Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year Read online

  No, the worst thing, worse even than sitting around crying about that inevitable day when my son will leave for college, worse than thinking about whether or not in the meantime to get him those hideous baby shots he probably should have but that some babies die from, worse than the fears I have when I lie awake at 3:00 in the morning (that I won’t be able to make enough money and will have to live in a tenement house where the rats will bite our heads while we sleep, or that I will lose my arms in some tragic accident and will have to go to court and diaper my son using only my mouth and feet and the judge won’t think I’ve done a good enough job and will put Sam in a foster home), worse even than the fear I feel whenever a car full of teenagers drives past my house going 200 miles an hour on our sleepy little street, worse than thinking about my son being run over by one of those drunken teenagers, or of his one day becoming one of those teenagers—worse than just about anything else is the agonizing issue of how on earth anyone can bring a child into this world knowing full well that he or she is eventually going to have to go through the seventh and eighth grades.

  The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I’ve ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit. Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended. One descended from the relative safety and wildness and bigness one felt in sixth grade, eleven years old. Then the worm turned, and it was all over for any small feeling that one was essentially all right. One wasn’t. One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and Germany.

  I experienced it as being a two-year game of “The Farmer in the Dell.” I hung out with the popular crowd, as jester, but boy, when those parties and dances rolled round, this cheese stood alone, watching my friends go steady and kiss, and then, like all you other cheeses, I went home and cried. There we were, all of us cheeses alone, emotionally broken by unrequited love and at the same time amped out of our minds on hormones and shame.

  Seventh and eighth grades were about waiting to get picked for teams, waiting to get asked to dance, waiting to grow taller, waiting to grow breasts. They were about praying for God to grow dark hairs on my legs so I could shave them. They were about having pipe-cleaner legs. They were about violence, meanness, chaos. They were about The Lord of the Flies. They were about feeling completely other. But more than anything else, they were about hurt and aloneness. There is a beautiful poem by a man named Roy Fuller, which ends, “Hurt beyond hurting, never to forget,” and whenever I remember those lines, which is often, I think of my father’s death ten years ago this month, and I think about seventh and eighth grades.

  So how on earth can I bring a child into the world, knowing that such sorrow lies ahead, that it is such a large part of what it means to be human?

  I’m not sure. That’s my answer: I’m not sure. One thing I do know is that I’ve recently been through it again, the total aloneness in the presence of almost extraterrestrially high levels of hormones. I have been thinking a lot lately of Phil Spector and his Wall of Sound, because to be pregnant is to be backed by a wall of hormones, just like during puberty, and the sense of aloneness that goes along with that is something I have been dancing as fast as I could to avoid ever having to feel again. For the last twenty-some years, I have tried everything in sometimes suicidally vast quantities—alcohol, drugs, work, food, excitement, good deeds, popularity, men, exercise, and just rampant compulsion and obsession—to avoid having to be in the same room with that sense of total aloneness. And I did pretty well, although I nearly died. But then recently that aloneness walked right into my house without knocking, sat down, and stayed a couple of weeks.

  In those two weeks, tremendous amounts of support poured in, as did baby clothes and furniture. My living room started to look like a refugee relocation center, but the aloneness was here, too, and it seemed to want to be felt. I was reminded once again that the people closest to me, including my therapist, function as my pit crew, helping me to fix blown-out tires and swabbing me off between laps, and the consensus, among those individuals who make up my pit crew, was that I was probably just going to have to go ahead and feel the aloneness for a while. So I did, and I’ll tell you it didn’t feel very good. But somehow I was finally able to stand in that huge open wound and feel it and acknowledge it because it was real, and the fear of the pain of this wound turned out to be worse than the actual pain.

  As I said, though, it didn’t feel very good, and it brought me up against that horrible, hateful truth—that there wasn’t anything outside myself that could heal or fill me and that everything I had been running from and searching for all my life was within. So I sat with those things for a while, and the wounds began to heal.

  This all took place a few months ago, at age thirty-five. I mean, I’m old and tough and I can take it. But Sam is just a baby. Sam, in fact, hasn’t even come out of the chute yet. I guess when he does, there will be all these people to help him along on his journey; he will have his pit crews, too, but at some point he will also have to start seventh grade. Maybe he will be one of those kids who get off easy, but probably not. I don’t know many who did. So he will find himself at some point, maybe many times, in what feels like a crawl space, scared of unseen spiders, pulling himself along on his elbows, the skin rubbed raw, not knowing for sure whether he will ever arrive at a place where he can stand up again in the daylight. This is what it feels like to grieve a loss that is just too big, the loss of a loved one, or of one’s childhood, or whatever. (And it is sometimes what it feels like to be in the middle of writing a book; and also what it feels like sometimes when you’ve lost your hormonal equilibrium.)

  Yet we almost always come out on the other side, maybe not with all our f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact, as Esmé put it, but in good enough shape. I was more or less okay by ninth grade. I am more or less okay now. I really love my pit crew, and I sometimes love my work. Sometimes it feels like God has reached down and touched me, blessed me a thousand times over, and sometimes it all feels like a mean joke, like God’s advisers are Muammar Qaddafi and Phyllis Schlafly.

  So I am often awake these days in the hours before the dawn, full of joy, full of fear. The first birds begin to sing at quarter after five, and when Sam moves around in my stomach, kicking, it feels like there are trout inside me, leaping, and I go in and out of the aloneness, in and out of that sacred place.

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1989

  So anyway, I had a baby last week. The night before, my best friend Pammy took me to the city because I was having cramps, and it turned out I was in the earliest possible labor—quite effaced but barely dilated a centimeter. Pammy and I had gone through Lamaze training together—actually we’ve gone through the last twenty-five years together, through our teens and through my dad’s death in my early twenties, and through her ten-year marriage, which has been a happy one, and through my getting clean and sober in my early thirties, and most recently through my pregnancy and Lamaze. Pammy is so beautiful, a natural platinum blonde with blue eyes and the most engaging, brilliant, kind, and funny mind. You would never believe that her parents were the two worst falling-down drunks you ever saw. I remember, as a teenager, stepping over her mother, Mary, at 9:00 in the morning. She’d have passed out an hour earlier on the living room floor, and then you’d meet up with her at breakfast and act nonchalant about the whole thing, like “Hi, Mary, want some toast?” Her father was this violent, crazy, Irish drunk, who murdered his mother’s best friend when Pammy was thirteen. But Pammy is unquestionably the sanest, most grounded and giving person I’ve ever known. She plays classical piano and flute and makes a living doing these stunning blown-glass figurines for boutiques and street fairs, and she’s been my guardian for years and years now. I’ve always secretly wondered if my family has been slipping her a small salary over the years to take me for our daily walks and keep an eye on things.

  Anyway, after the doctor told us
to go home that night, we were driving across the Golden Gate Bridge back to Marin, feeling giddy and afraid because it was maybe really happening, and we both got worried that we wouldn’t remember anything from Lamaze. I was suddenly panicked about not having enough Q-tips or diaper wipes. She asked how I was feeling, now that I was officially dilated one centimeter, and I replied that it was really all I could do not to start pushing the baby out right there in the car.

  Early the next morning, after having been up all night together at my house timing my contractions and watching That’s Entertainment on TV, we drove back into the city, and I thought I was about to deliver, but the male doctor who examined me at Kaiser said I was only dilated two centimeters and couldn’t be admitted, although I was in real pain by then. I went into a terrible, fearful depression. The doctor looked at the baby’s heartbeat on the monitor and said dully, “The baby’s flat,” and I instantly assumed it meant he was dead or at least retarded from lack of oxygen. I don’t think a woman doctor would ever say anything like that to a mother. “Flat?” I said incredulously. “Flat?” Then he explained that this meant the baby was in a sleep cycle. So Pammy and I ended up walking up and down Geary Boulevard trying to get me to dilate more, and we were actually laughing quite a lot intermittently. I called my brother Steve, who is five years younger than I, and asked him to please come be with us. I told him we were pretty worn-out and needed fresh horses. He said he’d come as fast as he could. Pammy and I continued down Geary, stopping in at Mel’s Drive-in, with me panting my way through contractions like a dog. I’ll tell you, we got served very, very quickly. I had a bowl of oatmeal.

  When we got back to Kaiser, I was dilated enough for admission, but there were no birthing rooms available, and I got so incredibly depressed again that I felt about ten years old. Kaiser sent us over to Mount Zion Hospital; they offered us an ambulance, but I was too depressed and pissed off and wanted to punish them, so I wouldn’t let them help me. Pammy drove and I was bellowing at the top of my lungs the entire way. There was blood all down the back of my dress when we got out of the car, and Pammy said really nicely, “Oh, it’s not bad, it just looks like a little crankcase oil.”

  Life became a whole lot better at Mount Zion. Both the nurses who were taking care of me had read my books and were treating me like I was Princess Di. The doctor was a woman and I fell in love with her, and I felt really for the first time that things were going to be okay. Perhaps there was a fifty-fifty chance that I would actually give birth to a live baby. I got the epidural immediately and decided that next time, if there is a next time, I will get the epidural upon registration. Lamaze is great and the classes totally educated Pammy and me about what to expect, but I never intended to have a natural childbirth. The moment that epidurals were mentioned in our class, Pammy and I had turned to each other and nodded. I had a few great hours of heavy but epiduralized labor. Then it became hard at the end, and everything went wrong. I couldn’t push the baby out, and Pammy and Steve stood by my feet in the labor room for an hour, exhorting, encouraging me to push, telling me how beautifully I was doing. I was in despair. I made a tiny little poo on the table, which they didn’t mention at the time but which they now manage to work into about two-thirds of all our conversations. I believe that when the last nail is being hammered into my coffin, they will both be peering in, saying, “Oh, remember when she made that little tiny poo on the table when she was having Sam?” And then I got really sick. I got an infection from where Sam’s fist tore a little hole in my vagina. (He came out with his fist balled up by the side of his head. I’m reasonably sure he was trying to do the black-power salute.) I was shivering like a wet dog and felt like I was freezing to death even though I had a big fever by then. The nurse kept covering me with sheets that she’d just taken out of a dryer. The doctor, Carol Gerdes, who was a resident, stayed way after her shift was over because she knew I felt safe with her. I kept saying, “But you only get one weekend off a month, you really should go home now,” and she’d say, “Do you want me to stay?” And I’d think for a second and then say, “Yes.”

  Finally, finally, Sam slid out, and they put him on my chest for a bit and then cleaned him up, and then Pammy and Steve held him because I was too hurt and out of it. They walked around the room with him, explaining what various things were and that he would get used to the light. They’d bring him over to me every few minutes and then carry him around again when I was too preoccupied with the fever and the stitching. I felt like my heart was going to break from all the mixed-up feelings and because I couldn’t even really take care of my baby. Finally the fever went away, just as the doctor finished stitching me up, and hope came back into me, hope and tremendous feelings of buoyancy and joy.

  They took us all to my room, Sam and Pammy and Steve and me, and I nursed the baby for the first time. None of us could take our eyes off him. He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. He was like moonlight.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1989

  Sam is two weeks old today. His umbilical cord fell off. I’m probably supposed to feel like the cord is very lovely and natural, but I must say I’m going to be able to live without it somehow. It’s like something a long-haired cat would get stuck in her tail.

  Sam is unbelievably pretty, with long, thin, Christlike feet. I told my friend Carpenter this and he said, “It’s an often-difficult world out there, and it’s good to have long, grippy feet.” I’ve decided the reason Sam’s so gorgeous is that God knew that I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with this shitting and colicky little bundle if he looked like one of those E.T./Don Rickles babies.

  I’m crazy tired. I feel as stressed out by exhaustion as someone who spent time in Vietnam. Maybe mothers who have husbands or boyfriends do not get so savagely exhausted, but I doubt it. They probably end up with these eccentric babies plus Big Foot skulking around the house pissed off because the mom is too tired to balance his checkbook or give him a nice blow job.

  This is strictly sour grapes. I wish I had a husband. I wish Sam had a dad. I hope God sends him one someday. It is a huge thing not to have. Some friends of mine are having a baby in a couple of months, and they already know it is a boy and that he has only one whole arm, which of course is also a huge thing not to have. They are also going to call their baby Sam. The other Sam’s father and I were both teaching at a writing conference in Napa a month ago, right before I delivered. I was massively pregnant, looking and feeling like a skinny ugly teenager with a giant baby in her tum. Even the oldest black people at my church had been laughing when they saw me the week before. The other Sam’s father and I were floating around a swimming pool, and I was thinking about how sad I feel sometimes because my dad is dead and he won’t ever get to know Sam, at least on this funny blue marble. Then I got sad because Sam wasn’t going to have some Alan Alda/Hugh Beaumont dad hanging around, throwing him up into the air and teaching him how to do manly things, like how to pee standing up and how to fix the toaster oven. Thinking about the other Sam without much of a left arm and of course no left hand, my chest just ached. I pictured the two Sams at the fiction workshop the following year, hanging out together while we taught our classes, and my Sam studying the other Sam and saying, “So where’s your arm?” and the other baby shrugging and saying, “I don’t know; where’s your dad?”

  SEPTEMBER 15

  There are a couple of things I want to remember about Sam’s earlier days, his youth, now that he’s kind of an old guy with no umbilical cord. The first thing happened the day my friend Peg and I brought him home from the hospital, during what for me felt like the most harrowing ride a person could take through San Francisco. The first time we hit a pothole, I thought, Well, that’s that, his neck just snapped; we broke him. He’s a quadriplegic now. But we did get him home safely, and Pammy was there to greet us.

  She and Peg are Sam’s godmothers. Peg is big and athletic and deeply spiritual, sober in Alcoholics Anonymous for three years now. Toward the end of her drinking a
nd using, she’d done so much cocaine one night that she woke up in a motel in Monterey with her face glued to the pillow by all the blood that had poured out of her nose while she slept. But she still didn’t think she had a real problem, and she didn’t get clean for another few months. I like that in a girl. That’s pretty much how I was. Whereas Pammy, with these two hideous falling-down-drunk parents, has a couple of glasses of wine every few nights, and maybe pours a third glass, and then leaves most of it. That used to drive me crazy. It would seem like an act of aggression. I’d ask, “Why don’t you finish that wine?” and she’d say, “I just don’t really want it,” and I’d ask why, and she’d say, “I’m already starting to feel it,” and I’d look at her like I was going to have to take her back to the asylum in the morning.

  Anyway, being there with Sam and Pammy and Peg was a dream come true, except that I was also having little blips of fear. I had all these nightmare images, left over from the last few months of my pregnancy, of what a petri dish my house was. Largely because we live under the redwoods, everything ends up breeding lots of mold and spores, and even though Peg had hired her housekeeper to scour the place for me, I was worried. It’s such a drafty old house, rust red, a hundred years old, with three stories. We’re on the bottom floor, and you have to climb up fifty stone steps to get to it. It’s beautiful, everything is green when you look out any of the windows, and there’s a creek in the front yard. Deer come through the yard nearly every day, and you hear a million birds, and butterflies fly by, but my apartment is really funky. It’s got one big long living room with massive built-in bookcases everywhere, and then a smallish kitchen, and then a tiny little bedroom with an elevated platform for the mattress and about five square feet of floor. Through its windows you see so much green beauty that you don’t mind how cramped it is. There are little holes and gaps everywhere, and lots of spiders. Of course, there was also the kitty, who I thought might be a problem. She has been so spoiled for the last five years, like some terrible feline Leona Helmsley, that I felt sure she would sneak into Sam’s crib late at night and put a little pillow over his face or at the very least suck his milky breath out of him, like in the old wives’ tales.