But every night the trip to and from her room became more perilous as every single floorboard in our house creaked, and I swear they didn’t creak before Leta was born. After she came to live with us they started to creak under the weight of our shadows. And they didn’t creak softly or longingly. They creaked violently and adamantly, like an angry symphony of floorboards trying furiously to re-create the sounds of souls damned to hell, souls crying out for mercy. Even the thirty-five-pound dog caused the floors to creak.
Once Leta woke up, whether it was in the morning or from one of her naps, I set my watch and made sure that I got her back to sleep before the two-hour mark. She couldn’t physically handle being awake for longer than that period of time and if we ignored that standard the PARTY WAS TOTALLY OVER. If we kept her awake even one minute over that two-hour mark, neither Jon nor I could console the beast that raged out of her screaming, violent limbs, and the switchover from beauty to beast was almost instantaneous.
These maddening sleep habits were one of many concerns we raised when we took her to her two-month checkup and torture session where she was weighed, measured, and injected with three potentially deadly diseases. Turns out she hadn’t inherited her mother’s aversion to needles, and she cried for all of four seconds after the final shot. I, however, saw the nurse make a movement toward my baby’s leg and then vomited twice in the corner of the room.
She was twelve whole pounds—almost a baker’s dozen!—and stretched out to twenty-four inches. I liked to tell people that she was two feet tall. The circumference of her head measured in the ninety-fifth percentile, meaning her head was bigger than the heads of 95 percent of all other babies her age. Oddly, this made me very proud. It was as if her brain was so big that it required extra storage space.
Her doctor gave us some upsetting news, however, when he diagnosed her with what is called torticollis plagiocephaly, a deformity in the shape of the head caused by favoring one side over the other. I’d noticed with some concern that when Leta was awake her head was positioned so that she was looking toward her right shoulder, and this caused the back of her head to grow into a diagonal slope. Her doctor was worried that the deformity had become so pronounced in just two months, so we made an appointment with a physical therapist in the following weeks to make sure that her neck muscles were developing correctly on both sides.
If you want to know how to scare the living shit out of a new mother, just utter the phrase TORTICOLLIS PLAGIOCEPHALY, and then hand her a prescription pad with the number of a SPECIALIST written on it, someone who is better trained with “these things.” The condition was in no way life threatening, but I was a new mother and there was little difference to me between mildly concerning and will totally kill your baby.
Jon accepted the diagnosis in stride, but then again, he was preoccupied with thoughts of work and projects. I was almost jealous that he got to flee the physical confines of parenthood every day and focus on something completely unrelated to the survival of an infant. Although I knew he used his work as a distraction from the unpleasantness of what was going on at home, from the lingering image of his daughter’s diagonal skull. My reaction to things was to cry. His was to flee.
That night we slept with Leta nestled between us. She was whimpering and aching from a 101 degree fever (a side effect of her immunizations), and I rested my hand on her belly all night long to feel the rise and fall of her breathing. I had never been so sad and worried and hopelessly wrapped up in another creature. I wanted to apologize to her all night, through her sobs and wails and half attempts at eating, for bringing her into this insane world where there are dangerous illnesses that she has to be protected against.
I was sorry about the shots. I was sorry that the shape of her head was distorted. I was sorry that the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I had the other day had given her bad gas. I was sorry that the dog loved to sniff her face and that his nose was really cold. I was sorry for dressing her in that onesie that was too small but was still so cute that I wanted her to wear it at least one more time. I was sorry that we had to pull her nightgown over her head, night after night after night. I was sorry that one day she’d have to figure out how to pay her own taxes and that we wouldn’t pay them for her.
I was sorry that one day she would be old enough that when she was sick and had a fever I wouldn’t be able to hold her and whisper her to sleep. I was sorry that I didn’t ever want that day to come.
Most of my freelance web design work that used to bring in income during my pregnancy had dwindled to a very slow trickle. That was intentional, something I had planned because I knew I’d have a hard time juggling a baby and work. But there was one project that didn’t want to end, there always is, so I enlisted my mother to watch the baby and the dog one afternoon so that I could tie up all the loose ends. I also used that opportunity to get out of the house for a few hours, so I drove the kids to my mother’s house, better known as the International House of Treats. My mother was incapable of spending time with the baby or the dog without lavishing them with gifts, so whenever we saw my mother I could safely assume that her local Wal-Mart had recently been emptied of all pink pajamas and packaged sausages.
In addition to watching the baby while I grunted through some terrible design templates, my mother spent her day sneaking the dog large chunks of cheese under the counter. I didn’t mind her giving the dog treats, and cheese happened to be his favorite, but my family never does anything in small quantities. We’re big people with big appetites and big hands and big feet and we buy everything in bulk, and by the end of the day my mother had given the dog enough cheese to constipate an entire herd of bison. The truck smelled of dog cheese farts for a week.
During the first few weeks of having a new baby I really enjoyed the very rare instances that I could spend entire days away from the house because it gave me a break in a frustrating routine consisting only of feeding, catnapping, and changing a never-ending string of diapers. Once I finally had the baby on a more predictable schedule it was hard to spend the day away from the smells and textures and noise levels she had become accustomed to, especially when spending the day away involved my relatives, The Loudest People On Earth.
For instance, my stepfather would answer the telephone as if he were trying to communicate from his living room with a deaf person locked in a fallout shelter on the moon. I wanted to tell him, hey, I don’t think that deaf person can hear you, maybe if you SCREAMED A LITTLE LOUDER THE WINDOWS WOULD EXPLODE AND THERE WOULD BE ONE LESS BARRIER. My mother talked the exact same way on the phone, as if she didn’t trust technology and couldn’t fathom that someone five hundred miles away could hear her unless she was S.H.R.I.E.K.I.N.G.
And then there was Granny, my eighty-year-old grandmother who could not hear anything and so performed everything so forcibly that even if she couldn’t hear she would at least be able to feel the vibrations. No one had ever opened a door so loudly, a door with no noticeable creaking, a door with no obvious reason to be loud. She could make that door loud, just like she could clomp around the house in slippers causing the foundation of the house to tremble. HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY CLOMP IN HOUSE SLIPPERS? And NO, you are not allowed to go wake up “that baby” to squeeze her face, you insane slipper-clomping door opener!
By the time we headed home after a day with my family I was a ball of nerves, having dodged catastrophe after catastrophe with the loud phone talkers. Leta somehow managed to sleep through four openings and closings of the garage door from hell, a conference call involving my mother and the speaker phone, and my stepfather’s encounter with a package of deli meat that would not open. I had never been so mad at a slice of turkey in my life.
When I was a child I knew the proper terms for the sexual anatomies of both girls and boys and wasn’t afraid to remind my grandmother to wash my vagina when giving me a bath. My grandmother, however, couldn’t believe she had raised a son who could in good conscience teach his own kids to use such foul language. Oh the horror
of her grandchild uttering PENIS! You might as well arm your kids with a gun and teach them how to shoplift! Penis is of course the gateway drug to felony misdemeanor.
At the age of four I was also under the impression that the penis was also called a delicate. The only way I could get my then seven-year-old brother to stop tickling me was to kick him in the delicate. It worked every time! My father had to pull me aside and tell me that boys had delicate parts and that I could permanently injure my brother’s delicate if I kept kicking him there. Years later when I was able to spell I noticed that the washing machine had a delicate cycle, and I could not for the life of me figure out how boys could detach their penises to wash them in the washing machine. And where was the vagina cycle? I wanted to detach my vagina and stick it in the washing machine. That only seemed fair.
Jon’s mother had also taught him the proper terms for his anatomy, but when she taught him that a vagina was a vagina he thought she said China. For years he would silently gasp when anyone referred to the country or to the tableware, and once when he was at his friend’s house and his friend’s mother began singing “China Girl” he could not believe this woman was openly talking about her China. HAD SHE NO DECENCY?
But Jon and I struggled with what we were going to call Leta’s anatomy when she was old enough to start talking about it. I did want her to know that she had a vagina, and we would teach her all the medical terms pertaining to her AREA, but when we talked about it casually, I thought that calling it a vagina would get tiring. Vagina is such a laborious word. It’s got three distinct syllables and you almost have to chew the word to get it out. What we were looking for was something cuter. Vagina was not cute.
We also had to consider the fact that whatever we taught her to call it would have its meaning completely altered in her mind. If we taught her to call it her PARTS then whenever she heard the word PART she’d either be mortified or chuckle wickedly. And then there was that one time the ultrasound technician called it a CHEESEBURGER, but I didn’t want her to have to think about her vagina every time she pulled up to a drive-thru.
Some terms we considered:
Bug
There
That Place
Um, you know (and then pointing in the general direction)
Certain Things Unspoken
Bottom System
When some of my more conservative friends found out that we were even considering assigning a nickname to Leta’s private parts they freaked out. Didn’t I know that encouraging such aberrant behavior meant that she’d grow up and nickname the severed limbs in her deep freezer? And I assured them, look, it’s not like we were going to call it her Wallace or her Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. GIVE ME SOME CREDIT.
In the end we decided on BUNKY because it was cute, and there was no possibility of it being confused with any other inanimate object. Except that I guess one of my friends knows this guy whose grandmother’s name is Bunky. WHAT ARE THE CHANCES OF THAT? And why did she have to tell me because now when I hear the word all I can think of is an imaginary silver-haired woman wearing a floral apron and garden clogs. That image lodged itself into my brain and now whenever I talk about my bunky I can’t help but envision a vagina preparing a pot roast and then sewing the button back on a festive Christmas sweater.
Dear Leta,
Today you are officially eight weeks old. I am sitting here typing this as you lie sleeping next to me. Over the weekend your father and I discovered that if we place you on your stomach you will actually sleep longer than five minutes at a time. This morning, in fact, I had to wake you up after three whole hours of sleeping soundly on your stomach, and when I rolled you over you had the cutest case of Binky Face, all mushed and covered in binky-shaped indentations.
I wish they made Binky Face bread tins so that I could bake a loaf of banana bread in the shape of your sleeping profile, and then instead of trying to eat your chubby cheeks I could just eat the banana bread. That would probably be better for both of us.
Yesterday I read in one of the dozens of medical books we bought since your birth that babies your age can sometimes wrap their fingers around objects that are held close to their hands. So we decided to test that theory out, and when we held a small rattle close to your right hand you reached out and wrapped your fingers around that thing so hard that it almost snapped in two. And then, proving once again that you probably have ancestors from the planet Krypton, you began waving that rattle around like you were flagging down a plane.
Your father and I got so excited that we almost had to change each other’s diapers, and we sat there cheering, “GO BABY GO!” At that moment I totally forgave you for the hours and hours—and did I mention hours?—of sleep I have lost getting out of bed at night to walk into your room to put the binky back in your mouth.
Sometimes you snort loudly in your sleep. Gigantic snorts that remarkably never wake you up. For the past couple of weeks when you have been attempting to sleep on your back, you have been waking yourself up by smacking yourself in the face repeatedly. I did a Google search on this flailing arm phenomenon (other recent Google searches include: “baby poop looks like caramel” and “healthy baby poop” and “infant hair loss Rogaine”) and I couldn’t find any professional advice on how to restrain your arms so that you can get some sleep. There have been nights when I’ve brought you back to bed with me that you have punched me in the nose with your little clenched fist and I’ve had to walk around the next day with a swollen nostril.
We’ve tried swaddling you, and in the first month of your life swaddling totally worked and you looked like a little frog-caterpillar hybrid. But your arms have become strong enough in the past month that you can break free of any of our swaddles, your father’s swaddles included, and your father could swaddle a full-grown octopus and it wouldn’t be able to wiggle its arms.
A side effect of your Flailing Infant Arm Syndrome is your discovery of your right hand, which you like to chew on at every possible opportunity. Aside from being very cute and very loud—the air you suck around your fist tends to slurp and often it sounds like a four-hundred-pound man passing garlic farts—your hand-chewing is also very drooly, dripping with drool, and if I don’t keep up with the drool the entire right side of your face becomes slimy with drool bubbles. You don’t seem to mind at all, but of course, you don’t mind sticking your sock-covered foot into your seedy caramel poop as I change your diaper, thus forcing me to do YET ANOTHER load of laundry. I can’t wait to teach you how to do laundry. I could use the help.
I look forward to this next month with you, to more coos and noises and near giggles, to more of the moments like the other night when I was feeding you at 1:30 AM and you kicked your sleeping father in the head. Your father and I love you more than you could possibly know, and you won’t know or understand just how much until you have a child of your own. Just please don’t have that child when you’re still a teenager. Which reminds me: you’re not allowed to date until you are twenty-five.
Love, Mama
CHAPTER NINE
The Dive That Turned Into a Belly Flop
Before Leta was born Jon and I talked at length about what we would do if I slipped into a postpartum funk, but for some reason I didn’t think it would ever happen, especially since I had made it through those first crucial months. But the funk finally happened, and it wasn’t so much a simple slipping into as it was a full-fledged belly flop.
For several weeks I felt like I was fighting a losing battle. I was doing everything I knew how to do to cope with feelings of hopelessness and frustration and an overwhelming sense of failure. But the cumulative loss of sleep and genetic predisposition toward depression totally body slammed me, and I spent several days locked in the house crying and wanting to puke.
Jon spent several days at work picking up his phone only to have me hang up on him. At night I would beg him to stay home the next day, and he would often say that while work was no fun it was far better than the sound of my screaming, not
to mention the endless squawking coming from the nursery. And then every day he’d go to work to escape us.
I experienced a few days of intense postpartum blues during the first two weeks of Leta’s life, but they subsided, the weather got better, my body healed, and soon I found myself getting out of the house and putting makeup on every day. The sleep deprivation was hard, but everything else was manageable because Leta seemed to be a relatively easy baby.
Almost everything I’d read said that a baby’s fussiness peaked at about six weeks of age, and when Leta turned six weeks I almost threw a celebration because I thought I might be out of the woods. But Leta became fussy at six weeks, and her fussiness only increased with each passing day. I don’t know if her temperament changed, I got worn down, or the lethal combination of both, but she rejected all my attempts to establish a schedule, and I spent days on end trying to soothe her incessant screaming. She screamed for hours every day. By the end of the day she was so tired from not sleeping that she was too frustrated to eat. Then she became too hungry to sleep and would lie there screaming. My daily life felt like torture. I struggled to make it from hour to hour. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. I was trying to find the humor in all of it, but I couldn’t ignore the crushing misery any longer.
There were many things about parenthood that I understood intellectually. I knew that this period of her life was only temporary and that things would eventually get better. I knew that I was a good mother and that I was meeting her needs as a baby. But depression isn’t about understanding things intellectually. It’s about an overshadowing emotional spiral that makes coping with anything nearly impossible.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 11