by Kim Petersen
Experienced, well meaning friends came by and offered me ginger cookies. They brought over meals like “tuna surprise,” which looked curiously similar to something I offered up in my altar earlier that morning. A few women from church who dropped by had been pregnant themselves, so I listened to all of their hints. Hopeful, I ate a whole box of saltine crackers and waited. It was not long before they reappeared for an encore. Tonic water, one said. Dry toast for sure, said another. Nothing worked. By the time I was into the 3rd month I had lost 11 pounds. The doctor was concerned, as I was thin to begin with. He admitted me to the hospital for hydration and prescribed medication to calm my nausea.
True to the doctor's prediction, by the end of the first trimester, I rebounded. I was ravenous. I made up for three months of no food in one sitting. I leaned back in the chair, patted my distended belly with satisfaction, smacked my lips, and asked what was around for dessert.
Nearing the due date, we had friends with no children tell us they were pretty sure that having a baby was like having a puppy. They had recently purchased a 10 week old yellow lab, and boy had life changed dramatically. The wee thing howled all night and wasn't housebroken, so made messes all over the place. To top it all off, she chewed on everything. Ruined a pair of Dolce & Gabbana heels, could you believe it? Sighing and shaking their heads, they described the responsibility which, by the way, was daunting: You had to make sure she got enough exercise, food (the right kind of food), and discipline because there was no such thing as a bad dog, only bad owners. How much different could a baby be, they asked?
The only thing similar between giving birth and acquiring a puppy, I thought as I lay on a bed in the delivery room like an overturned turtle, was that every time I had a contraction I felt like howling. Or barking. Maybe even biting. I was 2½ weeks late with no signs that the baby intended to do any sort of passage-making. In an attempt to encourage an exit, I had spent those weeks jumping on the bed, jogging, and eating tacos with hot sauce. The jogging in particular seemed to entertain the small town we lived in who insisted on making such comments as “you still around?” and “boy are you ever huge” as I pounded by on the sidewalk. It was fortunate for them that I owned neither a mallet, nor a gun.
Lying in the hospital, imagining what was to come, I wished there was some way to avoid the inevitable. Some ejection button I had missed all those months. It didn't help to hear the screams of the woman giving birth down the hall who kept yelling out things in Portuguese. Each time she would explode in verbiage, Mike would offer a translation like: “Oh! Giving birth is SO much FUN!” and “PLEASE, stay inside me little longer!” It helped as a distraction, but I knew there was no getting off the delivery train. My course was set with no emergency exits.
After 24 hours of various measures, including forceps and me pushing for almost two hours, I heard things whispered like “failure to progress” and “C-section.” With considerable pomp and circumstance I was rushed to the operating room and minutes later, had instant baby girl. They placed her briefly on my chest, serene and swaddled tightly in a white blanket. Her eyes were shut. I reached out to touch her cheek, but barely had time to hug her to me before she was scooped up and placed in Mike's arms. I launched a weak protest, but they explained that they would take me into the recovery room for observation.
I was exhausted, but steamed. I was thinking how typical this was of my life lately. I got sick for three months, gave up my body, gained a kazillion pounds, and every one of my orifices had been poked and prodded. I then spent 24 hours in pain and pushing only to see the end result for about 30 seconds before she was handed over to Mike, who had just enjoyed a nice hospital breakfast complete with coffee and sausage. I was allowed ice chips. While I had to be in the recovery room, he would get to enjoy her for the rest of the day.
Before the drowsiness engulfed me, I reached out my hand and weakly grabbed the collar of the nurse who was taking my blood pressure and twisted it up in my fist. I pulled her face down close to mine and hissed, “You can be sure I intend to take this up with management. It is completely unfair. Someone will pay.” Then I slept.
Later on that day, the same nurse came in and after checking my vitals, told me what I said. It had amused her and the other nurses. I didn't recall saying it. All of it was forgotten as Mike and I bent over the bassinette and gazed at the alien we called Lauren. We were co-conspirators in creation and heady with the drug of happiness. I tried to sculpt the moment into a monument on the pathway of my brain so that every time I walked by I would remember its texture. Its smell. The weighty moment of euphoria.
Growing up, I do not remember dreaming about being a mother. I didn't even like little kids. In high school, I was desperate for cash so I tried babysitting, which would have worked out great if there weren't any kids. Kids, I realized, were the obstacle between me and what I really wanted to do: house sit. An empty house with no parents and nothing between me, cable TV, and a well stocked refrigerator, was a dream. Kids complicated that dream. They put spaghetti in their hair, wouldn't go to bed when I told them to, and asked me to play checkers while I was watching Charlie's Angels. They spilled their milk and messed their diapers right after I had changed them. The whole experience was unpleasant and an inconvenience hardly worth the pittance I was paid at the end of the evening. While pregnant, I remembered my forays into babysitting. If motherhood was similar, I thought with apprehension, I was in for a long 18 years.
In the days following Lauren's birth, I discovered that being a mother was similar to babysitting, only worse. No one drove me home when the evening was through and I was eternally employed for free. I was puked on, peed on, my hair was pulled out by the roots. I ate small bits of food here and there in a sleep deprived stupor. There were piles of reeking diapers, dirty clothes, screams in the middle of the night, and no escape.
What I had not counted on was falling in love with my tormenter. This happens sometimes in hostage situations and is known unofficially as the Stockholm Syndrome, named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of the Kreditbanken in Stockholm, Sweden, in which bank robbers held employees hostage for six days. During that time the victims became attached to their victimizers going so far as to defend them in court. Psychologists explain it as a defense mechanism. A hostage will begin to identify with her kidnapper. The victim senses that their survival depends on the connection they forge between themselves and their captor. Feelings of pity and empathy emerge until when faced with a choice to leave, they voluntarily stay.
It did not take days or weeks for it to happen to me. One look at the cherubic face gazing trustingly up at me, fluttering Bambi-like eyelashes, and I would have been happy to defend her actions, criminal as they were, in a court of law. No one had to tell me I would willingly lay down my life for my daughter, I knew it. Not only that, but I started doing it every day without even thinking about it.
In the interest of the continuation of the species, I'm pretty sure Mother Nature has created an elixir that causes women who have experienced childbirth to generally forget its intensity. This elixir is released inside the brain every time we remember the first moment our child is placed in our arms. Or the first time tiny arms reached out to us. It makes us smile and tell fellow sojourners, their bellies swollen with child, “Oh Hon, it's not so bad, really.” It creates a selective amnesia that propelled me two years later, to look deeply into my love's eyes and whisper, “Let's have another one.”
It was late at night and we were sitting with our backs up against the headboard reading. “Okay,” Mike said, putting his book down as if he had expected it. “But you remember what happened last time? The puking, the moaning, the hospital?”
“Oh come on, it wasn't so bad. It was probably a fluke. This time will be different,” I said confidently.
So we PLANNED to have a baby. We consulted a book on my monthly cycle that I just happened to have sitting on the night table. We determined that next Thursday looked good.
“Do you th
ink you can pencil me into your schedule?” I asked playfully.
“Oh, I'll be there,” he said with a wicked grin, leaning toward me.
We were having fun with the planning (what a great idea) and decided to celebrate. We were both as fertile as Carla Tortelli on the sitcom “Cheers” and regardless of what the experts in my book determined as good timing, I got pregnant a week early.
In the words of Celine Dion: “It's all coming back to me now.” The puking, the moaning, the hospital. My life was a bad rerun. The days ran together in a blur between the couch and the bathroom. I ended up in the hospital again for rehydration. Many long months later, I gave birth to a girl. We named her Bethany Joy. I was into nicknames and thought how much I liked the short form “Beth.” Perhaps she would be similar in nature to Louisa May Alcott's “Beth” in Little Women. If she turned out to be a tomboy instead, we could call her “BJ.” She was fair and lean, placid in the first days, like her sister.
Mike, having managed to graduate from university just after Lauren's birth, was working as Project Manager at a construction company. In a mutual decision, we had decided I would remain at home with the kids for the first few years. We were up to our necks in life: kids, cars, house, a mortgage, job, meetings, and late nights. For several weeks I was seeing double. Two girls, two sets of dirty diapers, two diaper bags, two mouths to feed, two blankets, two pacifiers which were continuously lost, and two car seats. I rubbed my eyes to correct my vision but it didn't help. Just going to the grocery store required as much planning and gear as climbing K2. I fell into bed around 8 p.m. and occasionally slept through Bethany's cries in the night. Mike would shake me awake for the midnight feeding.
4
By the time Bethany was six weeks old, I felt like was getting used to the whole routine. I went to the thrift store. I was excited because the next day was Halloween and I was looking forward to dressing the girls up in costumes. Walking the aisles, I came upon a bright yellow raincoat with a hood that had been made into a duck head and found yellow galoshes with orange duck feet to complete an outfit for Lauren. In the infant section, I found a pink bunny sleeper for Bethany with long ears and a white cottontail. Back at home we dressed with fanfare. It was a mild night and the streets were full. I watched my little duck waddle into the throng of tiny vampires, ghouls, and ghosts. We made our way up one side of the street and back down the other. It took longer than I anticipated as we stopped to talk with neighbors and Lauren played tag with a witch and a kid dressed up like a red crayon.
When we returned home, we spread Lauren's candy out on the floor and took stock.
“Not a bad haul for a little kid,” I said.
“I'm not widdle anymore,” she said with knit brows.
“True,” I lied. “Care to swap college tuition for a couple of Snickers bars?”
I fed Bethany and laid her down. Lauren fell asleep on top of her candy mountain. Mike scooped her up, a Tootsie Roll sticking to her face, and put her to bed. Then the two of us curled up on the couch to watch a rented movie that happened to be about a couple trying to deal with the loss of their son. The wife couldn't let go and it ended their marriage. I was little irked at the storyline, as it was a downer and kind of wrecked the happy mood I had felt earlier after trick or treating.
While climbing into bed afterward, I said to Mike, “I can understand her heartache. If anything ever happened to you or the girls you would have to put me in some kind of asylum. There is no way I could deal with it.”
I snuggled up next to him and tried not to think about it. In the fog of a deep sleep, I heard Bethany's faint cries. We had recently moved her white crib from the end of our bed to the room directly across the hall from ours. Mike stirred.
“I'll feed her a bottle,” he said huskily, sliding out of bed.
“You're the greatest,” I said and then was instantly asleep.
Vaguely I sensed daylight. My eyes opened and I was looking directly at the digital alarm clock on the night table. Its numbers read 7 a.m. I bolted upright and said out loud, “She slept through the rest of the night!”
Mike shifted next to me.
“What time were you up with her?” I asked urgently, shaking his arm.
“Around 1 a.m.,” he mumbled.
“Fantastic!” I said.
Past experience with Lauren had indicated that once infants started sleeping more than five or six hours a night there was a good chance it would became a habit. I was elated. I walked happily out to the kitchen to make coffee. Lauren followed a few minutes later. We sat together on a chair and enjoyed a bowl of Cheerios. I told her it was Sunday and she would have to put on a dress for church. This came as good news, and she immediately slid from my lap and returned to her room to make a selection.
I walked past Bethany's room and paused to listen for stirring noises, but she slept on. No sense in waking her. I continued down the short hallway and poked my head into Lauren's room to tell that I was going to take a shower.
“If you need anything, wake Daddy,” I told her.
I enjoyed a luxurious and lengthy shower for the first time in weeks. With Bethany sleeping through the night, we were entering a new stage. More sleep equaled more sanity, which equaled a healthier, less crazy me. While the water gently pelted my skin, I sang a robust rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus. I got dressed. Mike was now up, eating breakfast, and admiring Lauren's choice of outfit. There was still no evidence that Bethany was waking up, so I went ahead and dried my hair and put on makeup. Mike hopped in the shower.
I checked the clock in the kitchen and realized it was getting late. I still had to feed Beth before church, so I pushed open the door of her room. There was a slight gush of cool air. I hoped she had been warm enough. I approached her crib. Her small body came into view. She was lying on her stomach, face down on the mattress. My insides constricted. I hung back, my hands clutching the crib railing, and studied her back for breathing movement. I told myself to be calm. She was still. I extended both hands and placed them flat on her torso and waited. There was no movement. I gently picked her up and as I looked into her face, experienced a dreadful knowing. Oh God.
Instinct kicked in. While choking back sobs, my lifeguard training took over and I checked for vitals, lifted her chin, yelled for Mike, and began CPR. I had never given an infant CPR, and was concerned in my desperation not to push too hard or that all my air would end up in her stomach. Mike appeared in the doorway, dripping, with a towel around him, and ran to call 911. He returned to hover next to me, holding her small wrist to catch a pulse. After several minutes, I looked up from her into Mikes eyes.
“There are no signs of life…she's not breathing,” I said.
I kept on giving CPR. Tears streamed down both our faces cheeks. I heard the wail of the ambulance and for the first time, it stopped at my house.
5
I remember swimming in a brown lake in Wisconsin. I was 12 or 13 and we were visiting extended family. Second cousins who I didn't know shouted and splashed in the water around me. To avoid their antics, I swam out into deeper, cooler water. Diving like a whale, my feet rising slowly upward, breaking the surface, my frame perpendicular to the muddy bottom below, I sunk down and let the silence engulf me. Back then I didn't like to open my eyes underwater, so I swam blindly into the deep, relishing the sensation, going deeper and deeper, until I remembered I had lungs and put myself in reverse. I opened my eyes, squinting through murky water, to find that the surface was further away than I had anticipated. Panicked, I swam as fast as I could, struggling and thrashing as my chest began to burn, but there was no way to go faster than slow motion.
In the moment of realization that Bethany was gone, I swam in the miry sea of time and frantically searched for reverse, my lungs burning. If I could just get to last night, to yesterday, find the surface somehow so I could catch my breath. I opened my eyes wide, and through the murkiness, saw my life in relation to hers. Scenes flashed forward revealing all the moments
I had dreamed of so clearly in my mind it was almost as if I lived them. Her first steps. Opening presents at Christmas. Blowing out candles on her birthdays. A scraped knee, scoring a goal in soccer, borrowing the car, blonde hair in a ponytail, shopping at the mall, walking down the aisle at her wedding. An older Bethany waving goodbye after dropping her kids off for me to babysit. All these stripped, like a Band-Aid, fast, unsympathetically, off my future.
On a drippy, grey, November morning, a few days after Bethany's funeral, I sat on a black, wrought iron bench in the children's section of the cemetery and wondered how I never knew there was a children's section of a cemetery. The results of Bethany's autopsy had come in earlier that day. It was what the doctor suspected. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I was thinking how words like grief, torment, hopelessness and even acronyms like SIDS, could in one instant go from being words I talked about to words I owned. As if the librarian of life, sitting at her desk in some pillared hall filled with ancient volumes, opened the book of SIDS, picked up a large stamp, rolled it on a pad of red ink, and thumped it down. On the page were these words, “This volume: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is now the property of Kim Petersen… if found please return to…”
From my bench, I looked out on a pastoral scene sprinkled with headstones and for some reason Karl Wallenda popped into my brain. While at the library weeks ago, I had read an article on this famous high wire circus performer. It took him years of practice to be a tightrope walker. He started when he was six. He believed tightrope walking to be serious business. You had to keep your wits about you when you were 30-40 feet up with no net below you. Perfect your sense of balance. Concentrate, he said.