Domestic Affairs Page 5

“Well,” she said, “except for grocery shopping and church, mostly we stayed home. We raked leaves and jumped in them in the fall. We made snow angels and snow forts in winter. My kids had a two-story tree house. They always had each other. What else did they need?”

  Peg was pinning fabric together on my couch as she spoke. She never stopped moving. I told her she made it look easy. “This is nothing,” she said.

  But surely she didn’t sew slipcovers when the children were small, I asked (I who can’t get a page of a newspaper read until after all three children are in bed). “Of course I did,” said Peg. “Even with my husband working two shifts, we needed the money. The children always knew just how to entertain themselves. Anytime they were idle, I’d just tell them to pick up my washcloth and start scrubbing something.”

  Weren’t there times, I asked her, when it was all just crazy? Out of control? Times you just wanted to throw up your arms and scream?

  Peg looked at me, thought for a moment, took the pins out of her mouth, and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can’t say there were.”

  “I don’t know how you did it,” I told her.

  “Maybe you don’t have enough kids,” she suggested. “When there’s only three there might be too much leeway. These women who only have one now—I don’t know how they do it.”

  “Of course,” she said, “you young girls are different, and I’m not criticizing. You’ve got your own needs. You want to go jogging. Want to go out at night. Me, I never knew anyone, besides my husband and my kids. I hardly even knew who was president. My children were everything: my career, my friends, my exercise program, my hobby. I guess I was sort of a child myself: down on my hands and knees half the day, playing with them. Your mind goes a little funny. But I’ll tell you, I had fun.”

  I asked Peg what the hardest times were, raising her nine children. One, she said, was when her oldest daughter left home to go to nursing school thirty miles away. “I cried and cried to lose her,” she said.

  Then she told me this story:

  She only gave birth to seven children. But one day a neighbor called, asking if Peg would watch a friend’s two babies (a girl and a boy, both under two). Just for a few hours. Peg said no problem, which was true. Two more babies fit in just fine.

  A few hours later the neighbor called again, asking whether Peg could keep the babies overnight. Once again Peg said no problem. The mother didn’t come the next day, or the day after that. After a few months Peg had the children baptized. After five years she and her husband decided they’d better file papers to adopt the kids. That’s when the mother finally showed up, and took the boy and girl away.

  Did she ever see them again?

  Not until Roxanne’s funeral. The girl was eighteen years old. Running with a bad crowd. Killed in a car accident. The boy was deeply into drugs too.

  So now she has just seven children. Plus one of her sons is divorced; the ex-wife doesn’t have anything to do with their three-year-old daughter, and the son has to work all the time. So the little girl lives with Peg and her husband. She keeps Peg company, drawing or looking at books beside her, while she sews or scrubs the appliances.

  This morning now, Peg got up at three o’clock to finish up a set of slipcovers for a customer. Then she made blueberry muffins. Then she did a load of wash and hung it up to dry. Then she got her granddaughter up and fed her breakfast. Then she mixed up a batch of bread dough and set it out to rise. By the time she got home, she told me (picking up the last of her pins, packing to go), she figured it would be about ready to pop into the oven.

  I told her I was a writer. I explained to her that now I would be leaving my house, too, leaving my littlest son with Vicky, our babysitter, and heading out to my office, to sit at my typewriter all day. I asked if she’d mind my writing about her.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she said. “There’s nothing special or interesting about me. I just did what I knew. Fed my children, loved them, kept them busy. Made sure they said their prayers every night. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  But just before she left, Peg noticed the old pink piano we got recently from my friend Ursula. She sat down at the keyboard. “Do you play?” I asked her. “No,” she said. “Not really. Not for forty years.” But suddenly she was playing a tune with both hands, not badly at all. From memory.

  “It’s good I don’t have one of these around my house,” she said a few minutes later, closing the piano firmly. “I’d spend all my time playing it. But it sure would’ve been nice to have, for the children. Your little girl must love it.”

  I didn’t tell her that as a matter of fact, the one who’s taking the beginning piano lessons in this family is me. I just shook her hand, circled the date on the calendar when the slipcovers would be ready. Headed out to my office, and looked out my window at Vicky, pushing Willy on the swings.

  BABY LOVE

  The Ninth Month

  Baby Longing

  The Six A.M. Report

  The End of Diapers

  OF COURSE LIFE WITH young children has its surprises. (Sometimes it’s the child himself who is the surprise.) But our days around here are probably more defined by repetition. If I have read Scat Scat Cat once, I bet I’ve read it five hundred times. I’ve sung “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word” nearly every night for the last eight years. Made ten thousand peanut butter sandwiches. Kissed five million places where it hurt.

  There’s no denying some of the tasks of parenthood are simply tedious. But in fact I guess I also love and need the familiarity of the territory. (At best, we have rituals. At worst, ruts.) I love ending my day with a tour of my sleeping children in their beds. Setting out the cereal bowls for morning. I even like folding my sons’ pajamas, still warm from the dryer. I know by heart the Joy of Cooking recipe for blueberry muffins and the names of all seven dwarfs and eight reindeer. I guess they add up to a kind of household rosary, and I can’t imagine ever forgetting any of it, though women older than I assure me I will.

  So much of life remains uncertain. But I always know the punch line to Charlie’s one joke. (What kind of car does Humpty Dumpty drive? A yolkswagen.) I know Audrey will always make a face out of her meatballs, arranged on top of her spaghetti. Willy will always claim his pants are dry. Charlie will always, before settling down to read a book with me, run to get his bear, whose string he likes to twirl in his ear.

  For years now, the routine around here has included looking after a baby. And while living with an adolescent may be more emotionally demanding, for pure physical rigor there’s nothing to match those first few years with a young child.

  Now, even as the end of baby tending comes into view, I find myself feeling not only liberated, but ensnared, looking back as much as I look forward. Partly, perhaps, my wistfulness comes simply from not wanting to see a stage I have loved come to an end. Maybe I’m also scared. (When my children were all very young, my life was clearly laid out. There was not so much room to question what I should be doing. There was little opportunity for experiment and adventure, but also that meant less opportunity for failure.) And partly I am wistful simply because there is not much I like better than holding a baby in my arms.

  I have been spending my evenings this past week watching Olympic skaters spin around the ice. In my dreams, and anytime I find myself on a smooth frozen pond with no one watching, I am Tiffany Chin. I hum myself a soundtrack. I rely heavily on hand gestures rather than triple jumps and camels. Because the truth is, I’m not much of a skater—even when I’m not, as I am now, nine months pregnant, with thirty extra pounds and a sore back.

  For the first eight and a half months of this third pregnancy of mine I have been carrying on my life pretty much as usual. It’s the two children with us already who demand the attention I once gave to childbirth manuals and nursery decoration. Also, I tell myself I know all about babies and having them. When people inquire how I am, I tend to register surprise at the question and then say “How about you?�
� I have almost forgotten that around March 1 a baby is going to be born here.

  But there comes a point—and it’s here—when the body and the mind get pretty much overtaken by a pregnancy and every inch is occupied territory. (With even my hair no longer normal, I am advised to hold off getting a permanent.) Three times in the past six years, I’ve reached that point in a New Hampshire winter. (My son’s and daughter’s birthdays coincide with the full moons of one February and one March.) And now here I sit once more, staring out a window at nothing but mud and snow, putting off taking the ten steps between my chair and the door, where our dog is scratching to be let out, because the task just seems too tiring. I’ve spent the last twenty minutes drawing moustaches on the models in the annual Sports Illustrated bathing-suit issue. I might as well belong to a separate species from those flat-bellied, golden-skinned women in their silver bikinis.

  It’s an odd state to be in, this period just before the birth of a baby. The mind empties. I see my true self slipping away, being replaced by a person who behaves, not like me, but like full-term pregnant women everywhere. Unexplainable tears. A ravenous appetite for salt one night and sweet the next. A need—as real as an artist’s for paint or a keyboard—to wax the floors and repaint the kitchen. I want to hold not only babies, kittens, puppies, but a nearly full-grown Irish setter. “That letter you wrote had the word tiny in seven places,” a friend tells me.

  So I bake cookies and stare for half an hour into the tropical-fish tank, watching a cobra-skin guppy circle a plastic model of a scuba diver, who endlessly raises and lowers a piece of plastic buried treasure. I fold laundry and sort old baby clothes, bury my face in the little T-shirts, remembering the one (my “middle child,” “the older brother,” people have already started calling my toddler son) who wore them last. And I read to Charlie the story of Babar and His Children—chronicle of the triple birth, to Queen Celeste, of baby elephants named Pom, Flora, and Alexander—and try to explain an illustration that shows Babar watering a flower and seeing in its center the image of a baby elephant. (Babar sitting down to read and seeing, on the pages of his book, a baby elephant. Poised over his royal stationery to write proclamations and producing a drawing of a baby elephant. I know the feeling.)

  The strange part is what follows. That what this is, really, is the original calm before the storm. That as the full-term pregnant woman sits, face to the sun, in a calm tidal pool, staring out to a sea with not a whitecap in sight, suddenly, she never knows when, there comes a tidal wave. I have known plenty of women to dread the birth and afterward to curse the agony they went through. For myself, I look forward to the event with the anticipation of a passionate surfer. More accurately, with the anticipation of one who never could surf, or ski, or stay on a skateboard, even. The last one chosen for every school field hockey and basketball team she ever played on. Before I had children I always wondered whether their births would be, for me, like the ultimate in my gym class failures. And discovered instead that I’d finally found my sport.

  My son Charlie was two days overdue the night a call came from Canada to tell me that my father, in a Victoria hospital with pneumonia, was not likely to live through to morning. Not much to be done about it: He couldn’t have heard me if I tried to speak to him, and I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I put down the receiver and told Steve, who had been watching the Boston Celtics play Los Angeles. Then I felt the sickest I have ever been in my life, and my legs began to shake so badly that I lay down on the bed and he lay across my shins to steady me. We had seen a baby of ours born, on that same bed, four years before, and still I didn’t recognize the symptoms I was feeling as the transition stage of labor. Just to be safe we called the midwife, a forty-minute drive away, suggesting that she come over. But things happened very fast then, and five minutes later I heard a sound in the room, coming from me, that I had heard only one other time in my life—when I pushed our daughter out into the world. Steve felt for the cord around the baby’s neck and guided him as he corkscrewed out—our ten-pound boy. The next morning when our daughter came downstairs to find the top of her brother’s head sticking out from under the covers of our bed, where he slept between us, what she said was, “My dream came true.” And the thing that always strikes me with amazement is how, in a house where there had been three people a few hours earlier, there were now four, although no one had come in the door.

  I think of my children’s births—carry them around with me—every day of my life. Sometimes it will be just a fleeting image: My friend Stephanie coming into the room, the day our daughter was born, with a bagful of oranges I’d asked her to bring over; seeing them spill out in all directions on the bed. Steve holding out a towel he’d warmed on our woodstove to wrap around a baby who would be born before the towel had time to cool off again. Audrey’s thick tuft of black hair that I saw and touched before I even knew the sex of the still unborn person it belonged to. Her hands on her cheeks, like some vaudeville chorus girl pantomiming surprise, as she shot out. The feeling of a newborn baby’s skin. Eyes wide open, looking at light for the first time.

  One more thing I want to say: If I had been unable to have babies myself, I would have grieved over never having known what it’s like to carry a baby, to feel movement inside my own body, and most of all I would have missed, terribly, watching my child born. But the world is full of adoptive parents and people who had their babies before the return of natural childbirth and the acceptance of fathers in the delivery room, and though I have heard some of those men and women speak with regret over having missed out on their children’s births, they didn’t miss out on their children. As for me, I will never know what it’s like to ride on a hang glider or execute a triple toe loop in Sarajevo. I love riding the wave of childbirth—love even how hard it is—and when the moment comes that I know I’ve done it for the last time, I’ll mourn. But birth is an experience and parenthood is a state of being; the one passes, the other never ends.

  It’s happening again: that old baby-longing. And the fact that I already have three children doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that I’m so tired at the end of every day, I haven’t stayed awake through the end of a movie in months. Doesn’t matter that I have rubber bands on all my cupboard doors to keep Willy out, and that we have to hide the egg cartons in the back of the refrigerator, covered in aluminum foil, now that he’s discovered the joys of taking out and breaking eggs, a dozen at a time. It doesn’t matter that I also dream of taking off for a weekend alone with Steve, that I long to do a kind of serious, uninterrupted work that’s simply not possible for the mothers of young children. It doesn’t matter that we can’t afford another child—financially, emotionally, or physically. All I know is, last week my friend Alice had a baby, and when I hold her, I want one too.

  I guess there are some women around who manage simply to give birth to the number of children that’s practical and appropriate for their situation, and then stop, with not a backward glance toward pregnancy, childbirth, and the world of newborn infants. Women who, given the choice between a bottle of Chanel No. 5 or the smell you find on a newborn’s head (and nowhere else on earth), would go for the Chanel. As for me, I don’t suppose I’ll ever reach the stage where the sight of a new baby no longer gives me pangs.

  It’s irrelevant how many children you have: I could have a dozen, and still, if one of them wasn’t a baby, there’d be an empty place in my life, a vacancy. Because having children is not the same—simply not the same—as having an infant.

  I’m not the only one I know who’s addicted. My friend Rachel—divorced, the mother of three marvelous children—waited three days before heading over to check on Alice’s baby. “I had to steel myself,” she said. “I knew once I picked her up, I’d never want to put her down.”

  Then there’s my friend Sally, the mother of four children. Two complete generations of them, she has, with two daughters by her first marriage, in their early twenties, and two sons from her second marriage, both i
n preschool. And still, though she’s forty-four now, and though she runs a successful toy store, though her life is full and good, she longed for one more baby. Even after her miscarriage two years ago, she kept hoping. Even after the second miscarriage, she hoped. After the third miscarriage, when her doctor told her it looked as if she was simply too old to carry a fetus to term successfully, she had to try again. She’s six months pregnant now. By the time the baby’s born she’ll be forty-five.

  As for me, I’ve passed on the maternity jumpers, but kept the one pair of stretch-front jeans that always were my favorites. I’m only thirty-two, I remind myself. We could hold off for seven years, and still there’d be time for one more baby before I’m forty. If it isn’t going to happen, I’d rather not know now—I’d rather harbor the hope for a few years, anyway, that I haven’t met all of my children yet.

  You have to quit sometime. There’s no such thing as never having a last baby, it’s only a question of when, and which one. Because though the capacity for loving children may be infinite, the capacity for raising them has its limits.

  When I was eighteen, I thought everything was possible: thought I could have a wonderful, successful career, an exciting, uninterruptedly romantic marriage, a perfect home, good food on the table every night with flowers from my garden, and six children too. I see it still in young women starting out today: that innocent belief not only in themselves, but in the world, too. Life will be kind. Money will be plentiful. Babies will sleep. In-laws will take the kids for weekends. The sun will shine. Every generation has to learn, all over again—as if for the first time, as if all the others hadn’t learned this already—just how hard it all is, and that along with all sorts of good things, every year also brings with it a narrowing of possibilities. Every month there’s a child who could have been born, who would’ve been loved—the one who might’ve been an artist, might’ve been a major-league pitcher—and there is simply no way in the world to give birth to every one of them. And even if you did manage to have every potential child, you’d lose something else—which is the time and space to know and savor them. And even if you managed that—to have the children, and to raise them right—there would be other doors closed. Books unread or unwritten. Trips not taken. A husband or a self not sufficiently tended.