Mommies Who Drink

by Brett Paesel

  On the upside, I figure, let someone else make the decisions about things I barely care about: what movie we go to, when to go home from a party, what color skirt to buy. To this end, my friendship with Lana is perfect. She’s quite happy to make these minor calls.

  On the downside of my willingness to follow lies a dark history of seething, silent bitterness.

  In my early twenties, I lived in a five-floor walk-up with Penelope, who was English and able to issue commands like she was to the manor born. The apartment had been my find, and I’m not even sure that I actually ever offered her the extra bedroom. All I remember is that she moved in and immediately set the tone for the household. I couldn’t wear shoes inside (too noisy), I couldn’t make phone calls until 11 a.m. (she might get a call from home), and I couldn’t take a bath before her (I’d use up all the hot water). All opened boxes of food had to be wrapped in Saran, no music could be played after she went to sleep, my bath towel had to be hung in my room and not in the bathroom, next to hers.

  I lived much like Anne Frank behind the bookcase.

  “I can hear the toilet flush after I’ve gone to bed,” she told me one morning as she washed Ziploc bags, hanging them around the kitchen to dry.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “So I’ve decided that there’s to be no more toilet flushing after ten at night.”

  “What do I do if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  “I guess you’ll have to hold it, or let it sit in the bowl until the morning,” she said, dropping our salt shaker into a dry bag, sealing it, and returning it to the table. “If you leave it there, remember to get up and flush it early. I don’t want to see it.”

  That did it. I followed the rule, leaving my waste in the bowl until early morning when upon hearing Penelope stir, I would run to the bathroom to flush. But I waited for the perfect moment to free myself from her tyranny.

  When my brother decided to move in with me, I gave Penelope notice. I wrote her a note and left for the weekend before she had a chance to read it. I couldn’t sleep the entire weekend. My imaginings of the reprisal to come were so terrifying that I developed diarrhea, making me grateful to be at a friend’s house, where I could flush.

  When I came back, Penelope was oddly calm. She said that she had been expecting this. She was surprised, she said, that I had put up with her for as long as I had. This was the most vulnerable I had ever seen Penelope. As we talked, I realized that while I had lived in fear of her edicts, she had been living in anticipation of the moment that I would kick her out.

  Had I been more sophisticated, I would have recognized that even the most confident seeming of my acquaintances had their moments of weakness. I might have even recognized that in many ways I was the stronger.

  Such conclusions, however, take a lifetime to realize. Compliance was not only a comfortable way to survive, it was habit.

  When Yana wheels Murph in two hours later, I’ve been stewing the whole time. My buzz has worn away, replaced by a knot of resentment grown larger through the years, with every missed opportunity to stand up for myself.

  “He’s not crying,” I say, looking at Murph sleeping.

  “It’s been two hours,” she says.

  “I’m not going to wake him up,” I say, my voice shaking.

  “It’s good to get them on a schedule.”

  I can’t imagine that Yana has been at this hospital very long. “Feeding on demand” is the most popular choice among all the mothers I know. So surely, she has come across this before. Maybe this is the day that she’s had it with all those crazy American mothers allowing infants to rule the house. Maybe today is the day that she’s snapped. Maybe she woke up this morning and said to herself, “Enough with these spoiled American babies. I’m going to do something about it. I’m going to get this entire lazy country on a schedule and I’m going to do it baby by baby. Starting with this one.”

  If that’s the case, she picked the wrong mother.

  I push the button that raises the back of the bed, clanking me into a higher sitting position. I feel like the paralyzed skier in The Other Side of the Mountain.

  “Yana,” I say, “this is my decision. I am the mother. You are not the mother. I decide how I’m going to do it. And I am going to feed him when he asks to be fed, not when the clock says it’s time.”

  Yana, steely, looks at me. I brace myself for her response. I try to imagine myself as the paralyzed skier valiantly claiming her independence. I have to stop myself from making more of the moment—from saying “I am a free bird. A bird who lives free, Yana. I may not have use of these limbs, but in my mind I soar.” I don’t think this is ever said in the movie. But it’s something like that.

  “Okay,” says Yana, shrugging. “Don’t matter to me.”

  She grabs my tray of discarded Jell-O cups and leaves.

  I stare at the closed door of my room. Could it possibly be that easy?

  I push the button to lower the back of the bed, stopping when my face is a few inches away from sleeping Murph.

  It’s hard to grasp that he is really mine. I marvel that at only a couple of days old he is able to instill in me such fierce protectiveness. Already, he has given me strength to overcome my own ridiculous fears, if only for a blip of a sliver of an instant.

  I relish the moment as my eyes start to close. I consider buzzing my buzzer and demanding more Jell-O, but I can’t open my eyes.

  And I fall asleep before giving it another thought.

  Two?

  Before Murphy was born, every mother I knew said, “Spence was a screamer? Then your next one will be an angel. No one gets two screamers.”

  My friend Kim said, “My first was a nightmare baby, screaming from the moment he woke up. But the second was a dream, a Buddha baby.”

  Another friend said that her first was a dream and her second, three months in hell.

  “But I guess that’s the way it goes—you get one easy and one hard,” she said.

  I don’t go in for maternal prognostications. I never thought, when I was pregnant, that being shaped like the bow of a ship meant that my babies would be boys. Even though they ended up being so. I didn’t put any stock in the ring-over-the-belly gender-determining test. I didn’t believe that it was bad luck to get the baby’s room ready.

  Mothers go crazy predicting all sorts of things about the fetuses that lie oblivious in others’ bellies. They combine old spells with New Age witchery. Balsamic vinegar will make you go into labor. Having sex late in your ovulation cycle will produce a girl.

  Late in my pregnancy it seemed pretty clear to me that all this voodoo on the part of mothers is an attempt to exert some kind of control over that which is cosmically uncontrollable.

  I am not like these mothers. It’s all a bunch of hooey.

  Except for the bit about not getting two screamers in a row. That makes solid sense. If there is a compassionate God, surely He is not so cruel as to send consecutive screamers to an innocent mother.

  Five weeks after Murphy’s birth I put him in the stroller, screaming like he’s on fire. I’ve fed him, changed him, burped him, rocked him, and checked to see if anything’s poking him. Everything’s fine except for the nonstop screaming. When Spence used to scream like this, I’d become paralyzed with anxiety and helplessness. With Murph I’ve become practical. I figure the screaming is idiopathic. And I manage to move through the days with my screaming companion, accomplishing most simple tasks, with resignation and faith that it will all turn out as well as it did with Spence.

  I push Murph in the stroller, howling, to the preschool to pick up Spence. He screams down the street, he screams in the 7-Eleven as I buy a soda, he screams as I open the gate to the preschool. He continues screaming as I check the family folder for announcements and Spence’s artwork. I pick him up and bounce him, screaming, as I look for Spence on the playground.

  Spence hears us coming, turns, and waves.

  Barbara, the teacher, appears beside me.


  “Sounds like something’s poking him,” she says.

  “I’ve checked,” I say. “Nothing’s wrong. He’s just a screamer. Spence was a screamer in the beginning. At about four months it stopped.”

  “Usually, you don’t get two screamers,” she says.

  “Well, I did,” I say.

  My back stiffens as Murph continues his ceaseless wail. My sane self knows not to hear accusation in her pronouncement. But that’s difficult. It’s hard not to hear, “What egregious sins have you committed in the past that God would send you not one, but two screamers.”

  Barbara stares hard at Murph wailing.

  “That’s not normal screaming,” she says. “It sounds like something is really wrong with him.”

  I shift Murph to the other shoulder to give my left ear a break.

  “No,” I say above the noise. “Nothing wrong. He’s just a screamer.”

  A month later I stand on the same playground talking to Mako, a Japanese American woman married to a Jewish man. Mako is a first-class overachieving mom. She speaks only Japanese to her trilingual child. At the preschool this year she has taught units on Hanukkah, American birds, and germs. For school potlucks she makes sushi rolls from scratch.

  Mako and I have had our second children around the same time. We bring them to school occasionally and jiggle them on our shoulders as we watch our preschoolers show off.

  “Is Murphy napping yet?” Mako asks, glancing at Murph, whose usual screaming isn’t at full volume right now..

  I can only hope that she knows that the cloud of passed gas I move around in emanates from Murphy and not me. I keep meaning to ask the pediatrician about it. How much gas can one infant pass? Is this normal? I sure as hell am not asking Mako. I think of Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoon. My second screamer with little wavy lines coming off of him.

  “Not really,” I say, swaying Murphy as he moans, mostly to break up his unpleasant bouquet.

  “Really?” she says.

  “He doesn’t really sleep much during the day. I mean, he’ll nod off, but as soon as he senses me relaxing, he fires up and screams like I just chopped off his finger. You know how it is.”

  “Wow,” she says.

  “No biggie,” I say. “I just have to stay tense and he’s happy.”

  Murphy’s foot jabs the air and an odor rises from him that could kill small insects. I move a couple of feet downwind. Mako moves closer.

  “So you have a hard time putting him down?” she asks.

  “I can put him down,” I say. “He just won’t stay down.”

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Have you tried rocking him?”

  “Oh, yes.” I say. Have I tried rocking him? Does she think I’m a total idiot?

  “Hmmmm,” she says, looking off into the distance as if this is some puzzle to solve. “Have you tried humming?”

  “Humming. Yes,” I say.

  “And he still won’t go down?”

  “Not with rocking and humming,” I say.

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Have you tried rocking and humming in a dimly lit room?”

  Not with the baby, I want to say. Only by myself—after a day of screaming, a couple of cocktails, and a hysterical call to my mother.

  “Because if I rock and hum to Kodi in a dimly lit room, he nods right off,” she says.

  “I think Murphy knows it’s a trick,” I say. “He’s incredibly intuitive.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” she says, sniffing the air.

  I move again. Mako follows.

  “Are you still breast-feeding?” she asks.

  “Mostly,” I say. “I switch to formula whenever my nipples feel like they’ve been stapled.”

  “That’s it,” says Mako. “That’s why he’s farting like that. It’s the formula.”

  She turns and walks away, quiet Kodi nestled on her shoulder.

  Maybe the gas is connected to the screaming. Maybe Murph is in tremendous gastronomic pain. I stop formula. I give him Mylicon drops. I change my diet. I bounce him, rock him, sing to him. Dim the lights. Nothing works. He rarely sleeps, and if he’s awake, he’s screaming, moaning, or making a cranky-old-man sound.

  I carry Murphy down to the office of our building to pick up a package. The building manager is a woman named Boo Merlin (you can’t make this stuff up), an older woman from New Orleans who came to Los Angeles thirty years ago “because of a man” and never left. She’s a mother of six, grandmother of several, and a kid magnet. She beams her Southern smile, opens her sparkly eyes wide, coos at them, and they all come running. Or crawling.

  Around Boo, stoned smiles spread across infant babies’ faces like they’re mainlining. Everyone’s baby but mine.

  Murphy wails on my shoulder as I reach for my package.

  “Does he always do that?” Boo asks.

  “Scream?”

  “Yes. That,” she says. “It sounds like something’s wrong.”

  “Not that I can tell,” I say loudly, sitting across from her, Murph still going strong.

  She tilts back in her chair to get the clipboard I have to sign to get my package.

  “Maybe he’s hungry,” she says.

  “Just fed him,” I say, signing my name.

  “Have you tried rocking him?”

  “Yup,” I say. “No problem, though. Spence was a screamer and he turned out fine.”

  “No one gets two screamers,” she says.

  “Guess I’m the exception to the rule.”

  I’m aware that I’ve begun to sound defensive, but I can’t help myself. Then something in me switches.

  “Turns out there are some new studies coming out of Johns Hopkins,” I say. Johns Hopkins? Where did I get that? “Babies who scream early are significantly brighter, more intuitive, and seem to be immune to certain cancers.”

  Boo’s eyes widen. “Really?”

  “Something to do with all that extra oxygen getting to the brain.”

  Boo stares at Murphy, who passes gas and wiggles, his wailing dialing down to a soft moan.

  “I had one screamer and he’s my smartest,” she says, her gaze contemplative.

  “I’m not surprised,” I say.

  I see gurgling, quiet babies everywhere—peaceful pink-cheeked cherubs, smiling as they lie in their mothers’ arms, in strollers, on blankets on the grass. I marvel at these beings who seem to bear no resemblance to the creature I wheel around—his howling so loud as to seem an agonized plea to be released from his earthly existence.

  Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I find myself starting to prefer my screamer. Those passive, bland babies, I think to myself—who needs ’em? All they do is lie there. I’ve got a lusty, full-voiced maniac who lets me know just how he’s feeling every second of every day. Aren’t I lucky?

  I also start to think about robbing banks and changing my name to Tanya.

  Friday

  Having wanted a second child desperately, I understand what drives Michelle to the sperm bank.

  “It’s wild,” she says. “Sarah and I take home these profiles of sperm donors and discuss the pros and cons of these guys like we’re a couple of assholes at a pickup bar.”

  “You’re not going back to China?” asks Lana.

  “We might,” says Michelle. “But I think I want to try to get pregnant first. I want to know what it feels like. And I love the idea of Sarah’s egg and my uterus. Sarah and I had less money when we got Faith. Now we can afford in vitro, so why not give it a whirl?”

  She reaches for her Amstel.

  “Hey,” she says. “We adore Faith. This won’t take anything away from her.”

  I know this is true. Faith is their girl. Their little China doll.

  “What are the guys in the profiles like?” asks Katherine, taking her cell out of her purse and putting it on mute.

  “Well, Sarah and I have different favorites. I like this black guy who’s a musician.”

  “Oooh, I’m already liking him,” says Katherine.


  “Oh. Who does he play for?” asks Lana.

  “He can’t say,” says Michelle.

  “If you’re going to go for a musician, you should find out if he’s good,” says Lana, who is a rock snob.

  I put down my glass. “Michelle said that she feels like an asshole in a pickup bar, Lana. She didn’t say she’d become one.”

  “I just think she should know if he’s any good.”

  “David Crosby’s already given his sperm,” I say. “This guy’s a musician. That’s all we know. It’s not like he’s going to send a three-song demo along with his sperm sample.”

  “Who does Sarah like?” asks Katherine.

  “She can’t choose between this southern trucker dude and a Korean PhD student.”

  “I know how she feels,” says Lana like Groucho.

  “She likes the trucker because he seems kind of sweet. He wrote that he likes driving into a sunset and working with his hands.”

  “Good enough for me,” says Katherine, slapping the bar. Who tends to like “rough around the edges” almost as much as she likes black.

  “What about the Korean PhD?” I ask Michelle. “What’s wrong with that? A smarty pants. What’s his PhD in?”

  “History. He’s doing a dissertation on fourteenth-century farming techniques.”

  “Wake me when it’s over,” says Lana.

  “Oooh,” says Katherine, like she just remembered. “You should go to one of those genius sperm banks.”

  “I’m not sure what they do with genius sperm. I’m not sure that they really give it out. Do they?” says Michelle.

  “It probably costs major bucks for genius sperm,” says Katherine.

  “Jesus, I know some geniuses who might skip the middleman and sell it to you at an extreme discount,” I say.

  “What geniuses do you know?” Katherine asks me.