Rescuing Julia Twice (14 page)

The climbing equipment looked too daunting for a baby, so I turned in the other direction where I noticed two hulking behemoths with long horns. “Look, Julia, din-o-saur. Look at the big din-o-saurs. Ooh, you can climb on those.” I trotted over to the beasts and propped her up on one of the creatures' back. Then I pulled her along its sloping tail. She seemed pleased. On the third excursion I said aloud, “Dinosaurs are extinct. They don't live on earth anymore. But they used to.” She looked at me blankly. I suppose any baby would. There are times when you hear yourself talking and it catches you by surprise. I have just told my child that dinosaurs no longer live on earth. There's no part of that idea she can absorb now, and yet it seemed like the right thing to say. I planted the idea like a seed, knowing one day it will have meaning. And then I thought,
Right! That's what it takes.
Nurture doesn't necessarily show its benefit right away, but if you keep planting seeds, they are bound to take root. Given enough time and experience, Julia will learn to trust. Napping won't be scary. I won't be a stranger.

“Okay, let's try the swings.”

I carried her to the row of the little boxy swings. I hoisted her in one, with a moan because she's heavy as a sack of potatoes, and threaded her little feet through the holes to let her legs dangle. I walked behind the idling swing and gave it a gentle puff of a push. With no warning, she released a blood-curdling scream. I ran back to the front of the swing, stopping it immediately, thinking I didn't have her in the seat correctly. I looked around to figure out what was wrong, but nothing was obvious. I smelled her bottom. She was clean. She had the queerest look of terror on her face. I returned to the back of the swing, and again, gave it a wee nudge. This time she wailed even louder. I fumbled again to the front of the swing and wriggled her from the seat. “Okay, okay, no swing, no
swing!” and in an instant, she was fine. She stopped crying; it was like nothing had ever happened, like a button had been turned off. But when I pulled her toward me to comfort her and tell her that I was sorry, she instinctively flexed her muscles to deflect me.

I put her back into the stroller and trudged uphill back to the apartment, stunned. What had just happened? What baby doesn't like a gently swaying swing? I always thought children are in thrall when they swing. Even adults like to shoehorn their bottoms into a malleable rubber swing and take a ride down memory lane. I kept thinking about the sensation of being on a swing. It's a way to lose yourself. Then, in a flash, I realized something. Abandoning control is the last thing in the world Julia wants. Being suspended in a little chair, high above the ground with someone arbitrarily pushing you from behind is tantamount to torture. There's no way to resist or brace herself, the way she does in the stroller. What she must have felt was the panic of a free fall, the absolute loss of whatever control she constantly fights for.

At home, I changed her diaper and slotted her into her high chair. I shook some raisins onto her tray, then grabbed a jar of Earth's Best baby food. I tried to feed her, but she wanted to feed herself. She's been doing that more and more. I watched her closely, analyzing my mysterious child. She's not daunted by the high chair, which is also confining and high off the ground, but she can see the ground and there's no motion. I gazed at her face for a moment and inhaled a deep, heavy breath. After lunch, I put Julia in her crib for a nap, and though she struggled, the excitement of the day took her under. I tiptoed into the other room and called Ricky.

“The weirdest thing just happened,” I said.

“What was it? Everything okay?”

“Yeah, we're fine, I think. I took Julia to the park, to the playground.”

“It wasn't too cold?”

“No, that wasn't an issue. I put her on the slide and the dinosaur.” “The what?”

“There's this dino—never mind. Just listen. When I put her in the swing, she freaked out. I mean freaked out like you've never seen.”

“How so?”

“She howled, like she was being attacked,” I said.

“Maybe she was hungry or cold or wet?” he said.

“No, it wasn't that. She reacted viscerally to the motion of the swing. She was fine before and fine the second I extricated her,” I said. “But she couldn't stand being in that swing when it was moving.”

“Well, don't put too much stock in it,” he said. “There are a lot of things that don't feel natural to her because she's never experienced them before. One day she'll love swings.”

“And me? Will she love me one day?”

“What?”

“I'll call you later.”

We are riding along the final section of the New Jersey Turnpike to a friend's party in Pennsylvania. This ribbon of road is a vessel of memories. In 1992, I took a job as a reporter at a daily newspaper in New Jersey. I worked the late shift, more than an hour from my apartment. My marriage was disintegrating. My career sustained me. A decade has passed, but the turnpike churns up those days. The most vivid memory I have is working on a story about Gail Shollar. She was a thirty-four-year-old mother, walking with her three-year-old from a food store to her car in a shopping center parking lot. She was carrying groceries in one hand and holding her daughter's hand with the other. A man with a gun crept up behind her and forced her and her toddler into her car. The next day, her toddler had been found, cold and crying, dumped in front of a day care center. Four days later I was deployed by my editor to a drainage ditch behind a local lumberyard where I waited a couple of hours before police recovered the mother's raped and stabbed body from a ditch. For months, I could feel Gail Shollar's spirit. I'd picture her on that night, in her car, a prisoner, unable to protect herself and her baby. I was haunted by the thought of the small child's confusion. Her mother was powerless to protect her. And the panic that child must have felt after being tossed
onto the unfamiliar street. It was unbearable to contemplate. The man who committed this heinous act was caught, but what lingered was the sadness of a little girl who would always carry the memory of having her mother snatched from her and of a mother who knew she was defenseless to help her little girl.

When I can't come to Julia's rescue, I suffer.

Julia is popping up and down in her playpen like a Whac-a-Mole, but she's not playing a game with me. She's not trying to catch my eye to play peek-a-boo. She's not looking for her “up” to complete my “down.” She's in her own world, in motion, as always. She needs to move, flex, push, pull, rock, shake, rearrange. She has a burning desire to break beyond whatever is physically binding her. When she's not busting out, she busies herself, like an officious secretary in a hectic office. People who meet her ask me if she ever stops moving, if she ever relaxes. I say no to both questions. She's on a perpetual mission of motion.

Is she trying to stay one step ahead of a ghost?

Her manic behavior reminds me of my mother. My mother is and has always been terrified of what I call white space. Everything needs to be filled in. Schedules and appointments paper the day. A Saturday night without plans gives her an anxiety attack. She needs a list of things to do, a list she never effectively tackles. Her bag bulges with scraps of paper filled with names and numbers of people she needs to call and make an appointment with. There are stacks of magazines in her apartment she will never read. She can't take twenty minutes and sit in her plant-filled living room with its wraparound windows and enjoy a quiet moment. She moves from one thing to the next, as she always has. I can't recall her idling on a bench or staring out the window. Call her and she'll ask you to hold on seven times while she takes other calls, feeds the dogs, and
nudges my father to go down the hall and collect the laundry. Sit with her and try to have a conversation. Impossible. Practiced distraction was the salve that helped her avoid her painful marriage. Rather than think, she did. She worked, drove, arranged, manned phones, did paperwork, helped with homework, supervised my father, ran to the beauty parlor, and then collapsed into bed at night with a book that lay open on her slow-rising and falling chest as she drifted off to sleep. I don't know if she ever finished a book. She skimmed a lot.

In my childhood home, we had a pair of crushed-velvet burnt-orange love seats in the living room. When I left for college, the cushions were as new as they had been the day they had been delivered thirteen years earlier. We didn't sit around. We didn't watch television. There was no television. We remained busy from sunup to sundown. Productivity was a way of life, an
ism.
My inclination, too, was to fill white space by reading, doing projects, practicing the piano, or preparing for a dance recital. As an adult, I was afraid to be alone with my thoughts, to face a blank calendar. My divorce, the blessedly apocalyptic moment where I reevaluated virtually everything, offered up a chance for change. I had to learn to be still. I finally understood that constant so-called productivity was really a tactic for avoidance. Rather than date right away, I allowed myself to grieve my lost marriage. I learned to hear my voice, to listen to desires that had been repressed. I pushed my mother's voice out of my head, until it went away permanently. I taught myself to balance fruitful time with time-outs. I took baths. I did yoga. I sought out white space. I remembered how to daydream again. I was not afraid to be alone.

Julia's only a baby, but I worry she is afraid to be. To just be. Sometimes I think she moves around and verbalizes nonstop as a way of telling herself she is there. I wish I could soothe her so she'd be free to daydream.

Today Julia and I have music class at 11:00
AM.
Mothers, nannies, and occasionally a father bring babies nine to fifteen months old. We gather in a large circle around a chipper troubadour who nests in our enclosure.
He has a skinned drum, a flute, a tambourine, and a guitar. It's kiddie Kumbaya. This will be the third mommy-and-me music class I try with Julia. The idea is to spend time sitting on the rim of the circle, bonding with your baby through music. Seems simple enough. Mommy holds baby up and wiggles her to the tune of the music. Baby smiles, sways, shows delight. Endorphins course the veins. Over the span of forty-five minutes, the troubadour mixes up the music with drum beating, and he teaches simple hand motions to go along with the songs. All very simple, except Julia refuses to participate. She will not let me hold her up so she can move to the rhythm. She won't even remain in the circle. As soon as we settle in, she takes off on her knees—and at ten months old, it seems incorrect to say she's “crawling.” She's a Ferrari on knees, a caterpillar on steroids. I can barely keep up with her. She uses raw determination to scud across the large gym floor. There's a lot of territory in here and dangerous equipment, so I go in chase, again and again.

The weirdest part is that she gets far ahead of me, gaining such distance that she can't even see me, nor does she bother to look back. This doesn't panic her. In the orphanage she learned that someone will eventually come along, pluck her up, and put her back in a crib or a high chair or another depot of sorts. It didn't—and perhaps still doesn't—matter who that is. She has no built-in notion that mother and child should be within reach of one another.

I can't figure out why Julia is so disinterested in an activity like this. Other babies wander a little here and there, but only she goes AWOL. She's not deaf, I'm certain of that, so it's not that she doesn't hear the music. Music is a universal language, so it's not a language issue. I leave again today feeling deflated because we have missed another opportunity to do something that might make us feel closer. In my darkest moments, I believe her behavior is intentional, that Julia simply won't allow intimate moments to flower, though I cannot fathom why. Then I tell myself,
That's ridiculous,
but I'm lying to myself. My gut reaction is right. Something is wrong.