Even more than I want to sit in a dark movie theater for 110 minutes—even more than I want to eat a medium-rare hamburger the size of my face—I want Gabe to do these things. Not because these things are so vital, but because I can’t opt out of a single task. I am the baby’s servant and his playmate. His transportation vehicle and his home. His bed, his food source, his mother.
And nobody ever tells me I’m a good one.
At Jack’s two-month appointment, he was mad even before the needles. He didn’t like being naked on the cold metal scale; he didn’t like having his tongue depressed, his testicles prodded, his reflexes affirmed. The doctor, a scruffy resident, asked if our baby was always so fussy, if he was “super colicky.” Gabe’s cheek twitched and dimpled, a sure sign he was offended, but his response was an even-keeled, “Not at all.”
My job was to hold Jack as still as possible, even as he reeled and writhed. We were flanked by two nurses, each young and ponytailed and wielding her syringe with an obvious lack of confidence.
A poke in each of his thighs. Jack locked eyes with me. His mouth rubber-banded into a shocked, silent O. By the time he found his voice, I was crying too. I pressed his cheek to mine, and our hot tears mingled. The clinic evoked the hospital, a place to which I’d never wanted to return.
The doctor and I were the same age. I could tell. We might have shared a middle school gym class or a dormitory floor in college. If you cut open our trunks, we’d have the same number of rings. He furrowed his unibrow at me and, shouting to be heard over Jack, asked, “How’s everything going at home, Mom? Do you have all the support you need?”
It’s a disorienting phenomenon about which no one thinks to warn you: starting the moment you get pregnant, doctors never bother to learn your name. They seem to relish referring to you exclusively by your new role; perhaps they imagine you relish it, too.
Grimacing, I nodded at Gabe. My entire support system.
“And you’re doing okay, emotionally? Any fatigue, anxiety, guilt? Feeling overwhelmed?”
Yes to all of it. What new mother could honestly answer no? Still, I must have shaken my head. I was bouncing and swaying, dying to strap Jack into his carrier and rush homeward. The motion of the subway would put him to sleep. It always did.
The doctor asked, “Have you harmed your baby or imagined yourself harming your baby?”
They were such radically different questions—why had he asked them back-to-back, in almost the same breath?
I have imagined Jack getting hurt in every way. Falling tree limbs, aggressive dogs, pots of water boiling over. Earthquakes and lightning storms and crosstown buses. Once, years ago, Gabe and I were driving between Deerling and New York and we passed the immediate aftermath of a collision. The paramedics had just arrived at the scene where an entire family—Mom, Dad, baby boy—had been ejected from their minivan and now lay prostrate, bleeding out onto the interstate. I had suppressed the memory until recently, when Gabe brought it up. I was eight months pregnant. We were shopping for a car seat.
Now the image crosses my mind daily.
I have imagined losing my temper. Shaking my baby or dropping him onto the floor and walking away. In the earliest, sleepless days I feared myself as much as I feared the weather, the highway, or miscellaneous acts of God. Over and over I realized the worst thing, the soul-destroying thing, would be if I hurt my son. To hurt him would be to erase every decent thing I’d ever done, reducing my life to one uncalculated yet unforgivable act of violence.
When I find myself at my wit’s end—3:00 a.m., always 3:00 a.m.—I think the worst thing until I catch my breath. Until I am back in my own skin. Until I am kissing his soft cheeks.
I found I couldn’t answer the doctor’s question, and Gabe intervened. With his hand on my back, he said, “Amanda is an amazing mother.”
The doctor made eye contact with Gabe and nodded. “I’m sure she is,” he said, and looked down at his pager. Their exchange had nothing to do with me. It was one man confirming to another: Everything here is under control.
Later, back in our apartment, the table strewn with gift wrap from the packages that wouldn’t stop arriving, I ranted about the scruffy doctor.
“What was the point of those questions? If I’m not head-over-heels in love with my infant at every moment, I require medication? If I’m not euphoric, I’m unhinged? Since when is ambivalence a crime?”
I trusted Gabe to take my side. In our old life, one of us was always ranting, gesticulating wildly with a drink in hand. Drops of red wine formed constellations on the ceiling of our apartment. I pointed upward, slyly, whenever a dinner guest witnessed one of Gabe’s impassioned speeches. But I was always on his side, and he was always on mine.
We had no reason not to agree on everything.
“I don’t think that’s what he meant,” Gabe said. Jack was asleep in his vibrating chair atop the kitchen counter. His lips were adorably pursed. “I think he was just running through common symptoms of postpartum depression.”
“Which are also common symptoms of having recently had a baby!”
Gabe shrugged. He seemed profoundly bored with me and only slightly more captivated by something on the internet. It could have been an email detailing school-wide budget cuts, or passive-aggression from his mother, or a hospital bill we couldn’t pay. I imagined grabbing his phone and chucking it across the room—but I didn’t do it.
“Do you think I’m depressed?” I asked him.
“I don’t think you’re happy,” he said.
“I didn’t have a baby because I thought it would make me happy.”
Gabe turned up his hand as if I’d said something laughably illogical. I didn’t order this pizza because I was hungry.
“Really?” he asked. “Then why’d you have one?”
I don’t remember. All I know is that I cannot un-have him, and I have never, for a single moment, wished I could.
CHAPTER FOUR
When Nina comes home the next day, I’m breastfeeding Jack in the kitchen and drinking one of Carrie’s beers. I am briefly terrified to be alone with her.
“Getting your baby drunk?” Nina asks. Her eyes are shadowed with post-sleepover exhaustion. Her purple skinny jeans are stained with something—pizza grease or nacho cheese.
Caught off guard, I can’t decide between putting my boob away and grabbing a receiving blanket to drape over it and the baby. I decide to do nothing, to fight sarcasm with sarcasm. “You want one?”
“A baby or a beer?”
“A beer.”
“Um, I’m twelve?”
“If Jack’s old enough, you must be.”