Maternity Leave (9781466871533) (14 page)

Annika and I stop by the merch stand, and I take advantage of the babyless shopping experience and purchase a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Kesha's cat, a Siamese bearing an uncanny resemblance to Doogan. I tuck it into the back of my shorts, and we make our way inside the hall.

The concert is held at what was probably once a beautiful, ornate dance hall used for swank, polished events, as many concert halls once were. Now, as we stand close to the back so as to remain untouched by the seething mass of sweaty bodies, a girl vomits white goo not ten feet from us and, consequently, passes out. As her friends drag her away, I think three things: a)
This is a far cry from the tux and tails this place once saw;
b)
Why would you get so fucked up after you paid for concert tickets that you end up missing the show;
and c)
Damn, I'm old
.

Kesha comes onstage, approximately the size of a Tic Tac from where we stand, and Annika and I spend the next hour dancing, sweating, and watching people slip on that girl's puke. I'm almost transported back to a time when I felt free to dance and not care how I looked to anyone. Or maybe I cared a lot more how I looked, since I was probably single back then. Either way, I most definitely felt better than I did now: older, bags under my eyes, heavy, milk-loaded boobs inhibiting my dance moves. I wager with myself that I'm the oldest person in the room, until I spy a seventyish-year-old man. He's not dancing so much as swaying, and for all I know he's a child-stalking perv, but for now I give him the benefit of the doubt that he's just an aged Kesha fan who doesn't give a crap what people think of him. I try to follow suit and let the glitter fall where it may.

After the concert is over, we haul ass back to my house so I can feed Sam before my boobs burst.

I change out of my sweaty concert clothes, and Zach grills me about the show. I tell him about pumping in the car, the barfing girl, and Old Man Kesha. He tells me that Sam seemed tired, so he put him down after we left and he's been sleeping ever since.

Five hours.

The second I put on my pajamas, Sam is up screaming. I nurse him and lay him back down to sleep. Two hours later he's up again. And another two hours after that.

I guess this is my punishment for taking five hours for myself.

FACEBOOK STATUS

I pray I do not look as old as James Spader.

84 Days Old

I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. Does it really count as waking up if I never really fully had a night's sleep? If my life is a series of unfulfilling naps that fail to invigorate me? If I look ten years older than I did a mere three months ago?

Do they have mom and baby couples therapy?

85 Days Old

Sam is twelve weeks old today. He smiles. He holds his head up to some capacity during tummy time. He laughs when his daddy makes silly faces. He plots maniacally against his mother each day as to how to make her life an aging, depressing, sleepless hell in which she will rot eternally for not knowing how to love this human she brought into the world. And he poops quite a bit, too.

86 Days Old

In preparation for her trip to San Francisco (eleven days and counting), my mom drops off the Costco case of formula she's been keeping in her trunk the last two months. “Just in case,” she notes.

“I'm not going to use it.” I grit my teeth. “But thank you anyway. Why are there some missing?”

“My mah-jongg group was over, and we wanted to try it. Zelda was insistent it was going to taste like Ensure.”

“You drank baby formula?” I laugh. “How was it?”

“Disgusting. I mixed it with a little vodka, but that didn't seem to help.”

“Vodka and baby formula? So that's why you're always bustling off to a mah-jongg game.”

“We know how to have a good time. What can I say?” Mom shrugs.

87 Days Old

Because of my, shall we say, lack of pleasantness (and because I look like a bulldog), Zach suggested we sleep-train Sam. He brought home a book called
Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child,
with a foreword by noted baby expert Cindy Crawford. I open the book, read two sentences, and throw it across the room. Well, I try to, but I'm so fucking tired that the book arcs downward in a pathetic rainbow.

I have no interest in reading a book about sleep when I am not getting any. I give it to Zach and say, “If you want to help, you read the book. I might be tempted to club someone over the head with it.”

89 Days Old

Two days later, Zach approaches me. “I read the sleep book. Some of it. It's a lot. The guy seems very focused on a baby needing sleep, and we're doing him a disservice by going to him during the night. I don't know if I agree with that.”

“a) What about
Mom
needing sleep; and b)
we?
” Zach may be a great dad, but he is an even better sleeper. Not to mention his lack of mammories.

“Hey, I read the book,” he tries to defend himself.

“Yes, and you also got me pregnant,” I note.

“Speaking of which…,” Zach starts.

I don't let him finish. “You want to get me pregnant again? Do you hate me that much? I can't even take care of one kid, and now you want me to have two? This soon? My body won't be able to handle it! I'll go into the hospital and have to be on bed rest for months like Tori Spelling!”

“Whoa! Calm down. I was just going to say it was nice making out that one night and see if you wanted to do it again. I'm not asking for another baby. I barely know what to do with this one.”

It surprises me to hear Zach sound insecure about parenthood. He always appears, at least through my sleep-blurred eyes, like it all comes naturally to him. “Really? Because you always seem to know what to do, or when to hold him, or when he wants a song or a silly face. He never laughs at me.” I pout.

“That's because you're always making faces like that. And as funny as I think you look, the comedy is not quite broad enough for Sam's palate.”

“You think I look funny?” I ask.

Zach engulfs me in his wide chest. “I think you look beautiful. A little tired, but even that's beautiful because you're a tired mom. You're not just my tired wife anymore. In fact, I would have to say that being a mom has made you even more beautiful. Thank you for giving me our little son, Sammy.” Zach sounds overcome with emotion, as though he might cry. What is it about me that makes all the males in my life such crybabies?

90 Days Old

U
GLY
R
EPORT:

Bags under my eyes.

Black shit in my belly button.

Zit still on my chest.

And now my hair is falling out in mass quantity. I read that this is all of the hair that did not fall out during my pregnancy. I don't mind losing the hair, but the problem is that in order to not clog the drain, I can't just let the hair fall where it may. So I untwine the nest from my fingers and stick my hair to the wall until my shower is over. After I dry off, I use a toilet paper wad to wipe the hair off the wall and toss it into the garbage. Only, by the time I'm done with my shower and start to dry off, Sam usually wakes up crying. Then I forget about the hair installation, and by the next morning the wet hair that was once stuck to the wall has now dried and fallen all over my shampoo and conditioner bottles. In order to get the hairy mess off my bottles and hands, I end up rinsing it down the drain anyway. Zach has already had to make two runs to Target for extra Drano.

File under: Stuff they don't tell you about in pregnancy books.

91 Days Old

My mom calls to check in during a break at her mah-jongg tournament.

“We got in trouble,” she whispers into the phone. “They told us we needed to be quiet while we listened to the rules, but who doesn't know the rules already if they're at a mah-jongg tournament?”

“Quite the rebel, Mom. I'll get you a leather jacket with a mah-jongg tile on it for your birthday.”

“Make it three bam. That's my lucky tile.”

“I can't believe you're leaving me here all by myself in a week,” I bemoan.

“Not this again. Anyway, we can Scope while I'm gone. It'll be just like I'm there.”

“It's Skype, and it'll be nothing like you're here. Say good-bye to my sanity. I doubt it will be here when you get back.”

“Gotta go—the game's about to start. Love you!” She hangs up.

I can't wait until I'm old enough to abandon my adult children.

93 Days Old

My vagina seems not to hate me quite as much as it used to during my treadmill time. I managed to run an entire five minutes. The worst part of my workout are the Kegels. Someone should make a workout video for Kegel exercises. I'm envisioning constipated, twisted expressions on the instructors' faces while they squeeze their inner lady parts. The hilarity of that makes me pee a little bit.

To: Annie

From: Louise

I am going fucking insane. It is beautiful and sunny and 72 fucking degrees outside, and all I want to do is curl up under my covers and hope it all goes away. Gertie cries all the time. Like I'm feeding her, and she's crying while I'm feeding her. I don't want to take her to the doctor because all they'll do is ask me a bunch of questions and then have zero answers. Plus, they'll be all, “She's getting so big,” and I have to pretend I give a shit. And if I have to take Gertie to the doctor that means I have to bring Jupiter, and every time we go to the doctor's office Jupiter feels the need to take a shit. It's like some Pavlovian response to the office. And I have to take her into that bathroom where all of the disgusting sick children go to puke and touch everything. Not to mention I still have to wipe her ass after a poo, so I'll have to stand holding Gertie while I wipe Jupiter's ass, then wash her hands, and somehow wash my hands while attempting not to drop the baby in the toilet.

FUCK.

—Lou

94 Days Old

I made plans to get together with Louise because she seems like she needs to get out even more than I do. We meet up at a park near her home in the city.

“I swear I'm going to pack up and move without telling Terry.” Lou's been threatening, to me, at least, to move out of Chicago for years. “Another house on our block foreclosed, and don't tell me that wasn't a crack pipe we passed while coming to this park. Of course we bought the house before the market went to shit, and now it's worth half what we paid for it, even though we put a buttmunch of money into it.” She takes a deep breath, lets it out, and slowly smiles at me. “I'm sorry. It's just so nice to get to bitch to an actual person, and not a computer screen.”

“I don't mind. It makes me feel better to hear someone who hates their life more than I do,” I admit.

“Does it sound like I hate my life?” she asks guiltily. “Because I don't. Not all the time. I just don't feel like I'm doing anything right. It's hard enough with a baby you can't communicate with, but wait until Sam's an actual kid and you really fuck him up. My guilt cup runneth over.”

“I can't wait until Sam can talk. Right now he's this roly-poly ball of poo. I don't know what he wants. I don't know what to do with him. He has the attention span of a donut.” I pause.

In unison, Lou and I ask, “Do you want to get some donuts?” We giggle.

“Watch me, Mommy!” Jupiter yells from the monkey bars.

“I'm watching, honey! She can't do anything without someone watching,” Louise asides to me.

“It's more interesting than watching a baby try to lift his head up. Why is this so hard? Why do people love being moms so much? I'm terrible at it. I hate being terrible at things. Give me the days when I was acing tests and job interviews and traveling the world on ten dollars a day. Now I'm spending hundreds of dollars on crap from QVC just so that I have someone to talk to.”

“Watch me, Mommy!”

“Seriously. We're eating lunch, and every bite she takes she's like, Watch me eat this spoonful of cereal. And I'm like, Why? Why the fuck do I need to watch the way you eat every single bite of food? Once is cute, and that is it. I have no patience for this shit.” Louise takes a sip of water from a Nalgene. “How exactly do you talk to QVC?”

“I call in. Order over the phone. Once I was even in a queue to give an on-air testimonial, but they ran out of time.” I sigh dejectedly.

“You know there's this little thing called the internet. Makes spending shitloads of money really easy.”

“It's not about the shopping. It's about the human interaction,” I counter.

“Okay, so there's this place called a mall…,” Lou starts.

“I know, I know. But I'm not up for
that
much human interaction. QVC is a happy medium. I don't have to get dressed or, even worse, get Sam dressed and pack up all his crap. I don't have to deal with him crying in public or having to breastfeed him in front of people—”

“Watch me, Mommy!”

“I'm watching! For fuck's sake. Shit's exhausting. Speaking of breastfeeding, do you mind if I whip out the old milk jugs? It's time for Gertie to eat.”

“I don't mind,” I say. “How do you know she's hungry? She's not crying,” I observe.

“Yeah, the one thing that keeps her from crying is being outside. She loves the sun. But that means I have to leave the house. Some of us don't have the luxury of loathing our kids in the privacy of our own homes.”

“Hey, I'm the one who came to you. Besides, if taking her outside stops her from crying, isn't it worth it?” I ask.

“I'm not going to be coerced into leaving my house by someone who does her shopping over the phone like it's 1925, and you've flipped open your Sears, Roebuck catalog, thank you very much.”