The mother act, p.28
The Mother Act, page 28
And that’s when I called her for the first time in thirteen years. I was doped up and incoherent—I cried through the entire conversation—but she knew it was me, as though she’d been sitting by the phone for more than a decade, praying for my call. We didn’t say anything to explain or bridge the years, just leapt straight into this moment—my need, her comfort, her presence with me on the telephone. My mommy! I cried and cried. I must have mentioned the name of the hospital because the next day she showed up at my bedside. I hadn’t seen her since I was seventeen, and she looked almost exactly the same. Serene in her long flowy skirt and peasant blouse, hair pulled back and face framed by wisps only just beginning to gray. Remarkably youthful for a sixty-year-old woman who had borne ten children.
She stayed a week. It was the first time in my life I’d had my mother to myself. Once the drugs wore off and I was back in my own home, I was embarrassed at my emotional display, and it didn’t take more than a couple of hours to remember the stifling expectations, her conviction that there was only one correct way to live and that she was living it. But even as I chafed against all the ways I expected she was judging me, I devoured her attention and I needed her help. I could tell she was shocked by our cramped apartment—“We’re moving,” I hastened to tell her—but she didn’t say anything, just started packing boxes when she wasn’t rocking the baby or changing the baby or checking the baby’s latch on my breast. There was nowhere for her to sleep—we didn’t even have a couch—so she moved one of the armchairs into the kitchenette-hallway and slept there.
We didn’t talk about the past. She didn’t preach her gospel. I didn’t preach mine. All that existed in that one week was milk and sleep and lack of sleep, mustard-colored poop, night mixed up with day, and the baby at the center of this surreal new life. My mother was there with me in it.
I felt unexpectedly bereft when she went home. I missed her palpably all that first day, not just her help but her, the mother I’d lived without for so long. She called to let me know she’d arrived safely, then called again a couple of days later, and though part of me was irritated that she thought she had full access to me now, I also didn’t wish to go back to full separation. Plus, once Damian returned to work I was alone all day with an infant and no mental stimulation—it’s not like I couldn’t make time to chat. Or to debate, because once I’d emerged from the initial postpartum fog, we did some arguing over the phone too. I knew it was useless—her beliefs were too entrenched for me ever to change them—but at least I could try to stand up for my principles in one part of my life.
As for this small alien being who was now my full-time companion, by the third week I still didn’t feel I knew her. I woke in the morning—and at midnight, two a.m., four—shocked all over again that she was here, screaming her lungs out and expecting me to meet her needs, though she seemed to understand in advance that I would fail. She didn’t nap so much as fall into exhausted breaks from crying, gathering strength to wake and cry again. The neighbors complained. “We’re moving,” we hastened to tell them. Before giving birth, I’d imagined I would spend those final weeks in the city taking the baby on leisurely walks to my favorite haunts, meeting up with friends, maybe trying out a mom-and-baby music class, but I was lucky if she stopped crying long enough for me to take a shower. Plus, I was still healing from the C-section, and it hurt just to shuffle across our apartment. We lived in a fifth-floor walk-up. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Damian thought she was magical. He cooed and sang and recited Shakespearean monologues to her, but he was teaching at NYU four days a week and needed functioning brain cells in order to do it, so most of the three a.m. floor-pacing fell to me. And then, after he once failed to fasten her diaper snugly enough and it leaked, and I had to change not only the diaper but her clothes and sheets and blankets, I concluded it was easier to do everything myself.
Plus, I was the one with the breasts.
And so, with the birth of this child who was as much Damian’s as she was mine, we stopped being an egalitarian couple who took it for granted that we’d share the domestic load and value our careers equally. With the birth of this child, we were transformed into a postcard from the fifties—exactly as I’d always feared.
We rented a van for the move. “Wild, Wonderful” declared the West Virginia license plates as we neared the state line. “Almost heaven,” sang John Denver in my mind. With each mile the beauties multiplied, mountains and valleys, forests and clear rushing streams, air fresher than I’d breathed since I left the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1981. It was stunning and foreign and familiar. It was everything I’d left behind, and I was afraid.
II
Don’t check the clock.
In five more minutes, I can check the clock.
How will I know it’s been five minutes if I don’t check the clock?
Play hide-and-seek, one round pretending I can’t find her hiding in plain sight, one round hiding in a reasonably obvious place so she can find me before she gets frustrated but not so obvious that she is frustrated by the lack of challenge.
Then I can check the clock.
Play tag, letting her run ahead and failing, but only just, to catch her.
Play airplane ride, comforting her when I lift her too high and she cries.
Play a video, but not a long one because only negligent mothers stick their kids in front of the TV all day.
While Judie is occupied with the video, try to complete the oh-so-dull legal deposition I am transcribing so I won’t have to do the work tonight when Judie’s asleep and can maybe have a relaxing evening with my husband. Try not to hate this low-paying work that is the only employment I could find that can be done from home with a child in the middle of nowhere by a person who has no education.
Heft Judie and a basket of dirty laundry down the basement stairs, making sure she doesn’t wander toward the sump pump or the mousetraps while I slosh detergent into the washer.
Scrub the spots of blueberry and applesauce off the kitchen floor with a rag that used to be a T-shirt that read “New York Feminist Guerrilla Theater Collective.”
Change a diaper, then change another one.
Bring firewood in from the stack by the door, feed the woodstove, feed it again.
Make a blanket fort.
Make a grocery list.
Make a snack.
Then I can check the clock.
* * *
In the first year, my doctor suggested I could have postpartum depression. I blew up at him. Don’t pathologize this. I do not have an illness. I have any sane person’s sane response to having her work, identity, intellectual engagement, social life, and creative outlets taken from her, to being shut away day after day with a nonverbal person, folding laundry and wiping up shit and making airplane sounds while attempting to introduce green beans. I’d like to see how you fare after one day of that, Doctor.
“If you were more bonded to your daughter,” he asked, “would you find more joy in these menial tasks?”
I stood and walked out.
* * *
There are seven hours remaining until Damian is back. Seven hours to fill, minus a two-hour nap if I’m lucky, forty-five minutes if I’m not.
“Want to read a story?” I say.
“Tugboat!” she cries, and runs to get the ratty Little Golden Book we picked up at a yard sale. I have read this story eleven million times. At first I did voices to keep myself entertained, but the voices made her cry. The voices were too much.
The voices, like so many things with Judie, are too much.
She settles on the couch beside me, a few inches from my body. Snuggle with your daughter, my mind instructs me, and I rest my arm across her back and pull her in. She goes rigid, then decides to allow it, and we are side by side on the couch, an idyllic scene—there’s even snow falling gently outside the wide, deep-silled windows—and I ease into the story, keeping my voice low and even. It is peaceful. For the duration of the story, it is peaceful.
“Again,” she says.
I read it again.
“Again!” she says.
And I, idiot, say, “Don’t you want to read a different book?”
“Tugboat!”
“Maybe But No Elephants? That one’s cute.”
“Tugboat!” She is not defiant (defiance, that sin I was so readily accused of as a child); she is begging. Her face contorts, teetering a moment on the precipice, and then it tips over and she’s falling, falling, falling into despair, as though I have denied her love and hope and comfort, as though, because of me, her life has been ruined and she will never be whole again.
“It’s okay, Judie, we can read Tugboat again, it was just a suggestion.” But her sorrow is too loud for her to hear me; she gulps and shrieks and wails. Don’t give in to her tantrum, my mother’s voice says in my head. My mother’s voice from our phone conversation last week, because I turn to my mother for support regularly now—my mother and my sisters, each of whom is rearing and homeschooling a minimum of six children—because this is how much I’m now conforming to the life I was reared for.
Your problem is boundaries, says my mother’s voice. She doesn’t know where her limits are.
Judie cries, I soothe or attempt to soothe, and finally I pick up Tugboat and read the damn thing all over again, at the top of my voice to be heard over her screams. I’ve read two pages before she notices.
I have given in. I have failed to set boundaries. But it wasn’t even a boundary she was pushing; it was only me expressing hope that I might read words I had not read eleven million times. It was only me being bored.
She whimpers all the way to the end of the story. I check the clock. We have filled twenty more minutes.
III
It’s easier on the days we go out. Correction: The time passes more quickly on days we go out. The end of the day seems to arrive after fewer hours. It is not, however, easier.
Yesterday we went out. Stacey, the wife of a man in Damian’s department, has a daughter Judie’s age. “Wouldn’t it be fun!” she said. “For our daughters to get to know each other!” There are a couple other moms with kids of similar age, she’ll invite them all!
We only have the one car, so after the ordeal of forcing Judie into socks (I could not show up at a playgroup in February with a child un-socked), then buckling her, weeping, into her car seat, we rode into town with Damian. Damian dropped us at his colleague’s house. He was all smiles and hope and optimism. We would have a good day! I would get out! Judie would get out! We would make friends! And Damian would pick us up after work and hear all about it.
I trundled toward the door with purse, diaper bag, activity bag, and Judie. “Walk, sweetie, you can walk,” I said, but she plunked herself on the shoveled walkway and sniveled until I shifted everything I was carrying to lift her into my arms.
Stacey opened the door and ushered us in. We were only just inside the entrance when Judie veered into full-scale crying. She clung to me, and the diaper bag slipped off my shoulder as I began my excuses. “She hasn’t been feeling great.” Damn, wrong strategy, moms are insane about contagions. “But nothing serious! It’ll just take her a minute to adjust.”
The other kids, all around Judie’s age, were in a play area in the living room. Laughing, chattering, rolling around, banging on drums. A squabble broke out over a toy. “I want!” “No, I want!” The moms rushed to mediate, but soon they were back on the couch with their coffees, chatting about toilet-training methods. Judie’s noise was confined to a restrained whimper as long as I didn’t show any sign that I might put her down. Still holding her, I sat in an armchair in the corner while fending off the mothers offering dolls and games and horrifying wind-up clowns that cackled and waved. “I think she just wants to sit here with me for a bit—it’s all right, she’s fine.” I threw out the odd quip about the news—whoops, they were all Republicans—and tried to find out what they’d been before they were mothers, but no one seemed to remember. They complained about their husbands, who could not boil an egg or pack a diaper bag with the things you would actually need. They discussed baby’s first words, whether or not the terrible twos were really so terrible, and a hippie chick they all knew who was still breastfeeding her four-year-old.
Stacey put a movie on in the family room. The kids charged toward it, and Judie lifted her head. “Want to check that out?” I asked. She did, but only if I went with her. She allowed me to set her feet to the floor, and I held her hand. In the door of the family room I realized I should change her diaper first, so I detoured us back to grab my own adequately packed diaper bag. Judie went stiff and began to scream. “Movie! Movie!” she wailed, throwing herself to the floor, kicking her bare feet against the hardwood, shrieking. It took me fifteen minutes to calm her while the women looked on—“Is she hungry?” “A good spanking is what I do,” “Oh my, she certainly has a healthy set of lungs”—and my exasperation skyrocketed toward fury. When she finally settled, I changed her diaper, gathered her up along with all our bags, made hasty apologies, and beat it out the door. I let her wear bare feet in her boots. I lugged her the quarter mile to the college, fantasizing the whole way about a life in which there was enough money for cabs. We slumped on the floor outside Damian’s locked office until he appeared from class.
It is easier to stay home.
* * *
Midmorning of this never-ending day, I station Judie by our living room window where she can see me, put on my parka, slip into my boots, and dash out to the end of the long drive. I lift the door on the mailbox and peer inside.
Yesterday’s mail had nothing but more tapes to transcribe. Today, so far, the mailbox is empty.
I trudge back to the house and kick the snow off my boots. The phone is ringing, Judie’s face showing her habitual distaste for the intrusive noise, and I dive for it.
“How’s your day going, darling?”
Damian’s voice through a telephone can still make me feel that I have found my answer and my person and my home.
Judie hasn’t left the window, absorbed now by chickadees at the feeder. I sink into the armchair by the woodstove. Damian’s question feels gigantic.
“Judie fell down the stairs,” is what I finally say. “She tried to climb the stairs and she fell.”
“She climbed the stairs? Is she all right? Was she injured?”
“More frightened than anything.”
“Should I come home? Does she need stitches? The hospital?”
Now I’m regretting telling him.
“Kids fall down stairs. There’s no permanent damage.”
“Oh, Sade. We have to watch her constantly.”
“I do watch her constantly. Watching her is what I’m doing with my life, Damian. Watching her and being with her and entertaining her and meeting her needs is what I do with every damn minute of every damn day, okay?”
Judie glances over as my voice rises.
“I’m sorry,” Damian says. “If it helps, I’m not doing what I’d prefer to be doing either.”
“No. Directing plays—you’ve never wanted to do that,” I say, sarcasm on full blast.
“Student plays.”
“And teaching, which is basically you talking about your passion all day. Must be miserable.”
“My life has changed too. I recognize that yours has changed more, but—”
“You are still you. You still have creatively challenging work in the arts. You still have a world outside of this house. I don’t even recognize myself.”
“I recognize you.”
I laugh. The bitterness in it alarms me. “How can you?”
“It’s entirely you to question and refuse to accept what the majority accept.”
“Except now I can’t do anything with my questioning.”
“Come on. Didn’t you write that thing?”
“Thing? Didn’t I write that thing?” My rage is so close to the surface. It erupts at the slightest provocation. “Why don’t you go sit over there and play with your toys while Daddy works on his big important Shakespearean project?”
“Christ, I just mean—I don’t know what you’re calling it.”
“A one-woman show. It’s a one-woman show, Damian.”
“Right. Great!”
“I’m not just a writer, I’m a performer, I’m a doer. I need an audience. I have no idea if it’s any good because I haven’t had it in front of an audience.”
“If you win this contest—”
“Yeah? Two weeks? Then a tour? I’m really going to leave for months in the middle of your term? Maybe the redneck neighbors will watch Judie for free out of the goodness of their hearts?”
“It’s not just rednecks here, or faculty wives or Southern Baptists or the other people you so enjoy mocking. There’s a whole community of musicians and back-to-the-landers. Progressive, artistic people you might connect with if you made just a bit more effort.”
“And they’ll watch my kid while I go on tour?”
“There’s day care—”
“Which costs money, and they will kick her out after three days when they realize she’s going to cry every day. For the entire day.”
“We’d work something out. That’s all I’m saying. Has the mail come?”
“It’s too early.”
“I’m sorry, darling.” I can hear him pulling away. He is not here with me on the phone, he is there in his office, with the play he is adapting and the rehearsal schedule he is coordinating and the drama games he will introduce to his next class. “I have to go,” he says. “I have a student coming at eleven.”
