Domestic Affairs (29 page)

I
THINK IT’S PART OF
the pain of parenthood that however hard it is being in possession of so much responsibility, relinquishing it is even harder. Being nine months pregnant isn’t nearly so difficult as going through postpartum depression. Holding a baby all day is easier than putting her in somebody else’s arms and walking out the door. Though that was hard, with all three of my children, I never felt the separation so acutely as I have, at every new stage, with my eldest. Maybe because she’s the girl, because she’s the one who looks the most like me, the one with whom I identify. Mostly, I think, because she came first. Now I’m accustomed to the familiar, stabbing sensation (part regret, part pride) of seeing a child of mine head off without me. But I remember when it was all new. Lines from my journal, 1979:

Audrey will be one year old next week, and I am trying to decide if it seems as if she’s been with us forever, or if it seems like the day before yesterday when she was born. Both are true. This year has been the longest and the shortest of my life. It’s hard to remember that there ever was a time when we didn’t have pretzel crumbs and ancient carrot sticks under our sofa cushions, a time when I couldn’t recite the words to
Goodnight Moon,
didn’t know every curve of her body and her face better even than I know my own. I have wondered often how I ever lived my life without her. But I also wonder, on occasion, where my life has gone now that she’s here. It has sometimes seemed to me, over these last twelve months, as if I’ve gained a daughter and lost a self.

Audrey is likely to get a new stuffed animal next week, and a dress whose ruffled skirt will annoy her as she resolutely (and for the fifteenth time that day) mounts the stairs to our sleeping loft. (Where she will then stand, looking down, unsupported, causing my heart to stop, and applaud her victory over the stairs, over me.) She isn’t interested in birthdays yet, of course. As for me, I feel the need for a present, a cake, a firecracker, to mark the anniversary of our parenthood. Someday I hope we’ll have another baby, who will be just as dear to us as Audrey. But no one, ever again, will turn our lives upside down this way. It is easier for three people to become four than it is for two to become three.

The odd thing is: The moment when suddenly you want a baby is likely to come precisely when your life seems so good the way it is. And having a baby is the one thing that’s guaranteed to change it. I was always crying, in the early days of my pregnancy. I would spend all afternoon cooking dinner, cutting radishes into roses, carrots into trees, decorating pie crusts with mermaids and swans, setting the table on our porch with candles and wine, and placing tiger lilies in the soup. And then I would sit across from Steve, watching the sun set behind his back, thinking about how it would never be this way again, and lose all appetite.

Not that I didn’t long for our baby, didn’t know I’d love her. It was because I knew I would that I was in mourning, I think, for my heart. When I was three months pregnant, Steve was still my one true love. When I was four months pregnant, though, and I’d heard her heart beat, felt her swimming, the baby had already begun to steal me. At six months I almost never cried anymore, and my dreams were filled not with images of Steve and me, but with visions of a washing machine and a dryer. I was on an express train to motherhood, and even though I didn’t want to get off, the knowledge that I couldn’t terrified me.

A few months before Audrey’s birth a woman I knew came to visit with her year-old son. Her little boy was still breastfeeding—constantly, it seemed, to the point where she sometimes just kept her shirt open, for convenience. Her little boy slept in a double bed with her; her husband had a pallet on the floor nearby. She had never lost the weight she’d gained when she was pregnant, she told me, and neither would I. She was tired all the time. She complimented me on a loaf of bread that I’d just baked. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. “You won’t have time for baking bread once the baby’s born.”

After she’d gone home I lay down on our bed and wept over the occupied territory that used to be my body, and the imminent invasion of our marriage. I was nothing but a mother. All I could think of was the baby. Now she was filling me up. Soon she would drain me dry.

Then Audrey was born. The morning after her birth it took me a few seconds to remember about her, and once or twice, for the first few days, I’d forget her name. But then my arms got so used to holding her and knowing exactly what weight to expect that when I’d pick up somebody else’s baby who was lighter, my arms, expecting those other ounces, would lift him too high. I did bake bread, but with Audrey in my arms. Audrey always in my arms.

And Steve, during those first months, seemed somewhat peripheral to our tight circle. The thought came to me one morning that she was my blood relative and he wasn’t, and that while there were things that he could do to make me stop loving him and stop being his wife, there was no way Audrey would ever not be my daughter.

My worst fears—that she would be too much with me— seemed to have come true. Steve was devoted to her, and she loved it when he played with her. But when she was tired or hungry, it was her mother she wanted. She didn’t know, I read, that she and I were two separate people. Not for her, yet, adolescent rebellion or the devastating announcement a five-year-old I know delivered to his mother once, “I hate you, but you still love me.” To Audrey, I was perfect.

At Thanksgiving we went to Steve’s parents’ house in Ohio and spent an evening viewing family slides. My father-in-law looking like Steve, in a T-shirt, standing outside a tiny rented house with a very pretty young woman who is now my mother-in-law and the three-week-old baby who is now their thirty-two-year-old son. More babies: getting teeth, losing them, getting them again, standing in front of a succession of larger and grander Christmas trees. Charley, Steve’s father, still handsome, but losing some of his hair; Anne, Steve’s mother, still pretty, but more lined. Then one by one, the children going off to college, until the slides show just the parents again, except at moments like Thanksgiving, when the children come to visit.

Now Audrey—I am both saddened and relieved to say—has already begun preparing for her departure. At the age of one, her declarations of independence are, like her, small. But when, on a day that registers five below zero, she pulls off the mittens I’ve put on her (three times in a row) and in spite of the cold, smiles defiantly at me, when she wriggles from my lap and heads for her own room and her xylophone, I am reminded that she is no longer what I used to call her, jokingly: my protégé. And that, though Steve may never give me the looks of total adoration Audrey sometimes gives, neither is he likely ever to throw a piece of scrambled egg in my face. He was here first and will, I hope, stay longest.

Already there are parts of my daughter’s life I don’t know about. On weekdays, from nine to five, she goes to her babysitter Irma’s house, where she plays with other children, hears Spanish spoken, listens to Irma’s husband, José, play songs on the guitar that I have never heard. The top of her head, that used to smell like me, smells like Irma’s kitchen now. Audrey knows some secrets. We no longer own her, if we ever did.

We go back and forth like dancers, my children and I. Two steps apart, one step back together. They need me utterly, they need me not at all. They want me to help, they want to do it all themselves. And luckily, they do still want me, need me, and I hope (for moments, anyway) they always will.

We were in our car, driving to the movies—my friend Ellen with her three children and me and my two older children. Steve had been away on a trip for two nights and I was finding every opportunity to be somewhere besides home. (So much so, that I was taking my seven-year-old and three-year-old to see Fred Astaire in
Top Hat,
at a theater some thirty miles away from our home.) Ellen is divorced, so for her, single parenthood is familiar and holds no new terrors. But I had been feeling lonely. Nights, especially, seemed long.

It was dark. Our older children were giggling and whispering in the back seat, recounting adventures and making future plans. Charlie (who was permitted to come along, instead of staying with Willy and the babysitter, only after taking a solemn vow that he would not cry or whine or spill his refreshments during the movie), sat very quiet and bolt upright in his car seat, sucking his thumb, listening to the others, looking out at the night. Suddenly his voice piped up from the back seat, “I want you, Mom. I want you.”

I was at the wheel. The movie was due to start in fifteen minutes, and we still had a good thirteen minutes of driving to get there. “Remember your promise,” I told Charlie. “You said if I let you come to the movies with us, you’d be a big boy.”

“I want you,” he said again. Not crying, not whining. Just a statement of fact, but delivered with some urgency, the way a child might say he needed to go to the bathroom or that he just remembered he left his science project on the kitchen counter.

“When we get to the movie you can sit on my lap,” I said. “You’ll get popcorn. Maybe a drink.”

Audrey joined in, “You’re lucky to be here, Charlie. Think of Willy. He didn’t get to come at all.”

“There’s going to be dancing in the movie,” said one of the other children helpfully. “Do you like to dance, Charlie?”

Charlie loves to dance. When I put on our Michael Jackson album for him and he starts moving to the beat, I think he forgets where he is entirely. He jumps off furniture, he twirls, he poses, he gets down on the floor and spins. When the song ends, he freezes in position, with one hand raised, and one finger pointed. His face registers something that sure looks like passion to me. And then he wants to hear the song all over again.

But right now all he wanted was me. “I want you,” he said again.

“Shall I sing you a song, Charlie?” I said soothingly. “Would you like ‘Hush, Little Baby’ or ‘Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night’?”

You. I want you.

Ellen laughed softly in the seat next to me. She’s been on her own for a couple of years now. A young, attractive woman, living in a small New Hampshire town with not a whole lot of single men over age nineteen around. “I’d love to hear those words,” she said. And the truth is, you don’t even have to be divorced for those words to have a strong effect. Husbands and wives, married a few years, paying bills, raising children, putting up and taking down storm windows, don’t always get around to saying those words to each other.

My son was saying them again. Over and over, like a chant. Like the little engine that could, going over the mountain. Like a mother comforting a child who’s just fallen down the stairs (“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay”). Like a medicine man, dancing around the bonfire, pounding a drum.

“Tell me what you want, Charlie,” I said.

“I want you to hold me.” That simple.

Now, there are lots of ways I try to be a good mother. I tell my children every day how wonderful they are, and how much I love them. I read them lots of books, I play games, I seek out interesting, stimulating “quality time” experiences at museums and concerts. I take them to old Fred Astaire movies, at which, if the truth be told, they will be politely attentive, but a little less than enthralled. I read about child development, and I debate, with my friends, ways to approach discipline, the importance of bedtimes, whether it’s a good idea to perpetuate the notion of Santa Claus.

But the truth is, there is not much that’s more important, I sometimes think, than just putting your arms around your child, tight. They want me. I want them. With all of our new, heightened consciousness about child sexual abuse—all those sensible and necessary reminders for children, in between the Saturday morning cartoons, to the effect that their bodies are their own, and private, and not to be violated—I have to insert the assurance, here, that what I’m talking about here isn’t incest or sex abuse. But sometimes I like my children to be in bed with me. Sometimes I can’t keep my hands off them. I want to nuzzle my face in their bellies, take a bite out of their ears, kiss every one of their toes.

So on the way to the movie, with three minutes left, and the older children groaning faintly, “Come on, we’ll miss the beginning.” I pulled over alongside the highway, put on my parking brake and my warning lights. Got out, came around to Charlie’s side of the car, opened the door and unbuckled his seat belt, picked him up and gave him the number of kisses he asked for, which was ten. Buckled him back in again. Got back in the driver’s seat. Headed off to see the show. Fred Astaire got Ginger Rogers too.

Steve and I had been away on a trip for three days, leaving our children home with Vicky, and amazingly, everything had gone well. Then the plane touched down and the flight attendant made her announcement about checking under the seat for carry-on bags. And when I did I realized my purse was missing.

I could have left it in North Carolina, when we changed planes there. I could have left it in Savannah, at the airport waiting room where we sat for a half hour before boarding the plane. I could even have left it in the ladies’ room, or in the cab we took to the airport. All I knew was, the purse was gone.

When we got off the plane I rushed, first thing, to the baggage office and had a man there call those other airports. All lines were busy, so he told me he’d take my name and let me know if anything turned up. I could tell from his expression (hearing the long list of places where the purse might be) that he didn’t hold out much hope of reuniting me with my bag. I could feel an awful headache coming on as I began tallying my losses.

Naturally, my wallet and credit cards were in my purse, but that wasn’t the half of it. There were my glasses. My driver’s license. My checkbook. It had taken me weeks to get my account in order, and now I wouldn’t have a clue where I stood.