by Faith Salie
Tracy is a graceful, unprecious mother and a blunt CEO. She’s the type of person who gives a TED talk and casually asks you, “Are you going to Davos this year?”, charitably implying you even understand what the World Economic Forum is. To which I answer, out loud, “No, not this year,” and in my head I add, “Largely because, for me, Davos is a knight in service to Stannis Baratheon, Lord of Dragonstone.”
John caught up with us in the middle of the baby clothes. I gave him a kiss and grabbed his hand, wanting to push the reset button on this exciting outing. In one of the many parenting books I’d been marking up with notes, I’d learned that marital satisfaction peaks during the third trimester of a couple’s first pregnancy. I was weeks shy of my third trimester. Except for the fact that we really weren’t having sex because John humbly feared he might impale our fetus, we were pretty darn maritally satisfied. It was a good time to set sail on our journey into a sea of onesies. I’d been anticipating soft pastels, but I found myself swimming in neon pink and purple for girls and a lot of chartreuse and brown for boys. My son’s potential layette featured monster trucks, gaping T. Rexes, and suspiciously friendly sharks. I especially did not want my boy to wear the onesie that proclaimed TOUGH LIKE DADDY. I shuddered to think I could walk to the girls’ rack and find PUSSY LIKE MOMMY. Furthermore, I did not want him wearing clothes festooned with footballs. As a gangly adolescent, my husband experienced so many blows to his head playing football that the only realistic onesie for his kid would say, CONCUSSED LIKE DADDY. I await the outfits that celebrate our family’s de facto traits, such as PALE LIKE MOMMY and HALF JEWISH. We didn’t linger.
Tracy eagerly marched us toward the breast corner and surveyed the display of breast pumps wistfully. “God, I miss breastfeeding,” she told us all, causing her children to scatter. She turned to me and announced, “This is what they’re made for. This is your breasts’ time to shine!” I duly wrote in my notebook, “breasts—time to shine.” The last time my breasts shone was when I guest-starred on a Roger Corman TV show with two Playmates. (The Playmates were women, not what I nicknamed my boobs.) I was part of a nefarious duo named Bend and Stretch. Being the shorter criminal, I played Bend. Being the only actress sans breast implants, the wardrobe lady had to shove a total of four of those squishy chicken cutlet things into my push-up bra just to make me look like I belonged in this pneumatic, vice-riddled world.
Tracy strongly suggested the Medela Pump in Style. I wasn’t sure how one actually pumps stylishly—is it a matter of technique or flattering flange size? I looked at all the parts and was too intimidated to ask how it works or when to use it. Tracy registered my consternation and assured me I’d figure it out. I did not appreciate her confidence in me. I don’t like being told I’ll figure something out. I’m taking notes because I want it figured out now please, especially something that involves my body being sucked into a machine. I prayed there was a Genius Bar for breast pumps. We discussed at length whether to get a backpack-carry pump or an over the shoulder. When I turned to seek John’s input, I spied him playing with stuffed animals. I was already learning that motherhood is an exercise in gut-led solo decisions. I went for the shoulder strap. Check.
I summoned John for our introduction to several different “bottle systems.” I’d just thought there were baby bottles. I had no idea I’d have to commit to a system. Dr. Brown’s, Playtex, Born Free, Evenflo—most of them sounded like feminine hygiene products, so I gravitated toward the one that didn’t. Then our guide delivered more shocking news: she warned us that our baby might reject the nipples we offer him. At first I panicked, because there’s not much I can do about my nipples, although I have been known to cover them with Band-Aids when going braless. Then I realized we were talking about the nipples that come with the bottles. Effectively I learned that we might end up chucking the whole nonreturnable, nonrefundable system because a baby might demonstrate an irrational discrimination in nipples. I sent a message to my uterus: You’ll take the nipples I give you and you’ll like them. Because I’m your mother, that’s why. How could I anticipate my child’s teat preference? I looked deep into John’s eyes and said, “Dr. Brown’s? Do we just go for it?” We went for it, mostly because Tracy was ready to move. So we sped past the bottle warmers, breast milk bags, bottle sterilizers, nipple cream, nursing pillows, nipple shields, and areola cozies as she breezily waved her hand in their direction and said, “You can worry about those later.” I was worried now. I was engorged with worry. Nothing about the words nipple shield sounded pleasant or even nonviolent.
John was gone again. I’d pictured us ambling through the store, holding hands all the while, possibly stopping to give each other soulful looks every time we picked out something that would cosset our son. As I strode past the registry center, I noticed unlined couples sitting with their “Registry Consultants,” like lovebirds happily building a nest, twig by overpriced twig. How did they know what they wanted? I envied them their togetherness, not just the way they were side by side, but also the way they seemed to have their shit together. They looked cheerful and confident, with a shared buoyancy we were lacking. Or maybe it was a blood sugar thing. Neither John nor I had eaten breakfast.
Tracy escorted us through the monitor center, a.k.a. Fearmongering Central. We chose a monitor expensive enough to make us feel like good parents who didn’t want their child to die of lack of surveillance but not so spendy that we felt like total chumps. My father, based on his reliably lackluster memory of my early years, tells me that he thinks he and my mother had a monitor, but only for sound. I feel cheated knowing that my folks weren’t constantly willing me to keep breathing by visual means like decent, loving parents of today. The only benign residents of that department were a row of sleepy stuffies—sleep-inducing sound machines implanted inside cuddly surrogates. Once again, I found John moonily clutching a few of the animals. John, with a handicapped sister, didn’t get much attention as a boy, and he’d explained that his stuffed animals were real friends to him. One day when he was about twelve, he discovered his father had unceremoniously thrown out all his stuffed animals “to make more room in the house.” Seeing my husband like that, smiling gently while cradling something small and cute, gave me a glimpse of the daddy I hoped he’d be. Which was the type of father he never had.
There was no time for an earnest family meeting about whether to register for the Sleep Sheep or Gentle Giraffe. We’d been late; family karate class was nigh. We went with sheep, the obvious choice.
We breezed past mysterious, bright things called Boppys, Bumbos, and Gyminis as Tracy hustled us all down the stairs. Fittingly, as we entered the bowels of the store, she and Sam introduced us to “the shitters.” A shitter, they explained to us, in front of their mortified children, is what they named the bouncing, vibrating, music-playing, automatic-rocking contraption that unfailingly induced intestinal movement. According to them, this was not optional. I nodded obediently and jotted down, “shitter.” No time to stop and decide between the Snugabunny or Rainforest Friends. I looked at John with a mix of weariness and panic. My blood pressure was rising as my glucose fell. For me, choosing the very first things that would surround a miniperson I hadn’t met—the most important person in the world for whom I would be 100 percent responsible—felt momentous. I really didn’t know if he should be looking at dangling birdies or dangling monkeys. “Choose later,” Tracy urged, and we entered the most confusing department of all: the Stroller Vortex.*1
I turned to John and said, “You choose,” and abandoned him during his tutorial with Sam and Tracy. Daddy could decide on things with wheels—I decided then and there that I would carry my child in a sling and breastfeed him lissomely while walking down the street. Plus I forgot to mention that, at the time of this excursion, I had not yet capitulated to maternity clothes, so a severe camel toe was effecting a private punishment. I walked like John Wayne over to the room devoted to recliners and sank into one. I put my feet on a nursing footstool. Did you
know there are nursing footstools? I didn’t. Something else I needed to get, or else I would be breastfeeding my child at a suboptimal angle. I closed my eyes and tried not to cry in front of Tracy’s kids, who were vigorously testing the structural integrity of the chairs.
It was all too, too much. It had taken my whole life to get here and now it was too rushed. This baby was coming too soon. I had willfully ignored this ineluctable need to gear up just as I’d been in denial about needing maternity clothes. Don’t get me wrong, I’d always wanted to be a mother. I felt intensely lucky. But at forty, I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready because I was forty, because being forty meant I’d lived a long time as just me, as someone who could fairly well do what she pleased, and I’d created—finally, after a lot of hard work and luck—a life that did please me, immensely. And at forty I was old enough, and had seen enough, to know that this baby would change everything forever. The sheer amount of crap in that hellhole proved it to me. That one teeny baby could require so much stuff filled me with terror.*2 Not because of the expense of it all, which is admittedly offensive, not because our “nursery” would be the room where we had our desk, printer, and John’s humidors, but because of the undeniable necessity of it all: my child will need so much, and I have to give it to him. Also because of the expectation—if I don’t furnish him with the best, I’m shortchanging him. I don’t mean in a competitive, consumptive way—I never cared about having the blingest stroller or the $3,500 Lucite crib. I mean that you want to give your kid the finest things that will help him grow and thrive and comfortably eliminate waste in a vibrating seat that plays a jazz version of “Frère Jacques.”
I felt that we were in a kind of hell. A fluorescent-lit capitalistic hellmouth of choices. There’s a phenomenon identified by psychologists and economists. They call it “the paradox of choice” or “analysis paralysis.” Basically it says that the more choices we have, the less happy we are. Too much information is debilitating. I believe this, even if it makes for a strong argument for arranged marriage. I was paralyzed in that Lac-T-Girl recliner. Every item on our registry represented something I didn’t know about the most challenging thing I would ever do, and that frightened me. This flaming abyss was a lesson in how much I had to get and how much I had to give up.
What I know now is that you can’t possibly figure out what’s best for your child ahead of time. Most of the junk you buy doesn’t matter—as long as bottles and bottoms are clean, and you put your baby to sleep on his back, it will all work out. And what works for your child this week won’t be necessary next week. Nipples get rejected.
(I will say this, though: Get the wipes warmer and the Snotsucker. I know you’re thinking that kids today have it too easy and how, back in our day, babies walked uphill in the snow both ways with cold butt cheeks. But warm wipes feel really good on everyone involved in the fecal maintenance business. And NoseFrida the Snotsucker? This is not a villain in a Pixar movie; it evacuates mucus. Like out of your kid’s brain. It’s a tube you put in your mouth connected to a kind of syringe thing that you insert into your baby’s nose. And then you suck. Ignore the one-star reviewer on Amazon who reports, “I suck and suck and her boogers barely move,” to which I say, dude, please get your COPD checked out. Even your baby will appear shocked at its efficacy. I use that thing with a zeal that verges on child abuse. It’s from Sweden, and though it’s not sexy or cute, you should get one.)
A Romanian facialist gave me the best advice I ever received when I was pregnant. When someone is looking at your skin under a magnifying glass, you feel a strong sense of intimacy with her. So I confessed how anxious I felt about not knowing how to take care of a baby, and she offered me these simple words: Your son will teach you how to be his mama. This brought tears to my eyes not caused by extractions from my pores. And she was right: there was nothing I could really do ahead of time, no gadget I could buy that would prepare me, say, for the fact that my now three-year-old will not go to sleep unless we hug and kiss his stuffed excavator and then place exactly four blankets, in a particular order, over my son’s head.
But I didn’t know all this then, sprawled out in the center of the netherworld, completely stultified.
And that is where our Virgil left us. Tracy and her karate kids had guided us as far as they could. Unlike Dante, we had to climb out of the inferno alone.
John joined me in the recliner section. Dazed by the alpha wake, we stared at each other silently. We were not going through this experience as a team even though we were similarly enervated. I dispatched John to find a salesperson to talk to about baby furniture and let a few tears slide as I sat in the puffy lavender recliner that looked very ’80s. I have a soft spot in my heart for this recliner, because it now lives in our bedroom. In it, I have spent countless hours reading stories to my kids and writing this book. But that first time I sat in it, I wept. Tracy was gone, so I could finally snivel. And oh, the hunger. I longed for a Diaper Genie to grant me one wish of a Luna bar.
When John returned, it was an excellent time for a brief, intense fight. We were both so shell-shocked and bitchy, it was inevitable. We decided to compare levels of fatigue and hunger. This was a bad move on John’s part. He was outnumbered, two to one. Because when I said, “You have no idea how exhausted and starving I am,” and he replied, “I’m just as tired and hungry as you are,” my only option was to break the news that I WAS THE ONE GESTATING ANOTHER HUMAN BEING, A HUMAN BEING HE MADE WITH HIS PENIS. There’s not much a man can say when you remind him that you’re pregnant, and he will never ever understand how you feel. It was a trump card I played only once, flung down in the fiery maws of the hellmouth.
We left to meet our friend Sharon for tea, to look at photo books she’d made of our wedding. I sat there, sipping herbal something with no Splenda, contemplating how far away the wedding seemed. Just four months earlier, we were breathlessly—possibly nauseatingly—in love, full of passion and hope. You could see it in the photos she showed us, taken all over Rome, from the Forum to the Villa Borghese Park. Beaming in front of the fountain in Piazza Navona in my wedding dress, embraced by my new husband, I looked care- and camel-toe-free. I thanked Sharon for her beautiful work while John stayed largely silent and got to drink caffeine.
We were not peaking, John and I. If we aren’t peaking now, I wondered, have we already peaked? If it’s this stressful now, how will I ever be a mother to a baby who lives outside of me?
—
Two days later, John took me maternity clothes shopping and sat patiently through an unsexy fashion show. A week later, he gave me a Valentine’s Day present of a special photo he’d had repaired and framed for me. That morning we’d been running late for Buy Buy Baby, I learned, he’d been on the phone with the framers trying to straighten out my gift they’d botched.
Since climbing out of that pit, I’m relieved to say that we’ve experienced countless peaks and valleys, and I can only assume they’ll keep on coming. That’s parenthood; that’s marriage; that’s life.
Just be sure to have a baby with someone who will go with you to hell and back.
* * *
*1 We returned to the Stroller Vortex again and then tested out strollers at two more stores. I grilled friends about their strollers for weeks and fell down the rabbit hole of online customer reviews: “Bugaboo vs. City Mini.” Scoff if you must, but when you don’t have a car or even parking for your stroller, because your husband’s dog takes up valuable floor space, this shit matters.
*2 Buy Buy Baby puts a more positive spin on it, on its website: “Who knew such a tiny bundle of love could need so much stuff?”
Whenever I hear a recovering addict confess of booze or cocaine, “I miss it every day,” I totally understand, because that’s how I feel about eyelash extensions. For two years and two months I batted lush, long, dark, curly, PERFECT lashes. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could still flutter them.
Can lashes change your life? Yes, depending on who applies them
.
I’m a little afraid to tally exactly how much I spent on my lashes during that time. Let’s just say that I could have kept a small public radio station in one of the Dakotas from having to do pledge drives for a year.
It all began as I’m pretty sure most of these dark journeys do: a phone call with a stranger possessing a thick Russian accent who promised to give me what I need. Her name was Karina, and when I told her what I do for a living—that is, hope that if people are listening to me they are simultaneously finding me slightly attractive, even on the radio—she assured me that she knew exactly what to do. I’d found her after watching Kathy Lee and Hoda Lucy-and-Ethel their way through a lesson on “Lash Dip” with their beauty expert. This was back in the days when I would turn on the fourteenth hour of the Today show and let its frantic drunken song fill the apartment while I wasted more time than I ever knew I had. Nowadays the TV is never on before dark, because science warns me that if my young children pass by a live television screen, they will become violent and obese and believe that Crunch Berries occur in nature. Lash Dip sounded great—better than guacamole—a no-commitment dunk in gunk that would make your lashes dark for a few weeks so you didn’t have to use mascara. When I googled Lash Dip, I found out Karina was a local purveyor. I e-mailed her. She said this warranted a phone call. She talked me out of the dip immediately (won’t curl, will clump—and “clump” sounds really ominous in a Russian accent) and assured me that what I wanted were lash extensions. “Dey vil be beautiful. Hew vil loff dem.”