The Perfect Child

by Berry, Lucinda

  On my birth plan, I had laid out that I was committed to natural childbirth and didn’t want any pain medication. I wanted to experience everything since it was going to be the only time I’d ever do it. I’d also read all the studies about how the drugs could slow down labor and increase the likelihood of having a C-section, and I wanted to have a natural birth.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, the doubt written on his face. He’d listened to me rant for hours about doing labor drug-free.

  I gritted my teeth against the pain. “Yes.”

  “I’m going to get the nurse,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  He hurried out of the room and returned with one of the nurses. He rushed back to my bedside and started rubbing my back.

  “Don’t touch me!” My entire body felt like it was having a contraction, beginning at my neck and moving all the way down to my feet. White-hot pain at the center. His touch made it worse, not better.

  He flinched and stepped back. “Okay, whatever you want. You got this, honey. The nurse is here. She’ll help you.” His eyes pleaded with her to help me.

  “I want the drugs! Give me the drugs!” I shouted at her.

  “I understand that,” she said. Her voice was calm, unfaltering. “I’ve called the anesthesiologist. He’s with another patient right now, but he’ll be with you once he’s finished with her.” She moved the top of my bed down. “I have to check you again to see how far along you are.”

  I gripped the side rails as I lay back and almost passed out from the pain. White spots danced at the corners of my vision. I reached for Christopher and dug my nails into him. “Please, please, I changed my mind. Just give me the drugs.”

  He used his other hand to wipe the hair from my forehead. “You’re almost there. The doctor is going to be here any minute.”

  The nurse pulled her hand out of me, and her face filled with compassion. “I’m sorry, but it’s too late for the drugs. I can feel the baby’s head in the canal. You’re going to have to push soon.”

  I shook my head like a mad dog. “I can’t do it. I’m too tired. It hurts. It hurts so bad!”

  “You can do it, honey. You can do it. I know you can. You’re strong,” Christopher said.

  My room filled with more nurses and another doctor in addition to my own. Everyone slipped on gear and surrounded my bed. Christopher lifted one of my legs while one of the nurses lifted another, pulling them back against me.

  “Stop! Stop!” I shrieked. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  “Just relax. Take a deep breath,” the nurse instructed. “Breathe. You’ve got to breathe.”

  I couldn’t concentrate on anything except the searing pain shooting through me again and again.

  “Okay, Hannah, push!” she yelled.

  They all chanted to ten while I gritted my teeth and bore down. Animal sounds came out of me. They gave me a few seconds to breathe and then made me do it again and again. I didn’t think it was ever going to stop.

  “It’s burning. Something is burning.” I wept from the pain.

  “Just push,” the nurse said.

  “I can’t. It hurts too much!” But my body ignored me and pushed anyway. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  Christopher looked down at me. I locked onto his eyes, feeding off his strength. “You can do it, honey. Just one more big push.”

  And just like that, my baby was here. I felt the release immediately as the baby slid out. The doctor grabbed the baby and laid it on my chest.

  “It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” Christopher cried out.

  Tears streamed down my cheeks, all the pain forgotten as he let out a wail. He instantly searched for my breast, and a secret space opened up inside me like it’d been there all along, just waiting to be discovered. He latched on to my nipple. I laughed and cried at the same time.

  “He’s perfect,” I said over and over again as Christopher worked with the doctor to cut the umbilical cord like we’d planned.

  I fell in love with my baby boy instantly, marveling at his perfection and that he’d lived inside me for so long. My feelings stemmed from the deepest parts of me. He wasn’t a stranger in my arms—it was like a missing piece of myself had been returned.

  They wheeled us from the delivery room into our hospital room. My head throbbed with exhaustion. All I wanted to do was sleep with my baby cuddled on my chest. We had just gotten settled in our room when he started crying. I’d heard plenty of babies cry, but I’d never heard a baby scream like someone was pulling their limbs off. I tried to nurse him, but it only made him angrier. I tried everything to calm him down—jiggled him, walked him, sang to him, and talked to him—but nothing worked. He screamed for the next eight hours. Christopher and I took turns trying to calm him down.

  I was supposed to be resting when it wasn’t my turn, but it was impossible in a crammed hospital room. I couldn’t relax a single muscle. My body was tensed and hyperalert as he screamed. I was driven to do something, and my body physically hurt from not being able to stop his pain.

  As the sun came up, the three of us piled on my hospital bed with the side rail raised on each side. I was on one side of the bed while Christopher was on the other. We took turns holding the baby. We slept for a few hours, but things got busy in the morning.

  We settled on the name Cole. Christopher’s grandmother was named Nicole, and we’d already decided to name the baby after her regardless of the gender. Our room bustled with hospital activity, and even though Cole finally slept on and off throughout the day, we were awake as our visitors showed up to congratulate us. Allison called, and we asked to talk to Janie, but she wouldn’t speak, not even to Christopher.

  “She’s had a difficult night,” Allison said.

  I didn’t have the energy to even ask about it.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  Hannah and I were wrecked by the time we got home from the hospital. We’d barely slept for three days. Janie had refused to come visit the baby and was bouncing with manic energy since she hadn’t seen us for so long. I helped Hannah over to the couch and got her settled with Cole. She was still in a lot of pain from where she’d torn during delivery and from getting stitches afterward.

  “Come meet your baby brother, Cole,” I said, motioning for Janie to join us.

  She stood in front of the fireplace, shaking her head.

  I tried again. “He wants to meet you. He’s so happy to have a big sister. Look how cute he is.”

  She glared at me before moving to hide behind Allison’s legs.

  “It’s okay, Janie,” Hannah said. She looked exhausted. “You don’t have to meet your brother right now if you don’t want to. You have plenty of time to get to know him.”

  Janie asked to be picked up, and she clung to me. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, something she’d never done before.

  “He’s so precious. Look at those tiny fingers.” Allison nuzzled Cole’s face with her cheek. “Is he still crying a lot?”

  Hannah nodded. “It’s not as bad during the day, but he screams all night long. I think he’s got his days and nights mixed up.”

  “It usually only takes a few days or so for them to adjust.”

  “Thank God,” Hannah said, looking relieved. “It’s pretty brutal. It wouldn’t be so bad if he were just awake, but he screams like he’s in pain. It’s like something is hurting him, and I don’t know how to fix it.”

  Allison hugged her from the side. “He’s probably colicky. Mom said I was. Maybe it’s a firstborn baby thing. Or he could be hungry because he’s not getting enough milk. Has your milk come in yet?”

  Hannah shook her head. “I wish it’d hurry up. He’s probably starving to death.”

  I sat down with Janie on the couch next to Hannah and Allison, hoping her curiosity would get the best of her and she’d be forced to look, but she buried her face in my shoulder.

  “Why don’t you take Janie to the park, and I’ll sit with the baby so Hannah
can take a nap?” Allison suggested.

  The last thing I wanted to do was walk to the park. I wanted to nap with Hannah, but being a parent meant you put your children’s needs above your own. Parenting hadn’t wasted any time making its demands.

  “Go find your shoes, Janie,” I said, putting mine back on.

  THIRTY-SIX

  HANNAH BAUER

  Christopher and I arrived at our pediatrician’s office for Cole’s five-day appointment with a list of questions. Cole hadn’t stopped wailing, and we hadn’t slept for more than a two-hour period in over a week.

  Dr. Garcia checked him over. He was gaining weight and responded to all of the doctor’s touches, pokes, and prods just like he should.

  “He looks good. Do you have any questions?” he asked.

  We pulled out our list, but I jumped to number one immediately. “He cries whenever he gets tired, and he really gets worked up at night,” I blurted out before Christopher had a chance to speak.

  Dr. Garcia nodded. “Yes, all babies cry when they’re sleepy.”

  “Yeah, but he cries for hours before he goes to sleep. Hours,” I said.

  “Oh, he might be a colicky baby,” he responded nonchalantly, not the least bit disturbed. “It will pass in three to four months.”

  I wanted to break down and sob in my chair. He might as well have told me it was going to last three to four years, because a minute of Cole’s screaming felt like hours.

  “Is there anything we can do to help him?” Christopher asked.

  “You could try gripe water. Sometimes that works,” Dr. Garcia said.

  The problem was, we already knew that it didn’t work. Christopher was obsessed with finding something to make Cole stop crying. Once while I’d fed Cole, he had scoured the internet, searching for a solution, and gripe water was one of the first things he’d stumbled across. It’d done nothing, much like everything else we had tried.

  Thankfully, my mom was coming tomorrow. I couldn’t wait to have someone around who knew what they were doing. Christopher tried to help, but his solutions didn’t make sense, like suggesting I go shopping while he stayed at home with the baby. Never mind that the baby would starve without me—I could barely walk and hadn’t stopped bleeding. Nobody had told me you bled so much after birth. I tried to hide my annoyance with it, but sometimes I couldn’t. It’d be nice to have someone around who knew how to help.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHRISTOPHER BAUER

  Lillian had only been gone for three days, and Hannah was already stretched to her limit again. Cole was a voracious eater and fed every two hours, sometimes sooner, and she wasn’t sleeping more than a few hours at a time. Even when she slept, she wasn’t completely relaxed. She jolted awake at the slightest sound. Cole was in a bassinet next to our bed, and she obsessively woke up to check and see if he was breathing, terrified of SIDS.

  “When he’s sleeping, you should just let him sleep,” I’d said last night after she’d gotten up to check on him for the third time.

  “I’m just making sure he’s okay.” She’d looked insulted that I’d even suggested it.

  The lack of sleep made her jumpy and edgy in a way I’d never seen her act before. I worried what she’d do if Janie gave her any trouble when I went back to work tomorrow. I wasn’t ready to go back, but I was out of paid time off since I’d taken so much of it when we’d got Janie. Nobody was ready for it, least of all me.

  “I want you to be good while Daddy is at work today,” I said to Janie while I poured the milk into her bowl of Cheerios the next morning.

  We’d been arguing for weeks about getting help at the house, but Hannah refused to hire anyone. It wasn’t that she didn’t think she needed it but that she didn’t like the idea of having someone in the house with her; she said it would feel like she was under a microscope all the time. I couldn’t get her to budge.

  I tried not to worry as Hannah paced the living room, jiggling Cole back and forth, treading a path across the room. She’d been up since two. He’d woken up, and she hadn’t been able to get him back to sleep. I’d offered to take him from her so she could rest, but she’d insisted she be the one to do it since I was going to work in the morning.

  I chopped up strawberries and put them in a bowl next to Janie’s cereal. “Mommy is really tired because she’s been up all night taking care of baby Cole, so I need you to go easy on her and help her out today. Can you do that for me?” I asked.

  She smiled across the table at me. “I’ll be good.”

  The house was trashed when I got home. It was clear Hannah had let Janie do whatever she wanted. Goldfish cracker crumbs formed a trail everywhere Janie had been, leading in and out of the living room and back again. Half-empty juice boxes were strewn around in the kitchen and in her bedroom. Her toys were scattered around the house. She’d created an obstacle course in her room, and it looked like she’d spent most of the day trying to get Blue to run through it like she was a dog. We’d watched the Westminster Dog Show a few nights ago, and she’d been obsessed with it ever since. I kept telling her that cats didn’t do tricks as easily as dogs, but it didn’t matter. She was determined to get Blue to perform. She was still in her pajamas, and her face was dirty, but she looked happy.

  “I was a good girl today,” she said.

  I gave her a big hug and high-fived her. “I’m so proud of you. Where’s Mommy?”

  “She’s in her bedroom.”

  “I’m going to go say hi to her, and then I’ll make us something to eat. How’s that?”

  She nodded and went back to trying to loop a jump rope around two of her toy bins.

  I walked down the hallway and into our bedroom. Hannah was curled up on the bed with Cole cuddled close to her. At first, I thought she’d fallen asleep, but she jerked her head up when I came into view.

  “Shhh, don’t come in here. You’ll wake him up,” she hissed through gritted teeth.

  “Okay. I—”

  Cole twitched and started to wail.

  “You woke him up. I just got him to sleep.” She glared at me. “I told you to be quiet.” She scooped him up and brought him to her breast.

  “I barely said anything. I think he woke up on his own. How long has he been sleeping?”

  “I just got him to sleep two minutes before you walked in the door.” She said it like I’d done something wrong by coming home.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized even though I hadn’t done anything wrong. “Do you want me to take him?”

  “He’s eating,” she snapped.

  “Maybe we could start trying to get him to take a bottle?” I felt bad that I couldn’t help more with feeding him. At least if he took a bottle, I could alleviate some of her responsibility.

  “I don’t want him to get nipple confusion. Not yet. He’s got to get comfortable breastfeeding first.”

  I didn’t dare argue with her about breastfeeding. Lillian had talked to Hannah about supplementing her breast milk with formula, and she’d acted like formula feeding was the same thing as feeding him glass. Hannah wanted to exclusively breastfeed and wouldn’t consider any other alternatives. I wasn’t used to her being so narrow minded since she was usually so diligent about researching all sides of an issue.

  I reminded myself that it had only been a few weeks since she had given birth, and her hormones were wreaking havoc on her; she needed her space to level out. I would wait to bring up leaving Janie alone or unsupervised.

  I spent the rest of the night trying to find ways to lessen her load and make things easier for her, so when Cole started screaming again around midnight, I jumped out of bed and ran downstairs to get his car seat.

  “What are you doing?” Hannah asked when I came back upstairs with it.

  “I’m taking him. You need sleep,” I said. As long as he was in the house crying, she would be awake, even if I had him in another room. We’d tried that the other night, and I’d come out to find her listening for his cries outside the guest roo
m door. I took Cole from her, which made him scream louder. I strapped him into the car seat while he wailed.

  “Where are you going?” she asked frantically.

  “I’m going to drive around with him until he falls asleep.” Dan had told me that he used to drive his girls around at night when they couldn’t sleep. He’d said there was something about the car that lulled them to sleep. I hoped it worked with Cole.

  “But it’s two in the morning. I don’t want him out. Please, Christopher, please, don’t go.”

  “It’s okay. We’re just going to drive around for a while so you can sleep. You need to sleep.”

  She started crying. That’s when I knew just how tired she was, because Hannah wasn’t a girl who cried easily.

  “Please, please,” she begged.

  I kissed her on the cheek. “Just go to sleep. You’ll see. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

  I strapped him into the back seat and started driving. It frustrated me that Hannah wouldn’t consider letting me stay home with the kids while she went back to work. She hadn’t always been so traditional, but staying home and bonding with her children during those first few months had been a dream of hers since she was a little girl, and she refused to let it go. I drove slowly up and down residential streets. It took him forty-five minutes to fall asleep, but he eventually did. I drove for another hour to give him and Hannah time to rest before heading home.

  I had barely pulled into the driveway when Hannah whipped open the front door of the house. She stormed outside, waving her arms around manically. She didn’t even let me shut the car off before she yanked open the back door.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” she screamed. She pulled Cole out of the car, waking him up. He immediately started crying.

  “What are you doing? He was asleep!” I yelled.

  She rushed into the house, and I followed her inside. He quieted once she settled him on her breast. Her face was streaked with tears and blotchy, her eyes wild.

  “Did you get any sleep?” I asked.