But I remember being so excited about weekends as a kid because it meant I’d get to see that video, and in my adult life I hadn’t experienced quite the same enthusiasm for Friday nights, not until I brought home a baby and she locked me in my bedroom. Friday nights suddenly became very special because they signaled a two-day vacation from being the only diaper-changer. Jon would get to stay home from work for the weekend, and we’d resume our tag team dynamic, one that involved headlocks and body slams and elaborate eye makeup.
When Jon went back to work after only five days of paternity leave, I felt like I was running a marathon that didn’t have an end. Leta was initially a very good baby; she didn’t cry very much during those first few weeks and was content to sit and look around, occasionally grunting and pooping, but I’d never been so nervous or frantic in my entire life. Was her poop the right color? Was she breathing too fast? Her feet were blue! Were her eyes supposed to cross like that?
To help Jon understand what it was like to stay at home alone, I put together a small list of things I’d learned in the short time I’d been with our daughter:
A good day was defined entirely by personal hygiene. Brushing my teeth = pretty good day. Brushing my teeth + brushing my hair = I was doing really good. Brushing my teeth + brushing my hair + taking a shower = WORLD DOMINATION. I believed that if I could get all the way to putting on mascara that I’d be magnificent enough to create my own planet and populate it with bears.
Leta came equipped with an internal altimeter that could detect the exact moment I wanted to sit down while holding her. It was so sensitive that it set off an alarm when my knees started to bend, so I couldn’t even think about sitting down when trying to soothe her. Sometimes we performed an awkward polka where I’d bend my knees, and just when she’d start to fuss I’d straighten right back up, over and over again, and it sounded like someone in the neighborhood had set their car alarm to “infant despair”: WAH!…WAH!…WAH!…WAH!
Sleep deprivation was going to kill me. Leta knew how to poop, she knew how to eat, SHE HAD TO KNOW WHAT TIME IT WAS, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. At 2:00 AM every morning she looked up at me with huge Armstrong eyes as if to say, hey, where’s the party? I was under the impression that there was a party going on. Take me to the party.
Leta didn’t like American Idol, and that was a serious crisis as we never missed a single episode. How could she possibly call herself an Armstrong if she didn’t consume lowbrow American pop culture with the same hunger she approached mama’s breasts? Was I going to have to start acting like I actually had taste?
Breastfeeding got much, much easier because my nipples had become so numb and callused that I could have safely nursed a full-grown crocodile without feeling the slightest pinch. People had always told me that I was going to be surprised at how big my boobs would get when my milk finally came in, but I was in no way prepared for how fucking ridiculous they would look. My cleavage was so high that I could rest my chin on my right boob, and I could shoot rockets at low-flying satellites out of my avocado-hard nipples.
Baby poop smelled like buttered popcorn.
To celebrate that first Friday night back together, I ran around the house bending over and touching my toes, over and over again, and then tied and retied my shoes with effortless speed. The things you take for granted when you’re not gestating life. I was a mad and mean bending-over machine and seriously contemplated spending the majority of my weekend bumping my belly into walls and countertops JUST BECAUSE I COULD.
Instead, Jon and I spent those next three days holed up in our bedroom, what we affectionately referred to as The Cave. It had become the center of our home, where we ate, where we slept, and where we would have pooped if we’d worn diapers and had two fumbling, gangly parents to wipe our bottoms. I never knew that I could be so satisfied to sit and watch another human being for hours at a time, and there was barely a moment that weekend when I didn’t gaze at The Biological Wonder and think to myself, how the hell did that come out of my vagina?
In addition to staring at Leta like two drooling, lobotomized idiots, we did a lot of scratching, stretching, catnapping, and watching an obnoxious amount of reality television. It’s amazing just how much television I didn’t watch during the week when I was trying to take care of a baby. In fact, it’s amazing just how much of everything I neglected, things as basic as plucking my eyebrows, which had grown so unruly that they had eaten half of my forehead.
And then on that Sunday afternoon we decided that it was time to face my new worst fear, worse than my fear of heights or natural disasters, worse even than my fear of biscuit containers that go POP when you unravel their cardboard exteriors, and that fear was the fear of taking Leta to a public place. I was frightened of the diseases that lurked in public places, viruses that could have wreaked havoc on the immune system of a fourteen-day-old baby, but I was more scared of being that woman with the screaming baby that I’d so often wanted to choke or beat with a wooden club. I had to keep reminding myself that the worst thing that could happen would be that she would start crying and either Jon or I would pick her up and comfort her while the other stuffed groceries into the shopping cart. It wasn’t like Leta would all of a sudden stand up in her car seat, pull out a machine gun, and open fire on unsuspecting grocery shoppers.
But I needed to come to terms with the possibility of some grumpy single person shooting me a disapproving look as I bounced a fussy baby in one arm while reaching for a gallon of milk with the other, as if a fussy baby has no business being in a public place. I was once that grumpy single person, and I feel her pain, the pain of sleeping more than eight hours a night, the pain of eating a warm meal with two hands, the pain of chugging two double vodka martinis without fear of poisoning another human being. And I want to say to the grumpy, single me of several years ago—the grumpy, single me who kept up with her eyebrows and had her nails professionally manicured every two weeks—I want to say, you just wait! And then I want to choke her and beat her with a wooden club.
At Leta’s first appointment with the pediatrician we learned that she’d gained twenty-one ounces in the fourteen days since we’d left the hospital, which meant mama’s milk made mouths happy! I knew she’d put on some weight because there were times when she’d wake up for the first of four times during the night and I’d think that her head had gotten bigger in the two hours she’d been asleep. But twenty-one ounces? In two weeks? That either meant she was going to be valedictorian of her high school because she was developing at such an advanced rate, or that she’d weigh over six hundred pounds by the time she was five years old.
Venturing out to the doctor’s office, however, did not prove as easy as her weight gain. Neither Jon nor I had slept more than two consecutive hours since bringing the baby home, and when I couldn’t get the car seat to fit into the car…in the snow…as the snow was falling on my baby’s face…as the snow froze my hands…the hands that couldn’t get the back door to shut…the door that was warped from all the wet snow…after yelling at the dog because he wouldn’t get back into the house…after comforting the dog because he was so displaced…I stood there crying in the snow. Bawling in the snow. Screaming in the snow. Rattling off a string of four-letter words. In the snow.
I’d never cursed so much in my life.
I finally gave up and stomped back into the house, picked up the wireless phone, took it back outside, and called Jon to have him walk me through the process of putting the car seat into the car. But once I heard his voice all I could do was stand there and scream, gigantic tears pouring from my eyes and freezing on the side of my face. Somehow he managed to calm me down enough that I noticed I had the goddamn thing in backwards, and once I turned the seat around it clicked in automatically, without any effort whatsoever.
I thanked him, told him I loved him, and apologized for exposing his daughter to such profanity. And then I climbed into the driver’s side of the truck, turned on the heat, and cried for another five minutes.
There were really good days, days when I felt strong enough to handle this job, days when I looked at the future ahead of us and got excited about the ride. On good days I could go several hours without crying.
And then there were bad days, days when I couldn’t imagine leaving the house again, days when I thought that by the time I did leave the house again my hair would be past my waistline, because how could I ever get my hair cut when the baby needed to be fed every two hours? On bad days I thought I’d never be able to walk the dog again, I’d never go shopping again, I’d never see a movie in a movie theater again. On bad days I imagined growing old in a dust-covered house surrounded by hundreds of mounds of dirty laundry and piles of forty-year-old poopy diapers because I’d never again have the strength to clean my house. On bad days I cried all day long.
Jon tried to help, tried holding my head when I cried, but I was inconsolable. He always ended up walking into another room to take long, deep breaths. Sometimes he had to walk around the block to cool off his frustration. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night to find him crying, and I knew it was because he was watching his wife go slowly insane.
Being a mother was the hardest thing I had ever done. It was really, really hard. It was impossible to make a single coherent decision when I was completely beholden to another creature’s sleep schedule, and that creature happened to sleep in random ninety-minute blocks. It wasn’t so much sadness I felt but utter delirium, and by the end of the day when we faced another night of not knowing if she was going to sleep, it was hard not to ask myself, how the hell can I do this another day?
And then the sun would come up, a full two hours after we’d tried unsuccessfully to get her back to sleep for the third or fourth time during the night. Delicate new light would flood the room, and I’d notice that her eyebrows had gotten darker overnight. Her cheeks were fuller, her thighs thicker, and she’d be wildly kicking her frog feet. She was thriving and gaining weight like a champion. And then I’d slowly get up and do it another day.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sympathy for the World
I was always afraid that Jon was going to suck Leta’s brain out of her nose when he tried to clean out her boogers with the blue rubber syringe. Clearing out someone else’s nasal passages was not something I signed up for when I acted on my biological urge to procreate. Neither was the dreaded clipping of the infant fingernails. Those things served more to torture me than they helped to keep Leta de-clawed or snot free, and when Jon would gleefully reach for the infant clippers I’d have to flee the room and hide my head in the oven.
You’d think that I would have been prepared for this, having practiced for years on the dog’s claws. But you haven’t seen Chuck’s claws up close and in person, and I’m sure that if you did you would have a completely different opinion about me and my notion of decency. I am horrified by the popping sound of the clipping and the very real possibility that I might cut him and cause him to bleed, something I have done on more than one or two or ten occasions.
When we clipped Leta’s fingernails for the first time, we cut off all peripheral noise, turned on all the lights, and held our breaths until near suffocation. It took about an hour to finish all ten fingers because we would pause between each clipping to admire each and every adorable joint and knuckle in her hand. It had become a pastime in our home to dissect the DNA of all of Leta’s body parts. The knuckles on her index fingers came straight from her father. Her cuticles were definitely mine. The size of her hands in general was the monstrous combination of the two families colliding.
Things were getting better only in the sense that I was becoming used to living this way. Parenthood was turning my whole body into one giant callus. Each passing day was unbelievably hard, harder than when I thought things couldn’t get harder, but my crying fits slowly disintegrated into fits of eye-rolling or sighing or throwing my hands up and saying to myself, Seriously? You couldn’t wait to pee until I had put the diaper ON your butt?
One thing I could not get used to was the anxiety attack that hit me every day at about 6:30 PM when I started to realize that I might not get to sleep that night. Leta’s sleeping schedule was completely unpredictable despite our best efforts at establishing some sort of routine to set her clock. During the day I didn’t let her take naps longer than a couple hours, and I’d listen to music or to the TV at an elevated volume to signify DAYTIME! When it was time to go to bed we gave her a warm bath and then turned off all the lights. We tried sleeping with her in between us, underneath my arm, on Jon’s chest, in a bassinet beside the bed, all to varied and irregular results. She was very loud when she slept, and as her mother I heard every sound she made—every grunt, every sigh, every angry attempt to pass a stuttering fart. She’d go an average of three minutes without making a noise, and then at the end of that three-minute stretch she’d explode with noises as if to say, ha ha! Just kidding!
And it didn’t really matter how many hours she’d been awake during the day. Her primary goal in life was to torture me, and she figured out that the easiest way to do that was to stay awake by any means possible. Her strategy one week was to spit out her pacifier every five or six minutes and then make loud noises until I stuck it back into her mouth. So I’d spend the hours from 10 PM until 2 AM sticking her pacifier back into her mouth. By 5 AM in the morning, after two feedings and another hour of pacifier relocation, I considered duct taping the damn thing to her face.
Dear Leta,
I am writing this letter to you here on the day that you turn one month old. I cannot possibly tell you how significant this is because I honestly didn’t think I would ever make it past the first hour. Just yesterday you smiled at me for the first time. It made me cry, which isn’t necessarily significant considering that your poop makes me cry, but you smiled with your mouth wide open and your eyebrows raised in delight. I had read that you might be smiling at me by the fourth week, and at the end of last week I was sweating bullets that you might not reach this milestone on time. What if you never smiled? What if we’d given birth to a smile-less baby? Could a smile-less baby get into college?
And then BOOM, you smiled all of a sudden, not once or twice but four times in a row. I spent the rest of the day breastfeeding and downloading applications for early entrance into several Ivy League schools.
To celebrate these four weeks, your father and I went out to dinner alone for the first time since you were born. I have only left the house a couple of times in the last month because this winter is one of the worst I have ever lived through, and carrying around a heavy car seat through two feet of snow is not at the top of the list of things I want to do on no hours of sleep. In fact, there is only one thing on that list: cry.
You are still too young for me to feel comfortable leaving for any extended period of time, and when we left you with my mother for just a couple of hours so that we could grab a bite of sushi I felt like I had cut off my arms and legs and could think about nothing but getting back to you. On the drive home it seemed like we caught every red light in the city, and it infuriated me to think that the city planners hadn’t thought about this specific circumstance. There are mothers out there right now trying to get back to their tiny babies and they can’t because of traffic lights. Which makes me believe that a mother should be consulted on every decision that’s made on Earth.
The entire day after we ate sushi you were in a terrible mood, and this means that I won’t be eating sushi again anytime soon. Because when you are in a bad mood the whole family suffers, including the dog whose response to your disgruntled shrieking is to jump on and off the bed, over and over again. This bed-jumping routine has become his reaction to everything you do, and to someone who isn’t chronically sleep deprived it might be cute. But in the middle of the night, here in week 5 of Project Leta Doesn’t Sleep, his compulsive bed jumping feels like someone is poking me in the eyeball with a toothpick.
The list
of things that you do not like is relatively small and includes things such as having the light turned on suddenly in the middle of the night, or having cold lotion rubbed on your naked belly. Every night after your bath your father and I wince right before we stick your arm into your nightgown, because there is nothing so upsetting in this world as having to put one’s arm into a nightgown, obviously, and we spend the next half hour dodging your wailing screams as they bounce off walls and melt the hair off our heads. When you are in the middle of an encounter with something you don’t like, the last thing I should do is stick the pacifier in your mouth because you are fully capable of spitting it four feet across the room.
I’ve also learned not to sing you lullabies when you’re upset because it seems that my singing voice is at the top of the list of Things That Make You Regret Being Born. I’ve tried loud singing and soft singing and somewhere in between singing, but your reaction to all of the singing is to get a pained about-to-pass-gas expression from your chin to your wrinkled forehead that says WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME?
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 9