Exploiting My Baby (6 page)

I knew she meant it when she said she liked some essay or book report I brought home, because she was incapable of sugarcoating. Although when I think about it, sugarcoating is sort of what moms are for, and I could have used some of that. But I got what I got and sometimes I’m at peace with that and other times I’m sad for what I missed.

I married a man whose mother is appropriate, dresses well, says the right things and has personalized stationery. This is no accident.

Of course, like everyone who tries to correct the things their parents got wrong, I will endeavor never to humiliate my child (
knock wood, if I am lucky enough to actually have one
) by being super weird or saying tactless things, but there is a strong chance I will fail at least some of the time.

My prime screw-up-the-kid years are far off, though; it’s really the baby thing that concerns me now, the looming possibility that tending to an infant will be at best thankless and boring, at worst a stifling slow death, a suffocation by talc-scented swaddle. If I am truly my mother’s daughter, there is the possibility that before I make my child miserable in ways he will recall, he will make me miserable, just by existing, just by being a tiny bundle of needs.

My therapist says I am at “high risk” for postpartum depression, because of all of what went down with my own mother. She calls in my husband for a joint session, lets him know he will have to look for warning signs and be prepared to toss some Prozac down my gullet if I get all withdrawn and affectless. If this happens, I’m assured that it will pass quickly. As we sit there on her couch holding hands, I like the way we must look to her: happy, respectful of each other, in love, and we aren’t faking it for her sake. It isn’t often I feel like a show-off for anything to do with my sanity, but the best thing I could do for a child, choose a father who is warm and stable and solid, I have already done. And I want my fucking gold star. And I think I see it glinting in my therapist’s eyes. My man is good daddy material, and she knows it.

(Hopefully, it’s not too Woody Allen that I write about my therapist. When you’re as mental as I am, having struggled with everything from paralyzing stage fright to various existential career crises and bouts of crippling loneliness, therapists are important in your life.)

At the moment, I don’t communicate with my mother at all, haven’t spoken to her in about a year. It’s not uncommon for me to take mom breaks when she gets to be too much, because while
you
might feel too guilty to cut your mom off, I don’t have that problem.

I don’t owe her anything.

She kept me alive for eighteen years, and while I appreciate that, she did it with such a minimum of effort and aptitude that it sometimes feels like our exchange in this lifetime is complete. She mostly phoned in being a mother and now I phone in being a daughter, which is to say I don’t phone her at all. Oddly enough, she would love me to call her every day, like my brother does; fill her in. I think this is because she is bored and the comings and goings of our lives as adults are interesting, in stark contrast to the misshapen ceramic ashtrays and poopy diapers of our childhoods. I get it. Now that I can wipe my own ass and don’t require full-time un-fun care, I’m a real hoot. But I’m also a resentful, grudge-holding hoot with “Cat’s in the Cradle” playing in my head on a loop.

Before going ahead with the baby making, I ran all of this by my therapist, who did the best thing a therapist has ever done, and I’ve had a lot of them. She offered me $1 million if I have a baby and don’t love it. She’s that positive I’m going to be okay.

She helps me make a plan to get some help for the first few weeks after the baby so I don’t get too sleep-deprived, hire a night nurse to do what some more capable mothers do for their daughters, help out with the bathing and swaddling and midnight comforting, model nurturing behavior, tell me everything is going to be okay.

The rest is just faith.

I am working on this chapter at a diner when a baby starts wailing and chucking Cheerios from a paper bowl. It’s not a beautiful sound to me, but I force myself to question whether it’s the worst, or whether an even more festering sound is my mother’s voice in my head; not reading great literature, but her own flawed script about motherhood.

four

Pregatory

 

 

 

I
f purgatory is a temporary state of suffering, pregatory is a three-month no-man’s-land during which your soul lurks between being an expectant mom and being who you were before.

They say you can’t be “a little bit pregnant,” but that’s exactly what you are at first, when you don’t feel or look any different. You’re the same, but you’re utterly changed.

You aren’t supposed to say anything to anyone about your baby, because for weeks and weeks what may or may not be your child is just a sac of yolk without so much as a heartbeat.

Partially, keeping your mouth shut is pragmatic, because whom-ever you tell, you will have to un-tell if the pregnancy doesn’t stick. And partially, it’s just being superstitious. I knock wood so many times my knuckles bleed.

Here’s how it sounds when I talk to my husband:

We can send the baby to the school around the corner, I mean, you know, knock on wood, if everything is okay. I hope the baby has blue eyes even though I have brown eyes, you know, knock wood, if the baby has eyes. We should probably be trying to find a pediatrician for the baby, if, knock wood, we actually have the baby. Let’s try to get a secondhand crib; the baby won’t know the difference. I mean, knock wood, if we have one
(followed by the weird addition of knocking on my forehead in case the surface is not actually wood but some sort of IKEA-based wood product that would not have the persuasive powers of actual wood).

I’m feeling very self-conscious about all my OCD wood knocking until I read that a couple of psychologists came up with the concept of “availability bias,” a brain quirk that makes us inclined to wildly overestimate the probability of events associated with memorable occurrences.

Even if an event is rare, if it’s memorable, it becomes more available in our minds and thus seems more common, like plane crashes and child abductions.

The minute I read about this theory, it immediately explains not only my sense that the entire population has fertility problems, but also my feeling that all women lose at least three pregnancies in the first trimester. Vivid tales of miscarriages are so available in my mind, it’s as though no pregnancy has ever gone the distance. This one’s sister-in-law had four miscarriages and that one’s cousin started bleeding at the grocery store and lost her baby, and this one has a compromised cervix and a poorly shaped uterus ... the horrific stories take center stage in my mind, linking arms in a kick line, glittering in gold leotards, blinding me with a show-stopping, heartbreaking, attention-grabbing, relentless song and dance.

A throng of people in line at Starbucks, a swarm of drivers vying for a spot in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, a crush of humanity at a downtown sample sale, I dispense with all of this proof that human beings are having no trouble reproducing themselves and decide instead that it’s a wonder any of us made it out alive at all and I should follow the common practice and keep the pregnancy mum for twelve weeks.

This is the hardest secret I’ve ever kept, so I constantly fantasize about telling people, about telling everyone.

This is followed by mentally rehearsing how I will disclose losing the baby. Will I even use the phrase “lost the baby” or just keep it clinical, tell them I “miscarried” with a brief medical explanation and a sunny sign-off about how we’ll try again next month? Will I send out a group e-mail, subject line: “sad news”? Or maybe I’ll have my husband roll the miscarriage calls, while I sit next to him listening and quietly weeping, turning a lamp on and off like Glenn Close in
Fatal Attraction
. Of course, in this mental rehearsal, we are always perched in a cozy nursery, which makes the vision even more poignant, because I’m sitting against a freshly painted, pale yellow wall on a nursing rocker I won’t be needing with a couple of sad little plush toys on my lap. My pregnancy hormones are like an endocrinological remote control, constantly switching the channel in my brain to Lifetime.

“Are your boobs sore?” asks my friend Lucy, who has three kids and used to be the anchor of the morning news show where I worked as a field reporter.

“Yes. Very sore,” I answer.

“You’re pregnant,” she says decisively. “Trust me. You’re still pregnant.”

I have long chats with her on the phone while she puts on her makeup to anchor the evening news in Houston and I stroll endlessly around the block asking a million questions about pregnancy and knowing that I won’t have to un-tell her if I miscarry, she will simply know, because she is one of these women who seem to have magical mommy powers. And this is the beginning of something I will feel throughout, a kinship with anyone who has a baby. I’m in the club; just barely and maybe not for keeps, but I’m in the club.

Lucy is the only person I tell, before I even get the official results from the blood test my doctor takes. Well, the only friend. I yap about being pregnant to any and all strangers, valets, waitresses, and sales-clerks because I will never see them again and won’t need to un-tell them. And I love saying it, finding ways to jam it into any conversation.

Non sequiturs will do when you really can’t work it in organically. It becomes this secret between me, my husband, my fetus, my doctor and any service industry professional or stranger who gives me twelve seconds of their time. It reminds me of using a fake name when I was a teenager hanging out at the arcade at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, where I grew up. That person, “Andi,” was my much cooler alter ego; she was a B-cup, thanks to a stuffed bra, and had a fictional bio, complete with married parents who lived in Pacific Heights and who were both college professors. Likewise, this anonymous first trimester version of myself, this character I play for strangers, is nothing like me; she is so sure about the health of her baby she never knocks wood, wouldn’t even know what that meant. She is carefree and psyched. She’s planning on delivering at home with a midwife, maybe squatting on one of those plastic yoga balls in a candlelit room filled with sage and confidence in Mother Nature.

On the other hand, despite being “a little bit pregnant,” too little to openly discuss, it’s all I can think about. It dictates every morsel I put in my mouth, every Google search in my computer, every thought and daydream in my head.

The “tri” in first trimester should really be spelled “try,” as in, try not to tell people even though you can’t believe they don’t know just by looking at you. While self-absorption isn’t one of the standard pregnancy symptoms, it is certainly pervasive in my case. Since it is all about me, and the totally unique miracle that I am creating a new life, I can’t fathom how my coworkers at the radio station don’t notice that I’ve swapped my coffee for tea, that I’m practically wearing a bikini to do the news every day because my inner thermostat is all screwed up and I’m standing there shuffling papers in a flop sweat. The studio, like every room, feels like a sauna I’m standing in fully clothed.

How can they not notice that I’m constantly adjusting the air conditioner to try and cool off the studio every single commercial break? I become very conscious of the packets of Wheat Thins and baggies full of pretzels on my console, the crumbs from countless Fig Newtons, a dead giveaway of my new morning eating schedule, which is constant. There are now blotting papers next to my laptop for the slicks of oil that form on my cheeks by nine thirty a.m.

The “try” could also stand for “try” not to feel nauseous and ravenous, the twin symptoms that have overtaken my body. These twins go everywhere together and even dress alike. The nausea makes me hungry, the food I eat to settle my stomach makes me queasy, and the twins make me gain an obscene amount of weight in the first three months.

Whining about gaining weight makes me feel about as cutting edge and literary as a Cathy cartoon, but this is a pregnancy book, so
aaack
! My inner critic can suck it.

Morning sickness doesn’t hit in the morning, but any time of day and especially in the late afternoon, and it doesn’t make me throw up, which might be nice because I wouldn’t be gaining about six times the recommended amount for the first trimester if I did toss some of the calories back up. The nausea I feel can only be described as a motion sickness so intense it feels like I rode in the back of an old station wagon, while reading, to an amusement park, where I rode the spinning teacups for an hour before returning home by helicopter through choppy weather to my houseboat lit only by a flickering, fluorescent disco ball. When it hits, all I want is a giant sack of cheese crackers to make it go away.

Anything tangy calls to me: oranges, peaches, lemonade, vinegar, cherry yogurt. Protein bars become appetizers for meals consisting of other protein bars. I fall asleep with a spoon in my hand, a half-empty bowl of oatmeal congealing on the nightstand. I wake up, spoon still in hand, and finish it. It’s difficult to separate a true craving, which you are supposed to satisfy because it means your body must require some nutrient therein, from the sense that I must eat just a little bit of everything in case my baby needs it, will starve without it, will somehow be deficient because of my unwillingness to eat a handful of peanuts or a can of tuna. The strongest craving I have is for Guinness beer—not just any beer, but something dark and viscous—which I want to drink with a mustard-covered soft pretzel. This is bizarre because I’ve never even tasted Guinness, though I served it to many a table as a waitress. It must have been the mumbo jumbo I read online about Irish beer containing iron.