The Love Children

by Marylin French

  “Okay, when she’s done feeding, let’s cook,” I said.

  Having a new baby is supposed to be a happy time. All the books I’d read to prepare for it emphasized this, and all the accounts I’d read described it that way. But I found it a time of huge anxiety and dread. Not only was my whole family gathered uneasily like a bunch of government officials after a calamitous security leak—searching each others’ faces for evidence of who had done it—but suddenly this . . . creature . . . had appeared and was screaming its tiny lungs out, expecting me to do something about her misery, when I couldn’t even understand what she was communicating. One of the nurses had said that having a baby was like being in love with someone you hardly know. Yes, I loved this creature absolutely, but didn’t know her at all.

  What was worse was that this tiny living thing, whose head barely filled the crook of my elbow, was horribly vulnerable. Babies died in their sleep; no one knew why. The top of her skull was still soft, and if something happened to her there, she could be badly injured or even die. Her neck was so weak she could not hold up her head by herself. And she was helpless. Animals at birth can at least stand. They know how to find where to go to nurse; she didn’t. She knew when she was hungry and she could pee and shit, but she had a hard time belching on her own. I had no idea what was going on inside her, and yet her very life depended on me! She’d cry and I’d think she was hungry, and she’d start nursing as if she was starved, but after five minutes she’d pull away from my breast and start looking around, waving her arms and legs, or fall back to sleep. Ten minutes later she was hungry again. She’d cry and cry until I nursed her again; she’d start to suck, then pull away and scream bloody murder. I didn’t know what to do. Mom said maybe she had gas, and I’d hold her up against my chest and pat her back and bounce her a little, but she’d just keep crying. Oh, God.

  At first she cried in tiny bleats, but as she grew, her cries became louder and more demanding. Sometimes she sounded as full of rage as my father at his worst—in fact, she reminded me of him. But at other times she cried with such sorrow that I wondered what she could possibly be feeling, since she had experienced so little. What did she know? The impulsion of birth, the discomfort of hunger and dampness, the satisfaction of eating, shitting, and peeing, the pleasure of arms enfolding her. Birth may not have been fun for her, but did it cast her into such sorrow? Was she aggrieved at leaving my warm, pulsing belly? I held her close and tried to calm her with my mouth soft against her head, but nothing sufficed. It was tragic. I wanted to cry with her.

  Mom was a help. She calmed me down when I got crazy, and taught me things I didn’t know. When things, or I, calmed down a bit after the first couple of weeks, and I could address the stuff I’d been ignoring—Dad looking at Mom as though she was the snake in Eden, or at Stepan like a man who’d been robbed, or Stepan staring in horrified fascination at my materialistic warmonger elitist capitalist parents, or Artur looking at me as if I was the corn-and-oil goddess who could confer huge favors upon him but just wouldn’t—I decided to retreat back into my daze. I couldn’t deal with it all; it was enough I had to deal with the baby, who bothered me more than anybody because she barely looked at me at all.

  Somehow everything passed without any explosions. I’m not sure how Mom kept Dad in abeyance; he sat every night at the dinner table like a chastened little boy, saying little and never looking at her. And every night after she’d made dinner for all of us, and eaten with us, and cleaned up the kitchen, she kissed me on the forehead and went back to her motel. Dad would then relax into his third drink of the night and fall into his usual stupor in front of the television set.

  Dad let himself like Stepan a little bit because he too believed in manual labor, and had spent his life doing it, but he hated him because he wasn’t taking responsibility for me and Isabelle, which a man should do, my father believed, much as he had repulsed it himself. Stepan, who rose at five even when he was away from Pax, at nights went directly from dinner to my office, where he spread out his sleeping bag and fell into a coma. Artur, who had managed to alienate both my father and Stepan, was, thank heavens, not with us daily.

  Days were better: Dad was in his studio all day; Mom helped me bathe and otherwise care for the baby. Mom showed me how to boil diapers—the paper ones were, I felt, ecologically toxic, so I wouldn’t use them. She took care of Isabelle during my brief sojourns away from her. I only went out for a half hour each day, for a walk along the lake, just to stay sane. It was too cold to take out a canoe, and some days the wind was vicious.

  When Isabelle was a week old, I risked taking her out with me. I put her in a pouch with shoulder straps that rested on my chest, and Mom and I went shopping in town. Mom outfitted the baby for the rest of the year (Dad paid for this; they must have talked to each other some). It costs a fortune to equip one of these tiny creatures. She bought Isabelle a snowsuit for next winter—little dresses and shoes, sunsuits, a bathing suit, pajamas, and undershirts in three different sizes. I wondered how fast she expected her to grow. She also bought a car seat, a crib, a playpen, a high chair, a stroller, a jump chair, and a record player and some records: nursery rhymes, Peter and the Wolf,The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, some Haydn symphonies, and Bartók’s and Debussy’s piano music for children. She said, “Just play them while you’re bathing her or dressing her.” Did she think I had the time to put on records in the middle of bathing and dressing her? Was she crazy?

  Yet I found myself doing it. The music calmed me.

  Stepan stayed for only a week. He wanted to be involved with the baby; you could see that. But he was even more intimidated by her than I was. He’d hold her when I let him, but the minute she cried, he was terrified and handed her back. Mostly he just hung around. He had to stay at Dad’s, not having money for a motel, and Dad treated him like a parasite, though he was somewhat sympathetic to this Communist defector. There wasn’t room for Stepan in my bedroom along with the baby’s crib, and besides, I didn’t want to sleep with him. On my office floor in his sleeping bag, he was out of Dad’s way, but I imagine he heard Dad rousing himself at three or four in the morning and stumbling drunk to his bedroom. I didn’t care. I hadn’t forgiven Stepan for the way he’d acted at Pax after the Brad-Bert takeover and I never would.

  I was curious about Pax, and one afternoon when I was halfway back to my old self, I cornered Stepan at lunch. Dad was working in his studio and Mrs. Thacker had already left. I’d already fed Isabelle and put her down for a nap. We were eating pea soup I’d made, with bacon and elbow macaroni in it.

  “So how’s Pax, Step?”

  “Uh, okay,” he said.

  “Anything new?”

  “Bernice left.”

  “Bernice left! Really! She left Brad?”

  “Bert. Brad. Whoever. She left.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. I remembered the joys of holding a conversation with Stepan.

  “Why did she say she was leaving?”

  “She say she sick of being bossed around by two assholes and doing all the scut work.”

  It took many more questions and much probing to discover that Bernice had gone back to California. She had returned to her mother’s house and was helping her mom sell real estate in Orange County. Bernice was going to get a broker’s license herself and planned to make a fortune. She told Lysanne in a letter to “tell that anus Bert” that she was driving a Thunderbird. This had puzzled Stepan. He had no idea what a Thunderbird was. After ten years in the United States, he was completely ignorant of the joys of capitalism.

  “And Brad and Bert? Still sleeping with Lolly and Lysanne?”

  “No.”

  Laboriously, he explained that Brad had met a girl in town one day and brought her back to the farm. Eunice was a runaway from an abusive father, with no place to go, a waif who was full of terror. She brought out the best in Brad, apparently, and he treated her delicately. Her fragility excited Bert, but Brad wouldn’t let him
touch her and didn’t touch her himself. That led to an explosion and Bert rebelled. He left, taking Lolly with him. The rest settled down to a more peaceful existence. Stepan was now happily coupled with Lysanne, and Brad was with Eunice. Another couple had joined them, she a horse person, he a farmer, and they had two kids. So they were eight people now, and all were content. The townsfolk seemed to regard them as respectable members of the community and called the place Pax Farm. They were thinking of buying goats and establishing a chevre-making dairy.

  I liked this ending a great deal—I hoped it was an ending and not just a pause. It sounded like happily ever after. But I wondered what had happened to Bert. Much as I disliked him, he seemed a tragic victim, destroyed by forces he couldn’t control, namely, an indefensible war.

  Stepan had borrowed the Pax truck, and they would be needing it back. I could see that he was unhappy at the prospect of staying and at the idea of leaving. He wanted to be part of the baby’s life, but I didn’t want him to be part of mine, and he didn’t want to be part of mine, and it seemed impossible. I told him he could visit her again in the summer and that I’d try to take Isabelle to visit him in the fall. He had to be satisfied with that. That was the first, and only, time in my life when the difference in people’s treatment of the sexes fell in the woman’s—my—favor.

  I can’t deny that Mom was a big help to me, but her presence made me terribly anxious. Dad tried to zombie out, but his intense involvement with her remained and I was relieved when after a month she said she had to go back to France. She made the announcement on a Thursday, said good-bye that night, and went back to her motel. Friday morning, she packed her bag and drove to Boston, turned in her rental car, and booked a midnight flight to Paris. I must have spoken to her on the phone almost every hour during this process. She was distraught at leaving me, and part of me felt wrenched too.

  But I also felt relief, ease. I was as fickle as ever.

  I think Isabelle noticed Mom’s absence, though I couldn’t be sure. Once I was freed from the nervousness I always felt when Mom and Dad were under the same roof, I felt utterly abandoned. Without her help, I had to spend the whole day, day after day, doing nothing but taking care of the baby! This was no life for a person! When Mom was there, we got the chores done and could sit down with a cigarette and a cup of coffee and have an intelligent conversation. We could go shopping or to the market or read together in the living room, looking up at each other when the baby cried in silent consultation. Now I had no one to consult with. Dad was pathetically willing to help me, but he had no idea at all how to take care of a baby. He’d never in his life changed a diaper or fed a baby. I had asked him once to change Isabelle when I had to go to the market; it was raining and I didn’t want to lug her out into the cold damp weather. I came back to find her fussing and miserable, her bottom red and raw. Dad was watching a ball game on television. He looked at me shamefaced, but then laughed. “Aw, honey, I just couldn’t do it,” he said.

  The next three months were without question the hardest time of my life. I wasn’t miserable, I was nonexistent. I had no life at all. I was only a servant, a slave to this baby. I trudged through a round of labor from a two a.m. nursing to a six a.m. nursing to a ten a.m. nursing, a two p.m. nursing, a six p.m. nursing and one at ten p.m., after which I put her to bed. I thought that was bad; I didn’t know that all too soon, I’d have to cook cereal for her twice a day, and soon after that, boil an egg, and soon after that, bake a potato for her two o’clock feeding. And soon after that, I’d have to puree meat and vegetables every day in a blender, since I would not feed her bottled baby food, loaded as it was with sugar and salt. But by then, she would have given up the two a.m. nursing and would be on a six-hour schedule with a bottle at midnight, and I would be on my way out of servanthood.

  Between nursings I sterilized bottles, which I left for the baby when I went to the market and took with me when I took her to the doctor for her monthly weighing and checking. Every day I did her laundry—an amazing amount because of spit-up and spill and leaked effluent. And I had to boil diapers every three days or so. I also bathed her every day, which was, I have to say, a delight. I soaped her gorgeous shiny skin, oiled and powdered her, and dressed her in fresh clothes. I burped her, soothed her, held her, and walked her when she cried, which was often. I surprised myself with my steely endurance, my patient fortitude. When she screamed unendingly and I could find nothing wrong, I just held her in a kind of mute sorrow and thought about how easy it would be to smother her. I didn’t feel guilty about these negative impulses. They seemed to me just a function of human nature, and of course I went on carefully cradling her fragile, defenseless little head and neck. Even when I couldn’t stand the screaming, even when I was exhausted, even when my life seemed mere servitude, I could feel myself loving her more than I loved myself, her little finger more precious to me than my own arms and legs or anything else on earth.

  That’s how these little creatures get us, I thought. They know how we feel and they know we’ll put up with anything to save them.

  My life seemed utterly given over to things I didn’t love doing but had no choice about. The snatches of time I had to myself were so short and interrupted that I couldn’t use them for anything. I tried to read, but kept losing the thread; I couldn’t concentrate on any of my books until one day, in a drugstore I picked up a murder mystery. It occurred to me that this was something I could read in snatches—a hard way to read Adrienne Rich or Günter Grass or Doris Lessing, whose books were presently on my bedside table. It cost only a couple of dollars, which even on my budget I could spare. And it worked: I could read for half an hour then put it down, and I needed only a little rereading to recapture the plot eight or twelve hours later. After that, I always had a mystery at hand to pick up when I had a half hour to myself. I knew I was wasting my mind, but at least I was entertaining myself.

  In May excitement returned to my life as I planted my garden. The plot Dad had given me was big, almost as big as my plot at Pax, so I needed help with it. I pinned up a note on the post office bulletin board and a woman offered her services. Kathleen Martinelli, who lived nearby, was married to a local dentist; she had three kids now in their teens and a big house with a garden of her own, but she was bored. She missed the farm in Georgia where she’d been raised. She was perfect for me. I hired a man to plow, and Kathleen and I planted seeds by hand, row after row. I had an automatic watering system installed; that left me broke and in debt. After that there was weeding to do, but we had put mulch on everything, so a couple of hours a day by us both was enough to keep it under control.

  I would set Isabelle in her stroller, which had a little canopy. I wheeled it under a tree, with a bottle of water tied to the metal support of the carriage. She regularly knocked it too far away to retrieve and would start to wail, and Kathleen and I got lots of exercise running over to her. Her lungs got some exercise too. But mainly she was happy sitting in the outdoors, watching us pull weeds, kicking her arms and legs and babbling to the wind.

  The deep winter months, January and February, were the slowest time at the restaurant, so Artur had been only mildly upset by my absence. For Artur, mild upset meant moderate hysteria. The restaurant did not do nearly as well with me absent, and as spring approached his hysteria heightened, with accompanying outbursts. But I had been trained by an expert, and I could shrug it off, not even getting angry with him. Since he was overwhelmed with guilt after each tantrum, this worked to my advantage: his debt to me grew with every episode. Still, after three months, I was itching to go back to work, but the baby was still too demanding: she ate five times a day. I could not leave her with Dad even for a few hours.

  Stepan came back at the end of May and by this time he could play with Isabelle a little. At four months, she knew us all. She could play peekaboo and enjoyed being lifted and swung around. She was just starting on pureed food and I let Stepan feed her. He held her in his left arm and fed her with his right, as I
did, but in the process revealed his moral deficiencies. For Stepan was shocked by Isabelle’s certainty about what she wanted to eat and what she didn’t. He profoundly disapproved of this. Maybe he grew up hungry enough to be willing to eat whatever he was given and felt that she should do the same. But Isabelle had never been hungry for very long; her screams might sound as if she were dying of starvation, but she was always fed within twenty minutes of their starting. She might be vague about most things, but not her tastes: she loved lima beans, green beans, any kind of beans mashed into a puree. She adored tiny bits of bacon on her tongue. But she hated peas and merely tolerated baked potato and cereal. Fussy little bit, she was. He tried to fight her on this, forcing mashed peas into her mouth. She just kept spitting them out. In this fight, like most struggles of will between parents and small children, he was not just wasting his energy but was also teaching her things like rage, hate, and rebellion. I told him parents invariably lose power struggles with infants, if not immediately, then in the long run. This got me nowhere. So then I told him if he didn’t stop he couldn’t feed her anymore.

  By the end of May Isabelle was down to four meals a day—milk at six a.m., cereal at ten a.m., a baked potato and vegetable at two p.m., and another meal at six p.m. She was sleeping through the night! Hurrah!

  I started planning to go back to work. I would stop nursing; I prepared to take her with me. I would go in about three, after her lunch. I’d only have to feed her once during my working hours, at six. I could use the restaurant blender to puree. Also I would have a larger choice of fresh foods and the kitchen staff could help me.