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This last month has been a mixed blessing for me, Leta. You have changed my life so markedly that sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. I did not know that I was capable of such strong emotions, both good and bad, and the only way I know how to deal with such emotions is to cry. You and I spend our days together on the bed listening to music on my laptop, and some of the songs I play only make things worse because they remind me of the days before you came into our lives, days when I could sleep when I wanted to, days when I was not physically chained to this house.
But I am not that person anymore. I am now your mother, and while thoughts of the future sometimes suffocate me with worry, they also make me feel so much more sympathetic to the world. In just the few short weeks that I have been a parent I feel so much closer to my own family, closer to what it means to be human. I feel like I have been let in on some secret that all other parents know, that they would have shared with me if they could have. But it’s a secret that I had to learn for myself, through loving you, that the fullness of life begins and ends outside of myself. By choosing to bring you into our family I have made an irreversible commitment, and the joy of the love I feel for you is as meaningful as it is because the loss of it would break my body in two.
Love, Mama
CHAPTER EIGHT
It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Pokes Their Eye Out With a Baby
Throughout the nine months of my pregnancy Jon and I were warned constantly by other parents to enjoy sleeping while we could. Many of our friends even suggested that we stock up on sleep, as if it were something you could seal in a Ziploc bag and toss into the freezer, something you could warm up in the microwave and mix with a little creamer on the nights when the baby refused to sleep. I’d really like to smack those parents because not only was that particular piece of advice unsolicited, it also wasn’t helpful at all.
You can’t store sleep in your jowls for the long winter ahead, so just stop patronizing soon-to-be parents with that absurd suggestion. Just say what you mean, which is, your life is going to be miserable, and I will take great pleasure in seeing you squirm.
If there is one thing I would tell soon-to-be parents, one thing that no one ever took the time to tell me, one thing no book or doctor or nurse cared enough to tell me, it would be this: the longest stretch of sleep you will get in the first month of your baby’s life will be four hours, and you will be very, very lucky if you can actually score four in a row. You will most likely sleep in two-hour blocks at completely random times throughout the day. The best way to deal with this torture—and it is torture, the worst torture you will have ever endured—is to realize that millions of us have been through it and are going through it right now. You have to look at it in the face and accept it, wholly and completely, with every tired limb of your body. There really is no way to prepare for this, and the only way to find any comfort is to understand that you are not alone.
After almost five weeks of living with a newborn, I’d only once slept for four hours in a row, and that was on the second night in the hospital when the nurse took the baby to the nursery for the night. My complexion was terrifying and I could have used the bags under my eyes to haul groceries, but I had to believe that living that way wouldn’t cause any permanent damage to my long-term health. I mean, how many other women have lived through this, right? However, I was in danger of traumatizing my child with the massive wrinkles around my eyes, and I feared she’d grow up with the ugliest mom in the neighborhood.
When Leta was born all sorts of maternal instincts were slammed into the ON position—the instinct to protect, to nourish, to comfort. And no matter where she was sleeping or pretending to sleep, whether in our bed, on top of me, in a bassinet beside the bed, or in her crib all the way over in her own room, I had to retrain my body to sleep. My instincts were telling me that when I slept Unknown Things happened, and my body resisted the urge to fall asleep. I was unconsciously listening to the sound of her breathing or swallowing, and if those noises sounded okay then I’d listen to the sounds of the house to make sure monsters didn’t crawl out of the walls to hurt her.
I had every reason to believe that those instincts would become numb with subsequent children, but Leta was my firstborn, and I had no idea how to turn it all off. She could have slept through the night, but I’d lie there awake for hours waiting for something terrible to happen. Was I torturing myself? I didn’t know how not to. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about it was that I didn’t know how much longer it would continue, how much longer I could go on. I didn’t expect to get more than two consecutive hours of sleep for at least another couple of months, and by that time I’d be such a lunatic that surely I’d go missing for a few days until Jon found me crouched in a corner, drooling, scratching sores that didn’t exist, mumbling to myself, what was so wrong with our old life that we had to go and do THIS to it?
For nine months I grew a human being inside my belly and then pushed it out my vagina. Afterward I fed it with my boob. Biology is so fucking weird.
I just really needed to point that out.
There wasn’t an official breast person to stand by and make sure that I was doing the whole feeding thing right, but I had to assume that my boobs were working because Leta completely outgrew all of her 0–3 months clothing before she was even two months old. Her legs started to stick out of her nightgowns like a little hobo baby, and her head became huge. Gigantic. Enormous. Sometimes I’d look down when I was feeding her and it looked like I had a hairy cantaloupe attached to my boob.
I defy anyone who is breastfeeding a five-week-old baby to go a whole ten minutes without saying boob or breast. That was the only word I could get out of my mouth. It was boob this and boob that and my boobs did this today and can you believe my boobs? When I answered the phone I said, “Boob?”
I wasn’t sure whether or not it would happen so soon but I finally arrived at a point where I actually liked breastfeeding. There were still moments when Leta latched on so fiercely that I was afraid she might bite off my boob (see? boob! boob! boob!), but otherwise it had become a magical, deeply moving experience. Not the type of magical that I had sparklers or smoke shooting out my nipples, but in the sense that I had this ability to comfort her instantly and that feeling was really powerful. I’d also developed a technique that didn’t require I be surrounded by fifty pillows to support my arms. My goal was to be able to breastfeed and load the dishwasher simultaneously, and when that happened I planned to take my act on the road.
My mother bought me four Sears brand nursing bras that I would rotate through my wardrobe. They were the most utilitarian pieces of clothing I’d ever owned and looked as if they were designed with the shape of a four-hundred-pound communist factory worker in mind. But I swore by those Sears brand bras. They were brawesome. They were comfortable enough to sleep in, which meant I didn’t ever have to wake up in a puddle of my own milk. The breast pads I wore to soak up the leaking, however, were not Sears brand and were a little less friendly than the bras themselves. They were boob-shaped maxi pads made of disposable cotton that stuck to the inside of the bra, self-adhesive side out, and I had to get used to the idea that as long as I breastfed this kid I’d have to walk around with crinkly boobs.
Crinkle, crinkle, crinkle.
Regardless of the inconvenience of the crinkling I was really glad that I’d stuck with breastfeeding. It’s true what they say about the unique bond between mother and child that is facilitated by the tender intimacy of the act, and there were moments in between feedings when I looked forward to the next feeding, to feel her frog feet kick at my chest, to feel her coconut belly pressed against my own.
However, I was completely unprepared for the bone-crushing pangs of The Breastfeeding Hunger. Everyone talks about hunger during pregnancy, myself included, and that hunger is typically about specific cravings. So specific, in fact, that you shouldn’t be surprised if your pregnant wife wakes you up at 3 AM asking for a Whopper from Bur
ger King, an order of fries from McDonald’s, and a Frosty from Wendy’s. It would behoove you to honor these cravings as if they were orders from God, because a Frosty from Wendy’s is completely different from a milk shake from McDonald’s, and if you bring back a milk shake from McDonald’s your baby will most likely grow up never knowing his father.
Jon had it easier than most men because my cravings were always for things we had stocked in the house. We bought bags of Nacho Cheese Doritos in bulk, and if I ever had a craving in the middle of the night he only had to go as far as the kitchen cabinet. There were moments, however, when the only thing I wanted to eat was whatever Jon had sitting on his plate, and even if he ordered the largest carton of fries on the fast-food menu he was lucky to get even two of them from the plate to his mouth successfully.
The Breastfeeding Hunger, though, is far more consuming than the Pregnancy Hunger because it isn’t about specific cravings, although if the dog had been covered in chocolate I would have totally eaten him. The Breastfeeding Hunger is more about craving every kind of food. It is an equal opportunity hunger, a hunger that does not discriminate, a hunger that believes homosexuals should be allowed to marry.
Breastfeeding made me hungry all the time. Once I finished breakfast I was thinking about my midmorning snack and what it would feel like in my mouth. Toward the end of the day I’d get so hungry, so panicked in my hunger, that Jon knew better than to ask me what I wanted to eat. I DIDN’T WANT CHOICES! I WANTED FOOD! Choices take time to sort through, and last time I checked time didn’t taste like anything or have any nutritional value. So I’d just open the refrigerator and start eating. Sometimes I’d forget to take off the plastic outer wrapping of whatever I was eating, but isn’t that what the large intestine is for?
One night Leta was sitting contentedly in her car seat, and we decided to use that opportunity to cook an actual meal on the stove with food that wasn’t packaged in a box. I prepared two full plates to carry to the dining room table—the place where childless people eat their meals, memories!—but somewhere on the ten-foot journey from the kitchen countertop to the dining room I ate everything on my plate. And I would have eaten everything on Jon’s plate, too, had he not held it high above his head so that I could not reach it. It was his small way of saying HAVE SOME DIGNITY, WOMAN.
One day during Leta’s seventh week of life my mother agreed to watch her for a few hours so that I could get my hair colored. I guess the word “agreed” isn’t necessarily correct in the sense that my mother informed me that she would be taking my baby away from me for two hours, and I either comply or be written out of the will. Not wanting to jeopardize the lifetime supply of Skin So Soft I stand to inherit, I gave in without any argument. I’d never seen my mother so in love with another human being, and there were nights when I’d hear a noise outside and I was certain that my mother was there to kidnap the baby.
I was thrilled that my mom had become so involved in Leta’s life. Family was the primary reason Jon and I moved back to Utah, and I honestly couldn’t have made it through those first seven weeks without my mother’s help. She single-handedly stocked Leta’s entire wardrobe, and although the clothes were flashier than I would normally prefer, I didn’t see the harm in having a daughter dressed like a mini Avon World Sales Leader. Plus, we could use the money we saved on baby clothes to buy more chocolate.
Leta was still too young for me to feel comfortable leaving her for any extended period of time. When I did leave her, I felt like I was cutting off my arms and legs, and I was left an armless and legless nubbin who could think about nothing but getting back to her. When I was forced to leave her, though, I trusted her with no one but my mother. She had that annoying grandmotherly ability to comfort a baby just by entering the room. I studied her to see if I could figure out how she did it, but she had no discernible technique. Was it something they taught at grandmother school? How could I enroll?
Leta would be wailing that certain baby wail that said I am now officially possessed by the Devil, and I’d pace and shush and sway back and forth, and the Devil inside my daughter just laughed at me. My mother, however, wielded some sort of secret Pope-like power and could cast out the demons just by picking her up. It was infuriating! And of course she did it with a wickedly smug grin on her face as if her perfect hair hadn’t already made me feel incompetent for years. In those instances I wanted to threaten my mother that if she looked at me like that again her granddaughter would grow up surrounded entirely by Revlon products, which to the Avon World Sales Leader would be the equivalent of threatening to register my daughter as a Democrat.
Regardless of our occasional tensions I was really grateful for the two hours I got to spend having someone fix my embarrassing roots. While the color dried on my hair I had the almost orgasmic luxury of reading a magazine uninterrupted, and when I glanced at the table of magazines sitting next to me I almost passed out from the possibilities. Should I read an article in Vogue or spend the whole fifteen minutes reading People from front to back? Maybe I’d just look at the pictures in Us Weekly. THE DECISIONS WERE THRILLING.
By the end of the seventh week I figured I had the hang of this thing, this thing being my new job as mother of an almost two-month-old baby. I hadn’t mastered this thing by any means, but I’d at least come to a point where I didn’t panic when Jon left for his job in the morning, and I was faced with spending the next ten hours ALONE WITH A BABY. For a while it felt like he was leaving me alone with a bomb, and if I turned away from it at any point during the day it would explode and destroy the whole world. But things got better and it started to feel more like a hand grenade, and I just had to resist the urge to yank out its safety pin, which in Leta’s case was picking her up when she was perfectly content to lie on her back. There was no cradling of the hand grenade in our household, because the hand grenade would look at me like T-minus three seconds before I blow your hand off.
There were moments during the first few days of Leta’s life when I really didn’t think I was cut out for this whole thing. I remember feeling very inadequate because I’d known some really stupid people who had kids, and I thought if really stupid people could do the whole kid thing, why was I having such a hard time? But look! At almost two months in I was finally gaining on the stupid people! Somehow I’d managed to go over fifty days without doing any permanent damage to myself or to the baby, and when you consider that I’ve always had a chronic problem with not being able to walk around walls but only straight into them, having a dent-free baby was something I could put on my resume.
I’d had other jobs in my life where I was unable to meet the standard set by stupid people. During the summer after my freshman year in college I attempted to wait tables at a very popular chain restaurant. I thought it would be an easy way to make a fair amount of money in a short period of time, and since I had just aced calculus the semester before, I thought I would have no problem taking an order for a hamburger and bringing it to someone’s table. Little did I know that my mastery of differential equations would have no bearing whatsoever on my ability to fulfill a drunk Southern woman’s request to bring her taters and biscuits. I had dated a really stupid guy in high school who could wait tables (he was stupid, yes, but he did have great hair), and when I quit after three days I cried at the realization that I wasn’t as smart as stupid people. I was so stupid that I couldn’t even bring taters.
After I graduated college I took a full-time job as a phone reservationist for an airline and had to sit with my ear pressed to a phone for eight hours a day fielding calls from the American public. I had a college degree, I thought, how hard could it be to memorize fifty airport codes? But the only thing I learned from that job was that I could only remain in a seated position for forty-five minutes before my butt would become numb, and then the entire lower half of my body would fall asleep. Phone reservationists should not have numb butts because a numb butt does not a cheery phone reservationist make, and toward the end of every shift when I
was supposed to be answering questions with quiet concern and authority, I found myself yelling NO YOU CANNOT RIDE IN THE CARGO BAY WITH YOUR CAT, ARE YOU INSANE?
Behold, there I was doing a job that stupid people before me had been able to do. And yes, I did consider parenthood a job. It was the most difficult job I’d ever had, a job where my boss called at least twice during the middle of the night, a job where my boss had to approve my bathroom breaks, a job that required me to wipe my boss’s ass. And not only was I really good at it, but I was also stupid enough to love it.
After two months of sleepless nights we decided to try putting Leta to sleep in her crib and leaving her there for the duration of the evening. This experiment produced mixed results as some nights I was walking to her bedroom over twenty times to soothe her back to sleep or to plop that goddamn binky back in her face. Some of my friends thought I was insane and that I needed to let her cry it out right that instant because it worked for them! And I totally gave them a cookie and encouraged them to run for president.
I wasn’t morally opposed to letting her cry it out; it’s just that I didn’t think she was ready for it. I wasn’t ready for it. By the way her sleep habits were playing out I knew that I’d eventually have to give her a crash course in sleeping through the night, and I was certain it would be the hardest thing I would ever do in my life. It was hard enough to put her back in her crib when we made the decision that I shouldn’t bring her back to bed with me after her first nightly feeding. That was my favorite part of the day, getting back into bed with her under my left arm, her soft furry hair brushing my chin, the smell of her head lulling me to sleep. It was beautiful and natural and magical, but then she started grunting and shooting firecrackers out of her ass. Sleeping directly next to the loudest baby on the planet proved nearly impossible.
So I started putting her back into her crib after the first feeding, and the first time I did it I cried all the way back to my bed, like I had just sent her off to college and she wasn’t answering my calls. But that was the first time Jon was able to sleep over five hours in a row, and once we made that decision he consistently collected multiple hours of sleep, and that meant he was well rested enough that he could change more diapers and rub my feet and make me Pop-Tarts. I was still sleeping only two hours here and there because I was the feeder and official binky-putter-back-inner, but I had Pop-Tarts and rubbed feet and the world was once again okay.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 10