by Mary F. Pols
Meanwhile, Dolan was under the ultraviolet lights in an incubator with a bad case of jaundice. My blood type is Rh-negative, which is uncommon (about 15 percent of the population is Rh-negative). Unless the person who impregnates you is also Rh-negative, your baby’s blood will be Rh-positive. Your blood will detect the foreign blood type and develop antibodies to it. In the old days, Rh-negative women were discouraged from having more than two children because the antibodies would have built up in their body to the point where the mother would send those antibodies across the placenta and into her fetus’s bloodstream. Having antibodies to Rh-positive blood in your Rh-positive blood is never a good thing. It causes something called the bilirubin levels to skyrocket. Jaundice is one of the early symptoms of that. From there it goes to liver and brain damage and, possibly, death.
There was a drug to counter this, and I’d been getting shots of it throughout the pregnancy. Nonetheless, there had been some crossover, and now Dolan was jaundiced and had a high bilirubin count. If it didn’t drop on its own in the next few days, with help from the ultraviolet lights, he’d have to have a blood transfusion.
I was eager to have him beside me, but all I could do was walk to the nursery every couple of hours to try to breast-feed him. They had me supplement with formula, run through a syringe and a tube that I put next to my nipple, so he’d get both breast and bottle at the same time.
Dolan seemed perfectly content in his incubator. Naked except for his diaper, he lay mostly on his stomach with his rump in the air. To protect his eyes from the ultraviolet lights, the nurses had made him a pair of “sunglasses” out of foam, even drawing eyelashes on them. I’d put a finger through the opening in the side of the incubator and stroke his cheek while he slept, but he’d barely stir. Wib went back to Massachusetts; my being so late to start labor and taking so long to get through it meant she had only about thirty-six hours with her new nephew before she had to fly home. Matt had gone back to work and came to visit at night, bringing takeout. I was enormously swollen and the incision hurt. I called my father on the second day after Dolan was born. Wib had already filled him in on the story of the birth.
“It’s quite astounding that of all of you girls only Wib, the smallest of you all, managed to avoid a C-section,” he said. “Alison and then Sondra [Adrian’s ex-wife] and Beth. And now you.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “They say external measurements have nothing to do with the internal ones. So you can have huge wide hips and still need a C-section.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “She’s quite tough, of course, our Wib.”
What about me? I thought. I’m not tough? I picked at the sheet. They didn’t seem to have fitted sheets at the hospital. Why was that? What was the point of hospital corners anyway?
“Not much going on here,” he said. “I’ve been staying away from your mother for the last couple of days because I have a slight cold I don’t want to pass on to her. And I have a blasted canker sore.”
I made sympathetic noises. My father had canker sores all too often. I got them, too.
“Are you using your medication?” I asked. A few years before, I’d gotten a magic potion from my dentist that made cankers disappear in half the usual time. I’d given the name of the stuff to my father, and he’d gotten a prescription from his doctor. But mostly he declined to take it. “I’m troubled by the idea of a topical steroid,” he’d say. He was, for all intents and purposes, a nondeclared Christian Scientist, who believed that aspirin should be avoided, antibiotics were to be used only in the kind of emergency that would otherwise require hospitalization, and, clearly, C-sections were for wimps.
“No, I am not,” he said. “I can’t seem to find it. Perhaps when you get home you can send me the name of it again and I’ll have my doctor give me a new tube of it.”
I sighed.
“Dad,” I said. “I’m sitting here with a big gash across my stomach praying I don’t have to poop anytime soon, just in case I accidentally blow my stitches open. So please, stop complaining about your canker sore.”
There was an awkward pause. I felt guilty almost instantly, but still annoyed.
“All right, dearie,” he said, sounding more distant. “You get some rest, and I’ll talk to you when you get home from the hospital.”
I wanted to cry again. “When you go see Mum, will you tell her about the baby for me?” I asked.
“I’m not sure it will mean anything,” he said. “But I will tell her.”
“Tell her that he has her dimple,” I said. “And I think his eyes are going to be blue like hers.”
“All newborns have blue eyes,” he said.
“Yes, but these seem like her shade of blue,” I said. “That soft blue.”
MY FIRST NIGHT HOME from the hospital, I was sitting on the couch watching television with Dolan in my arms and Matt next to me when something terrible happened inside me. A wave of pain, a pain much worse than a contraction, swept around my back and into my torso, as if someone were grabbing me from behind and trying to rip me open with his bare hands. It pulsated. I thrust the baby into Matt’s arms and began to gasp. It was getting worse. I must be hemorrhaging. Maybe the stitches were ripping open.
“Call 911,” I gasped.
Matt vacillated. He was standing now, holding the baby, who had woken up and started to cry. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “Something awful is happening to me.”
I thought that I was going to die, that I would not get to know my son at all. I panicked at the thought of him alone, without me. But I just met you. The fire truck and paramedics were there within two minutes. By the time they arrived I’d gotten myself down to the floor, then back up on the couch again, lying full-length on my back. The pain had subsided, but the ghost of it hung around my waist, as if it might come back at any moment.
I realized what it had to be. A back spasm. The paramedics walked me through a series of questions, but it was clear that’s what they thought it was too. While they were examining me, Dolan pooped violently and loudly. They all laughed, including Matt. There’s nothing like a fart joke to make men chummy. They offered to take me to the hospital, but the thought of going back to that place was too gruesome to contemplate. As long as the spasm didn’t come back, I’d be okay. I had my Vicodin and my Motrin. It was time for a dose.
After they left, I wondered, What would happen if I died? Would Dolan be raised by Matt and his mother? Would he know little to nothing of my family? Miss his mother for his whole life? I felt foolish for making Matt call 911. But I had just experienced the process of giving life, so death no longer seemed theoretical. I wasn’t about to tempt fate.
MY SISTER ALISON flies only if her final destination is Venice. That is her unspoken rule. For about twenty years, she did not fly at all. In the early eighties, she’d gone to Italy with my mother, not long after they both finished college. On the flight back to the States, there was some turbulence. Alison had been seated next to a priest.
“She was asking him about last rites,” my mother said, rolling her eyes. “And shaking. I don’t think we’ll be getting her back on a plane anytime soon.”
Mum was right. Alison crisscrossed America by train and by automobile for decades, never setting foot on a plane. Then in 2002, Wib and Sean had enticed her to come to Venice. I flew to New York to meet her, and we took a direct flight to Marco Polo together. Some medication was required, and it was obvious she didn’t like it, but if the payoff included being able to lift her face to the sun in Piazza San Marco while drinking a $9 cappuccino, it was worth it.
Over the years I’d tried to convince her to come to San Francisco. “Our most European city,” I’d say. “The food. The markets, the cappuccino. The hills, the Bay, the architecture. You would love it here.” While I was pregnant, I tried again. Having Alison come after Wib would be the perfect solution to new mother angst. She’d get to see California and she’d charge through my house, restoring order without
ever breaking a sweat.
“I’m sending Katy,” she said. “Katy is my proxy.”
“Can she cook?” I asked. My niece was a junior at Bowdoin. When I was in Maine, we either went out for Thai together or hit one of the seafood shacks that specialized in big oily baskets of fried shrimp or clams. Every Christmas Eve, Katy participated in Alison’s giant cook-off of spring rolls. But beyond that, I hadn’t seen much evidence of culinary talent.
“Of course she can cook,” Alison said. Her tone said, Don’t beg, I am not coming. You are not Piazza San Marco. “She can do whatever you tell her to do. She takes instruction very well.”
“Can she drive?” Katy knew how to drive, of course—our father had taught her—but whether she possessed a legal license was a perpetual question.
“Not in Maine,” Alison said. “Not until she takes that alcohol awareness class. But she can drive in other states. Definitely in California.”
“Okay,” I said. I still couldn’t picture Katy sweeping through my house in a tornado of efficiency.
Benet chortled when I told him that Alison was sending Katy.
“What if she and Matt hit it off?” he said. “After all, they are closer in age than you and Matt are, right?”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “I think Matt has a little bit more class than that.”
“I hope so,” Benet replied.
KATY ARRIVED having just had a fight with her on-again, off-again boyfriend, involving some past violation on her part of the code of proper girlfriend conduct. I was too dazed from the pain of attempting to breast-feed to absorb all the details, but I gathered there was some slight overlapping of her affections. Both young men were angry with her. Both of them wanted to discuss her treachery at length. I heard her muttering on the phone at 3 A.M. She woke up anywhere between 11 A.M. and noon, emerged sleepily, still looking to me like the towheaded, sweet-faced toddler she was not so long ago, sat down to share a cup of tea with me, and, almost immediately, the phone would ring. She’d smile apologetically and retreat outside with the phone and her smokes to engage in yet another round of What Katy Did. I propped myself up on the couch with the not particularly helpful horseshoe-shaped breast-feeding pillow and tentatively offered Dolan the breast again.
Everyone tells you how awful labor is. Everyone tells you how much it sucks not to get sleep when you bring home a newborn. Everyone tells you that breast-feeding is extremely important and that your child will be ten times smarter, stronger, and better-looking if you do it. No one ever mentions that in the early days, breast-feeding hurts like hell. It doesn’t feel natural; it feels like torture. No matter how much potion and lotion you slather onto your poor nipples, they still feel as though someone has been chewing on them for days. That’s because someone has been chewing on them for days. And not lovingly, not tantalizingly, not playfully. Chewing on them as if they were a tough but tasty clam’s neck. While Katy was getting verbally spanked by her ex-boyfriends, Dolan suckled and I cried.
I knew I loved him, but he seemed much more like a small animal than a small human. I had imagined him burrowing into my breast sweetly. Instead he fought it, then reluctantly took it, then slobbered over it. He was like a thirsty piglet, and often a piglet without enough sense to find the trough. The best part was when he fell asleep on it. Then he looked sweet. Then he seemed like a real baby. But while the various lactation consultants I’d had at the hospital gave contradictory advice on most aspects of breast-feeding, they were in agreement over one thing: Never let the baby fall asleep on the nipple.
These lactation gurus speak of “the latch” as if the nipple were a key and the baby’s mouth a keyhole and there is only one way to get the damn door open. It’s simply not that precise. “Oh,” one nurse had said knowingly in the hospital, inspecting my tender nipple. “Bad latch.” Her tone made me feel like a failure. Then she proceeded to shove my breast into the baby’s mouth in a way that seemed not that different from the way I’d been doing it. In my first few days home, a number of friends who had breast-feeding experience came over. “Let me see your latch,” they’d say. (It is the baby who is doing the physical latching on to the nipple, but it is the mother’s job to make sure he or she is doing it right. Thus it is not his or her latch, but yours. This is a fantastic summation of the responsibilities of motherhood in general.) I’d oblige, and half would say, sunnily, “That looks good.” The other half would wince and make some adjustments and instruct me to do it that way and only that way from now on or suffer terrible consequences. It was like having someone try to tell you how to have an orgasm. The truth is, I don’t think there was any conceivable way to avoid misery. Two things happen in those first few weeks: First, your nipples do get tougher—tougher to the point where you can’t imagine how they ever responded to a hand brushing across them. Second, the baby grows and his or her mouth gets bigger and thus is able to get a better grasp on more of the breast.
My incision hurt and I was afraid to even look at it. It wasn’t the outside I feared so much as the internal stuff. What if it ruptured or got infected? Every time I sat up, it felt as though there were a chef’s knife resting on my belly, with an Oxford English Dictionary sitting on top of it. I slithered out of bed sideways trying to avoid using any of my abdominal muscles. Or rather, what was left of them. I had imagined how nice it would be to sleep on my stomach again after the baby was born, but there was no way I’d be doing that anytime soon. I didn’t give a damn about having a scar—but I was still pissed about the C-section. It was definitely going to take longer to recover. The only bonus was that because of state law, I’d get an extra two weeks at home now. Between California’s disability payments and my accrued vacation time, I’d have eleven weeks with my baby before going back to work.
“Phew,” Katy said, coming back into the room, shaking her head.
“Which one was that?” I asked.
“Franco,” she said, picking up her mug of tea.
“Is he still mad?” I didn’t really care, but felt I should ask.
“Oh yeah,” Katy said. She looked around the living room. “Hey, do you mind if I smoke some pot?”
I would have liked to smoke some pot myself. I would have liked to smoke myself into oblivion. But I was pretty sure it would not help with my current state of paranoia about whether I’d achieved a good latch or not. Dolan was sleeping. I put him down on the couch, blocking his route to the floor with a pillow. Social Services would love this tableau. I took Katy into the kitchen and showed her my stash. Dregs in three different plastic baggies, well over a year old now. Some more weed ground down into a fine dust at the bottom of a wooden dugout. “It’s not exactly fresh,” I told her. “But you’re welcome to it.”
Her eyes lit up. “Great,” she said. “I’ll just do it in the bedroom.”
Off my caretaker went to get high.
When my best friend from college had her first child, her mother came to stay. The mother had announced on the phone, before her arrival, that all she was going to do was “sit in a rocking chair and hold the baby.” In other words, no cleaning, no cooking, just baby holding. “Which is what I wanted to do,” my friend said to me. She, and others, had warned me about the unhelpful houseguest who comes to “help take care of the baby.” Katy wasn’t unhelpful; she did everything I told her to. But I had to tell her what to do. I didn’t want a servant; I wanted someone to take care of me.
Liza had come that first day when I was all alone with Dolan for the first time and given me a foot rub. She brought magazines, she made me lunch without asking questions, she cleaned my apartment. In between tasks, she sat on the back step and smoked. “I’m the maid,” she said. “The maid needs her smoking breaks.” But she wasn’t the maid; she was someone who could anticipate my needs before I did. She’d even brought me a heating pad for my back, without my asking. Sally, from book the club, was the same way. She arrived on my second full day home with lunch in Tupperware containers and a full dinner, including sal
ad, all ready for me. Sally and Liza were both mothers. Katy was not. Neither was Matt. I wanted my mother, who would not be coming.
Dolan did make it easier on me by being a very good sleeper. He’d go several hours at a stretch during the night, and even though breast-feeding was miserable, I wasn’t finding it all that hard to wake up for him. Still I was thrilled on his tenth night home when he truly slept through the night. Refreshed after my seven hours of sleep, I sang his praises all day. Then in the afternoon, I realized I felt feverish. One of my breasts was hard. An angry red flush was spreading across it. I took out my books and frantically looked for possible causes, even though I knew instinctively what it had to be: mastitis. I called the doctor, who couldn’t see me until the morning. In the meantime, ice packs. Chicken broth. Pumping. Tylenol. Fluids. And sleeping.
I went out to the living room and barked orders to Matt and Katy, who were watching television. In an hour, I wanted dinner. Wib had left some minestrone in the freezer. They should start thawing it. In a half hour, I wanted a fresh ice pack. I should be brought ginger ale regularly. I was sick and I wanted to see some effective caretaking, starting right now. They both looked at me and nodded.