Signs of Life (14 page)

With every conversation her subtext is, “I know what I am doing and you don’t, so let me help you. Aren’t I
so
generous?” My inner monologue always seems to be,
Are you fucking kidding me?

Everyone wants to tell me how to do things. In part, I need to listen because I really don’t know how to do anything. But it is hard to admit that I am a mom and I don’t know anything about how to take care of my own baby.

I wish I had some sort of fairy godmother. I think everyone who is suddenly dropped into an unlikely change of circumstance should get his or her own version of a fairy godmother. There could be the Fairy Breakup Godmother, the Fairy Divorcée Godmother, and the Fairy Over Forty Godmother. Or wouldn’t it be great if we had a fairy godmother for even basic transitions? I could’ve really used a fairy godmother in middle school.

But what I really need now is a fairy godmother for moms. Like every other fairy godmother, she would visit me when my life is fraught with confusion and frustration. Through her gentle guidance, she would help me see the truth. But she wouldn’t look like your average fairy godmother. She wouldn’t bear the angelic exterior with the flowing dress and neatly tied hair, and her language wouldn’t be fluffy or full of false praise. She wouldn’t be the fairy-tale type, because she would be a woman who has gone through the challenges of child rearing, so she would know this job is no fairy tale. My fairy godmother would wear her hair in a banana clip with strands sticking out everywhere. She would dress in an oversized T-shirt covered in spit-up stains,
faded black stretch pants, worn-out running shoes, and one ankle sock and one tube sock. She would be the fairy godmother for new moms. Every now and then she would appear and guide me in my journey, but she would advise me honestly, without the veil of what things are supposed to look like. She would sit slumped in the glider and talk about what it was really like to be a mom. She would answer all of my questions in a plain and direct way with no subtext attached. She would be my Fairy Mom Godmother.

“Fairy Mom Godmother, everything I’ve read says not to put the baby in bed with you, but it would be so much easier for me if I didn’t have to get up every time I heard him cry.”

“Ignore everything you’ve read. Everything. If it’s easier for you to have the baby in bed, put him there and don’t be an idiot. You need to make things easier on yourself if you don’t want to go completely insane. And you can go insane doing this—I’ve seen it happen plenty of times.”

Much like the other fairy godmothers, no one else could see her except me, which would come in really handy when I’m trying to figure out how to deal with Ashley or other people who try to tell me how to be a mom. Because as any mom knows, being a mom isn’t just about taking care of a baby, it’s about dealing with the crazy aunties, the lazy uncles, the grandmas who want to do everything their way. Maybe she could even wander in and out of important conversations between Ashley and me to help me gauge how to stay calm. When Ashley goes through Kai’s closet and pulls out the cute jacket he hasn’t worn yet, Fairy Mom Godmother would just lean against the changing table, watching her.

“Hey, Nat,” Ashley would say from the closet. I walk in and see both of them standing there. “Has he worn this yet?” Ashley
hands me the corduroy jacket and goes back to flipping through hangers.

“Um.” I take the jacket and look at it. It has hardly been touched. Kai has absolutely not worn it yet. I consider telling Ashley my own personal opinion about how ridiculous it is to buy a jacket for an infant who doesn’t even leave the house. My Fairy Mom Godmother looks at me and, reading my mind, shakes her head. I follow her lead. “Yeah, he’s worn it. We wore it last week when we went to dinner at my parents’ house.” Fairy Mom Godmother gives me the thumbs-up.

“That’s weird,” Ashley says, “Why is there a tag still on it?” With a quick sleight of hand, my Fairy Mom Godmother swipes the jacket, pulls off the tag, and throws it back at me just as Ashley peeks her head out of the closet again.

I show her the coat. “No tag, see?” Ashley flips the coat over and scrunches up her nose.

“Oh, I could have sworn I just saw it.” She hangs it back up and closes the closet. She tells me she’s glad we like the coat. “We love that coat!” I say as Ashley walks out. My Fairy Mom Godmother makes a face in Ashley’s direction and spins her index finger next to her head as if to say, “What a wacko.” We exchange a high-five.

The one way we quiet Kai down when he gets fussy is we wrap him tightly in a fleece blanket, hold him as close to our bodies as we can, turn on music, and dance around with him. This strategy has yet to fail. When I dance with Kai, I like to listen to Abba, Alison Krauss, and Jack Johnson. (Vito was a little disturbed to hear that Kai was being rocked to “Dancing Queen.”) Chris plays Bob Marley. Deedee can’t figure out how to work the iPod, so she sings to him. My dad sings to Kai also, but he only knows the words to three songs: “Amazing Grace,”
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “O Canada” (from watching thousands of hockey games). Whenever my mom walks in and a song is playing that she doesn’t know, she’ll say, “Okay, Kai, let’s change it. I know, I don’t like this song either.” When Kai is at her house she puts on Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” and announces, “This is his favorite.”

I love this. I love that everyone in my family has their songs for Kai and their moments with him. He has bonded with everyone and he’s hardly one month old. But at the same time, I see him passed around from person to person and I can’t help but think that Josh is the only one who doesn’t get to hold him.

I’ve told myself over and over that I won’t be a sad mom. I remember when I was eight months pregnant, Toby was over with a few other people and we were all chatting about how excited we were for Baby Taylor to arrive. Toby remarked how seeing the baby would make him so happy, but he knew he would have to go in the other room and cry at the same time. I sat there, stoic, with my large pregnant belly, and said, “Don’t be surprised when I
don’t
do the same thing.” I was convinced that motherhood would make me stronger in my battle against my grief. I would show Kai a life filled with laughter and love and I would not concede to revealing my long journey with darkness. He would never see me sad. He would never hear me cry. But Kai has been here for two weeks and I have found that my grief has sort of started all over again. It is as if I just found out that I don’t have a husband. My reflections of Josh are more frequent than they were in the weeks before Kai’s birth. In many ways they are more profound. I think about Josh a lot when I nurse Kai. I know for some that may seem a little perverse, but for any mother who has nursed her child, she knows exactly why I would find this moment a moment of deep reflection. I don’t just think about losing Josh, I find myself remembering
small details about him that I hadn’t thought about since he died. I think about how he wore his watch so that the face of it was on the inside of his wrist. I think about how initially he didn’t want to wear his wedding ring because he had never worn jewelry before, and then without me nagging him at all, once we were married he never took it off. I remember odd memories that have no significance whatsoever except for the fact that we were together. I remember standing in line at the Denver airport on our way home from rafting. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and his blue Salmon River Experience visor. I remember taking Louise for walks through the park in our neighborhood when she was a puppy. I remember how he sang songs in the car. How he would play the same verses over and over because he knew all the words. I remember we had this sort of dance to the song “Gloria” by Van Morrison. He would mouth the lyrics into his fake microphone and I would do this sassy hand motion like a background singer and we thought it was hilarious. Just the two of us, singing “Gloria” over and over again in the car. These are the things I remember suddenly. I am happy they are so vivid. But they bring me immense pain at the same time. All of these glimpses of our life together flash in front of me all the time.

Last night Kai and I slept at my house, just the two of us, and we did fine. Technically, this was our first night alone together. Chris had been here since he was born, but I never woke up Chris in the middle of the night. Ashley, Maggie, and my mom keep insisting that someone stay with me, at least until after his midnight feeding. But I keep insisting that no one should be here. We need to learn how to do this by ourselves.

This morning after I feed Kai, I decide that I want to take a shower. Prior to this morning, I only took showers if there was someone else here to watch Kai. But this morning I figure we
need to learn how to do another thing on our own. I lay Kai’s changing pad on the floor of the bathroom and lay him on the pad. He is always content on his changing pad. I get in the shower and talk to him the whole time so he doesn’t think I’ve left him. I take a nice shower. I get out, get dressed, put on lotion, and Kai never cries once. This is a huge accomplishment for us. The fact that I can resume a normal daily activity with Kai and no one else is a very big deal.

When Kai and I walk back to my bedroom to put the dirty clothes in the hamper, I look at the computer and see a picture of Josh on the screen saver. It is a picture of him and me standing in the streets of Denver at night. He’s looking right at the camera and I’m laughing at something else, looking off to the side. I look at the picture, and without even thinking, a flash of emotion runs through my body. I don’t know what word best describes it. It’s like I suddenly said, “Yeah, that’s right, we can do this.” It isn’t anger or frustration; it is more of a pompous emotion. A confident, edgy streak that comes into my eyes as I look at him.

I have vivid memories of last spring when I was coaching and teaching and Josh was looking for a new job. The dogs were crazy, I was pregnant, and we felt like our lives were incredibly hectic. I can remember feeling completely overwhelmed, and then I would settle myself down by thinking,
As long as I have Josh, I can handle this
. I vividly remember saying that to myself. Now the one person that I convinced myself I couldn’t live without is gone. For weeks after his funeral I remember looking at my stomach or staring out the window, thinking,
How am I going to do this? How the hell am I going to do this?
Then I went back to work in the fall, and then Kai was born, and this morning I took a shower all by myself. Now I look at his picture and I want to yell, “Yep! This is me, doing this! I am making this happen without you!” I know there are setbacks to come, and in five
minutes or five hours I could feel sad and frustrated again. But just give me this one second with this very small moment of triumph.

Tonight, Friday night, a bunch of my friends stop by my house a few hours before going out. Toby, Nikki (Toby’s fiancée), my friend Becky, Mathews, and Elliott. Everyone is dressed in bar clothes. Mathews is wearing black slacks with a baby blue button-down shirt. Elliott has his leather jacket on. Toby is wearing cuff links. Becky has straightened her hair and is wearing makeup. This is not the first time my friends stopped by my house before going out for the night. My friends do a really good job of including me in their social schedule. They usually plan on meeting at my house so they can spend some time with me before they leave. Instead of going to dinner, sometimes they bring over carry-out so I can be included. They are amazing people. But it always feels a little strange seeing them leave. I feel like I’m their grandma. They come over, help me around the house, bring me food, see how I’m doing, and then after a little bit of time they get in their cars and drive away to do things that young people do.

It’s not that I want to be one of them. It’s not that I want to be a young, single, twenty-something who can go out and get drunk and sleep until eleven the next morning. I want to be a mom. I want to stay home with Kai. But turning to an empty house after everyone leaves is not the way I envisioned things. Obviously Josh should be here. Obviously I wanted to be a mother with a husband. Every weekend Josh and I would have stayed home in our pajamas, talked about Kai’s latest developments, and watched him fall asleep. But now I sit in my bedroom alone, wait for Kai to wake up, type on my computer, and listen to my podcasts. No one’s voice fills the room except Kai’s quiet squawks as he rustles around in his bassinet. At this moment I am
not unhappy, but it feels a little odd as I watch my friends pile into their cars. Part of me would like to go with them, but I know full well once I got to the bar I would just want to go home.

The problem, the root of the problem, is that I don’t fit anywhere. I am a huge paradox. If Josh were here, I would fit here. It would be normal to stay at home with my husband and my son. We would be a family together. But now I am single. And single women in their twenties go to the bar, perhaps not even to meet someone, but that’s just what they do. But I am also a mom, and moms stay home with their children. And I don’t even fit into the category of single mom because single moms do go to the bar on occasion. And some single moms do go out to the bar to meet people. But I am a single mom who is a widow in my midtwenties, and I have no idea what the rules are for me, but at this point I am in no way prepared for or interested in going to the bar or meeting people.

One of the best things Dr. G. told me was that I didn’t have to judge every new situation I encountered. Living alone, for example. She said I didn’t have to say living alone was good or bad, I could just live alone and not make a judgment on it. I know this moment is the same situation. I stay at home on weekends because I am a single mother and even when I do go out, it will not be to meet people, and I don’t have to say that any of those things are good or bad. They can just exist. Still, tonight feels different. I don’t know why. It’s not even that I want to be at the bar. It’s just that I feel so out of place. I look out my front window and I think, I am the only single widowed mother in her midtwenties on this planet. The only one. There is something a bit isolating about that.