And so you drive to a dismal apartment building where Alex, just out of college, fourteen years younger than you, has promised banana bread. He had offered to bring it over on his bike, but you told him you needed to get out of the house, and so he invited you here.
Alex opens the door with a smile for the baby, asleep in the car seat. “Cómo estás?” he exclaims. “Or, I should say, Cómo están ustedes?”
You know each other from Tertulia, a Spanish conversation group that meets Thursday nights at a Mexican restaurant, a group composed mostly of earnest Americans trying to work on their Spanish. Alex, skinny and sweet-faced with a gringo accent, seemed to look up to you simply because, in the hierarchy of nonnative Spanish speakers sitting around the table munching chips and salsa, you were near the top. As a graduate student in comparative literature studying Latin American modernism, you’ve spent years learning Spanish. You’re in the midst of a dissertation on Chilean revolutionary women poets—in the way one can be in the midst of a dissertation for going on five years now. But that is another depression that has, as of fifteen days ago, been upended by the arrival of this other project that won’t stand to wait around until you’re in the mood to pay attention to it.
“We’re all right. How are you?” You’re not here to speak Spanish. You’re here because you thought you could keep from crying in front of this young, male not-quite-friend.
“Kind of bad, actually,” Alex says, as you set the car seat down. “My cat’s been missing since last Friday.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“She managed to get out when I was carrying laundry down to the basement and somehow escaped from the building. I put up signs and rode my bike all over, looking for her.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“She always wanted to be free,” he says gloomily. “But wow. You have a baby. How did it go? I mean his—being born?”
You had the childbirth experience you’d wanted, a natural birth: meaning it hurt so much you thought something must be terribly wrong, even though you knew childbirth was supposed to feel worse than anything you’d ever experienced in your life. “I can’t do it!” you kept screaming, and the midwife contradicted you gently, and she was right, but when the baby finally came out, you didn’t feel triumphant so much as beaten into submission.
“It was okay, I guess. I mean it was good in that he’s healthy. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to talk about it.”
“I understand. I mean I don’t understand, of course, so. Do you want to sit down and have some tea?” He gestures toward the single chair at a tiny table and gets the teakettle going in the galley kitchen. The apartment is shabby and dreary, with a stained beige carpet, and nothing on the walls but peeling paint.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Four months. Since I graduated. I could have gotten a nicer place if I lived with roommates, but it’s better for me to be alone. Or, I don’t know if it’s better, but it’s what I can deal with. And they allow cats here. Not that it matters now.”
He serves you a large, gooey slice of homemade chocolate chip banana bread. You eat that slice and then another. It’s the only food that’s tasted good since the birth. Alex perches on a corner of the bed with his tea mug. He tells you that he feels stuck; he’s cashing in savings bonds from his dead grandmother and supposedly applying to grad school. He majored in history, but the idea of teaching high school history makes him very afraid. He thinks he should probably try to get a job in a coffee shop, or a bakery, but he’s worried that then he’ll keep working in a coffee shop or bakery forever. Should he go to grad school? What should he do? And he is sorry to be laying all of this on you.
You tell him that grad school has been bad for you, but it’s probably not grad school’s fault. You tell him he should find a way to leave the country immediately: go to Latin America, go anywhere exciting and cheap. You tell him you have no wisdom to offer—that age and experience mean only that you are older and have found ways to let years of your life go by.
Too soon, always too soon, the baby wakes and starts gnawing on his fist. In a minute he will realize that his fist can give him nothing. And you’re not going to breastfeed him here, in front of Alex.
“I’d better go before he freaks out.”
Alex jumps up to open the door, knocking over a stack of Mother Jones magazines balanced on a milk crate. “I can’t believe I just talked about my lame stuff when you, you’re the one with the amazing new thing—new person.”
“No, I, I’m interested.” You step into the hallway, gripping the car seat. “That banana bread was delicious. I hope you find your cat.”
“Yeah. Well, as you can see, I’ve got nothing going on. Come by anytime.” He touches the baby’s clenched hand. “You too.”
2. Lack of Energy and Motivation
THINGS TO DO:
· Reflect on the miracle of birth.
· Begin filling out pages in the fancy journal on your nightstand, entitled Baby’s First Year, recording weight, length, hair color, first impressions, etc.
· Use the stationery printed with Edwardian baby dolls, which you received as a gift, to write thank-you notes for the stationery, the journal, and other adorable gifts.
· Consume oatmeal, oatmeal cookies (special recipe for lactating women), salmon, carrots, fennel seeds, fenugreek seeds, cumin seeds, and garlic in order to (possibly) increase your breast milk supply.
· Keep a round-the-clock chart of the baby’s feeding times, sleeping times, and diaper changes, which may help to facilitate the illusion of control.
· Sign up for a postpartum yoga class, or get a postpartum yoga DVD from the library and follow along, which may help to ease the reality of panic.
· Speak to the baby in Spanish: step one of his bilingual education.
· Read the stack of parenting books on your nightstand.
· Sleep when your baby is sleeping.
THINGS YOU HAVE DONE:
· Lamented the demise of the wet nurse.
· Watched the instructional video for the Moby Wrap Newborn Hug Hold, over and over, and failed to re-create the Moby Wrap Newborn Hug Hold on your own person.
· Read a pamphlet you received in the hospital, entitled Ten Warning Signs of Postpartum Depression.
· Cried when your baby was crying.
3. Negative Feelings Toward Your Baby
On the second visit to Alex’s apartment, you decide to ditch your modesty and breastfeed, while Alex works in the kitchen, his back discreetly turned. You set the writhing baby on the comforter, unlatch your nursing bra, stick a pillow on your lap, pick up the baby, and attempt to position him once, twice, three times. He grips your nipple with puckered lips. It kills.
You pull him off and try again to aim him just so, to get him to open his mouth wider so it pinches you less. “Big mouth,” you whisper hopelessly (the baby understands neither English nor Spanish). “Big mouth.”
One more frustrated try—then you give up and let him pinch.
If you’re to breastfeed for at least a year, as everyone says you should, that’s roughly six times a day for at least 340 more days: a minimum of, say, 2,000 breastfeeding episodes.
These precious early months with your infant: you wish them all away. Let him be sitting in a high chair on his first birthday with a plastic plate of cake, having learned to hold his head up, sit, wield a spoon, and eat unnutritious food—all in the blink of an eye. Let him be drinking from a sippy cup full of milk produced by a cow. Let him be, then, one year closer to the end of his childhood.
Endless suggestions, endless pep talks are available online. It’s possible to spend most of the time you’re not breastfeeding attempting to fix, or optimize, the endlessly celebrated mammalian superpower. Everyone refers to t
he latch—master the latch and all will be well, as if it’s a matter of calling in a good locksmith—but the pain comes not only during a feeding, but afterward, and not only in your nipples, but deep within your breasts and around them, burning into your armpits. You want to press something tightly to your chest at all times, a shield against the throb, and also you want nothing—certainly not a baby—touching you there. The doctors and the lactation consultants respond with mild surprise at your struggle to describe the feeling, not unlike the IT guys manning some help desk you’ve rushed to in the past, pleading for a resolution, or at least an explanation, to some weird computer problem.
How odd. How strange of the equipment not to operate according to design. A manufacturing fluke, perhaps. Or user error. Either way we can’t repair it. So maybe it’s your fault. Maybe it’s all in your head, not your boobs.
When you’re finally done—one down, only 1,999 more to go—Alex offers a cup of chai and some corn muffins. You try to smile as he sets a mug and plate in front of you.
“Do you want me to hold him while you eat?”
Yes. That’s what you want.
Cradling the baby awkwardly against his flat, useless, masculine chest, Alex says tenderly, “He looks so content.”
And he does, now that he’s satiated for the moment, until he’s desperate for milk again. And you can’t think of a time—no, not in your whole life—when you have ever given another person what he needs so basically and absolutely, while you’re left despising your very ability to give.
“Are you okay?” Alex asks, because you’re crying into the chai.
“I hate it. I hate breastfeeding.” Head in your hands, you can feel him hovering, trying to figure out what to do.
“Well, couldn’t you—you could give him formula, right?”
He is twenty-two years old, a childless male. What does he know of it all? Breast is best. Liquid gold. Dr. Sears, La Leche League. Maternal guilt, mommy wars. Your husband’s urging you to “stick with it; it’s so good for the baby.” The people online who say if you don’t want to breastfeed, you should never have had a child. The medical evidence indicating that breastfed babies experience lower rates of gastrointestinal infections, ear infections, respiratory diseases, asthma, SIDS—and perhaps higher IQs, better achievement in school. The swirly painting in the pediatrician’s office of a woman with infants on both breasts—a glorification of the beauty and power of motherhood that makes you want to find a new pediatrician: a bad one, a compromised one, who lets Similac and Enfamil and the rest strew her office with free samples, and will counsel you under the influence of their empires of fake milk.
You nod toward Alex without meeting his eyes. Acknowledged. New topic, please.
4. Worrying About Hurting Your Baby
Before the baby was born, you used to worry that you might drop a baby. Plates, coffee mugs, water pitchers slipped out of your hands sometimes. Babies, too, are breakable.
Now you understand that parents don’t drop their babies. Parents are skilled that way. They jiggle and juggle, toss infants back and forth to each other, balance them along with everything else that needs carrying. They don’t drop them.
The problem is that you have visions. A bracelet of hands around his throat, a pair of fingertips pinching his nostrils shut. Kitchen knife, pruning saw, refrigerator, oven. Bathtub, washing machine, the trunk of the car. Baby shoved down the laundry chute.
His body is small and compact; it could fit anywhere.
Baby head severed from baby chest. Baby slit open like a sick science experiment.
It’s not something you want to do. It’s something that occurs to you as within the realm of the horrifically possible.
A life can be started. A life can be ended. The baby knows so little, not even that he has a life. Put a knife to his throat, and he won’t be afraid.
You would never do it. You would never do it. You would never do it.
And yet, when you’re alone with the baby—husband at work, husband asleep—your heart beats fast, adrenaline gearing up for an unspeakable act.
You pull him in close and tighten your grip. Over and over again, you save him from yourself.
5. Sleeping More or Less than Usual
You come to consciousness in Alex’s bed, the baby beside you, eyelids fluttering, sleeping in his arms-up-don’t-shoot position. Alex is at his desk in the corner, the back of his neck naked after a close-cropped haircut. You deliberately didn’t tell him you noticed, that it looks good. He served treats as usual, and then you apologized for being so tired you could barely keep your eyes open. He offered the bed and you took it.
Close your eyes again, and the world disappears. Isn’t that how infants perceive reality? If you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist?
Here, in this drab rented apartment, your life doesn’t exist. And what about your husband, who has done nothing wrong, or almost nothing? His growing impatience with you, as the gloomy, weeping mother of his child, is understandable. Already you can see that he will be the reasonable grown-up parent, the demonstratively affectionate parent, and you will be something other than that. And that parenthood leaves no time for meaningful conversation between the two parents. Or maybe that’s just an excuse for not wanting to discuss how miserable you feel.
Alex swivels around in his chair. “Did you get a good nap?” And you think he is beautiful, both because he’s so young and because he won’t be for much longer.
“Yeah, thanks. It’s a cozy bed.”
“I’ve been sleeping a lot lately.” He looks embarrassed. “I guess I’m depressed.”
“About the cat?”
“Mmhm. And, you know, not having a job. Or even knowing what I want to do. Being kind of isolated. It’s good to talk to you, though.”
All your life people have told you that you’re a good listener, and you used to feel flattered, but now it seems a dumb thing to be proud of. What if a good listener is just someone who doesn’t have anything to say?
“Why?” you press him.
“Why?” There is perhaps nothing more endearing in a man than embarrassment. “I feel like we get each other right now. Maybe that’s presumptuous. I wish there was more I could do for you.”
You turn your palms up in that what-is-there-to-do way. “Take a nap with us.”
You want that, yes, and now you said it. A quick half smile, and his head is on the other pillow, arms pasted to his sides, serious again.
Ridiculous to think of any seductive intent. Your breasts bruised and full of milk. Your vagina a gaping, wounded hole. The baby, prone between the two of you, about to wake up starving any minute now. Plus, you’re old.
Close your eyes again; make the world disappear.
And if you turned toward him, then what? He’s full of angst and need and tenderness, ready to heap on the person right beside him, simply because you’re there.
Down below the baby’s curled bare feet, the edge of his hand touches the edge of your hand—touches and doesn’t touch it, like a breeze skimming skin.
Then you both pretend to sleep.
6. Changes in Appetite or Weight
Pre-pregnancy appetite: Hungry for yummy and reasonably nutritious food.
Pregnancy appetite, 1st trimester: Hungry for miso soup and orange sherbet.
Pregnancy appetite, 2nd trimester: Hungry for grilled asparagus and French fries.
Pregnancy appetite, 3rd trimester: Hungry for watermelon-lime-cucumber smoothies.
Postpartum appetite: Why the need to eat, to make food for oneself and others, day after endless day?
Pre-pregnancy weight: 130 pounds.
Pregnancy weight: 165 pounds at final prenatal visit.
Postpartum weight: Who gives a shit?
7. Loss of Pleasur
e
They’ve always seemed so complicated, affairs. The cheating. The lying: by word and by omission. The requisite self-deception. Of course some people get a thrill from all that. It’s never sounded thrilling to you, only another bureaucratic responsibility to manage, like paperwork deliberately misfiled by a sadistic secretary.
The first few times you visited Alex’s apartment, you mentioned it to your husband when he got home from work—he’s from Tertulia (you know, Spanish group); recent college grad, not sure what to do with his life; seeking advice (from me, ha); likes babies; likes to bake. Now your husband no longer asks what you’ve done all day because he suspects the answer will be tedious, and that you’ll recount the tedium in a grim voice; and so there’s no need anymore to mention where these tedious, grim activities took place, while your husband eats dinner, and bounces the baby, and reads the newspaper, sometimes all at once.
Other than the cursory bits you told Alex when you first sat next to him at the table of semi-Spanish-speakers in the Mexican restaurant, you’ve never said anything about your husband. And Alex is also mum on the subject of romantic interests past or present. So it’s possible to pretend that two people lying in bed holding each other, while fully clothed and generally unhappy, are simply engaged in some form of primal healing. Skin to skin. Or cotton/poly to viscose/spandex, as the case may be. Various things are discussed. Books. Trips taken and not yet taken. Therapy as mild amusement/narcissistic exercise/waste of money. The unpleasant side effects of antidepressants. The pros and cons of getting a new cat. One afternoon you share suicide stories: you each had a friend, now dead by their own design. Your friend Lydia, a year or so after college, done in by some cocktail of codeine and sleeping pills. Alex’s friend Nick, who hanged himself in their junior year of high school. For a little while, the two of them are there in bed with you, the only way they can come alive again, ghosts summoned from fumbling words.
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