“Could I come check your crawl space?” he asked.
“Oh, there’s no way he could be in there,” I explained. “It’s bolted shut. No one can get into it without removing the door with a screwdriver.”
“Can I just look?”
Holy Dateline special, our neighbors thought we’d buried their cat alive. My heart hardened right back up.
“Fine,” I said.
John went out in the rain with his tools, and our neighbor held an umbrella over the bushes that obscured the two-foot-square wooden door that led into the dark underbelly of our house, a dank tunnel where the pipes snaked under our floors.
When he pulled the door away from the house, out bolted the big white ghost cat.
John stepped back onto a slick of oak leaves, knocking over a tightly packed leaf bag, which exploded like a bomb, shooting leaves into the air.
* * *
We never figured out how that cat got in there, although we suspect he wandered in after a rat while the mold guy had the door off the crawl space the day before.
We did, however, eventually figure out why barking dogs are so upsetting to parents of young children. We looked back, after some years, and saw the gulf between where we were and where our neighbors were and how little we knew. I never apologized, but in the years that followed the births of our own babies, I spoke to our neighbors in the contrite tones of a person who is ashamed to admit, but knows without question, that she was wrong.
The Window
“Should I have kids?”
Several times over the past few years, I’ve been invited to lunch by younger friends who eventually push the chips and guacamole aside and get down to asking this question. I remember asking it—or a version of it—of a friend of mine years ago. I was twenty-five and she was thirty-two, and she’d just announced her pregnancy. “Why?” I asked (which, just so you know, is considered a strange response to a pregnancy announcement). I meant, “How did you know it was time?” and “What made you sure you wanted to?” and “Did you always know this would happen?” I wanted her to tell me something about my own future.
I’m now a woman in my forties and I have children, so maybe it looks like I have knowledge and perspective on this matter. But I know only my own experience, and if there’s one question that doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, it’s this one. No one is really qualified to give anyone else an answer, although that doesn’t stop anybody from asking.
* * *
Here’s what I usually say: Have kids! You’re going to be great! I love my kids so much, I think my head will explode!
And if the other person starts to look terrified, I say: Don’t have them! That’s cool! You’ll have such a good life! Think of all you’ll do with your time and resources!
And if they sit through either of those answers and keep looking me in the eyes, waiting me out, I say: Okay, you want to know the truth? Having children made me wish for a time machine.
I explain it like so:
I knew I wanted kids, and I knew I wanted to be a young mother—partly because my parents had me in their twenties and that seemed like as good a model to follow as any, and partly because I have this “do the work first, have fun later” mind-set. Having kids seemed like a big job I needed to get started on. Luckily, we married young, so we were able to enjoy some childless married years before we started a family. Then, when we decided it was time, I didn’t get pregnant right away . . . or after a year . . . or another year . . . so we ended up jumping through fertility hoops. We were willing to put a lot of time and money and medicine behind the effort, because Mother Nature had worked her baby-wishing spell on us. Every fiber of my being longed to produce a tiny human made of half me, half John.
Our son arrived healthy and gorgeous about ten days before his due date, ushered into daylight via Caesarean section after trying to kick his way out feet-first. In the hospital, cross-eyed on Percocet, I squinted at his little face peeking out of a blanket in my arms. I tried to focus on his impossibly symmetrical eyebrows, a dozen tiny hairs each. When he opened his mouth to cry, tears spilled from the corners of my eyes. “What’s wrong?” John asked. “He’s crying,” I said, not realizing that I was, too. I wanted to heal my son’s pain, soothe his alarm, feed his hunger, do whatever he needed, if I could just figure out what it was. I wanted to do everything right for him.
I knew what brand of car seat to buy and how to wash his blankets in dye-free soap and how to make the temperature of his bathwater match the exact heat of his skin. But there was so much I didn’t know. I had never felt such desperate not-knowing.
For instance, I didn’t know when I quit my full-time job if that was the right thing to do. I hoped staying home with him would be an A+ move. (Lots of child-rearing books said it was, but then I read an article about “helicopter parenting.” Was I doing that already?) Although those early months were everything everyone told me that time would be like—amazing, exhausting, surreal—I felt a little whiplashed, too, having slammed on the productivity brakes so abruptly. At the end of every day, when all I had to show for myself were four peed-on onesies, six diapers, and three and a half hours of sleep, what did those numbers mean? Was I doing a good job? I had a habit of stacking the baby laundry in neat piles on the breakfast table and leaving it there until John got home, just so he’d see some quantifiable proof of my industriousness, like a three-dimensional cotton bar graph. I remember going over to my desk in the kitchen one morning and pulling the abandoned spiral-bound carcass of my work calendar out from under a pile of unopened mail. I found a blank page and scrawled “TAKE SHOWER” in shaky handwriting. Then I showered, put on leggings and a T-shirt, and walked back into the kitchen, wet hair dripping, and crossed it out.
I felt ashamed when I found myself wishing for just an hour of my old life back. Not that I’d give up my baby, not for a second—I just wanted to hit pause, to leave myself and my baby frozen in an embrace with the clock stopped, while I left my present body, inhabited my past self, and visited a life of good sleep and clean clothes and lunch in public and adult conversation. A time machine, I thought. That’s all I need.
* * *
I did not know, in those first days, that once you have children, the passage of time feels different than it did before. Everyone says this, and it’s true: Days with young children feel four hundred hours long, but years flash by in seconds. I had no idea I’d become one of those parents who posts pictures along with clichéd captions like “And just like that . . . he’s ten!” or “Wasn’t she a baby just yesterday?” I know, barf. But it was just yesterday that my baby boy got so excited about a jar of creamed spinach that he knocked it out of my hands and sent it clattering across his high-chair tray and onto the kitchen floor. I did just give birth to my daughter last week. How can they be looking back at me with such grown-up faces right now?
(If you’re reading this book in the future, when time machines exist and my children have long since left the nest and moved away, come back and tell me: Did I survive their leaving or did my heart stop?)
* * *
I couldn’t have predicted or understood how much the start of a baby’s life warps an adult’s perception of her own childhood. Suddenly my own spelling bees and birthday parties and childhood feuds seemed farther in the past than they did before. It was like a dial turned, and—click—a new human had appeared at the beginning of the timeline and I was bumped forward a notch into the old-human slot. Yet somehow the opposite felt true as well. When your child is four, you remember things about being four that you hadn’t remembered since. My mother got toys out of storage for my son that I had played with, and when I saw them sitting in front of me on the rug, I felt dizzy. If that wooden duck with the paint flecked off its back where little-me once rammed it into a wall can exist right here in front of right-now-me, then surely little-me also still exists and is sitting right here, invisible, with us. It’s as if someone put a stitch in time, pulled the thread taut, and yank
ed a minute from decades ago into the present.
In those moments, it feels as if I actually do have a time machine, and it’s stuck on a random setting, flinging me back and forth, keeping me present in every stage of life I’ve experienced. In my mind, I am every person I have ever been. I’m six and the reigning queen of the spelling bee. I’m a teenager, dreaming of a flat in Paris while cursing the flatness of my chest. I’m a terrified new member of the workforce, straight out of college sporting three mix-and-match suits and a briefcase with the tag still on. I’m a freshly stitched-up, squishy mess, home with my infant and drunk on baby love.
Being aware of all these versions of me makes me feel both the presence and absence of all the people I have never been, too. I’m the girl who stayed single and lives in New York and stops at the bodega down the street on my way home every night to get only what I need for my own dinner. I’m a veterinarian. I’m a hermit. I’m Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s third gal pal, and we write movies together on my screened porch. People say friendships don’t work in threes, but we prove them all wrong.
These potential selves exist as surely as my past selves do and as truly as the real, right-now self does, too. They happen to live just on the other side of an unseen line—the boundary between past and present, or the border between real and imaginary—but they are there.
One of the things I tell nervous young pregnant friends, when they confide that they’re freaking out, is not to worry—life happens in phases. You parent a baby, then you parent a toddler, then you parent a kid, and so on. You don’t have to know everything about every phase the minute they’re born. What I don’t say is that this phase thing also sucks. Each phase is all-consuming and then over. A time machine would let us slip out of one phase and visit another, live all our lives, be all our selves. A little of this, then a little of that. I can’t stand the “or” part of life; I prefer “and.” I want to spend a day with my thirteen-year-old daughter and then a day with her as a baby and then a day being a thirteen-year-old myself. I want to be a preschooler again and I want to be a retiree, both for a little while, now.
I don’t say that this is the thing I’d ask for if a genie offered me one wish.
Having kids made me think of my parents differently, too. If I’d been bumped out a notch on the timeline, so had they. Not too long ago, I was considering the “your memories from this day” pictures Facebook was showing me from five years earlier and doing that “just yesterday!” thing in my head. Then I thought: In four sets of five years, I’ll be in my sixties. My children will be in their thirties. (How the HELL can that be true?) My parents might be gone. Like a runaway car with no brakes or emergency lever, time was accelerating beyond control. I felt a surge of soul-panic as I held my phone in my hand and looked at that picture: Please slowdownslowdownslowdown.
I see my friends caring for their elderly parents, and the role reversal takes my breath away. Moms and dads have turned into old people who have seemingly turned back into toddlers. These once competent adults don’t understand how to work things; they refuse to take their medicine; they need help.
It makes me want to hop in the machine and revisit my younger parents. I want to go back to when I was sixteen years old, so I can tell them that although they would not let me stay out past eleven o’clock and I said at the time that they were just mean and didn’t want anyone to have fun, I get it now and I’m sorry and they were right. I was never up to any good past that hour, and I should damn well have come home.
I want to go back to even before I was born, to see my mother when she was in college and nicknamed “Wild Mary.” Growing up, I found that moniker to be incongruous with the taskmaster who made me take piano lessons on Friday afternoons, although once I graduated from college and got out into the world, she softened considerably. She knitted little round, fuzzy hats for each of my babies, so their little round, fuzzy heads wouldn’t get cold. She is still the first person I call when I don’t know whether it would be tacky to buy a Christmas wreath made of fake holly or if it’s okay to wear a suede jacket in April. I want to go back and tell her then that she will be all of this now.
I want to go back and spend more time with my dad—I haven’t called him Daddy in decades, although he still calls me Mary LaLa. I want to listen when he turns up Little Richard songs on the radio to get my mom to dance. I want to make tiny acorn and mushroom cabins again in the greenhouse behind our home in Memphis, where I’d find the butts of his sneaked cigarettes and bury them in the dirt with my tiny garden spade so he wouldn’t get caught. I want to be in the kitchen that Thanksgiving in Augusta when he tried to be helpful and wash a pan full of turkey drippings that had been left on the counter, and when my mom saw him squirting Joy dishwashing liquid all over the greasy brown bits, she screamed, “YOU’RE KILLING THE GRAVY WITH JOY,” and my brother and I laughed until we couldn’t breathe.
I know that one day, I will look to my son—who was my baby five minutes ago, yes, he was—to carry me up the stairs, to drive me to doctor’s appointments, to help me when I spill something or can’t operate the sleeves of a sweater. He is already taller than me. He will be a man before I can blink. I feel this ahead of me on the timeline and I need to get in the time machine and go back. Please, I say to the universe. I can accept all this if you just let me go back sometimes. Let me nudge the edge of a sippy cup between his lips. Let me comb his matted little fluff of hair. Let me hold his wriggling torso between my knees and button his overalls at his shoulder before he bolts away. If I could just go back and forth. If it weren’t all or nothing.
* * *
I used to want a fancy camera, one with a big, powerful zoom lens. I’d go to the kids’ school holiday concerts and try to capture decent shots from the bleachers with my phone, only to wind up with grainy shadowscapes populated with indecipherable little figures. Luckily there was always at least one parent in every class who had a real camera and took perfectly crisp, magazine-worthy photos featuring the unpixelated nostrils and eyelashes of even the back-row xylophone players. Whenever the fancy-camera parents would email everyone else the pictures they took, I’d pull them up on my computer and find myself unable to look away. At first I’d think, yes, I want pictures like this of every moment of childhood. But the more I looked at these exquisite photographs, the more desperate I felt. Such precise visual reminders of exactly what my children looked like in a moment that was irretrievably past thrilled my heart and then broke it. The photo was proof that the split second was over. As sharp as that focus was on their hair, light glimmering on individual strands, that’s how sharp the pain was at not being able to reach out my hand and feel its silkiness on my fingers.
It would be better not to be reminded so much—or to be reminded in slightly blurrier terms. I never bought the fancy camera.
* * *
In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion wrote that “when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Every despair in the world comes down to this, she believes. Every joy, too, I say. Because every joy will run out. And so will every life. And maybe that’s what I mourn as my children grow: the fact that they and I and we will one day not be here at all. No one’s getting out of here alive.
* * *
If the person I was speaking to is still with me and is looking at me like I’m the voice of doom, I say: Yikes. That got dark fast. Sorry.
I say: Listen, there’s so much light on the other side of that darkness, too.
The way a diapered newborn rump fits into a cupped palm? Perfection. The smell of a toddler’s clean neck—wondrous. And there may be no greater entertainment than taking a child to the zoo and watching him see a zebra for the first time. A zebra!
A baby’s arrival gives us adults the closest thing we’ll ever get to magic. There’s no person there; then there’s a person. You witness the opening of the window between whatever other dimension there i
s and here. Where did this new soul come from? Who else is over there? It’s mind-blowing, because that window must have been there all along, but you’re just now noticing it.
That magical time doesn’t last, of course. Babies turn into people who walk and talk and eat grilled cheeses, and you think only sometimes—instead of constantly—about how one day they weren’t here and then they were and one day they won’t be again. Sometimes you don’t think about the time machine thing at all.
Me Real
When my daughter was about two and a half, she did something to annoy her brother. I don’t remember what—probably committed the heinous crime of tipping over a tower of blocks—but I can still picture how his little cheeks flushed and he clenched his fists as he struggled to express his sudden outrage.
“You!” he sputtered. “You . . . are temporary.” It was the worst insult he could conjure in the moment, and, to him, a very grown-up one, because it used a newly acquired vocabulary word. (We had recently discussed the difference between a temporary tattoo and a real one. The real one is here to stay; the temporary one isn’t.)
Indignant, she bowed up and yelled back, “NO. Me real!”
* * *
Poke.
Plunge.
Every time I jabbed a needle into my belly to inject myself with fertility drugs, I felt like the injection should make a sound. My skin should pop open, the liquid should swish around the barrel and whoosh down the needle into my flesh. I pictured the adrenaline-injection scene in Pulp Fiction, with Uma Thurman playing the role of my reproductive system. The physical, financial, and emotional toll of this process deserved a little palpable drama. Like many things, this daily act occurred silently, without a soundtrack commensurate to its importance, though its lack of fanfare didn’t mean it wasn’t actually happening.
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