It Sucked and Then I Cried

by Heather Armstrong

  In the last month we have met Leta The Person. You are no longer this little blob of a thing that I take care of and wipe up, but this flailing, wiggly little personality that likes certain things and really, really doesn’t like other things. You love pears. You do not like peaches and will fling them at me if I try to feed them to you. You like applesauce. You do not like vanilla custard and you make this horrible gagging noise as it sits in your mouth and tries to make an innocent descent into your throat. You love to be tickled under your neck and around your thighs. You do not like it when I try to eat your nose and you’ll look at me like, “Mom, that is so not cool. Get a grip.”

  In the last week you have discovered that if you throw yourself backward while sitting on my lap that the whole world turns UPSIDE DOWN! You LOVE to throw yourself backward and gurgle as you do it, and then you wait there for me to tickle you on your neck, and it is just the funniest thing in the whole world to you. If I’m late to tickle you on the neck you make this jerking motion with your body that seems to say, “Hey. Hey. You’re supposed to tickle me on the neck now. Why are you veering from the routine?!”

  We’re still going to physical therapy to try to get you to put weight on your legs, but I think we’re butting heads with the most stubborn part of your personality. You are not yet mobile; you aren’t crawling or scooting or rolling across the floor. You’re just very content to sit there surrounded by toys, and when you see other kids walking or crawling you stare at them like, “Why are they wasting such precious energy? Energy that could be used to rip apart a toy or scream for attention? Do they not know that EVERYTHING can be delivered right to them? That’s what this whole baby thing is about.” Right now I’m confident that you’re going to be fine developmentally, that you’ll eventually want something so badly that you’ll move your body in its direction somehow. But I have to admit that having you immobile is somewhat convenient. I can turn my back and not worry that you’ll be halfway across the room about to put your tongue into a light socket.

  We finally have a solid routine during the day, one that can be timed by the clock, and you seem to like it just as much as I do. Within minutes of your naptime you show me signs of fatigue and make it solidly clear that you want nothing more than to curl up in your crib. The biggest sign that you are tired is the rapid sucking of your thumb. Yes, the nightmare that people warned me about CAME TRUE: You are a thumb sucker! (That should be read as if God were yelling it down from the sky.) You suck your thumb, and surprisingly, THE WORLD STILL TURNS. The best part about your thumb sucking is, well, okay there are two best parts about your thumb sucking:

  1. It takes you about three or four times to get your thumb into your mouth right. You’ll bring it to your mouth, and then pull it away, and then bring it close again, and then pull away, like, “No, no, no, that’s just not right!” The rest of your fingers caress your nose as you do this, and then finally, when you get your thumb into your mouth just right, your whole body relaxes like you’ve just taken a huge hit off a bong.

  2. You suck your thumb rather loudly when you sleep. So loudly that we can hear it through the monitor, and your father is constantly telling me to turn that damn thing down. I like to hear it, because it lets me know that you are asleep and happy and snuggly with your friend, the thumb. But it is kind of an annoying noise, slurp slurp slurp, and I smile inside thinking about how horrified you would be if I recorded that sound and played it for your friends at your sixteenth birthday party. That is going to be so awesome.

  Today is a bit of a sad day for your father and me as the person we wanted to win the Presidency was defeated. It’s sad mostly because we’ve brought you into a country that is heavily divided, and we’re worried that things aren’t going to get much better in your lifetime. We’re leaving your generation a huge mess to deal with, but I want you to know now, here when your judgment isn’t clouded by the crap that you’ll hear on TV, here when your heart is pure, I want you to know that your father and I want to teach you love and compassion. We want to teach you that there are always several sides to every story. We want to teach you about all religions and let you choose for yourself what you want to believe. We want to teach you that there is power in knowledge, but that there is even more power in reaching out and loving other people, that life is about relationships and friends and giving everything you’ve got.

  I love you, Leta. I love that you hug me tightly before I put you down for naps. I love it when you growl like a bear because you know that it makes me laugh. I love how you like to turn the pages in books. I love it that you cry when I leave and then brighten up like a sun-flooded room when I come back. I will always come back to you.

  Love, Mama

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I Never Thought I Would Become This Woman

  A few days after Leta turned nine months old we shared a huge day full of doctor’s appointments and cheddar cheese Goldfish. I had scheduled her physical therapy appointment after her first nap and her nine-month checkup after her second nap because I wanted her to be rested and in good spirits and an all-around lovely lady. You can do that as a parent, manipulate your children and ensure that they will be on their best behavior.

  You, you who have children can now pick up your jaw after reading that last sentence, because it should be followed by a gigantic, witchlike cackle that goes something like, BWHA HA HA HA HA! YOU AND YOUR LITTLE DOG, TOO! For those of you who don’t have children, the last sentence in the previous paragraph is the biggest bunch of bullshit I have ever spewed out of my mouth.

  Leta was certainly going to be starting her period soon, because for several days she had been nothing but bipolar baby. I kept asking her to pick a mood and stick with it, because I felt like I was dodging bullets. Thank God my meds were working because otherwise I would have been locked inside a closet on the phone with Jon, going, “SHE DOESNT EVEN LOOK LIKE ME,” demanding that he come home from work so that I could get in the car, drive around the block with the windows down, and scream.

  But the meds were working, so instead of crawling into the closet with the phone I was able to say, “Leta, all I did was take away my keys from you so that I could start the car. There is no need for your mouth to droop at the ends like that, and for that silent big breath before the storm of tears and screaming. Let’s be civilized.” That line of reasoning never worked, of course, and she cried and wailed, and couldn’t understand why in the name of God I would be so audacious as to TAKE SOMETHING AWAY FROM HER. But babies have incredibly short attention spans, so once the wailing started I could hand her another object that had the potential to be taken away but was currently not in the state of being taken away. And did that ever shut her up.

  The physical therapy session lasted forty-five minutes, which was a pretty long time for a nine-month-old baby whose normal daily routine was to sit, eat, burp, fart, and sleep. Leta’s therapist worked her hard, and had her sitting in several weight-bearing positions, including one where Leta was sitting on a bench with her feet dangling off into a container of rice. This was supposed to help with sensory issues, and it was fascinating to watch as Leta leaned over and reached for the rice but then remembered, “My feet are down there and if I lean over I will have to put weight on them, and can someone tell me again why is that necessary?” That night as we were preparing Leta for bed I found rice in between her toes. And then the following morning I found rice in my bra. This is what happens when you have kids.

  But we did get some good news; at her nine-month checkup we found out that Leta’s head had grown significantly in the last month. The bad news was that the doctor must have measured her head wrong at the previous checkup (the checkup that had him so concerned that he ordered the MRI), that the little chart that illustrated the progress of her head circumference looked like it had been drawn by that guy I used to work with who was always so high on pot that HE FORGOT WHICH HAND HE WROTE WITH and used the wrong one.

  Her head size was not even on the chart, it ha
d grown so much. This meant that the piano in the dining room had to go because there was just too much mass in our area of the neighborhood, what with Leta’s head in the room, that our house was in danger of turning into one big black hole and sucking the entire state into its abyss. Good-bye, Utah! Hello, one less red state!

  A few days later she woke up at 5:30 AM making her usual noises that say, “hey, I’m awake now, come and get me this instant.” This happened from time to time, and our usual response was to let her fall back asleep until 7 AM so that we could start our day on schedule. Usually she complied and fell back asleep, but that morning she was being really obstinate and her noises were more like, “NO, SERIOUSLY, COME AND GET ME NOW.”

  So Jon went to check on her to see if everything was okay, but he didn’t have his glasses on or his contact lenses, which meant an elephant could have been sitting in Leta’s crib and he wouldn’t have seen it. He came back to bed and said, “All her limbs are in place, she’ll go back to sleep.” Seconds later her noises escalated to, “THAT’S IT, I’M PRESSING CHARGES.”

  So I climbed out of bed and went in to see what was going on, and what Jon didn’t see was that Leta had turned ninety degrees from the direction we had put her to sleep in the night before. She was perpendicular, and her head was stuck up against the bumper, her feet kicking the bumper on the opposite side, her entire body out from under the covers. The eerie thing about the whole situation was that her blankets appeared as if they hadn’t moved all night; they were perfectly straight, exactly as we had covered her the night before. It was as if some unknown force had entered her room in the middle of the night, picked her up, and placed her at the head of her crib in the wrong direction.

  I yelled, “Jon! You’ve got to come see this,” and Leta looked up at me like, “How did this happen?” And I was all, “Dude, you’re the one who got yourself into this mess, explain it TO ME.”

  I could barely handle the thought. It meant she was on the verge of mobility. She was on the verge of being able to move from point A to point B, which meant that the purchase of plastic outlet covers was upon us. PLASTIC. OUTLET. COVERS. Who came up with that whole concept? Some baby somewhere was sticking his tongue into an outlet, and his parent had to go, “Dude, I’ve got an idea, and we are so going to be rich.” And I was going to be putting money into that person’s pocket. All because our baby just had to go ahead and be mobile.

  And yet, maybe our baby would one day be mobile! Holy shit, it just might happen.

  Two weeks later we were at a dinner party when one of the neighbors I had never met walked up to Leta and me and asked how old she was. When I told him she was almost ten months old he asked if she was walking all over the house yet. I answered, simply, “No.”

  He looked quite surprised and then continued, “Well, I guess she must be in that crazy crawling stage, huh?”

  And when he said that, it felt like a dagger went through my heart. I explained, “Actually, she isn’t crawling, either. She has some sensory problems and refuses to put any weight on her legs.” And then I wanted to run out of that house, Leta pressed to my chest, and go hide with her under the covers in the bed.

  It’s not that I was ashamed of the fact that she wasn’t crawling. It’s just, people asked me all the time why she wasn’t crawling yet, and I felt like I was doing something wrong. I felt like it was my fault, and while I knew that wasn’t true, I kept wondering if there was something I should have been doing that I wasn’t doing. We saw a physical therapist every week, and I worked with her every day on her exercises. Still, it hurt me to hear her scream when I forced her to move in ways she didn’t like to move.

  This was part of being a mother, I suppose: the constant nagging feeling of guilt and sorrow and joy and worry and unfettered elation, feelings that should not exist simultaneously but CONSTANTLY EXIST SIMULTANEOUSLY.

  I had never been so alive, and yet, so on the verge of collapse.

  A few weeks before Leta turned ten months old a neighbor came over on a Saturday morning so that Jon could walk her through a design software application. Jon is THAT person, the one you turn to for any and all technical questions and has helped members of my family and his family and neighbors and plumbers with questions about their computers. For all the time he has spent walking my father through The Microsoft Blue Screen of Death we should have wiggled our way back into my father’s will, or at least have made it back onto the list of people he wants to attend his funeral.

  Leta had taken a terrible first nap, and by terrible I mean not long enough to mask her inner raging beast. This happened a lot, and what I had to do was keep to our schedule and make sure she took her second nap at the precise time so that we could correct the balance of the universe, because if she took a bad second nap…do you remember that movie The Day After? Where the world has been obliterated?

  Jon knew not to question me when I went into Project Prevention of Leta Fallout Disaster Mode, a finely tuned ballet where I distracted the living shit out of that kid and brought her delicately to the crescendo of her second nap where the violins and cellos trembled in unison and hummed her softly into a deep, soul-cleansing sleep that would leave her refreshed and bearable to be around. Sometimes the only way to do that was to leave the house, and since Jon was teaching our neighbor about the various ways you could crop the head off of someone’s body in a photograph, I had to go on this adventure alone.

  ALONE. (ECHO ECHO ECHO)

  So I packed up the kid and headed to my P.O. Box because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. We’d done all our grocery shopping and had been to Costco earlier in the week. (Just a note here: for those dead souls out there who refer to Costco as “The Costco,” may a house fall out of the sky onto your head and your legs shrivel up underneath it.) My P.O. Box happened to be in an area surrounded by other shops including a Starbucks, and you know what they sell at Starbucks? SUGAR. So the mailbox seemed like a good idea. Sugar + mail + distracted kid = One Badass Mother.

  And here’s the point in the story where my ego begins to unravel.

  The first mistake I made was to park the car in front of the building that housed my P.O. Box, because that building was all the way over to one side and not at all close to any of the other shops. But that didn’t matter at the time. I was going to get actual mail, that I could hold in my hands, and it felt like Christmas. The rush was a little blinding. And because I didn’t think we would be gone for a very long time I just held Leta on my hip. Because my brain was made of Skittles.

  Inside the mailbox was a gift from a friend for Leta, a pair of shoes to help keep her socks on. One pair had frogs on the toes, and I opened the package right there and put the shoes on her feet immediately. Enter mistake number two, stage left. Leta screamed the entire time I manipulated her feet into the shoes as if I were severing her feet from her body. Not because it hurt, but because she didn’t want to move her feet the way I needed her to move her feet and CURSE YOU, ARMSTRONG GENES.

  We headed back to the car to drop off the packaging so that I wouldn’t have to carry it around, and that’s when I should have come back to my senses. Why didn’t I just get back in the car and drive over to the Starbucks? BECAUSE THAT WOULD WASTE GAS AND JUST SCREAMS LAZINESS, RIGHT? But that’s not why I didn’t get back into the car. I didn’t get back into the car because I calculated the amount of energy it would take to carry her over to the Starbucks versus the energy it would take to put her into her car seat again, strap her in, start the car, drive over, and GET HER BACK OUT, and my math told me that if I had to do and undo that car seat buckle one more damn time I might say horrible words in front of my innocent daughter. I did it for her.

  So we began the walk, and it was a walk and a half, not unlike how Moses led his people through the desert, onward and onward, not unlike how the Mormon pioneers trekked across the plains. We walked and walked, or shall I say I walked and walked, and Leta bobbed up and down on my hip, and all of a sudden I remembered, SHIT! One of
the neighborhood kids was having a birthday the following week and we didn’t have a present for him yet. And the Old Heather flew down from the sky and sat on my shoulder and whispered, “That’s okay, you’ve got the rest of the weekend to go and get something. Relax.” But the new Heather, the Mother Heather, the daughter of the Avon World Sales Leader Heather who was coming into her birthright, this new Heather ROARED from the inside of my body and made my head spin around three times.

  The Mother Heather reasoned, “WE ARE HERE. TOY STORE RIGHT THERE. PRESENT MUST BE BOUGHT NOW.” And I couldn’t stop myself. I COULDNT PROCRASTINATE. I had to get that birthday present right then because it MADE SENSE. OH GOD, what had I become? And as I walked into the toy store and found an age-appropriate, nonflammable present the Old Heather took her devil wings and forked tail and shook her head in disgust as she flew off my shoulder.

  So with Leta on my right hip and a large present hanging in a bag from my left hand I walked over to the Starbucks. FINALLY. And the end was in sight, it really was, I could see the light, but that’s when Leta started to squawk. Loudly. In public. And the motherly instinct kicked in once again and I reached for my keys and shoved them into her mouth and she couldn’t have been more delighted. And so we were standing there in the middle of Starbucks, Leta with half of a Nissan remote-control door-opener hanging out of her mouth, the present now half-hanging out of the bag, and I couldn’t reach my wallet in my back pocket. Why don’t mothers come with four hands? TELL ME WHY.