I write these lines in a hurry. I have just set Kai down in our fourth attempt for a nap since he awoke at eight this morning. He is already stirring again. I did not take my bathrobe off until noon today even though I am well aware that the bathrobe is not an option for the answer to the question “What should I wear today?” I am fully aware that the bathrobe is simply an article of clothing that was designed to get one from the bathroom to the bedroom without the hassle of clothing but with more coverage than a towel. However, this morning I literally did not have the three minutes it takes to get dressed. Between the dogs and Kai, all I had time for was to make a cup of coffee, and in my world of four hours of sleep a night, coffee trumps everything. So, around noon I set Kai down for a nap and I take off all of my clothes, so there I am, in my bra and underwear, standing in front of the closet, looking at what to wear. Before I can open the drawer and pull out a pair of black “yoga” pants from my stockpile of “yoga” pants (I tell myself they are yoga pants because I can’t handle the fact that I wear stretch pants every day. I told myself I wouldn’t be the mom who wears stretch pants every day … but I do wear them every day, so I call them “yoga” pants even though I have never worn them to do yoga. Actually, I have never even done yoga). So before I can even put my yoga pants on, Kai starts to cry. He wakes up within one minute of being set down. So I pick him up in my bra and underwear and start to rock him. And by rock him I mean I start doing squats in my bedroom. Next thing I know, Louise is barking insanely at the front window. She does not stop. Finally, I go out and see the Consumers Energy truck and the Consumers Energy guy looks up and gets the surprise of his life with me in my bra and underwear. I yell at Louise. She ignores me. Kai is still crying. Finally, I bark at the girls to get into their crate. I squat for another twenty minutes (for some reason this is the only way I can get Kai to fall asleep)—which doesn’t seem like a lot when you read it, but go try and squat for twenty minutes. Go and try it, and I’ll even be generous with you and you can hold a ten-pound weight, even though Kai is probably more like fourteen. Finally, he falls asleep. I get dressed. I put on black yoga pants, a fleece sweatshirt, and my slippers. Is this any better than a bathrobe? This is my life and there was a time when I would have thought this was a crazy person’s life.
I remember a time period when I judged moms. I was annoyed at moms who complained. Remember how I cursed that book I was reading about a stay-at-home mom who dared to whine about her stay-at-home-mom life? Now, as a mom who doesn’t sleep or get dressed on a consistent basis because I don’t have the time or energy, I am in awe that there was once a point in my life when I could actually read a book. More important, I am sorry I said those things and thought those things. I didn’t know. I wasn’t a part of the club yet. I just want to take a moment to say I’m sorry. At the time I cursed all of you, I wasn’t a mom. Now that I am one, I know all the secrets. I am now one of you and this job is not easy. I didn’t mean it.
I remember last January, when I didn’t know I was pregnant yet, I returned to work after our two-week winter break. I asked my co-worker, Susan, how her vacation was. Susan has three children: four years, two years, and nine months. “Vacation?” she said. “I didn’t get a vacation.” She said that every minute of her time away from work was taken up with fulfilling the requests of someone else: her children, her husband, her in-laws, and her parents. She went on to explain that Christmas Eve was the worst. She didn’t want to go to church. The kids were tired, she was tired, and she still had presents to wrap. But her husband insisted that they go as a family. So the five of them went to a full Catholic Christmas Eve service. “I sat in the pew thinking, This is why Gregor turned into a bug.” She ended by saying that she was overjoyed to come back to work.
At the time, I thought Susan was being a little dramatic. Now, as I run around the house with one child, I get it. I am turning into a bug at an alarming rate. I feel like my brain is diminishing. My memory, my patience, my ability to put logical thoughts in order—everything is slowly leaking out.
At the same time, however, even in the midst of this sleep-deprived, emotionally unstable place, there are certain parts of me that have sharpened immensely. Sharpened doesn’t even quite capture my capabilities. On one hand, I can’t even get myself dressed, and on the other hand I’m suddenly superhuman.
For example, you could take any object in the house and give it to the dogs and have them slap it against the hardwood floor and from two rooms away I could tell you what object they had in their mouths. Thus far I have been able to identify Kai’s pacifiers, their sea-ray chew toy, my slipper, a diaper, one of Kai’s socks, one of my socks (Bug treats them very differently), my flip-flops, and dozens of other items. Honestly, you could blindfold me and sit me in the bedroom and let them roam free and the second they had something they weren’t supposed to have, I would know.
The other day I was rocking Kai in my bedroom (which is at the back of the house), and while we were watching American Idol, I heard a noise that was not in my registry of normal house noises. I walked to the front of the house, suspecting that the humidifier might be malfunctioning or perhaps a toilet was running. I walked to the bay windows and discovered the source. My neighbor, on the other side of the street and two houses down, was snowblowing his sidewalk. Kai and I returned to my bedroom. Noise identified. Classification: harmless.
In addition to improving my auditory identification skills, I have also developed strange talents that I did not have as a nonmother. They are as follows: (1) When Kai wakes up in the middle of the night, I know what time it is without looking at the clock, and he wakes up at a different time every night. (2) Without looking at the humidifiers (there are two in the house), I can sense when they need to be refilled. (3) If someone (say, my overbearing sister-in-law) changes the thermostat by one degree, I know in an instant. (4) If you handed me an empty container of any depth, width, or shape, I could pour you eight ounces of water almost on the dot. (5) I can tell snot color, quantity, and consistency just by the sound Kai makes when he sneezes.
Now that I’m a mom, I’m some weird spawn of a human. Franz Kafka, you think you know what a metamorphosis looks like? I got news for you. You don’t.
• • •
Ashley is going through the guest bedroom on her continual quest to identify baby clothes and products that I haven’t used yet. There is a stack of clothes on top of the Boppy swing. I walk in to see what she is doing. She holds up my purple sweatshirt revealing the buried Boppy swing and says, “Did you know this was in here?” (Subtext: “It’s a good thing you have me to go rifling through piles of shit in your house or else you may lose track of things.” Dialogue she will later have with Deedee: “I mean, Mom, have you seen her house? She’s got stacks of clothes in every room and she doesn’t even know they’re there.” They’ll have a long talk about how disorganized I am and how badly they just want to come in and rearrange things themselves. If I don’t watch myself, this will actually happen someday.) I take the sweatshirt and say, “Yeah, thanks.” She picks up the Boppy swing. The following conversation takes place:
ME: Ash, what are you doing?
ASH: Well, I was just looking for this Boppy swing because you know how he likes the big movement of you rocking him, and I am wondering if this will help him go to sleep.
ME: Yeah.
ASH: Does it help him fall asleep?
ME: It did a couple times.
ASH: Then why is it in here under a pile of clothes?
ME: I tried the swing a couple of times, but then it broke.
(What I want to say:) Ashley! Do you really think that if I found the secret trick to helping my son sleep—remember, I am completely sleep-deprived on a daily basis—I would put it in the guest room under a pile of clothes? All this time I’ve been looking for something to help Kai sleep and here it is! The magic swing is sitting right here in the guest bedroom! Holy shit, you’ve solved the fucking puzzle to it all! This is it! This is the answer! Thi
s is fucking Rosebud right here under our noses! I am so stupid! We might as well get the adoption papers ready because clearly you are the smarter mother (even though you’re not a mother)!
ASH: What do you mean? (Her tone clearly says she thinks I simply do not know how to use the Boppy swing. She begins to fiddle with it as if I am not intelligent enough to operate the swing. She thinks she can fix it.) What happened to it?
(SIDE NOTE: The Boppy swing runs on three C batteries, but the contraption itself is a piece of shit. It’s difficult to get the battery pack in and out of its holder. After a few uses, the swing stopped working. I tried putting in new batteries, but nothing happened. After wrestling with the battery pack four or five times I decided that the Boppy swing would not get the best of me, so I put it in the guest room. Ashley, who clearly assumes that I haven’t spent hours trying to fix the fucking Boppy swing already, continues to mess with it.)
ME: It wouldn’t go. It started making this weird noise, like the motor wasn’t working, and it stopped swinging on its own.
I then see Ashley discover a small plastic knob on the right side of the swing. Underneath the knob is a lock icon, the same icon you would see on a keyless entry of a car. Obviously, this plastic knob locks the swing in place so it won’t move. I had put the lock on when I put the swing away. That way I could stack stuff on top of the swing, like my purple sweatshirt, and not worry about things toppling over. Ashley pulls the plastic knob out and the swing moves freely. She then says (get ready for it): “It wasn’t just locked?”
ME: No. It wasn’t just locked. (What I want to say:) Are you fucking kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you seriously think that I didn’t check to see if the Boppy swing was locked? Do you honestly think I am that stupid? No wonder you come over all the time. You must think your nephew is in danger living with a person who is too stupid to check to see if the Boppy swing was locked!
I walk out of the room. I cannot handle this conversation anymore. The Boppy swing has already stolen enough minutes from my life. I let her mess with it. She is still clearly not convinced that the swing is truly broken. I go into my bedroom to dig up The Science of Breath. My FMG is rummaging through my sock drawer. I ask her what she’s doing.
“Just seeing if we have any STFU cards left.”
• • •
I am standing in Kai’s bedroom. All of the lights are off, all I can hear is the noise of the fan and the humidifier. As I rock Kai to sleep, I feel my breath shorten. I can feel myself getting upset. I don’t even know why. There is no trigger, no picture, no smell or sound, it just happens. It’s been happening all the time lately.
I want to tell you that I have made progress, capital P Progress. I want to tell you I am better. I am great. I smile. I take care of my baby. I enjoy my life. I like waking up in the morning. But I don’t know if that’s true. I think I am only starting to admit that my journey through grief is going to be a lot longer than I ever imagined. Sometimes I think I’ll be grieving for the rest of my life.
After I put Kai in his crib, I look through a stack of pictures of Josh. I find one of me lying on the dog bed with Louise and Bug and I have my arms around Louise. My eyes are closed and there is this soft glow from the lights of the Christmas tree. Josh took this picture. I look so happy. The dogs look so relaxed. You can feel the love when you look at this picture. We look so balanced, the three of us. Now, it’s still the three of us, and we are completely unstable.
Sometimes I feel like I cannot survive with the dogs in this house. It is just too much. But when I look at this picture, it rips through my heart because I know there was a day when I loved Louise and Bug and they loved me back. Now they destroy everything. They jump on the beds. They know that I can’t handle them. They’re mad. I’m mad. I feel such a huge loss when I look at this picture because I know that I didn’t just lose Josh, I lost my life that I had with him.
I’ve hit a snag. I feel more depressed than I have in the last two months. It is as if someone has put a light behind all of the pictures in the house with Josh in them. They are illuminated. I can’t make it down the hallway without getting choked up. I miss him more today than I did during the holidays. I am regressing. Fuck.
Ashley stops by tonight for a little while after Kai goes to bed. We talk about everything. We talk about The Biggest Loser and how much we love the pink team. We talk about sperm banks (for her, not me) and being single moms. We talk about being single for the rest of our lives, about how we’ll just live for our kids and be happy. We talk about my parents, Deedee, Josh, Chris, Drew, Margaret and Ray, Kai, me, and her. She says that she’s always so impressed with my dad, with how kind and considerate he is. He always knows what to do and how to help. She says she still feels guilty and regretful about her relationship with Josh. We both cry. We cry for Josh, Margaret and Ray, and we cry for the rest of us who have to deal with all of it.
After Ashley leaves I think about how I have nothing negative to say about her visit. I am not filing a complaint. I am really happy she is in my life. I am fortunate she is here to talk to me, to entertain me, to help me, to love me.
Before I go to bed, I put on my headphones to listen to Dr. Joy Browne as I pick up around the house. Her opening anecdote is about how it is important to be thankful, even when times are bad, because if anything is certain, it is that time passes and things change. She says that sometimes they go from bad to worse and sometimes they go from bad back to good. But at any point, we should be thankful. We should be thankful that we had good times when they were here and we can be thankful that they will come again. Despite my state of regression, Dr. Joy’s words are a tremendous comfort to me. I’m not mad or angry at her wisdom, which has been my usual reaction when someone tries to reassure me that it’s going to be okay. Here it goes again, this bizarre side effect of grief; I am completely manic-depressive. I go from the darkest place in the world to being inspired by a radio psychologist. But she is right. I need to be more thankful even when I hit a bad patch.
My quiet house, for example: I can honestly say that I am getting used to the peace and quiet. I even savor it a little. I like spending the evenings with Ira Glass and Dr. Joy Browne. If I do watch TV, I just quietly sit and rock Kai and watch Dog Whisperer. I have become so accustomed to these people that I can picture them sitting in my living room.
I feel like I know Ira Glass. I feel like after dinner, it’s just me, Ira Glass, Dr. Joy Browne, and Cesar Millan, just sitting around and chatting. I know what all of them would say. Ira would do a lot of listening, make an occasional witty comment, and ask poignant questions.
“I know Ashley drives you crazy,” he would say in his distinct voice, “but have you ever thought about what your life would be like without her?” His tone isn’t abrasive or judgmental; it’s just a question. Dr. Joy Browne would do the most talking. She would have strong opinions and try to get me to not be so hard on people. She would force me to see things from other people’s points of view, which would initially frustrate me. “I mean, Natalie,” she would say, in her direct, somewhat harsh tone, “you really just need to think about how Deedee feels.” I would sit and listen and sigh. “You need to start being more polite on the phone. Tell her a nice story about Kai when she calls. I mean, you don’t think it’s killing her to be away from her grandson? I’ve got news for you, Cookie, she’s not calling to hear about you, she’s calling to hear about him. So get over yourself and fill her in a little bit more.” Cesar would describe things in a straightforward, honest fashion, just as he does on his show. He would never accuse me of being too aggressive or short with people, but he also would never blame outsiders for their behavior. “Natalie, you have to have rules, boundaries and limitations. Humans are a lot like animals: they will follow rules, but you have to give them rules to follow.” The whole time Cesar talks, he would be on his knees playing with Louise and Bug with his perfect posture. I would vent to Cesar about how my dad is always trying to give me advice on how
to get through to the dogs. Cesar would add his insight. “You can’t get frustrated when your dad talks about the dogs all the time, because your dad doesn’t know that talking about the dogs is against the rules, because you haven’t set the rules.” In his calm, assertive voice he would give me some direction. “Next time you talk to your dad just say, ‘Dad, the rule is no talking about the dogs until I bring it up.’ Then, he will know how to behave because you have drawn the line for him.”
Sometimes we don’t talk about me, sometimes we talk about other things like the latest political news or the weather or who Ira has interviewed lately. It’s quite a panel when you think about it. Three people who know how to ask questions and solve problems. Every now and then Ira comes over with his friend David Sedaris, who wanders in and out of conversations and picks up on strange details that no one else has noticed. “Kai,” he would say in his dry voice as he looks at Kai’s big blue eyes, “do you think it’s frustrating when people shake things in your face all the time?”
“That’s how babies develop,” Dr. Joy Browne would snap back. “Research proves their eyesight improves if they look at contrasting colors.”
“I’m not arguing the research,” he would say. “I’m just saying it certainly would frustrate me.”
This is what I picture. I know if my parents knew my evenings were filled with podcasts and odd journeys of my imagination, they probably wouldn’t leave me by myself so often. But I’m okay with it. This is good for now. Maybe someday I’ll have the desire to share my space with someone again, but certainly not now or anytime soon. Kai and I are quite content being all alone. It’s all a part of this strange metamorphosis.
• • •
The dogs are getting worse. They are bad on the walk, and then when we come back to the house, they are horrible. Louise whines all afternoon. Bug barks incessantly in the backyard. Every time I yell at Louise, Bug gets scared and runs to her crate, but it doesn’t faze Louise. In the middle of feeding Kai, Louise starts barking in an incredibly loud alarming bark at a squirrel out the front window. I cannot get them to calm down. I am losing it. I can’t do this.
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