I spent the rest of the day waiting for news and also dreading it. But sometimes life lives up to your eight-year-old goals: Connor arrived safe and sound later that afternoon. Four days later, I boarded a plane home.
•
My parents were waiting for me on the other side when I came through customs in Toronto. This was unusual. Until my mother’s health had kept her from being able to drive, my father rarely made the trip. I had volunteered to take the bus, trying to avoid a scenario that would leave my mother home alone, but he had insisted on coming. They were standing off to the side together when I emerged, my father rigid in his black puffy winter coat and tweed hat, my mother floating along beside him, like an astronaut tethered to a space station. My mother was skin and bones.
People toss that sort of phrase about casually, the same way they say, “I’m losing my mind,” or “This is driving me crazy”; remarks which now also felt like physical blows when I heard them. My mother literally was skin and bones. There was nothing else. Every time I saw her—and it had been only seven weeks since I was last home—there was less of her. Her frailness felt like a punch in the stomach. She was also literally losing her mind; I’d watched her grasping for it for months now, like a hand trying to retrieve a lost shoe under a bed, she vaguely knew it was there somewhere. Weight loss was a symptom of Parkinson’s, I knew, but surely this was extreme.
In pictures from university and the first years of her marriage to my father, my mother had been slim and tall and inarguably beautiful (to everyone but herself. Whenever I or others remarked on her looks, she scoffed, entirely disbelieving). But for most of my life she’d been in some sort of battle with her weight. It was a battle largely fought in theory: she talked in detail about the diets she was planning to go on, though when she eventually did they usually lasted until bedtime; at some point after dinner, she’d pour herself a bowl of cheesy Doritos and declare she intended to start fresh “tomorrow.”
Now, during the times she was lucid, she delighted in her newfound thinness. When I was visiting, she liked to go into her closet and emerge holding up a pair of pants. “Can you believe I need an extra small?” she’d say happily. When I tried to push bowls of ice cream on her, or slices of pizza, desperate to fatten her up, she’d say, “Oh, I shouldn’t, I don’t want to get heavy.” Even as other things fell away from her mind, family histories vanished, and relationships dissolved, the pleasure at having finally achieved a certain appearance remained. And still the weight disappeared. Walking down the ramp toward my waiting parents, I could see my mother’s collarbones showing through her pastel top; her hip bones jutted visibly through the waistband of her pants. When I hugged her, her ribs felt like piano keys under my fingers. She was so light when she walked it was like watching a bird flit from branch to branch; I was never quite sure she was touching the ground. It gave her a childlike quality, as though she were skipping along, no longer beset by the cares of the world. Her usual pleasant smile was still there, though. That had persisted, at least in the more reliable morning hours.
That smile had infuriated me as a child. “Why are you always smiling at people? You don’t know them,” I would rage at her in the grocery checkout line, at the mall, at the gas station. I didn’t know why exactly it made me so livid, but in those preteen years that pleasant smile would leave me vibrating with anger. In hindsight, I’m not sure what I resented more: her undying need to please people she’d never met or her inability to just admit this was why she was doing it. I wanted a straight answer. She never had one. Her answers were always long and tangled up with big words and random associations until by the end my anger would be worn down simply by trying to keep up with her level-headed argument. “I like to analyze,” she would say, good-naturedly analyzing her analyzing while I stomped around my adolescence trying to goad her into throwing a dish or at least losing her temper enough to raise her voice. It rarely worked. “You push and you push and you push,” she’d say, exhausted by my persistence. But she almost never pushed back. Sometimes I wondered whether one of the reasons I held on to New York so tightly was because it was a place where people largely said exactly what they felt.
I could not seem to get a straight answer on her illness either. Every conversation with a doctor felt like it was weaving back in on itself. I kept a notebook beside me when I made phone calls now, recording names and specialties and extension numbers so I could reach the person I needed more quickly when I inevitably had to call back. Along the margins, I would doodle looping arrows from one to the other, directions to my future self. My mother’s body was giving me a definitive answer, however. It might be making a long goodbye, but it was unmistakably a goodbye.
On our walk from the terminal to the car, my mother rolled into her usual chatter. She asked me about my friend who was the chef. My friend who had the baby. She told me she thought a long article I’d done about the “storm” was “just wonderful.” Each new remark required some detective work on my end. What chef? (Answer: Maddy had years ago professed an interest in doing a cookbook.) Which baby? (Answer: fifteen years earlier, my manager at the Greenwich Village tavern had an infant daughter I would often babysit.) What storm? (This one was easier: I’d written a piece about Sandy two years earlier that had done well.) Figuring out what she was referring to meant patiently handing my mother different details, as though talking her through a treasure map, and then carefully sifting through her response until together we arrived at the thing she was looking for. By the time we made it to our level in the parking garage, I’d solved all her inquiries and was thinking with a drop of relief how she might be thinner, but at least her mind seemed as if it hadn’t declined too much since I’d last been home in mid-August. The fact that it was taking only minimal prompting right now to keep her on a cheerful conversational track felt like a small gift of time. There’s still time. I smiled to myself wryly, thinking of the woman at the wedding. Were our whole lives just a series of vainly constructed arguments to convince ourselves we had more time than we did?
As we reached the car, my mother turned to me brightly, her face lit up as though she’d just remembered something wonderful she wanted to tell me, and said, “Oh, honey, I’m so glad you’re here.” She wrapped me in her fragile embrace. I hugged her back gently, the way I hugged my niece and nephew. When I released her, she gazed at me with the same wondrous expression. “Oh, honey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, how is your friend who’s the chef?” I clenched my jaw. I circled my emotions as though they were wagons preparing for an attack and took a breath. “Maddy is fine, Mom,” I said as levelly as I could. “She has a daughter now.”
My father was mostly silent during this exchange. Which was not unusual. My childhood had been populated by nonstop chatter from my mother, who considered it her responsibility to fill every empty moment, and long silences punctuated here and there with one-syllable responses from my father. It was never clear whether he was listening. When he was in the grip of deep depression, which as the years went by had been more often than not, he spent nearly as many hours of the day in bed as out of it. Sometimes more. Increasingly, he was like a main character in our family play who existed entirely offstage. Present in his absence. My mother’s decline had forced him onto the stage, so to speak, but I was still figuring out how to navigate around his actually being there. Now that I had to, his habit of not answering had begun to make me crazy; I could sometimes hear my own voice return to demanding, dramatic teenage decibels, as though I were arguing for a later curfew and not simply trying to confirm specific doctor’s appointments had been set up for my mother.
“Do you want me to drive?” I asked him, rolling my suitcase to the trunk.
No answer.
“Oh, honey, let me help you with that,” said my mother, her hands fluttering toward my bag, a carry-on that probably weighed almost half as much as she did.
“It’s fine, Mom. Why don’t you just get in the car?” I tried not to let my teenage self bleed in
to my tone. Getting frustrated with her now only left me feeling guilty.
“Oh, but here, I can help.”
“Just get in the car, Jean,” said my father in his stern tone.
“All right,” said my mother with a smile, clapping her hands together like a child who’s just been promised extra dessert for good behavior.
“Do you want me to drive?” I asked again. I was not a nervous passenger; since I was a child I’d loved being in the car, but my father’s driving unnerved me. Maybe this was normal; we spend our childhoods with full faith in our parents’ decision-making, and our adulthoods second-guessing their every move, certain we know better. Yet, much as I was never convinced he was listening, I was never confident he was fully aware of his place on the road. On the rare occasions I traveled with him, I spent most of the ride alert and paralyzed, as though I were watching someone play a video game. Still, he almost always insisted on driving—I knew from the tone it was a point of pride, evidence he was still in control of something—but I asked anyway, always hopeful I might be spared.
He didn’t answer. Instead he walked over to the passenger side and steered my mother into the front seat.
“Dad! Do you want me to drive?”
Silently he walked back around the car, handed me the keys, got in the back seat, and closed his eyes.
“I guess, yes,” I said to the underground parking lot, fifteen years old again and filled with sarcasm. I got in the driver’s seat.
“Oh, honey, how is your friend, the one with the baby?”
“She’s fine, Mom.”
I looked at the clock. It was a few minutes after noon. I pulled out my phone and texted my sister. Leaving the airport now. I need a drink!
I looked at the message, imagining her opening her phone while standing between two screaming children, holding a dirty diaper. I erased the drink part and sent the text.
When I was growing up, my mother would sometimes say, “Okay, everyone, let’s gird our loins for the fray!” as we would leave the house. Like many things she said, I had no idea what it meant at the time; it was just another thing she did. It came back to me now; I could hear her gay voice in my head and taste the smell of that house. I knew what gird meant now. I girded for what was coming.
9. Having It All
My sister and I lived opposite lives. As opposite as two lives can be for people who have been raised in the same house. This had always been the case. Growing up, she was the cool one who went to rock concerts, the one with the boyfriends, the popular girl in school. We’d never had the intimate sisterly discussions some other siblings shared, but we’d also never been enemies the way some friends I had were with their brothers and sisters. We were on each other’s side when called to be. However, children are very effective at bridging nearly all divides, and once hers arrived I made it a point to participate in her and their lives with regularity. Before my mother got sick I came home every three months like clockwork: for holidays, for birthdays, for baptisms, and eventually communions. It had been just the four of us growing up: my father didn’t communicate with most of his family, and my mother’s two brothers lived on either coast. Neither of my parents had a close circle of friends they saw frequently, and they rarely entertained. This lack of outside voices had often left me feeling as though our family lived in a separate reality from the people around us. I wanted my niece and nephew to know me as a regular person in their life, for them to have the outside family we had lacked.
My parents didn’t stay when we reached the house. I wasn’t entirely sure my mother understood my sister had even had a baby; she seemed to be confusing Connor with the other two kids. Still, when I kissed them goodbye, I explained to her one last time what was happening and why I was getting out and not coming with them. She nodded pleasantly. I could tell by the fluttering of her hands she was approaching the witching hour.
Alexis wasn’t there when my parents dropped me off. She lived in a small town, and doors were never locked, though I thought it likely at least one of the neighbors had seen us pull in and was aware I was here. Whenever I ran into them on the street they never seemed surprised to see me. As I was walking to the door she texted I’m out running errands with the kids, be back shortly. She’d been out of the hospital exactly one day. The doctor had let her stay an extra night, mostly to give her a respite from the children waiting for her at home.
Inside the house was the aftermath of the constant storm known as small children, which also sometimes looked like the news reports you see from the aftermath of an actual storm: toys, socks, discarded t-shirts, shoes, puzzle pieces, books, and leftover breakfast dishes were everywhere. The air was heavy with the sickly-sweet smell of little children, the constant exhaust of breakfast cereal and milk and now new baby. I took a deep breath and began to tidy up.
The meeting I’d had a few days earlier about cowriting a book had gone well. My friend Naama ran a successful company that produced videos about puberty aimed at preteen girls. She’d been approached by publishers about writing a guide to puberty for them. I’d officially been brought on board as the cowriter. It was a terrific opportunity, a bigger project that would allow me to step out of the cycle of pitching article ideas to different editors, waiting for a response, and then chasing down payment. It was the next big step in the writing career I’d been slowly reestablishing for myself since burning out so badly. But we were on a tight schedule, and the first draft of the proposal was due to our agent in two weeks. I looked around again. I was going to have to figure out a way to lodge parts of my career into this maelstrom.
Before I’d made a dent in the chaos my nephew, Quinn, and niece, Zoe, exploded through the front door. They swept in like a summer storm, upending everything in their path. Up the stairs they rolled, not bothering to remove their coats or their boots, and hurled themselves into my arms, wrapping themselves around me with surprising strength. That was often the thing I was most unprepared for with small children—not the noise and the chaos and the unrelenting nature of it, but the boundless emotion, given and required.
Alexis slowly came up behind them, her right arm looped through a baby carrier.
“Are you supposed to be carrying that?” She was four days out from a C-section; picking up heavy things was, to the best of my knowledge, not allowed.
“I don’t have much choice.” She put the carrier on the floor slowly and stood back up stiffly.
Were there baby books for this? I wondered. What to expect when you’re expecting to be alone? What to do when you can’t avoid all the things you’re supposed to avoid after childbirth? How to massage your own swollen feet. How to manage three children under the age of five. There should be a book called How to Raise a Newborn When Your Hands Are Otherwise Occupied Making Lunches and Driving Children to Swimming Lessons.
I gave Alexis a hug and looked down at my brand-new nephew. Zoe and Quinn, ages three and a half and five, were such a complete unit it had been hard to envision an addition. But now as I gazed at Connor’s scrunched-up face for the first time, it seemed he had always been here. Babies are like that. They appear, tear themselves a hole in the world, and somehow it becomes immediately impossible to remember a time when that space did not exist.
“You can pick him up,” my sister said matter-of-factly, going into the kitchen.
I reached down and began to unbuckle him from his carrier. Babies are one thing. Newborns feel like another species; every part of him oozed vulnerability. At barely six pounds he was small, even for a newborn. Quinn reached over and roughly began pulling Connor’s arms under his straps.
“I want to do it,” Zoe yelled in her high-pitched three-year-old voice, and began pulling the strap in the other direction. My stomach dropped; they were going to break him.
“Everyone step back!”
I used my sternest military-commander-directing-an-evacuation voice. It stopped them just long enough to allow me to scoop up the carrier and put it on the dining room table out
of their reach. By some miracle, the baby was still asleep. Was he breathing? Okay, yes. I slipped a hand under each shoulder, tried to get my fingers under his neck, and then, with the sort of deep breath, eyes closed, off-the-cliff-we-go mind-set, I lifted him up and put him on my shoulder. Had his neck flopped? The kids were hovering below me, hands reaching up for him like snakes from a pit.
“I want to hold him.”
“No, I do.”
I turned my back on them and lowered him into the crook of my elbow. He fit perfectly. He was the exact length of the space from my wrist to my elbow.
He cracked an eye open, then two, his brow furrowed, thoughtful and stern, as though he remained unconvinced that being on the outside was a good decision. Then he looked up at me and stared. This at least felt normal. For as long as I could remember babies had been fascinated by my face. All the contrast caught their attention: big eyes, pale skin, dark hair that exploded in curls around my head, as if I were a walking mobile. It was the same sort of look Drew Barrymore first gave to E.T., except without the screaming.
“Hello,” I said, gently stroking his head. “You share a birthday with the most important person ever.”
•
From the start, we agreed I would sleep in Alexis’s room on the main floor with the kids, and she and Connor would take the spare room downstairs that I normally stayed in. This way she could try to keep her own sleep schedule with only the baby interrupting, and I could oversee Quinn and Zoe. I would also do breakfast and the school run. And take them to swimming lessons twice a week. Quinn was still young enough to go into the women’s locker room, so I could change him, send him out, take Zoe upstairs to the viewing area, then back down, change her, and send her out as Quinn was coming back in. I’d do bath time, too. And bedtime snacks. And story time. Also, I’d finish my book proposal.
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