Lift (3 page)

“Fine with me,” he said, like maybe he regretted something.

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know—let’s just get through this,” he said, standing over your metal crib, which looked
more like a cage. He shook his head like he was just now internalizing your baby-ness. “This is the first time she’s seemed small to me,” he said. You tricked us by coming into the world so big and loud and strong.

He had to leave. Someone had to pick up Georgia from Shannon’s house.

“Kiss me, Eddy.”

Dad leaned over and kissed me. “She’s gonna be okay, Kel.”

That first day in Children’s, you probably slept twelve hours. Every few hours, I tried to get you to take a bottle, but you didn’t want it. Sister Bernice stopped by to ask if I had any questions about insurance, parking validation, anything at all. Something about a nun going room to room reminded me of old war movies. I started to say, “I just want
her to wake up,” but my voice was shaky so I just shook my head
no
. I didn’t want her to hug me or crack me wide open and do therapy on me.

“Well, if you need me, just ask the nurses to page me,” she said. “All right, dear?” I felt my face flush as I nodded, like I was back in third grade with Mrs. Ford’s necklace in my mouth.

Dad came to sit. He had a report from home—someone had invited us to a black-tie party at a champagne lounge, we got a postcard from the dentist about an appointment next week, Georgia fought to wear her fleece kitty-kat jacket even though it was 75 degrees. I wanted to break in with “How can you possibly care?” but I decided not to. For all I knew, Dad was self-medicating with to-do lists and calendars. I didn’t respond at all, which I knew was a rejection of sorts, a way of leaving him alone, but it was better than lashing out.

Dr. Benjamin came by to check in and assure us
they were keeping an eye on the cultures. I asked him when you would get your appetite back. He said maybe the next day, and reminded me that you were being hydrated through the IV and that was the important thing.

Early the next morning, while Dad was home with Georgia, I walked around the hospital. I found myself in the parents’ lounge. There were pens and paper, a fax, a printer, and power strips, so multiple people could plug in while their kids had bone marrow transplants or slept off chemo or waited for their femurs to reset. I picked up a brochure about a summer camp—archery, sailing, crafts—for kids with cancer. I read a poster about Beads of Courage, a program where kids get a new bead for every shot and pill and procedure until, I suppose, their necklaces drape on the ground. At that point, I had no beads of courage myself. Mono, chicken pox, tonsillitis, that’s what I knew of shots and hospitals.
It’d be another year before an oncology nurse settled me in for my first bag of chemotherapy.

Next door was a play space for all the kids who couldn’t go outside because they couldn’t risk the everyday germs that the rest of us sneeze all over each other without concern or repercussion. The shelves were crowded with wooden puzzles, coloring books, stuffed animals, some costumes. A Corn Popper Push Along was leaning against the wall, near a rocking horse. If necessary, I gathered from the bouquet of withering balloons in the corner, kids could have their birthday parties here. And I had recently announced to Dad that we
had
to take you guys to Disneyland one year for a birthday treat.

I wandered back to our room and slumped in the recliner. I was so tired, things were kind of gauzy. An infection in your membrane. How thin is a membrane? I stretched a white sheet from
my shoulders to my knees, like I was on a cross-country red-eye, and then put my head back down.
TO LOWER BAR, LIFT THEN SQUEEZE,
that’s what the plaque on your crib said. It seemed so simple, but only the nurses were able to do it without a struggle.

On day three, you sucked a bottle dry. The sound of that milk being pulled through that nipple, I can hear it now. Right after Dad showed up, Dr. Benjamin strode in beaming and announced that the culture was in and you had viral meningitis, “the good kind.” Dad jumped up to shake his hand.

We thanked Dr. Benjamin as a nurse came in to unhook you. I hovered as she unwrapped the splint, pulled the tape off your hand, slipped out the needle, and put a tiny band-aid on, all in a single motion.

“She’s all yours,” the nurse said, as I picked you up.

The relief was physical, like cold water on a burn.

I signed forms with my free hand and cleared our things out of the room and waited with you by the exit. You held my finger and I rotated my attention from you to the driveway to the wall across from me—it was a mural, a landscape photograph that obeyed the rule of thirds, a principle of composition I’d learned in that one-night seminar at Elmwood Camera. The bottom third was the city of Oakland, the middle third was clouds, and the top third was blue sky. Someone, whoever was in charge of lobby decorations, I guess, had glued a small wire-and-mesh butterfly to the image, above the clouds. Could something that small really survive at that altitude?

Dad pulled up out front. He jumped out to open
the back door and kissed you before he snapped you into the car seat. I leaned in the other side to tuck a blanket around your chin so the straps wouldn’t rub against you. We drove away, into Berkeley, past the people walking with their coffee and cell phones, their shopping bags and strollers, their backpacks and school books and skateboards.

But the smell of the hospital, the sting of those overhead lights in the night, the snippets of conversation I’d overheard stayed with me and marked the beginning of how I came to know what a bold and dangerous thing parenthood is. Risk was not an event we’d survived but the place where we now lived.

I’ve done a few daring things—scuba diving, sky-diving, bungee jumping—but after I had you guys, that kind of thing lost its appeal. There
are
par
ents who still chase the double-black-diamond high—rock climbing, motorcycling, white-water kayaking. My friend Tracy’s husband, Tom, is into hang gliding, loves it beyond all reason. Sometimes, he’s up there for four or five hours. I visited Tracy and Tom last spring on the way home from my college reunion, and over a Costco hamburger and a stiff mojito on the back deck, I battered Tom with hang-gliding questions. Don’t you get tired? How do you know where you’re going? If there’s no motor, what keeps you up?

“Basically,” he said, “you fly from thermal to thermal, looking for lift.”

I loved the way that sounded—flying from thermal to thermal, looking for lift. Something about it made instant sense to me and I wanted to say, “Don’t we all?” Instead I said, “What’s a
thermal
?” and he explained that a thermal is a column of hot air surrounded by turbulence.

“I assume you want to avoid turbulence?”

“No,” he said. “Well—some turbulence is really dangerous. I actually had a friend, Terry.” Tracy stopped doing the dishes and leaned against the counter. “We were flying together and he got caught in something—a sudden patch of sink, we don’t really know—but he landed too fast.” Tom looked over at Tracy, who was folding a dishrag. “And he died.”

“Jesus,” I said. We spent a while talking about Terry, his wife, his family, that horrendous day, and then I brought it back to hang gliding. “So, why would you ever go near turbulence?”

“Turbulence is the only way to get altitude, to get lift. Without turbulence, the sky is just a big blue hole. Without turbulence, you sink.”

I understood what he was saying.

“I just think,” I said, “I mean, the expense
alone—then you layer onto that all the work involved. Then the danger…”

But you know what Tom said?

“I’m really careful and I love it. I mean, I’m
flying
.”

People rarely rave about their childhoods and it’s no wonder. So many mistakes are made.

I see how that happens now, how we all create future work for our kids by checking our cell phones while you are mid-story or sticking you in the basement to watch a movie because we love you but we don’t really want to be with you anymore that day, or coming unhinged over all manner of spilt milk—wet towels, unflushed toilets, lost
brand-new!
whatevers.

Almost every day I yell at one of you so loudly
that my throat hurts afterward. That’s why I keep lozenges in practically every drawer in the house. I hold it together and hold it together and then, when the bickering picks up again, I just detonate. Like yesterday, Claire, when I listened to you whine through two rounds of some card game called Egyptian War. Finally, it was Georgia’s turn to go first, and you said you couldn’t play anymore because your armpits were sore. “That’s stupid,” Georgia said, and you cried, “Stupid is a mean word!” and smacked Georgia with your open palm as I watched. “GO TO YOUR ROOM RIGHT NOW, MISSY!” I hollered. “It was an accident; I fell into her on accident!” You both froze and I got to my feet and I leaned down into your faces and ranted at you through set teeth, like the heartless tyrannical caretakers in movies about orphans. I was so disgusted with both of you, your impatient overreactions, your loss of self-control—then I turned right around and disgusted myself.

If John Lennon was right that life is what happens when you’re making other plans, parenthood is what happens when everything is flipped over and spilling everywhere and you can’t find a towel or a sponge or your “inside” voice. But if my temper has made you hesitant or tentative, is there any atoning for that?

In a parent-teacher conference last year, Ms. Tunney said, with obvious hesitation, “Sometimes—sometimes, your daughter has a bit of an edge, a way of snapping that makes the other kids pull back.” I cried when I left the classroom. I knew.

There are other mistakes, less obvious. I don’t mirror your emotions enough, though I can’t say why because when I do, it seems to calm you down. I forget to praise your effort instead of your achievement, I discipline by carrot and stick instead of reason, and I ignore the indisputable research about the benefits of family dinner. I’m a
zero when it comes to the culinary arts—everything tastes like ground shoelaces, except my salads, which you are years away from appreciating. Until then, we go over to Beth’s house and trade wine for dinner. It’s a brilliant solution but sometimes, on the way home, when you go on and on about how Beth is
such a good cook
and then Dad adds his accolades about Beth’s homemade red sauce and roasted broccolini and how you ate
every bite,
my mom-ego twitches and cramps, and by the time we get home I’m practically convulsing with animus.

I used to be “pretty chill,” as I once heard Dad say to his friend Graham when I turned down a Corona at a two-year-old’s birthday party. For instance, before I was your mom, I didn’t have one of those plastic dividers for my silverware. I’d just take the basket out of the dishwasher and dump all the knives, forks, and spoons right into the
drawer. My friends Mike and Andy, who coached me through the last of my single years, still talk about it. I went around the world without a credit card or a cell phone or a plan of any sort, I hitchhiked a thousand miles, I went to Dead shows with people whose last names I didn’t know, I wore green Birkenstocks to the office. I thought I’d be cooler as a mom. But then I leaned back on the delivery table and Dr. Laura Statchel pulled out a baby, and somewhere between the precious bundle that was Georgia and the placenta, all that
it’s cool, no worries, sure why not?
stuff came out too.

My default answer to everything is
no
. As soon as I hear the inflection of inquiry in your voice, the word
no
forms in my mind, sometimes accompanied by a reason, often not. Can I open the mail? No. Can I wear your necklace? No. When is dinner? No. What you probably wouldn’t believe is how much I want to say
yes
. Yes, you can take two dozen
books home from the library. Yes, you can eat the whole roll of SweeTarts. Yes, you can camp out on the deck. But the books will get lost, and SweeTarts will eventually make your tongue bleed, and if you sleep on the deck, the neighborhood raccoons will nibble on you. I often wish I could come back to life as your uncle, so I could give you more. But when you’re the mom, your whole life is holding the rope against these wily secret agents who never, ever stop trying to get you to drop your end.

This tug-of-war often obscures what’s also happening between us. I am your mother, the first mile of your road. Me and all my obvious and hidden limitations. That means that in addition to possibly wrecking you, I have the chance to give to you what was given to me: a decent childhood, more good memories than bad, some values, a sense of a tribe, a run at happiness. You can’t imagine how seriously I take that—even as I fail you. Mothering
you is the first thing of consequence that I have ever done.

Every now and then there are victories, which is to say, moments when I let go, when I set aside all instruction and we dance. I remember the first time Dad played Van Halen for you. He’d just gotten home from work—it was a Friday so he was in an extra good mood—and we were goofing around in the living room, and he said, “Wait! I just thought of something,” and a moment later, “Panama” started. Georgia, you were on the coffee table and about halfway through the song, you said to Dad, with the signature earnestness of a three-year-old, “I could listen to this
all day
.” He tells this story a lot; I think it validates something for him, like you two have something crucial in common—or just a tacit, gut-level esteem for ’80s arena rock. He
turned the volume way up and when the song said
jump
, we jumped. You girls couldn’t believe how rowdy we were being, and I thought,
They’ll remember this—someday they’ll be lying around a dorm room drinking Miller Lite and picking pepperonis off a cold pizza and say, “Our family used to have dance parties and my dad would play the music so loud we couldn’t hear each other talk…”

Sometimes when we’re doing errands, a song’ll pop into my head, and I have to write it on my hand to remember to play it for you when we get home—like that song from
Rent
about all the moments in a year and what we should be doing with them. I can’t tell if you’re responding to the music or to what the music is doing to me, but you always seem hooked. The kicker is when you start singing back—just hearing you say, “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” is enough to trigger a little rush of Mother’s High.