This partially ingrown toenail was the most awful partially ingrown toenail there ever was, monumental in its awfulness, and I need to spend the next paragraph talking about just how awful it was, just in case you missed the awfulness that I have already mentioned. It was just so awful, really and very much awful, OH SO AWFUL. And it hurt, and continued to hurt, and in the two seconds since he mentioned it was hurting it hadn’t stopped hurting because it still hurt and IT WAS AWFUL.
I know it was just a toe, but it was an important toe. And I understood this, I really did, because my vagina was just a vagina, but it was an important vagina. But he argued that the comparison must stop there because my vagina was designed to stretch and tear like that, but his toe wasn’t designed to have the nail part jut into the skin part and it HURT SO BAD. Perhaps if there were stages of pain it would have been more manageable, he said, like how the cervix slowly dilates. At least I had had dilation. The toe doesn’t dilate, so the pain in his toe was painful all at once, and this pain had to be talked about, at length, very loudly, with lots of moaning and gnashing of the teeth.
I really wanted to take away his pain, because I didn’t like it when he was in pain, but more important, because I would have very much liked to talk about something else. Leta was almost ready to start rolling over! And she could almost touch her face with her foot! And she…oh, wait. His toe still hurt. And it was awful. And there was just so much pain.
Did you know that Achilles felt pain, too? In the foot area! And that was not a coincidence. In the middle of moaning about his toe he compared himself to Achilles, and that was just too cute. So I pointed out that Achilles never experienced childbirth, never pushed a swollen eight-pound rodent out of his vagina and then had to get up and immediately feed that rodent with his breast, so sorry if I am not all that impressed with Achilles.
Dear Leta,
Today you turn four months old. I have been trying to keep up with all the changes going on in your life, but even in the last twenty-four hours you’ve learned something new, and I can only type so fast. This is one of those moments when I wish I could record you, press pause, and replay you over and over again so that I don’t miss anything. Like when I watch episodes of reality television and your father makes loud, mean comments, and I have to rewind it to hear what they’re saying.
A couple of days ago you learned how to blow bubbles and raspberries with your tongue. This was an inevitable development as you were trying to figure out what to do with all that drool. Where did you learn to drool like that? We could water the lawn for a month with all the drool that seeps out of your mouth on a daily basis. Perhaps all this drool is compensation for the fact that you never spit up, ever, except for that one time we were outside talking to the neighbors and you hurled all over your father’s new black business shirt, right after we had just proudly announced, “She never spits up!” You’ve got great timing, kid!
You’ve discovered both of your hands, and they are the most marvelous creations you have ever seen. You suck on your fingers and then your fist, and sometimes we look over and you have both of your thumbs in your mouth, as if one thumb just isn’t enough. When we’re dressing you for bed at night and we have to pull your pajamas over your arms, you are separated from your hands for all of three seconds, and the look of panic on your face seems to say that you are worried that you will never see them again, oh wonderful hands, come back! And then you are reunited with them, your long-lost friends, and you get so excited that you almost hyperventilate, sticking both fists into your mouth so violently that you almost choke on your knuckles.
This month you also discovered the joy of sticking other things into your mouth. One night a few weeks ago you were lying on your back on our bed and I dangled a teething ring over your head. The room got very quiet, and time seemed to shift into slow motion as you reached up, grabbed the teething ring, opened your mouth, and tried to bring the teething ring to your tongue. But you missed your tongue. You missed your whole mouth altogether and tried to stick the teething ring into your ear. You did this three consecutive times, shoving the teething ring into your ear, and then into your forehead, once into your nose, and then, as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir swelled to a triumphant, room-shaking Hallelujah! you brought the teething ring to your mouth! Fireworks exploded in the distance as you took the teething ring out of your mouth and then put it back in your mouth, over and over again, as if putting that thing in your mouth was what you were born to do. As you squealed in celebration I said good-bye to my old life and hello to my new one, a life that will be consumed with running to grab potentially harmful things out of your hands before they make it to the inside of your eager, drooling jaws.
You are becoming such a little person, and every day I have to resist the urge to put you between two slices of wheat bread and lather mayonnaise on your head, gobbling you up in one bite. Things are so much better, so much more fun now that you have graduated from the oozy, poopy larva stage into an actual baby, one that I can play with, one who responds to my voice and my touch. Your giggles and squeals are delightful, and the once intolerable screaming has been replaced with occasionally hilarious fussiness, thunderous squawks of displeasure as you try to communicate with me that you are mad or angry or just so damn tired of it all! You’ve never seen a baby so exasperated, and now I have to resist laughing at you because you sound like a really pissed off bird.
A little over a month ago when the screaming was really bad, your father had to come home from work early because I was in a dark, unforgiving place. You had been screaming on and off for hours, and I was crying uncontrollably, still dressed in my pajamas. Your father tried rocking you, singing to you, swinging you. He tried everything I had already tried, and in a moment of frustration he set you down in the crib and walked away to regain some perspective. Twenty seconds later you were asleep. ASLEEP! You fell asleep in twenty seconds and you slept for two hours. That was the beginning of the end of the screaming. It was as if all that screaming was your way of telling us PUT ME DOWN, YOU IDIOTS. Ever since that afternoon we put you down in your crib for naps and you fell asleep BY YOURSELF. You don’t want to be rocked or sung to or fussed over. In fact, you hate to be fussed over, and if I try to rock you or soothe you to sleep you scream at me. So I leave you alone now when it’s time to sleep and you couldn’t be happier. THANK YOU, LETA.
I know you’re awake when I hear you scratching the mattress. It’s your way of letting me know that it’s time to come get you, SCRATCH SCRATCH SCRATCH. I can hear the scratching from the most remote point in the house, even outside in the backyard. It’s not the prettiest sound, and it makes my spine twitch every time I hear it, but it also breaks my heart it’s so damn cute. It’s also cute when your father is holding you in the BabyBjörn and you scratch his arm like you scratch the mattress, and then you grab hold of his arm hair and yank it like you’re pulling weeds. He shrieks a bit from the sting, but that is okay, because that’s his way of sharing in the pain since he didn’t have to push you out of his vagina or suffer engorged, torpedo boobs.
Over the weekend you met your Grandpa Hamilton for the first time. He’s the man responsible for your pointy chin and the shape of your upper lip, sorry about that. He’s a good man though, as good as they come, and you should take his advice when it comes to money and financial planning. However, when he starts talking about politics I want you to cover your ears and kick him in the shins.
What a great month, little one. We are having so much fun together, going on walks and reading books and watching Pyramid twice a day. Just when I think my love for you couldn’t be any bigger, I wake up and discover that I love you even more, and I worry that my body isn’t big enough to hold this much love. I worry that my insides may explode because there isn’t any more room. I am drunk on my love for you, a sloppy drunk who can’t see straight or speak in coherent sentences, a drunk who giggles every time you fart. And it’s just so awesome that you’re old enough now that you can giggle with m
e.
Love, Mama
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Other Mothers: Your Harshest Critics
A few days after Leta turned four months old we took away Leta’s pacifier and it felt like we were running a division of the Betty Ford Clinic. We’d taken away her cigarettes, her heroin, her daily 64-ounce Diet Coke, and from the resulting hours of weeping and gnashing of the toothless gums you would have thought we’d taken away her will to live.
Our little Robert Downey Jr. cried more in the span of four days than she had in her entire life on earth. She used up all the crying. There was no more crying left in the world. Your baby shouldn’t cry anymore because Leta cried enough that week for all the babies ever in the history of mankind and the universe.
Everyone thought we were insane for attempting this intervention, this game of chicken with the most stubborn will ever given a body to enact its wrath. And there were many moments during those days when I wanted to pick up that binky and plug it into her face to stop the wailing, it would have been SO EASY. Maybe a couple of puffs would have tided her over, made the transition a little less painful. But we all know that it would not have stopped at a couple of puffs. She would have wanted those two puffs and then a couple more puffs, and then she would have begged for even more puffs, and within an hour she would have injected the pacifier into her veins.
Once an addict, always an addict. Leta was an abuser.
We probably wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to cleanse her of this disease were it not for the terrible things it had done to her sleeping habits, and thus to my sleeping habits, and my sleeping habits took precedence over water and food, over the air that I breathed. Leta needed the pacifier to go to sleep, and when she woke up in the middle of the night and the pacifier wasn’t in her mouth she became one pissed infant, like someone had stolen her last pack of cigarettes, the last pack of cigarettes in the world. And for months I’d had to put the binky back in her mouth. I had climbed out of bed, walked into her room, handed her a cigarette and asked, “Do you need a light?”
We’d also discovered that these bad sleeping habits were causing her bad eating habits, and everything could be traced back to the cigarettes: the yellow stains on her fingers, the wrinkles around her lips, the raspy sound of her cough as she swallowed tobacco-colored drool.
All of our problems were tied to that plastic sucking device, and the withdrawal was ripping apart the fragile fabric that held the family together. None of us was sleeping, and both Jon and I developed muscle spasms in our faces and arms. Chuck trembled and licked his empty nut sack every time he heard Leta crying for more binky, and after four days of detox his ass had become a rubbery, hairless knob.
I was on the verge of a mental breakdown. Leta sensed my vulnerability and gave me merciless guilt trips in the form of helpless, wistful gazes that seemed to say, “Mama, why dost thou hurt me so?” And even though I knew I was doing the right thing, that helping her to learn to sleep without the cigarettes would help her eat better and become a healthier, meatier baby that we could sell to the butcher, those gazes pierced my heart and gripped my quivering soul. I knew she was in pain and that she was suffering, and that knowledge was perhaps the worst pain I could endure.
Except for maybe the judgmental snickering of other mothers.
I never knew that the binky was such a political issue, and when we made the decision to cure Leta of her habit we pissed off pretty much every person we knew.
Well-meaning friends informed us that because we had done this to her, Leta was going to suck her thumb until she turned twelve or thirteen years old. Someone even suggested that she’d suck her thumb for the rest of her life and that the only way we’d be able to solve that problem would be to AMPUTATE HER HAND, so I’d better “stop being so mean” and give her back the damn binky.
And then there was the suggestion, repeated over and over my ear, that I let her put the binky back into her mouth herself, duh. Why hadn’t I thought of that one myself? Maybe because she was only four months old and possessed the hand-eye coordination of a slug. She could pick up that binky and put it back into her mouth about as well as she could wipe her own ass, and if she was falling behind on that milestone, well then, maybe blame it on all the vodka I fed her in a bottle.
From the sound of the criticism I received you would have thought that Jon and I just woke up one morning and said to each other, “Hey, I’ve got an idea! Let’s take away Leta’s pacifier today. It will be a lot of FUN!” Because that’s all that kid meant to me, a good time. We’d just take away her soothing mechanism and watch her scream, why not, it would provide hours of laughter and merriment. And let me tell you, I hadn’t had that much fun since my OB-GYN took a pair of scissors and sliced a two-inch gash in my vagina. THAT was a fucking riot.
But you know what? Do you want to guess what happened on the fifth night of our intervention? Leta slept for TEN HOURS IN A ROW. TEN. T-E-N.
TEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That’s one, two, three, four, five—wait, I need to catch my breath because there are so many numbers to count…phew, okay, that’s better, where was I?—six, seven, eight, nine, TEN.
The most Leta had ever slept up until that night was six hours in a row, and that was just a side effect of her two-month immunizations. It only happened once, and since that night the longest she had ever slept in a row was three hours. Taking away her binky tripled her sleeping capacity. That can’t be a bad thing, right? Oh wait, I forgot. If my baby slept that long that meant I was neglecting her. I’d never learn!
Guess what else happened? No, guess. GUESS!!
She started eating! During the day! In the daytime! When it was day outside! MY BABY KNEW HOW TO EAT, WHY HAD NO ONE TOLD ME?
But just because Leta slept ten hours, however, didn’t mean that I slept any of those hours, any at all whatsoever. I woke up every hour and half hour waiting for the wailing, my heart clinched up in my throat. And then it got later and later, and the wailing never came, and when she finally woke up (TEN HOURS LATER! REMEMBER?), my boobs were so full I could have sprayed milk twenty feet into the air. I hopped out of bed, two rock hard concrete traffic mounds on my chest, and ran to my binky-less Wonderchild, attaching her to my boob before I even had her out of the crib. She could barely keep up with the flow, my boob a gushing fire hydrant that she was trying to stop with her mouth.
On Father’s Day I got a little weepy, a little carried away in my emotion for the man who’d given my daughter the blueprint for her DNA. Our child inherited his eyes and his nose, his profile and his forehead, and pretty much everything else. I could not look at her without seeing him.
I often felt that parenthood seemed lopsided. Mothers were the ones who had to suffer all sorts of unimaginable pain to bring the child into the world while the father got to sit to the side, smoke cigars, and pat the kid on the butt from time to time. And while that wasn’t an entirely accurate depiction of our roles in Leta’s life, it was a pretty accurate depiction of the intrinsic nature of this process.
Becoming a mother had been very hard for me. My pregnancy was marked with nausea and bloating and swelling and thirty pounds of weight gain and heartburn and insomnia and a never-ending need to go pee. Labor wasn’t so bad, if you can say such a thing about that kind of pain, it being “not so bad.” I was fortunate in that I didn’t experience any complications, but the aftermath was Biblical in its devastation.
There were stitches and chronic constipation and crying and hemorrhoids and bladder infections and back pains and bleeding and crying and cracked nipples and crying and lumpy breasts with the texture and firmness of granite. And then there were weeks and weeks of crying and sleep deprivation and depression and anxiety and hard, hard, uncomfortable breasts.
Jon got to share in the sleep deprivation, but his main physical contribution to bringing this baby into the world, aside from his Very Potent Sperm, was carrying me every step of the way. He hadn’t experienced any of the physical pain of the process
, but he had picked me up off the floor more times than was required under the law for men who were married to Really Difficult Women.
He held my head when I puked; he cheered for me when I tried to pee. He helped me turn over in the middle of the night when I was so whalelike in size that I couldn’t turn over by myself.
He pushed with me during labor and almost passed out from depriving his brain of oxygen. He changed Leta’s first diaper even though we both hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours, and the diapers in the hospital were all broken, and the meconium stuck to every pore in his forearm.
He stood outside the door when I went to poop for the first time after labor, The Most Horrible Day of My Life, coaching me like I was going through labor again, giving birth to Leta’s twin. And then he held my head as I cried afterward.
He had come home from work early (more times than I was proud to admit) to wipe away my tears, to calm the baby’s screaming as I screamed in the other room.
He rubbed my feet because he wanted to, not because I asked him to. He let me sleep an extra thirty minutes in the morning at least three or four times a week because he knew that those extra minutes were the key to my sanity.
He let me spew nonsense every night, and then he let me cry and cry some more. And then he held me once again.
And then there was his relationship with Leta.
Jon put Leta to bed every night. When I saw them together in the rocking chair reading stories together, sharing those quiet evening moments, father and daughter, my heart would break into a million pieces. I think about how he could have chosen someone else. He could have looked at me across that table years ago and said, “You are nice and all, but I need to see other women.” He could have walked out of my life any number of times. He could have given another woman a child with his eyes.
It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 14