One does not watch the second baby as closely as the first, and the fourth may hardly get watched at all. Nevertheless, I remember that Elly did the usual things roughly on schedule. I remember that at seven weeks she smiled, in a brief interval between screams. At two months she even smiled at her teddy bear. That seemed very advanced to us; none of the others had recognized a human surrogate so early. She reached for objects at the usual time. Photographs of her at five months show an alert, gay baby, smiling up out of her bath straight into your eyes. Memory can play tricks. My children all have the same hair and colouring, and their baby pictures are very much alike. Three years later, in the midst of Elly’s dreamlike remoteness, I went over the old pictures, combing my brain for clues to when it began. I found one of a baby laughing aloud, eyes focused. directly on her father’s face behind the camera. I rejected it altogether. That was not Elly’s empty gaze, straight through you to the wall behind. The pictures had been scrambled. That was not Elly. That had been Matt. But I was mistaken. Two years afterwards, my mother produced her copy of the picture, incontrovertibly dated. That was Elly. The smiling baby had really existed. She had been different then.
I nursed Elly, as I had the others, for nine months. Her head was small and warm like the others’, her body snuggled soft against mine. It broke my heart to wean her. I am a thin woman, grown from a nervous child, a nail-biter, a ring-twister. Serenity is not natural to me; I value the rare experience that brings it.
The long hours spent nursing my children, relaxed, not moving, only functioning, each of us completely satisfied in the other, were to me the happiest times of their babyhood.
When I weaned her, Elly was still very much a baby. Other people’s children, after six months, begin to do all sorts of things — they sit up, they crawl, they fall down, they eat pins. At an age when other people’s children are pulling themselves to their feet in their playpens, mine are still flat on their backs on a blanket. I had got used to this long before Elly came. Matthew had not sat up until eight months; Becky, who had not crawled till eleven months, was seventeen months old before she stood alone, nineteen months old before she walked. Elly followed a month behind. At nine months she finally sat alone. At a year, she crawled. Months went by and she did not walk. Another family might have worried at such slow progress. We felt no reason to. Elly crawled very well once she began. It was true that even when she became mobile she seemed satisfied with very little, but what mother of four does not consider that a virtue? Does not Spock point out that babies may prefer very simple toys? She did not want to put rings on a stick, but I knew already that not all babies did. I remembered vividly that Becky had taken the educational toys that Sara had delighted in assembling, and methodically dropped the parts, one by one, down the stairs.
So when did it begin? A friend, also a mother of four, tells me she began to wonder as early as eight months, seeing Elly lying in her baby-tender, content without even a rattle in her hand. Has she hit on something significant? And there are pictures from around nine months or so (dates are vague; it did not occur to us that one day Elly would be a case-history). The friendly bubbly smile is gone, and there is only one picture in which she faces the camera. She looks serious. Had it started then? But those photographs were taken on one day. There are often days when a baby doesn’t photograph well. Perhaps Elly was tired that day. If I could go back I’d know in a moment. I can never find out now.
Was it significant that as early as eight months, propped up in a chair, she showed that strange quivering tensing of all muscles in a kind of passing paroxysm — that response to intense interest or pleasure which has been with her ever since yet which no doctor has ever seen? Was it significant that as she approached a year she would not play hide-and-seek behind a diaper? If I held her on my shoulder and her father dodged up at her from behind my back, instead of discovering him, as the others had, with squeals of pleasure, she paid no attention. But children differ, and not everyone likes the same games. Elly seemed independent and cheerful. All this description is based on hindsight. We noticed nothing then.
One looks for a trauma and finds none. She was rarely sick, never severely so. A few stopped-up noses, unaccompanied by fever. Chicken pox at six months — an unusually mild case. At seventeen months, an earache. We guessed because she whimpered and rubbed at her ear, for she was not talking. We played safe and called the doctor — for the first time in her life. She was already better when he came, leaping up and down in her crib and laughing. I remember he exclaimed, ‘What a lovely baby!’ Yet surely it had begun by then.
She was not ill, nor was I. No one was hospitalized. We left her only once, when she was nine months old, and then only for a weekend. Nonplussed, one looks for less obvious causes — events and experiences that went unnoticed at the time but that could later reveal their true significance. Once a child ran with her in her stroller, hit a bump, and pitched her out on her head. An injury? But I picked her up undazed, crying lustily, her eyes not even crossed. Then there was the trip we took in Elly’s second summer, a month after her first birthday. It was a typical station-wagon safari from friend’s house to friend’s house. The first part of the trip had been pleasantly uneventful. We had driven to Rhode Island, stayed there a week, and were now on our way to Maine. We broke the trip in the middle, staying with a student who put up all six of us in a room of his boarding-house. Two beds, floor covered with mattresses, Elly in her car-bed, by now too small for her. She didn’t like it, and cried, and I spent most of the night rocking her, though ordinarily she was a good sleeper. Nobody slept well, and the next day’s drive was one of those trivial nightmares that any family lives through on occasion. The children were intermittently crabby, we ran out of gas, we even lost a five-dollar bill out of the window. Elly was fretful from the start. She wouldn’t go to sleep, and by the time we had been going half the day she was crying steadily. We arrived exhausted, and spent the next three days confined to the house by a nor’-easter as seven children who didn’t know each other interacted in one not-very-large living room. Elly fretted constantly. I had never seen her like this. Then the weather lifted, she crawled outside, alone in the quiet garden, and we had no further trouble. Did it start then? Was that cramped and crowded week the beginning of her retreat?
I doubt it. Nothing so ordinary should be able to cause a major psychological disaster in a baby — not if the baby were healthy to begin with. But I record it nevertheless, as I record here everything I know of those first two years — the measles and the colic and the bump on the head and the fact that I was an intellectual mother by no means totally accepting of her feminine role, who did not at all want another baby. Out of these come the possible explanations — out of these, or out of whatever may in time be elucidated in the complex balance of a baby’s metabolism or the choreography of the electrons in its brain. Every piece of potential evidence must be recorded in this account, not least the evidence that can be used against me. We need to know all we can if someone someday is to understand at last what is relevant and what is not.