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

  I keep wanting to do what Martin Luther King taught us—to walk in love, to love the racist and hate the racism—but I must say, it is not going very well these days. I am often beside myself with hate. I have a quote of his on the wall over my desk that says, “Let us not despair. Let us not lose faith in man and certainly not in God. We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love.” But I sometimes despair. My hatred of American conservatives apparently sustains and defines me as much as my love of Jesus does, since I don’t think I’m willing to have it removed. Who would I be without it? I know I’m as much a part of the problem as anyone else and that we’re all like the people in that old Dylan song who think God is on their side. Part of me does not want Sam to be like this at all, and part of me thinks that it’s right and important to scorn and revile the conservatives, because—well, because they’re bad, or at least they’re wrong.

  OCTOBER 1

  The worst night yet. Sam was wild with colic until midnight, and nothing helped. Nothing. I have never felt so impotent and frustrated in my life. I tried everything. I put a tape of summer night sounds complete with crickets on the boom box, because white noise is supposed to help. I put a warm hot water bottle on his tummy, held his feet, and made him do bicycle pedaling because that is supposed to help him pass gas. I surrounded him with pillows in the baby swing someone lent us, rocked and nursed and rocked and nursed, which would help for ten minutes every so often. Then the sobbing would begin again. This went on for four straight hours. I can’t walk him for very long because my body is still all torn up. The wound feels like there’s a fishing weight suspended from its highest point; the weight swings like a pendulum and drags the wound downward. The ache when I walk or stand up for too long is totally defeating. All I can do is try to breathe, deeply and slowly, and pray. We Christians like to go around thinking that God isn’t here to take away our pain and fear but to fill it with his or her presence, and I can feel Jesus’ sorrowful eyes on us as Sam and I walk and rock and nurse and listen to our white noise on the boom box, but still the frustration flushes through me again and again. If I had a baseball bat, I would smash holes in the wall.

  I naively believe that self-love is 80 percent of the solution, that it helps beyond words to take yourself through the day as you would your most beloved mental-patient relative, with great humor and lots of small treats. But, God, it is so hard to feel that way today because I’m so riled up. I keep thinking of something the great black theologian Howard Thurman said, that we must try to look out at the world through quiet eyes. But I tell you, in the middle of the colic death marches, I end up looking at the baby with those hooded eyes that were in the old ads for The Boston Strangler.

  Midnight

  I felt very sorry for myself today until Peg called and reminded me of Renata Adler’s wonderful line about how self-pity is maybe just sorrow in the pejorative. I wrote it down on an index card and carried it around in my pocket all day, like it was currency. The baby has fallen asleep after being just mildly colicky for a few hours, not psychotically so like last night, and the kitty is lying beside me asleep. Things are a lot better.

  Steve took Sam for a while this afternoon, after dressing him in a little yellow duckling sunsuit and the Israeli cat hat that someone gave us. He looked so incredibly beautiful and tender that you almost had to look away. With a teddy bear next to the baby in the stroller, Steve figured, what woman could possibly resist? Steve is actually very handsome, six-foot-three, thin, with thick dark hair and a great nose, but he is still terribly shy and a little gangly. He trolled downtown with the baby for nearly an hour. One girl bit, but Steve didn’t get her phone number. He says he is going to try again tomorrow.

  4:00 A.M.

  After I nursed the baby a while ago and we had gone back to sleep on the futon on the living room floor, which is still our headquarters, I heard him begin to whimper, and I thought, “Go back to sleep, you little shit.” He kept whimpering, like a golden retriever whose feelings you’ve hurt, but he wasn’t really crying, so I didn’t wake up all the way. I kept shushing him and thinking, “You whiny little bugger.” Finally, at least ten minutes later, with total hostility and resentment, I roused myself enough to reach over to rub his back, which sometimes helps him a little—and he wasn’t there! I turned on the light, and he wasn’t anywhere on the bed! I actually thought he’d been kidnapped; or left. It turns out he had somehow scooted off the bed and landed on the floor between the head of the futon and the wall and had just lain there whimpering. I don’t think I can capture in words how I felt at that moment.

  I couldn’t stop thinking of a day at the end of my father’s life when the brain cancer had progressed to the point where he was barely functioning. He was sometimes like an eager-to-please three-year-old, sometimes like the Rainman. He was in his early fifties. On this one day, I took him over the hill to do errands with me, and he just sat in the car totally spaced out while I ran into various stores. Everything was going okay except that it was so sad to see him in that kind of shape. Still, he was actually sort of cheerful and very very sweet. I remember we were listening to a live Pete Seeger tape. On the way home, I had to stop at the bank in Mill Valley, so I gave him a big candy bar and left him belted into the passenger seat and ran in. Of course there was a huge line, so every so often I’d run to the back of the bank and look through the window to make sure he was still there (as if someone were going to kidnap him). The last time I looked, he wasn’t there—the car was empty! I felt like adrenaline had been injected directly into my heart, and I turned to stare out the windows behind the tellers, just to collect my thoughts, and through them I saw this crazy old man pass by, his face smeared with chocolate, his blue jeans hanging down in back so you could see at least two inches of his butt, like a little boy’s. He was just walking on by, holding his candy bar, staring at the sky as if maybe his next operating instructions were up there.

  OCTOBER 2

  My mom and my Aunt Pat, my mom’s twin sister, came over this morning. They are short and slightly round, originally from Liverpool, ever so slightly Monty-Pythonish, and desperately in love with the baby. Both of them work, but they come over every chance they get, and they never stay too long. This is a greatly underrated quality. I think they see Sam as royalty and me as his governess. Pat’s grandchildren live in Canada and she doesn’t get to see them nearly enough, so she now officially considers Sam hers because she can get her mitts on him whenever she wants. Her husband, my Uncle Millard, is one godfather. (The other is Manning, who told me it would be a great blessing for me to have the baby and who took me in for the amnio.) Millard is tall and skinny and hilarious and Jewish and says that my people do not know anything about educating children, so he will handle things every step of the way. Millard makes it sound like Sam and I have only a few more weeks together before he begins his study of Hebrew at some yeshiva in Los Angeles. Millard will be a great godfather. He calls the baby Third Samuel.

  Mom and Pat take turns holding the baby for ten and fifteen minutes at a stretch, gazing and cooing, clucking about how much he seems to adore whichever one is holding him: “Oh, you love your Nana, don’t you, you love your Nana so much.” “No, no, no, come here to me, darling; oh, you love your Auntie Pat so much, don’t you, honey, hmm?” I lie on the futon with my eyes closed, letting their cooing and murmurs wash over me like a cool breeze.

  My mother lives about twenty minutes up the highway; Pat and Millard live on the other side of the mountain. I was raised around their four kids and the kids of my father’s sister, who also still lives in the county. We’re all still pretty much around, except for my older brother, who lives with his wife in Sacramento. I was afraid when I told Mom that I was going to have a baby that she would think, Oh God, my sluttina daughter’s knocked up, what will people say? But I think it was the happiest day of her life so far. That night she called every si
ngle person she has ever known to tell them the news. Some of those people say she called with tears of joy, and I think I have only seen her cry three or four times in my whole life. She even called a lot of people I have never heard of. She all but called the papers. I don’t know why I was afraid: she has been a screaming liberal her entire life. She and I have sometimes not known quite what to do with each other since she and Dad split up when I was twenty-one, but we’re doing okay these days. Of course, now I have a major bargaining chip in Sam: “Do this,” I say, “or you’ll never see the kid again.” So she makes me homemade soup. Sometimes we can’t communicate well, for no particular reason except that we’re mother and daughter and so different: I’m so flamboyant and confessional and eccentric; and she’s so essentially English, concerned with how things look to others. But she makes me these big pots of soup, and when she leaves sometimes I cry. I remember in Franny and Zooey, how Franny is lying around having a breakdown, starving herself, saying the Jesus prayer ten thousand times a day, trying to find something holy in the world, and Zooey finally explodes in complete exasperation, crying out to her that she should simply drink her mother’s soup—that her mother’s love for them consecrates it, makes it holy soup.

  Sam is so much bigger every day, so much more alert. It’s mind-boggling that my body knows how to churn out this milk that he is growing on. The thought of what my body would produce if my mind had anything to do with it gives me the chill. It’s just too horrible to think about. It might be something frogs could spawn in, but it wouldn’t be good for anything else. I’ve had the secret fear of all mothers that my milk is not good enough, that it is nothing more than sock water, water that socks have been soaking in, but Sam seems to be thriving even though he’s a pretty skinny little guy.

  I’m going to have an awards banquet for my body when all of this is over.

  Once Peg said that she knew God had given her this marvelous brain but that unfortunately he had put her mind inside of it. That pretty much says it for me.

  I wonder if it is normal for a mother to adore her baby so desperately and at the same time to think about choking him or throwing him down the stairs. It’s incredible to be this fucking tired and yet to have to go through the several hours of colic every night. It would be awful enough to deal with if you were feeling healthy and upbeat. It’s a bit much when you’re feeling like total dog shit. When he woke me up at 4:00 this morning to nurse, I felt like I was dying. I felt like getting up to pull down the shades and wave good-bye to all my people, but I was too tired.

  He’s losing his hair, but his acne is definitely better. My acne is about the same, but on the other hand, my hair isn’t falling out. At least that’s something. The way I’m feeling, it’s a miracle that my hair isn’t falling out in huge clumps and that I haven’t developed a clubfoot.

  There was some famous writer, I think it may have been Tolstoy, who said you must be wounded into writing but that you shouldn’t write until the wound has healed. But I just want to keep typing up these notes from the middle of the hurt, although maybe they won’t amount to anything.

  I am definitely aware of the huge wound that having a baby makes—in addition to the fact that your ya-ya gets so torn up. Before I got pregnant with Sam, I felt there wasn’t anything that could happen that would utterly destroy me. Terminal cancer would certainly be a setback, but I actually thought I could get through it. And I always felt that if something happened to Steve or Pammy, if they died, it would be over for me for a long time but that I’d somehow bounce back. In a very real sense, I felt that life could pretty much just hit me with her best shot, and if I lived, great, and if I died, well, then I could be with Dad and Jesus and not have to endure my erratic skin or George Bush any longer. But now I am fucked unto the Lord. Now there is something that could happen that I could not survive: I could lose Sam. I look down into his staggeringly lovely little face, and I can hardly breathe sometimes. He is all I have ever wanted, and my heart is so huge with love that I feel like it is about to go off. At the same time I feel that he has completely ruined my life, because I just didn’t used to care all that much.

  God, they sure shit a lot, don’t they? He pooped on my leg the other morning at church. Every diaper has that mustardy baby color to it. It’s almost all he does. It’s his life. Every twenty minutes, you hear him starting to go again. Pammy says he sounds like an aquarium.

  We went to see Sam’s doctor at Kaiser again, Dr. James, whom we love more than life itself. It turns out that my older brother, John, landscaped his garden years ago. So James likes us already because he likes his garden. You nonreligious types think, Well, that’s a funny little coincidence, but we Holy Rollers say that coincidence is just God working anonymously.

  I tried to get Sam to sleep all morning so he’d be in good shape for James, but it took two hours of rocking and nursing and dancing around to Joan Baez before he dropped off. I’ve heard that babies prefer higher tones. How did they find this out? Did they give them little questionnaires? Did they have specially trained social workers interview them in little baby-dolphin voices?

  OCTOBER 4

  Have I mentioned how much I hate expressing milk? I do it nearly every day so there will be bottles of milk on hand for whoever comes by to take care of Sam, but I hate the fucking breast pump. It’s the ultimate bovine humiliation, and it hurts, the suction is so strong. You feel plugged into a medieval milking machine that turns your poor little gumdrop nipples into purple slugs with the texture of rhinoceros hide. You sit there furtively pumping away, producing nebbishy little sprays on the side of the pump bottle until finally you’ve got half a cup of milk and nipples six inches long. It’s so incredibly unsexy and secretive, definitely not something you could ever mention on “Wheel of Fortune,” nothing you’d ever find in a Cosmo piece about ten ways to turn on your lover—crotchless underpants and a breast pump. I sit there in the kitchen miserably pumping away, feeling like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, pumping out a bottle of milk for the little infant Antichrist. Yesterday the refrigerator wasn’t working, so after I produced a small bottle of breast milk, I had to store it in a wide-mouth thermos filled with ice, like it was a severed finger that I was about to rush to the hospital to have sewn back on. It was too ridiculous for words.

  • • •

  He loves rocking in the rocking chair. He loves his pacifier. I tried his pacifier myself a few days ago, sat there sucking on it while I watched TV, and then I threw it down in fear, absolutely convinced, old addict that I am, that I’d get hooked immediately. By the end of the week I’d be abusing it, lying about how often I was using it, hiding it in the hamper.…

  Dr. James said Sam is wonderfully healthy, nine pounds, twelve ounces, twenty-one inches long, and he was like a Gerber baby on the examining table. Here I was telling James how terrible the colic was, what a difficult baby he is, and Sam was being Stevie Wonder. James said that if the colic was severe, he would prescribe a drug that has a little belladonna in it. It isn’t severe, it’s just three or four hours of kvetching every night, but I was tempted to lie to get my son some drugs. Still, I said, “No, no, I don’t think so—you see, I’m an addict—it’s been three years that I’ve been clean and sober, and I just don’t feel okay about the drugs,” and he said to me very patiently, very gently, “Oh, but you see, you wouldn’t be taking the drugs—you would give them to your baby.”

  There’s a part of me that doesn’t trust that I would give him the right amount. I’d give him a bit more. I have never once in my life taken the prescribed dosage. I even abuse the kitty’s ear-mite medicine. If it says to spray in two little blasts, I’ll spray in three. At least I don’t use it on myself—yet.

  OCTOBER 5

  We had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00 A.M. What a joke. I feel like thin glass, like I might crack. I was very rough changing him at 4:00 when he wouldn’t stop crying. I totally understand child abuse now. I really do. He was really sobbing and t
he gas pain was obviously unbearable, and I felt helpless and in a rage and so tired and fucked up that I felt I should be in a home.

  I can’t stop crying. I cried all night, along with the baby. Pammy came over and brought two sacks of groceries, and put clean sheets on our bed, and helped us both have a bath, and just in general talked me down as if I were on a window ledge. The exhaustion, the sleep deprivation, make me feel like I’m in the bamboo cage under cold water in The Deer Hunter. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this must be what it feels like to be a crack baby. It’s a little like PMS on mild psychedelics.

  Yesterday we took a fabulous Polaroid of Pammy and Sam. Pammy is holding him up under his arms, and he has this quintessentially alarmed but very game look on his face, as though he were some great little kid you were lowering into a seat on the Ferris wheel.

  OCTOBER 6, 3:45 A.M.

  He just slept for four hours in a row. It feels like a small miracle. We nursed for a long time, and I liked him so much.

  Then he was very wired and couldn’t go back to sleep. My vagina ached terribly. I kept trying to push his pacifier in, but his jaw was sort of gritted, the way you are when you’re coming down off cocaine. I just couldn’t get the pacifier in. I kept feeling like I was trying to push a bit into the mouth of a wild horse.

  OCTOBER 7

  You won’t believe this. I tell you, I will be out there on Market Street wearing a sandwich board for Jesus. Because the baby smiled. It was his first real smile that wasn’t from gas. Pammy has claimed non-gas smiles for days now, but I’ve always just rolled my eyes at her. Yesterday she announced that he was smiling, and I looked up derisively at the ceiling, and then I heard her cooing to him, “It’ll just be our little secret.”