I brought Henry on the plane and he was sleeping in his sling. People tsked with love for a sweet baby. I like to start him off this quiet to trick people, I laughed to the stewardess when we walked on. We all laughed. He’d had three plane rides before this one and all of them were relatively great. We got to our seats and I told the 6′5″ man in the aisle seat that our seats were beside his — me, my baby, and my 6′3″ husband were going to squish in beside him. This is gonna be hell, Steve said to the man. Then laughed and said, just kidding, he’s a good baby.

The first ten minutes Henry was calm. Then I gave him to Steve and he started kicking and making noise. It was okay, it was cute. He’d been so quiet the past few days, it was good to see him animated and comfortable. But then it looked like he was trying to squirm out of his clothes, so Steve politely asked the man beside him to stand up so that Steve could take Henry to the lavatory to change his diaper. This was okay. They came back and Henry was okay.

Then Henry very suddenly wasn’t okay. I tried to nurse him and he wouldn’t have it. I tried the other side and he wouldn’t have it. He was making noise of upset, but it was still manageable. But then he started pouting and his face started turning red. He only pouts when it’s going to get really bad, when he’s really upset.

Was it my let-d0wn? That happens sometimes when I’m in public and stressed. It could have been that, he was trying to drink and nothing was coming and maybe the air pressure was hurting his ears or stomach — the air pressure hurts my own stomach, so maybe so — and then he started really crying. Uncontrollable, inconsolable. The plane, they announced, was starting to descend, we needed to stay in our seats.

Uncontrollable, inconsolable.

I tried nursing again and again. Maybe this, maybe that. Shake him, jig him, shush into his ear. This breast, the other breast. This breast, the other breast. Think calm thoughts to bring on the let-down. Breathe. Picture the flowers of the milk ducts. Picture the baby drinking. Give him to Steve. Hold him on the left side, hold him on the right side. Hold him upright, hold him lying down. Turn him to face his face, turn him to face the window. Raise him up in the air. Turn him to face me. Smile at him. Look concerned. Shush into his ear. Sing that song he liked once into his ear. Sing that song he liked once while the other of us is singing Old McDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o. And on that farm he had a rooster, e-i-e-i-o. With a moo here. Moo, moo, moo, moo. I think he likes the moos. Moo, moo, moooo, a shudder of moos. Steve gives him to me. I try to nurse him, right side, left side. Old McDonald  had a farm. Boo. I try the pacifier and he turns away. I try again, he turns away. I blow into his hair to see if maybe he’s hot and needs to cool down. Blowing air, his hair moving, still crying. All this time still crying. Real tears. Face in a pout, face red, nasal definite moaning. Howling. Uncontrollable, inconsolable howling. The plane is still descending. I want it to crash. I want to see the ground. I want to muffle the crying. I smile, I look concerned, I look away. Boo. Boo. Mooooooo. Henry? Henry! Buddy, shush. What’s wrong? What can I do? Left breast, right breast. He turns his head away. He seems to like the plstic cup. He looks at it without crying. He tries to drink from it but it’s empty. He starts crying. Tap on the cup, he seems to like that maybe. Steve flicks his thumb against it. More nasal howling. Red-faced. I don’t dare look up at everyone. I try to nurse him, left breast right breast. He pushes away. I give him my water bottle. He tries to drink from the black plastic cap. He drinks, he’s quiet while he drinks. Water  from the airport water fountain fills his mouth and dribbles out. He seems to want more. We do this again and again, and he gets increasingly irritated, making sour faces at the taste. Then he’s howling again, his mouth in a severe pout, his face red. The plane is on the ground, and we are sitting on the tarmac for one minute, two, three, four, five, ten minutes sitting on the tarmac with the air off while Henry screams. Everyone is very quiet. There’s only one other kid on this flight and he’s older and quiet. I try to nurse Henry, left side right side. I try to burp him. I try the water again. For a minute he is quiet when I stick a dirty finger in his mouth and it presses against his gums. Then the seatbelt sign comes off and people stand to go. Slowly I think I see people leave the plane — I’m not sure anymore if this is really happening. More tears. That look of agony on my baby’s face. I shush into his ear. I blow onto his hair to cool him down. It’s definitely hot in here. People are not moving fast enough. I jig him left to right, right to left. I bounce him up and down. I look away. I sing into his ear, three blind mice, three blind mice. He’s not looking at me. He’s hasn’t been able to look in my eyes for ten minutes, he’s so far inside his tears. It’s our turn to go. I stand up and suddenly Henry is quiet. I walk off the plane and he is quiet the whole way. I put him in his sling and nurse him as we walk and he instantly falls asleep.

How are you? a woman asked the man in front of us when we got off the plane.

Good now, he said.

For the rest of the night the world seemed dangerous. Everything Steve said sounded wrong, like it was going to hurt me. The sky looked ominous. I didn’t trust drivers. I screamed at a woman who didn’t put on her turning signal. At this moment, I never want to fly again.

April 30th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

(The thing is, we’ve been so incredibly happy the past fews weeks. This boy is so good, so alive and beautiful. He smiles and he studies our faces, he sleeps when I sleep and more, he only wakes twice at night to eat, he is calm and aware, he cries rarely. I could list some problems we’re having, because there are always problems, but I’d have to think hard to name them, they’re not taking up any room in the forefront of my brain. I love this boy profoundly. It’s the most amazing feeling.)

April 26th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

April 25th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

April 23rd, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The teenage girl wants to believe in god.
My enormous heart, my wily my rope my upset my tender my bleep my love.
How many words have ohs and apostrophes:
the midwife checked her watch and announced the time, eight o’clock.
Lights, yellow beams and fluorescent tubes here
because the outskirts, right around the rim of this process is pain,
there is nothing sacred about a hospital.
Mama. A snow storm coming.
The animal: most babies are born at night.
Someone turned off the fluorescent lights.
Still unformed. Brand new and ancient.
What did I say, I don’t know. Probably hi. Hi, hi little one.
His lungs were clear: he howled.
The midwife made a whooping sound, he slipped slippery.
A tight rectangle of a human, dark and wet.
When he was born. Tell me what happened, go through it with me.
Who comes from and evolves into god, gets absorbed into light.
We keep moving there, spiraling up toward there.
Baby eyelids lavender.
A boy with a transparent face and no nightmares yet.
A glass of water. My boy on a silk-rimmed planet.

April 21st, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The envelopes fill with spider webs.
If I could have seen. If I. The sentence obscured with leaves.
We thought we were safe in the small blue house.

Three bicycles gone, the stock market down,
spiders found a way through glass.
You watch. You maintain a mason jar of blame.

If I could have not fallen. If I.
Skin cracked like glass, bright red-orange blood
seeps out the vessel of my knee.

The jars stolen. At night my human dreams
get choked, spider webs collecting weight around our arms.
Spider web blankets clot the sorry gap between our arms.

Our breath is a vacuum. Our lungs are bicycles.
This sentence contains all the letters to spell I’m sorry
but you are asleep breathing in webs where my mouth once was.

April 20th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Not even for food, just for sport the baby rabbits die.
One brain is gone and the ears with it,
the other two baby rabbit bodies lie sprawled intact and still.
Bunnies. Lucky the cat is calm propped
outside our bedroom door, his paws sooted.
I want to punish him. I want God to be kind.
Nature is cruel. I shouldn’t be fooled by the hyacinths
and the daffodils: yellow is not equal to hope.
The dead bunnies and the daffodils side by side.
Steve is pouring hydrogen peroxide on the entrance rug.
I change the baby’s diaper, cooing, laughing, dulled.
The bunny without the head had the softest fur.
Short, fine, each piece too small to draw. The baby sighed.
The older boy saw the rabbit before we woke
and said at breakfast that he was fascinated.
He locked the dogs in his bedroom to keep the carnage intact.
I don’t want the baby to grow up to love death, too.
I have to keep on learning how to forgive.
The baby rabbit fur was softer than my baby’s skin.

April 18th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

(It seems that with the pollen I am also allergic to poetry at the moment. I’m okay about that. One goes through a struggle to reach a higher level of understanding. Though it’s still frustrating. So I will most likely disobey copyright laws, though hopefully in the name of good, to post this poem that lives in me a lot these days. Linda Gregerson is brilliant in her tone, her mix of high and low language, the quotidian and the theatrical, past and present, and at ripping my heart out. [The lines below should be indented -- every second line indented two tabs and every third line indented one tab, but my wordpress frustratingly won't let that formatting stick.])

Target

by Linda Gregerson

—

1.

What is, says the chorus, this human
desire —
do you know the part I’m

talking about? What is this
human
desire for children? Medea

has just left the stage
(ab-scaena,
said my friend, ob-

scene) to brood on her terrible work.
His ety-
mology is false, I’ve looked it up,

but my friend wasn’t thinking
of children
in any case. What

says the mother, for all
her books,
who bathes the newborn child

in the sink, is sick
with fear
for the pulse in the scalp, the foot

still flexed as it was in the womb
and peeling
from the amnion. They have no death

in them yet, you see, their very excrement
is sweet,
they have no death but what’s implied

in the porcelain rim, the drain
with its food scraps,
the outlet, the sponge, the thousand

mortal dangers in the kitchen drawer.
I’d sometimes feel,
with the child in my arms,

as I’ve felt looking down on the live
third rail.
What is this human desire

for children? They just make a bigger
target
for the anger of the gods.

2.

The thing she can’t be rid of is that
no one
would believe her. Not the uniformed

policeman at the edge of town (and surely
he knew her?
the wildest boast of the census

could scarcely have amounted to
a decent
row of pews on Christmas Eve),

nor her own forbidding father nor
good Emma
at the kitchen sink. Months later

at the jury trial,
the word
of a nine-year-old girl would suddenly

count. Late morning
on the third
of May in 1929

(the other crash was yet to come),
no seam
of comprehension in the ordered world,

no help from the mild
spring sky,
my nine-year-old mother ran at last

to the dead girl’s house and de-
livered
her burden of blight directly. Arrow

unwilling, whoever took pity
on you?
The rest replays in borrowed

light: the courtroom in Chicago with its
unswept floors,
two girls with their handfuls

of violets. And one moving one way while the car
bore down
and one, my mother, the other.

3.

For those who think, as he did once,
that in-
advertent suffering is the worst of it here,

in the range between hating thy neighbor
and destruction
on a global scale, the middle range,

where people live, the range
from the hills,
the journalist describes his con-

versation with a captured Serb.
The boy –
the man? — was twenty-two.

I am happy, he said. He must
have been asked
what he hoped for or thought

while he lay in the high half-light with his
gun,
a sniper in the frozen hills whose

angle on the heart and hearth’s acute.
I am happy,
he said, to kill a child crossing

the street with his mother.
Now something
has been altered in the transit

from language to language; this isn’t
exactly
the way we speak. Offstage,

obscene, the god-from-a-machine
at work.
And circuitry whose other name

is “happy”: coincident
access
of never-on-this-good-green-earth

and ground-from-which-we-start.
I am happy
to kill a child crossing the street with his mother.

There is something so fantastic on the mother’s face.

April 17th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

It was Henry’s sixth day of life and we were waiting to hear from our agent to see if the revision of our manuscript was adequate. We’d been working on it with her for two years. She had asked us to send it to her on the last day of October and said she’d respond that weekend, but no response. We wrote to ask why after a week, and no response. Then a belated response in December — her intern was reading it for her, she said. Then no response, so we piped in again. Now it was January and we weren’t hearing much and fearing the worst.

Meanwhile, we didn’t yet know that Henry didn’t tolerate my drinking milk. I started the day with a decaf peppermint mocha latte from Starbucks — a splurge to tolerate this lovely but trying new life phase. Rosie went to school. A friend of hours came over to meet Henry in exchange for dropping off dinner that we needed only to heat up when the time came. The day was going fine. Blissful, in fact. A lactation specialist came over — the first in what would be a line of six of them through the next month. We were all so new. I had no idea that the pain I was experiencing nursing was abnormal. The boy was light as a kitten. Our house was a mess. The lactation specialist gave me a new set of tools and hope that I could get through this. She laughed with us at the nurse the day before who had incorrectly told us that breasts are emptied after ten minutes of nursing. They are in fact never empty. She watched as I nursed Henry and he drew blood, and he nursed and nursed, ten minutes, twenty, thirty, forty. She told me to take him off.

We walked around for a little, but Henry was crying. I asked if I should nurse him again, but the lactation specialist said that he was full. Henry cried on repeat. We rushed her out the door, Steve closed it and turned to me. Feed him. I agreed. Who knows what this baby needs, and our guess is certainly better than a stranger’s. I bled through nursing for what was probably the seventh time since the sun had risen. One hour, two hours. After three hours he still wasn’t satiated. Each time I took him off he’d cry. He wasn’t sleeping. He hadn’t slept for eight hours, and then for twelve hours. I was raw.

Rosie was having a hard day at school. Her mother was rightfully mad about something she’d done, and her stepfather called her about it in the middle of school. And she had worked very hard on a paper for her difficult English class and she found out at lunch that it had disappeared from her computer and she was going to have to rewrite it. She cried in the bathroom.

Our friends down the street were planning to come over at six and they kept rescheduling, 6:30 and then 7. We were trying to coordinate it around Rosie’s swim schedule and dinner. Evening came at last, the sun setting and the baby still crying inconsolably. Steve picked Rosie up from school with disappointment in his voice about what she had done, having heard it from Rosie’s stepfather.

When they pulled in the driveway, Henry was crying still, and now Rosie was crying. Our friends still weren’t here. Steve kept saying to me that we should cancel, but I didn’t want to. They were our friends, they could see us a mess, and they deserved to see the new baby they had been rooting for all this time.

I checked my email. Our agent had finally written us. Her intern had read our manuscript and hated it –no, she hated me. Copied into the email was her intern’s feedback, which didn’t read so much as a review or evaluation but as a character assassination against me. There with my broken body and my sleepless mind and crying new baby, I read about how selfish I sounded and how I was trying too hard to be a writer. Our agent dropped us.

It was getting late. Henry was still crying. I had ice packs in my bra and an ice pack in my underwear. I swallowed my twelfth ibuprofen that day. Rosie had returned to her senses and was talking to us about her horrible day. I feel like I’m letting Henry down, she said, and began to cry again. We reassured her otherwise. But I felt that way, too. All my Dr. Sears-inspired hopes that this baby wouldn’t cry were already long gone by this sixth day.

Figuring our friends would just have to watch us eat at this point, I started heating up dinner. I went downstairs for something and saw that a dog had puked on the rug. I tried unsuccessfully to clean it up while holding a newborn baby with no head control. Let’s cancel. I said to Steve. I just wanted to hide. Steve called our friends just as they were ringing our doorbell.

They walked in the door expecting to see a new family portrait of bliss, but the food was starting to burn and Henry was gnawing on my finger making sounds of pain. My friend asked to hold Henry and I nearly threw him to her, forgetting in my anxiety that I was holding a baby and not a broken radio.

For an hour our friends stayed while our food cooled and Rosie stayed sad in her room and Henry suckled my finger and I sat unshowered with all my ice packs and puke dried in the rug and my dreams of this book I’ve worked on for four years felt squished by an intern who said I was as selfish, I quote, as Jessica Simpson.

I can only write all this because it took me months to write our agent back in a way that let go of her kindly. And as soon as I did, I sent the manuscript out again and immediately found the agent for us, the one who was probably a better fit from the start. So we’re okay now. And I don’t drink dairy. And Henry is asleep on my lap. And Rosie is strong, so strong and good.

April 15th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (2)