In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  I was, again, wrong. When they lifted my daughter over my head (an emergency C-section after twenty-two hours of labor—don’t ask), she looked down at me with her globelike eyes, and I breathed: This is the person I have been waiting my entire life to meet. The exact person. It was an instant, molecular transformation. I’d been agnostic my whole life, but in the moment of my daughter’s birth, I understood Mary. After they took little Zanny out of sight to weigh her under the warming lamp, Cal looked at me, panicked: Should he stay with me? Should he go to the baby? Go to her! I pleaded. Go talk to her—make sure she knows she’s not alone! He did. The fear that Cal might love the babies more than me vanished. Neither of us would ever love anyone more than we loved our babies.

  Some women report that their partners feel neglected or even jealous when the baby is born. What happened to hanging out with friends, tossing back the martini flavor-of-the-moment? What happened to watching Jim Jarmusch or Chris Farley movies until one in the morning? Moreover, what happened to the time you used to fawn over me and how funny and cool I was? And what happened to how funny and cool you were? Most important, where is the sex? All understandable. None of it Cal. Many studies issued on Generation X dads report that while they’re the most involved of any in American history, and help around the house more than their forefathers, they still offload the bulk of domestic burdens to women.* Cal was the classic curve thrower. We never even discussed whether he would wake up in the middle of the night with me, change diapers, any of that stuff. If he could have figured out a way to lactate, he’d have done it in a heartbeat. But he did everything else. He did the grocery shopping and cooking; he wanted to bathe, diaper, and dress Zanny; he managed the mail; I handed over my money and he paid the bills; he made the phone calls and booked the appointments; if Zanny cried, Cal wanted to console her.

  When Zanny was eight weeks old, I took my first stroll without Cal to hang out in the park with an old college friend who had a three-year-old and a newborn. How was Cal taking to fatherhood, she wanted to know. Kind of amazingly, I said, ticking off everything he’d taken on, unbidden. “If I wasn’t breastfeeding, I don’t think she would know which one of us was the mother,” I said. My friend looked at me. “Make sure he doesn’t get too good at it,” she said. “You’re the mother.” I bristled. Yuck—what a weird, sexist thing to say! Plus, for a child to feel this kind of ambidextrous attachment to her parents was, I felt, a kind of ideal. Oh, well—her issue. It probably sounded obnoxious and braggy of me to tout his bona fides. Cal’s and my relationship, I told myself in a tone of superiority, had always been different from our friends’.

  When the NASDAQ crashed just before Zanny was born, our combined income tanked along with the markets, since both our jobs were tied to the tech economy. To cut back on overhead, Cal re-jiggered his business—the company he’d worked like a dog to get off the ground throughout the mid-nineties—and closed his downtown offices to work from home. True, he was making half what he’d made before, but we actually viewed it as a backhanded blessing because it meant we would both have more time to hang out with our baby.

  Our baby! When she was awake, we talked to her and played with her and sang to her. When she was napping, we talked about what she had done while she was awake. When we were all asleep, we dreamed about her. Cal woke up one morning and excitedly related a dream in which she was a physicist and a runway model. What did she look like? I asked. He looked at me, perplexed. What do you mean? She looked like herself, just tall. That adorably batty response underscored a seismic shift in our sense of time and space. There was no future or past—there was no moment but the moment. In fact, life before her felt like a counterfeit existence, a way to pass the time until she was ready to come to us. One evening, I tried to introduce a thread of reflection. What do you think of everything? He lay back on the sofa and closed his eyes. Finally, he said: Everything is different now.

  Everything was different now. Cal’s prediction that day in the park was beginning to materialize—but so, I thought, was mine. This new reality, for me, called up a particular combination of love and terror. As open and wonderful as the world had become with my child’s presence, it was simultaneously more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. My nearly unmanageable love for my baby made me almost frantic. Even considering that she might somehow be taken from me by the forces of nature or fate was unfathomable. I was so insanely attached to Zanny that I couldn’t let anyone other than Cal take care of her for nearly a year. I knew it was crazy. I knew I was crazy. But picturing someone taking her away from me even into the next room—never mind out of the apartment—sent waves of pure white fear whipping up my spine. It wasn’t until she was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatrician and the books referred to “separation anxiety,” it was meant to describe the baby’s psyche, not mine.

  I knew that there was no way I would be able to leave her to go into an office; my neurosis would flower into a full-blown psychotic lifestyle. This realization snapped into stark relief when Zanny was three months old. I got a call from a producer at a major television network who was revamping one of the flagship news shows; he asked if I was interested in a position as an anchor. At the time, I had already resigned from my full-time job and was freelancing, doing the kind of writing a person can do while babies nap. I certainly wasn’t back to anything resembling a twelve-hour workday. I had neither employed nor made plans to employ a nanny or day-care center. As the producer described the job, I became aware, in almost an out-of-body kind of way, that had I been listening to this just three months earlier, my only challenge would have been to keep quiet until he had finished talking so that I could chirrup, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” like Molly Bloom at a job interview. But now, everything was different. It didn’t sound like a great job at all, or at least it didn’t sound as though taking that job would equal a great life. It sounded like the kind of exciting and exhausting work I’d done for fifteen years, albeit played out on the stage of national prime-time television. Which meant that I would be working a million hours a day. I looked down at my sleeping bunny rabbit. And I said no. Instead, I ramped up my freelance work—and later, got my first book deal—so that I could work from home.

  Boring—to loll around with a baby all day long? Are you nuts? The only question was why no one had told me about this sooner. I would lie in bed next to my firstborn as a newborn, watching the slide show of expressions flash across her tiny, mouselike face—the bursting of the unalloyed grin now flattening back into the neutral poker face now curling into the sad lip look—and literally ache with love. (You can hear veteran moms in my neighborhood invoke the weirdly perfect take on this kind of baby passion: “That baby is so cute it makes my uterus hurt!”) I loved nursing her, nuzzling her little butternut-squash body, annoying her with spongy kisses, slurping in that sweet ricotta breath. I loved singing to her and dancing with her around our tiny living room in our rental apartment in Brooklyn, once a flop pad only for passing out after the zillion-hour workweek, or for hosting the occasional debauched party. Had I really ever smoked cartons of American Spirits, drunk bottles of wine, bent in agony over my computer, obsessively watched Freaks and Geeks with Cal over the nightly deliveries of Thai food, yakked on the phone until the wee hours with friends in West Coast time zones, blasted Portishead and Hole in this place—for eight years? Here, in this gentle nest of sweetness and light? It all looked the same, but I was somehow occupying a completely different space. My brain, along with our apartment, had evidently been transported to another dimension, as if some cosmic blueprint outlining the Meaning of Life had suddenly been overlaid on us.

  It sounds psychedelically grandiose, like some kind of hippie awakening. Trust me, it was not. For my people, mind-expanding experiences were what you made fun of. Reality was not, as the dumb-ass sixties saying went, “a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs”; our drug-doing revolved around numbing ourselves, killing pain. Reality was definitely real, it sucked, and
you got mad or sad, but mostly you made poisonous, snickery comments and drove around aimlessly under the miasma of someone’s mom’s tranquilizers. Yet here I was, with my infant daughter, light-years away from the forces of irony. Just being with her, and watching what she was doing or “saying,” forced me to see a radically different world. There’s nothing like having a baby to compel you to apply, in astonishingly literal terms, the substance of Philosophy 101. When you observe your newborn child working every waking moment to assemble a picture of you, of her own body, of the world, it makes you cringe to recall all those sophomoric conversations you—gesticulating with your hand-rolled cigarette—had with your friends about Descartes, Kant, the Platonic precept of how one comes to know the “Other.” This is where it all happens—with infants—and it is unfolding in front of your eyes. If it is true that perception is reality, as Buddhism and quantum physics tell us, this is when the perceptual foundation is laid.

  Which made me think. If you’ve read your Chomsky, you’re acquainted with the idea that all social or cultural messages are constructed, and are invariably constructed by someone or something with a vested interest in controlling their content as well as your consumption of that content. Even if you haven’t read your Chomsky, you’ve seen The Matrix, which is kind of the same thing. Jesus, I began thinking, what if my perception has been wrong all along, or mostly wrong, and all I’m doing is guiding her within the confines of my fraudulent perception? All the abstract angst I’d harbored in relation to my own upbringing lurched from the realm of the caustic joke into that of the stunningly serious, and consequently the premises of all my defensive tactics suddenly turned on me as questions that I had to answer now—or risk botching my own child’s sense of security.

  And the questions came in rapid fire. What if it is not true that your work is what you are, that it can help to dissolve the psychic weight of your hideous adolescence? Moreover, what if the whole way I was raised was wrong, and that whole excuse for having had a shitty childhood—“You were raised like that, and you turned out okay”—was the biggest load of crap of all time? What if I was not okay? In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I began to think that while I might be okay at this very moment, I had not turned out okay at all in the scheme of things. I had become a pretty fucked-up adult. I’d gorged myself maudlin and frantic on drugs and booze for more than a decade. I’d spent my teens as a punky truant running myself and boyfriends ragged, my twenties as a workaholic drama queen running myself and Cal ragged. Maybe now, at the threshold of my thirties as a sober married woman and mom, it was time to sort through the whole messy hill of beans. Maybe I was a slave: born into bondage, into a prison that I couldn’t taste or see or touch, a prison for my mind. Dude. The red pill—give it.

  I had always thought that at least my infancy and early childhood were decent, but the more I thought about it now, the more scandalized I was. There was no way I was going to hand Zanny off to a bunch of babysitters—what if they were like Hilary, or worse, like Bonnie, the evil fairy-tale queen? No way was I going to read her the damn Highwayman as a bedtime story—I was going to read her comforting, sweet stories and listen to her feelings! And what non-thoughts were going through my parents’ minds when they decided that it was okay for my dad to go ice climbing with an infant? Mother of God! That photo was banished to storage.

  Listening to stories about my own babyhood now became all but intolerable. The casual abuse! The banality of evil! “We were just following doctor’s orders.” Averting her eyes in a dramatic way—but in a way transparently calculated to look as though it was not dramatic—my mother commented to me one day as I was nursing Zanny that I had been “allergic” to her breast milk.

  “What in the world can you be talking about?” I sputtered. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “Well, it may sound crazy to you, but my doctor at the French Hospital of San Francisco said that in very rare cases, a baby is simply unable to digest her mother’s … milk … and that you were clearly one of these children,” my mother sniffed. “You were a very allergic child, extremely colicky.”

  Silence. I stared at her.

  “Well, the baby will be able to start taking solid food soon, in any case,” my mother then declared, changing the subject to what she must have thought was a less controversial topic. Wrong. Solid food! What could she be talking about now? Was she out of her mind? Babies should have nothing but breast milk until they’re at least six months old! Nothing but! At least! And then they still need to be nursed for at least a year!

  “Six months old!” My mother was aghast. “Why, you were six weeks old when you started eating applesauce!” I felt the blood drop out of my brain. Six weeks. A baby is barely able to lift her head at that age, never mind digest solid food. No wonder I was “colicky.” Had she been trying to kill me?

  “Well, things may be different now, but I do know one thing absolutely,” my mother retorted. “You adored applesauce.”

  A year and change later, when Zanny started uttering her first words, I asked my mom what my first word had been.

  “Well, I don’t know that I want to tell you,” she said, after a belabored pause on her end of the phone line.

  “Stop with the Brontë theatrics,” I said, annoyed. “Just tell me like a regular mother.”

  “Well, you’re not going to like it, my dear,” she said, threateningly.

  “What was it?”

  “ ‘Scotch’! All right? It was ‘scotch.’ ”

  Silence.

  “Well, I told you that you wouldn’t like it,” she said, satisfied, a glass clinking in the background.

  When I relate this story to people ten years younger, Generation Y, they are properly horrified. This is the generation whose parents fawned over them, giving everyone a blue ribbon whether they had come in first, second, or third place—or any place. They love their parents! They have said so, in public, for nearly a decade now, making such perky declarations to the press in stories about generational differences as “my parents are my best friends!” It is also the generation that is such a well-documented pain in the ass in the workplace because they expect everyone older than they to tell them what an amazing job they’re doing with every office memo they staple together. When I tell this story to friends my own age, however, they cackle with conspiratorial delight. “Oh my God,” they say. “That is so fucking great.” Then, after we stop giggling, there is a moment. We push the strollers silently. And then someone says to the kids, “Hey! Who wants a Tofutti ice-cream sandwich?”

  As phenomenally delicious as having children often is, it can also be phenomenally sad for Xers. The old truism about finally being able to understand, and sympathize with, your parents and their choices after you have your own children often just doesn’t hold up for many of us. Rather, we find ourselves wondering how our parents could have acted the way they did. Cal, though one of the few, was not the only person my age with a good relationship with his still-married parents. I do have some friends who not only had none of these childhood issues with their parents, but also remain on excellent terms with them. I love hearing stories of their upbringing much in the same way that I like to read books like Eat, Pray, Love or A Year in Provence, whose narratives recount life experiences so remote from my own financial and familial circumstances that they function as refreshing weekend trips to virtual reality. But even more, I love seeing those friends with their parents now because it gives me the idea that it might be possible to have this kind of relationship with my own children when they are grown.

  Take my friend “Holly,” for example. The eldest of three, Holly grew up in a solid middle-class home with a smart stay-at-home mother and a stable, no-frills, fishing kind of dad. Her complaints about her parents are that they are kind of provincial; her mom can be casually stinging, and her dad, she says, is relatively boring and unimaginative. But the basic point is: So? I’ve known Holly for twenty years, and her position on her parents
has never varied: She loves them and is grateful for her happy, normal childhood. Holly and her siblings went on to attend prestigious colleges and graduate schools; they became experts in American Modernism, opera, and neurobiology; they have traveled to interesting places and have had complicated, grown-up relationships. Holly’s adult life is nothing like her parents’. She is a single mother living in New York City and working on the highly competitive, ridiculously overeducated sales force of a high-end antiques dealer. But what makes Holly a freak by our generation’s standards is that instead of resenting or comparing the differences in their lives, she has renewed admiration and appreciation for her mom’s graceful management of the daily needs of three children, essentially single-handed. Holly’s mom, as ever, is a source of genuine comfort, support, and inspiration to her. In fact, in talking about the demise of her own marriage, Holly often reflects that her upbringing is to blame only in that it is hard to find a mate whose own background matches the stability of her own. “Most of the men I’m attracted to are complex and interesting—which I love and want—but they have these tortured interior lives because of their childhoods,” she says. “Basically, I’m not that emotionally complicated because my childhood was, well, good. It is impossible for me to understand what it is like to live so constantly with such demons.”