began to shake her little body furiously, rattling the bars, laughing until her chin puckered, her lower lip protruded toward me, and once again, the deluge.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen Page 23