I've tried to tell this story a bunch of times. This will be my last try, here in my garden with Moana, Lucky, Abigail and Boomerang, each naked except for Boomerang, who is cinched into a blue plastic saddle. The "garden" hardly merits the word by the standards of the house-proud resource-hoarding whites I must count myself among. My garden is mostly rock and dirt, wild, needless as Moana with so many sticks in her hair. Lucky and Abigail are Netflix properties. They have no sticks in their hair, for my daughter gave them butch haircuts last time she was here.
The story starts at some point in my daughter's first year, the point perhaps at which I became aware of my inability to feel any feelings beyond those set to music by the Walt Disney Company. I'd banned Disney, its toxic messages and bankrupt values, forbid it my child long before conceiving her. Yet there I was listening to the Moana soundtrack a dozen times a day and digging it, screening the film as often as my infant's budding synapses could bear. No other text moved me as much, with the exception perhaps of Charlotte's Web, particularly the chapter called "Escape," in which Wilbur briefly breaks out of his pen and the Goose, soon to be yoked unmerrily to her eggs, urges him yonder.
. . . the woods, the woods! They'll never-never-never catch you in the woods!
Or maybe it starts before then. Like I said, I've tried to tell it a bunch of times. Each try takes me further from whatever it is I'm after. I finish on an alien shore with a raft of needs, reminded once again that books heal people all the time, just not usually the people who write them. I promise to need nothing from this last try. It's only a yarn for the dolls.
It starts with my husband, Theo. (I've disguised his name because he innocent.)
It starts with Theo in a waiting room reading over my shoulder.
1. Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things.
a.Β As much as I ever did.
b.Β Not quite as much now.
c.Β Not so much now.
d.Β Not at all.
2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.
a.Β As much as I ever did.
b.Β Not quite as much now.
c.Β Not so much now.
d.Β Not at all.
"That's kind of evasive," Theo says. "'As much as I ever did.'"
"Do you think I'm being dishonest?"
"No, but . . ."
"But what, Theo?"
The baby squawks. I rock the car seat with my foot.
"I'm just saying a diagnostic like this shouldn't be multiple choice," Theo says. "It should be short answer. Or essay. Don't you think?"
"a. As much as I ever did."
Ten-Item Edinburgh Post-Natal Depression Scale
1.Β Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things.
We tried to find you a nickname in utero but nothing fit so well as the ones we had for your father's scrotum and penis, your brothers Krang and Wangston Hughes.
An app dinged weekly with developmental progress and fruit analogies. Some weeks I wrote my own.
This week your baby is the size of a genetically modified micropeach, which itself is about the size of a red globe grape. Your baby's earholes are migrating this week. Your baby can hear you and may already be disappointed by what it hears.
This week your baby is the size of a medjool date dropped from the palm and left to soften in the dust. Your baby is now developing reflexes like lashing out and protecting its soft places. It is also developing paradoxes, and an attraction to the things that harm it.
This week your baby is the size of a navel orange spiked with cloves and hung by a light blue ribbon on the doorknob of a friend's guest bathroom. Your baby is developing methods of self-defeat this week, among them boredom, urgency, and nostalgia. It may even be besieged by ennui!
Your baby has begun to dream, though it dreams only of steady heartbeats and briny fluid.
2. I have looked forward with enjoyment to things.
Pain-free bowel movements, sushi, limitless beer and pot brownies, daycare, prestige television events, everyone going home.
My sister visits and asks how much a doula costs. Does a person really need one?
No, I tell her, not if you have an older woman in your life who is helpful, trusted, up to date on the latest evidence-based best practices and shares your birth politics, someone who is not all judgmental, won't project her insecurities onto you, is respectful of your boundaries and your beliefs and those of your spouse, carries no emotional baggage or unresolved tensions, no submerged resentment, no open wounds, no helicoptering, no neglect, no library of backhanded compliments, no bequeathed body issues, no treadmill of jealousy and ingratitude, no internalized misogyny, no gaslighting, no minimizing, no apology debt, no I'm sorry you feel that way, no I'm sorry you misunderstood me, no beauty must suffer, no don't eat with your eyes, no I cut the ends off the roast because you did / I did it to fit the pan.
"That's a steal," Lise says. "Seven-hundred and fifty dollars for the mother you wish you had."
3. I have felt scared or panicky for no good reason.
There are little white moths drifting twitchy through the house, sprinkling their mothdust everywhere. I cannot find their nest. I brace myself each time I take a towel or a sheet from the linen closet.
You are born jaundiced. We wrap you in a stiff so-called blanket of LEDs, to get your levels right. She's at twelve, they tell us, without saying whether the goal is fifteen or zero or a hundred-not telling us whether we are trying to bring them up or down. I don't know which way to pray, Theo says. Little glowworm baby, spooky blue light-up insured baby in the bassinet, hugged by this machine instead of us. A gnarly intestine-looking tube coming out the bottom of your swaddle. Jaundiced and skinny though neither of us are. Failure to thrive. In the car Theo agrees that a ridiculously lofty standard. Haven't we every advantage-health insurance and advanced degrees, study abroad and strong female role models? Aren't we gainfully employed, and doing work we do not hate no less? Didn't we do everything right and in the right order? And yet, can either of us say we are thriving? I remind myself it's not so bad, the jaundice, the smallness. Lise says, I was little and look at me! I remind myself of the nick-u and pediatric oncology, which we must pass on the way to our appointments. I remember the apparatus we learned about in breastfeeding class that the lactation consultants can rig up for a man. A sack of donated breastmilk and a tube taped to his pectoral, positioned to deliver milk to the baby as though through his nipple. I comfort myself with the dark, unmentioned scenarios wherein this rig would be necessary.
A box on the birth certificate paperwork says, I wish to list another man as the baby's biological father (see reverse). I see reverse, curious what wisdom the hospital has for such a situation, what policies the board has come up with to solve this clusterfuck of the heart, what discreet salve for-profit medicine might offer the modern woman's roving loins, but the reverse is blank.
Theo has hymns and spirituals, but I can remember only the most desperate lines from pop songs.
If you want better things,
I want you to have them.
My girl, my girl, don't lie to me.
Tell me, where did you sleep last night?
4. I have been anxious or worried for no good reason.
Lise says, "Your phone is ringing."
"What's the area code? There are certain area codes I categorically avoid."
"What about home?"
"Especially home."
In my Percocet visions, our blankets are meringue-thick and quicksand, suffocation-heavy, the baby somewhere in them. From the toilet I shout it out.
"She's not in the bed," Theo says from the hallway.
"How do you know?"
"Because she's in the bassinet."
"But how do you know she's in the bassinet?"
"Because I am presently looking at the bassinet and I see her in there."
But how does he know that he is truly seeing?
5. I have blamed myself unnecessarily when things went wrong.
A postcard arrives from Lake Tahoe. Addressed to the family but meant only for me. Funny how some people feel like home.
6. I have been so unhappy that I have had difficulty sleeping.
On video chat people say things about the baby I don't like-she seems small, she seems quiet, she is a princess, she will be gone before we know it-and I slam the computer closed. After, I send pictures of the baby and small loops of video, to prove I am not a banshee. I am a banshee, but cannot get comfortable with being one, am always swinging from bansheeism to playacting sweetness and back. The truth is I cannot play nice and don't want to, but want to want to, some days.
7. I have felt sad or miserable.
I can hear the whispers of my own future outbursts. I wiped your ass, I suctioned boogers from your nose, I caught your vomit in my cupped hands and it was hot! I pruned the tiny sleep dreads from your hair and blew stray eyelashes off your cheeks. I can feel the seeds of my resentment as I swallow them. When you couldn't sleep I lay beside you with my nipple in your mouth. For hours I did this!
I can feel lifelong narratives zipping together like DNA, creation myths ossifying. You would smile, but only if you thought no one was looking. Your hands were always cold, little icicles, but pink and wrinkly as an old man's, little bat claws, little possum hands. Your dad cut off the teensiest tip of your finger while trying to trim your nails, and after that we let them grow. That's why you have socks on your hands in all your pictures, to keep you from scratching yourself. When we took the socks off, you had little woolly worms of lint in your palms, from clenching and unclenching your fists all day. We have a machine that rocks you and another that vibrates you and an app that very poorly replicates sounds from the world you've not yet heard-breakers and birds, rain on a tin roof. Robo-baby, I worry you'll become, since you like the machines so much more than me.
8. I have been so unhappy that I have been crying.
Ours is not even a bad baby! She's chill. She sleeps so much I have to lie to the other moms, pretend to be a different kind of tired than I am, commiserate lest they turn on me. In truth ours sleeps through anything, even two adults screaming at each other crying begging saying things they can't take back making up and screaming again-our baby sleeps through all of it, waking only when we stagger into bed.
Creation myth, his: He broke his collarbone falling off a fence. He was trying to get to the neighbor girl.
Creation myth, hers: When they brought her baby sister home from the hospital she tried to put the bundle in the trash.
9. I have thought of harming myself.
But more the profound pleasure of sitting in the backyard on the last warm day of fall, you and your dad on a bedsheet on the grass, me in a lawn chair because I cannot yet bend in the ways that would get me to and from the grass, in my lap a beer and a bowl of strawberries.
10. Things have been too much for me.
On Christmas Eve the Ann Arbor Whole Foods is a teeming, jingle-bell hellscape. I take deep belly breaths. I decide to play nice for once, an exercise, my Christmas gift to the universe! I strap the baby to me and do not pretend not to notice when strangers gape at her. I stop and let them say oh how cute and even oh how precious and when they ask if the baby is a boy or a girl I do not say, Does it really matter? nor, A little bit of both! nor, You know, I'm not sure, how do I check? And when they ask how old? I do not say, Two thousand eight hundred and eighty hours, nor, A lady never tells. I round up and say, Three months today! I wag the baby's hand and make the baby say hi and bye-bye. I spend too much money on stinky cheeses and chocolate coins, stovetop popcorn, armfuls of fresh-cut flowers, muffin tins I will never use, pomegranates that remind me of home. I do not use self-checkout, the misanthrope's favorite invention, and when the nosy checker asks me to sign my name on the electronic pad I do not write 666 or draw a big cock and balls and instead I sign, in elegant cursive, the baby's name. And outside I do not look away when more lonely people ask me with their eyes to stop so that they might see the baby and touch the baby and instead I do stop, in the fresh snow padding the parking lot, let them hold the baby's hand and tell me how I will feel in five years or ten years or twenty years or this time next year, let them tell me where I will be and what will be happening and how I will cherish every minute.
Vagina Dentata
Theo took the baby to her first Christmas Mass. I stayed home to read a little and masturbate a lot. How I'd missed masturbation! I'd beaten off like a maniac throughout the pregnancy-watched filthy porn with headphones on so the fetus wouldn't hear-but this was my first self-love session since giving birth.
It wasn't long before I noticed something alien in my vagina. A node in the wall. Left side-my left-about half a finger in. My first thought was birth injury, though I'd had a c-section so that didn't track. The node didn't hurt, but it also didn't heal. It seemed over time to harden. I did some research. A vaginal dermoid cyst, I decided, a condition so rare and unlikely I would never ask my doctors about it. They already thought me drug-seeking and insane.
Cyst. Such a soft, sisterly word, all air. It allowed me to nearly forget the nub for months, until the day my daughter cut her first tooth. Absently letting her gum my index finger, I felt an edge and recoiled. I put my finger immediately back in her wanting mouth and found a spearhead of enamel. I thought: if this is tooth then that is tooth. More research revealed that vaginal dermoid cysts are in fact sometimes teeth. I found mine inside me that night and pressed it, confirming.
