The hours after he was born were the worst of my life. Two pediatricians whisked him off to the NICU, and every time I asked the roomful of remaining nurses and doctors what was wrong with my baby, they seemed to answer in another language. A resident stitched me back together under the supervision of an OB—who commented, casually, “It’s not your best work, but it’ll do”—while I, shocked and hollow and in no less pain than before, looked up at Gabe and said, “I haven’t even met him yet. I only came here so I could meet him.”
We were apart for two hours. All I ever understood about his time in the NICU was that someone there had taught him how to breathe.
In the aftermath of childbirth, women tend to announce their private thoughts. I don’t know why, but Carrie did it, and I did it too. Holding Jack for the first time, looking into the ice-blue eyes that have already darkened, I said, “Oh, we’re going to be fine.”
I couldn’t have imagined feeling a fraction of the frustration I now feel toward him nightly.
The problem is I am a person with only two hands, one boob that works better than the other, overactive tear ducts, injuries in dark places, and feet that no longer fit into my shoes. And I need to sleep. My need for sleep occurs to me sometimes as a revelation, the way when I was a child it would periodically dawn on me that what my parents needed was money.
When we both have tea—mine in my hands, Carrie’s growing cold on the counter—I finally think to say, “I hope we didn’t wake up Nina.”
“Nina’s not home.”
“Where is she?” The possibility of Nina being anywhere without Carrie is for me a novelty.
“Sleeping over at a friend’s house. I said no, earlier, but then you showed up . . . and, well.”
“You renegotiated? Is that wise?”
I realize I’m still swaying from side to side, dancing along with Carrie and Jack. To stop myself, I sink into a chair. Jack’s cheek is deflating against Carrie’s shoulder, his eyelids at half-mast.
“Nina demands constant renegotiation. It feels like I never stop bargaining with her.”
“Are things not good between you guys?”
I’m conscious of having phrased the question like I’m asking Carrie about a coworker, or a lover.
“She thinks I’m evil incarnate.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It’s just the usual preteen stuff. When I’m home, I’m breathing down her neck. When I’m working, I’m guilty of neglecting her on, like, a criminal level. I occasionally require her to eat a vegetable, or a damn egg. Yesterday I wouldn’t let her get a pair of camo jeans from the juniors section at Walmart, and she still hasn’t forgiven me.”
“Were the jeans expensive or something?”
“They were camo,” Carrie repeats. “Camouflage jeans.”
I blink at her.
“Camouflage is for ill-adjusted white boys who pose with the corpses of the animals they’ve just killed.”
“I doubt she sees it that way.”
“What other way is there?”
“I don’t know. There are hipsters wandering around Brooklyn in Carhartt jackets. She probably just thought they looked cool.”
Carrie shakes her head. Admittedly, I have a hard time picturing these pants on her daughter. If I try too hard to reconcile preteen Nina with the three-year-old I once carried on my hip through the aisles of the video rental store, beaming when people assumed she was mine, I know I’ll be flooded with regret.
“Where’s the sleepover?” I ask. In Deerling, a person’s address tells you everything you need to know. The town is divided into four quadrants: the farmlands, the trailer parks, and a residential jumble bisected by train tracks in the conventional sense. Carrie and I grew up on the right side of them. My mother has since downgraded.
Carrie avoids my actual question and tells me, “She has this new friend.”
“Go on.”
Carrie heaves a sigh. It’s a bottomless 3:00 a.m. sigh. “She’s fourteen, and her name is Maxine.”
“Max for short?”
“Never. Always Maxine.”
“What’s her deal?” I’m thirty-one years old, a card-carrying member of our neighborhood’s grocery co-op, and thrilled to be gossiping about some small-town teenage girl. This is the most enthralled I’ve been in months.
“No deal. She’s perfectly sweet. I mean, she keeps asking me to tattoo her, which is annoying.”
“What does she want?”
Carrie gives me a blank stare.
“Like, for her tattoo.”
“I haven’t asked. I’m not tattooing her. It’s illegal.”
“Do you ever do it, though? Tattoo kids who you know are lying about their age?”
“Of course not, Amanda. I could get my license revoked.”
I’ve insulted her. By implying she’s strapped for cash or somehow less than professional. It’s not what I meant. I was thinking about Carrie and me, the kind of mischief we used to concoct for ourselves. Back then, I couldn’t believe I would ever become an adult.
Now I can’t believe I’m supposed to stay one forever.
“Sorry,” I say.
“My concern about Maxine is I’m not sure her family’s the best influence on Nina. They’re filthy rich.”
“Come on, this is Deerling. No one’s filthy rich.”
“They won the lottery.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, assuming family money or stock market success.
“I mean they literally won the Powerball jackpot.”
“No.”
“And then they bought all that land adjacent to the wildlife preserve and built, like, a Cribs-style mansion on it. Tennis courts. A circular driveway. A pool edged with actual palm trees.”
I shudder. “That’s spooky. Palm trees in Ohio.” Jack is asleep, but Carrie knows better than to test her luck by sitting down. She continues to sway. It’s tempting to sneak out of the room and crawl into bed, but talking to Carrie is an addictive pleasure. Given the chance, I’ll stay here until dawn.
“Well, Nina’s obsessed with them. She says Maxine’s parents have traveled. Maxine’s parents know about cheese made from animals other than cows. Maxine’s parents treat them like adults.”
“Big deal. It’s 2016. Any redneck can invest in some spreadable goat cheese.”
When Carrie resists laughing, I tell myself it’s because she doesn’t want to startle the baby.
“My daughter thinks I hate her best friend,” she says.
“Do you?”
Carrie presses her lips into a line. “No. But I see through her.”
“You see through her,” I repeat.
“Sure. She’s one of those kids who wants to feel important and admired, so she’s found a younger girl willing to look up to her, mythologize her, whatever. She’s, you know, poetic. She has song lyrics scribbled all over her backpack. She’s chatty and charming.”
“Some girls can’t help being chatty and charming. You never could.”
Rolling her eyes, she says, “I wasn’t like that. I think you’re remembering yourself.”
“No . . . Carrie, I worshipped you.”
“Why?” She sounds disgusted.
“I don’t know. All the usual reasons. Because you were gorgeous and talented. And when boys took you to the drive-in, you stuck to your usual order of three coneys with extra onions.”
Carrie wrinkles her nose. “Those are terrible reasons.”
I shrug.
Jack makes a sleepy, satisfied chuffing sound. Carrie brushes her lips against his forehead. It’s so easy for her to love him. She knows what a baby is, and how briefly he will inhabit this hot-water-bottle form before becoming a person. To me, Jack’s personhood is still notional. When I think about his future, more than excitement or curiosity, I f
eel hope. A desperate kind of hope that makes me wish I were religious so I could pray for his safety.
“I don’t think you worshipped me,” Carrie says. “I think that’s a convenient way to remember things. As if I had some kind of power over you.”
“All right. I’m sorry.”
“I’m just saying, the admiration was mutual. I think we actually had a remarkably healthy friendship. I’m still waiting to feel as comfortable with another person as I did with you when we were kids.”
Gabe has a theory that no one has more than five friends. You may think you have twenty, but you’re kidding yourself. No more than five individuals are genuinely pleased to attend your birthday party. No more than five will visit you in the hospital, let you borrow their family’s house upstate, or remember the results of your last visit to the allergist.
By Gabe’s definition, Carrie and I are not friends. But I do think about her every day. Often I have trouble convincing myself we are not the same person, living out alternate versions of one life.
Did I worship her?
Not exactly. As a kid, I loved her and loathed her with a kind of recklessness typically reserved for loving and loathing oneself.
We’ve been taking turns letting our guards down. The moment one of us veers toward sincerity, the other’s hackles go up. To tell Carrie what she wants to hear now would mean betraying Gabe. And however it looks, that’s not what I’m trying to do.
I stay silent too long. Resentment radiates from Carrie.
“I’m glad you were comfortable,” I say.
“You weren’t?”
“I was. Mostly.”
“Was there something else I should have done? To make things easier for you?”
I’m too tired for this. “I’m not a comfortable person, like, in general?”
She exhales through her nose. “Right.”
I offer to take the baby back. Slowly, Carrie uses her whole body to lower Jack into my arms. The deadweight of him is so satisfying. He’s the most substantial thing I’ve ever made.
I stand up, yawning. Carrie’s looking at me like I owe her something—and it’s true, I do, but it’s almost beside the point. She and I both understand why I drove from New York to Deerling—five hundred miles with a baby in the back seat, both of us crying more often than not—and turned up on her doorstep utterly unannounced.
Carrie Hart is the best mother I know.
* * *
Gabe is a model father. When he’s home, he tends to our son with a patience that is not willed or performed but innate. A patience of which he seems completely unaware. On our best Saturdays—when Jack has slept an extra hour or when one of Gabe’s colleagues has had bagels delivered to our apartment door—I watch him whisper sweetness into our son’s ear, and I’m charmed, contented. The sight of them together is sexy in a way that has nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the smug, animal satisfaction of having made a healthy baby with a good man.
If you ask Gabe’s parents—and if they were a few drinks in and feeling honest—they would specify that he’s a little too good. Overachieving, or even overcompensating for something (me). Mr. and Mrs. Feldman, along with all of our friends in New York—who ask us about parenthood as if it’s an exotic destination where they haven’t yet vacationed—note how often Gabe goes beyond the minimum dad duties. He carries Jack out of the room for diaper changes without passive-aggressively presenting the baby for me to sniff. He holds Jack face-out, so that the baby is seated in the crook of his right elbow, for hours at a time. He talks to the baby in a voice that is half Raffi, half Grover, even though the baby is too young to laugh and can only gaze at his dad with solemn appreciation.
Meanwhile, I keep a mental list of all the things Gabe doesn’t do.
Gabe has never
• trimmed the baby’s fingernails,
• checked the baby’s temperature,
• wiped away the cheese that forms in the rarely exposed creases of the baby’s neck,
• put socks on the baby’s feet,
• refilled the plastic dispenser with a fresh stack of wipes,
• scheduled the baby’s next checkup, or
• turned the baby onto his front for ten supervised minutes of “tummy time”—a ritual that is both ineffably crucial to the baby’s development and, judging by the baby’s screams, absolute torture.
Even more than I want to sit in a dark movie theater for 110 minutes—even more than I want to eat a medium-rare hamburger the size of my face—I want Gabe to do these things. Not because these things are so vital, but because I can’t opt out of a single task. I am the baby’s servant and his playmate. His transportation vehicle and his home. His bed, his food source, his mother.
And nobody ever tells me I’m a good one.
At Jack’s two-month appointment, he was mad even before the needles. He didn’t like being naked on the cold metal scale; he didn’t like having his tongue depressed, his testicles prodded, his reflexes affirmed. The doctor, a scruffy resident, asked if our baby was always so fussy, if he was “super colicky.” Gabe’s cheek twitched and dimpled, a sure sign he was offended, but his response was an even-keeled, “Not at all.”
My job was to hold Jack as still as possible, even as he reeled and writhed. We were flanked by two nurses, each young and ponytailed and wielding her syringe with an obvious lack of confidence.
A poke in each of his thighs. Jack locked eyes with me. His mouth rubber-banded into a shocked, silent O. By the time he found his voice, I was crying too. I pressed his cheek to mine, and our hot tears mingled. The clinic evoked the hospital, a place to which I’d never wanted to return.
The doctor and I were the same age. I could tell. We might have shared a middle school gym class or a dormitory floor in college. If you cut open our trunks, we’d have the same number of rings. He furrowed his unibrow at me and, shouting to be heard over Jack, asked, “How’s everything going at home, Mom? Do you have all the support you need?”
It’s a disorienting phenomenon about which no one thinks to warn you: starting the moment you get pregnant, doctors never bother to learn your name. They seem to relish referring to you exclusively by your new role; perhaps they imagine you relish it, too.
Grimacing, I nodded at Gabe. My entire support system.
“And you’re doing okay, emotionally? Any fatigue, anxiety, guilt? Feeling overwhelmed?”
Yes to all of it. What new mother could honestly answer no? Still, I must have shaken my head. I was bouncing and swaying, dying to strap Jack into his carrier and rush homeward. The motion of the subway would put him to sleep. It always did.
The doctor asked, “Have you harmed your baby or imagined yourself harming your baby?”
They were such radically different questions—why had he asked them back-to-back, in almost the same breath?
I have imagined Jack getting hurt in every way. Falling tree limbs, aggressive dogs, pots of water boiling over. Earthquakes and lightning storms and crosstown buses. Once, years ago, Gabe and I were driving between Deerling and New York and we passed the immediate aftermath of a collision. The paramedics had just arrived at the scene where an entire family—Mom, Dad, baby boy—had been ejected from their minivan and now lay prostrate, bleeding out onto the interstate. I had suppressed the memory until recently, when Gabe brought it up. I was eight months pregnant. We were shopping for a car seat.
Now the image crosses my mind daily.
I have imagined losing my temper. Shaking my baby or dropping him onto the floor and walking away. In the earliest, sleepless days I feared myself as much as I feared the weather, the highway, or miscellaneous acts of God. Over and over I realized the worst thing, the soul-destroying thing, would be if I hurt my son. To hurt him would be to erase every decent thing I’d ever done, reducing my life to one uncalculated yet unforgivable a
ct of violence.
When I find myself at my wit’s end—3:00 a.m., always 3:00 a.m.—I think the worst thing until I catch my breath. Until I am back in my own skin. Until I am kissing his soft cheeks.
I found I couldn’t answer the doctor’s question, and Gabe intervened. With his hand on my back, he said, “Amanda is an amazing mother.”
The doctor made eye contact with Gabe and nodded. “I’m sure she is,” he said, and looked down at his pager. Their exchange had nothing to do with me. It was one man confirming to another: Everything here is under control.
Later, back in our apartment, the table strewn with gift wrap from the packages that wouldn’t stop arriving, I ranted about the scruffy doctor.
“What was the point of those questions? If I’m not head-over-heels in love with my infant at every moment, I require medication? If I’m not euphoric, I’m unhinged? Since when is ambivalence a crime?”
I trusted Gabe to take my side. In our old life, one of us was always ranting, gesticulating wildly with a drink in hand. Drops of red wine formed constellations on the ceiling of our apartment. I pointed upward, slyly, whenever a dinner guest witnessed one of Gabe’s impassioned speeches. But I was always on his side, and he was always on mine.
We had no reason not to agree on everything.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Gabe said. Jack was asleep in his vibrating chair atop the kitchen counter. His lips were adorably pursed. “I think he was just running through common symptoms of postpartum depression.”
“Which are also common symptoms of having recently had a baby!”
Gabe shrugged. He seemed profoundly bored with me and only slightly more captivated by something on the internet. It could have been an email detailing school-wide budget cuts, or passive-aggression from his mother, or a hospital bill we couldn’t pay. I imagined grabbing his phone and chucking it across the room—but I didn’t do it.
“Do you think I’m depressed?” I asked him.
“I don’t think you’re happy,” he said.
Everything Here is Under Control Page 3