Exploiting My Baby (27 page)

Haven’t even had a chance to check out my new slice, but I have run my fingers over it and I will tell you, they need a little extra room to remove the frank breech types. Seems about five inches or so. I’m okay with the scar in principle; I just don’t want to see it yet.

My husband frantically runs out to the store and comes back with $700 worth of groceries, which must be his form of nesting, like when I was nine months pregnant and decided to order twenty-four Magic Erasers and remove every mark on every wall in our house. We don’t just have everything. We have three of everything: three jugs of prune juice (it’s been five days since I’ve gone number two), three boxes of every Lean Cuisine I like, three bottles of three different kinds of gas drops for babies, three tubs of pasta salad from the deli counter.

Despite having birthed a baby and a placenta, I still appear almost as pregnant as when I went in for surgery, which I wasn’t expecting. I had deluded myself into thinking that despite my above-average weight gain, I would waltz out of the hospital not totally back to normal, but at least in my chubby jeans. No. I look virtually the same, except maternity clothes look terrible now, because they are designed to highlight the bump, which is exactly what you don’t want unless you like people asking you when you’re due and having to lie and say, “Next month. So excited.” My legs are still so bulky that my ankles and knees are hard to differentiate from the overall fluff of leg flesh. My wrists are sore, so I wear one of those carpal tunnel splints on both hands. My new giant shoes don’t even fit, so it’s slippers full-time. When the baby takes a nap, I sit in bed with my laptop and order some men’s dress shirts from Target because the old clothes aren’t even close to fitting and the pregnancy clothes all feature a new mom’s worst enemy: empire waists.

Because of the baby’s jaundice, I nurse him every two hours or more. In between, we take him out for a little sunshine in ten-minute increments as prescribed by the hospital pediatrician, and then it’s back to more nursing. Nurse, burp, diaper, sunshine, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes it’s kind of nice to find yourself living a cliché. Deliriously happy and deliriously tired mom, that’s me. Mom. I’m someone’s mom. He is my son.

You know the surreal sensation that accompanies being pregnant, what I always think of as a Talking Heads moment (“You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”)? It’s magnified a hundred times when one day there is no baby, and the next, there is your baby. At times I think to myself, “Surely, this isn’t real. This has been fun, but I wonder when Nate’s parents are coming to pick him up.” I don’t mean this in a detached way, as in, I better get on Prozac because I don’t love my baby or feel connected to him, but the opposite, something more like winning the lottery but still buying generic catsup the next day because it hasn’t sunk in that you’re loaded.

For someone who wasn’t baby crazy, who didn’t really get babies at all, who never actually held a baby until I was four months pregnant and snuggled Cassandra’s baby for a minute or two, I do all the disgustingly mommyish things actual moms do, like smell his head and take pictures of him incessantly and become convinced that I’m not biased at all but that my baby actually is extra adorable with fantastic hair and an exceptional disposition, which he surely inherited from his dad.

The sensations I’m having now, the baby “high” and the rubbing his velvety arms and the crying because I can’t poop or sleep and the sad-sack thoughts when I catch my bloated reflection and the dreamlike smacking myself over being his mom and him not being in my stomach anymore but instead sitting there in his bouncy seat, I know this has all been said and done and felt before. Maybe by you. But instead of that taking away from its value, somehow, today, it seems to add to it. Instead of scoffing at the human experience, I’m just giving in.

I remember when we were walking along the beach in Avila trying to decide whether to have a baby and thinking there aren’t that many main courses on the menu of life. Despite wanting to be terminally unique, at some point you just have to order the chicken or the steak. Maybe the surf and turf. Because there are only so many entrées at the cosmic table. And here I am with my baby, like a billion and a half mothers before me, and we all want to hear that our children are chunky monkeys, and that we are not, and that’s where I find magic where I least expected it, right in the schmaltziness.

It feels so good to have what the rest of you are having. I’m happy I’m actually welcome at the table, even if I don’t quite have a grasp of the table manners yet. I earned my seat not by being special but just by being deliciously ordinary. All I really have to do is eat what’s in front of me, a bite at a time. All I really have to do to be a good mom is love this creature, which I do despite my fears that I couldn’t.

The feelings are so sweet that maybe I’ve skipped right to dessert. There aren’t many offerings here, either, and that’s the best part of motherhood so far, that we’re all telling the same stories and delving our cold spoon into one infinite pint of baby bliss.

twenty-six

My Mother, the Rabbi and a Bag of Crap

 

 

 

B
uster is one month old today.

And I think I am finally ready to tell the story about the rabbi, my estranged mother and a bag of shit, and how this only partially holy trinity converged at my home one Tuesday afternoon.

When Buster was eight days old, we invited a rabbi over to circumcise the kid. My husband—not a Jew—was okay with the snip-snip but thought it was creepy to turn the whole situation into a party. Fair enough. So it was going to be just the two of us, until he started suggesting it might be nice to have my mom there, my mom who I haven’t talked to in over a year now.

Just before the baby was born, a package arrived addressed to the unborn child from “Grandma Strasser.” Inside were a hand-knit orange stuffed dinosaur, a tiny sweater with pockets and a hood, and a powder blue blanket. Though she hadn’t called me since my brother told her I was pregnant, it looked as though she had been knitting ever since.

There was a note to the baby that simply said, “Grandma can’t wait to meet you.”

I cried my fucking eyes out with that orange dinosaur in my hand because I was hormonal, and it was a week before my baby was due, and my mother was reaching out in her own stilted way, and while it would be nice if she could say “sorry” or “I miss you,” I stood on my stoop fully aware that some people speak with yarn.

That woman let me down in such a profound way that just the sound of her clearing her throat too loudly makes me want to toss her purse out of a moving car. Try as I may, I haven’t been able to process the backlog of anger at her even after all these years, which has made me an impatient, puerile, irrational daughter. Yes, the woman put me on many a Greyhound bus when I was in elementary school, but I don’t know how to stop making her pay, so I just stop talking to her.

It’s kind of a mom sabbatical. I take one every few years or so.

Somehow, between the knit creature’s baleful look and the post C-section narcotics, my husband convinces me that we should invite my mom to the
bris
.

Also, when we went to the rabbi’s Web site, there was a checklist of things we needed for the procedure—gauze pads, kosher wine, ointment and other items the acquisition of which was impossible as I could still barely get up and down and my husband couldn’t leave me alone with the baby. I was a mommy and I needed a mommy. I really needed my mommy.

My husband calls her for me, and as he predicted, she accepts the invite on very short notice, offering to pick up everything we need plus a platter of bagels and lox. I can hear her voice over the phone, and the tone suggests something like enthusiasm, maybe even exuberance. It heartens me that my chronically depressed mom would not only sound elated to hear from us but would also drive five hours from Vegas to see her new grandson at the drop of a yarmulke, salve in hand.

So, with the rabbi and my mother heading our way for the afternoon ceremony, my bowels, which as you already know have been stopped up, finally decide to work after more than a week.

The resulting poop clogs the decrepit toilet in our old house.

At this point, I can’t bend, lift or twist. So, I sit there on the potty with my head in my hands just trying to think my way out of this mess. The rabbi and my mother are converging on the place in half an hour, my week-old son is stirring in the next room with his dad, and I am hovering over—and up—Shit’s Creek.

I am not now nor have I ever been one of those women who impresses guys by being really open and carefree about their gas and bodily functions. Even writing this makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Sometimes I wish I was that fart-in-your-face girl (I honestly hate even typing the word F-A-R-T), but there came a point in my twenties when I realized two things: I don’t dance, and I don’t enjoy talking about gas or bowel movements. When I embraced being fundamentally inhibited, it changed my life. I am not the girl pretending to think gas is funny or grimacing my way through the conga line at a wedding.

While I have few, if any, emotional boundaries, I make up for it by being private, almost proper, about the physical realm. I would like the world to believe that I don’t poop but instead excrete waste through my skin, like a frog. Never have I indicated in any way to the Mister, up until this moment, that anything noxious ever comes out of my ass, but now I’m screwed.

“Baby,” I yell, sheepishly, “I have a problem.” That’s when my husband rushes to the bathroom door. I start sobbing because I’m freaked out and exhausted and I don’t want this magical Jewish ritual to be marred by the smell of feces wafting through the house,
my
feces, and I certainly don’t want my husband seeing, smelling or experiencing my waste in any way, but I’m out of options. I wash my hands like I can cleanse myself of this whole situation.

He hands me the baby and runs to the garage for some sort of drain snake. I try to place my thoughts elsewhere, so that I can easily delete this memory in the future. I bounce the boy and look out the window at Koreatown.

There is some running back and forth from the garage to the front door, to the bathroom in back. I hear him call the plumber, who can’t make it until tomorrow. He calls the hardware store to see if they have a larger snake; they do not. I bounce the boy and watch the clock. Fifteen minutes to go.

It is at this moment that I glance outside the window again and see my husband running gingerly along the side of the house holding a plastic bag.

It takes my mind a moment to process (again, drugs, lack of sleep, major surgery, sudden life-changing transition to motherhood, heavy emotional family issues about to be addressed, impending removal of my baby’s foreskin).

There it is. My husband walk-running around the side of the house carrying—as one might a goldfish won at a county fair—a bag of toilet water and the offending, drain-clogging crap that he has somehow liberated from the bowl.

Nothing says your life has crossed over like seeing your husband carry a bag of your shit.

If one could die of cringing, I would.

This is all my fault, I tell myself, for not better orchestrating my life, for having a breech baby and a C-section, for moving to this old house just weeks before the baby’s birth because I couldn’t make up my mind any sooner, for all the chaos of unpacked boxes and curtains not hung. I want everything to be slender and clean and tucked away and predictable, but I can’t go back and I smell Buster’s fuzzy head just to get a hit of the good stuff.

This, too, shall pass, I tell myself, just as that poop did through my colon.

Until now, I didn’t even discuss going number one with my husband and now I’m anxiously running to the front door to find out how it went when he hand-delivered a bag of number two to the trash can out front.

“No problem,” he says, trying to pass it off. “All fixed.”

A tacit agreement that this didn’t happen is made.

Before the rabbi arrives—a bearded man right out of Central Casting—my mom shows up. She has been driving for hours, so her lime green linen shirt is a bit rumpled, but I can tell she has dressed up. She is carrying a lavish platter of bagels, cream cheese and lox for fifteen, as well as a bag with doubles and triples of all the items on the rabbi’s list. When she opens the door, I hug her and point to the baby, sleeping in his bouncy seat perched on the sofa. She strains to keep a neutral expression on her face, but tears are landing on her shirt. She doesn’t make a move to wipe them away, because her face is still trying to say, “This is no big deal.” I hand her the baby and she cries right onto his blankie, which she must recognize from her months of knitting it.

“He’s beautiful,” she says. And she manages to sound a way she never has before.
Maternal.

And just like that, we commence making small talk about Buster, his dimples, will his eye color change, does he know what terrible thing is about to happen to his pee-pee. We have a nosh. Like the unspoken agreement never to discuss the contents of the bag, my mother and I silently conspire to act as though the past year, and many of the years before that, have not been crap.

The rabbi arrives, and dips a cloth into some wine while gathering the four of us to talk about the “covenant” and the idea that a circumcision happens on the baby’s eighth day because there is no eighth day of the week and so the concept is to transcend the earthly plain. Or something like that. I don’t know. Anything a guy with a long beard who has done fifteen thousand snips has to say seems deep. And we give the child a Hebrew name—David—because my stepfather’s last name was Davidson and I know this will make my mom happy. When my stepfather was around, I could deal with my mother. He was a buffer, like the baby will be.