Playing House (10 page)

This is not to say I wasn’t ambivalent. I was. It’s just that the ambivalence did not have the strength of the fear that propelled me forward. Nevertheless, especially during the eighteen weeks of vomiting, I thought,
What have I done? What am I doing?
One night my husband said to me, “We were happy with one. We don’t know if we’ll be happy with two. We don’t know if we’re strengthening or weakening our family.” He said this to me just as we were getting ready for bed. Our room is blue-violet in color. It has a single skylight cut in its sloped ceiling, and on clear nights you can see planes swimming like sharks across the sky and the javelin sharpness of stars. “We might not be happy with two,” I said while above me a jet glided in its ascent. “But,” I said, and then I couldn’t think of how to go on. We turned out the light.
Happy happy happy
, I thought. We live near an air force base. The fighter planes are trim and dart around. They lean in on one wing like a gymnast showing off skills. They occasionally nose down and then zoom up and then disappear, leaving behind only their echoing roar.
Happy happy happy
, I thought as the fighter planes went by. I couldn’t sleep. The baby was hanging off my heart. It hurt. I understood, then, that happiness was not a primary drive. Our Constitution got it wrong. We didn’t want to be happy. We wanted to extend.

I grew enormous with my second child. I gained eighty-eight pounds. It was disgusting. It was unreasonable. I swear, for the first eighteen weeks I ate only watermelon. But it was as though my body knew to plow forward, to pack on protective fat; by the thirtieth week, even my face was huge. I looked nothing like myself. My husband and I went to see a lawyer. His name was Frank Grimaldi, which sounded grim, ominous to me. We went to set up wills. We hadn’t thought to do this with our first, but now it was as though we’d deepened into another level of parenthood; we couldn’t fake it anymore. With one, you can retain aspects of a child-free life. With two that becomes impossible. You are sucked into a stream of Gracos and Huggies and ant farms. So we set up wills.

I was eight months pregnant, and the lawyer peered at me suspiciously from his desk chair. “Who will be the guardian?” he said. We thought and thought about that: My siblings—too crazy. Ben’s sibling—didn’t like kids. At last, we decided on our longtime, live-in babysitter.

Two weeks later the wills came in the mail. I opened them up. It was a little like reading my own death certificate; I could smell death everywhere. The babysitter was thrilled. The night I received my will, I lay with my daughter on her bed, in her yellow room, my bulging belly pressed against her back.
I am lying with my two babies
, I thought, and then I fell asleep.

On January 20, 2004, Lucas was born via C-section. They carved him out of me and held him up, blood speckled and snuffling. He was just about ten pounds, full of himself, secure in the knowledge that he belonged here—right from the start. We brought him home on the coldest day of the year, when the air was cracking and painful, the trees black and thin. My husband said as we were in the car, the two children in back, “Well, now we’re really a two-kid family,” and I could hear several things in his voice: happiness, hesitancy, fear. At every rut in the road, my wound sparkled with pain. I was high on Dilaudids and had that postpartum weepiness, a mood that amplifies the meaning of everything, so you are at once full of rapture—I have a son! I have a second child!—and also full of despair.

Eventually, the vicissitudes of my mood evened out. Slowly, I got to know Lucas. My daughter displayed zero jealousy, which made me think she’d shoot up a playground someday. The winter eased and the air began to smell like spring. Walking with Lucas in his sling outside, stepping over the wet spots in the road, my cuffs splattered with mud from speeding cars, I thought of what people had said to me regarding my reason for wanting a second. “You won’t ease your worry,” they’d said. “You will only double it. With a second you’ll have two to possibly lose.”

And in some ways these rational, thoughtful friends and family members were right. Lucas came down with a strange illness; his throat was full of white spots. He screamed and screamed. Worrier that I am, I immediately assumed the worst: Small pox. Measles. Death. These fears were in no way easier to bear because I had my girl. No. I took Lucas to the doctor, and they diagnosed him with hoof-and-mouth disease.

He’s better now. At night I feed him and I can feel the fontanel hardening, the plates of bone growing together in his skull. Perhaps because my daughter primed me, I fell for him more quickly than I did for her, say around week three. I feed him and I press my lips to the fading soft spot, and I see the place in his head where his pulse bubbles up. My boy. I hold him close, and it is never close enough.

Though in some ways I’ve doubled my worry, I feel I have also eased it in a way too primitive for words. Let me be clear: if I lost either one of my kids, especially if they were hurt in the process, it would be devastating. But now I know I would have to live through it, for the other one. And when I see Clara playing with her brother, I think it was worth it, because she truly is less alone in the world. Yes, we have less money. Yes, we cannot afford a house in a nicer neighborhood or a private school; yes, I have lost whatever remnants of the child-free life I once had. I have become exactly the kind of woman I said I would never be.

With two, in love with two, responsible for two, I have at long last set my beloved friends aside. I have no social life. Eating out almost always means the pizza place just down the road—Bertucci’s. But somehow the world feels a little bit more right to me. A gap has been closed. My girl has another. And we’re now four dots on some screen, the lines connecting them into a solid square. And as it turns out, my eggs are not in the same basket; I have two eggs, and they’re each in their own separate spots, hatching, growing up, all around them the dangerous, smoking world. I hold my children’s hands. I did not know it was possible to love so thickly. My life has in some ways been narrowed by sheer fear and flailing instinct. I have less and I have more. What matters most is this: I have absolutely no regrets.

Before my first child was born, I knew I would need help. Even with the sixty-forty or seventy-thirty split between my husband and me, I knew assistance would be required, especially because, as time went by, that split dissolved, not all at once, but slowly, like sugar corroding a tooth. Cavities opened up, empty spaces, requiring that someone step in. Work came back to claim my husband and love came forward to claim me. Love takes time and resources and tactics, and that’s why I knew I needed help.

Given my precarious mental state, I already had help, a doctor with ink-black hair and a massive desk and a thick prescription pad he wrote on with a flourish. Though he had been enough before I had my first, I now saw that I needed a different sort of support, someone in-house, someone who knew how to sew, perhaps, or draw a warm bath or pat the baby on the back. I needed . . . I needed . . . a nanny. I hate the word “nanny,” smacking as it does of British privilege. I also hate the word “babysitter,” because it always conjures for me the image of a woman sitting on a baby. I could say I hired “help,” but that has an antebellum sound, snotty and antiquated. I hired another mother. Yes. This is exactly what I did. It was a decision based at once on total necessity—both my husband and I were back to working full-time—and also rooted in a deep sense of my own inadequacy. Though not quite admitting it to myself, I was pretty sure that whoever took the job would be so superior to me that I would step to the sidelines while she took center stage. In a sense, I would be the other mother, offering help, holding out tissues, while the real drama went on without me.

I didn’t want it this way, especially because I had come to adore my daughter, but adoration does not come with built-in confidence, of which I possessed, as a mother, very little. From my own mother I had learned . . . very little. I believed, I think, that my childhood had destined me to be an anemic sort of parent, lacking in essential instinct. When I look back into my past, I often cannot even see her face, my mother’s face, muffled by mist and then suddenly, swiftly appearing, like the sun burning brightly on an otherwise cloudy day, an instant of saffron brightness, and then gone. Gone! Who had been there, then? In truth, I was one of those kids raised on babysitters, so hiring one seemed absolutely natural to me. I was raised on the knees and by the sides of hired help. Corita taught me to sew; Jane nursed me through my illnesses; Angela, the Irish nanny, with hair the color of apple cider and a lilting way to all her words, Angela taught me to ride a bike, to pray (Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name), and to name the wildflowers, things I still do today, by instinct or, rather, by habit, echinacea with their bulging centers, columbine in the woods, the purple spikes of chive, and the weedy strawflowers that rise from the ground in August. In fact, yesterday, I went to the woods with my daughter, and we named the wildflowers, studying their leaves and their corollas, and it was Angela who was there, in spirit, my own mother nowhere near.

And I was my mother’s daughter, of course, similarly stunted, serrated, and rageful. My mother, her fists, her hitting. My father had told us that before my mother had children she was “a different woman, really,” but the pressures and conflicts of motherhood had done her in, changed her irrevocably and for the worse. Indeed, early photographs show my mother smiling on a Cape Cod beach with a red scarf around her wind-blown hair; by the time my sister, her first, came along, her face had narrowed, her eyes small and fierce, screwed into her skull. I never knew exactly why having children caused her undoing, her mad chatter and terrible violence, but not knowing made it all the more potent, more possible.

“You are the most like your mother,” my aunts always told me, ominous indeed. In order to avoid her female fate, I got a doctoral degree, published pounds of books, acquired prizes. I studiously avoided anything maternal, claiming a mannish incompetence, an inability to do baby talk and all of its equivalents. On the other hand, I held onto a sliver of hope, and my babies were born on this sliver.

Our first nanny did not work out. She came to us three weeks before my daughter was born. She was only nineteen, whip smart but boy crazy. Within a few weeks of her job she met a man, got engaged, broke up, and then got engaged to someone else. Therefore, she was, of course, preoccupied, all this yes and no, back and forth. My husband and I had no specific complaints—she didn’t shake our baby or leave her thirsty—but there was something distracted in the sitter’s eye, something rushed in her ways. She could barely wait for five o’clock, at which point she would race out of the house, rouge swooped onto her cheeks and her bitten lips bright with carmine. We didn’t have to decide a thing. Within a month or so she left us, a white wedding gown over her arm, on her way to Pocatello, Idaho, to walk the aisle with a man she met over the Internet.

Our second nanny, Ceci, came to us from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. She was thirty-six—an excellent age, we thought—new to this country, with shoe-polish-shiny black hair and a beautiful face. She spoke very little English. Not long after she started, our newborn baby got sick. Clara corkscrewed her body and screamed. Her stomach felt hard and lumpy. We stretched her, thumped her, cycled her little legs, but still she screamed, her tiny tongue extended.

I remember one night when I’d been up with her until the daylight came. Ceci was living with us in a room down the hall. The baby howled. I turned on the fan to block the sound so Ceci could get some sleep. The baby yowled, one long painful skein of sound; it just went on, and on. There is really nothing like being with a screaming baby dead in the middle of the night. Her room was lit by one small bulb, shedding shadows so that my hand looked huge raised between the light and the wall. I held up the baby, and she too looked huge, her mouth a flapping, monstrous thing, her arms like wings, going nowhere.

At five in the morning, when I hadn’t caught a wink of sleep, it started to get light outside. The air got grainy and gray, the lawns visible, veiled with dew, and far in the distance a radio tower blinking its red light on and off, on and off. I started to cry right along with my daughter. Perhaps I cried even louder than she, for Ceci heard, and came to get us. Mussed and sleepy, she said, “Here,” and held out her arms. I gave her the baby. She said, “Go get me some lettuce leaves,” which I did. She then ran a warm bath and told me to drop the lettuce leaves in. The water turned pale green; the leaves looked like lily pads, charming. She lowered my daughter in. “In our country,” she said, “we know if you put lettuce leaves in a warm bath, it calms the child down.” I thought this was sweet and very lyrical. Lettuce leaves! Who knew what other neat herbal cures lay in wait for us, delivered fresh from her Mexican culture—a bath of apple blossoms, a cup of hot pomegranate juice? I have never been a big believer in anything outside of Western medicine. But let me tell you this: Presto. The baby quieted down. A cynic would say it was the water, not the lettuce leaves. Who cares? She quieted down, and soon after, she fell asleep. From that day on, Ceci made our colicky daughter a bath of lettuce leaves, and from that day on the other mother, she took my baby in and always, always knew exactly what to do. She had a gift.

It did not take long for Ceci to become famous in our neighborhood. Everyone wanted a piece of her. She was too good to be true, but let me tell you, she was true, the real deal, the best. It was not so much what she did—although she did a lot—but more who she was, her competence mixed with kindness, her sheer energy. In the five years she worked for us, she never once was late for work. She never took a sick day. Amazing. But perhaps she is best described by what she did outside of her working hours. Ceci took kickboxing, English as a second language, cooking classes. She was a gifted photographer and painter. She had her degree in marketing from the University of Mexico, but her interests leaned more towards the arts. She knit elaborate blankets, used a loom, could crochet a piece of intricate filmy lace. She found a beat-up bike in the trash and single-handedly restored it to working order. She loved jigsaw puzzles, huge four footers with thousands of scrambled pieces, and she had the patience to put it all together, day after day, until a coherent scene emerged. Once she was finished, she would spray her creation with clear glue, hang it whole on the wall. It always delighted my daughter, the image at once cracked and solid, a seeming impossibility, but there it was.