It Sucked and Then I Cried Page 13

  What would happen when she found out that I once talked about throwing her out the window? I WAS KIDDING, LETA! I wouldn’t really throw you out the window! I might pull your toes until you scream, but the window thing…a JOKE! And that time I called you a frog, I meant that lovingly. Frogs are great! I love frogs!

  Now that she was wearing clothing from Big & Tall I didn’t dress her in as many frilly outfits as I had when she was smaller. She was more mature than that now, and so I dressed her in long pants and sophisticated onesies, all without lace and bows. We are not bow people, we Armstrongs, and never would anyone be able to convince me that it was perfectly okay to put a bow in her nonexistent hair. Really, is there anything more frightening than a bow on a bald head? WHAT IS IT DOING THERE except making a baby look like a PIN CUSHION?

  Jon did make me promise, however, that I would never take Leta out in public with bare feet because apparently nothing screams NEGLECT! like a sockless baby. It’s not that I was struggling with deep and unresolved sock issues, I just didn’t see why she always had to wear socks when she wasn’t even using her feet. But then, I was also the type of mother who would rather put tin foil in the windows to keep out the light than buy a proper set of blinds, and OH MY GOD what my kid is going to say about me on her website.

  Some days were really good.

  Some days started with bacon and biscuits and then more bacon because the first round of bacon wasn’t enough. Some days had foot rubs and flowers and an extra thirty minutes of sleep, delicious and indulgent. Some days the drugs seemed to work and I felt like I was born to do this, and when I looked at her and I didn’t remember the stretch marks or the constipation or the episiotomy or the bladder infections or the constantly malfunctioning left boob that woke me up every four days with a clogged milk duct or the hemorrhoids or the bloating or the nausea or the tremendous weight gain.

  Some days I enjoyed living in the moment and treasured her little feet and fingers and squeals and excessive drool, because I knew she would never be this little again. Some days I hoped she never grew up.

  But most days were really, really bad.

  Some days she started screaming only a half hour after she woke up, and I immediately wanted to hit the reset button. Some days the drugs didn’t work, and the isolation of spending my entire day with someone who couldn’t tell me what she wanted, PLEASE JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT, spread like a disease in my body, choking me and rendering me paralyzed.

  Some days I remembered the ongoing physical pain of bringing and having this child in the world, and I wondered how much more my body could take. Some days I made it to 11 AM, and then I made it to 2 PM, and then I’d try, try, try to make it until Jon came home, and when I did I felt simultaneously triumphant and beaten down.

  Some days I stared eternity in the face and thought about how many diapers I would change that would only get dirty again, towels I would wash that would only become soiled, dishes I would load into the dishwasher that we’d use to eat on again and again, and I felt useless, as if I was fighting a battle that couldn’t be won.

  Some days my life was reduced to an hour by hour game of survival and I didn’t feel like I’d make it another fifteen minutes, and I couldn’t stop crying.

  A friend once asked me whether or not I liked my job, and at the time I was working full-time at a web design shop in Los Angeles. My answer was that I loved my job approximately three days out of every month, and during the other twenty-seven or so days our relationship was more platonic, at times resembling the rocky relationship of two college roommates who happen to be on their periods at the same time.

  I figured that three whole days’ worth of love was much more than most people could claim about their employment, and so I didn’t mind lugging my hungover body into the office most of the week to deal with Account People Who Wear Panty Hose Even Though No Dress Code Requires Them To Do So. For three days every month I got to work on an original design, and then I would spend the next four weeks redesigning and tearing apart that design, all to the specifications of those Account People and clients who thought that the Internet was a person who lived inside their computers.

  I actually worked for a client once who asked me to program their homepage so that when a user brought it up on a browser it would disable the printing function on their computer. They didn’t want anyone printing out their website because they were worried that someone would steal their great ideas, the great ideas that they were putting on the Internet for thousands of people to read. I asked them if they also wanted me to include a piece of code that would break a user’s fingers, thus preventing anyone from printing or even writing down their great ideas, and they asked me if they could get in trouble for that. Sometimes parenthood doesn’t seem so bad.

  Some of my friends at the time said that they were envious of my job, that I got to work with big-name clients and that I got to play on the Internet all day long, and from the perspective of someone who was washing dishes and waiting tables for hours on end, I can see how my job would have seemed alluring. But the reality was much less glamorous than the idea of it, because there’s nothing fancy or prestigious about spending forty hours on one background color because someone in charge can’t decide if he likes purple or dark purple.

  Maybe all jobs are like this in the sense that there are the good parts and the bad parts, the bad parts occupying the majority of the space because it is a JOB after all. If you have a job where there are more good parts than bad parts then you’ve obviously made a deal with the Devil and you’re going to spend the rest of eternity being tortured by fork-wielding elves to make up for the imbalance. I’m just saying.

  I remember when I was single and living alone and wondering what it would be like to be married and have a family, and whenever I saw people with kids at the park I couldn’t wait to have my own kids to play with at the park, because that’s what having a family was going to be like. Playing at the park. Having a family was going to be so fun, and there would be ice cream cones and tricycles and round baby cheeks and everyone would be smiling all the time. I couldn’t wait to have a kid that I could dress in a soccer uniform, someone whose hair I could braid, someone I could train to say mean things to the Mormons.

  And I know that what I’m about to say is completely obvious, and it will be the least profound thing I have ever written. But to those who have suffered the unmerciful pangs of an angry biological clock, who have felt weak in the knees at the sight of a newborn baby, who daydream like I did about what your own kids will look like, what the biological clock isn’t telling you is that the job of motherhood is nothing like what you think it will be.

  Yes, there were baby smiles and giggles, although Leta only giggled for her father. Or when I had just left the room. She was evil that way.

  There were transcendental moments when I’d look at her and she’d look at me and there were traces of recognition and THE WORLD STOOD STILL I LOVED HER SO MUCH.

  But there was all this other stuff that I hadn’t bargained for, and I felt foolish for being so unprepared. The day to day minutiae of raising a baby was at times so boring that I wanted to bang my head against the changing table. There were only so many ways to entertain a three-month-old baby (Let’s walk into the kitchen again! Let’s look out the window! Here, chew on my finger!), and I knew it would only get worse from there. In the next year I’d be repeating words all day long, reading the same books over and over and over again, and changing diapers that would redefine my entire definition of offensive.

  I was discovering that motherhood was just like any other job, that the good and fun parts were there, it just wasn’t good and fun all the time or even most of the time. I now understood that the family with the kids at the park had to get those kids dressed and fed and into the car and that on the way to the park the kids probably all threw tantrums and spit at each other. And then they had to get back into the car, drive home while everyone was complaining about how hot it was, and then they had
to feed them dinner, get them ready for bed, and fight them to brush their teeth. And those kids probably didn’t even have the redeeming fresh baby smell that made so much of this job endurable.

  Books about early childhood development like to remind you to speak out loud to a baby all day long so that the little seedlings of language can take root in the mush of their brains. And when I say mush I mean it lovingly yet truthfully, because COME ON. I could have barked at Leta all day long and she would have found it just as instructional as if I were reading her a dictionary.

  To prevent myself from absentmindedly going hours without saying anything, which happened many, many times—YOU try talking to a person who refuses to answer you or to give you any indication that she can differentiate your voice from the sound of the dishwasher—I developed the strategy of describing everything I did. This meant that I was talking all the time, nonstop, hours and hours without stopping:

  “Right now I am lying you down on the bed, Leta. And while you lie there flailing your arms I am going to go turn on the television so that we can watch Pyramid, hosted by Donny Osmond who is a Mormon just like Grandmommy. Pyramid is our new favorite show, isn’t it? It has nothing to do with Donny Osmond, who is very cute and all, and I know he sits at the right hand of God or whatever, but he has all the charisma of a lima bean. I’ll never force you to eat lima beans, Leta, not like Grandmommy forced me. I’ll also never force you to sing songs about how much you should want to grow up and become a missionary and thus a mindless cog in the wheel that is cultural imperialism. But I digress!

  “We like Pyramid because it is fun to try and guess what these crazy people are trying to describe, isn’t it? And when we do guess correctly we feel good about ourselves, because we’re smart enough to know that when they say, ‘Not winning, but…’ the correct answer is ‘LOSING!’ And when they say, ‘Not a bride, but a…’ we say ‘GROOM!’ And the thrill of it is exhilarating! Kind of what it feels like to drink a lot of coffee! And inevitably the word ‘movie’ will come up and the person describing the word will say, ‘You go to the cinema to see a…’ and of course the answer is ‘MOVIE!’ but the person who is supposed to guess will invariably just sit there, dumb as a stick, and go, ‘Huh? Guh? Whah??’ AS IF YOU WOULD EVER GO TO THE CINEMA TO SEE ANYTHING BUT A MOVIE. THE WORLD IS A PIECE OF CRAP.”

  That was the exact script of my day, really, just an incoherent string of verbalizations that I hoped would stick in her mush. But I found that I couldn’t stop describing things even after we put her to bed, and by the end of the night I’d given Jon a blow-by-blow commentary on how I was brushing my teeth—“up and down and up and down, and now the toothpaste is foaming, like an angry dog or maybe a washing machine that has been loaded with too much detergent, and now I’m spitting and isn’t that gross.” It got so out of hand that I fully expected Leta to stop in the middle of one of her screaming fits and turn to me and say, “WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT UP ALREADY.”

  Leta’s screaming got really bad one week, not that I should have been able to notice a difference in magnitude—is shrill any different from really, really shrill? But one day her screams were shrill, and the next day her screams were SO NOT KIDDING.

  She’d been grabbing at both of her ears, so I decided to take her to the doctor to find out if she was suffering from an ear infection. And I won’t lie, a baby with an ear infection was one of my worst nightmares, right up there with being tickled to death or being force-fed black licorice, The Worst Tasting Taste in All of Tasteland. But I was almost hoping that she had an ear infection because then they could give her an antibiotic, and then maybe the shrill screaming would come to an end. An ear infection would at least have been an explanation.

  So I took her to the doctor and while we sat in the waiting room we watched other mothers chase after their shrieking, mobile toddlers and I caught a glimpse of what my life was going to be like in the next couple of years. It was like I was watching a videotape of my own execution, the volume deafeningly loud, and when one little boy threw himself on the floor and began pounding his arms and legs in a whirlwind thrashing of anger, all because his mom wouldn’t let him tear the covers off of all the magazines—mean, unloving mother!—I felt the dull blade of the guillotine slice into my neck, my head tumbling off my body and into a jeering crowd of cannibalistic three-year-olds ready to gouge out my eyes and teeth with crayons.

  Before the doctor checked her ears she stuck Leta on the scale and we were both startled at the number that popped up on the digital readout:

  14 LBS, 8 OZ. My child had more than doubled her weight since we brought her home from the hospital. This made no sense because 1) Leta didn’t really eat during the day, and 2) LETA DIDN’T EAT DURING THE DAY. I told the doctor that I’d been worried about her eating habits, and she looked at me like ARE YOU KIDDING? YOU MEAN YOU AREN’T FEEDING HER BACON GREASE? Which led me to believe that Jon was feeding her Twinkies behind my back.

  The doctor then checked both of her ears for signs of infection, and not only did she not find any infection, she didn’t even find any Twinkies. In fact, she found Leta to be the model of perfect health, a tragic diagnosis as that meant Leta was just irritable. There was no antibiotic for irritability. Ear infections would clear up in a matter of days, whereas irritability would last a lifetime, lifetime, lifetime. (Yes, that was an echo, symbolic of the vast canyon of misery ahead of me as mother of a screaming person who refused to stop screaming. And at the end of my life when Leta gave the eulogy at my funeral no one would understand a word of it because it will be ONE. LONG. STRING. OF. SCREAMS.)

  When we bought the dishwasher during our kitchen remodel we also bought a garbage disposal as a new dishwasher won’t work without one. And the dishwasher was our key to eternal salvation, remember? When we died we would go to heaven like all the other dishwasher-owning parents who sterilize bottles. Except, I was still a little confused as to how someone who bottle fed their baby could end up in heaven, even if they did sterilize the nipples, because God had himself decreed that mothers who don’t breastfeed their babies go to hell, and by extension the non-breastfed baby is doomed to an eternity of shoveling coal alongside all the goblins of Hell. This was all discussed in the New Testament.

  Against our better judgment we bought both items at a popular electronics store, also known as The Store for Masochists, but only because 1) the dishwasher was on sale and 2) this particular electronics store had special parking spaces for pregnant women. I was six months pregnant at the time, and the special parking space was like a corporate-sponsored invitation to eat whatever I wanted. No matter how big my ass became, no matter how wide the swipe of my waddle, those people had my back. I could swell to the size of a moose, and I wouldn’t ever have to walk more than thirty feet from my car to buy a stereo. They really, really cared.

  The disposal we bought came with a twelve-year manufacturer’s warranty, which meant that it shouldn’t have broken during THE NEXT TWELVE YEARS. Other than the seven dead bodies we shoved down the drain we hadn’t used the disposal for anything more than to grind up a few leftover mushy peas, and they were mushy as mushy peas could sometimes be. But one weekend when the disposal still had eleven years and six months left on its warranty, it started leaking! Out the side! All over our new cabinetry! Onto our wood floors! And the usually serene and patient Husband, who normally stood by to watch the usually depraved and chemically imbalanced Wife lose her shit, TOTALLY LOST HIS SHIT.

  So the family with no shit piled into the truck and headed to the electronics store, disassembled and leaking disposal in hand, to see if we could piece our shit together again. But this time we couldn’t park in the special parking space because I was no longer pregnant (THANK THE LORD GOD JESUS!) and we had to park in the non-pregnant parking space and walk an extra twenty feet to the door. We found this inconvenience totally unacceptable as we were living in America and shouldn’t have to walk an extra twenty feet for anything. AM I RIGHT? AM I RIGHT? This is the best
country on Earth! WE DON’T WALK NOWHERE FOR NUTHING. Damn straight.

  I carried the still-under-warranty disposal and Jon had Leta, the only member of this family with anything resembling pieced together shit, strapped to his chest in the BabyBjörn, her chubby, innocent cheeks facing outward, her arms and legs poking out the sides like a jumping jack frozen in midair. We marched right up to the Returns/Exchanges counter, plopped the leaking disposal on the counter and started recounting our long-winded nightmare to the girl standing on the other side. Her eyes immediately glazed over. The girl had BRACES, for God’s sake, CLEAR PLASTIC BRACES, and she obviously couldn’t count to ten, let alone decipher a receipt. Who did she think she was kidding, clear plastic braces? I could still see them! SOMEONE WAS IN DENIAL.

  She listened to most of our story but cut us off short and said something about the ten-dollar store warranty we hadn’t bought, and because we hadn’t bought it we couldn’t get our money back or exchange the disposal for a new one. And the patient and serene Husband with the chubby baby on his chest began spewing obscenities like an eager volcano let loose, his hands on his hips, the dangling innocent baby drooling and smiling at the sparkly plastic braces.

  And then he stormed off, huffing and puffing, still uttering obscenity after obscenity, and from behind you could see Leta’s arms and legs wiggling as she drooled and cooed and chewed on the collar of her shirt. Why they didn’t take us seriously I’LL NEVER KNOW, but all those heaven points we stored up by breastfeeding and sterilizing nipples had just dripped out our leaky disposal.

  Later that night a partially ingrown toenail descended upon our household, and I’m not sure there are words that can communicate just how awful was the awfulness of the pain and the ache and the affliction, and did I mention that it was awful? According to sources close to the toenail, the pain shot all the way up from the point of entry, along the shin, around the knee, up up up unto the jawline. Jon’s whole body was paralyzed, except for the voice part, which COULD NOT STOP TALKING ABOUT THE PAIN.