When did i get like this.., p.8
When Did I Get Like This?, page 8
Connor will be seven this December. He begs me for ice cream every time we pass the Mr. Softee truck parked, as soon as the temperature hits 60, right where we get off the downtown bus together after school. His stomach seems to tolerate the Spider-Man frozen dairy product bar (with black gumball eyes) quite nicely. Before bedtime, I sit with him on his twin bed, trading pages as we read Danny and the Dinosaur. He squints at his page, sounding out the word “taught.” As Connor concentrates, I reach up out of habit and rub the flat spot on the back of his head. The books’ warning came true: Baby Connor got moderate plagiocephaly from all those months sleeping in his car seat. But now, almost seven years later, the spot has shrunk enough so you cannot really see it. I am the only one who knows where to find it under my son’s thick hair. As Connor reads to me, I rub his flat spot for luck, and remember that the tempestuous first months of his life—as fuzzy to me now as real life was then—really did, after all, happen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
My Book of Faces
I have a good friend named Julie, whose every word I cling to for any scrap of coolness I might salvage from it. Julie is child-free and is my primary tether to the halcyon days of regular workout schedules and first-run movies, of sleeping in Saturday morning and going out Saturday night without having to factor in another $65 for the babysitter. (Julie likes to remind me that since she works two jobs, her life is not exactly the one of ease and leisure that I imagine. I say, don’t mess with my fantasy.)
When I manage to escape the house and spend time with Julie, she lets drop effortlessly urbanista tips on the perfect comfortable-but-cool boots, the latest concealer, and what I should have on my iPod. “I like Florence and the Machine,” she’ll mention, and I nod, pretending to have ever heard of them, and make a mental note to download some of their music one of these days, just as soon as I file all the health claim forms from 2003 I’ve been meaning to get to.
Last summer, I was attempting to speak to Julie on the phone. I had my two youngest, overheated children clamped to each of my legs, clamoring for my attention with that panicked immediacy children only acquire when they see their mother with a telephone to her ear. “This is why I have no friends,” I said. “I can’t talk to someone for thirty seconds.”
“You should be on Facebook!” Julie said.
I thought she was trying to be funny.
“Seriously, Ame,” she said. “It’s not college kids anymore. You’d love it.”
This would probably be one of those cases where Julie’s coolness far exceeded mine, like the time I attempted to rock these old lady sandals from Germany that had looked much cuter on her. I assumed Facebook would be a bunch of youngsters “chatting” with winking emoticons, sending urgent missives like “CU L8R!!!” Since I abhor excessive use of the exclamation point above all other things, I was almost certainly too old for this newfangled communication medium. But that evening, once the kids were in bed and the laundry was folded, I decided to enter my e-mail address so Facebook could whirr and click its way through my Yahoo! contact list. Then, bam! Up came fifty people or more whom I knew, all already using Facebook, most of whom I had lost touch with long ago. Here was that cute novelist I went to college with! Here was that kind of famous actor I kind of knew! I “friended” them all, and they “friended” me back, and by the next evening I was trading witty banter with all the cool people I used to know, as if at a giant cocktail party, only without the trouble of putting on makeup beforehand.
I gorged on Facebook every night after the kids were asleep, furiously refreshing for real-time updates. Here was a girl I went to grade school with, saying she just saw one of the “Real Housewives of New York” at TJ Maxx! Here was that guy who sublet my apartment thirteen years ago, asking me to take the “Which Character on Full House Are You?” quiz. Some of these topics were, admittedly, less than scintillating. But I was wallowing in my new sense of community. A week earlier, the only people I had contact with were the moms I waved to at camp drop-off. Now I was back in touch with friends from all chapters of my life! Sort of! Still, wasn’t it better to choose a virtual plant for my college roommate’s Li’l Green Patch than not to be in touch with her at all? I would never have time to catch up fully with all these people, but now I wouldn’t have to. I would hear the highlights of their lives going forward, and I’d never have to feel isolated again. I was enchanted with my many, many Friends.
The only part of Facebook that had me fraught with anxiety was the choosing of my profile photo. I had been going with no photo at all for a few weeks, which seemed like a safe choice. But in actuality, the shadowy blue no-face lady next to your name merely brands you as a Facebook neophyte. Even I, a Facebook neophyte, could see that. But there were so many ways to get the photo wrong that indecision stayed my hand. If I used an overly glamorous or professionally taken photo of myself, my narcissism would be on display for everyone I had ever met. So I attempted a self-portrait, holding my cell phone above my head at an insouciant angle like my college sophomore cousin had, and got a horrifying “before” picture such as one might see in a magazine makeover story. If I used that picture, the apparent toll the last seven years had taken on me would be evident to everyone I had ever met. I needed to find an accidentally terrific candid shot, one in which I looked great without looking like I was trying to look great. I spent the next several nights after the kids were asleep sifting through every digital photo stored on my computer, and found a handful of options:
a photo of me in the hospital delivery room, taken immediately after Seamus was born, with IV-bloated face and burst blood vessels in my eyes
a photo from the previous Christmas morning, my matted hair and dark-circled eyes a testament to how long it takes to put the Fisher-Price Planet Heroes Solar Headquarters together (without instructions)
a photo of me on my birthday the year before, seven months pregnant, “glowing” with forehead acne, and my eyes half-closed
That was about it. If you were to piece together our family’s story based on our photos, you would think that our three children had raised themselves and some scary sweaty fat lady stopped by once or twice a year.
I broadened my search criteria from a good photo of me, to any photo of me, to any photo in which some part of my head appeared, and finally found something acceptable: a picture of our whole family at the pool, the boys hamming it up, me in the background behind hat and sunglasses. Shrunk down to Facebook’s thumbnail size, you could barely see me in the photo. Eh, it was fine; my kids were my biggest news since the millennium, anyhow. I did wonder, though, if it was wise to broadcast “I am a boring mother with nothing to say” to all of my Friends without children. Sometimes I get the sense that not only do people without children not want to hear about my kids, they might actually think less of me for having them.
Before kids, I had a pretty successful career as an actress, and I had stories about meeting Woody Allen and Warren Beatty fit for any occasion. Now, when someone asks me, “What do you do?” I don’t necessarily want to say, “I’m an actress,” since that will beg the question of what they’ve seen me in, which is, recently, nothing. Instead, I go with the job that has kept me most consistently busy for the last seven years. “I’m a mom,” I say, and then I see the switch go off behind their eyes: Oh. Uninteresting, not smart, and now that I look at her, I guess she is kind of frumpy.
I remember feeling that way myself a decade ago when David would take me to work-sponsored events. He works in the financial industry, a male-dominated world where they are politically correct enough to call their companions “spouses,” even though we are all, in fact, wives. I would work the room with David at one of these cocktail parties, or sit at these dinners, and dread when his conversation, as it inevitably did, would turn to matters financial. He and his coworkers would begin speaking in jargon that was completely incomprehensible to me (and still is).
DAVID: Did we traunch that mezz piece out yet?
OTHER GUY: Yep. Twenty over forty, margin EBITDA.
DAVID: Who’s on the left?
OTHER GUY: Us, less fifteen basis points top three.
DAVID: Well, let’s diligence that out.
Once this sort of talk started it would always continue uninterrupted through the end of the evening, icing me out completely. David had tried to explain what he was talking about to me many times, but just because you take high school French doesn’t mean you’ll understand a word they say in Paris, either.
That meant I would have to turn to the “spouses” at the table, the other women who were as squeezed out of the work conversation as I was. It never seemed to bother them much, though. They’d have plenty to talk about: their second grader’s traveling soccer team, their Parents’ Association obligations, and the Italian tile for their kitchen backsplash that had been lost in customs and was setting their renovation back by six weeks or more. I would sit there nodding and smiling, and while at least they were speaking English, it wasn’t like this sort of talk was really any better. I had nothing to say about runny noses and Uba Tuba granite countertops, and I was proud of it! Seriously, who were these women? Didn’t they ever watch the news or read a book? Didn’t they understand how very uninteresting all of this was? Did they really think anyone else cared?
Now, ten years later, I have drunk the Stepford Kool-Aid, and I do great at these parties. Sure, I read the newspaper, but the subjects on top of my brain-pile are the minutiae of my daily life as a mother, and when I am in a room with other mothers, these topics are universal, noncontroversial, and endlessly regenerating. It’s only when I catch a glimpse of myself through the eyes of someone without children that I share in the horror of just what has become of me.
David’s younger sister Kelly and her boyfriend Chris came over to visit a few years ago. It was a charity visit; David was out of town on a business trip and both boys had a stomach bug. Aunt Kelly tucked the boys in and read them bedtime stories while I gave the bathroom a good sanitizing. I followed Kelly and Chris to the front door once the boys were asleep, not ready yet to let these beguiling visitors from the Land of the Childless leave me. I started in on what I thought was a hilarious monologue about the color and extent of baby Seamus’s diarrhea that afternoon. “I mean, it was like Jell-O pudding! And yellow!” I brayed. I saw Kelly and Chris cast a furtive look at each other. Not even an eye roll. More like: On my signal, run for your life, before she eats our brains.
This was why my Facebook photo choice was a little bit risky. If a mother wants to sojourn in the non-child-centered world, she is better off keeping her Shutterfly brag books tucked securely away. The ideal of the woman who “has it all” is predicated on that woman keeping her worlds totally separate. She doesn’t begin meetings talking about how the baby can sing “Old MacDonald.” She doesn’t close the deal with a raucous breast pump anecdote. We mothers can continue to participate in grown-up society only if we don’t let our mothering lives leak into our professional lives. We are of interest to the real world only to the extent that we don’t remind anyone of our real world. We mothers, like our children, are supposed to know our place.
I’m not sure why there is such little patience shown for mothers. If I bring my little yappy dog into a coffee shop, I can see people being miffed. But a crying baby? I’ll back his stroller out of there and be on my way as quickly as I can, but honestly, he’s a human being too. Adults who have no tyke tolerance did not, as they seem to believe, spring fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. All cranky adults were once cranky kids, and when they cried (as clearly they did; their dispositions speak for themselves), they were annoying too.
And so are mothers, I hear the non-child-centered saying in response. I do have some sympathy for how they might have lost their patience. First we clogged the sidewalks with our double strollers, now we clog the news feeds. And even I think that mom who uploads thirty-seven photos of her son’s Little League banquet, one at a time, onto the Facebook pages of everyone she knows, needs to be stopped. She’s making us all look bad.
But why shouldn’t we mothers talk about our lives, even when among the childless? Hell, there’s a lot to discuss, and most of it is a lot more interesting than the articles we wrote for law review. Just because a topic is grown-up doesn’t make it interesting; I once talked to an astrophysicist who bored me to death. But I didn’t groan inwardly as soon as he told me he was an astrophysicist, thinking, Oh God, this guy’s sure to be a snore. The entire topic of motherhood is considered not worth one’s time unless one is a mother, and maybe not even then. Motherhood is still seen as a waste of a smart woman’s mind, as if motherhood were beneath her talents, rather than the job that most requires every ounce of strength and ingenuity that she possesses. How each mother negotiates that is, in my opinion, a topic of endless variety.
Still, once we mothers get the sense that the friends from our old lives don’t really want to hear it, we gravitate toward those who do. As a result, every friend I have made in the last seven years became my friend because she was a fellow mother. Whenever I talk to these women, whether at karate pickup, work dinners, or girls’ night margaritas, we have tons to discuss: spelling tests, swine flu, and why our husbands leave their dirty dishes in the sink rather than in the immediately adjacent dishwasher. What we almost never talk about, though, are the lives that we left behind when our kids arrived, or are struggling to maintain now that they’re here. We stick with the parts of each other with which we are already familiar. Right now, we don’t have enough energy left for anything else. While these friends understand what has become the largest part of me, they do not know who I was before motherhood, or who I hope to be once my kids don’t need me anymore. I am still left with things I am yearning to say.
And so I find myself coming home after a night out with the old playgroup gang and logging on to Facebook one more time before bed, where I can be mother, writer, sister, theater geek, 80s trivia champion, and confidante, or all of them at once, to some of my three hundred Friends. I wait to speak up until I have something witty, provocative, or at least charming to say. Then I shout into the void: “Amy thinks the movie Diner is overrated.” “Amy wants a chocolate milkshake.” And sometimes no one answers. But sometimes, the person who responds is someone whom I never could have predicted.
David says he’ll never join Facebook. I think he’s probably right. But his life hasn’t changed like mine has in the last seven years. He has gotten to stay the same him all this time. David also says I spend too much time on Facebook and I should get a good night’s sleep instead. He is certainly spot-on there. Why am I staying up till all hours to read whether the woman who stage-managed my high school plays prefers Goobers or Raisinets?
But the funny thing is, it’s kind of nice to know. She likes Raisinets better. A moment later, there I am, peeking out from behind my children in my photo, saying: so do I. For just a moment we are heard by each other, her life intersecting, once again, with mine.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Translocation
Staying home with a toddler will lead to some of the longest, most meandering afternoons of your life. After nap time, you’ve got five hours to fill (best-case scenario) until it’s time for night-night, and when it’s been raining for three days straight, you yearn for a little excitement. Something. Anything. Such are the moments, once interrupted, that you rue having wished away.
The phone only rarely rang in the afternoon, and I remember thinking, first, that it was strange to be getting a call at all. “Hello?” I panted, since I had been giving Connor horsey rides around the house, and in my second trimester of my second pregnancy, shortness of breath was already in full swing. Seventeen weeks, and I looked and felt more like thirty.
“Hi, Amy, it’s Mary? From Dr. Merman’s office?”
“Oh, hi, Mary—Connor, couches are not for jumping!” Dr. Merman was my obstetrician, and Mary was probably calling to reschedule an appointment or something. “Sorry. How are you, Mary?”
“I’m fine,” she said, and I thought it was a little strange that she didn’t ask me how I was, or “the babies,” as she usually did. Mary had been with me from the very beginning of my journey to motherhood, and she was a lot like my own mother, except for the flat Queens accent. They shared a sunny and unflappable Irish Catholic disposition. When it came to my body, and the making of babies, Mary actually knew a lot more than my mother did. While still on my odyssey of infertility, I would go to Dr. Merman’s office month after month, cry in the waiting room, and have yet more blood taken. Only Mary could find a good vein and get it over with without me seeing black spots. She worked quickly, chattering away the entire time, and allowed me to feel that everything might yet be okay.
When my second pregnancy caught me completely by surprise, I called Mary from my bathroom, the pregnancy test still unsanitarily wet in my hand, Connor crawling around on the floor. “I think I’m pregnant,” I whispered, too shocked to say it out loud. “You get over here right now!” Mary said, laughing, even though it was already four thirty in the afternoon. Upon treating my urine sample, she confirmed my suspicions with a wink and a congratulatory punch on the arm. She let Connor play with the paper clips on her desk while Dr. Merman examined me and declared me healthily super-pregnant. I hadn’t even told David yet, but Mary knew. Between Mary and me, there was very little to hide.
Now I stood in my den, hoisting Connor on one hip so he would stop face-diving off the sofa. “I’m calling with the results of your amnio,” Mary said.
“Oh, right,” I said. I had forgotten.
This was my first amniocentesis, ordered only because the results of my prenatal blood work had shown a one in two hundred chance that the fetus might have Down syndrome. These were higher odds than might be expected for a woman of my age, although still pretty remote. I was not that concerned. Growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where everyone is Catholic, I had known a handful of families with Down syndrome kids. I wasn’t blind to the challenges of such a life, but it wasn’t a complete unknown to me, either. For me, it was something I could face, as long as I had time to prepare. “Let’s just check the box,” Dr. Merman had said. “Let’s know for sure.”
