Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  6

  My Life as a Father

  The first word my daughter said was “Papa.” The second word my daughter said was “Papa”: this is Papa with a difficult p, not an easy d, not Da-da, everyday baby mumbo jumbo; my daughter was not speaking mumbo jumbo, she was speaking significance, the thing closest to her heart, Papa first, Papa second, and then, third, “Lila,” which is the name of our thirty-pound sweet Shiba Inu dog, who somehow managed to take up a place on my child’s tongue before me, the mama. “Ma ma, mama, maaa-ma,” I’d say to my girl, and she’d grin back, a chip of white tooth erupting from her red gum, and refuse me. “Papa,” she’d squeal. Her world, right from the start, was all about dad and dog with me on the fuzzy periphery, waving my arms around and insisting that I be seen.

  Maybe I’m overstating it. My daughter loves me. She blows me besitos, the Spanish term for little kisses, and in grocery stores she occasionally puts her plump arms around my neck and rests the scrumptious pad of her cheek against mine, so it’s like we’re dancing then, waltzing one on one. My husband, Benjamin, tells me I’m being oversensitive. “Of course she loves you,” he says, but we both know she loves him best. In any case, I tell myself, I deserve it. I am, after all, a modern mother, and my husband is, after all, a modern father, and this is just what I said I wanted. Two years ago, on September 28, the Clearblue test wand turned clear blue, and I made my husband, a chemist, swear on his hops vine that he’d be as active a parent as he is a gardener. He is a great gardener, spending hours in the spring sun coaxing dahlias and delphiniums from the ground while I hunch inside, staring at my computer screen, worrying over words. “We can’t have this child,” I’d said to him, waving the test wand in front of his face, “unless you swear you’re in it with me fifty-fifty.”

  “Forty-sixty,” he’d answered.

  “No,” I’d said. “It’s fifty-fifty or nothing. I’m not doing sixty percent of the parenting. My career is just as important as yours.”

  “I mean,” he’d said, “I’ll do sixty percent, even seventy. You do forty, or thirty. I’m shortening my hours at work once the baby is born.”

  Very cool, I thought. I bragged to my friends about how cool my husband was, a real feminist who’d put his money where his mouth was; who, literally, would swallow his salary and swaddle the baby; who would, he promised me, walk his talk. All throughout the pregnancy I suspected he’d renege, but he didn’t. Clara was born by C-section after a two-day labor, and I was so wiped out and drugged up that he was the first to hold her. It was he who insisted with a touching and slightly irritating enthusiasm that we take every class the postpartum unit offered, from feeding to first aid to bathing. Once at home, it was he who got up with the baby five nights out of the seven, he who took three weeks paternity leave while I scooted back to my office after just seven days, my cesarean scar still oozing. I was determined not to fall prey to motherhood, as though motherhood were a maw. My vision of motherhood comes, of course, from my own mother, who was more or less devoured by her children—she had four of them in close succession. My own mother never had a paying job, she drank cocktails with pitted olives speared with frill-topped toothpicks, and wept in frustration in the vast master bedroom from the hollowness of her life. I could not allow such a thing to happen to me. This wasn’t the fifties; this was the nineties, and feminism, far from reappropriating the dignity of motherhood, had taught me to try to escape it, even though my ovaries were silver sacs stuffed with human eggs, and my heart, well, even while my heart, in a secret corner, could not wait to feel the flesh of my flesh, close against me.

  I gave birth; he got up nights. I went back to work as a psychologist and a writer full-time; he went back to work as a chemist half-time, and something not-so-strange but difficult happened. Clara started to like my husband more. This was the first problem, and it was piercing. When the baby was nine months old, she began waking in the middle of the night from nightmares. Of course, we can’t be sure they were nightmares, and if they were, I can’t imagine what a nine-month-old’s demons would be—maybe vague watery dreams of sharks and falling, of smothering skin. She’d scream out. We’d both bolt upright in bed. It was always dark then, with maybe a crescent moon clamped against the sky, or stars salted generously; the baby screamed. “I’ll go,” I’d say, throwing off the covers. “No, I’ll go,” he’d say, throwing off the covers. And then there was the night I heard it. “Papa!” she screamed. What happened next is obvious. Papa leapt up, ran to her room, and Mama lay alone, listening through the monitor to sounds of cooing and comforting, not made by me. Not my sounds.

  I smelled a skunk on our front lawn. I remembered as a child wanting to touch a de-scented skunk in a pet store, the thick stripe of white icing on its furred black back, the delectable snout. I wanted to touch my daughter, my baby girl; it would not be too much to say I ached for it, but someone had usurped me, at my insistence. I thought of all the other times, in all the other ways, she clamored for him first. It was he who had to put on her shoes, to brush her hair, to bathe her. Papa papa papa. But the night of the skunk was when I fully realized how the modern mother, freed from the burden of primary-care giving, gains a lot and loses a lot, in language and in love.

  Most women, in becoming mothers, feel they finally come to understand their own mother with more depth and compassion. For me, in becoming a mother, I felt I finally came to understand my father and what must have been his inevitable feelings of “fringeness,” as the woman he married ran the domestic show. To be loved second best, how have men tolerated that all these years? How awful, how hurtful. It makes you want to withdraw. Now I see why fathers fade away. There is no way to compete with the fierce love a child has for its primary caretaker, and it’s so easy to feel rebuffed when the little one shakes off your hand and runs for her obvious favorite. So you retreat, to your study, your den, your desk, your TV, where there is always football. At one point, early in my daughter’s life, I actually started to watch football, half out of humor, half out of resignation. Men so padded they couldn’t feel a thing rammed helmeted heads and tossed a rawhide sphere through the air. “What are you doing?” Benjamin asked me, coming into the room one day as the Patriots and Jets had it out.

  I looked up. He was carrying Clara in one arm, a stack of freshly washed bibs in the other. Crowds cheered, touchdown. The baby gave him a huge, open-mouthed kiss, and something lurched in me. “I hope you washed those bibs in Dreft,” I said, a detergent for very young skin.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I don’t believe in Dreft. Tide’s just as good.”

  “What do you mean you don’t believe in Dreft?” I said.

  Whereupon followed a long, exhausting argument about the relative merits of Dreft over Tide. This is just one of the liabilities that happens when a husband becomes the mother, the mother the father. It’s sociologically complex, and the power plays perpetual. As “the primary caretaker,” Benjamin feels it’s within his purview to choose the detergent, the clothes, the types of diapers. While, on the one hand, I’ve asked him to do this, at least partially, on the other hand, I’m a woman; I gave birth to that baby, no one else, just me, and I secretly believe he should step aside and let me assert my innate rights over her life when I want. This leads to frequent bickering. In traditional arrangements, one parent inhabits the work sphere, one the domestic sphere, and the division of labor is not only clear but in keeping with gender. However, in our case, the gender thing is confused, and on top of that, or because of that, both of us dabble in both spheres, he a little more in one, I a little more in the other, but there is overlap. The politically correct thing to do is not always the easiest or most efficient or sanest. Having both parents mucking about in sex roles while also weighing in on detergent, binkies, and shoe size can make for pretty slow going. If I were a real football father, I’d just step out of the way, but I’m not. I’m also a mother. When Clara kisses him, calls for him over me, I feel in part resignation—well, what the hell, I�
��ll just watch the game—but in part a kind of fierceness that has led me to feel ever more confused as to why so many men have for so long been willing to sit on the sidelines. As a parent, the sidelines is a radically free and lonely place to be.

  My problem is, I want it both ways. I want the freedom that comes with traditional fatherhood and the closeness and primacy that comes with traditional motherhood. I want to be the center of my baby’s life while I leave her for eight, nine, ten hours at a time to pursue my own central interests. I see the essential impossibility and selfishness in my desire, but even more surprising to me is that underneath my working-woman, let’s-get-it-done feminism exists a real reservoir of traditionalism, even conservatism; what I call Phyllis Schlafly-ness.

  For instance, a few weeks ago the baby got sick. Because we have been blessed, so far, with an incredibly robust little girl, any illness we experience as a deviance, a departure. I had been in California on a writing assignment for a few days, one of the many work-related trips I’d taken since her birth. When I got back to Boston, rain was pounding down, the taxi stunk of smoke, and I keyed open the front door of our house to find a fever-faced child lying on the couch with a dozy-looking dad. “She’s got a little cold,” he said to me. A little cold? The child’s nose was plugged from nostril to neocortex; her breath was wheezy and her eyes had the glazed look of predelirium. I put down my suitcase. “Benjamin,” I said, “she looks awful. Have you taken her temperature?”

  “We don’t need to take her temperature,” he said. “I can feel her fever with my hand. It’s about one hundred.”

  “A hand is not a thermometer,” I said. “I’m going to take her temperature.”

  “No you’re not,” he said to me.

  “What?” I said. “You’re telling me what to do? I’m her mother.”

  The word hung dead in the air. Mother.

  “Lauren,” he said, “it upsets her to have that rectal thing in her butt. There’s no need. I gave her Motrin.”

  “I’m her mother,” I said again and started to cry.

  I was crying in part because my baby was sick, in part because I had jet lag, and in part because, at that moment, as in many others, I wanted just to be her mother and have all the prerogatives that role has traditionally enjoyed: to choose the medicine, to take the temperature, to be in charge, solo. Somewhere in my heart exists a trenchant traditionalism that says a “real mother” does not share the work of parenting; she hogs it; it’s her special domain. And I wanted to dance there, in that domain, a real mother, cheek to fevered cheek, with my own sick girl.

  After this incident I decided to change things. I’d had enough of my modern ways. I was going to quit my day job as a psychologist and spend more time with my daughter. I was going to insert myself into her heart. To be honest, I was after her love, but other things too. I was feeling competitive with her father. And I wanted to take a crack at old-fashioned caretaking, see what it felt like to claim the kind of expertise that comes only when you’ve spent hour upon exclusive hour watching the toddler toddle, charting the bowels, mixing the mash, women’s work. The fact that I started to yearn for women’s work shows, perhaps, just how far feminism has taken us, for what exhausted mother one hundred years ago could possibly have romanticized the difficult labor of raising a baby?

  So I cut down my hours at work. This coincided with a three-week trip my husband, a chemist, was taking, the first time he’d been away from the baby since she’d been born. I couldn’t wait. I felt, secretly, like good, now we’ll get him out of the way. He left, and Clara and I were alone. It seems odd: she was over a year old now, and never had we really been alone for an extended period of time. The house was so quiet, the mornings were so yellow, the spring was so soft, the nights were so long and lush, it was blissful. Hour after unbroken hour we were together, and I experienced how a child changes time, how the moments are marked not by the ticktock of a clock but by the blurrier cycles of a baby’s sleeping and waking, crying and eating; by how long a morning can be, a saffron egg yolk, the brightness of tangerine juice, the drip drip of silver drool. One year after my child was born, one week into leaving my day job, I experienced, at last, what people must mean when they say “the rapture of motherhood,” for indeed it can be rapturous, and it is definitely radical, how such a small being can tip over time and make you see the tiniest thing, hour after hour, the piece of plastic on the floor, the twig, the pebble, the zigzag crack in the concrete. Like I said, there was rapture, and also revenge. Benjamin called on the phone and he said, “It’s Papa,” and she said, “Mama,” and my heart went high up in my chest, beating both good and bad.

  However, not all is so simple. Two days passed. Three days, four days. After a while, I started, sometimes, to feel bored. Well, let me be honest here. After a while, I started a lot of the time to feel bored. This is not easy to admit, and I’m in no way saying my daughter is boring but, rather, that I, as an adult with serious cerebral tendencies, lack the capacity to imaginatively enter her world on an on-going basis. Zigzags, cracks, pebbles, and plastic are enchanting for only so long. I am sure, in this sense, I am no different from many, or most, mothers, who find the world of a baby tiring over time. But, somehow, I didn’t think it would happen so soon. Or, perhaps, I found the boredom harder to tolerate because I am a person so naturally inclined towards product, whereas a baby is all process. In any case, it didn’t take long before my mind was wandering back to a Trollope novel I wanted to finish. By day seven, she’d be building a tower and I’d be sneaking furtive glances at a manuscript. By day fourteen, I was propping her in front of Sesame Street and encouraging an Elmo obsession. By day eighteen, I had hired a babysitter for four hours and then paid her for an extra hour overtime because, well, I had a few writerly ideas I thought I might like to scribble down. By day twenty, I was singing Papa Papa Papa, eager for his return. Eager to go back, sixty-forty, seventy-thirty, for he, her papa, possessed caretaking talents I do not. He likes to build towers hour after hour, day after day. He likes red-wagon rides and yellow ducks. He does excellent animal imitations and knows how to toss her just shy of the ceiling while she squeals in ecstatic delight.

  Benjamin returned. Not long after, I went back to work full-time because, well, I like work. It was with sadness and also relief that I came to this understanding, and that I let my husband reinsert himself into Clara’s life in a major way. The sadness had to do with giving my daughter up, but it was more than that, for many parents give their child up to other caretakers. What’s different in my situation is that this caretaker also happens to be my husband, not a paid outsider. And this adds a complex element to our marriage. Our marriage now has an edge of competition, a little lake of loneliness for me, and an off-kilter triangle shape that it didn’t have before and for which there are few social role models. None of my women friends have this particular challenge, by which I mean none of my women friends feel like fathers in the triad of a family. None feel, as females, as mothers, left out, on the sidelines. None struggle with their husbands over the mundane details of raising a baby. They choose the binkies, the shoes, the doctors. On the one hand, I feel I am very lucky, for I am in the unique situation of being both with and without child, a paradox that, like all paradoxes, confers confusion and possibility. On the other hand, I know I have willingly lost an opportunity to be the one and only, the most adored, and my girl, well, my girl has lost the opportunity to have the close, conflicted kind of mother-bond that most daughters enter the world with, a bond full of edge, anger, and, almost always, passion.

  But I am oversimplifying. My daughter, after all, blows me besitos and rests the scrumptious pad of her cheek against mine, not as often as I’d like, but a kiss, even air-blown, lingers on the skin for a very long time. After my three weeks solo with the baby, it is true, I have gone back to work full-time; it is true I have left my daughter physically with her father, but make no mistake about it: Clara lives in me.

  Perhaps what differen
tiates humans from animals is their capacity to imagine. Hours and hours during the day go by when I do not think at all of Clara and then suddenly, unbidden, she leaps into my mind, and I miss her with a fierceness bred of distance. This is its own sort of passion, is it not? By the end of the day, I cannot wait to see her, my girl! I come rushing home. Yesterday, rushing homeward, I got stuck behind a funeral procession. I wanted to lean in on my horn and honk mortality away, let me through, let me through! I couldn’t get through, though, so I had no choice but to trail the mourners, and I saw, after a while, that I was one of them. I miss my girl a lot. I wonder if, when I come to the end of my life, I will regret having opted out of being the primary parent, even while I know that the option connotes luxury, luckiness; most women in this country have to work, which means they have to turn the child care over to someone else. I also wonder, sometimes, if my marriage will survive the tilted triangle it has become. Trailing behind the mourners, being one of the mourners, I pictured myself—maudlin writer that I am—on a ridiculously overdone death bed, a powdered satin pillow under my graying head, and my girl standing by my side. What will I leave her with? Many, many things: Empty spaces. An unusual father I was selfish enough and generous enough to really let into her life. A paradoxical mother who, if push came to shove, in some big, ultimate way, would lay down her life for her—I have no doubt about that: shoot me, save her, absolutely—but who, on a daily basis, chose work pursuits. And of course, the fruit of those pursuits are these words, every one of which tells a certain story, and the story is this: I am not my mother. I have not had a hollow life. Follow me, Clara, I am trying to do for you what my mother could not do for me. I am providing you a path, etched in ink, full of spiky sounds. I hope it will help you on your way. I hope, in knowing my full life, you will be better able to shape your own. This is my way of telling you. Not the best way, but my best way. A tale. The trade-offs. The luckiness, the luxury, the difficult choices. Read them. Rewrite them, better.