Now I See You (16 page)

I loved the baby so much it actually hurt—in my chest, a little like I was having a heart attack. In retrospect, it’s possible I
was
having a heart attack, or at the very least a panic attack. Even so, there was no doubt that the force of my love for Lorenzo was unrelenting, consuming, brutal even. It was like when I pushed him out, I also pushed my heart out of my body and now I had to wear it on the outside without any protective barrier.

I found myself breaking down in tears on a daily basis, like I was training for the Crying Olympics. These sobbing episodes were unlike any I’d ever had. In my life before baby, I’d cried when I was sad, occasionally when I was angry. Now, I cried from a complicated combination of feelings whose primary ingredient was joy. I’d sit on the edge of my bed, staring at Lorenzo’s tiny bowed lips, and then he’d flicker open his eyes and they were the very opposite of blind, they seemed to see things no human could ever see, staring off into space with such intense wonderment. Then his eyes would momentarily alight on me and I would feel an electric jolt, as if I were beholding something very pure and divine, not meant to be looked at directly. And I would weep with gratitude and joy, incredulous that he was mine.

And if you think that experience is fun, you’re fucking nuts. There’s a reason life pounds us into jaded, hardened assholes. David was right: that much feeling wears you out.

Of course, it wasn’t all joy to the world and hosts of angels singing. Wrapped around the love, like a tumor on an essential organ, was fear. I was more scared than I’d ever been in my life. Hell, I was more terrified than the time I saw
Fatal Attraction
at a friend’s house when I was twelve. I was shit-my-pants scared.

Because as I marveled at his perfection, I couldn’t help but think,
I’m gonna fuck this up.

There was no way I could take care of this baby. I wanted to, all right, and I’d give it my best shot but I was certain that I would screw up somehow and not just in a vague sense, like the kid would end up in therapy one day because I sleep trained him, but in a serious, awful way, like I’d trip on a diaper and crack his head open.

Lorenzo was so spectacular he deserved to have a professional take care of him. Whoever took care of the Princess of England’s kids should be pushing him in his pram. Get the lady who wrote
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
in here. Not me—shitty me, with my lousy eyes and my bleeding nipples. I wasn’t good enough.

I wasn’t just scared of how I’d fuck the baby up. I was also suddenly plagued by the fear that I’d be blindsided again with bad news, the way I was about my eyes, only about the baby this time. I couldn’t stop worrying about how fickle Fate is, how you can be blithely buying bras one minute and hearing the words “incurable disease” the next.

The baby might be breathing fine now, but you never knew when SIDS might strike, silent and deadly in the night. You never knew whose friendly hand, shaking the baby’s fingers, might be hosting a drug-resistant strand of
E. coli.
You never knew when a massive belch of amniotic fluid might resurface, obstructing the baby’s tiny airway and causing brain damage.

In an effort to shield my baby from these misfortunes, I kept him inside, away from people except those I could nag into scrubbing well enough to enter an OR. I followed every guideline from the AAP. And I worried, incessantly, because you can’t be blindsided if you’re always prepared for the worst at every turn. Fate might do something awful to my beautiful baby but I’d be damned if I let her sneak up on me unawares again.

This worrying annoyed David because, as a new parent himself, he had no barometer by which to judge whether my reaction was rational and responsible or totally loco. We developed a detailed argument routine in seven parts.

1. I’d freak out about something small: “Do you hear that rattley sound? I think the baby has a snotty nose. Get the aspirator. Or should we look it up on the internet first? Maybe we should page Dr. Frye. God, I hope this isn’t early signs of RSV.”

2. David would downplay the issue: “It’s just snot.”

3. I’d question his credentials: “How do
you
know?”

4. He’d insist I was being alarmist: “You don’t have to be an expert to know kids get snotty noses. And you freak out about
everything
!”

5. I’d accuse him of shirking his responsibility: “You don’t freak out enough! I have to do everything myself!”

6. He’d go for a low blow: “You’re just like your mother.”

7. And then, while I was taking a breath in order to verbally rip him a new asshole, he’d bring the conversation back to the baby: “If you’re worried, just call Dr. Frye.”

Which was always an excellent idea.

Dr. Frye had been highly recommended by my only friend with kids, Natalie.

“He’s thorough and careful and great with the kids. And I trust his judgment completely,” Natalie raved. “But I should say—he’s not for everyone. He can be a little, ummm, opinionated.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s just, he’s not one of these low-key doctors who defers to you as the parent,” she explained. “If he thinks you’re doing something that’s not in the kid’s best interests, he’s not afraid to tell you all about it. Like, he didn’t like me using a crib tent with the baby, and he thought I should wait to pierce her ears. And he’ll reprimand you if you let your kids watch too much TV. Stuff like that.”

Sounded perfect to me: I intended to hold myself to the highest standards of mothering excellence and I was happy to find a pediatrician who’d help me do that. But by Lorenzo’s first check-up it was clear that achieving mothering excellence was harder than I thought.

I was sitting next to David in a Sesame Street–themed examination room while week-old Lorenzo snoozed in David’s arms and Dr. Frye took down our family’s medical history. I was relieved Dr. Frye was asking the questions verbally; this way, he wouldn’t catch me struggling to make out the print of a medical form.

“History of cancer?”

“No.”

“Diabetes?”

“Yes, my grandparents had it.”

“Blood disorders?”

“No.”

“Any genetic conditions?”

I paused, blinking.

It was a standard question but, somehow, I wasn’t prepared. It’d been eight years since my diagnosis and almost as long since I’d told anyone about my retinal disease, with just a few exceptions. I was embarrassed, uncomfortable. My mind thrashed around, trying to settle on a suitable answer. Did I have to tell him? I didn’t tell other doctors I saw, like the gynecologist or podiatrist or anything. Maybe it wasn’t relevant here either.

David looked at me expectantly.
Tell him.

I glared back at him.
It has nothing to do with this.

He raised his eyebrows.
If you don’t, I will.

Dr. Frye looked up from his chart.

“What is it?” he asked, scrutinizing me over the top of his eyeglasses. He looked suspicious.

“Oh, nothing, it’s just … I, um, I’m not even sure this is relevant,” I stammered.

Why was it so hard to share this straightforward piece of medical information with a doctor? If there was ever a place where it should be easy to tell someone about my eye disease, this was it, yet every last atom in me strained to keep the information concealed. I felt like uttering the diagnosis would make it airborne, contagious, and I didn’t want that disease mentioned, even tangentially, in relation to my baby.

Then, too, I was vain. I didn’t want this doctor, who I was trying to impress with my impeccable parenting, to know about my big, irremediable flaw. What if he judged my decision to become a mother? Couldn’t I wait until he got to know me better before I told him?

“Well?” Dr. Frye pressed. “Are there any genetic conditions or not?”

“Ummmm, sort of,” I mumbled.

“I’m confused,” replied Dr. Frye. “This is a simple question.”

“She has a retinal disease,” David piped up. “It’s genetic but no one else in the family has it, so the specialist we saw said our kids would have about the same chance of having it as anyone else’s kids, in the general population.”

“What’s it called?” Dr. Frye asked, and I told him, along with all the other pertinent details. He didn’t look disappointed in me or sorry for me or even that interested, which made sense of course because the guy hardly knew me. The whole thing took about two minutes and then it was in the chart and it was done.

On the walk home afterward, I flagellated myself. The doctor needed to know our medical background to keep Lorenzo healthy. Didn’t I want my son healthy? What the hell was I doing, putting vanity and fear before Lorenzo’s well-being? Hadn’t I just vowed, when he was born, to sacrifice everything for him?

My eye disease didn’t belong just to me anymore; it was part of his story, too, and I no longer had the luxury of keeping it confidential. To take good care of him, I’d need to be honest about my limitations so I could enlist the help of other people, to measure out the Infant’s Tylenol, to locate him when he started walking, to check his head for lice when there was an outbreak at school. I had a long road ahead of me and I could not go it alone.

I knew I’d have to come clean with my secret.

I just didn’t know it would be so hard.

Tip #12: On stepping in it

Prepare to step in a lot of shit. I am speaking literally here. The world is full of canine excrement and when you can’t see out of the corner of your eye, there’s no way to maneuver around it. This is an unpleasant fact of blind life.

Walking in dogshit, however, will seem positively delightful after you’ve slipped on the carcass of a dead animal. Like uncollected dog turds, sidewalks accumulate a rather revolting amount of roadkill—rats, squirrels, pigeons—and unless you shuffle around with your eyes glued to the pavement like a little old lady, eventually you’re going to place your foot right inside some slimy, flattened pigeon intestines.

I have no advice to prevent this; I’m just giving you a heads-up so you can get yourself used to the idea. I do suggest, though, that you avoid sinking too much money into footwear, so that when it does happen and you’re hopping around the street shrieking, “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, MY FEET ARE FUCKING COVERED IN RAT GUTS!” you won’t feel guilty about tossing those shoes into the nearest trash can.

12. THE MOTHERLAND

There’s nothing like seeing a man cemented in volcanic ash to make you appreciate life.

“Holy crap,” I marveled, turning to David. “Is this, you know, appropriate for the baby?”

“He doesn’t know what he’s seeing,” David reassured me. “Besides, this isn’t a horror movie. It’s history. The kid’s seeing Pompeii and he’s not even two years old yet.”

“You’re right,” I agreed.

I stood there next to David and Lorenzo in his stroller, looking at the petrified corpse and feeling incredibly good about myself.

We are a great family,
I thought,
and I am a stellar mother
.

My self-congratulation was pierced by a wail so thunderous it threatened to crumble the ruins.

“Baaaaaaaaa-BUUUUUUULLLLL!” shrieked one-and-a-half-year-old Lorenzo, a sweating, writhing mass of limbs in his Maclaren Volo.

“Where’s his bottle?” I asked David, translating from Lorenzese.

“We ran out, remember?” He produced the empty bottle, an Italian
biberone
we’d bought a few days ago after Lorenzo had thrown his last American bottle over the railing in the Coliseum. He’d sucked down the last dregs of milk a few hours ago on the train from Rome and I’d made a mental note to fill ’er up, but as we weren’t traveling with our own cow (I had ceased being one a few months before), this was hard to accomplish.

“Oh shit,” I said, biting my lip. “Now what?”

The baby needed his bottle. If that plastic nipple was not shoved in his mouth in the next minute or two, sending gulps of creamy goodness down his gullet, we were going to have a situation. Imagine being stranded on an island with a toothless meth addict who’d just smoked his last crystal and you will get a sense of the panic and foreboding we felt then.

“Let’s get out of here,” I instructed, grabbing the stroller handles. “Before he blows.”

Before we’d come to Italy on our first family vacation, David and I had been in the process of weaning Lorenzo off the bottle, as per the recommendation of Dr. Frye. We had a very complicated weaning schedule which involved him reducing the quantity of milk he consumed as well as the frequency with which he consumed it. I’d spent weeks chastising my grandmother, who babysat Lorenzo, for caving and giving him the bottle before the appointed Bottle Time.

“Eh-oh Mussolini! Wat’s a matter wit you?” Nonny rebuked me. “You making dis poor baby suffer! He’s a baby! He needs his baabull!”

Of course now we were in Rome, doing as the Romans did, and that meant letting the kid drink as many bottles as he wanted. By Italian standards, he had another two, three years before we even needed to think about cutting him off. Ditto on diapers, and the paci.

“Wow,” remarked David one night as we passed a boy in Piazza di Spangna cursing in Italian at his video game while sucking on his binky. “I don’t think they’d blink if I started using a paci again.”

“Yeah, it’s no coincidence they use the word
bambino
to refer to kids until they’re teenagers,” I said. “Here, you’re a baby until you turn into a man.”

I thought of my old Venetian beau, Benedetto, who’d be nearly forty now and probably still living with his mamma: “And then, in some cases, even after, too.”

It hadn’t taken long, though, for our derision for Italian-style parenting to morph into jealousy. Sure, these kids stayed in diapers till they were almost old enough to say, “Mamma, I shit-a my pants!” but so what? Why the big rush to grow up, anyway? You were only a baby once, after all. And besides, it would make life a helluva lot more enjoyable not to be so exacting all the time. So, even though I knew Dr. Frye would pop an artery about it later on, we scrapped bottle weaning, and bedtime, too. Before you knew it, Lorenzo was chain-drinking milk out of Big-Gulp-sized bottles and staying up until midnight, after which point he’d climb into bed right between David and me.