Domestic Affairs (10 page)

The catch is, the very impulse that drives so many people to domesticity and child raising sometimes allows them to drift apart. Before you know it, you’re kissing the baby all the time (instead of each other). He’s working overtime; your fantasies have to do with dishwashers and a new washing machine. Overrun as a person gets with the thousand little details required to make the household function, it’s not hard to lose sight of what it was about your partner that got the two of you into this in the first place. By the time you get an evening out, away from the children, you may look at each other across the restaurant table in the candlelight and think of nothing better to say than that you found a terrific buy in high-top sneakers today and your daughter got an A+ in spelling.

None of this is news to anybody who’s been married a while, especially if they’re raising young children. But I think it’s important simply to acknowledge the syndrome now and then, because when it’s happening to you it’s sometimes hard to remember that this doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. (You’re nothing but a cook and a babysitter. Romance is gone from your life. He gave you a frying pan for your birthday. That’s it: the marriage is finished.) It’s hard to step back and take the long view when all you can see is unfolded laundry, unwashed dishes, and the crusts of three children’s peanut butter sandwiches lying in the sink.

Now (speaking of the sink), we’ve had another problem around our house these past few days. There was a cup stuck in our sink. A very hard plastic cup, whose diameter (it turned out) matched precisely the diameter of the opening to our garbage disposal. When it first happened, I wasn’t too concerned (I was sure Steve would know what to do about this). But by that night, after watching him struggle for over an hour, trying to dislodge the cup, we were both pretty fed up. You couldn’t get a hammer into the opening to smash the cup. You couldn’t get a pair of pliers around the edges of the cup to pull it out. You could take the whole disposal out, of course, but you’d be talking major plumbing work then. So since there were so many other things going on in our lives at the time, we just left the cup for another three days or so. It began to collect apple peelings and bits of eggshell and old yogurt and soggy Kix. It was depressing to see that cup in there. I’d pound away at it with a screwdriver for a few minutes every few hours, then get frustrated and give up. Eventually I covered that half of our double sink with a cutting board and tried to ignore the whole thing.

But I missed my garbage disposal, and the kitchen started smelling funny. One night I dreamed about the stuck cup (dreamed I tried pulling it out using the suction from my vacuum cleaner and got electrocuted). In the morning I got out my turkey baster and suctioned all the old yogurt and water out of the cup and tried the vacuuming method (wearing rubber-soled shoes), but it didn’t work. What was going on in our sink began to look like a metaphor for my whole life. Clogged. Murky. Becoming stagnant.

Then this morning Steve’s sheetrocking partner, Dave, came by with a pair of incredibly strong snips, and after spending another half hour hacking away at the cup, we pulled it out. The water gurgled down the drain, the children cheered, I hugged my husband, and we decided life was bearable after all. (It’s often this way. When we’re having rough times together, our breakthrough is more likely to involve getting our car back from the repair shop, or an efficient new babysitter coming on board, than the discovery of some whole new way of relating.)

And tonight (this being Saturday) I’m putting on my fanciest dress and the silk stockings Steve bought me for my birthday (following the one we’d all just as soon forget, on which he gave me the can opener), and we are going out to celebrate. And we are not going to mention plumbing or children or car repairs. To look at us you wouldn’t even know we’re married.

I
WAS TWENTY-FOUR
years old when Audrey was born. And of all the things that were strange and new and frightening about becoming a parent at a time when I was in many ways a child myself (starting with the sight of one small body emerging from another that’s one’s own—something that’s never wholly real, during all those endless months of pregnancy, until you see it happen), the one familiar part was her being a girl. She looked, people said, like me. And I felt like her. When she cried, my eyes filled with tears. When she was frustrated or angry (looking for her thumb, waiting the thirty seconds it took between when she cried and when I fed her), my own impatience was as real as a baby’s empty belly. If I was sitting down, waiting for Steve to pick her up and bring her to me, and he hesitated first, just long enough to tie his shoe or throw a log on the fire, I would feel like screaming. Come on, come on, come on.

She grew, of course—cut first from the cord, then from the breast, and then (and still) an endless succession of further separations. Her first night away from home. The first (far from the only) time she said to me, “I don’t like you. I’m going to find another mother.” Four weeks when Steve and I went to China as teachers with a group of American high school students and left Audrey with her grandparents, during which time my night was her day and the whole globe stood between us. By the time she was six she was choosing her own clothes every morning (seldom the ones I would have put her in) and heading out into the world for eight hours at a stretch, carrying a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox and a pocketful of friendship pins. And though I would ask her every afternoon at three how her day had gone, she seldom gave me more than a sentence’s worth of information.

With all of that, though, we’re alike. I know which of a caseful of dolls will be her favorite. I know, when we meet a woman carrying an alligator bag in an airport lounge, that at the first opportunity she’ll pull me aside and whisper disapprovingly, “Endangered species!” I hear about the birthday party of a girl at her school, to which she wasn’t invited, and though I don’t cry, I easily could. Like me, Audrey loves to talk, so that now (at times more than my often silent husband) she is my companion and confidante who, settling into the front seat of the car beside me or reaching for the fanciest china teacup at the kitchen table, says with a happy, expectant sigh, “What are we going to discuss today?”

You have a child, and then you think you know what children are like. Who yours resemble. How it is, being a parent. Everything has changed, and will never be the same. There can be no enormous surprises left.

But then maybe you have another child. And it turns out you didn’t really know what babies were like after all. You knew only that first baby. This second one is all new, something totally different. He teaches you about himself, and also—by his differences—about his sibling. That face she made (that you thought all babies make) turns out to be hers alone. Your children are not necessarily dark-haired and dark-skinned after all. (They can also be blond and fair.) As for being a parent: You knew all about raising one child. But all the rules change, raising two.

And then there is that other joy that comes when there is more than one, and that is seeing your two children together. Providing them with the gift of each other.

Audrey had been an only child for four years and a month when her brother Charlie was born. For four years she had been the central—only—star in our small galaxy, and certainly my life revolved powerfully around hers. Every morning she’d bound into our bed, asking us what we were going to do today. Sew doll clothes, make valentines, bake pies? Drive to the children’s museum, play Old Maid all afternoon? We had tea parties with my grandmother’s china. We sewed dollhouse curtains and embroidered hankies. I read her stacks of books at a sitting, and when we were done she’d turn to me to ask, “What do we do next?”

Even the desire for another child came, in part, anyway, out of my endless attempts to give the one I already had everything (including a sibling). I was eager for another child too, and hoping for a boy. But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think I ever believed I would love another child as much as I loved the one I already had: my dark-eyed, dark-skinned, dark-haired daughter, the little girl who looked like me and gave me a chance to relive and (sometimes) rewrite my own childhood. I never had a brother, myself. But Audrey would have one.

It was a good and easy second pregnancy, filled not only with Steve’s and my anticipation, but this time with Audrey’s too. She and I used to carry on conversations with her sibling before he was born: Audrey, lifting up my maternity top, whispering gently into my belly button, and me, in a squeaky, muffled voice, providing the baby’s response. She asked the baby questions about life in utero, but more than that, he would ask her about the outside world, and then she’d hold forth, sweetly and patiently explaining Christmas, or popcorn, or telling him about our house, our dog, the room that would be his. She sang him songs, taught him the numbers up to ten, told him, above all, not to worry about being born. She’d take care of him. Every couple of weeks I’d cook a ham—usually a seven- or eight-pounder—and whenever I got one, I’d let Audrey carry it around the kitchen for a while, before it went in the oven, so she’d get used to the weight of a baby. Pretty soon she was calling our unborn baby Hamhead, and Steve and I did too.

Eventually Hamhead—Charlie—was born. But where my daughter had been instantly familiar to me, my son showed up like a wonderful, lovable stranger. A boy, for one thing. And a big, ten-pound, blue-eyed blond. A child over whom people still express surprise when they hear he’s mine (and the brother of Audrey). They’re that different.

I liked him right away, of course, but where the heart gives over blindly to a first child, this time I held back some. No question about it, my first loyalties were to the child who’d been with us four years already. If he was crying, and she needed me, he was the one who had to wait. Partly that was an instinctive strategy, I think (I never wanted her to see him as having taken her mother away. Better a little motherly neglect, I figured, than sisterly resentment). But it’s also true, the choice wasn’t hard, in those early days. Charlie would have to win my love, earn his place in my heart. And faster than I had anticipated, he did.

He was a sunny, cheerful baby. Almost from the first I let Audrey carry him around—our real-life hamhead—and though wherever we went I’d see people looking shocked to observe a four-year-old toting an infant, I knew she’d be as unlikely to drop him as I was, she was so proud. As for him, he’d never known a life in which he wasn’t carried by his sister, and was accustomed to the somewhat bumpy ride she gave him. Maybe out of self-preservation, he held his head up on his own faster than any other baby I’ve known.

In the first weeks and months after Charlie’s birth, people who knew us, and knew of my deep and single-minded devotion to my daughter, used to ask us how Audrey was taking the arrival of the new baby. Their faces would look worried when they made their inquiries, their tones were hushed, as if what they were speaking of was not the birth of a baby, but an attack of some terrible disease or the discovery of head lice. Over and over they would ask Audrey herself, “How do you like your baby brother?” And almost as often, they would anticipate, and plant the suggestion of, trouble. “I bet he screams all the time,” they’d say. “I bet sometimes you wish he’d move away.”

I understand it’s modern, progressive thinking to talk this way. We are all of us more in touch with our feelings these days, as they say. And once in touch with them, we’re all anxious to express them, get them out in the open. Children’s books about new baby brothers and sisters are filled, now, with older siblings’ feelings of displacement, declarations of hatred, and examples of acting out.
(Validating.
I think that’s what they call it.) But sometimes I wonder whether being allowed to say repeatedly, “I hate my brother,” doesn’t simply reinforce the idea for a child. She hears the words so often they begin to sound familiar, and true.

As for me, I had started out this business of having a second child with my heart and mind still centered on my first (and worried, lest he become a rival for my affections). But it came to Steve and me, after Charlie’s birth, that the only real danger was not of one child becoming more loved than the other, only of the consequences if the two failed to love and support each other. I saw how Audrey rejoiced over her brother’s arrival, and how little she seemed threatened by it. One more person to love her, and one more person to love, that’s what he was to her.

I didn’t want that to change. So, to preserve that feeling, we handed over to Audrey large measures of responsibility (real, not invented) and tried to make sure that he associated her only with good things and that she saw him as taking nothing from her, only adding to her life. When there were cookies to be handed out, she gave them. When she fell down, he was dispatched (first crawling, later staggering with his first steps) to kiss her. Inevitably, of course, his presence in our lives sometimes meant I had less time for her. But more often he served as playmate, companion, comforter. In the interest of reinforcing those things, I allowed some things I mightn’t otherwise. She dressed him like a doll, put him on a leash and took him for walks, sat him down, for an hour at a time, to learn the ABCs or the names of colors. For his part, he has always been so happy and grateful for her attention he almost never complained. As soon as he graduated from his crib, he began sleeping beside her in the single bed they still share, and when he cried in the night it was (and is still) usually Audrey who calmed him and sang him back to sleep.

Sometimes I’ll be on a tirade (the children will have left their room a mess, or failed, again, to pick up the dirty clothes, or spilled orange juice over the kitchen floor), and the two of them band together like sailors on a storm-tossed boat. And in a way I’ve never really minded. Let me be the villain, sometimes, if it solidifies their alliance.