Look How Happy I'm Making You

by Polly Rosenwaike

  “Hey, is that a smile?” Alex wonders on another afternoon, when the baby’s mouth jerks in an upward direction, apropos of nothing, and then jerks back down.

  “It’s just a puppet smile. A reflex.”

  “When are they supposed to start smiling for real?”

  “Around two months. Pretty soon.”

  “That’ll be so cool.”

  His own smile makes you think of childhood seen from an honest distance, both lovely and lonely. Birthday cakes, park swings, a secret attic hideaway. And what is the age at which one develops a longing for impossible things?

  8. Lack of Concern for Yourself

  Why not seek out the company of other women, other new mothers: your kind, your kin? Your husband encourages this; so does your mother, and your best friend, who lives on the other side of the country, and whose own child has reached an age—between babyhood and self-entertainment—that no longer allows your friend to talk on the phone, because if the daughter is around, she’s always saying “Mommy, Mommy” in the background, and if the daughter isn’t around, your friend needs to work and vacuum and sleep, and all the other things she can’t do when the daughter is around.

  Also, at your eight-week postpartum checkup, the midwife asks how things are going, and you’re not able to lie to her well enough, because she has seen you with all your clothes off, screaming obscenities and giving birth to a baby, so you say in a tiny voice, “It’s been hard,” and she says, “You know, support is out there,” and you hate the word support because it makes you think of bras and panty hose and girdles: the body parts of women spilling out if not appropriately propped up and contained, and of a sea of concerned faces asking what’s wrong and nodding slowly at your answer and thanking you for sharing. But you tell the midwife you’ll at least try to go to the new mothers’ group that meets on Wednesday mornings in the basement of a Presbyterian church.

  When you walk in, seven or eight women are sitting on the worn-out couches, or standing up, jiggling their babies in that habitual mother sway. You’d imagined that it would be like an AA meeting or something: that everyone would state their names, and their issues, and there’d be an air of commiseration and revival in the room. But it’s placid here, with a slight aroma of baby shit. One or two of the women smile at you; one or two babies give you the staredown. No one asks your name. You find a corner of a couch next to one of those breastfeeders who doesn’t even need to use her hands at all; she’s free to gesture as she talks to the woman on her other side, who is busy wrapping her baby into a swaddle.

  “He loves the swing,” the hands-free breastfeeder says. “I just put him in there and play the nature sounds, and I actually have time to make spaghetti.”

  “Which one do you have?”

  “The Fisher-Price My Little Snugapuppy Cradle ’n Swing. It’s expensive but so worth it.”

  “Wait, say that again.” The woman whose expertly swaddled baby now lies like a cozy mummy in her lap pulls out her phone.

  “I feel guilty for sticking him in there all the time, though.”

  “You have to take some time for yourself,” one of the standing-up mothers says, and the sitting-down mothers agree.

  “As soon as my husband comes home, I get in the tub, and I stay in there for, like, forty-five minutes.”

  “Mmm, light a candle, and pull out the leftover Halloween candy, and you are set.”

  And you can see it in the eyes of these women, gently joking and laughing. They aren’t stunned by motherhood befalling them like a chronic condition. They don’t view breastfeeding as a prison-with-torture sentence. They’re not stuck in a codependent relationship with a depressed young man who isn’t the father of their child.

  Or maybe they are—maybe everyone is—while managing to put on a falsely cheerful face, the way you do, when the mother beside you asks, “Where did you get your baby’s cute socks?”

  9. Feelings of Worthlessness and Guilt

  Think of all the awful stories. The nightmare pregnancies, when the doctors suspect something is wrong, or know something is wrong, but can do nothing to stop it. The baby coming months and months too early: weighing one or two pounds, unable to breathe on his own, bowels obstructed, organs failing. An unexpected event during labor and delivery: asphyxia, hemorrhage, traumatic brain injury. Infants trapped behind glass in the NICU, hooked up to tubes, eyes squeezed shut. Birth defects, surgeries, fatal meningitis.

  And the women who can’t conceive, who try for years, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on IVF, their hormones jacked up, their hopes jacked up—and still, nothing. The women who carry all the way through—nine months of budding life—and then birth their babies blue and cold, bury them.

  These people should have babies right now, should be enjoying them as lovingly as they’ve imagined in their dreams; while you, with your perfect, “easy” baby, feel trapped inside some vessel that just barely contains your body: an MRI machine; an airport scanner; the replica of a spaceship in a museum, grounded forever.

  Also, studies have shown this: Infants of mothers who are clinically depressed are more likely to go on to suffer from depression themselves.

  10. Recurrent Thoughts of Death or Suicide

  You’ve come to Alex’s apartment with a mission this time. Come through the freezing rain, the beginning of winter, the baby dressed in his nubby brown bear suit with the ears. This morning you picked up the newspaper for the first time since before he was born, the old-fashioned, print newspaper. Your husband doesn’t miss a day. When the three of you came home from the hospital, he collected the accumulated newspapers and read them all that night, saving the one from the day of the birth. “He might want to look at it someday,” said the new father, sentimental. Today, while the baby watched with half-closed eyes in his bouncy seat, like you were some kind of dreary show, you read. Syria. Afghanistan. International terrorism. U.S. gun violence. Alzheimer’s. PTSD. The world still out there, still going down in flames and hanging on. And it felt like the very least you could do—something that would matter to four people or less—to decide, this has to stop.

  But first have some poppyseed cake. Alex tells you he has news: an interview scheduled at a coffee shop, the one you can’t go to anymore because you’ve spent too many dismal hours there trying to work on the dissertation. “That’s great,” you say, with a jealous pang you must tamp down immediately. This could begin a new chapter for him: a job, fun friends, maybe even a girlfriend to eat his cake with.

  Then he says, “I dreamt about Nick last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was swinging on a trapeze and just talking to me down below, like nothing had happened. But I knew he was dead, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell him. For some reason I felt like it was my job to tell him.”

  The baby starts fussing, and you take him out of his car seat and prop him up on your lap, where he looks intently at Alex. More and more, he has the look of someone who sees what’s going on, who’s keeping quiet only because he believes that’s the wise thing to do.

  “I think about death a lot,” Alex says. “Nick choosing to be dead. Forever. We’ll all be dead forever. It should make us just want to live right now, run outside and feel that, that rain there, like some amazing thing, but somehow it doesn’t.”

  You think about it all the time, too. And now, on top of the dread that rises at the thought of your own end—the real dread of never existing again, not the leaden moments when death seems like some trick to ease pain—there’s the unthinkable, too. Babies die. Children die.

  It’s a kind of grim seduction, Alex your partner in doom, but you can’t let it sway you from your decision.

  “So, I have to say something.” A pause, but not too long. “I feel like I shouldn’t come over anymore.” He looks away, stirring the spoon in his mug of hot
chocolate, and you have to push past it now: chug-a-chug-chug.

  “I care about you. I really do. This has been a bad time for me, and you’ve—I’ve looked forward to seeing you.”

  Ignore the pang of his bent head.

  “But look. If you were married to me, would you want me to be going over to some other guy’s place and lying in his bed, being miserable, with him?”

  Throw a dog a bone: “We can still see each other at Tertulia.”

  “You never go anymore,” he says.

  “I will. I’ll—once everything settles down a little.”

  Though probably you won’t, probably things won’t settle down. Some people say it’s better when the child gets older, and others say it’s just different.

  You could tell him, “You have your whole life ahead of you.” Or, “I’m not doing you any good.” Or, “Some woman soon is going to notice how great you are.” But of course those things are patronizing, and they would also require more openhearted generosity than you feel right now. If only the damn cat were still around, and you could pull her away from her feeding dish, or drag her out from under the bed, and place her in Alex’s arms—a soft, warm body to love—but she’s been gone for ten weeks now. She has some new life, or else she’s dead.

  You stand up with the baby tucked under your arm and grab the car seat without bothering to strap him into it. Go quickly now, go, while Alex sits on his bed with his head down like a chastened child, like Rodin’s The Thinker in jeans and a flannel shirt. With your free knuckle, you bump him on the shoulder.

  “Take care, okay? Good luck with the interview. Thanks for everything.”

  You manage to get the door open and shut it behind you, start lumbering down the dingy stairwell, like a callous brute, a petty thief. You think of the way Alex would stroke the baby’s hands so gently, exclaiming over the tiny opals of his fingernails. And then a vision comes: the baby all grown up into a young man, about Alex’s age, a sensitive young man, a young man in love for the first time, and holding within himself the silent wonder of that.

  On the second-floor landing you stop to rest for a moment, and another vision comes, one of the terrible ones: hurtling the baby down the stairs, his head cracking on the cement floor. The screams, the blood, the broken body. You squeeze him into your aching chest, breathing hard against the panic—and your son, in your arms, gazes up at the light fixture suspended from the ceiling, the way he’s looked at light for as long as you’ve known him: like it’s a marvel, a celestial sign, the first miracle of creation.

  Welcome to Your Family

  Christmas music at the mall, plastic reindeer in the neighborhood. Cards crowd the mantel with pictures of everyone’s merry children, sending tidings of joy and minor sports triumphs. At the airport, the holiday travelers funnel through—the excited, the weary, the primed-for-disappointment. Alice, the baby, travels from room to room in a portable bassinet, a six-week-old whirl of light and movement, her parents’ faces looming large and important, like in an Ingmar Bergman film. Someone has sent her a red-and-green knit hat with a bell. Someone else has sent her a board book called Baby’s First Hanukkah.

  Four years ago, Jack Keeling left his wife and his software development job and began teaching math at a progressive private high school. Tracy Goldman, who taught English there, offered her advice and support. They went out for beers on Friday afternoons, and then began spending the weekends grading together, shoving stacks of student essays and trig tests aside to have sex on Tracy’s couch. Two summers later they married at the courthouse, with the assistant principal and her husband serving as witnesses. Jack didn’t want to suffer through a second wedding. Tracy had never wanted one to begin with.

  So now, over this winter break spanning Christmas and New Year’s, their families are coming together to meet the baby, and also to meet one another for the first time. There’s Jack’s brother Barrett, his wife Michelle, and kids Christina and Luke. A blond, big-boned, toothy clan: the adults outfitted with it’s-all-good smiles, the kids on the verge of adolescent blowout. They squeeze into Jack and Tracy’s bungalow: the pull-out futon in the upstairs office for Barrett and Michelle, sleeping bags on the floor of the basement family room for Christina and Luke.

  Tracy’s family is stashed a few doors down, at the house of some neighbors away for the holidays. There’s Tracy’s mother Ruth, who carries her widowhood like a hernia. Tracy’s sister Jessica, husband David, and six-year-old son Ari. A slight, brooding, olive-skinned trio, as dedicated to sulking as the Keelings are to aggressive cheer.

  And finally, staying at a hotel—a nice one, with fluffy robes and chocolates on the pillows—Jack’s parents, Francine and Nicholas. They are pasty-skinned, in Brooks Brothers clothes. They have money they don’t mind spending on their own comfort.

  “It’s supposed to be a vacation,” Jack had said before the Christmas plans were set, when they were counting their daughter’s life in days. “Do we really want to have everyone at once?”

  “Who do you want to say no to?”

  “How about all of them. Just to be fair.”

  Tracy has her reservations, too. She’s met Jack’s parents three times now, and they are the sort of couple whose tense relationship with each other inevitably chills the room. Her own parents’ bickering was warmer, sillier, often ending with her father pinching her mother’s cheeks into a smile. Now that he’s gone, there’s no leavening influence on her mother’s gloomy nature.

  “Don’t worry, she’s our decoy.” Tracy stroked the baby’s cone head. “We’ll hand her over and go hole up in the bedroom. Let everyone get to know one another, or kill one another, or whatever.”

  “Did you hear that, Alice?” Jack cupped his hands into a megaphone. “We’re sending you out as our envoy. Just call if you need a wire transfer. Or military assistance.”

  Alice started in with her frantic headbanger moves, which meant it was time for Tracy to unlatch the giant nursing bra. She braced herself for the pain the lactation consultant told her she shouldn’t have if the baby was feeding correctly. Jack sat back against the couch pillows and watched Tracy wince.

  “Remember, she’s the boss,” the ob-gyn had said to him at one of Tracy’s final prenatal visits when they were discussing the birth plan. How was he supposed to respond to that? Yes, ma’am. If she changes her mind and demands an epidural, I’ll bring it in on a tray with a cup of coffee and a vase of fresh flowers. A month later he sat uselessly in the hospital room for hours, patting Tracy’s back while she sucked wild-eyed on popsicles and screamed her labor screams. He’d wanted to seize power, demand a stop to this barbaric ordeal. What was wrong with a nice, efficient C-section? He couldn’t help feeling that his wife, the CEO, was dying, and he was just an incompetent, low-level employee, watching it happen.

  * * *

  —

  They overwhelm the small living room—the Keelings and the Goldmans—three generations of eyes and mouths, hair and noses, skin tone and face shape. The baby has been scrutinized for inherited traits and deemed a mongrel by Nicholas, her paternal grandfather. In her Christmassy hat, she perches on Tracy’s mother’s lap, an air of aloofness in her rainwater eyes. Ruth removes the hat, smooths Alice’s blond fuzz. It upsets her, the tree in the corner, delicately adorned and unassuming though it is (tiny white lights, a laughing Buddha instead of an angel on top). She still can’t accept that such a thing stands in her daughter’s house. The fact that Jack never went to church growing up and sees Jesus as nothing more than a do-gooder type who came to an unfortunate end makes it only a little bit better for Ruth.

  “You’re Jewish,” she’ll whisper later to the baby, when they can be alone. “Aleeza. Which means joyful.” Aleeza would be Alice’s Hebrew name. But Ruth knew there’d been no naming ceremony, no rabbi’s blessing. The child was adrift in this world.

  “My turn,”
Barrett says, sticking his arms out. “Hand her over.” And Ruth reluctantly relinquishes her granddaughter.

  “What do you think, hon?” Barrett addresses Michelle. “Should we make another one?”

  Michelle smiles with her preternaturally white teeth. “I always wanted three.”

  “Oh my God,” Christina says.

  “Aren’t you too old?” Luke says, which makes Barrett laugh and Michelle’s smile waver.

  Christina and Luke, thirteen and eleven, are used to spending winter break at their other grandparents’ house, in Florida, at the beach. This year they’re stuck in a small Ohio town instead, in a house that doesn’t even have a TV. They have three cousins already, on their mother’s side, close to them in age, and with the benefits of a Ping-Pong table, the latest generation Xbox, a cupboard full of nonorganic snack food, and parents too preoccupied with their own affairs to worry about what the kids are doing.

  The little boy, Ari, technically not their cousin, hangs shyly around Luke, hoping for attention from this boy almost twice his age and height, who carries around his own phone and has a dog back at home. Ari would like to have a brother, an older brother, if such a thing were possible, through some form of time travel perhaps. He isn’t exactly sure how babies are made, but he knows it has something to do with the mother and father being close to each other, loving each other. His own don’t sleep in the same bed anymore. Before the cleaning lady comes over, his mom takes the sheets off the couch in the family room so it won’t look like his dad has been sleeping there.

  “So what does everybody want for Christmas?” Nicholas asks in his booming Santa-Claus-for-hire voice.

  “Not everybody’s Christian,” Christina says.