Now I See You (15 page)

I looked at the naked infant in my arms.

For him, I’d do it.

Tip #11: On baby care

The good news is, you don’t need to see to accomplish most of the big, important tasks of new motherhood. You can create a baby and deliver them into the world, with no vision at all.

The bad news is once you do that, you’ll have a cantaloupe-sized human being with no abilities or defenses whatsoever who will be left in your care. The desire to keep this being alive will be roughly one billion times stronger than the most passionate desire you ever had before. And if you trip over a rattle on the floor, it could all be over. No pressure or anything.

The only answer is to go slow. Turn down your speed dial so that you’re moving at half the speed you normally would, and then turn it down again, so that you feel like the room is filled with cannoli cream and you’re just trying to wade through it. You’ll know you’re moving at the right speed if octogenarians pushing walkers are leaving you in the dust.

You still won’t be able to prevent tiny and potentially fatal mistakes, but it’s as much a guarantee as you, or anyone else really, gets.

11. BABY STEPS

When I imagined the halcyon days of new motherhood, I never imagined sobbing as I soaked my tits in a sitz bath in the toilet at 3:00
A.M.
Yet there I was, wailing as loud as my newborn.

I’d known the first few weeks would be hard but this was like Armageddon. The effect of the baby’s birth on my life was not unlike that of a demolition crew laying into me with a wrecking ball. Everything—my identity, my apartment, my lady parts—had exploded into chaos and now I was left to sift through the rubble to see what was salvageable and what needed to be replaced. Odds were good that the finished product would be an improvement over what was there before but that didn’t mean the process wasn’t ruthless.

In the first few weeks after Lorenzo’s birth, unimaginably weird shit occurred on a daily basis. Usually, these developments were revolting and/or painful. Invariably, a medical professional assured me they were 100% normal.

Baby pissing directly into your eye during a diaper change?

Routine.

You passing blood clots the size of a fist?

Comes with the territory.

Scabs on your nipples?

Yeah, shit happens.

I’m no dummy but I did expect Life with Baby to more closely resemble a Pampers ad than, say, a carnival freak show.

What really troubled me was that I had no instinct anymore to sense what was okay and what wasn’t. Not only were my nerves shot; my confidence was decimated.

The morning after Lorenzo was born, I was lying in my hospital bed, cradling the baby in my arms and gazing at his sleeping face, when he suddenly started to choke. On thin air. He hadn’t been nursing or anything, he just went from slumbering in that unreachable, newborn way to gagging.

I lay immobilized for a second or two and then I raced into the hospital hallway, holding Lorenzo and yelling: “Help me! Someone! My baby is choking!”

I was fully aware of how ridiculous this sounded and what a spectacle I was making but my panic overrode any sense of decorum. This was life and death.

A middle-aged nurse strode over. She was built like a brick shithouse, solid in her scrubs, and she walked like she meant business. Within a few seconds, she’d grabbed the baby out of my arms like a sack of beans and whacked him on the back, twice, with what seemed like excessive force. I winced as I imagined his spinal column shattering. But he remained in one piece, as erect as a newborn can be, and his gagging was replaced with bawling.

“That’s normal,” the nurse explained, handing the baby back to me and paying precious little attention, I noted, to supporting his head. “He’s just gagging on his amniotic fluid. They do that sometimes.”

She said it casually, like it was supposed to make me feel better. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I’d been prepared to protect my son from all sorts of choking hazards—loose change, hot dogs, paper clips—but later, in a few months, when I’d had a chance to hone my mothering skills. I’d never thought I’d need to start now, right out of the gate, and that I’d have to also worry about him choking on stuff that was
already inside of him.
The very stuff that had shielded him from harm for the past nine months.

All of a sudden, the enormity of the enterprise before me slammed down on my shoulders. Holy Mother of God. There’d be things I would fail to protect him from. And not just the stuff I’d already, very diligently, worried about like clipping off his fingertips instead of his fingernails because I couldn’t see details that small. There was a whole world, a whole galaxy, of other stuff that I couldn’t protect him from, stuff that hadn’t even occurred to me, stuff I didn’t even
know
about. What the hell was I going to do now?

What I was going to do was hang my head and cry, which I did right there in the hospital hallway, in my no-slip socks and pink polka-dot pajamas.

“You mean he’s going to do it again?” I sobbed. “And there’s nothing I can do to stop it?”

Without missing a beat, the nurse put her hand on my shoulder and ushered me back to my bed. She seemed so unfazed by my sudden crying fit, it gave me the strong suspicion that that hallway had seen far worse mental breakdowns. Working in maternity was probably pretty similar to working in the psych ward, except with bigger maxi pads.

“It’s going to be all right,” she promised. “It’s really harmless, you know. A little gagging won’t hurt him.”

“But what if—” I sputtered, “what if he chokes so much he can’t breathe?”

“He won’t,” she replied. “I’ve never heard of that.”

That wasn’t sufficient reassurance for me. There was all sort of shit you never heard about until it happened to you and then it was too late. I’d never heard about retinitis pigmentosa and yet, here I was, unable to see the tissue she was holding out to me until she finally shoved it right in my hand.

I blew my nose and took a deep breath. Too late to back out now.

“Tell me what to do, exactly, if it happens again,” I pleaded. “Step by step.”

“There’s only one step,” she replied. “Just give him a good old whack on his back.”

“But how will I know for sure that his airway is clear?” I pressed.

The nurse looked over in the direction of my roommate who was buzzing her call button insistently from behind the room’s dividing curtain. I’d been privy to my roommate’s every sound for the last twelve hours and despite the fact that I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her, I’d put together a pretty detailed profile: Polish, first baby, C-section, not much luck nursing, prone to sudden meltdowns herself. From the sound of the call button, there was another breakdown in the works, which meant mine had to be wrapped up.

“Look,” said the nurse, “if the baby’s crying, you know he’s not choking. So I guess if you really wanted to be sure his airway was clear, make him cry. Give his big toe a good squeeze—that’ll aggravate him.”

“Okay,” I affirmed, “got it.”
If I have any suspicions that the baby is choking, any at all, I should make him cry.

Which is why I spent the first month of my infant’s life annoying him relentlessly.

I’d look over at the bouncy seat, where Lorenzo lay still, silent, and peaceful. Though this is most mothers’ dream, it was my call-to-arms. Why was the baby so preternaturally still? Clearly, he was not breathing. Likely, it was that damn amniotic fluid causing trouble again. Who knew how long he’d been like this? As I sat pondering, his brain might be losing oxygen! No time to undertake the subtle investigative measures I’d learned in infant CPR class like watching his chest rise and fall; I couldn’t trust myself to see the ever-so-slight movement of his chest anyway, my vision was so poor. No, no, this emergency called for the squeeze-the-toe test, approved by medical professionals as the quickest, most effective way to confirm baby’s respiratory health.

I’d squeeze the toe. He’d scrunch his placid face into a scowl and commence caterwauling. Mission accomplished. The baby was breathing. And, now royally pissed off.

Over and over again in the first weeks of my baby’s life, people were assuring me that if I trusted my mother’s instinct, I’d be fine and over and over again, I was finding that was a load of horse crap. Maybe other mothers, ones with all their primary senses intact, had functional maternal instincts, but worry and a severe lack of confidence had caused mine to short-circuit. None of this mothering business was coming naturally. I needed a detailed instruction manual to do everything and sometimes, even that didn’t work. Like with breastfeeding.

There are few areas in my life where I have ever been so bumbling. I was a hundred times more skilled at hammering nails into wood than I was at nursing and I had a 90% fail rate there. And—I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so—Lorenzo was no ace himself. It was a classic case of the blind leading the blind. To make matters worse, there was nothing specific anyone could identify as the reason for why the whole thing was going so badly. I believe the clinical term for our situation was “cluster-fuck.”

“Okay, let’s get ready to nurse,” directed the lactation consultant I hired for a house call on day four, after we took the baby for a weight check and discovered he’d lost too much weight. “Put your feet up. Adjust your pillow. Relax those shoulders. Now let’s just try to get that baby’s mouth wide open so he can get a good deep latch.”

Already, with one hand holding my breast and one holding the baby’s head, I was out of hands. But I stuck a finger out and attempted to gently caress the baby’s cheek so as to trigger the whatever-the-hell-you-call-it reflex that was supposed to make the kid open his mouth.

I caressed and caressed, watching his mouth with so much intensity, sweat beaded on my upper lip. And then, finally, it happened—he opened, wide.

“Now!” yelled the lactation consultant. “Go! Go! Now!”

Placing her hands on top of mine, she grabbed the baby’s tender little head, with all its terrifying soft spots, and slammed it onto my breast, like she was hitting the buzzer on Jeopardy.

Unfortunately even the specialist lacked the lightning-fast reflexes necessary to attach the baby to my breast, because by the time the baby’s mouth made contact, he’d already clamped his lips shut again. As much as this failed attempt frustrated me, it frustrated the baby a thousand times more. After all, he was the poor sap dependent on this whole thing for survival. He started bawling, that awful lamblike bray that makes nails on a chalkboard sound like Ein kleine Nachtmusik.

“Let’s try again,” the lactation consultant urged. “But wait—look at how hunched over you are. No good. And your hands—they’re so tense! Relaaaaaaax. This is a perfectly natural experience.”

So is getting lost in the woods and having a bear tear you limb from limb but I wasn’t keen on doing that either.

I started to cry along with the baby.

“It’s not working.” I sniffed.

The lactation consultant placed her hand on my shoulder. “There’s always formula,” she offered.

I knew
that
before I shelled out $150 for a lactation consultant.

I was determined to nurse at all costs, not only because I’d read everywhere that Breast Is Best but because it was one mothering skill that had absolutely nothing to do with my eyes. There were so many other things I couldn’t do as well as other mothers because of my failing vision, everything from safely walking down a flight of stairs to reading the dosage information on the gripe water bottle. But here was an ability I possessed that was in no way hindered by my vision, one area in which I could give my child the very best. Unfortunately, the very best came at a steep price.

Because I couldn’t get the baby to feed correctly, I ended up with mastitis, a breast infection that treated me to a fever, flulike symptoms, and one rock-hard, flame red boob. This, in combination with waking every two hours throughout the night to feed the baby, as per my doctor’s instructions, whipped me into a state of such severe fatigue I literally couldn’t see straight. My already awful eyesight became even more hazy, my field of vision more constrained. Some people get fall-down drunk; I was fall-down tired.

One night, after I finally rocked the baby to sleep and laid him ever-so-gently into his bassinette, lifting one finger off his body at a time so as not to rouse him, I tip-toed over to my own bed a few steps away, and threw myself into it. Ever since I’d gotten pregnant, I’d forced myself to take extra care, and time, moving my body through space. Walking, like talking, was something I’d always done fast and I liked it that way, but I’d made the conscious decision to slow down, reminding myself that this excruciating, glacial pace was the velocity at which even nondisabled people moved outside of New York City. Still, I missed the luxury of physical abandon. So, once I’d deposited Lorenzo in his bassinette, I indulged in immoderation, letting myself drop like a stone onto the bed.

Except that there was no bed underneath me. I belly flopped, face-first, onto the hardwood floor approximately a foot to the side of the bed. The worst part was, the crash was so loud, it woke the baby.

David came running and found the baby and I crying in stereo.

“What the fuck?” was his well-formulated inquiry.

“The baby’s fine,” I sniffled, “But I’m all black and blue. I miscalculated.”

“Nicole,” he chastised, taking the baby. “You have to be more careful.”

“How can I?” I wailed. “I’m a zombie. Like from your stupid movies.” I liked the way that sounded so I repeated it as I sat on the edge of the bed and cried: “A zombie! A zoooooommmmmbie!”

“Maybe you wouldn’t be so tired if you didn’t cry so damn much,” David snapped, striding out of the room with the baby on his shoulder.

He had a point. Not that there was anything I could do about the incessant crying. The postpartum hormones were firing at me with both barrels and I was getting blown to bits.