by Suzy Becker
“She was an amazing partner, too,” I said. Aurora’s heartbeat was rock-steady every time they’d strapped a fetal monitor onto me, and she nursed two of her first three hours on the planet. She was still in the size dregs, but we were never interested in becoming percentile parents.
I went downstairs to get us good coffee on Saturday morning and got back to the room just as they were broadcasting the nursing-bathing-class reminder. Lorene grabbed Aurora, I held on to the coffees, and we headed back to the elevator beyond the front desk. “Hold up—let’s see some ID, please!” I looked behind the desk to see who had said it.
“We’re just going to the nursing-bathing class downstairs,” I said, pushing the “down” button.
“Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no. Your baby is not allowed off this floor until you go home. You shouldn’t even be in the hall without one of those carts. And whichever one of you is going, you’re going to need some ID to get back on the floor.”
I’d made it back onto the floor with nothing but sugar packets in my pockets when I’d gone to get coffee. Lorene preempted any further conversation. “Let’s take her back to the room. I’ll stay, you get your ID and go to class.” So I breast-fed and bathed a pretend baby like taking a bicycling class without a bicycle while Lorene watched our real baby. And when I got back to the room, I breast-fed our real baby while an underemployed lactation consultant bestowed the La Leche League seal of approval upon us (me, my breasts, and my baby).
The Red Sox parade shut out all visitors until late afternoon. We watched the parade coverage and napped. I wrote. We had our meals brought up from downstairs; we could’ve been staying in a hotel staffed by nurses.
Dr. Middleton handled our discharge the next morning in a surprisingly perfunctory manner. I felt compelled to draw it out. I asked her a question about baby care; she gave me the not-my-department “ask your pediatrician” answer and was gone.
HOROSCOPE
LIBRA
Everything is turning out in your favor. Don’t stop while the momentum is building. Give it your best shot and follow through with your plans.
SCORPIO
Look over your personal papers and get things in order. You will have to act fast. Preparation now will save you time later.
For all its empowerment, natural delivery did not exempt me from the wheelchair exit. I was pushed down with Aurora in my lap, and the three of us waited curbside for our car to come around. The car seat was checked for proper installation, then we buckled our baby in and pulled out from under the overhang into the late-morning sun.
Lorene was driving, checking the rearview mirror every tenth of a mile; I craned my whole self around the passenger seat to look at Aurora every third check.
We got off the highway one exit early to pick up some milk and the Sunday Times, passing by Hudson Art & Framing on the way. “It’s a girl!” was painted in big pink letters across the windows.
“That’s Ma’s shop, peanut,” I narrated.
Lorene pulled into a parking space to have a closer look. “Geez, it’s Halloween—I completely forgot!” I had, too. It could’ve been spring or fall. We could’ve been gone two days or two months.
Lorene pulled back out onto Route 62. A half mile later, a pickup crossed the double yellow line right in front of us, careening up onto the sidewalk—beside us for an instant, then gone. We kept going. “Aren’t you going to stop?” I asked.
“There’s somebody right behind us.” I craned again; the pickup was safely stopped on the sidewalk. We were silent until the next turn. “I’m sorry,” Lorene apologized. “I’m too shaky to help. I just want to get us home.”
“If we had left the shop one second earlier . . . ” In those instants I always conjure up all the near misses we never even know about.
We took our baby and our paper and went straight to our bed.
There were still three hours until the dogs were returned and the dinner guests arrived (with dinner).
We lay there propped up on pillows, with Aurora sleeping between us, and I knew I should have been thinking how our lives had changed forever, so I tried. But it was way too soon to know how, and I preferred feeling as if she’d always been there.
The phone rang. Aurora didn’t stir. Our friend Susan Anker couldn’t hold out any longer. She was coming over. She piled onto the bed and held Aurora as though she was her own, until Aurora started crying.
“Hungry, I think,” I said. “Hide your eyes.” I didn’t care about my ninnies; I didn’t want her to see the hurts-like-a-bastard face I made when Aurora latched.
As I was pulling up my supersize mesh underpants a week later, the absurdity of the idea that we were about to host a naming-day ceremony for sixty people entered my mind, and then exited, embarrassed, as quickly as it had entered. Steve had come home two nights earlier to help us get ready and spend his last few days with his daughter. We collected anointing water from our town’s Little Pond to add to the water Steve brought from Australia’s Port Phillip Bay. Prepared food. Bought wine. Cleaned the house.
Everyone was gathered between the two old maples in the backyard. The sun was warm, directly overhead. Our baby’s first no-hat day. She was in a christening dress that had been in Lorene’s family since the nineteenth century. The three of us stood with Julie, the officiant, facing our guests. Steve, my mother, my sisters, David, and Bruce up front. Then Susan Anker and our friends who had wanted this baby with us—the village that would help us raise our child—gathered behind. The thought, the sun, looking into all the faces, made me well up.
We had just about finished cleaning up and cramming the last of the food into the refrigerator when it was time to take it back out for dinner. Steve’s farewell dinner: leftovers. Aurora was sleeping in the sling. Lorene set the table. Steve put on dinner music.
“Will you take some more photos of me with Aurora tomorrow? Nana June will eat them up.”
“We’ll get you up early; there’s a nice light in our room,” Lorene offered. Steve didn’t say anything. Lorene nudged him. “You okay?”
“Me? Oh, fine. Look.” He pushed his plate away from the edge of the table. “You two’ve got the major adjustment ahead. But leaving is hard. It was hard the last time, and she has a very strong pull, that little one.”
“Oh, c’mon, stay!” Lorene said.
“Please, Daddy?” I whined.
“Stop it! If it weren’t for my parents . . . and Mark . . . Never mind.” He got up to change the music. “Last-night dance party!”
It was only nine, but Lorene and I were ready for bed. Steve would be up all night packing, pacing, having his tea and cereal. We had a few dances and said good night. Then I went back downstairs to give Steve the compass necklace. “We’ll get it when we’re in Melbourne. Or you can bring it back before—” He lowered his head, and I centered the compass on his chest. He had been listening to 10,000 Maniacs.
“Natalie Merchant’s always reminded me of you,” he said.
“She had a baby,” I said. Just like that, without envy, without wondering whether I ever would. “G’night, honey,” I said, and we hugged good night again.
The next morning we got Steve up with us. By 11:30, we had accomplished breakfast, the photo shoot, and the trip to the post office to ship his suitcase overflow back to Australia. Everything was looking good for a one o’clock departure to Boston, making stops at Old Navy for Mark’s presents, and a three o’clock appointment at the hospital, where Aurora’s birth certificate was waiting to be signed and sent back over to City Hall.
Steve was headed into the bathroom for a quick shower about the time we were sitting down for lunch. “Listen, don’t worry about me, I’ll make myself something, or I can always grab a bite at the airport.” He was still in the shower when we rolled Aurora out in her all-terrain stroller for a walk with the dogs.
A little before one, we got back and Steve was popping a couple of pieces of bread into the toaster. He got himself a plate and had a sit-down l
unch. I went upstairs to change Aurora.
When I came back, Steve was reshelving his lunch makings in the fridge. He slinked by in his slippers to finish up his packing. “Don’t say it. Don’t say it; I’m hopeless. I’m just not very good at these transitions, you know.”
It was three on the dot when we arrived at the hospital and valet-parked the car. “Want me to stay down here?” Steve offered.
“Maybe they’ll add a third line to our certificate,” Lorene said, and pulled him onto the elevator. It was a nonappointment, nonevent; someone asked our baby’s name and handed us the birth certificate. We signed and handed it back. Our mute tagalong smiled.
“You okay with it?” I asked Steve when we were a few blocks from the hospital.
“No question. You two are the parents. I would have absolutely no idea what to do with her at this stage.”
“You’d figure it out,” I said. “Feels kind of dumb, inadequate, saying it again, but . . . thank you.”
“Thank you. You’ve changed my life. Made it much better, really.”
We killed some time at the airport, lingering this side of customs. Then Steve walked backward through the passageway, waving until we could no longer see him.
It was just getting dark, a hush coming over the day. Aurora was hiccupping in the back seat. The one who used to be hiccupping inside. “It feels good to be home, just the three of us,” Lorene said as we walked up the garden path.
She froze in the kitchen doorway. “Oh. My. God.” I set my car-seat baby basket down and looked over her shoulder. The floor was covered in leftovers—some eaten, some licked, some regurgitated. “He didn’t close the refrigerator door,” we said in unison.
A trail led to the dogs, who were lying on the couch, too full or sick to feel remorse or any urge to get up. “WHAT’S THIS?” Lorene said in her very-bad-dog voice. Vita’s brow furrowed. Mister’s chin never left the armrest. “WHAT’S THIS?!” Aurora started to cry.
This? This is our life.
Postpartum Impressions
Life was what happened while we were busy coming up with our new routines. Balance was like a direction on a compass, a bearing we set ourselves on, not some specific place where we ever hoped to actually arrive.
Aurora’s birth certificate was recorded, registered, sealed, and delivered to our mailbox on December 3, 2004 —the same day she smiled for the first time. A couple months later, she rolled over. She was crawling by the end of the summer, speed-crawling during her first Ride FAR, and she had been walking for three months when we made our first family trip to Australia in February of 2006.
I streamlined my workload. I gave up environmental cartooning and focused on parenting, pet, and other cartoons and books, which I could draw from my day-to-day experience.
Lorene back-burnered her doula business. She didn’t want to be running out on our baby in the middle of the night to help someone else have hers. She sold her house. And she rented an office above her shop so she could take Aurora to “work.”
JOURNAL: JULY 10, 2006
The past nineteen months have gone by faster than any I can remember. I think time used to go by more slowly when it seemed like the Future (when I’d have everything I ever wanted) would never get here.
Now that I no longer felt the need to plan for a lifetime, I made a plan for one day.
My neighbor Margaret is at the door. She is returning some eggs she borrowed. Not the one egg she borrowed the afternoon of my first retrieval—that was five years earlier. Aurora is three. We’ve stopped counting her age in months. I’ve stopped feeling like an imposter; the words “my daughter” roll right off my tongue.
“God, it’s such a relief seeing your place looking like this. I can remember coming over here when my kids were young—I was so jealous. It looked like a museum!”
“Thanks, Margaret.”
I can remember caring what people thought about the way my house looked. Trying to ban the plastic items at first, then keeping them at bay, insisting on getting them back into the correct bins and boxes, then letting go. Not completely. I have to tell myself The Velveteen House story. Our house has been made Real.
There are so many things I didn’t know to factor into the baby decision back when I was making it, like this connection to neighbors, strangers, other mothers everywhere. The fear of other people’s disapproval has no basis in my reality. If anything, people have expressed a little envy of Lorene’s and my shared parenting. We each have a wife.
“MAMA!” Aurora is calling. I am everything except Ma, that’s Lorene. There has never been any confusion, save a few days when Bruce was Mommy Bruce and we had to clarify that “Mommy” is reserved for actual mothers, not just someone who does your bidding.
“Just a minute,” I call back.
“I’ll let you go,” Margaret says, and lets herself out.
“Mommy, can you tell me the Laya burp story?”
“Sweetie, I can’t tell you a Laya story while I’m cooking, I have to think.” I’ve told her the story a hundred times and you would think I wouldn’t have to think, but I have to tell it as if I’m Laya, the doll Daddy Steve gave her for her third birthday.
“Pinky Delicious!” Lorene bursts through the door and saves me.
After dinner, I get the dishes started and Lorene helps Aurora get ready for bed. The two of them call when it’s time, and Lorene and I trade places. Aurora is lying in her big-girl bed, a toddler bed that sleeps one small person comfortably. She has the framed picture of Daddy Steve beside her pillow and she is inhaling an open Ziploc. “See, Laya? It smells just like Daddy.” It’s his T-shirt.
I fold myself in beside her. “Does it make you sad?” Laya asks.
“No. Some parents go away and never come back. It’s like a business trip, Laya. Daddy always comes back,” Aurora explains.
“Okay, what am I reading?” I ask her. She points to a big book of fairy tales. She wants to hear The Little Mermaid.
“ . . . Looking through the porthole, she sees the prince. Her heart pounds. It was love at first sight.”
“What is ‘love at first sight’?” she asks.
“When you fall in love before you even know somebody.”
“Did that happen with you and Ma?”
“Ma and I knew each other for a long time before we fell in love. Love at first sight is more of a fairy tale thing.”
“Oh. I want to be David.”
“You wish you were a boy?” Aurora shakes her head no. “You wish you were older?”
“I wish Ma was twenty-eight when I was born. I forget, how old were you when you had me?”
“Forty-two. Sorry.”
“Why forty-two?”
Ask Mary. “If I hadn’t waited so long, I might have had someone else. Sarah Nastyman or Doshua Stump or . . . ” I won’t say it was all meant to be, the brain surgery and everything; but I will say I am so lucky it is. Now that they’ve favored me (with my old eggs and defective tube), I can acknowledge the incredible odds against all of it.
“Let’s get back to the mermaid,” I say. After the story ends, she falls fast asleep. I let the toddler-sleep vapors overtake me and wake up twenty minutes later. I fix the covers, smooth her hair, and whisper, “I love you . . . more than you love ice cream.” Then I pad next door to change into my pajamas. Fresh from a power nap, I am ready to start the night shift in my studio.
Three hours later, I can see our bedroom light go out. An extra hush falls over the house.
It’s even better than you dreamed.
It took a village to write this book. A bottomless thank-you to my agent Edite Kroll who read and thoughtfully edited the manuscript more times than one would think humanly possible. Then again, I think she’s superhuman. It was a privilege to work with my editor Nancy Miller and the rest of the Bloomsbury team: Lea Beresford, Laura Phillips, Sara Mercurio, Patti Ratchford, Cristina Gilbert, Laura Keefe, Alona Fryman, and Megan Ernst. I would also like to thank my village readers: Brooke
James, Susan Oblak, Janet Zade, Bill Strong, Kathy McCullough, Robin Becker, and Marcy Krasnow. Their insights made this a much better book. I am heavily indebted to the all-night kind-but-ruthless editing services of Karen Dukess and Kathleen Cushman. And I am probably indentured to the book’s designer, the talented and unflappable Cia Boynton.
Big thanks to Birdsong at Morning, Robin Becker, Tamara Grogan, Hilary Price, the Jameses, the Ewing-Hannans, the Nashes, and the Park Slope Community Bookstore for generously sharing their spaces, and to the Lachances, the Oblaks, the Rabinowitzes, the Carrolls, and the Rezacs for the play dates which made it possible for me to finish this book.
I’d also like to acknowledge a couple of divine interventions (friends I made in my advanced maternal age)—Brooke James and Nancy Aronie. And my dear old friend (a.k.a. Aurora’s new best friend Big) Bruce Kohl, who is practically family. Which leaves my family itself— the Wicks-Beckers, Robin Becker, Alan Becker, Linda Mita, the But-mores, Steve Dillon, Lorene Jean, and Aurora Jean Becker—the people for whom I would do anything and who have done the same for me, over and over and over.
ABOUT SUZY BECKER
Author, artist, educator, and entrepreneur Suzy Becker began her career as an award-winning advertising copywriter and then founded the Widget Factory, a greeting-card company. She entered the world of books with what would become the internationally best-selling All I Need to Know I Learned from My Cat, and has since written and illustrated several award-winning books for both children and adults. She and her family live in central Massachusetts.