Chapter 24
APRIL
DESPITE TIGHTLY HELD HOPES, I have a second cesarean. Otto is asleep as I begin to bleed. As we try to get him to suckle. My son is minutes old, and I’m already mad at him. Why couldn’t he come out the right way? Why won’t he open his eyes or his mouth when they want him to?
They say he’s healthy. They weigh him and check his reflexes and put goop on his eyes.
It just takes C-section babies longer to wake up, they tell me.
I know that, I want to tell them. I’ve done this before.
I’ve had the knife to my stomach, the hazy weeks in bed, the newborn who is somehow neither awake nor asleep when he should be.
A nurse carries him back to me with his chest in her palm, her thumb under one of his arms and her pinky under the other.
His little body curls around her hand like a lion cub hanging from its mother’s mouth.
I can see the beadlike articulation of his curved spine. I have another baby, vertebrae and all.
Last time hangs like a weight around my neck, the memory of postpartum darkness ripping through me like labor pains. God knows why I thought it would be different, but it is nauseatingly similar, and I suddenly don’t have it in me to do all this again.
Post-birth contractions are still racking me when Leo smiles at me from beside the hospital bed, as though he is willing me to do the same.
His pure devotion irritates me. His immediate love.
His unmarred body and milkless chest. He takes my hand tenderly, making my blood run hot with shame.
The bath of emotions after birth isn’t supposed to be a bath of anger.
But my birth was wrong, my body is wrong, my feelings are wrong.
Taking Otto home is like traveling back in time. I had forgotten the exhaustion and clots of blood and cracked nipples. The piercing cry of an infant who just wants more milk.
Two things are different this time. First, I’m older. And if I thought my body felt foreign the first time, this time it’s downright grotesque. Skin is loose in places I didn’t know it could be.
Second, we have an older child who seems to be baby-blind.
She asks me to get her a snack or tie her shoe when I’m half-dressed with the baby clamping his gums on my breast. She talks to me as if there’s no brother there at all, as if I’m merely standing barefoot in the kitchen waiting to serve Her Highness.
She wants more from me now that my attention is divided.
During this pregnancy, the school reopened and Leo started working very long hours.
I assumed he might scale back after the birth, but I was wrong.
And we can only afford for him to take one week off.
So he went from being trapped in this house to never being home, and I miss the parents I thought we’d be.
It’s not just Leo—it’s me too. I love my children with ferocity, but I’m nothing like I expected.
Not with Sadie, and definitely not with Otto.
I have no energy. I’m not doting or euphoric or baking treats in the kitchen or posing my children in sweet outfits.
In fact, many days evaporate without us getting dressed at all, the same drool-wet onesie draped on Otto’s little body for far too long.
My breasts throb, empty, fill, throb, empty, fill.
I shower to get away from my kids, and I sleep to get away from myself.
But it’s never quite enough. Leo is too gone, and I am too here.
I figure it out on my own: the thousand daily routines with two young children, when and how to manage naps, the positions in which the baby likes and doesn’t like to be held, all their changing idiosyncrasies.
It’s exhausting. And Leo doesn’t know the intimate and ever-shifting minutiae of our children like I do.
Watching him try is more exhausting than just doing it myself.
He does make a point to tuck Sadie in most nights. But other than that, it’s me and a colicky infant and a thinks-she’s-independent preschooler, a lone trio of domestic survival.
The worst thing about colic is its unfixability.
Otto will be fed and dry and burped and warm and held and still crying and crying and crying.
In this shrill isolation, I turn on myself, the easiest target.
My self-loathing becomes an addiction: I need bigger hits to get the same results.
I hate my stomach, breasts, thighs, face.
I hate how I read, how I cook, how I mother, how I need.
Maybe this is only a season, but so is winter.
And even one single winter day, if severe enough, is not survivable.
This, of course, is an unacceptable thought for me to have.
An unacceptable reaction to the happy season of bringing new life into the world.
So I don’t share these thoughts with Leo, or with Mom, or with anyone.
One morning, I decide to broach Leo’s increasing absence.
Otto is nestled in my numb arm as I stir oatmeal with the other, because he cries if he’s put down.
And don’t tell me about all the rocking and vibrating gadgets that work like charms. He knows the difference, and he cries.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s half of what colic is: a refusal to accept a fake.
I know his need is temporary, but it’s constant.
I can barely slather peanut butter onto a piece of bread for Sadie.
So I ask Leo if he could maybe come home earlier.
But he says tiredly, “You have no idea how hard it’s been in the schools.”
I blink. He’s right, I don’t. My old classrooms are distant lands. All I am now is a mother.
After that, Leo does come home earlier. Twice. Then the minutes stretch back into hours, and I won’t ask again. I won’t say that he has no idea how hard it’s been in the house.
After many tenuous weeks, I get a burst of motivated energy and make a quiche for breakfast one Saturday. The aroma of ham spreads through the kitchen like a promise.
I put on makeup. Mascara, even. I set out the latest Smithsonian for Leo, and I light a candle. The effort is extravagant for a woman whose nipples stand at attention and dribble whenever the baby makes a peep.
I smile when Leo comes into the kitchen, mirroring the days when we were newly married and I would try to cook like my mom, eager to impress him.
Sadie is crawling around the kitchen floor, meowing. We will have a good weekend, I decide. A good weekend as a good family. We have all the ingredients.
Leo, however, passes through the room like a phantom. He fills a travel mug of coffee, says he has a lot to do, and then walks out the door with no further explanation. Not even a perfunctory peck on the forehead. He didn’t notice the magazine or the candle or the hope pouring from my eyes.
I hear the car start. The engine is loud, faint, fainter.
He will stay gone all day, I’m certain of it.
Still meowing, Sadie headbutt-hugs me and grabs a fistful of my belly.
I blow out the candle and fight tears. It will be Otto’s witching hour soon, so I sit down with a slice of quiche and bring the warm weight of him to my breast, dropping bits of crust onto his downy head and trying to count those crumbs like blessings.
I had a perfect childhood, perfect parents, my own perfect romance and perfect children.
Unhappiness is a privilege I have not earned. And so I dry my eyes.
The day comes when Leo sits down beside me and says he has good news. Asks if I want to go back to work. A new opportunity has come up.
The stages of infancy are obscure—I’m never quite sure if they’ve ended.
So I don’t know if Otto is still a newborn or not.
Either way, I wonder how I could possibly manage to work when I don’t even have time to brush my teeth.
But the sharp cry of our baby grates on me, and tiredness ceases to matter.
Anything will be less tiring than being alone in the house like this. “Yes,” I tell him. “I’m ready.”
This is how I come to work for Cody Blanchard as a reading tutor. We work my schedule around the kids’ needs. Leo is gone so much at this point that even his bedtime tuck-ins with Sadie start to dwindle.
And into his absence, Cody enters. I find much-needed energy in this new friendship.
We talk about literacy over faculty lounge lunches of sub sandwiches and grocery store cookies.
He has a dyslexia specialist certificate, and he too likes to entrust students with classic tomes.
He respects how I’ve handled my own dyslexia, how I invest in my students.
I do so much for them in addition to my own family, Cody tells me.
A force for good, he says with admiration in his eyes.
And suddenly I’m more than a mother. I’m a teacher, employee, friend, woman.
Cody thinks I’m brilliant. A good mom and a beautiful soul.
And he is here. He is sturdy and close and paying me scintillating compliments for which I lean in as if to say, Convince me.