No answers. Just stories.
Dear Cute Husband,
I am sorry for concluding that you must have forgotten to lock the bottom gate. I think maybe I have an explanation for what really happened.
xoxox
Me
P.S. Thanks for making this great family with me. It’s better than anything I ever dreamed and I love you extremely a lot.
P.P.S I think maybe Eden is actually a harder child to manage than Ren was at this age. Please don’t be frightened.
P.P.P.S Could you grab us some cupcakes from Sweet? I really like those.
xoxox
Me
Eden cries.
Through the rattle of the window a/c in her room, and the one in ours, and the two shut doors and the fog of heavy sleep, I hear her.
Covers back — smooth so I can cover us in one motion when I have her with me. Feet on the floor. Pile of laundry, avoid, step on Cute Husband’s shoes — squint in at the clock, notice the time and instantly forget it — yank on a door, push on a door, trip on a doll, stumble through a discarded blanket … soft fuzzy head. She’s standing up.
“Did you have a bad dream? — Momma fix,” I say against her cheek, one palm against her soft curls, the other rubbing her back. Pad through the wadded blanket, the doll, the doors, the corner, the flip flops, the laundry. A leg over, then the other, bring the blanket smooth, tuck her in for a nurse.
“Momma fix,” I yawn. I squint hard at the blue digits that would tell me the time if I were not so near-sighted. Must be around three, I guess.
Eden drapes a bare arm over my shoulder and I stroke it.
Little arm in the moonlight. Little arm on the sonogram screen so long ago. Flesh, pale and contoured like drifted snow.
Every inch, every chub, every muscle and sinew, I built. I built it in this room, on this bed. I built it in the kitchen where I made her meals, and at the dining room table where I fed her and worked on my laptop to help earn the money that would help keep us stocked in whole grains and fresh veggies.
Eden finishes with a happy sigh. She sucks her thumb, burrows, and then that snow-drift arm squeezes me, once, like an earnest handshake.
When did she first know she loved me?
Was it when we met, when she was gray-eyed and confused, and I was thrilled and incapacitated on the operating table?
Did she love me after nursing took hold or after some number of times I reliably showed up when she was hungry and wet in the darkness?
Eden does not yet know that I am expert at Skeeball, that I will allow her a far more creative wardrobe than most of her peers will be permitted to wear in public, that I will throw her birthday parties of unparalleled enthusiasm.
The Tilty-Floored Farmhouse she has lived in her whole life is relatively new to me. She has never been to Florida or Mexico, like I have, and she has never sat in circle time or waited nervously at recess to see if anyone would play with her.
This is Eden’s whole world, a full belly, her mother’s warm body, her father’s breathing with his strong back against her. This little gesture of hers, this squeeze of my shoulder, this thank you –
it is perhaps the purest expression I have ever known.
In the waiting room of the Boston Children’s Hospital ER I checked the weather channel from my phone.
Chance of precipitation tomorrow? 90 percent. But the best part was the little snowflake icon. Not just water, people. Snow-freaking-flakes.
The ER was overloaded– apparently lots of children falling off slides and swings that day. They asked whether I minded being seen in the hallway instead of an exam room and I said, “Heeeelll no, just get us out of here” –and they set me up on a gurney in a corridor.
Schmoopy and I sat together chatting and playing peek-a-boo.
“What’s going on with Eden?” the surgeon asked. Schmoopy grinned, blood poured out of her mouth, and I brought the crinkled bloody tissue up to her chin.
Do you know what a “frenulum” is? — I totally do. You’ve got a bunch of them — two in your mouth.
The one I was worried about used to adhere Eden’s top lip to her gum. It’s a small piece of tissue, one she obliterated when she bonked her chin on something and sent her two sharp tiny botton teeth up through it. Blood spouted. Cute Husband said it was like a World War II movie. To me, it was like watching your one year old shoot blood from her mouth.
She bled for 45 minutes before we called Dr. Button, who said “keep an eye on it” and then another two hours before we all screamed “chicken” and I put her in the car for Children’s. Now we were being evaluated by a surgeon to determine whether she needed stitches.
“Hey … what do you see here, Eden?” A supremely nice nurse in scrubs brought out a shiny Elmo balloon. She held it in front of Eden’s face. Eden batted it, grinning blood.
A quick swoop and the surgeon had her lip flipped up.
“Oh, look at Elmo, Eden! He’s right here again!” the nurse said, and Eden was torn between taking a whack at the balloon or the surgeon.
“Yeah, she severed it,” the surgeon said.
And here I learned some interesting facts: first, that they almost never stitch the inside of a child’s mouth. Apparently, this is a part of the body that heals insanely quickly. Even when there is a puncture through the lip, they will stitch the outside, but not the inside. If Eden were to not stop bleeding, she’d get the stitch. But they really thought this would slow down dramatically by tonight and stop sometime tomorrow, so would we like to just go home and wait it out?
Yeeeee –FREAKING — ss!!
Back home, I tried not to be bummed. I cleaned her up for bed, removed her blood-stained onesie, scrubbed her bloody fists, rammed more cotton into her mouth. It was raining out, and my dream of a sunny garden party was gone. The birthday girl had not had stitches, but she was cranky and bloody, I was on emotional overload, and it was hard to imagine that her party was going to be very much fun.
The morning dawned gray and wet. No snow, but it was freaking cold out and we quickly ruled out the option of the screened-in porch for overflow.
The key was going to be to create space inside. We moved the long dining table against the wall and brought the chairs out into the middle so people could sit. In the family room, we cleared out all the big toys and shot for a wide open middle area for dancing and drums.
I plated up cheese and shrimp and crackers, and jelly beans and juice boxes and marzipan eggs. Schmoopy’s cake was a glory of pink and frosting roses.
“I really think we can fit everyone,” I said to Cute Husband at least 33-point-fifteen times.
“I think it’s great,” he said, which irritated me because it seemed pat, but really, honestly, what the hell was he supposed to say, Liz?
Deni arrived with her drums and guitar. Our guests started coming up the wet walkway and into the entry, wiping their feet and hanging up their rain coats and streaming into the tiny living room. They sat on the pink settee and the chairs with plates of shrimp and cups of fizzy water.
We moved the kids into the family room, everyone piled onto laps and sharing drums and egg shakers. Deni sang out in that beautiful voice, the kids drummed a rain rhythm and a bear rhythm and sang the dinosaur song, and it was impossible not to have a good time. Kara, my oldest friend, and her baby girl. My brother and his baby girl. Moonbeam and Sunbeam, and Miss Ellie and The Other Miss Liz and her girls.
I looked down at my baby — my little chubby-sweet Eden, shaking her rattly egg and giggling a full-belly giggle, in a room packed with people who cared enough to spend a rainy afternoon helping her celebrate her first year. In the Tilty-Floored Farmhouse with its skylights and wood beams, and all the familiar echoes of home.
And then we were all of us stuffed into the living room gathered around one small high chair, belting out Happy Birthday, Schmoopy wide-eyed and happy. She brought fist fulls of cake to her mouth to wild applause and cheers and I thought how very lovely is the world and how no one should ever plan anything too much.
Because the stories that just happen are so much better than the ones we think should happen.
ELS is 1 from Lauren Hoffman on Vimeo.
*My thanks to reader Lauren Hoffman, who did all the work of making this video.
I know I have made a mistake, I just don’t quite know what it is.
Eden will not sleep.
I discovered co-sleeping when Mare was a newborn. I was afraid to do it initially because of the Roll Over and Smother factor, but putting her in the crib carried the Spontaneous Death While You’re Sleeping factor. So I decided I would just stay awake while she was a baby, (a decision that may or may not have been heavily influenced by the post-Cesarean Percocet). Then I thought, holy God she’ll be a teenager and I can’t sleep then or she’ll bust out a basement window and hitch a ride to the Cape and I won’t catch wise until morning. So I figured, well, she’ll move out some day, I can sleep then but — OH! What if she needs me and I don’t hear the phone?
So then I decided just not to sleep — actually, I think it was the deciding not to sleep that led to all the thinking in the preceding paragraph. Then I took a nap and realized I needed a better plan.
So we co-slept. Mare never used a bassinette. I bought a new one for Ren that she never used, and in keeping with tradition, I even got one for Eden that she never used, either.
I love co-sleeping a newborn. It inspires me to keep the laundry current. You tuck in beside this warm, sweet-smelling little package bundled in a bleach-fresh white sleep sack, bury your head against her, hear her breathe all night long. Also, don’t tell anyone this, but it is super-convenient. No getting up, stumbling around in the dark. No crying, even. She barely wakes up. The baby roots against me, I nurse, pat her back, she burps and passes out and we’re both back to sleep. Dreamy.
With all three children there came some point near the end of the first year where they stopped sleeping. Both Mare and Ren turned the convenience of my body next to them into a desire to latch on and stay that way all night long.
Cute Husband would take them over to his side in his arms, and they would screech and shriek to get back to me. With me, they would shriek unless I let them nurse.
With both of them, it got to a crisis point where we were all sleepless and desperate. I suffered for weeks — I wanted to find the solution that nurtured, didn’t abandon, met their needs … and resulted in sleep. I never found it.
The sleeplessness had turned to abject hopelessness, day and night. A darkening of perspective so dismal there was nothing left to do but the thing I did not want to do: I put them in their crib and left them and did not come when they cried. I hated myself for it.
With both of them, I swore it was the wrong thing to do, I cried in the other room feeling like I had become the mother I did not want to be — and cried in relief on the third night when the baby was blissfully asleep in her crib at 7 p.m..
With both kids, I swore that next time I would figure it out so we did not get to this point.
Guess what?
Eden’s path to this point has been slightly different: she wanted out of our bed at four months. Cute Husband and I think this is because we couldn’t stop poking her to check her breathing and like, major organ function. She hated us and wanted her own space.
But oh, what a dream she was to put to bed. Down on her belly, bummy up in the air, thumb in her mouth, and she would close her eyes and drift off.
I hated the inconvenience of a baby that had to be tended to in another room, I begged her to come back to our bed, but she really liked her own space. So I did it: I got up, I nursed, I soothed. Every two hours for a year.
And yet, it has happened anyway. Eden has reached a point where she will not sleep. She screams in her crib, she screams in our bed. The most she will sleep is four consecutive hours at night, and just forty five minutes twice per day.
And the sleep deprivation is one beast during the day when I am working and taking care of kids and trying to keep up with the stuff of life with a cosmic neurological hangover. But at 2 a.m. sleep deprivation is even darker. I pat a wailing baby, I stare out into the dark street, I try not to think about how the hell I am going to get my work done tomorrow, and what will happen if I am fired and what will we do when the money runs out and who did we think we were to have these kids and how many years am I going to have to work this hard and be this desperate?
And what if something bad happens? If it’s this hard when it’s good how bad will it be when it’s bad and what will be the next bad thing that happens?
And then morning comes and I drink too much coffee and my head hurts and I am anxious and again it is 2 a.m. and I don’t know how to make this baby sleep.
I have made a mistake. I know I have. I know this was avoidable, but I have not managed to avoid it.
In the darkness of that empty sleepless hour, I understand that this is what it means to be accountable: this has to end. It can’t be about what I don’t want to do – it has to be about what has to get done. I’m not perfect and the more I try to be perfect, to find the answer I am happy with, the more damage I will do.
I will tell myself that she is crying in anger and not fear. I will tell myself that lots of people do this. I will remind myself that I have done it twice before and it has worked out. I will take myself firmly by the shoulders and say, “What you have done for her in hours of nurture and devotion cannot be undone by this.”
But at the end of the day I just feel bad. I will forever wince at “the Sleep Question” because I feel I have answered it badly for our family. Because I am completely morally opposed to crying it out, and we’re going to do it anyway.
A third time.
I look like hell.
Although I am apparently looking better than I was. One of Ren’s teachers remarked to me last week that Eden is finally looking older and I am looking younger. As Eden’s health stabilizes some of my gray gaunt expression has warmed.
But there are dark circles under my eyes.
Eden is still not sleeping through the night. In fact, she is up on average, three times per night to nurse, or about every two to three hours.
In other words, I’ve been on a newborn schedule for about a year. I haven’t completed a REM cycle since just after the end of the Bush Administration.
I get a lot of grief for this — you mothers know, we get a lot of grief for everything. I am asked for the Sleep Report by people who think that I should be looking more rested by now. Some of them are generous, others critical.
Take care of yourself, they say. You work now, you can’t do this.
That is the problem, of course. I work now. I work full time with part time day care for Ren and only four hours per week for Eden. Eden is a pro at going to meetings, playing quietly with toys while I take notes and try to ask insightful questions to make up for the fact there’s a baby with me.
She has gotten used to nursing while I bang away on the laptop behind her head, to eating in her high chair while I read through notes or get a meal made.
Eden has figured out that if she wants to get on my schedule, 2 a.m. is her best bet. At that hour, there’s no laptop. It’s just her and me under the covers. I rub her baby down hair between my fingers while she feeds. I carry her back to her bed, her legs hang limply over my arm. She sucks her thumb and nuzzles against my chest. We always stand there a minute before I put her down, just rocking, her and me. When I set her down, she brings her legs up under herself and is instantly asleep.
“How can you do it?” people ask. “How are you still getting up every two hours?” My wise-ass response comes straight from Men in Black — “You get used to it. Or you suffer a psychotic episode.”
My straight answer is that some day she will be thirty. Some day, God willing, I’ll get an ungodly-hour phone call and arrive just in time to see her greet her own baby, and maybe I will watch her hold her baby close, comforting him or her, despite how beat up and tired and overwhelmed she is.
She’ll know how to do it because it was done for her.
And I’ll think back to that crazy year I spent working, not-sleeping, barely keeping all the pieces together. And I think I’ll think it was a pretty small price to pay, the exhaustion.
I remember the first time my milk came in. It was 3:30 in the morning, about four days after Mare was born. I hated nursing. It hurt. All I wanted was to go to bed for a week to recover from what had happened to me. Instead, I was in a rocking chair, bare to the waist, holding a squirming infant against my chest, wincing as she repeatedly kicked my incision.
And then it happened. A rush. A slight burning. A trickling sensation down my arm. It was milk, spilling from me. On the other side, Mare snorted, burrowed, drank deeply. I switched sides, she drank again until she fell into a contented sleep with milk on her lip. She slept four hours after that, and I did, too.
I nursed her for fourteen months. I nursed Ren for eighteen.
I was a devoted breastfeeder, but I also learned a leeriness for the militantly pro-breastfeeders. I had seen too many women suffer at the hands of callous lactation consultants, had watched too many first months of life lost to pursuing something that made the mother miserable.
Yes, breast is best if you can stand it. If you can’t stand it, happy mother and child are best. Plenty of babies are never breastfed (yours truly included) and grow into perfectly lovely human beings.
But I address this post to prospective mothers, to the ones considering giving it a try:
My most recent baby, Eden started to lose weight in the hospital, just like all my babies did. My milk wasn’t even in — at 24 hours postpartum, it wasn’t supposed to be — and they started with the pressure to give formula. Initially it was polite. But by day two, Eden had lost too much weight by their chart, and the pressure was really on.
“One bottle won’t affect nursing,” they said. “She is losing too much weight, just give her a few extra calories.”
The maternity ward pediatrician made me feel bad about myself. Clearly, I didn’t have enough milk, she said. I pointed to pictures of Mare and Ren and explained that I had successfully nursed them both in to toddlerhood. What did she think had changed in three years?
She said it didn’t matter, that I needed to let go of my ego, do what was right for the baby and give her a bottle. It won’t affect nursing, she swore. I wanted to ask her how many babies she had personally breastfed.
In my experience, a bottle in the early weeks is the first brick on the path to giving up nursing. The bottle fills baby’s tummy, so baby sleeps longer than normal and wakes very hungry. Momma has slept too long, too, and has missed a breastfeeding, so her milk is declining. Hungry baby isn’t satisfied, and Momma caves and gives another bottle and another breastfeeding is missed. Supply goes down, baby sleeps longer. Nursing is never really established after that.
I made that mistake with Mare, caught it before my milk disappeared and spent a miserable two days listening to her scream while I insisted she try at the breast. I did not give her another bottle for many months.
I wasn’t going to give Eden one now. I assigned a family member to stay with the baby to make sure no one gave her a bottle. The nurses glared at me, at Emily, at Sunbeam, as our tiny baby was wheeled down the corridor gazing up at her Person in Trace.
The staff became so hostile that I checked out just 48 hours after a brutal 2-hour Caesarean delivery. I was afraid that if Eden got any skinnier they would refuse to release her to me. Without my consent, the maternity ward pediatrician called Dr. Button. He told me she asked him whether my other children were well-cared for.
I was pretty sure she wanted his support in holding Eden if I tried to leave the hospital.
He made me promise to see him before Eden was a week old, and then gave his support to my release — and Eden’s –from the hospital.
When we got home, Eden developed jaundice. We went to urgent care every day for a week, where a new and different pediatrician lectured me each time.
Play it safe and give formula, she’s too skinny and that’s the bottom line, they said. How much was I nursing? How much I was pumping? -they never actually accused me of lying, but the aggresiveness and criticism made me dread the doctor’s appointments. I made the mistake of admitting to one that Eden slept in our bed — next to her sister — and got the Co-Sleeping Lecture, too.
If Eden had been my first, I would have stopped nursing her. I would have crawled into a tiny hole and stayed there.
Dr. Button changed everything. He agreed to exclusive breastfeeding if I agreed to be seen every single day. I did. Our days developed into a routine: nursing every two hours all night long. Get up and get the bigs dressed for school, take Eden to the doctor, get the kids from school, make dinner, play for a bit, back to bed, up for school and doctor.
Eden had been born weighing 8 pounds, 6 ounces. At six weeks old she was just a hair over 8 pounds. Dr. Button finally insisted that she be offered a bottle. But only, he said, after taking a full breastfeeding. She never took more than a half ounce or so, and didn’t gain more weight. We were allowed to stop offering a week later, and returned to exclusive breastfeeding.
It wasn’t the milk.
Children’s Hospital, blood work, tests, Dr. Google, nightmares, tiny baby in my arms shrinking instead of growing. I nursed her, I rubbed her back, I stayed calm and carried on.
At five months we had a confirmed diagnosis: Eden had picked up an infection somewhere in the first days of life. She was burning massive amounts of calories fighting it. The infection was so severe it had elevated her tiny liver function.
And then in month six there was a sudden change and Eden started to eat massive amounts of solid food while continuing a healthy nursing schedule. She got plump and rosy-cheeked. In four weeks’ time she gained back the missing weight. People stopped asking me if she had been a preemie. She was finally starting to be normal.
Here’s the part that’s about you –
Eden had an infection. A really bad one. It could have killed her. Breastmilk is packed with natural antibodies that boost the immune system. So the “conservative” approach the doctors were suggesting was to take away Eden’s last defense against the infection that was making her waste away.
If you are considering breastfeeding, read this as an argument in favor. Your milk can protect your infant in ways you can’t imagine. Do not let medical professionals convince you that your body is flawed. Do not give a bottle if you don’t absolutely have to.
Seek a doctor that truly supports breastfeeding and does not encourage mothers to supplement. Work now to find a lactation consultant who is empathic, supportive, and well-trained and who will help you navigate through conflicting medical advice.
Know that breastfeeding can be miserable work. For some people it’s easy and great, but for many of us it is a huge effort. But the payoff is beyond measure.
Life with Eden is much more normal now. When she tucks in for a feed, she looks up at me with big, bored eyes. She takes my hand, smirks a little, feeds. Warms her belly against mine. She is fat and dimpled and has no idea that she was ever anything but what she is now.
I’ll never be the same. I have spent weeks and months praying over a sick infant, and my relationship with her is different in ways I don’t yet have words for. But my love for my body and what it can do is renewed.
It gave Eden life. Twice.
The last six weeks have been sort of remarkable for Eden. She woke up one morning and realized she was hungry. That day, I fed her a bannana. Two apples. Six ounces of oatmeal. She took a nice nap and asked me, “What’s for lunch?”
She carried on like that, four or five times a day, even a few times at night. Then she started waking up because she was soaking her diapers. Why? Because the size 2′s that were too big on her when I bought them could no longer contain the flood from her kidneys.
Speaking of flood, I’d put pants on her and about six inches of ankle would show and I COULD NOT HELP MYSELF.
“Hey, where’s the flood??” I’d ask, and she’d laugh. And then tell me to shut up and bring on the chicken pie.
Sweet potatoes, green beans, squash. Mango, yogurt, pineapple. Beef stew. Apple sauce. Always with the freaking apple sauce. Constant runs back to the market for more because what I expected to last a week didn’t last a day.
And you know, it’s funny. I think I’m starting to see maybe a little difference in her. Take a hard look and tell me whether she seems any different to you.
Then …
August 7, 2009
Now …
November 24, 2009
Let me be clear — I don’t believe breast is best. I believe that a happy, satisfied mother and a fed and contented child is best. When breastfeeding interferes with that, it should be abandoned.
However. As much as possible, as much as you can stand it, breastfeeding is quite simply one of the greatest gifts one human being can give another. It’s hard — don’t let anyone tell you it’s easy or enjoyable. In the first weeks, it’s absolutely awful. The sound of a wailing hungry baby has made me curl into a ball and cry more than once. But I’ve never found any challenge with a greater payoff.
I breastfeed because …
… breastfed babies smell divine. Like sweet cream or buttered popcorn. Breastmilk diapers are inoffensive.
… no one will ever love you the way your breastfed baby will. Her eyes follow me wherever I go, and I can silence her shrieks just by holding her close and whispering her name. When she’s seven, and she’s sad, and she’s growing up and away, she’ll still find the crook of my arm and I’ll close my eyes and remember when she had a fuzzy head and a tiny pinched face.
… because if you massage breastmilk into a cut, drop it into a conjunctivitis eye, sprinkle it on acne — it clears the problem up. I want as much of that magic stuff into my kid as possible.
… because once you get the hang of it nothing is easier. You can slip a dipe-and-wipe into your purse and be on your way for the entire day without thinking about the next meal.
… because it demands that a couple of times a day I snuggle this young sweet thing, I rub her back, look into her eyes, pay attention to nothing but her.
… because when my baby is elderly, when I am nothing but a scattering of relics in the homes of my grandchildren, when she sits in her chair and looks out the window at a world she is fading from, her body will still remember that it was nurtured by mine. The million blessings I gave her in the quiet dark of the predawn bedroom, the two of us alone, her tiny hand against my skin, lifesmilk flowing between us– they will last her lifetime.
… because when all was said and done, Dr. Button concluded that Eden picked up a beast of an infection somewhere in the third week of life. An infection so severe her liver ached from fighting it, and her body shrank. But she stayed out of the hospital, she stayed out of really serious trouble because of the antibodies I was pumping into her tiny system through my milk. My fierce mother-self protected her with my very body, giving her life twice.
“Okay, where do I aim the gun?” Mare asks. I am holding the clipboard, she has the scanner, and we are looking at a bright pink Boppy pillow.
We are standing in the very same store where I came — just about this pregnant — to register for all the doodads, gizmos, gadgets and trappings of my first baby.
Her.
“We don’t need that,” I say, remembering the first Boppy, the big red one I dragged to the hospital that never proved as helpful as a regular old pillow. I think I gave it away to some dew-eyed new mother a few months later.
“We totally do,” Mare says, plopping down on the linoleum with that thing around her waist, cradling her arms. “When Renny and I hold her, it will help us not drop her.”
Oh. Kedokee then.
Mare zaps it and we move on to bathing.
“I LOVE this!” Mare breathes, aiming at a large blue plastic tub with all kinda slings and harnesses and stuff.
“Now that I know we don’t need,” I say. After a few weeks of dutifully filling one of those for her I discovered the magic of a Kitchen Sink and a Towel.
I find a $3 spongy designed to hold a newborn in a sink, we zap that and make our way toward Feeding.
“Does it really hurt a lot, Momma?” she asks. It has started to hit her. Someone will take a knife to her mother. It will take days for her mother to walk normally again. And there will be a new baby. Nothing will ever be the same.
“Yes, it really hurts a lot,” I say. “But I don’t mind.”
“How can you not mind?”
“I get a prize at the end,” I smile.
She has found a wall of bibs. She zaps a bunch that say things like, “Princess … just give me a credit card!”
“You wanted me that badly?” she asks.
The orange glow of the operating room. The pain that wouldn’t end. The ripping ache in my belly.
“That was when I really understood how much I wanted you. That it could hurt that much and still seem so small compared to you. I realized after that that pain isn’t very important. It goes away. Who cares how much it hurts as long as we’re together?”
She zaps a pink Bundle Me, and I suggest the one for warmer weather, too, and she insists on the dark pink and zaps it.
We come to the cribs, and I tell her we don’t have the space for those and steer her toward Pack-and-Plays.
“What happened to Ren’s?” she asks.
“Oh, she smeared it in poop. She was a very angry napper.”
“Ah,” she nods. She examines each Pack-and-Play, checking it for softness, for height (to be sure she can lift the baby out herself) and for storage convenience.
Then she picks the pink one.
She zaps some pink sheets, and a blue gingham one that struck her for no apparent reason.
“Do you think Eden will be annoying?” she asks
“Oh, I am sure of it. Everyone is annoying, particularly if you have to live with them. Have you noticed Daddy, lately?”
“Have you noticed YOU lately?” she giggles. “You’re pregnant!” We both laugh and I can’t believe that’s the little milky-sweet baby I kissed that night so long ago.
“There is good and bad to everything, Mare,” I say. “Nothing worth having is easy. Eden won’t be perfect.”
“She’ll cry a lot.”
“Yeah. And she’ll take your stuff. And she’ll pester. But — here’s great news — she’s going to annoy the heck out of Ren, too.”
“Hehe,” Mare says.
“She’s going to love you so much,” I say. “Just like Ren does. And the love you three have for each other will be just for the three of you, forever. It is very special.”
We’re at high chairs.
“Did Ren smear poop on that, too?” Mare asks.
“No, she was a happy eater. I don’t actually know what happened to the high chair,” I say. I just can’t find it.
We zap a nice-looking booster that promises to do everything the big chairs can do.
We turn our zapper in at the counter, where they print out a list of what Mare has selected. It is all pink, poufy, covered in bows. Nowhere on it is a single gizmo that promises to entertain, enlighten, or bestow musical talent and higher earning capacity. Eden will play on the floor with her sisters, with Barbies and stray blocks. She’ll nap at gymnastics and I will spend absolutely zero time contemplating her wardrobe.
Hard to say which kid had it better. There is good and bad to everything.
Before we go, Mare asks if she can buy an outfit for Eden. I take her over to the discount rack and grandly gesture that she should take her pick. She manages to assemble an outfit entirely of boutique pieces in varying shades of pink.
“She’s going to love the bonnet!” she gushes. “And the tutu and the slippers! She will be a ballerina like her sister!”
It costs $50. D’oh!
We head out to the parking lot, holding hands. I think that Mare also is noticing that Spring is coming. The days are longer, the sky is bluer, and the air is losing its bite.
“Are you scared?” she asks me.
“Yes,” I say. “Only a little of the pain. I know that’ll be bad for a week or two and then I will be my old self. But I am scared about how hard it will be to have three kids. I am afraid of failing you.”
“You could never fail us, Momma,” she says.
“No one is perfect,” I answer.
“Yeah, but you’re a great Momma. You always figure it out.” I turn my head so she will not know that she has undone me, will not guess how much her mother doubts sometimes.
I promise to take her to the pet store to hold the puppies if she promises to be patient through a Starbucks run. She agrees, I put the Loser Cruiser in gear, and we head for home.
Da Momma: Elizabeth, a journalist and college instructor. Formerly a latte-slinging, cell phone-talking Washington political junkie. Now a wild-dancing accidentally offensive woman with an irrational passion for flinging things on the floor and hanging things from ceilings. Wants you to think she's a grown-up, even though she calls her Dad the minute things get complicated.
Baby Eden: The Schmoopy. My sweet little Three, who shrank instead of grew. But she's always had Momma's back.
Mary: Devoted to hermit crabs and FREAKING OUT. Made me a mother.
Karenna: Peekaboo Streak. The Roodle, Doodley. Everybody knows about Roo. Passionate about folk music. Some werewolf tendencies. Always looking for new employees. Sophisticated vocabulary
Cute Husband, Esq: A former Marine, it was he who instilled in our daughters a love of getting up very early in the morning to go off and do things. Some days he's lucky he's still alive.
Moonbeam and Sunbeam: Yes, okay, somehow or other they got the same sorta names as our cats, Moonlight and Sunshine. That was a total accident. However, like the cats, they are super-cuddly, will get food for themselves if hungry, and they're part of the family. Like the rest of the family, they believe in the power of liquor, drugs, and hot glue. They have no fear of blood.
The Beasties: Two cats. And some cacti that refuse to die. This is a picture of a fish we killed a long time ago. Need to update that.
