Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  * * *

  Right up until the moment Felix arrived, I had a clear idea of how I wanted his first few minutes in the world to transpire. I’d read the books, taken the birthing class, discussed the details with my husband and midwife and doula, and we’d all decided how we wanted it to go. We’d wait for the umbilical cord to stop pulsing, as the latest research showed was beneficial, then my husband would cut the cord, then the baby would be immediately placed on my chest to bond and nurse. This birth experience, or “birth plan,” as we had been told to call it, would be the best entrance into the world for our son, but would also, I felt but did not admit, reflect positively on me and my preparedness. His birth was not something that was happening to me, to us, but something we were doing—consciously, with love and care. Right from the beginning, I would prove myself to be a conscientious parent. That was the plan.

  But after two days of mind-numbingly painful labor, I begged for the epidural I had spent six months swearing off. Then, when our midwife announced that it was time to push, her brow furrowed, her expression hardened, and she called for the doctor.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Probably nothing. But I see some meconium, so we want to have help in the room just in case.”

  “Just in case what?” Pete asked.

  She didn’t answer. A physician whose face I don’t remember came into the room and stood beside the midwife. My body was hoisted, my legs raised. I pushed once, twice, three times, and then he fell into their hands, gray and silent at first, then flushing pink and screaming.

  “It’s in his lungs,” the doctor said. “We need to suction.”

  When he handed Pete the scissors, it was with urgency in his eyes.

  “Can I wait until the cord stops pulsing?” Pete asked.

  “No, we have to clear his airway. Cut it now.”

  Pete did as he was told. I lay back on the bed, numb and sweaty, watching him fumble. The baby was whisked off, suctioned, given oxygen, hooked up to monitors and taken for a few hours of observation. I dozed off, exhausted. I opened my eyes sometime in the middle of the afternoon, looked around the unfamiliar room. For a moment, while my mind cleared, I felt so happy, so content, so relieved that the hours of labor were finally over and I’d made it through, that I hadn’t managed to jump out the window as I’d threatened to do at the height of the pain. Yes, I was alive. And I was not in agony. I’d made it. And the warm September sun was filling the window. And everything was good. That was what I felt for about five seconds. And then, following this contentment came another, unfamiliar feeling. I looked over at the roller crib beside the bed and saw that it was empty.

  “They’re monitoring him in the nursery to make sure he’s breathing well,” Pete said before I could ask. And as soon as he said it, I began to understand. There was now a he (my son) and a they (his world) that mattered to me more than myself, more than the most deeply seated notion of who I was. And what I had wanted for him—an easy, hitchless birth—had not come to pass. And furthermore, all the things I wanted for him or would ever want for him—joy, love, belonging, a meaningful life—might come to pass and might not. It wasn’t up to me. This new kind of love, which seemed to take up all the space inside me, was not limitless in its power to determine the future or to protect him. And in realizing this, that feeling I’d had upon waking, that feeling of relief and contentment, dissolved.

  I pushed back the hospital sheets and stumbled out of bed toward the hallway to find him. He was in the nursery, asleep in a cradle, a few wires streaming from his head, but breathing, sleeping, healthy. I’d like to say that this was a moment of pure tenderness and joy, going to check on my son for the first time, realizing that I was his mother. But that would be an omission. There was joy, of course, but beneath it, and above it, and around it on every side, was fear.

  * * *

  Felix was born on a Monday morning, and Pete and I took him home from the hospital Tuesday afternoon. In another era, I would have stayed for the better part of a week, resting and recovering, but hospital costs and managed health care had made such indulgences the stuff of fairy tales. We’d planned to stay our state-mandated two nights, but the hospital where I gave birth had no nursery for healthy babies. Parents were expected to room with their infants to promote bonding (and cut costs). This sounded wonderful when I was pregnant. What I hadn’t anticipated then was a baby who would spend his first days on Earth screaming as though he were on fire. The room was small and hot, the bed narrow and uncomfortable, the nurses curt and overworked. Breast-feeding was not going well. The lactation specialist so lauded on the tour was nowhere to be found, and after one night, Pete and I decided that if we were not going to sleep, we’d rather not-sleep at home.

  A few months earlier, an acquaintance at a party described to me her childbirth homecoming. In the hospital, she’d told me, her baby had been a sleepy, sweet-tempered bundle of quiet. He’d been like the babies you see on toilet paper commercials and inspirational greeting cards. But once home, he’d moved his half-open eyes from one parent to the other as though to say, “My God, there’s been some horrible mistake. They didn’t really send me home with these people.” Then he cried for a month.

  Since Felix began expressing his distaste for existence so urgently and immediately upon entering the world, Pete and I thought at least we’d be spared this sort of surprise. What we didn’t anticipate was that once at home, among the many fruits of our anticipation—plush nursing pillows, unopened boxes of pacifiers, vibrating bouncers, towers of burp rags and bibs and blankets—amid this oasis of infant plenty, Felix would howl ten times louder than he had at the hospital. He howled when we fed him, when we burped him, when we rocked him, when we put him in his crib.

  “He’s just not a happy guy,” my aunt said when she came to visit. Pete and I passed him back and forth, exhausted. Where the hell is everybody? I wanted to scream. But then I remembered warning them away, laying the groundwork for that nebulous endeavor that had seemed so important—taking ownership of my birthing experience. For two days, we cared for our child in a fog of sleepless terror. Then I called my mother and begged her to get on a plane.

  “I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m so tired I feel nauseous. I feel like I could fall asleep walking. Everything’s sore. The sink is full of dishes, and we haven’t eaten in days.”

  “I thought you wanted time to yourself,” she said.

  “I was wrong. I want help. I don’t know what to do. He won’t let us put him down.”

  “You need to stay calm. He has a little colic.” She was looking at flights while we spoke. “It’s so expensive to come last-minute.”

  I was trying to nurse him. He’d suck for a moment, then cry, suck a little longer, then cry harder.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I’ll pay you back for the ticket. I don’t care how much the flights are. I don’t care if the ticket costs a million dollars. At this moment, if Adolf Hitler knocked on the door and offered to help me, I’d invite him in and pour him a cup of coffee. So charter a jet if you have to. Bum a ride with an escaped convict. I don’t care how you get here as long as you come and as long as it’s now.”

  “Kimmy! What is wrong? What is the problem?”

  I hardly knew. I couldn’t say. “I’m scared,” I told her. “I have this awful feeling that something terrible is about to happen.” This was a laughable understatement. The truth was that it was even worse than I let on. The anxiety that began with my pregnancy was spreading and growing stronger.

  * * *

  Why does he cry so much, so ferociously? Why can’t I soothe him? Why, fifteen minutes into feeding, does he arch his back and shriek as though in pain? Is it colic? Is it acid reflux? When he was six weeks of age, we started giving him Prevacid, and the crying abated. We were relieved, but within a week, there were other worries. He had his first upper respiratory infection, fever, runny nose, but why was he wheezing like a leaky balloon? The pediatrician said it was r
eactive airway disease and a double ear infection. He’d need nebulizing treatments of albuterol, oral steroids, antibiotics. He got better, but a few weeks later, it happened again. Then again. Why was he always sick? Was it because I’d given up on exclusive breast-feeding and supplemented with formula? Was it all the germs he encountered during his two days a week of day care? Should I even have him in day care? Was I prioritizing my writing over my child, doing him irreparable damage? Would he be better off if he stayed with me at home every day? And yet at home there were more worries. Was I giving him enough tummy time, enough playtime, enough visual stimulation? He hated sleeping on his back, but if I put him on his stomach would he die of SIDS? He loved being worn, but I’d read a story of a woman whose baby suffocated in its sling, so when I wore him I held my hand by his lips to make sure he was breathing. Was he nursing enough, napping enough, smiling enough, babbling enough, meeting all of his developmental milestones? Were all the asthma steroid treatments damaging his brain?

  These were the thoughts that met me when I opened my eyes in the morning. They were with me when I was with him, and they followed me when I tried to work. He was not a hardy baby, but would he be sickly forever? He wasn’t putting words together as much as expected or engaging in extended play. Did he have autism, a hearing problem, some other mysterious deficiency? Could I help him by doing something differently, giving him more time, more attention, by reading a book on new parenting styles or making my own baby food or learning the art of infant massage? Was I doing everything I could for him? Would he get into a good preschool, a good grade school, a decent college? Would he find a job, a calling, friends and lovers and eventually a mate? Would he have a rewarding career that paid the bills and filled his soul? Would he continue to love and value me? When he thought of me twenty years from now, or thirty, or fifty, would he think I’d done well? Would I be a point of pride and affection or of loathing and shame? And would any of this even matter? Would there still be colleges when it was time for him to go to school? An economy when it was time for him to get a job? Drinkable water or breathable air? One question led to another, which led to another, an endless train of worry chugging along.

  When I remember those first years of motherhood, it is not so much memories or moments I return to; it is this feeling, this constant gnawing, on-edge-ness, this vague but persistent sensation that something wasn’t right, that I was doing something wrong. And the feeling was different from what I’d experienced during pregnancy. It was not only an intensification of fear but a multidirectional expansion. Where there had before been a straightforward fear of something bad happening, there was now fear of something bad happening as well as a fear of my own incompetencies, of present mistakes, future failures, the omnipresent possibility of not measuring up.

  Looking back, it is clear to me these feelings were not within the range of normal anxiety. I’d been reminded repeatedly about the warning signs and dangers of postpartum depression. At the same time, I didn’t think that’s what I was experiencing. But I had no idea. Awareness of postpartum depression has increased in recent years, but the reality is that while depression is distinct from anxiety, there’s a significant amount of overlap. Trying to untangle the emotional and mood-related changes I experienced after the birth of my son, I spoke with Emily Miller, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Northwestern University, who explained that the overwhelming majority of women with perinatal depression will have anxiety symptoms and vice versa. Miller became interested in the subject of perinatal mood disorders when she noticed a significant number of patients coming to her with symptoms, not of depression but of anxiety disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorders that began during pregnancy. “One patient,” she told me, “had these obsessive thoughts that her kid’s car seat would turn over and the kid would suffocate. Another woman had obsessive thoughts when she was cooking that she would accidentally put the baby in the oven. She didn’t want to put the baby in the oven. It was very disturbing to this woman, but she thought she might accidentally do this or this might happen and then these obsessive thoughts and compulsions like, okay, let me check the oven twenty times (or the more standard of washing hands fifteen times, checking that the doors are locked). Things that would be fine if done once or twice but were now happening enough to disrupt these women’s ability to complete other tasks.”

  It was only when Miller started sharing these stories with other obstetricians, and learned that they’d also had patients who’d begun having similar symptoms around pregnancy, that she began to wonder if what she was observing was part of a larger phenomenon that wasn’t being talked about enough by the obstetrical community. “I spend so much time teaching my medical students and residents about preeclampsia and postpartum hemorrhage,” she told me, “but mood disorders are more common than any of these other things and we don’t focus our medical education on them.”

  Later in the conversation, I asked her why she thought there was more awareness around perinatal depression than anxiety.

  “That’s a good question,” she said. “Maybe it’s because with depression, there’s a potential effect on maternal mortality. Depressed people sometimes kill themselves. Anxiety is more about quality of life.”

  * * *

  Of course, women don’t usually kill themselves from chronic anxiety; chronic, gnawing perfectionism; and self-consciousness and isolation. Mothers don’t often die of fear. What happens, I think, far more often, is that we simply, slowly disappear. We become something less than we thought we’d be. We see things less clearly, experience things less intensely; as fear expands, the world recedes. The more minutiae a mother has to worry about, the more unlikely disasters she’s charged with preventing through her infinite maternal wisdom and foresight, the less mental, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual energy she has for herself, her work, her community. Feminists frequently debate which elements of systemic and internalized sexism most need to change in order for more women to run for political office or rise to the top of their companies or colonize professions from which they’ve been historically excluded. Undoubtedly, there are many. But maybe not expecting and encouraging women to worry about every fucking thing that happens in their household might be a solid place to start.

  I’ve been reminded of this many times since I began writing about parenthood and fear, but maybe never so much as a few months ago, having coffee with a woman a little older than myself whose kids were finishing college. When she learned that I was writing about parenthood, she asked if we could chat. I was excited for the meeting, as she seemed to me not just any mother but exactly the kind of mother and woman I hoped to become. She had two kids who seemed not just successful in a looks-good-on-the-college-application kind of way, but also genuinely interesting and curious and connected and thriving. She had a successful career, a strong marriage, a circle of intelligent and interesting friends. Here is a success story of American motherhood, I thought to myself as I’d gotten to know her. And yet after we’d chatted for a few minutes, she said something about her memories of motherhood that startled me in a way not much else had.

  When I asked her to tell me about the role that fear had played in her life as a mother when her kids were babies and then as they grew, she sat quietly for a moment, then she said, “I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember how fear affected you?” I asked.

  “No. No. The effect, I think, is that I don’t remember much of those years. It’s so strange. I wasn’t an absentee mom. I was there. I tried my best to be present, to give them so much of myself. But now it seems what I mostly remember of those years is the worrying, the anxiety, the uncertainty. Always feeling afraid that if I did the wrong thing, made the wrong choice, something bad would happen to them. I never chose to parent that way. It’s just what we all were doing. Now they’re gone, those babies and little boys of mine are all grown, and what I remember most of my time with them is feeling afraid, feeling like I didn’t measure up. I remember
the other stuff too, the sweetness, but somehow it seems more muted than it should be, obscured by something.”

  It seemed to me, as I sat there, that perhaps this was the greatest cost of fear, the way it blots out everything it touches—drowning out the joys of parenthood, deadening the very thing we hoped it would protect.

  I asked her what advice she would give, now that she’d scaled the wall, to today’s mother of small children. Somehow, after all that had happened in Virginia, after all the women I’d talked to and things I had read, it was her response, the beautiful, brilliant simplicity of it, that most changed me. She said it with a little shrug, as though the answer was so obvious, impossible to miss. “Try to be less afraid” was what she said.

  And so that was what I did.

  * * *

  As spring arrived in Chicago that year, as I began writing and thinking more and more about my experience and the questions it raised for me and for all parents, I decided to make another trip to Virginia—this one not to go to juvenile court, but instead to do something I’d wanted to do for years but hadn’t been able to bring myself to do. I went alone, without my children, to an artist residency near Charlottesville to spend a week writing.

  As much as I’d always wanted to do this, I wavered. After all, responsible, nondegenerate mothers didn’t ditch their small children for a week of writing and going on long, meditative walks and talking to other writers and artists around a communal dinner table. What if Felix’s asthma flared up while I was away? What if Violet got an ear infection? Pete could handle it, certainly, in a baseline way. No one would die, probably. But he couldn’t handle it the way I would handle it. My children, I imagined, would become inconsolable without the one person (me) who was the most attuned to their wants and needs. Pete would feed them macaroni-and-cheese and grapes for seven days. Violet would grow constipated and get dreadlocks in her unconditioned hair. Felix would forget to use toothpaste when he brushed. They loved Daddy. Daddy was fun. Daddy was terrific. But Daddy was no Mommy. Or so I told myself, buying into one of the lamest tropes of the cult of motherhood.