Sex Object (11 page)

THE FIRST TIME I REMEMBER SEEING MY DAUGHTER SHE WAS A
picture of a baby that didn't look like a baby. A neonatal nurse brought the photo to me as I lay in the middle of a windowless recovery room after my C-section, separated from other women by a few curtains and a haze of drugs and exhaustion.

I held the photo—decorated with a pink printed border like something you'd get at a mall photo booth—with both hands. She was two pounds of red wrinkled skin hanging off tiny bones covered in tape and tubes.
LAYLA VALENTI
was printed at the bottom in script, the lettering blocking whatever machine was pushing air into her lungs. I was pleased that they left off Andrew's surname—a just mistake given the circumstances, I thought.

Before they brought the picture in, I kept asking Andrew what her name was, so I was glad to have the photo to remember. I asked for less pain medication so the confusion would let up, but the nurse said that wasn't such a good idea and gave me another two large round pills. When my mother came into the room, I waited for Andrew to leave and told her I thought
I was going to die. My body was too swollen with water for the nurses to draw blood—every time they tried they left an inch-deep indent in my arm—so they brought in an anesthesiologist to try to find a vein. It took him more than ten tries and twenty minutes.

I met the baby twenty-four hours later, lying on a gurney. A nurse wheeled me into the NICU and placed me alongside her incubator. I still couldn't sit up so I reached my hand through the hole in the plastic and used one finger to stroke her small red arm. A neonatal nurse told me preemies didn't like that, though—too much stimulation for something that was supposed to be in your uterus for another three months. And so I just lay there, looking at her—blue from the lights meant to help with her jaundice, a piece of foam tied across her eyes to protect them. She was on her stomach and moved her legs occasionally; it looked as if she was trying to climb or crawl away.

I held on to my stomach and wailed to my husband once I was back in the room that I needed my baby but stopped soon after, embarrassed at the display. Still, I felt empty—as if my guts had been left on the operating table.

When I was well enough to get my own room they wanted me to pump my breasts right away. Even though the baby couldn't eat yet, her digestive system too immature, they wanted me to start filling the NICU fridge. They gave me bags of two-ounce plastic bottles that attached to the bottom of my yellow breast pump, but when I tried the machine the only thing that came out of my nipples was brown ooze and blood. Still, I pumped, bleed
ing, until my nipples were stretched to three times their size in the machine and, finally, milk came. I attached stickers with the baby's name to the bottles and put them in the fridge alongside rows of and in drawers with other babies' milk. The color of the other milk looked cleaner, not like mine.

I want to say that a week later I refused to leave the hospital, that I couldn't bear the thought of leaving her there. But the truth is that I just wanted to go home. On the day that I left her in a large room with a dozen other sick babies, I begged my doctor to rush the discharge paperwork so I could be in my own bed before evening. She looked at me strangely and said,
You know your baby isn't coming home for a long time, don't you?
Yes, I knew.

For eight weeks, Layla lived in a plastic box called an Isolette. It was clear on all sides so she was on display for the nurses should she need them, with holes in the sides for handling her without taking her out of this box that would be her home for so long.

Outside of pumping, there was not much for me to do besides sit beside her. Sit and wait for her to wake up, holding her arm—not stroking—through the plastic hole. Sit and wait until one of the nurses agreed to help me pull her out, untangling the maze of wires, so she could rest on my chest. As she lay there I would breathe in and out loudly, my chest rising and falling, whispering,
Strong lungs, strong lungs
. But she could only stay with me for short periods of time because she was too small to regulate her own body temperature and needed to go back into the warmed Isolette, which I thought was an appropriate name
for a box that babies had to stay in by themselves all hours of the day.

Every day, I got to hold her longer and longer, but most times that I did her oxygen level would drop or her heart rate would drop, and though the nurses didn't run over, they did rush—scooping her off of me to tickle her feet or move her around to get her breathing again or her heart going at a better speed. She turned blue a few times while I held her, once so much so that the nurse tapped on her chest until she was pink again.

It was the way I was holding her, they explained. I had to make sure her head and neck were at the exact right angle to let air through—if her head leaned too far back she would stop breathing, and if her head leaned too far forward it cut off her air supply too. I didn't like holding her much.

When I sat with her sometimes I would take an accounting of her wires: multiple stickers attached to wires for her heart rate, another attached to her foot for oxygen levels, her arm held together with Popsicle sticks and tape so she couldn't rip out the central-line IV that went almost straight to her heart. On good days she just had a nasal cannula, on bad days—weeks, really—she had a CPAP machine breathing with her, the plastic stretching out her nostrils and rubbing parts of her face raw. Later, there was the feeding tube—sometimes in her mouth, sometimes up her nose. While there she had a blood transfusion, a collapsed lung, eating and breathing problems, but no surgeries.

We were very, very lucky, they told us.

The other babies in the room had parents sitting with them
too, sometimes only one. One baby had been there a long time—he was bigger than all the other babies but just couldn't seem to breathe on his own. Sometimes babies weren't there anymore in the morning but were too small to have gone home, and so we knew where they had gone.

The song most frequently sung in the NICU was “You Are My Sunshine.” Every parent sang it a different way—faster tempo, stresses on different words. Andrew and I kept track of who sang it worst. But what was universal were the lyrics, which struck me as appropriate:
Please don't take my sunshine away
. . .
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken, so I hung my head and I cried.

Andrew and I had a routine. One or both of us would spend the day at the hospital. The few days I took off from going I made myself watch videos of her crying or being washed, until I would weep or my breasts would leak through my bra. Just punishment for someone selfish enough to stay home while her baby lay alone.

At night, we watched
Friday Night Lights
on Andrew's laptop, ordered dinner, and then would share a carton of ice cream. At eleven thirty p.m. or midnight Andrew would call the NICU to check on her progress and ask the nurse staffing her that night to please change the position of her head. Most of the babies lay on their stomach with their head facing the door and the direction of the medical staff so that if they were in distress nurses might see it on their faces. But because they lay there for hours and days and weeks, one side of the babies' heads would start to flatten out. Changing her position from time to time helped to
at least get a symmetrical flattening on both sides. Toaster head, they called it on the online preemie forums I looked through.

We commended each other on the excellent job we were doing. But Andrew still could not bear to look at her when he visited, preferring instead to look at his phone while he held her hand. And I just wanted to keep up appearances and publishing article after article even though I was convinced she was going to die every day and went to a friend's book party when I still had staples lining my lower stomach. A famous columnist looked at me, horrified, as I tried to walk and nearly collapsed.

The baby got out exactly eight weeks after she was born, one week after my one-year wedding anniversary, and four weeks after Andrew's twenty-seventh birthday. She was four pounds.

I don't remember much after she got home. I remember her sleeping upright in a car seat because her acid reflux was so painful that if she lay flat she would vomit and wail. I remember the first night sleeping with my hand lying on her chest with the hope that if she stopped breathing I would feel it on my palm. I remember posing for pictures, smiling, and sending them to my family.

My meticulously scheduled 2010 calendar tells me that a few days after Layla came home from the NICU, someone from a visiting nurse service came over. I remember she praised me for having the baby in a wrap,
to encourage bonding
, she said. The day after that Andrew took a CPR class, learning how to revive a four-pound infant should she stop breathing suddenly—a requirement for any parent bringing home a baby this small.

The next week we had a pediatrician's appointment, a pediatric ophthalmologist's appointment, and an early intervention specialist come over. The week after that I had therapy, another nurse visit, and a consultation with a pediatric cardiologist, who told us, in a Queens office where there was a dirty orange cafeteria tray next to the doctor's desk, that the baby had a hole in her heart. That we should come back in a few months, that she might need heart surgery.

Then another doctor's visit, another eye exam for the baby, a few friends over for lunch, and a second opinion on Layla's heart. This time we went to someone at NYU who had the latest, the nurse told us, cardiac imaging machine. This doctor told us no, she did not need surgery, she didn't need anything. Maybe the hole closed on its own—maybe first doctor got it wrong. We didn't need to come back. The following day we went to a pediatric gastroenterologist because Layla could not keep food down and was shitting blood.

She was allergic to dairy, so much so that if I ate a cookie with butter cooked into it and breast-fed her, red streaks appeared in her diapers.

I don't remember being a very good mother.

When I was still pregnant, I had agreed to write a book about parenthood. And now, with a baby that I was sure would not live and the inability to leave the house for fear that when I did she would die without me near her, I had to write it. The advance was gone—spent on medical bills and specialists and to hold us over because freelancers don't get maternity leave.
And so I met with my editor, who pointed out that I did not call Layla by her name but only said
the baby
or
her
whenever I needed to.

The brain does strange things to protect us. I knew that I loved her, but there is a difference between loving someone and having the ability to feel that love. To be fair to myself I wasn't feeling much of anything, but to not feel the most powerful emotion a woman is ever supposed to have—for a baby that needs you to survive, something you brought into this world—is the absolute worst, because you feel like a failure on the most basic, human level. Sure, you can write books, but if you can't even love your child properly what kind of shit person must you be?

This is when I am thankful for technology. Because, years later, when I see the pictures I took of her during this time—when I watch the videos of me cooing at her and laughing—I realize that I did not let my full-body numbness catch on. I was good at pretending, or maybe I wasn't pretending and was too buried in my brain to realize it. The mother on these videos looks present and happy, clapping when her baby dances, kissing her on the stomach, and stroking her arm to help her fall asleep. I wish that I recognized or remembered her.

At least, though, Layla might.

A FEW MONTHS AFTER WE MOVE TO BOSTON, INTO A RED HOUSE
that sits at the beginning of the curve of a cul-de-sac, I start to eat ice.

I have always liked to keep a glass of cold water nearby—on my desk while I work, on my nightstand while I sleep—and so I don't notice at first that along with sips, I am taking the cold oblong shapes into my mouth and rolling them around before biting, the shards hitting the insides of my cheeks with cold.

But soon I'm not just eating the ice along with my water, but walking to the freezer multiple times throughout the day to pick out pieces to chew on their own. It may be Andrew who first notices, the sound grating enough to keep him awake at night as we lie next to each other. Whoever it is who first takes note, though, the initial thought that goes through my mind is about Rebeca from
One Hundred Years of Solitude
, who ate dirt and plaster from the walls. I frown at the thought of how she ended up alone and grieving, holed up in a large house.

Layla was one year old when we got to Boston but looked
no more than six months. When I bring her to a new pediatrician near Boston Children's Hospital, the other mothers stare at her in the waiting room as she holds on to my hands and walks, laughing and chattering nonsense like some sort of baby genius. Andrew and I joke about it often—her smallness giving other parents inferiority complexes about their own normal-sized children, their not realizing how lucky they really are.

Her new doctor tells us that Layla is underweight and she is sent to a nutritionist, who “prescribes” her vanilla ice cream every day after dinner now that she's grown out of her dairy allergy. I put butter in everything she eats, smashing it into her mashed potatoes and mixing it in with spinach, even black beans. I keep food on me constantly—in my pockets and purses—putting something into her mouth whenever she will tolerate it.

As if in solidarity, I lose fifteen pounds during those first months in our new house without trying. I go to a doctor to find out why this could be happening, shamefully, because I am more concerned about my hair falling out than I am my shrinking size. I know, though, it's because I've lost my taste for food. Still, I tell the doctor I'm eating normally.

It isn't a conscious move, but I can only bring myself to eat once Layla is asleep in her room and I can step out onto our balcony overlooking the street to take two small hits off a joint. Only then am I hungry enough to order takeout for dinner, mostly Cuban or Chinese food that I eat in front of the television as Andrew works late. During the day I simply forget to eat, or don't want to, and instead drink water and eat ice.

My doctor looks at the thinning hair at my temples and glances at my chart in her brown folder.
Two milligrams?
She's surprised at the amount of antianxiety medication I'm taking and wonders, she says, if the hair loss is just the result of stress.
Do you pull at it?

Still, she's not happy about the pills. One milligram in the morning and one milligram at night. Despite the strict schedule, I carry the bottle of Ativan with me everywhere I go just in case I start to believe Layla is dead in her room or, like I did in New York, won't leave the house for fear that the moment I do something terrible will happen to her.

Our house in Queens—on a landmarked block in Sunnyside Gardens where every house has a backyard that melds together into a large common space with a weaving path—was old but huge. Three stories plus a basement where we put a Ping-Pong table. The neighborhood was one of the first planned communities in the United States, built in the 1920s; after the Great Depression more than half of the residents lost their homes. Rather than moving out, however, they mobilized, lobbying state officials, and when that didn't work they went on a group strike for lower mortgage payments. Most still had to leave.

While I was pregnant, we thought we wanted to live in this neighborhood of large trees and backyards permanently, and decided one day to look at a house for sale just across the shared common lawn behind our home. The couple who lived there were a decade older than us and had modernized the house beautifully: central air, a refurbished basement, an all-new kitchen.
The three stories were narrower than our own house but better maintained, and the rooms were impeccably decorated and colorful.

When we asked why they wanted to move they looked at each other first before answering that they just felt they needed a change.

We walked up to the second floor and in addition to an office space and long hallway, there was an empty bedroom—the only empty room in the house. It was pink with white trim at the ceiling and floor. On the back of the door and on the inside of the closets there were small white hooks screwed in just about at my hip's height. I immediately felt shame over telling them about my pregnancy, about how we wanted to buy a house to start our family in.

After Layla was born, this couple would enter my mind at inopportune times: while I was breast-feeding, while Layla was sleeping with my hand on her chest.

She was so small when we brought her home from the NICU that when I breast-fed her I had to be careful that while she sucked my nipple didn't sink into her face, covering her nostrils and smothering her. I was sure if I looked away my breast would kill her and I pressed the top of my areola with one finger as she ate to keep the skin away from her face. I'd let it go, to check—yes, it would kill her—and push it back in again.

Layla was so tiny that when I burped her, her whole body shook, her thin arms involuntarily shaking upward with each beat. When I look back at photos that I posted on social media
at the time, I understand now why few people liked them: she did not look like a happy, well baby. She didn't fit into any baby swings or the car seat unless we padded the sides with rolled-up towels. We kept a spreadsheet of how much she ate and how often. I looked at her shits to make sure they were normal and that there was no visible blood.

Because we didn't have a baby shower for Layla—I was in the hospital about to have her by that point—relatives and friends kindly mailed us packages of welcome-home presents. Some toys, a high chair, and the smallest clothes they could find.

One relative sent a shirt-and-pants set from a company that specializes in clothing for preemies. Underneath the tissue paper, sitting on top of the tiny shirt with carrots printed on it, was a card advertising the company website. At the bottom of the card it read, “Bereavement sets also available.”

I started to forget things. I'd be walking to my parents' health food store on Queens Boulevard—their latest small business attempt—and couldn't remember why I was going. I'd be talking with Andrew and ask him a question that he'd answered just minutes ago. One day, a bad day, I got into my car and suddenly realized that I was deep in Queens, driving through the neighborhood that used to house my parents' clothing shop when I was a child. An hour had passed that I could not recall.

When I looked at Layla I saw a baby with pieces missing. If I was on one side of the living room on the couch and she was in her swing on the other side of the coffee table, I couldn't see
her mouth under the shadow of the blanket covering her and I thought it was not moving as she took in breaths. When she slept beside me in a small co-sleeper that attached to one side of our mattress, I woke up in the middle of the night and didn't see her legs there and jumped up for fear that they were caught in the sides of the co-sleeper or somehow, strangely, just gone.

The same thing will happen in Boston after the marathon bombing—I'll take Layla to the park a few days later and be shocked to see a three-year-old amputee at the slide, only to realize moments later that her body is, in fact, intact.

It is now, with the memory lapses and blackouts, the visual tricks and nightmares, that I realize there has always been something wrong with me. That this was always in me, this ability to disconnect without much trouble. I know I am living in the same world as everyone else but also feel, acutely, that I am living in a completely different one as well, all by myself. I am alone with Layla in the house most days and go without talking to other adults until Andrew comes home. I take walks to the park with her and point out the ducks but am mostly silent otherwise.

In the end, the doctors tell me I am iron-deficient anemic and I imagine that my veins are filled with something closer to water than blood, thin, cold, and motionless in my arms. Even though I am still not hungry, I start to cook every day with the hope that doing so will inspire me to eat. Butter-filled meals for Layla, elaborate short rib and pasta concoctions for Andrew and any guests who happen to come over. I bake cheesecakes and
lemon bars with cups of sugar and whole sticks of butter but still they taste heavy and limp in my mouth. Nothing fills me.

I know I should not be this thin and I hate the way my breasts look deflated and stretched, but when I see my family and friends back in New York they keep telling me how good I look.
So skinny after a baby, wow!
Friends on Facebook comment on my cheekbones, suddenly more visible than ever.

I decide to stop taking my Ativan, which has stopped working. I only notice the medication in its absence—I forget to take a pill one day and I'm sweating and feel sick to my stomach. And so my doctor makes me a calendar of how to withdraw safely from this drug that doesn't work anymore, a calendar that takes weeks and necessitates a pill cutter, sleepless nights, and willpower I'm not sure I have. Smoking pot helps.

Around the same time Layla starts to talk in sentences, I start to gain weight. She goes to early intervention group classes in Boston with other children who were also born early or have disabilities. While there, if I wander too far from her side, she says,
Mama, here, Mama, here
, until I come back to her.

Later, when it comes time to drop her off there to stay without me, the teachers tell me she repeats this phrase over and over to comfort herself, now saying,
Mama's here, Mama's here
. She says it again at night in her room, the phrase coming through the baby monitor. If I don't go down to get her right away she starts to cry, then throws up. So I keep her in the bed with me and Andrew.
Mama's here
, I tell her. But I'm not so sure.