It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather Armstrong

  But there he was, my husband, Leta’s father. He had endured pain he never knew he would have to endure at the hands of my disease, and he stood by me, carried me through many sleepless nights. His contribution was as vital as mine.

  The best part of my day was when Jon carried Leta back to the changing table after her bath, and she’d lay there wrapped in the towel, her hand shoved as far as she could get it into the back of her mouth. He’d lean down and pretend to eat her neck, causing her to laugh. And she laughed for him like she laughed for no one else, a full-body laugh that shook her belly and caused her to let go of her hand for a second. Her giggles would fill the house and echo through the baby monitor into the living room and out to the street. I imagined that those echoing giggles were what the background music in heaven sounded like.

  The first time we fed Leta solid food she smeared the entire jar all over her face, and three days later we were still finding sweet potatoes in her ears. I don’t know why they call it solid because there was nothing solid about it. If it had been solid then she wouldn’t have been able to paint with it, and she used her whole body as her canvas.

  I’ll be honest and admit that I thought it was going to be easy to feed a baby. I was just going to shove a little bit of food into her mouth and she’d swallow it like a reasonable human being. She stuck everything else into her mouth, so wouldn’t she be delighted that this particular thing actually had taste! A sweet taste! Not at all bitter like the paper towels she’d snatch out of my hands and shove down her throat!

  But how many times have I seen pictures of babies with food smeared all over their faces? I always thought that parents smeared the food on the baby’s face because babies are cute with mushy vegetables on their foreheads. Who doesn’t love a baby with carrots dripping from her nostrils? That’s a perk of parenthood, getting to decorate one’s baby with colorful foodstuffs and then taking a picture and posting it on the Internet, right? But the baby SELF-DECORATES, I did not know this, and the mess from this self-decoration becomes exponentially worse by the second as it travels from spoon to face to hand to everything within a two-mile radius. Two days after we fed Leta sweet potatoes they found some splattered all over the gates of the Mormon temple downtown.

  I had to take the idiocy one step further and carry out this experiment on our couch. Our custom-made, blue velvet, imported down-filled couch. And in the panic of the moment I couldn’t think straight, and instead of doing the thinking-straight thing and running to get wipes to salvage our couch and our coffee table and the refinished hardwood floors, I did the non-thinking-straight thing which seemed like the thinking-straight thing at the time. I began LICKING UP THE SWEET POTATOES WITH MY TONGUE, starting with her face.

  That was the fun part.

  I licked her cheeks and her nose, then her hands and wrists, and then I ate her chin, and then her third and fourth chin. This did nothing to alleviate the mess. It did, however, taste very sweet, and I walked around for a week with a faint orange tattoo of a small hand on my forehead.

  LESSON CONCERNING SOLID FOOD: learned.

  In the weeks leading up to Leta’s birth I received several gifts from friends, including infant clothing and receiving blankets, breast pads and tiny nail clippers. I remember looking at all the stuff and wondering, “What the hell do you do with a breast pad? Can you eat these things?” because I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I honestly thought that the baby would come with all the clothes she needed. After giving birth to the baby and the placenta, I thought a whole package of cotton onesies would shoot out the birth canal, followed closely by several nightgowns and a six-pack of tiny pink socks. I had gained so much weight that I was certain Leta would arrive with luggage.

  I’d learned a lot in the few months since I had been a parent. I’d learned that babies don’t necessarily like to be dangled by their toes from the rooftop or to have their mouths clamped shut with clothes-pins. Duct tape worked better at silencing the screaming than swings or strollers or diaper changes. I’d also become an expert on the subject of breast pads (no, you cannot eat those things), and could shoot breast milk at a target thirty feet away.

  Every night Jon and I took inventory of what we’d learned and added it to our notebook of parenting: Leta did not like to be outside; she did not like the vacuum cleaner or other obnoxious noises; she liked the book about the ladybug, but not the book about the rocking horse; Leta would stop screaming if I sang a certain Morrissey song, but I couldn’t sing it in my normal voice and had to instead imitate Morrissey because she knew the difference.

  And finally: Leta would use solid food to draw intricate landscapes on our expensive furniture.

  Dear Leta,

  Today you turn five months old. FIVE! WHOLE! MONTHS! You’re practically an adult! Isn’t it about time you started paying rent?

  The first thing we should talk about is how you’ve slept through the night five nights in a row. And when I say slept through the night I don’t mean six or seven hours in a row. Six or seven hours is for three-month-olds, for babies. When I say slept through the night I mean twelve HOURS IN A ROW, from 7 PM until 7 AM. You’re sleeping better than most Harvard graduates, Leta.

  You have discovered the joy of sleeping, something you definitely inherited from me. Your naps are now all an hour or longer, sometimes even two hours. And when we put you in the crib for a nap, you smile, bring your fist to your mouth, and close your eyes. When you wake up in the morning you usually lie in the crib for five to ten minutes just playing with your blankets and examining your abnormally large hands, waiting for us to come get you. And when we come get you it’s like you’re playing the slots and have just hit JACKPOT! Your whole body convulses with excitement and you gasp and smile and squint your forehead with glee! The look on your face seems to say THERE IS THAT WOMAN WHO FEEDS ME! or THERE IS THAT MAN WHO MAKES ME LAUGH ALL THE TIME!

  And since we’re talking about the laughing…you have this low, back-of-the-throat laugh that sounds like a fake laugh. Sometimes it sounds like you are laughing to make us feel good about our attempts to make you laugh, like, “Haha, I know you’re trying to be funny, but you’re really not that funny, and since I don’t want you to feel bad I’ll just go ahead and laugh anyway, you sad, pathetic people.” It sounds so fake that I always expect you to roll your eyes.

  But then there are the full-bodied chuckles that only your father can seem to elicit from you, and every time he makes you chuckle, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, he gives you the hiccups. This wouldn’t normally be a problem except that it always happens right before bedtime. So the whole time I’m feeding you dinner you’re hiccuping, and the hiccups continue throughout your bedtime story. Sometimes the hiccups don’t stop until about ten minutes after you’ve fallen asleep, so you sound like a beer-bellied frat boy who has passed out after drinking two cases of Old Milwaukee.

  So you’re sleeping well and laughing and being a cute little kid all around, but there is something we need to talk about: why must you make that awful noise when you are bored? Why can’t you be patient and quiet and lovable when you’re just sitting there, instead of going, “Iiiiiiiiiiiiihhhhh! Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiihhhhhh!!” like a sick and diseased goat who has been left by the herd on the side of a mountain to be gobbled up by wolves?

  I live my life in two-hour increments. Once you wake in the morning or from a nap I have to come up with distracting activities to fill the two hours until you go down for your next nap, otherwise you bleat, not out of discomfort or pain, but out of anger and disappointment at being left all alone in the room, except not really all alone because I’m sitting there RIGHT BESIDE YOU. If we aren’t engaged in a new activity with new toys you haven’t seen before, you assault me with the most annoying noise ever uttered in the universe. So we go on walk after walk after walk, and then we go to the grocery store, and then to the park, and then we read books and play with rattles and spoons and measuring cups, and that’s just the first fifteen minutes. After two hours
of nonstop Project Distraction, I’m ready to collapse from exhaustion, and you seem only slightly amused as if you’re thinking, “Is this the best that you can do?”

  This month you have learned how to reach for things, which is rather unfortunate because you haven’t yet learned how to balance yourself, so anytime you reach for something you end up face first on the floor or the couch. Surprisingly, this isn’t nearly as frustrating as being bored (bleat! bleat!), and you could remain in the face-plant position for several minutes without announcing any sort of discomfort. I don’t know if that’s because you trust me to come running to your rescue or because you’re studying the pattern on the floor and want to be left alone in your research.

  Also, this month I have gone on a carb-only diet consisting of orange juice, strawberry Pop-Tarts, and your chubby cheeks. I cannot keep your face out of my mouth, it is just so scrumptious and plump and chewy and round. You have a lot more hair on your head, so instead of putting your whole head in my mouth I bite off your ears and nose and gnaw on your chin. And then I go back for more cheeks. Sometimes I just can’t stop and I end up swallowing you whole and I walk around with your feet hanging out of my mouth. When your father comes home from work he asks, “Where’s the baby?” And I have to confess, “I ate her.”

  Love, Mama

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Trusting the Wisdom of a Dog

  Never underestimate the importance of a mutual love and need for wiper fluid within a marriage. How many families are being torn apart because one spouse doesn’t understand the value of a clean windshield while the other spouse cannot breathe air knowing that the windshield is dirty?

  When I was single I broke up with men because they refused to wash their windshields. One of them claimed that it just wasn’t dirty enough, and that he would be wasting wiper fluid if he went ahead and cleaned the windshield, as if there aren’t hundreds of thousands of bottles of wiper fluid sitting idly at every supermarket and auto parts store in the world WAITING TO BE BOUGHT AND USED TO CLEAN WINDSHIELDS. So he would drive around with all this shit on his windshield—bird poop and water stains and mud and various other fluids of curious origin—and he could barely see out of a two-inch space on the passenger side of the window. We argued about the state of his windshield incessantly. I refused to go anywhere in his car because I would have to sit there looking at the filth, and I would want to throw up and punch him. So we broke up, partly because of the windshield, partly because he had this other habit of being a homosexual.

  If I’m not careful I can go through a couple of gallons of wiper fluid a week. I clean the windshield every time I get into the car, and then three or four times while I’m driving city streets, a couple dozen times if I’m on the freeway. There is just no reason to drive around with crap on the windshield, not when you can pull back that lever and hear the heavenly gush of wiper fluid, oh cleansing baptismal blue liquid! The power! To clean the windshield of the car WHILE THE CAR IS IN MOTION!

  Is there a worse sound in the world than the coughing, dry clanking of an empty wiper fluid reservoir? And then the immediate, echoing realization that the sacred pools of cleanser have dried up and that you might have to drive a whole mile with bird poop in the middle of your line of sight? The horror! Let me gouge out my eyes with forks rather than drive another inch without my wiper fluid!

  My marriage is built upon a mutual understanding of the hallowed nature of wiper fluid. The first time I saw him reach for that lever to cleanse the windshield I knew that he was a keeper. Imagine my squealing delight when he continued to hold that lever back for TEN WHOLE SECONDS. He doesn’t just clean his windshield; he showers it with love.

  Sometimes Leta and I would sit on the porch in the mornings to watch Jon pull out of the driveway and turn up the street to go to work. Invariably I would watch as the morning sun reflected in rainbow sheets off the shooting waterfalls of wiper fluid as he cleaned the windshield near the corner of our block. I liked to think of it as his way of waving good-bye, bidding me a good day, one he hoped was full of clean windshields.

  My mother and I were sitting at a restaurant having lunch when we both noticed that Leta was trying to put the table in her mouth. The whole table. We could see the concentration in her face, her thoughts swarming around how she could pull the whole table closer and fit it in her mouth. She had already burned through every toy I had packed in my purse (her response to each toy was, “You’re joking, right? I have already seen this toy before, therefore it possesses no entertainment value. You obviously aren’t trying hard enough, and now I must scream.”), plus six or seven packets of sugar that she would suck and then violently discard by throwing them at the person sitting next to us. We had only begun our appetizers, and the level of Leta’s boredom had reached Terror Level: RUN FOR YOUR LIVES.

  Rarely did I get to have lunch with my mother. She worked in Los Angeles five days a week, and on the weekends she had to split her time among forty family members whose sole purpose in life was to make her feel guilty. Sometimes she’d stop by our house on the way to or from the airport so that she could snack on Leta’s cheeks, but then she’d be off again having spoken only a few words to me, those words being “hello,” “good-bye,” or “Where’s that baby?”

  That particular lunch, however, lasted four hours and was the longest amount of time I had spent with my mother in years. This can be explained by the fact that I hadn’t been that depressed in years, or ever, and I finally decided to risk being one of those forty demanding family members and told her that I needed help. I needed help because I was on the edge, and I was holding on to that edge with my fingertips, my body dangling precariously over a dark hole that was reaching up to swallow me.

  I kept thinking that my depression would go away, that my self-medication was going to work. But I should have known better than anyone else that this just doesn’t go away. In fact, it festered and grew until one morning I found myself throwing things in the general direction of loving and wonderful people who did not deserve to have things thrown in their general direction. It had entered my bloodstream and was systematically choking me to death.

  Leta was sleeping unbelievably well, and I hadn’t had to feed her during the night in over ten days. But I had’t slept any of those nights. I lay awake at night waiting for her call, waiting for something to go wrong, waiting for someone to take her away from me. I couldn’t sleep thinking about how I wouldn’t want to come home to me, why did Jon continue to come home to me?

  I’d get up in the morning having slept only an hour or two and couldn’t imagine living another minute. The expanse of the day unfolded before me and I couldn’t comprehend how I was going to distract my cranky baby for the next twelve hours. There’d be walks and more walks and books and rattles and moving from the porch to the sidewalk and back to the porch to delay her disappointment just a few more minutes. And then there were the moments when I couldn’t do anything to stop her from screaming at me, and it felt like she was sad that she didn’t have a mother who knew what the hell she was doing.

  I used to be sad only in the morning, and after 11 AM I was okay. But the mornings started to turn into afternoons, then into nights, and soon it got to the point that I was never okay. There wasn’t a moment in the day that I looked forward to. I didn’t see an end to this cycle of stress, and I found myself asking much too often, “Why go on?”

  I finally saw a psychiatrist who prescribed me a new combination of drugs, ones completely different from the ones I had been trying. I wished that there were other ways that I could have gone about getting better, but I knew that what I was feeling was beyond the help of herbal remedies or dietary changes. I exercised all the time and I had a very healthy diet, but my situation had become life-threatening. I was truly afraid that I would hurt myself.

  Slowly I started taking an antianxiety drug and a mood stabilizer, two very powerful drugs that had to be monitored. The doctor did not prescribe a sleep aid because he thought that the anti
anxiety drug would stop the incessant and unnecessary worrying that kept me awake at night. I felt very positive about this, hopeful that the drugs would work and that I would one day soon be able to wake up in the morning and recognize what a wonderful life I had.

  But there was one terrible drawback to the step I was taking toward sanity. The doctor told me that I would have to wean Leta if I wanted to work up to therapeutic levels of these drugs. I’d have to stop breastfeeding in the next month.

  I never thought that I would feel so devastated at the prospect of having to stop breastfeeding. I couldn’t talk about it without crying. I really believed that feeding Leta was the only way that she was comforted by me, and once that was gone would she even know who I was?

  The strange thing was that breastfeeding had never been the beautiful and peaceful and wondrous endeavor that they wanted me to believe it was. I’m sure it had been for many women, but for me it had been a struggle from the first moment she latched on in the hospital. It started out with excruciating pain, and then continued being painful for a month, and then five months later I still got engorged when she didn’t eat a full meal. And Leta didn’t ever eat a full meal, so I was constantly worried about whether or not she was getting enough to eat.

  I tried pumping for a few weeks, but every time I pumped I got a clog in my left boob and spent several days afterward hunched over in paralyzing pain. I couldn’t count how many nights I lay in bed awake waiting for her to wake up so that she would eat and the pain in my chest could subside for at least a few hours.

  There had been moments, a select few moments when feeding her was an almost religious experience. Moments when she’d stop eating, smile, and reach her hand up to touch my face. My beautiful baby in my arms so close to my chest, her soft fingers exploring the line of my chin. Those were moments when I believed in God.