To let the dogs out the back , I have to get on my knees and put on their dog collars, but then I have to put the baby down, and when I do that he cries. The dogs look at me and pace, and pace and look at me.

To let the dogs out the front, I have to hold two leashes, but I can’t do that and also hold a baby.

To let the dogs back inside, I have to get a bowl of warm water and dip eight paws to clean off the Spring mud, which means the baby cries for many minutes. Real tears, tongue curled, face almost purple.

To feed the baby, I have to eat, but it seems that just as soon as I’m famished, he’s also hungry, and then he’s crying. Everything I want to eat takes too long to make, but if I eat only jelly beans like I’ve been doing lately, then he’s not going to have the milk he needs to grow.

He needs his diapers washed, definitely, but in order to wash them, I have to go downstairs, then put him down somewhere where the dogs won’t hurt him. But it’s so dirty in the laundry room, and besides, when I put him down he cries. And there is so much other laundry to do, and there is a mountain of clean laundry upstairs that someone needs to fold. But if I put him down to fold it, he cries.

To feed the family, I have to stir items in a bowl, which takes two hands, but I only have one. I can’t stand the look of a teenager who has been waiting for dinner eagerly all day to learn that we’re having leftovers, but in order to have a new meal I have to get to the store, but driving to the store means the baby cries. The dogs pace and look at me beseechingly.

Once I sit down to nurse, I can do something besides juggling counteracting logistics, I tell myself. I can read, or I can write with one hand. But when he latches, there is this rush of hormones that knocks the wind out of me every time. I feel dizzy and a little sick to my stomach, and with that comes an almost unbearable thirst. Then I get tired, a symptom of that rush of hormones, so tired and brain dead. I remember I once asked a woman who had a baby what it was like. She’s much older than I am, and she’s a poet. Brain numbing, she told me. I’ve remembered that for ten years, and now I understand. It literally makes my brain feel numb to nurse him so many hours a day, all day. I sit down and think I have time for myself, but then I disappear to myself and want only to sleep. I see why so many new moms are on Facebook. Status updates and browsing websites are about all I can muster with one free hand and a quarter of a brain.

I get half an hour a day that is set aside for me to write without a baby attached to me, but in order to have that half an hour, I need to pump milk for Steve to feed the baby. But in order to pump, I need someone to hold the baby. While I pump he gets hungry, so Steve feeds him a bottle. Then, no bottle to spare, I get my writing time with the knowledge that if the baby cries, I’m on duty again. The baby rarely lasts half an hour without crying for food these days. I can get fifteen minutes at a time to write.

In order for me to get time to write when no one else is home, the baby has to be asleep. But in order to get him to sleep, I either have to be holding him nursing him, which means I have no hands and no brain, or I have to lie down with him, which means I inevitably fall asleep. If I don’t fall asleep, I get up so very slowly and the baby lasts maybe five minutes before he realizes that he’s alone. Then there’s that crying sound again.

And all this difficulty, all these moments of feeling so bored of myself — the catch 22 — I have to experience it in order to feel this new kind of love. This ever-evolving beauty.

March 18th, 2010 | Category: apparent | Comments (1)

I read Lorrie’s Moore’s newest fiction,  A Gate at the Stairs, and for the first half I was enthralled. Completely, uncritically enthralled. I wish I could be her in some ways, because she must have the coolest brain to be able to write the way that she does. She has so many earthly details — this contemporary world with a stream of conscious of coca-cola cans and flowers and funny facts all mixed up in one fast-thinking but slow-talking narrator. I can’t be as funny as Lorrie Moore, nor as articulate, nor as quirky or free to write whatever pops into my head. There is certain genius that can see the world that way.

But she’s a short-story writer, and I think the novel is clumsy in its plot and character development. Like a short story, the metaphors are more conspicuous throughout, but they felt heavy-handed to me. The plot overall, after getting halfway through, really stopped moving. There was a point where I really thought the book must be over — it felt like big stuff all happened at once, then we extracted ourselves from the narrator and floated away as if we were leaving the book — we saw the world with her eyes, but it didn’t feel like we were in her anymore for some reason. But then we were plunged back into more plot frenzy that didn’t feel earned. I felt detached from what the narrator was going through, and she was going through a lot surrounding 9/11. I found myself unable to feel for her or care for her well being.

Then the book was over and I felt used. I felt like I had fallen in love and then learned halfway through that it was an unwise investment. It left me in a bad mood, even, for over a day. But if I were to open the book and turn to one page or another, any page at all, I could find some idiosyncratic detail that makes me want to keep the book on my shelf. She captures a life experience in the details, just not in the authentic movement through time.

March 16th, 2010 | Category: book | Leave a comment

As part of a random ongoing cooking relationship with a few of my friends from the Vermont Studio Center, I set to work making Christine’s lemon bundt cake. I really feel like I was accidentally included in this group, like I was mistaken for another pregnant woman at some point, because I’m not exactly a baker. Christine showed us a photograph of her bundt cake: perfect shape, lemons so yellow tucked in the cavernous center of the bundt shape.

I didn’t have a bundt pan. I was holding a baby and I couldn’t also carry the Cuisinart to my station in the kitchen, so I tried to blend ingredients with a spatula. I didn’t have enough lemon juice. The baby started crying. I stopped measuring and started throwing. Some egg shells fell into the batter. The oven wasn’t fully preheated: I threw the batter in the bread pan into the oven anyway. I forgot to set the timer. When it came out of the oven, the rusty bread pan left cancerous silver nonstick flakes all over the bottom of the cake, which Steve scraped off while I nursed the baby.

My friend Jennifer invited me to her house for dinner and I said I’d bring a bundt cake. She said I couldn’t, I had a new baby. I said it was so easy! It was! Christine’s recipe had no order — you gathered the simple ingredients and threw them all in the blender at once, then poured that into the pan, and voila!

The first cake was gone too fast. Steve and I each had two slices while we watched a movie that night. Rosie ate some when she came home from her activity, and it’s possible she ate some in the middle of the night, and then we all had some for breakfast. It’s lemon, right? It’s not chocolate. I could have poured them into muffin pans and called them muffins, right? Baked goods aren’t safe at our house, which is why I rarely make them. The most boring cookies will be gone before the oven’s cooled. Steve asked that, while I was making one for Jennifer, could I double the recipe and make one for him, too?

So I went to the store with the baby and bought more lemon juice and confectioner’s sugar and eggs. I bought a real bundt pan for $26.99 at ACE– so expensive! The baby was quiet while I bought the bundt pan, but he cried inconsolably at the grocery store while I raced through the aisles. I wanted to go home and take a bath. I wanted a drink. That crying is the most heartbreaking, sanity-destroying sound, especially while driving when there’s nothing I can do.

I made double the batter and preheated the oven. But how do you butter a bundt pan? It has so, so many crevices. I did my best with crisco and a paper towel, but really the pan looked so nonstick to begin with. I poured half of the batter in the bundt pan, put it in the oven with a timer, cleaned up the kitchen, asked Steve if he could take the cake out when the timer went off, then I jumped in the shower.

When I came out of the shower, the cake was destroyed. I hadn’t made the pan nonstick enough and Steve, trying to be helpful, had tried to take the cake out of its mold and it emerged in pieces. Thinking that maybe it was because he hadn’t let it cool enough, he washed the pan, didn’t nonstick it, and poured the rest of the batter in. That second one, surprise, came out in pieces, too.

I went back to the store to buy nonstick spray–a genius idea–and more sugar and eggs and lemon juice. I made the batter again. I sprayed that pan until it dripped with oil. Within an hour, the cake slid right out, a perfectly browned empty-volcano shape.

Four bundt cakes sitting in our house in one weekend. And a husband, and a nursing wife, and a teenager and her food-loving friend — who sat next to the cakes, right up on the counter, and dug in — and a Jack. And, apparently, two hungry cats, who got blamed the next day by the teenager for some suspected midnight snacking on the third cake. The second cake was unabashedly eaten by Jack, who first used a fork and then just his hands. At first it was fun — we never have baked goods in the house, let alone four cakes in two days, and we’re so sensible with food all the time that it felt like some sort of holiday, or like a shopping spree, and things have been a little tense sometimes with a new baby and his sleep-deprived parents — but after I said enough and he went back for more, the game was over. And then to wake up to the whole cake gone, every last lemony crumb, it definitely wasn’t a holiday anymore.

Only one cake was eaten on dessert plates with forks, the fourth one, at Jennifer’s house. Or at least I think so. I had to leave to get home to the baby just as it was being served.

March 16th, 2010 | Category: house | Leave a comment

The flower on the base of the nipple light.
His belly button filled with lint.
The nipple cracked like glass.
From which point hang the crystals.
Every piece of the chandelier.
The hot pink cat collar and its encircling spikes of blue-black.
Plastic white pearl lid.
Polyethylene blue with water inside.
Now no water inside.
Fuchsia pattern, tiny on the bedspread.
Black and brown dog dirt on the fitted sheet like fleas.
Black outline and black mobius of two hair bands.
The dog nose painted on the nightlight.
The dog nose holes.
All the pewter ones and one gold stamen porcelain drawer knob.
The brushed nickel doorknob.
Ugly white plastic curtain rings along the curtain rod.
Beat brown leather dog collar
around a dog neck, thick.
The fan encasing like tree rings.
A diamond.
A new boy asleep on the dirty fitted sheet,
eyes closed: two ohs, ohs.

March 13th, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment

He seems to learn in waves. As in a new connection in his brain is made in a spark, a quick wave forward, and then it recedes and we wait to see that connection again. We saw him smile days before he became a regular smiler, but it was as if he made that connection, had to step back and absorb it into his system, then come forward with that connection again. The same with language: he’ll be talking away and then make a new sound, move his mouth in a way I’ve not ever seen him do before, and I’ll be sure that we’re in a new phase, and then that sound will not return for some time — and now here it is again.

And this, in the sixth week when I was spiraling down, six weeks of pain while nursing almost every hour, six weeks of intermittent sleep, it felt like suddenly his spirit shot forward to show me that he was in there, that this was worth it:

He has been eyes closed or eyes blurry, and now he sees. He stares into something near my eyes when he drinks. And this isn’t a day of this or two days it is each hour of each day everyday for one week and then two and then six and counting, and then suddenly he is drinking and looks up, looks directly in my eyes, and his arm shoots up and touches my face and he holds it there, his eyes right on me, he holds his hand on my face. The greatest love affair of your life. And you thought sex was intimate, someone said to me after her son was born. I am left shy. I kiss his hand. I kiss it again. I don’t know what to do, how to tell him without scaring him that I am here, I am made of skin and bone like he is, both of us made of the same material. He holds his arm up for a long time. My arm would have been tired by this point, almost a minute. Then he returns to drinking. His eyes are blue.

Nine weeks now. I’ve been waiting for that moment again, and I can tell we’re getting closer. He stares at me perfectly and solemnly. He looks completely wise and completely unknowing. His hands open and close and touch my skin and hold my shirt as he drinks. There is no other touch like this.

March 12th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

There is awkwardness in dealing with a hungry baby in public in Michigan. When the baby is hungry, he cannot wait–he will cry until he chokes on his own tears. And I am not in love with hiding in the bathroom to feed him. I already can’t feed him when I drive, or even really when I’m sitting next to him in the car. If I want to have a relatively smooth time feeding him in public, I have to prepare by pumping at least two bottles in advance, which usually doesn’t happen. And if I did that every single time I went out, I would never leave the house. As it is, I get traumatized each time he cries–screams, howls, chokes–in the backseat while I drive. So if he’s hungry and we’re at a restaurant, I’m going to feed him, which means I’m going to unbutton my shirt in public, and I’ve never done that before now. I have a bebe au lait nursing cover, which has come in handy so far twice–once at a restaurant, and once when I didn’t feel like exposing myself while in the company of a 75-year-old friend. In church twice I left and found a lonely chair in the hallway because I wasn’t sure how indecent it might seem to hear intense sucking sounds while people are trying to pray.

There are two opposing morals: what is best for the baby, and what is proper. I could be kicked out of an establishment for breastfeeding my baby in public in Michigan, but the World Health Organization recommends that I breastfeed my baby until he’s at least two years old. I don’t know how to bridge these two ideals, and it seems unfair. I remember in Spain seeing a woman breastfeed her baby on the beach, topless. But I have not seen more than two women breastfeed her baby in public in America in my lifetime.

In Canada, women are given a year’s paid leave from their jobs to raise their babies. I spoke to a woman recently who lived in Toronto for many years, and she said that the whole first year of a baby’s life is so much different in Canada. Women are more likely to breastfeed for a full year because they aren’t forced to go back to work to provide for the family that they have to leave. Women also can easily ask one another, So what do you do? because they haven’t had to decide between their career and their family. Breast pumps, as the following New Yorker article explains, are a sad compromise. The baby gets his mother’s milk, but he doesn’t get his mother.

I read this article this morning in a January New Yorker: Baby Food, by Jill Lepore:

There are some new rules governing what used to be called “mother’s milk,” or “breast milk,” including one about what to call it when it’s no longer in a mother’s breast. A term, then, nomenclatural: “expressed human milk” is milk that has been pressed, squeezed, or sucked out of a woman’s breast by hand or by machine and stored in a bottle or, for freezing, in a plastic bag secured with a twist tie. Matters, regulatory: Can a woman carry containers of her own milk on an airplane? Before the summer of 2007, not more than three ounces, because the Transportation Security Administration classed human milk with shampoo, toothpaste, and Gatorade, until a Minneapolis woman heading home after a business trip was reduced to tears when a security guard at LaGuardia poured a two-day supply of her milk into a garbage bin. Dr. Ruth Lawrence, of the breast-feeding committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, promptly told the press, “She needs every drop of that precious golden fluid for her baby”; lactivists, who often stage “nurse-ins,” sent petitions; and the T.S.A. eventually reclassified human milk as “liquid medication.” Can a woman sell her milk on eBay? It has been done, and, so far, with no more consequence than the opprobrium of the blogosphere, at least until the F.D.A. decides to tackle this one. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, however, does provide a fact sheet on “What to Do If an Infant or Child Is Mistakenly Fed Another Woman’s Expressed Breast Milk,” which can happen at day-care centers where fridges are full of bags of milk, labelled in smudgeable ink. (The C.D.C. advises that a switch “should be treated just as if an accidental exposure to other bodily fluids had occurred.”) During a nine-hour exam, can a woman take a break to express the milk uncomfortably filling her breasts? No, because the Americans with Disabilities Act does not consider lactation to be a disability.   [...]

March 10th, 2010 | Category: apparent | Leave a comment

In the early hours after Henry was born, a midwife attending us asked what we’d be doing about birth control–as if I were a baby-crazy addict who couldn’t wait to go through that painful labor again, as if it were her job to stop me. She had no idea who we were. He’s an IVF baby, I said. She said Oh in this way that seemed emotional and shut her up quickly. I need to find a better way to word it without labeling my baby. He’s a product of IVF doesn’t sound right, either.

At a five-week follow-up visit, I saw the first midwife I saw after finally getting pregnant. At that point so many months ago, I was emotional — a train wreck, perhaps. She marked on my file that I was depressed and I was talked to a little more cautiously than was probably necessary after that. We had just been through a war to get to zero, to get to this point where most people are just beginning their baby journey. When I talked about IVF then it was with gruffness in my voice and tears in my eyes. So at this recent visit it was her again, and she asked me what I was doing about birth control. I looked at her quizzically. We had to do IVF, I told her quietly.

Then at an eight-week follow-up visit, she asked me again. Henry had just been crying in the car and crying in the waiting room. When they called my name in the waiting room, I was nursing him and had to unlatch him and hold him, now crying, while also holding the car seat, his hat, my hat, my winter coat, his blanket, and the diaper bag — and the nurse just stared at me while I gathered all this stuff with my baby crying in my left ear. So when the midwife asked me what I was doing about birth control this time, after all the other times, after all this, I started crying. Not so much because it’s an emotional topic, though obviously it is, but because, despite my trumpeting the midwives vs. the doctors in this whole fight about how best to deliver my baby, the service has been, from the very beginning right to the end, anything but personal.

Rosie was born with a midwife at home fifteen years ago in the tiny apartment that Steve and Rosie’s mom shared so long ago. Her midwife goes to our church so we see her from time to time. When Henry was born, Rosie’s midwife came to our door with soup — one jar to eat that night, and a jar to freeze for later. She came to fawn over Rosie’s brother, to welcome a new family member, to give her blessings after all these years. Now that’s service.

March 9th, 2010 | Category: the baby thing | Comments (1)

Essay in the Boston Review: Smothered to Smithereens: the poetics of motherhood, by Stephen Burt.

…

To portray life with small children—so it seemed to Mayer and Notley, to Owen, and for that matter to Olds—one had to break just the standards of form, of closure, of compactness, that Plath (even in Ariel) worked to retain. One had to show language and time as unfixed, uncertain, as in the speech of preliterate children, or in the day-to-day, hour-to-hour reschedulings that children (even older ones, and even given quality day care) require. A poet had to aspire less to immortality than to immediacy, to turn away from made things and toward processes, toward some sense of poems as always—uneasily—shared. Owen called one poem “There Are Too Many of Me.” Notley’s “Three Strolls” encompassed the bleariness, the blurry sense of self, the cuteness, the resistance to cuteness, the sense of confinement, the infinite expectations, and the stretched-out sense of time: “how much of what goes on gets stopped & started.”

…

March 8th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Comments (1)

March 8th, 2010 | Category: written | Leave a comment