Wiped!

by Rebecca Eckler

  I know my mother asked me how the baby was, and that annoyed me. But it annoys me too when people don’t ask how the baby is. I’m a sleep-deprived new mother who can’t work a stupid Diaper Genie. I’m allowed to be annoyed about whatever I want, whenever I want.

  11:10 A.M.

  I call my friend Sara, who had a baby two weeks ago, right after I did. She must be like me, yearning for adult conversation. I had tried Vivian, who had a baby six weeks before me, but she wasn’t home. Sara is practically in the same stage I’m at, and it would be fun to moan about our lives. We always have liked to complain.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Sara, David, and Ella,” goes her voice-mail message.

  I can’t believe it. This is a woman I used to go drinking with, and now she’s changed her home voice-mail message to include her three-week-old baby? I’m so shocked that I hang up without leaving a message. Is there something wrong with me for not changing my voice-mail message? The thought of changing our outgoing message to include the baby didn’t even occur to me. Um, I don’t know much about babies, but I know newborns can’t speak.

  God, it’s amazing that the people you least expect to embrace parenthood are the ones who surprise you the most. Who would have thought Sara, who loved to complain about being pregnant with me, would embrace new parenthood with such a vengeance and want the world to know—via outgoing voice-mail message—that she was a proud mother?

  I leave messages for three other friends on their work machines. I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel guilty going back to bed so soon after getting out of bed. I don’t think I can fall asleep anyway. I’m past the point of tired, entering the over-tired phase, when you’re too tired to sleep. Nanny Mimi is in the baby’s room, watching her sleep and organizing her sleepers, folding and refolding, like she works at Baby Gap. The Fiancé is at work, all my friends have jobs, and my mommy friends have their children to look after and, apparently, their voice-mail messages to change. All I have is thirty-eight pounds to lose, two black eyes, and a woman in my house who I don’t know how to talk to. Make that a woman in my house whose very presence is a constant reminder that she is skinny and I am not.

  I need to turn off my brain, because over the past few days, it’s really started to sink in that life did not stop, as I thought it would, when I had the baby.

  The newspaper I write (wrote) for still appears on my doorstep every morning, much to my shock and dismay. How can they possibly manage without me? How can they possibly put out a good newspaper, when I’m not writing for them? When did I go from feeling special, like I had everything—a fiancé, a great job, a fun life—to feeling nonexistent, with nothing to do? Am I really so replaceable?

  Is this what being a mother is really like? Sara couldn’t wait to go on maternity leave. Though she’s never said this, I think one of the reasons she got pregnant was so she could go on maternity leave. I, however, have always loved my job. Sure, when I had bad days, I’d moan, “I should just get pregnant and go on maternity leave.”

  But now that I am on maternity leave, I’m not spending my days shopping for clothes (still too fat), meeting friends for lunch (they’re all working), and seeing matinees (by myself?), which is what I thought people did on maternity leave. Or at least it’s what I imagined I would be doing.

  When I first came home from the hospital, I felt like a beauty pageant queen, the center of attention. There were bouquets upon bouquets of flowers, which had arrived after the news spread of our baby’s birth. I felt like I had done something truly special. I have never received so many gift baskets and flowers in my life, even if I counted up all my birthdays and Valentine’s Days. People had never been so happy for me. They had left messages asking all about the baby, yes, but they asked about me too. Everyone wanted me to call back with all the news—the baby’s name (Rowan Joely), her weight (7 pounds, 3 ounces).

  But over the last couple of weeks, the flowers stopped coming, and so did the phone calls. The Fiancé went back to work, and the newspaper continued to show up on my doorstep, as if nothing had changed. I am on maternity leave, supposed to be bonding with my newborn, and basically, I hate my new life.

  1 P.M.

  “Hi!” I say, calling the Fiancé at his office.

  “Hi.”

  “So, when are you coming home?” I ask, trying to sound like I don’t really care. The thing is, I do care. I really want to know when he’s coming home.

  “Beck, it’s one o’clock.”

  “I know. So when are you coming home?”

  “I’ll be home when I get home,” he snaps.

  “So, like around five?”

  “Beck!”

  “Fine! Bye!” I say, hanging up.

  This conversation—rather, me asking the Fiancé, “When are you coming home?”—has become a daily ritual. Along with asking, “Am I getting skinnier?” I can’t help but call the Fiancé a half dozen times a day, asking when he’ll be home. I’m bored.

  It’s not even that I miss him. It’s just that I want someone around, someone I can complain to, someone who understands that this is hard. Why am I feeling this way when there’s actually a new person in my life who is supposed to bring me nothing but joy? Do other new mothers call their husbands at work, at 10 A.M., asking when they’re going to be home? Or is it just me? At least today I waited until after lunch to ask. Last week I asked when he thought he’d be coming home…before he even left the house.

  1:30 P.M.

  I’m lying in bed, wishing I still had some Tylenol with codeine left over from when I had my C-section. God, those pills were good. I’m too tired to read. I’m too tired to watch television. I close my eyes, playing over in my head the moment the doctor held up the baby for me to see for the first time. I cried, for the first time in my life, tears of joy. She was so cute and slimy and red. She was so beautiful. She was so perfect. My stomach knots with happiness and tears of joy appear behind my closed lids as I replay the moment. The first time I saw the baby is a thought I replay in my head every time I close my eyes, like replaying the first time some guy you love kissed you. Seeing the baby for the first time was the happiest moment of my life. I actually ache thinking about how much I love her. I fall asleep, smiling. Life isn’t that bad. No, life couldn’t be better.

  5:15 P.M.

  Someone kissing my head wakes me up.

  It’s the Fiancé. I have somehow been asleep all afternoon.

  “My parents invited us over for dinner,” he says, sitting on the bed.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “We don’t have to go if you don’t want.”

  The Fiancé knows me well and knows how I’ve felt lately about going to his parents’.

  “No, we can go,” I say, not adding, “What else are we going to do?” which is what I’m thinking.

  It’s not that I don’t love my in-laws. I do. They are the most generous, kind in-laws a girl could ever hope for. It’s just that sometimes they annoy the crap out of me.

  When you have a baby, no one warns you about how painful sleep deprivation is, and no one warns you how annoying relatives become. Was I just so tired all the time now that everybody annoyed me? Or was it everyone else who had changed? Sure, people told me I absolutely needed a Diaper Genie, but no one bothered to warn me that my in-laws were going to drive me bonkers after I had a baby.

  “Hey, you have to look at this,” the Fiancé says, lifting his pant legs.

  “What?”

  “I’m wearing one black sock and one blue sock, that’s how tired I was this morning. I can’t even dress properly anymore.”

  Pre-baby, the Fiancé dressed well. Now, not only does he constantly look kind of rumpled, like all his clothes have been run over by a truck, but he’s wearing mismatching socks.

  I don’t dare huff, “Well, at least you still get to get dressed because you’re a productive member of society, unlike me, and get to go to work.”

  The baby, of course, is sleeping. Of course she is
sleeping now, at dinnertime, because that means she won’t sleep later, when we want to sleep, you know, at the normal hour humans are supposed to go to bed. I get out of bed and go in to look at her. I love the smell of her room. It always smells like baby powder, even though we don’t actually use any baby powder on her. Do all babies smell as good as mine? God, she is beautiful when she sleeps.

  I notice a pad of lined paper on the baby’s changing table. Nanny Mimi, upon my recommendation—my only recommendation to her—has begun to keep a log of when the baby pees, poos, and feeds. It’s like the most boring schedule you’ve ever seen. Today, Nanny Mimi has written:

  9:00 A.M.: pees.

  9:15: feeds.

  10:30: pees.

  Noon: feeds.

  1:45: poos and pees.

  2:00: feeds.

  2:30: pees.

  4:00: feeds and poos.

  I had thought I would eventually see rhyme and reason to the schedule and that that would be helpful. Like, every day at 2 P.M. the baby poos, and I’d make sure I was “busy” taking a shower. But the only thing I’ve learned about babies from this schedule is there really is no rhyme or reason to when they eat or poo, at least from what I can see. I stopped taking notes about her bowel movements and eating schedule two weeks ago. What was the point? It changed daily. I think that Nanny Mimi, however, feels important taking the notes, so I haven’t bothered to tell her she can stop if she wants to.

  6:30 P.M.

  We’re at the Fiancé’s parents’ condo, which, depending on your sensibility, is either in a great location or the most unfortunate location ever, next to living at an airport. The Fiancé’s parents’ condo is in the tower right next to ours. It’s in a great location for us because we don’t have to go outside to visit them, which means the baby can just be in her sleeper and we don’t have to worry about bundling her up, and the in-laws are readily available if we need them to look after the baby, or if they just want to, as they say, “pop by.” If we’re at their place and she needs a change of clothes, we can just run back to our condo and be back at theirs in two minutes. We can take the indoor hallways from our condo to theirs in a minute and a half, in fact.

  The proximity of their condo to ours is unfortunate because it’s located in the next tower and we can get there in a minute and a half, and they can easily “pop by.” Which they do. Often. They never “popped by” our condo before the baby. This is new.

  The baby is asleep in the portable bassinet when we walk into the in-laws’ condo.

  “I saw this really interesting show on Dr. Phil,” the mother-in-law says as we sit down at the kitchen table.

  I’m convinced that no good sentence has ever begun with “I saw this really interesting show on Dr. Phil.” It didn’t when I was single and childless, and it sure doesn’t now. “It was about how to get your baby to sleep through the night,” she continues. Ever since I gave birth, most of the mother-in-law’s sentences begin with “I read this really interesting article” or “I saw this really interesting show” or “My friend’s granddaughter.” And all the shows and articles and conversations she tells us about are about babies.

  I know the mother-in-law means well, but I’m not interested in what experts have to say about getting your child to sleep. If I were, I would have read books. Every mother has told me it takes about three months before they sleep through the night. I don’t need experts. I don’t need books. Plus, what do people think? That new mothers don’t pay attention to this stuff? If there were a foolproof way to make sure your baby slept through the night at six weeks, don’t you think I would have done it by now? I try not to roll my eyes. I don’t say anything like “Oh, tell me about what Dr. Phil has to say, please, please, please!” because I know she’s going to anyway.

  It’s been hard on the Fiancé to mediate between his parents and me ever since the baby came into our lives. He’s an only child and a bit of a mama’s boy, as most male only children are. And he’s caught in the middle when his parents tell him to do something with our baby and I tell him to do something else. He doesn’t want to hurt their feelings, and he definitely doesn’t want to hurt mine, especially since I’m still pretty hormonal and if he uses even a slightly harsh tone with me, I’ll cry. In fact, if the Fiancé even looks at me strangely these days, I cry.

  The other day there was almost a blowup between the in-laws and me, and the Fiancé, of course, was stuck in the middle. The in-laws offered to pick up a jumbo box of diapers and wipes for us, which was a very thoughtful and considerate thing to do. “That would be great,” I told the Fiancé over the phone, when he called to tell me his parents would do this for us. Like Nanny Mimi, the in-laws aren’t exactly comfortable with me either, which is why they call the Fiancé at work to ask him questions and then he calls me to pass them along.

  “Tell them we need Pampers diapers and Huggies wipes,” I told the Fiancé. I’m not sure how I knew I wanted Pampers diapers and Huggies wipes, but I know that’s what I wanted. I think Ronnie, who has three children and thus is an expert in the variety of diapers and wipes on the market, told me. I didn’t need to read any parenting books, because Ronnie was a walking, talking parenting book. Whenever I had a question, I’d call her.

  “Okay,” the Fiancé said.

  Two minutes later he called me back. “My mother told me she heard that Huggies were better diapers than Pampers,” he said.

  I immediately felt all my muscles tighten and my jaw clench. I was immediately annoyed. All I wanted was Pampers, and it had turned into an issue.

  “What, did she hear it on Dr. Phil or something? Did she read an article about it?” I asked, the sarcasm dripping off my tongue like thick chocolate sauce (mmm…chocolate).

  “No, I think her friend’s granddaughter uses them,” he answered, ignoring my tone.

  “Whatever. So, what did you tell your mother?” I asked, trying to hold in my anger.

  “I told her you were the mother and that if you said Pampers diapers were better, we’re getting Pampers,” he said. “We almost got into a fight. I was very short with her.”

  “Well, thank you for siding with me,” I said.

  “You know, they’re just trying to help,” he said.

  “Then why don’t they just do what we say?” I asked. “Why do they always have their own opinions? Why couldn’t they just go and get Pampers?”

  “Because they think they know best.”

  “Well, they don’t.”

  “I never said they did.”

  “So, when are you coming home?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

  “Good-bye, Beck!”

  I knew he wanted to get off the phone with me so he could call his mother to apologize for being short with her. If there’s one thing the Fiancé hates just as much as pissing me off, it’s feeling guilty about hurting his mother’s feelings. This is annoying but is also what makes him a good father. When my single friends wonder if their partners would make good fathers, I always say, “Look at how he treats his mother.” If men treat their mothers well, you can be pretty sure they’re going to treat their children well. At least that’s my theory.

  7:30 P.M.

  After dinner, the mother-in-law puts a box of chocolate-covered coffee beans on the table.

  I take one. If I nibble on it like I’m a mouse, this one chocolate-covered coffee bean could possibly last me ten minutes. Was it only months ago I was polishing off entire large bags of Cheesies, and eating two Big Macs a day without thinking twice about it, because it felt so good to give in to every craving? After all, it was the baby in me who was craving the Cheesies and Big Macs. Or that’s what I had told myself.

  “You’re being so good,” the mother-in-law says. “I would never have that kind of willpower.” It’s true, I am being good. Since the baby came out of me, I’ve cut out most carbohydrates and I try to eat only two meals a day; my treat is one chocolate-covered coffee bean a day. Still, the weight is not coming off. I’ve never had to d
iet before. I have a newfound respect for anyone who has tried to lose weight, because it’s really fucking difficult.

  I don’t think I really have that much willpower. I thought the cravings for french fries and chocolates would go away once the baby came. They haven’t. I still crave chocolate. I still crave potato chips. In fact, I could easily go for a Big Mac and super-size fries right now. The only thing stopping me is that I’m wearing a pair of the Fiancé’s trackpants. The only thing worse than wearing a pair of the Fiancé’s trackpants would be to be seen eating a Big Mac and super-size fries while wearing the Fiancé’s trackpants.

  November 10

  2 P.M.

  I decide to take a shower. I think I fall asleep in the shower. Is it possible to fall asleep standing up? Well, elephants do it. When I get out, I know something is just not right. I know I’ve missed some process of showering. Did I forget to soap myself? No. Aha! I forgot to shampoo my hair. That’s it! I remember putting conditioner in, but I don’t remember rinsing out any suds. Right. This is what they must mean by “mommy brain.” I remember feeling this way when I was pregnant, too, forgetting to do basic things, like putting shampoo in my hair. From pregnancy brain to mommy brain—will it ever end? Will I get my brain cells back? That reminds me. I must get the Fiancé to take a roll of film in for developing.

  The Fiancé and I now spend a lot of time taking pictures. We have throwaway cameras all over the condo, along with two digital cameras. Though we have taken literally hundreds of digital photographs of the baby, we have yet to e-mail them to anyone. This is because the Fiancé can’t figure out how to do it, and neither can I. (Hey, we’re the only two idiots who can’t figure out how to work a Diaper Genie too. And it took three hours for him to put the stroller together.) Because we have taken so many pictures, it would take hours to pick out the good ones (otherwise known as the ones I don’t look fat in). So we also take photographs of everything the baby does with the throwaway cameras as well. Mostly these are pictures of her sleeping, because that’s mostly all she does.