I’ve already briefed The Reader on my various forays into postpartum dysphoria, so I don’t want to elaborate too much. (Boring you would punish you and me, because I wither without your approval!) Let me just say that after the birth of my first child, I was overcome with a kind of anxiety that felt very familiar and completely foreign all at once. If you were to ask me what exactly I was so afraid of as I wept in bed late at night, waiting for my infant to awake and cry, or wept during one of my infant’s many naps throughout the day, waiting for him to awake and cry, or wept in the morning when my husband left for work, petrified by the idea of simply being alone with my child, I couldn’t have told you. What was the worst that could happen? Illness? Choking? SIDS? Well…. hmmmm. Now that I think about it, YEAH! Those would have been pretty fucking bad! But honestly, at the time, I wasn’t getting that far. I was just incomprehensibly, unrecognizably, scared. What did feel familiar was the profound discomfort of being responsible for anybody but myself. Abandon me and I thrive! But keep me company, regardless of your competence, and I will expect you to do everything.
Sadly, a baby can’t do everything, or really, anything. So I cried. Mostly to my parents on the phone, but sometimes, when I just couldn’t stomach how pathetic I sounded to people with whom I was not inclined to filter myself, I’d tentatively float my fears to other women I knew. I’d message friends in a tone half-joking, half-deranged, about the “difficulties” I was “navigating”. At one point I texted a very old and dear friend who was then pregnant with her third child — a friend who loves being pregnant, loves giving birth, loves being a mom. A friend who, at least in this regard, has terrible taste. I’m not sure why I expected her to be anything but breathlessly excited to gab about the beauty of creating life, but I’m not sure what I was thinking most of the time back then. I do remember that at one point in the conversation, I wrote: I don’t know if I can do this. She responded, Well, you have to. At the time, it hurt my feelings.
I thought about this exchange last week, during what was perhaps the worst family trip I have ever taken, and I once flew back from a Mexican Club Med with a 105 degree fever. Like, I’m pretty sure they had use a wheelchair to get me on the plane. Afterwards, my mother would remark offhandedly, we really shouldn’t have flown with you like that! You could have had a seizure! Last week was worse. It started with arriving late to the airport. Usually I’m pretty zen about the minor “shit happens” obstacles of life, unless shit is happening to me. Then I blame my husband. Because he booked the flights. He set the alarm that morning. He drove us to the airport. He knew the departure time. But Hallie, you didn’t even know what time your flight left? No, dammit! How can I get it into your thick skull that I am a helpless creature!!!!?? Anyhoo, there we were, two adults stress-sweating in the security line, our children laughing, lying on the floor, chewing on the bacteria-ridden stanchion connectors, spitting entire mouthfuls of apple juice in our faces when we yelled at them to behave. We briefly argued over whether he or I should ask the people ahead of us if we could cut the line, but ultimately decided it was better to miss our flight and suffer a day in the airport with two wild animals than to put ourselves even mildly out of our comfort zones by asking for help from strangers.
Against the odds, we made it through security. My husband told me to run to the gate while he gathered our belongings from the baggage scanners, so I did, shoeless, with seventy pounds of children in my arms. When my husband finally made it to the gate, he immediately had to use the bathroom, like he does any time it is least convenient to do so. So off he ran again, while I stood bewildered, shaking my head, cursing his bowels, and yelling at my children not to lick the chairs in the boarding area.
We made it to Denver to visit my family, but all that airport licking and chewing would come back to haunt us on the second night of our stay, when somewhere around 10pm, my two-year-old started vomiting. Nothing is sadder than watching a two-year-old master the journey from the bed to the toilet to assume the gagging position. It took a lot of practice, and three outfit changes (mine, not his!) but by the last puke, his technique far surpassed his years. Then I started puking, every half hour until dawn, while my baby finally slept peacefully beside me.
But the truly low point was the next evening, when — my youngest son and I no longer vomiting but still feeling unlike healthy people do — my family ventured into the blazing Colorado heat to join my parents and their friends for an early dinner at THE COUNTRY CLUB (the friends’ club, not my parents’). Now, deeply embedded in my sense of identity is the fact that I have never belonged to a country club, although many classmates at my expensive private middle school did and still do, and although I attended cotillion classes as a tween, wearing actual white gloves, at the very country club we were eating at that night. Somehow, I have decided I am different. Regardless of my constant proximity to privilege, I am NOT a product of it. Rather, I’d like to think of myself as the result of like, a meal kit of privilege. Sure, the ingredients (precisely measured) for success arrived at my doorstep with meticulous instructions, but I and I alone assembled them. So I was hauling that emotional baggage with me to dinner. To add to our impending doom, my children are simply unable to behave at restaurants. Someone should really teach them how! Even at the shittiest of establishments, they manage to shock and horrify, which is why we never take them.
So there we were, unwell, unmannered, unhappy, trying to make conversation with strangers (my parents’ friends) about their recent cruise to Alaska while my four-year-old grabbed butter from a crystal tray by the fistful and my two-year-old, sick and hot, screamed until mercifully, he got diarrhea and I escaped from the table to change him. Once clean, I tried to calm him by walking him around the grounds, while the parents of kids I went to school with long ago, with names like Brewster and Conrad and Leland, watched as my son stuck his fully sneakered feet in their pool. Why was I embarrassed of his unruliness? Hadn’t I always wanted not to fit in? Hadn’t I once trashed the bathroom of that country club myself in protest of the stupid things they were teaching us in cotillion (and also because my friends were doing it)? Why did I suddenly mind that my children were also rejecting the pomp, the affected etiquette? Somehow it didn’t feel like a badge of honor that I couldn’t get my kids to listen to me. By the end of the night, as my two-year-old, now in nothing but a diaper and soggy sneakers, chased a tennis ball in the parking lot while women in Lilly Pulitizer walked to their Jags gawking in horror, I almost couldn’t find the funny in it all.
As we drove back to our still-vomit-perfumed abode, my four-year-old asked of The Country Club, “Can we live there?” And look, I get it. He’d never been to a place with a playground, a pool, and fancy restaurant that gives you cookies AND ice cream all in one, a place covered with beautiful flowers and manicured grass that doesn’t function exclusively as a breeding ground for mosquitos. But no, we informed him, we couldn’t live there, because country clubs suck. And yet, as we explained that it’s not nice to have fancy places barricaded off from people without a lot of money, I wondered why I felt it was so necessary to impart on him my disdain. And how was he supposed to understand it, when he himself has a pool in his backyard, a scooter and a bike, clothes on his back, a warm bed to sleep in, a fridge full of food, and a tablet? I mean sure, it’s an Amazon tablet, not an iPad, but still, what’s the difference between enjoying nice things and expecting them?
I don’t have the answer. I do know that having children has been the hardest, most uncomfortable experience of my (very young!) life. For the first time, most of what I do, I do because, well, I have to, and still there is so much more left to do. I have to clean up poop and puke. I have to sacrifice my sleep to help my children get theirs. I have to teach them to sort through their emotions, to behave in public places, to listen to me, to grow up to be kind, caring men and not the privileged white assholes society compels them to be. And I don’t exactly know why, but I know that it’s good that I have to, even though it’s scary.
I remember some of my anxiety around my child's behavior, especially when he went through the Extremely Loud Voice period around age 2. In retrospect, I don't give a hoot what anyone thought of him, but I love to recall the times he and I laughed about it together. It all passes by so fast!
You commented about how it was typical that your husband would need extended restroom break before boarding the plane. But, I think you meant it was more than just airplane boarding situations where he’d need to go last minute before leaving somewhere.
When I was growing up, we’d typically need to wait for my Dad as we were getting our shoes and jackets on to go someplace. I know poop talk can be gross, but this phenomenon interests me since it caused problems and was so consistent. Sometimes, I thought he was just being difficult. But to wait for not just the last minutes, but at “T minus one,” it was just too good, it had to be true.
If I were my Dad, and if I had cared, I would have tried tricking myself that we were actually leaving earlier. But, sometimes the bowels know your lies. Sometimes, the bowels know no bounds nor boundaries.