Now My Heart Is Full

by Laura June

  My mother stayed home with us, and I was so close in age to my brother Daniel, who was just sixteen months younger than me, that most of my first memories are of babies: him, then John, who was four years younger than me. My father worked a lot, as fathers often do. But we were surrounded by family on the weekends and neighborhood friends and mothers during the week.

  I didn’t go to kindergarten, so I stayed home with my mother until I went to first grade, at the nearby Catholic school. I remember her walking me out to the bus that first day, me in a little jumper with pigtails and her kneeling down in front of me. She had a cigarette in her left hand. Back then, as I remember it, every parent smoked. My mother held my hand—my brother David went to the same school, and he was there off to the side—and we walked down our long driveway to the road. He seemed so much older than me, a fifth grader. I was excited to be starting school, to learn how to really read, where then I just knew some words in the books I tried to parse. I could write my name; my mother, who had studied childhood education for her two years of college and had wanted to be a teacher, had taught me how to write.

  “You’re going to be fine,” she said.

  I didn’t feel afraid to leave her or to go off to school on my own. I would quickly grow to love my class, my teacher, the little dark hallway that led from the school of just fifty or sixty students to the beautiful church. I wanted to go. I was ready to go.

  But I felt, even then at six, that my mother wanted me to want to stay home. She had tears in her eyes as she knelt in front of me.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to reassure her or make her feel what I felt she wanted from me. I thought she wanted to hear me say that I would rather stay home, but that wasn’t true. She’d formed me already into a little independent person, and there I was, happy to leave her. She still had Daniel and John at home, of course, and what’s striking in hindsight more than anything else are my tiny feelings of obligation to her. Even that young, I felt that in some way she needed me more than I needed her. But maybe that was only in my six-year-old imagination.

  My mother had taught me, so young, to be happy left to myself. I listened to my records and looked at books alone in my room, colored pictures happily. My parents were strict: we didn’t watch a lot of TV, and we did what we were told.

  One night, probably around the same time as I entered first grade, I made what I recall as my first act of rebellion against my parents. At dinner, the six of us sat there talking at the dining room table. At our house, you didn’t question what was for dinner; you simply ate what was on offer. This was mostly for convenience: you can’t cater to the whims of six people, four of whom are little kids. So we dutifully ate what was provided.

  On the night in question, my mother made pea soup. It was the kind of pea soup that was pork based, little bits of ham floating among the muck. I realized as I sat there, staring at it, that I hated pea soup. I tried to eat it but simply couldn’t muster the enthusiasm required for it.

  “I don’t want this,” I said.

  My parents looked over at me.

  My little brother Dan echoed me. “Me neither.” I could be ushering in a full-scale mutiny, my parents probably realized.

  “You need to eat,” my father said. He was tough and quiet, affectionate, but he always stuck to his word. I carried a normal sense of awe and fear a girl my age had for her father. I adored him but didn’t fuck with him. Ever. He never hit me or even raised his voice very often, but when he did yell, it was loud and scary. I don’t remember my parents fighting back then. I had no reason to fear him, but I did.

  “I’m not eating this; it’s gross,” I said.

  My father put down his spoon and sat there for a second, planning his response.

  “Your mother made this; it’s delicious. Please eat. That’s enough,” he said.

  I could have pretended to eat. I could have slipped through the cracks with all the other people at the table. I could have said nothing. But I wanted to see where this could go.

  “No.”

  Everyone else was finishing up. David, I could see by the looks he was shooting me, thought I was incredibly dumb to bother with any of this. Daniel sat beside me, not eating either but no longer repeating whatever I said. My mother stood up and started clearing the bowls away. She reached over my shoulder to take mine.

  “Leave it,” my father said. “She can sit there until she finishes.”

  And so I sat. I sat for what seemed like hours but was probably twenty minutes. It got dark outside, the sun went down, my brothers were in the other room watching TV. I sat there, waiting for something to happen. For someone to release me from the agony and boredom of simply sitting there, a now-cold bowl of soup in front of me.

  My mother came in from the kitchen, having finished washing the dishes. My father appeared. She took the bowl and walked into the kitchen without saying anything to either of us.

  “You can go to bed now,” he said.

  I went to my room and cried myself to sleep, still dressed in my clothes from the day. An hour or so later, my father woke me up. He was sitting on my bed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He picked me up and carried me downstairs, where my mother and David were still awake, watching television.

  I don’t know if this was the same night, but in my memory, it was: the night that we watched, together in our family room, the Motown twenty-fifth-anniversary special. The first time I remember seeing Michael Jackson perform live. My parents loved music, and they sat there with us, watching this insane genius sing “Billie Jean” and moonwalk across the stage. My parents were like that, then: our minor misbehavior, to the extent that it happened, was silently passed over. The subtext was clear. You learned the lesson—don’t do it again—but nobody made you feel too badly about yourself in the process, either.

  Home was, for all of my first six or seven years on planet Earth, warm and loud, and the doors were always open, usually literally. The sound of the screen door banging open and shut as kids or neighbors or family streamed in is baked into my memory: I remember specific screen doors, the metal ones of the two houses, the wooden ones at my grandma Elly’s, where the policy was the same, everybody welcome.

  Home was warm and normal until it wasn’t, and there weren’t, in my memory, any warning signs of the change, which came swiftly and abruptly. I’m sure my parents struggled and that they learned fitfully how to manage four young children, their finances, all the things that come with having a family. I wasn’t ever naive or unaware, though I was a very small child at one point. Often I find myself in disagreement with anyone who believes that children are unaware of the serious, adult problems going on around them. I was always, to my mind, sensitive to the adults in my midst. And though I see now with Zelda how the nuance of an argument may be lost on her, it’s also very true that she senses the broad strokes and tone of a serious discussion. Any time Josh and I have argued around her, I have felt her tense up and close down into her mind. She listens and waits, the way I myself listened and waited.

  My mother was in lots of ways a very typical late 1970s or early 1980s stay-at-home mother. She paid lots of attention to us, but we also roamed on our own in little groups as she cooked and cleaned and did laundry, soap operas sometimes playing in the living room in the background. She was laid-back and left us to our own devices a lot, not out of neglect but simply out of the necessity of running a big household.

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Josh and I couldn’t have gone into our new life as parents more differently. We were older, which meant that Zelda’s grandparents were older, too. We were both by nature loners without many close friends. The friends we did have were not parents themselves. We lived in Brooklyn, hundreds of miles away from our immediate families. We both worked a lot, and I had no intention—none—of staying home with Zelda for longer than the twelve
weeks allotted to me by my job.

  In Brooklyn, I knew no other stay-at-home mothers. I didn’t consider myself a stay-at-home mother; my sojourn home with my daughter was to be just that twelve weeks, and yet, I almost immediately had many of the problems of any stay-at-home mother: I needed some other stay-at-home mom friends. I was lonely. Daytime television sucked. The baby was boring. Days were long.

  We thought, in a wrongheaded but probably unavoidable, nearly universal manner of first-time parents, that Zelda would slide right into our old lives, causing minor disruption and increasing photo ops, but we did not suspect that she would devour, overnight, our way of living.

  Josh and I were on our own and uninformed about the ways of modern parenting. If we needed help, we’d have to hire it. I’ve never excelled at asking for help, and there, in the first few days at home with Zelda, was no different. I’d blindly gone through pregnancy assuming I could simply pile on the extra duties of motherhood to my already overflowing work and home stack. I’d managed our household for years. I’d handled our finances and taxes; all of that was my domain. Though I had lots of ideas about “equal parenting” based on feminism and shit, and though I was totally uninformed about the actual real labor involved in taking care of a baby, I carried few illusions about who would do most of the work: I knew that it would probably be me. I knew it would be me because I wanted it to be me. I like being capable and busy and in charge. I knew that I would suck up extra work in the family and with Zelda because I wanted to do things my way. I looked forward to this.

  Those first few weeks at home were an insane mixture of joy tempered with the realities of a newborn. Big cities are weirdly isolating places to have children, simply because most of us living in them aren’t from there, so when we do have kids, the rest of our family—parents, siblings, cousins—aren’t around to fill up those long and somewhat lazy hours.

  I’d made a conscious decision to leave my familiar surroundings of family and friends behind, to move a six-hour drive away from them, as had my husband. We didn’t think about what it would be like when we had kids. Does anyone?

  In the early days of Zelda’s life, it was the three of us—me, her, and Josh—most of the time on the weekends, with a smaller circle of friends, none of whom had kids, who would stop over occasionally for a visit.

  During the weekday hours, though, almost no one was around. Josh went back to work one week after Zelda was born, though he’d intended to stay home longer, called back by something that seemed to us at the time worthy of his return. It wasn’t ideal for any of us, and we hadn’t planned it that way, but that was what happened. We, Zelda and I, were on our own. A lot.

  I want to tell you that this transition was easy for me, but it wasn’t. I didn’t know, going into motherhood, that newborn babies didn’t really sleep. I assumed that they slept a lot, and though they sort of do, I didn’t know what constituted sleep and what was awake. She was noisy and greedy and seemed unhappy in her new life a lot. Though it was clear from the get-go that Zelda was a “good baby,” any baby is rough on the uninitiated. And I, so used to living in my head and having hours of time to myself to think and daydream and cook elaborate meals, was in for a wake-up call. And the first few weeks with Zelda were all about sleep—or a lack of it, I guess. All three of us were hampered by exhaustion.

  But I need to say that part of the reason the transition was so hard for me was that I felt an intense amount of pressure to “do” motherhood well. I wanted to do it well, I was desperate to be a devoted and caring and attentive mother from the start. I am naturally competitive with myself, and I love to multitask. I wanted to be a great mother but also to manage all the things I’d managed before: the house, our money, my career. I’d waited quite a long time to have children, and so when she arrived, I assumed my daughter would necessarily be the focus of my efforts moving forward. And though in the first months I did not yet feel the pull of going back to work, of my career and my own projects, I did feel, keenly and selfishly, the loss of personal time. The loss of time to be just alone with myself. She was always there. We didn’t have time apart. I hadn’t thought about this in advance. And I didn’t know, couldn’t know, how hard it actually is to be a parent. How much labor it is, emotionally, physically, and mentally. And I began, very quickly, to see that having a career and a well-loved daughter and an orderly house was not simply a matter of me wanting it badly enough. I began to suspect that I would run myself ragged, possibly for the rest of my life. But still, I was up for it most days.

  While Josh was exhausted at work, I was exhausted at home with a baby who didn’t ever seem fully awake or fully asleep. She existed in some middling state where I could barely put her down for fear that she would start crying. She didn’t cry much, to be fair to her: she was pretty lovely from the start, like I said. But my options often seemed limited to simply letting her sleep on my chest or never at all. At night, it was worse.

  I remember one desolate Sunday morning when Zelda was just two weeks old, where no one had slept and when Josh and I had argued, at 4:45 a.m., over who would “get up for the day” with the baby. I had lost. I usually did, simply because Josh had to be “presentable,” he had “a real job.” I say these things in quotation marks not because his words were untrue. They were absolutely true. It’s impossible to go to a job and seem even seminormal on the amount of sleep that he and I were getting. But, at the same time, hearing him say it to me, in the state that I was in, made me want to spit fire. I’d been home for only two weeks and already I couldn’t conceive of the world outside my house. I was hopelessly self-involved and didn’t think beyond a few hours ahead of myself.

  That Sunday morning, I reached a crisis point. I couldn’t keep not sleeping at night only to have to be conscious during the day, too. My incision still hurt when I laughed (which was sort of more often than I’m making it sound like here, right now), and walking up and down the stairs was terrifying. During the day I kept the baby on the first floor with me all day, jetting up the stairs as fast as my still-swollen feet could carry me only to go to the bathroom while she slept in a basket on the couch, our dog, Penny, standing guard.

  I emailed a friend of mine who had told me that when he and his wife had twins, they’d hired a baby nurse. I only vaguely knew what a baby nurse was, but in that moment of the email, so tired and overwhelmed as I was, I knew simply that I wanted one. I needed one. Three scattered emails back and forth and I was on the phone with a woman who said she could come that evening. She would stay, she said, from 8:00 p.m. until 7:00 a.m. I would, in those hours, do nothing. Do whatever I wanted. Sleep. Eat. I didn’t know.

  At 8:00 that night, Monica showed up at my door. We were in the middle of blundering through “bath time,” which was still terrifying and seemingly full of danger. She took Zelda from me and, in a matter of less than five minutes, had expertly cleaned and toweled off her body. “See, like this,” she said, as Josh and I stood behind her, marveling. “The baby gets cold very fast, so the bath should only take two minutes,” she said.

  We followed her into Zelda’s bedroom, and I showed her where everything that they could possibly need was in the tiny space. She put Zelda into her little pajamas, and I handed her a bottle. “Good night,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “She doesn’t sleep much,” I said.

  “But you should,” she said.

  I went upstairs and laid across my bed. I burst into tears. After ten minutes, I crawled under the covers, fully clothed, and fell asleep. I didn’t wake up until the next morning at 7:15, when Josh shook me to let me know that the nurse was ready to leave.

  “She slept four and a half hours straight,” Monica told me as she bundled herself up to go out into the bitter Brooklyn cold. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Monica came back on and off for two weeks, just so that we could get some sleep, so that I could recover from surgery and be present with Zelda durin
g the long, twelve-hour days, and so that Josh could manage better at work. It was a great decision and a good lesson for me: asking for help is often the greatest thing a mother can do.

  I’ve wished so many times for family to be closer since we became parents, especially when Zelda’s grandparents come to visit. Each of the four of them (my father remarried the same year that Josh and I got married) loves her so much, and she them. I had very close and special relationships growing up with my own grandparents, and I want that for her, too.

  But we don’t have, mostly because of proximity, the same relationship with our parents, Zelda’s grandparents, as my parents had with theirs. Geographical distance means long-planned trips to visit are a big deal, not thrown together at the last minute. And of course, grandparents are, for us, never a last-minute babysitter option. Where my parents had access to their own parents for help—I remember my grandmother always came along on shopping trips and to doctor’s appointments, and I realize now that it was probably because a second set of hands was really helpful—Josh and I hire helpers: we find babysitters and housekeepers and try to manage the best we can mostly on our own. There are upsides to isolation, but only when I became a parent did I realize how much easier family life could be if only there were more, well, family around, and how important it is for Zelda to be close to her aunts and uncles and grandparents.

  CHAPTER 4

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I’ve learned a lot from Zelda. There’s been a lot of nuts-and-bolts acquiring of skills over the past few years. The early days of complete cluelessness died extremely hard and really fast. I am now officially “good with babies and children.” I know how to talk to them and keep them calm, how to be firm without being mean. I can stay patient in the face of the great annoyance of small children. I’ve discovered that even young babies can learn by example and that children always do. But Zelda has taught me by example, too.