Some Assembly Required (4 page)

I remember the first time I looked into his eyes, two weeks ago, it felt like staring into a sky full of space, but the size of a marble. Or into a deep tiny ocean. We enjoyed our awake time with him until it caught up to us and he was both exhausted and hungry at once. He wanted to eat but was too tired to fully latch on, and was sobbing because it meant he couldn’t get milk.

Amy is exhausted from Jax being fussy all night because of the frustrating sleeping/eating situation. I took Jax and let her sleep in, but she isn’t pumping her breast milk so I can’t feed him. This makes me sad and mad, not to sound too much like a Dr. Seuss book.

I started thinking about how much I really hate the umbilical cord stump and wish I could pick it off. I’m fantasizing about how much easier life will be without it—bathing, being able to throw on diapers without worrying about it. This damn stump has been a nightmare for someone who worries and likes to control things, because it has been spotty, bloody, and not at all cooperating with what I’d like to see there, which is a nice plain tummy.

But as I was writing this just now, Jax began to fuss. I walked over to pick him up, and as I did, this black thing rolls off him. I quickly realized it’s the stump! I should be like, “Hooray,” right?

Nope. As I was going over to show off the new stomach situation to Amy, who has been peacefully sleeping, I looked down at where the stump was, and I was now convinced that I could see his insides.

I don’t think it healed right, and I’m looking at what must be his large intestine! I woke Amy up in a panic, yelling at her to call the paramedics—Jax needs surgery. Amy looks at what I’m seeing and is very concerned but somehow keeps her cool and calls the pediatrician. During the phone call, I find
blood
on his fingernails. I’ve caught him red-handed—he has clawed open his stomach. Plus it’s all our fault because we didn’t clip his nails.

Amy called the pediatrician’s office, and nobody seemed to be concerned that my baby’s guts were coming out of his stomach. I mean the person on the phone, and then the advice nurse who listened to our concerns. There was no emotional change on their part.

Are these people desensitized?

When I’m convinced my child is dying, the medical professionals trying to sound calm actually have the opposite effect for me. So on the phone, I feel that this is a dire emergency, and my baby probably needs emergency surgery, so these receptionists and nurses should be
very
attentive and
concerned. Instead, they gently convince us that we didn’t even need to come in! That Jax was perfectly fine. This small open wound turned out to be just a normal old gooey belly button. They see it every day.

We covered it up with a SpongeBob SquarePants Band-Aid. All is well, ish.

Amy’s two best friends, Amanda and Michelle, drove all the way from Chicago to see her and meet the baby. They are staying at the apartment in San Francisco. They are both lovely in every way. The three of them are so young, children really, who have been together since childhood. They came over today with Jax to visit me, and I plunged into feeling less-than. They are beautiful, lively, have strong backs, and a lot more energy than I am going to see again. They are the main reason Amy sometimes talks about wanting to move back to Chicago, along with her grandmother Nonny, Trudy’s mother, who is in a home, with advanced dementia and heart failure. Other relatives live there, too, lots of cousins and aunts and uncles with whom she is close; everyone but her parents. Amanda and Michelle are gaga over the baby, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and Amy gets to be a girl again, instead of stuck in the wife-and-mother role.

Amanda is going to be Jax’s godmother, although there have been no discussions about his baptism. I assume and
hope that he will be baptized at St. Andrew when he is three months old, as Sam was. I drove them out to Samuel P. Taylor State Park, one of my favorite places on earth, and gave them the Annie California History Tour. They are so much fun that I started feeling competitive again. I am old and unfun. Amy hates it when I even joke about seeing them as the competition, or as my contenders—but at breakfast, when I tried to sic the dogs on them, Amanda and Michelle both thought it was funny.

They were taking pictures of one another at the park, and I took pictures of them holding Jax, and standing inside the burnt-out trunk of a giant redwood. How can Sam and I possibly compete with these two young women, Sam who fights with Amy sometimes, and me with my CIA Black Ops attempts to get Amy to need me so much that she has to stay here forever? And get a job? Oh, wait, just remembered—it’s not a competition. Ah. Got it. Roger. Copy that.

Today, me and the girls and Jax of course went to Fisherman’s Wharf. After finally parking, the clock in my head told me that Jax had one hour of sleep left before his next feeding time. I didn’t want to go too far from the car, because since I had a c-section, my uterus still really hurts, and I can’t nurse him the traditional way—it hurts—I have to hold him football style. Also I’m like a dairy farm with too many cows. I
never run out of milk. I swear. I’m constantly leaking, especially at feeding time—the side that is unoccupied doesn’t just drip while it’s waiting its turn—it’s more like a waterfall pouring out. Nursing in public is complicated. My system when I’m out is to go to the car, set up the changing table, stuff a towel in one side of my bra, grab him and position him like a football and hold him up. I know this sounds complicated—it is—but it works.

Anyway, we’re making our way down Fisherman’s Wharf, farther and farther away from the car, ’cause I am just starved for this sort of normal friendship thing. And to my surprise Jax is sleeping overtime. He has now been asleep for two and a half hours, when I thought he only had one hour left. We get to the very end of the wharf, and all of us are so hungry, but since I was making tacos for dinner, we decide to settle for a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone. Well, the line was
extremely
long and not moving, and I was losing hope and trying to keep Jax asleep with my willpower, and finally, finally, I order my double scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream in a waffle cone. I’m dying of starvation and worn-out from all the walking, so we sit down to enjoy our ice cream, and it was heaven. Then I get
exactly
two licks of this overly great treat when Michelle says, “I think Jax is crying.” My first reaction is, “No, I don’t hear anything,” because the thought of not eating this ice cream is just too sad. But yup, Jax has started to cry. He woke up and now wants to eat, and yes of course he has a terrible dirty diaper, too. I just hand Amanda my ice
cream to throw out, sigh, pick up Jax from the stroller so he will be calm, and we rush all the way back to the car, with him screaming, all poopy and miserable, and the girls looking everywhere for a public bathroom, any public bathroom, but no luck.

We finally find a place. Then we make it to the car after almost three hours since we arrived. I change him, nurse him, and then have to change him
again
just while we’re sitting there. On the way home, for the first time ever, Jax stayed awake in the car. I was giving Amanda and Michelle the tour of San Francisco, and asked Michelle, who was sitting next to Jax in the backseat, if he was sleeping, and she said, “Nope, he’s just looking out the window,” but he was not crying. He was just looking out the window at San Francisco. It was like he was listening. It was the first time he’s stayed awake in the car without crying.

My life would be infinitely harder if my mother were alive, because she was impossible, and then sick with Alzheimer’s, but I’m sad that she didn’t get to know Jax. She and Sam loved each other deeply until her death, when he was eleven. She appreciated him in a way she wasn’t able to do with her three kids. Kids are hard—they drive you crazy and break your heart—whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally,
finally, after all these years. A friend of mine said, “When I return, I am only having grandchildren, not children.” A grandchild is like a fine jewel set in an old ring.

Sam’s other grandmother, Gertrud, was by appointment, not blood: I asked her about six weeks after he was conceived to be Sam’s paternal grandmother, since his father, John, was not involved. Besides, Sam’s real paternal grandmother had died years before. Gertrud had been my mother’s best friend for thirty-five years when Sam was born, and her children, with whom we had grown up, could see that she loved Sam in a much more exuberant and pure way than she had loved them. She died in late 2008, and that broke Sam’s heart for a long time, but she lived long enough to be close to Amy. This was where I got to see Amy’s profound way with older people, which I think is her greatest gift, and which I try to remember when she is pushing my buttons. She always showed up to help care for Gertrud, and was like an Egyptian servant girl to her, all but fanning her with palm fronds. She went to Gertrud’s house when she was an invalid, and gave her haircuts, manicures, and pedicures, which was exactly what Gertrud needed and wanted but couldn’t ask for, because she felt both too proud and too ashamed. She had been such a beautiful woman. Amy gave her shampoos, filed and painted the bad toenails until they were pretty again, rubbed lotion into her ancient arms and legs, practically changed water into wine.

Amy helped Gertrud have beauty again in that wracked
and ruined body. What price can you possibly put on that? I remember this all the time and am grateful.

Life is mostly okay right now, sometimes lovely and peaceful; and when it’s not, it’s hard and weird for my nineteen-year-old son to have a baby, and the scary parts feel like they could break you. But then those parts pass, against all odds, and things are mostly okay again, temporarily. Until they get hard and weird again and break your heart. It’s not a great system. If I were God’s West Coast rep, I’d come up with something easier, whose outcome you could bank on.

I was trying to be gracious with Amy while simultaneously manipulating her today over the phone, attempting to maneuver her toward setting a future date to go look for a job. She was quiet and unresponsive. Another way of saying that is: She did not take the bait. I like to think of what I am doing as “helping her get back to her career path,” although she has not worked since graduating from cosmetology school, six months ago. I actually thought that I was trying to impart my truth, which is that everybody has to work. But I think she sees me as chirpy, intrusive, and judgmental, which, while she is probably right, still hurts my feelings.

I am having a hard time. I’m lonely and between books and boyfriends, although “between” suggests there are new
ones waiting on the other side of these doldrums. So, since I am without a plan—or, for that matter, much of a future—the uneasiness of the world has been creeping in, and I was feeling peculiar and odd. And then Amy called a while later to say that she and Jax missed me, and were coming for a visit.

I sort of clutched one hand to my chest in a swoon. Saved by the bell.

Jax has the most fabulous hair, dark, defined, and sculpted by baby sweat; it’s elegant while easygoing, in a gangsterish way.

He’s gained back the weight he lost in the first few days of life, and he is now at least ten pounds, with the tawny skin of a ripe peach. He is all health and life and delectability—life force with earth in it, Mayan life force, like his mother.

I especially love tracing the outline of his eyebrows. They are already so strong, like a photo developing slowly.

You fall into his eyes because he looks like he’s taking things in with great concentration. He has a very nice nose, definitely Amy’s nose, ever so slightly wider than Sam’s. Although, of course, very seldom does a baby not have a charming nose. Besides, it’s not what you concentrate on.

His face becomes a wide screen when he’s wrapped up in a blanket, and it flickers, flutters, when he sleeps. Then he smiles, but it’s digestive stuff, although
not
according to Sam, who says it is love, which is what my late, great best friend Pammy always said about Sam’s first smiles. He has a great
crooked grin, whether that is gas or delight, and then an old man’s worried concentration. His expression shifts so fast, as though he’s trying on all the stuff in the bag of facial muscles and expressions.

Sam has the same quality as Jax, as if something full of wonder has fallen out of the sky; there are times when they both look transcendent and dazed. Their eyes are huge, brown, and unfathomable. He and Jax, and Jax and Amy, pour into each other the connection and communion like a palpable thrum of energy and fear and marvel.

I’ve never seen Sam so there: all his humor and lightness and joshing and focus. It’s like, “He’s my baby and I can kind of sort of take care of him.” I am spellbound as Sam holds him, sits with him—meditative activity that is otherwise hard for a nineteen-year-old.

Amy is holding on to Jax for dear life. She is still hurting, and I think she needs the constant flesh connection to soothe the pain. She’s the tender bar. Sam seems glad for every break that Amy’s time with Jax gives him; he picks up sketchbooks and zones out on his art.

Me, I’m the worry-wart. I think this is a public service, so that Sam and Amy can relax. When I carry Jax in a sling, I want to check his vital signs every few minutes, maybe do a little prophylactic CPR.

Sam and Amy are often at their best, with stoic pride and joy and solidarity and endless hard work, but Sam gets to be much lighter about everything, because he’s not the mother.
Amy’s a cavewoman, sitting in the hut. It’s easy for Sam to get out in the sun or take off in the car, because he doesn’t have to lug around milk jugs, or the physical pain. Amy’s sequestered in the cave. She’s an achy vessel. She has to move with care. She has to hold herself the way she holds the baby. She’s very focused, very workmanlike; she has a job to do, and nothing is going to stop her. She’s pumping milk to relieve the pressure in her breasts, but Sam says she does not seem willing to let him give Jax this milk in bottles very often. Of course, this is his side of the story. I don’t have a clue what their private life is really like. I assume she does most of the work, because Sam is a full-time student, and—this will sound judgmental, but I say it with love—the male. She says it’s better for Jax to nurse exclusively, but I don’t agree, when there is a father in the picture. I nursed until Sam was thirteen months, but early on, I pumped milk frequently so that Pammy, Stevo, my mom, Gertrud, and Sam’s unofficial Big Brother Brian could give him nourishment, too. They were like his composite father. I love hearing about fathers who get up in the middle of the night to give an infant a bottle of breast milk. But maybe the truth is that Sam is lazy about helping. She and Sam fight about it, because the plan had been for Sam to share feeding duties, and I had loved this idea—and to this end, Amy had asked me for an extremely expensive breast pump, which I provided. But as my favorite joke says, if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans.