Right now, as my son screams, I am sitting in my walk-in closet, with classical music blaring outside in the bedroom. But I can still hear it, a single ugly note that never ceases. In case you think I am a depraved and mentally ill mother, which maybe I am, it is my mother’s turn to walk and walk and walk him. We take shifts-my mother, my husband, and I. We walk and walk and walk and walk, and soothe and croon and shush and rock and rock and rock. We never stop moving; we have crossed miles, oceans, and traveled into space walking our boy.
Colic, the pediatrician says. Whatever the hell that means. It should stop at eight weeks. The digestive system should mature by then.
The Baby Whisperer. The Happiest Baby on the Block. What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Touchstones. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. Ferber. Attachment parenting. Nurse on demand. Set a routine. Baby slings. Baby swings. Vacuum cleaner. Car rides into eternity. There is no book, no expert, no contraption we have not tried. And still, he cries.
When there is a blessed time of silence, we all sit waiting, holding our breaths, keeping our bodies very still. Once he slept for three hours. And me, my husband, and mother whispered giddily to each other in the kitchen. What was it? I had given up wheat, dairy, broccoli, coffee, and citrus-any one of those things might have been passing to him through my breast milk and causing him an allergy. Maybe that was it, finally, after a week of eating nothing but (gluten-free) chicken soup? Was it the new Sleep Sheep, which issued soothing white noise? Was it the swaddling, the classical music, the new pink lightbulbs? But then it started again.
Tomorrow, my husband has to go back to work. And soon my mother will have to return to her own life. Only I will remain with the boy who I want more than anything to love but who screams every time I touch him. I have never cried so much; I didn’t even know I had so many tears.
I hear my husband knocking softly on the door. But I don’t want him to come in, so I don’t answer. He will leave me alone; he knows I need the silence. I can feel him linger, waiting. But I feel dark inside, mean and selfish. There is almost nothing left of me, and I need to hold to every cell.
I am angry. I have been robbed. There is a fantasy we are sold. I can see it even now, the nestling mom and newborn. The blissed-out hours of just lying and looking, sucking on little toes, eliciting smiles, dangling colorful toys. The cooing, fat, pink baby in adorable onesies, lying beneath soft blankies and cuddling plush ducks. I didn’t get any of that.
My baby cut a bloody swath through me. Labor and delivery was a grueling, twenty-six-hour ordeal that ended in an emergency C-section necessary to save both our lives. I remember, though I was addled and racked with pain, wondering why my child was trying to kill me. I could feel that something was wrong. The pain, the consciousness-altering waves of agony that rolled through my body, did not feel productive. There was a darkness to it, the pull of death. Had he been born in the Middle Ages, certainly we would not have survived, neither of us. It was that bad.
But luckily, it’s the modern first world, where white-coated, scalpel-wielding, trained professionals zip us into sterile rooms and save the day. In my darkest moments, I wonder if it was a cheat, an escape from that cosmic yawning. Maybe there is an angry god somewhere, raging. He wanted us, almost had us. We were nearly washed to him on a rushing river of my blood, pulled back just as he closed his hands around our hearts. Maybe in my baby’s incessant crying, this god is making himself known.
My husband, my beautiful, kind, loving husband, is still out there. I can feel him hovering, wondering whether to knock again or drift away. Since the hospital, he treats me so gently, as though he is afraid that I might shatter into a million little pieces and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put me together again.
I want to lean on him, to cry to him, to let him hold and comfort me. But it’s as if I can’t access the person inside me who wants that. I can’t wrap my arms around him and weep into his chest. I want to comfort him because I know he is suffering, too. But I am as stiff and cold as a corpse, limp in his embrace.
We used to have heat, so much heat. But we are a lifetime away from the hot, humid, stormy summer night in Key West when we first met. I had come down for a long weekend with my girlfriends. God, we were young, my girlfriends and I. We were all just out of college, all working seemingly glamorous but poorly paid jobs in New York City. We were all edgy, hungry. We wanted big things, and had no reason to believe we wouldn’t get them. We were privileged, well educated-we didn’t know anything about the world yet and how it conspired against you and your dreams.
When I saw him, standing on the edge of the dance floor, I watched. He was dressed in black in a sea of colorfully patterned dresses and shirts. He was cool and composed, while everyone was rowdy and writhing around him. The music was terrible, deafening and discordant. People were wasted, living it up. It was a messy, ugly scene that everyone seemed to be enjoying except for him and me.
I saw him watching, as I was. I am not one to always participate. More often than not, I stand on the sidelines observing, taking in details. I don’t want to be inside the crowd, being carried along in its current. I don’t do well at parties, though you’d never know it to look at me. I blend-laughing, dancing, chitchatting. But inside, I hold myself apart. He knew that about me intuitively, knew it right away. There was pain there, he said. I saw it right away. Something about it made him feel tender, he said. He wanted to care for me, protect me from whatever it was that made me so sad.
“It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?” he asked. Actually, he yelled this at me because it was the only way I could hear him over the music.
“It really is,” I said. And I couldn’t help but smile. Because he had dark pools for eyes, and a long, full mouth. He had a jaw of stubble, and close-cropped brown hair. His shoulders were wide and defined, pressing against the black of his T-shirt. I found myself thinking that he would have been gorgeous even if he were a woman.
Maybe it was the full moon, he always says when he tells our story, or the booze. (He always gets laughs for that one.) But I leaned in and kissed her, he’ll say. When she didn’t slap me, I knew it was love. He makes light, but it’s true. From that night onward, we were never really apart again. Until now, when we are worlds away. The floor of my life has turned to quicksand, and I am sinking, sinking, sinking down. He is reaching out his hand to me, trying to pull me back. But I don’t even have the strength to help myself be saved.
Sweetie, my mom crooned when my head was in her lap this morning. It will get better, I promise. One day, he’ll just stop. And he’ll be the beautiful little boy that he is inside. And you’ll all be fine. This will be a distant memory.
I didn’t believe her. It doesn’t seem possible that our lives won’t be lived under the incessant siren of my son’s unhappiness. But I pray that she’s right. And I pray for silence.
5
“He sounds like a nightmare,” said Rebecca (or Beck, as we called her). She peered at me over her notebook. She was the only one I knew who didn’t type her notes into a laptop. “Don’t you just want to work at Starbucks or something? Less baggage. Free lattes for your best friend, maybe?”
She also didn’t text, e-mailed only when absolutely necessary, and would rather “lose two fingers on her left hand” than create a Fakebook page. She could sometimes be convinced to watch a movie, if it was suitably obscure. But as soon as the television went on in the common room, Beck left. I’m an artist. Garbage in, garbage out. We are what we watch. I am not sure what she considered herself an artist of, precisely. She neither painted nor wrote. I am an artist of living. Okay. Whatever.