When did i get like this.., p.7
When Did I Get Like This?, page 7
Sleeping in the car seat was not a practice I found supported in any of the baby books I consulted. There were warnings of restricted airways in slumping infants, and of “plagiocephaly,” a flattened head that could occur in an infant who spent too much time at a forty-five-degree incline. But I had no choice. When I put Connor down on his back, he usually didn’t go to sleep at all, and I would sooner have given him laudanum than put him on his stomach, since the risk of death was apparently about equal. While I fretted about the flat head thing, I fretted more about what his lack of sleep was doing to his rapidly developing brain thing. In the crib in the car seat he went. Nothing else worked. I’d tried the Baby Bjorn, three kinds of slings, the swing, the rocking chair, the bouncy chair, the vibrating chair, and putting him facedown on my lap while I patted his behind and whispered “shush, shush,” in his ear, which is something some book said someone’s grandmother used to do. All of these things only made Connor angrier, his tiny red fists shaking with outrage that I would even try to distract him from his afternoon’s work.
The only other thing that had proven intermittently successful was a big blue exercise ball, purchased in my third trimester so that I might leisure my way through early labor in the comfort of home. During my actual labor, it sat neglected in a corner of our bedroom, and it remained there until one evening’s “witching hour,” the twilight moments when Connor really hit his stride. At the utter end of my fraying rope, I sat down on the ball with Connor and bounced him up and down. He stopped screaming. I stopped bouncing. He started screaming. I resumed bouncing and stayed there until David came home an hour and a half later.
After this accidental and wondrous discovery, we had a new evening ritual: David would get home from work, drop his papers in the doorway, and immediately begin his bouncing shift. It required a delicate handoff, since any rhythm-ceasing would send Connor into a paroxysm of rage. I would bounce one, two, three, and stand up in one motion, keeping the bouncing going as I stood there. Once David had arranged himself on the ball and assumed the rhythm, I would one, two, three, hand Connor over. We were tightrope walkers above the lion’s den, defying death only by our incredible teamwork. Once the handoff had safely occurred, I would go to the kitchen drawer, grab the takeout menus, order Chinese food, answer the door when it came, shovel some down, and then take over again so David could eat. Sometimes Connor would be in a fitful sleep, far too fragile to disturb, and on those nights I would shovel forkfuls of kung pao chicken into David’s mouth while he kept bouncing. This was a major breakthrough. The more vigorously we bounced Connor, the more content he seemed, as long as there was no hint of cessation. But we both knew that if for any reason we were to stop, Connor would blow up, just like that bus Sandra Bullock was driving in Speed.
Still, it was something, a way to stop his wailing that didn’t involve one of my body parts. I was greatly relieved to have it when an audition came up the following week, a big one, to replace one of the leads in a Shakespeare play off-Broadway. (My acting career had been dormant ever since I got pregnant, so even an audition was a shot in the arm.) Since I couldn’t read while bouncing without feeling carsick, I taped myself reading all the scenes and played them back while Connor and I bounced on the ball. Connor tipped his head back and listened, looking at the ceiling, as if he were trying to envision what onstage tableaux might accompany these particular lines of iambic pentameter. This audition was the very first time I would leave him. While I felt my attachment to Connor as physically as if the umbilical cord still joined us, I also felt confident in the person I was leaving him with: a kindly neighbor, a woman who had worked for years as a nurse. I instructed her in the use of the blue exercise ball, offered Connor one last milk snack, and dashed off to my audition.
I did well. I knew my lines and stayed focused, even though I could feel my breasts refilling with milk as I stood before the director, that sudden sensation of a faucet being turned on inside. I was sure my body was sensing Connor’s hunger and distress from five miles away. I hurried home as soon as my audition was over, but it was the beginning of evening rush hour, and by the time I got home, I had been away for almost two hours. Connor’s screams were echoing through the front door. I fumbled for my key and rushed inside. My neighbor was walking up and down with him, terrified. “Does he always cry like that?” she asked as I pulled up my shirt, Connor drinking in angry gulps.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “He must have gotten hungry.”
“But he cried the entire time you were gone,” she said. “And you had just fed him.” The big blue ball had been useless. (She did not, evidently, have the appropriate abdominal discipline to use it; perhaps I should have pre-screened.)
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “I know he can be tough.”
My neighbor looked at me, eyes wide. “It’s not that,” she said. “I think there might be something wrong with him.”
There’s something wrong with him, I told his pediatrician the next day at his four-week checkup. He cries all the time. Well, babies cry, his doctor said with an indulgent chuckle. This is different, I said. He may have colic, his doctor said, unconcerned. You’ll find it happens at certain times of day, he said. (I did not.) Then he looked at Connor, who of course had chosen this five-minute consultation to be his crying break for the day, and said: Look at him, looking up at the light. What a cute little guy. Don’t you worry, Mommy: things are going to get better, any day now.
They got worse. At six weeks, Connor was screaming more instead of less. During our endless days alone at home, I jazzed things up with the Dustbuster, the only thing Connor could hear above his own hundred-decibel lament. He’d stop, mid-squall, and listen with furrowed brow. I’d turn it off. He’d start crying again. I’d turn it on again. And so on. He was like the goldfish in that Ani DiFranco song: the little plastic castle was a surprise every time. Unfortunately, my short-term memory had been wiped nearly as clean.
The occasional visitor would still come by, a person I once knew, now a stranger from another world. Their visits would inevitably coincide with one of Connor’s precious, hummingbird naps. They would fuss over his tiny fingernails as he dozed in the car seat, me watching them both through the glassed aquarium that had become my consciousness. I was too lobotomized to carry on a conversation. “I got a thing in the mail to get, a—you know what I mean,” I told my sister Mollie, a little impatiently, as she took a turn with Connor on the big blue ball. “What you have when you belong to a museum? You buy something, and then you go whenever you want? You know that thing?”
“A membership?” Mollie replied cautiously, not wanting to insult me by suggesting I had a smaller vocabulary than a three-year-old.
“Yes,” I said, exhaling. “Membership. I knew there was a word for that.”
Now repeat that once a sentence. I had to use a calculator to add twelve to fourteen. I would count the minutes until David came home, so I could speak to another adult, and then be too tired to follow the thread of what he had just said to the end of his sentence. I began greeting him at the front door in wordless tears, passing Connor to him, and going to the sofa so I could sit (not bouncing) and stare at the wall.
I could not take Connor anywhere. Wherever it was, he hated it. We left restaurants before I even ordered; we abandoned onesies on the countertop at babyGap. Any enclosed space, whether a supermarket or an ATM, was out of the question, and the outdoors wasn’t much better. He hated our apartment too, of course, but at least he couldn’t frighten the bejesus out of passersby (and their dogs) while we were home. And since there wasn’t anyone I could leave him with—my kindly neighbor had stopped returning my calls—I stayed home too. Our only field trip was to the drugstore two blocks away, and that was the grimmest of enterprises, me grabbing the toothpaste before the salesperson could even hand me my receipt and rushing out of the store before Connor really opened up his lungs.
One gray March morning, as I scuttled out with my toilet paper, I spotted a flyer posted near the door:
Peggy Levine Postnatal Fitness
Underneath that, it said:
Babysitting While You Work Out!
Meet Other New Moms!
How had this neighborhood paradise escaped my notice until now? On-premise babysitting and other mothers? Why, there was a place for us! In a room full of new moms, Connor’s crying would be understood—acknowledged, sure, but with a sympathetic grin. Other moms would understand.
Connor and I were there ten minutes early for the next morning’s 9:15 A.M. offering, “New Mama Boogie.” He was asleep in his stroller when we got there, and I parked him with the babysitter, a large African-American woman exuding capability as she presided over a dozen dozing infants. I went into the exercise room, got my step, and found a space next to a lovely English woman named Fiona. She had also just had a baby boy and lived only a few blocks away. “I don’t know many other new mums,” she said in her awesome accent.
“Me neither,” I said. We both grinned.
Our instructor was to be the Peggy Levine of Peggy Levine Postnatal Fitness herself. I had spotted a picture of Peggy with Jane Fonda by the front door of the studio, and it seemed that Peggy had updated neither her workout outfit nor her musical selections since that time. “Let’s strut our stuff, mommies!” she trumpeted, making a grand entrance in her shimmer tights to the rousing “Celebration” by Kool and the Gang. “Let’s boogie off that baby weight!”
As Peggy led us through our routine, I had an unfamiliar lightness in my step. It took me a few moments to realize why: I was not bouncing on the blue ball! I was not holding anything in my arms! I swung them overhead as I hop-turned, maximizing the burn and celebrating their emptiness.
“Repeater knee, ’round the world!” Peggy yelled.
“Woo hoo!” I yelled back, along with Kool and his gang. I was free.
Just as we headed into the next song, I heard a familiar, piercing wail coming from the next room. So could everyone else; even through the wall, Connor was a good bit louder than the Pointer Sisters. Fiona and some of the other mothers faltered in their grapevines, listening with growing alarm. “Oh, don’t worry!” I yelled. “He’s mine. And he’s fine! He’s just a little tired!”
I was still grapevining to the beat when the babysitter burst into the exercise room, in a full sweat. “Whose baby is screaming like this?” she hollered. Peggy Levine cut the Pointer Sisters. All eyes turned toward me. Face hot with cardiovascular effort and shame, I walked toward the babysitter and took Connor back. As I could have predicted, this did not really help. “Put him to the breast, child,” the babysitter said gently, as if to an imbecile. I sat against the mirrored wall, pulled up my sports bra, and attempted to latch him on. Connor twisted away from me, screaming, my let-down milk spraying him in the face and enraging him even further. “He’s not hungry,” I hissed at the babysitter, Peggy Levine, and the room in general, and went to get his stroller. Everyone watched, horrified, as I stuffed the demon child back in his snowsuit, wheeling him outside so he could worship his Dark Master in peace. Good-bye, Fiona, I thought. I will never forget you.
Back at home (a prisoner again) I began noting Connor’s sleeping and eating “patterns” on a chart, having just read that a baby without a schedule was a baby whose mother was not paying enough attention. I was to record everything Connor did, sleeping hours shaded in pencil, waking hours left white, feedings noted by a star. This would, this expert promised, show how even a ten-week-old baby was creating his or her own schedule: waking once a night to be fed, nursing maybe six times during the day, taking four or so daily naps. On the weekend Connor was ten weeks old, according to my records, he nursed six times a night and took eight daily naps of ten minutes apiece.
Granted, this was a particularly bad weekend, since we had taken our possessed child out of his element and brought him to our hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania, to attempt an exorcism. Connor was to be baptized in the same church where I received First Communion and where David and I had been married. Afterward, we were hosting a brunch for fifty friends and relatives. That morning, on thirteen minutes’ sleep, I bounced Connor on the big blue ball in his white christening gown. (We had, of course, deflated and packed the ball for our trip to Scranton; I would sooner have left Connor behind than that ball.) Since the ball might have been deemed an inappropriate accessory for the moment Connor was washed in the waters of salvation, I was giving him some extra-vigorous bouncing before we left for church. On this particular day, though, not even the ball could stay Connor from swift completion of his appointed howls. Connor’s paternal grandmother (christened “YaYa” by the oldest grandchild) stood in the doorway and watched me bounce, a little too forcefully. “He screamed all night,” YaYa said, incredulous.
“That’s what he does,” I answered, not even looking up at her. By now, I well knew I had the worst baby in the world; I was just tired of having that pointed out to me.
YaYa proceeded tentatively, as any good mother-in-law should. “Maybe,” she said, “you should get him checked out.”
After the baptism and the brunch, which my body attended but my brain did not, my mother (reveling in her new role as “Nana”) offered to mind Connor at her house while I napped in the guest room. After two hours of dreamless, drooling coma, I went back downstairs to find Connor staring at the kitchen lights, Nana holding him away from her with her fingertips, like a grenade. Under normal circumstances, my mother would rather cut out her tongue than express an unpleasant truth. “I don’t know,” Nana began, gingerly. “I think he might need to go to the doctor’s.”
I went back to the pediatrician that Monday. This time I asked to see a different member of the practice. “There’s something wrong with him,” I said. The doctor regarded me hesitantly. I was just another unhinged new mother, a Cassandra, doomed to possess the truth without being able to convince anyone who could help. “His grandmothers said,” I continued. “Both of them. Please.”
The doctor vacillated. “Colic can be very hard,” she said.
“This isn’t colic!” I answered, cutting her off. “You have to believe me! Look!” I pulled out Connor’s sleeping charts, pages and pages of them, random like computer punch cards, the confetti non-pattern of our days. She looked at them, then up at me. She gave me a referral.
Dr. Desciak was among the best pediatric gastroenterologists in the field, and saw no need to waste his time with pleasantries. He took Connor from me, laid him on his back, and vigorously palpated his tiny torso, Connor too confused to protest. He assessed Connor’s poopy diaper for some time. Then, finally, he spoke:
DR. DESCIAK: Does he sleep at night?
ME: No, Doctor. He’s worse at night. I have some charts—
DR. DESCIAK: Does he stop in the midst of nursing to cry?
ME: All the time.
DR. DESCIAK: Does he tip his head back and look up at the ceiling?
Well, that was spooky.
ME: Yes. He does. He likes to look at the lights.
That was all Dr. Desciak needed to hear. There was a flap at the top of Connor’s esophagus, he explained, that the vagaries of prenatal development had left less than fully formed. Therefore, the contents of Connor’s stomach were washing back up into his throat, creating a fire of pain at regular intervals. Connor was tipping his head back in an attempt to keep the acid down. Lying on his back, allowing the acid to flow freely, was baby torture.
Double waves of relief (from finding out what was wrong) and guilt (from wondering what had taken me so long) crashed over me as Dr. Desciak issued his physician’s orders:
Two milliliters of Zantac, twice a day.
Keep Connor upright as much as possible, even when he was asleep.
Most important, as long as I breastfed, I was to
Remove every trace of dairy from my diet.
Dr. Desciak told me this last part as if he expected some resistance. But I would have gladly restricted my diet to occasional nibbles of cardboard if I thought it would make Connor sleep for four hours at a stretch. I dove into label-reading that very evening, tossing the offending soups and salad dressings in our pantry that had by-products of whey lurking deep within their lists of ingredients. I shopped at the kosher market for products marked “pareve,” a word that had in the past caught only my passing fancy on a bag of pretzels but that was now of direst importance, designating a food as dairy-free, as safe. I held Connor completely vertical against my shoulder as he napped four times a day. I administered the Zantac, which I knew tasted terrible from its leavings on my fingers as I filled the syringe, but which Connor took without complaint. Maybe he too hoped that one of these things, or all of them, might begin to work, slowly but surely.
After a month of breast milk without a trace of cow milk in it, Connor napped for two hours. In his crib. Without the car seat. After two months, Dr. Desciak cut the Zantac to once daily. After three months, Connor began eating rice cereal, devouring tablespoons of it at each feeding, smiling broadly at me as I loaded his spoon with the next bite. After eleven months, I treated myself to pizza for dinner and tore off some tiny bites for Connor to chase around his high-chair tray with his fat little hands. Both of us slept until morning.
Change does happen. I read somewhere that the human body totally regenerates every seven years, that over that time, every cell in the body replaces itself, and there is no part of you left that was there seven years ago. Over seven years, you become someone completely different.
