Authors: Sarah Bilston
We had the opportunity to test this interesting theory out half an hour later, when the doorbell rang, and a local fisherman’s wife named Marie arrived with an order of sturgeon.
I went to answer the door, noticing the swirls of purplish gray that now loomed on the very edges of my vision. The ground was pulling me into its force with a gentle tug upon the bottom of my eyebrows; my knees were stuffed with floaty puffs of cotton wool—
Marie’s bright cheerful voice lifted me out of my stupor. “Hi, you people, how’re you settling in?” She was a familiar type of the area, big hipped with coiffed hair and large stately glasses; a connoisseur of Hollywood gossip but utterly happy in a small town; a devoted reader of fashion magazines while comfortably unfashionable herself. “Ooof—that’s some yell,” she observed, walking into the kitchen, as Samuel opened his lungs.
Three minutes later, she actually had her fingers in her ears. “Kid has volume!” she said, retreating to the door, having plopped the quivering wet package down on the table. “Colic, huh? My eldest had it too. Gave us a crazy time.”
We stared at her. What?
“And the worst thing is,” she went on cheerfully, having achieved the comparative quiet of the front hall, “there’s nothing you can do. Just got to wait it out. Of course, it seems never-ending at the time. I don’t envy you…”
I stood with my hand clutching the door, waving her a faint farewell as she heaved herself into her truck and swept out of the driveway. Colic? What exactly
is
that? I vaguely remembered something about sweating colts in some James Herriot novel I read when I was ten…
I dragged myself into the bedroom and feverishly unearthed (from beneath Tom’s tottering pile of gold-embossed thrillers)
After Birth: Surviving the First Year,
a book I slung into our overstuffed suitcase when Tom was not looking. The cover was adorned with an im
age of peaceful, fulfilled maternity: a slumbering naked child slung over a serene woman’s shoulder. No one was screaming.
After Birth
had a whole section on “Colic,” I discovered, looking in the index, complete with subsections on “Remedies,” “Possible Causes,” and “The Myths.” I was briefly euphoric; I hadn’t had much recourse to
After Birth,
but whenever I’d used it, it had concrete, useable answers. What to do when the umbilical cord gets icky: keep clean, use alcohol wipes, don’t worry. What to do with a scurfy head: use oil at bath time, wash off, don’t worry. A hundred other small but equally useful pieces of information bristled in its pages: use rectal thermometers for a really accurate reading; remember to keep blind cords away from your baby’s crib; take your baby to the hospital if his fever tops 103. It was a how-to guide to motherhood, and it had never failed me.
Colic was a term “for sustained infant crying,” I learned in its pages. But there was something missing here, some crucial gap between word and meaning, since presumably all children with colic cry but not all children who cry have colic. What
is
it? According to Nurse Barbara Trimblethwaite, illustrious author of
After Birth
(over a million copies sold), no one really knows. However, she lit upon a comforting fact: colic was not “serious,” she claimed (unless you call screaming for hours on end “serious,” of course), and it gradually subsides by week twelve.
I slumped onto the floor, raking my hands through my disheveled hair. Paul Dupont, one of New York’s most dashing, brilliant, erudite men was arriving in three days’ time, and would surely find his house possessed by a monster. A six-week-old tiny pink banshee who could clear a stadium on Super Bowl night. Would he ask us to leave? Could we possibly put him off until week twelve, when the spectral possession would apparently pass from the body of my once-perfect child?
“No chance, Q.” This, sadly, was Tom’s opinion. “He’s got to get a boat ready for a regatta down in Florida in a couple of weeks. Look,
there’s no point in worrying about this, we’ll just have to explain what’s going on” (he set his shoulders manfully). “Paul has handled the Supreme Court. Of course he can take the crying of a little newborn baby…”
“You know, Q,” he continued in a whisper half an hour later, when we were both laid flat out on the floor, Samuel slumped between us, “I thought when we had a child—well, I thought he’d just sleep and play, and cry a bit when he was hungry, you know? But this colic thing, if that’s what it is—I mean, he cries
for what seems like no reason at all.
Did you know that could even happen?”
I didn’t, of course. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d expected mothering to be, but it wasn’t this. It didn’t have to be perfect, I didn’t expect miracles.
But could somebody please explain,
I said to myself, hot tears sliding down my cheeks,
why it has to be like this?
Jeanie
T
he ghosts ate, but I wasn’t sure when; they ate in the middle of the night—in the middle of the morning—whenever Samuel happened to give them five minutes of peace. I made sandwiches and left them in the fridge, and usually the next time I checked they’d disappeared.
“Alison,” I whispered into the phone one morning,
“it’s
not as
much fun as I thought it would be.”
Alison clicked her tongue at me. “Darling, who ever said it would be fun? You’re not there to have fun, you’re there to help. So the baby cries a lot, does he?” She was obviously very interested. “What’s wrong, do you think? Is Tom helpful? Is Q coping?”
I had to describe Samuel’s screeching fits while she clucked and muttered worriedly on the other end of the phone. “It sounds like colic, you know. You should tell her to contact me, I can help,” she added confidently. “I expect he’s having gastrointestinal troubles, perhaps caused by her milk composition, I think—” I switched off while she gabbled on about digestive matters. Parents!
But then she had to run off to collect her son from school. Feeling rather lonely, I turned to my computer for support, locating a wireless signal in the bathroom. I opened my inbox, where twelve new e-mails awaited. Seven were from Dave (“I LOVE YOU, YOU OLD BAG”); three were from my mother (“Just when
are
you coming home?”); one, strangely medieval, offered me the opportunity to improve my peniss lenght and enhance my ladys plesure. One, from college, three days old, contained news that caused a profound darkening in my mood.
“Dear Jean Boothroyd,” it opened, and you know you have to worry when the writer drags in your last name at the beginning. “We still have not received your” (big gap, text continues on next line) “coursework for the independent study module (SW415)” (big gap, text continues three lines down) “and we regret to inform you that you have not therefore fulfilled the requirements for the Master’s Degree in Social Work and Social Policy. Yours sincerely, Ann Dougins (secretary to Professor Sibelius Mordaunt, Dept. of SW&SP, Kingsbury College).”
This was something of a downer, since the day before I left England I submitted an application for a job in which I claimed—and I guessed this part really mattered—that I was about to receive
my master’s degree in social work. It was also quite bewildering, since I’d given a large, bound copy of my final coursework (SW415) three days before that to the very same Ann Dougins, who was (I believed) cohabiting with Professor Sibelius Mordaunt and thus had ample opportunity to deliver said manuscript into his plumply wrinkled blue-white hands. In other words, the whole thing was a typical bureaucratic fuck-up of collegiate life, but one of those things that is nightmarishly hard to resolve when you are three-and-a-half thousand miles away from London, in a small American seaside town.
I finally got through to Professor Mordaunt, who did a very good job of acting as though he hadn’t the faintest idea who I was (even though I’d been sweating through his wretchedly tedious classes for months). “Jean? Jean?” he said fretfully (I’d clearly disturbed him in the midst of his mid-afternoon milky drink). “Boothroyd?” he added, as though the name itself was an offense. “Yes,” I explained patiently. “Boothroyd. With a B. And a Y. And an—er—double O in the middle…” I discovered I was doing a simply horrible job of spelling my name, and stopped.
“And you’ve completed this coursework, you say?” he asked, with evident suspicion. “You’ve actually submitted it to Ann—to Miss Dougins?”
“Yes. Weeks ago. It’s bound and everything,” I said, as if this was the important part. “It’s about the impact of short-term separations on families,” I explained, hurrying on into the meat of the subject, “especially children aged between seven and twelve. Prison, family members serving as carers in other parts of the country, job relocations, that sort of thing. I worked with families in south London, placement in Brixton…”
“Wait a minute, yes, yes, I remember now…” Professor Mordaunt began, slowly, “but it’s
Jean
Boothroyd, I think?” he shot at me suddenly, as if I’d been masquerading all this time as Cheryl or Amy or something.
“That’s what I said,” I replied, starting to lose a scrap of my patience. “You see—”
“Of course I read your thesis,” he went on cheerfully, “it’s all coming back to me now. I wondered why you
will
keep working on children, clearly not your greatest strength. You just don’t have a real feel for family issues, do you?” he continued, without waiting for an answer (which was a good thing, on the whole, since I was temporarily bereft of the means of providing one). “It was fine, not great, think I gave it a B-. Or maybe I felt generous and bumped you up to a B, I’m not sure. Not that it matters, really, eh? B, B-, all a bit of a fiction. Depends which way the wind’s blowing, eh? Oh Lord, the thing must be around here somewhere, I wonder what happened. Yes, yes, I’ll speak to Ann—Miss Dougins—and make sure the examination office is informed before graduation week that you’ve done everything you were supposed to, good little girl stuff, eh? If you haven’t had the letter in a week or two let me know, though. Eh?”
I put the phone down and pounded some pillows for a bit, imagining Professor Mordaunt’s puffy white face (and Ann Dougins’s equally puffy, and probably equally white, buttocks) were in fact receiving my blows. First they lost the work drenched in my heart’s blood. Then they told me I couldn’t graduate. And then, to cap it all, here was Professor “I’ll Sleep With Anything That Moves” Mordaunt telling me I’d “no feel for family issues”
just
as I was about to move into a life dealing with, well, family issues. I stared at a photocopy of the application I’d just submitted for a job in Cumbria, supporting the children of imprisoned parents. Oh dear.
Why
didn’t I have a feel for family issues? I pondered, anguished; what did that even
mean
? Why did he wait till now to tell me about it? Did I perhaps have a feel for something
else
? Did I get a B or a B-? Who knew?
I phoned Alison back, to ask her what she thought. She was home by this point; I could hear the kids in the background. “Darling, you can’t let some professor make your mind up for you, you have to do
that yourself,” she chided, and I explained disconsolately that after a full year of study, I still had no idea which area of my field interested me most. The course was quite long, and there were so many different subjects! “Well, what does Q think?” Alison asked at last, quite sensibly, and I had to explain I hadn’t mentioned a word of this to our sister. “They don’t have time to talk to me
at all,
you know,” I said sadly. “Not anymore.”
Q
W
hen you go to work, no one sits on your shoulder and screams until your eardrum implodes.
When you go to work, you get to wear clothes that don’t have spit-up, vomit, and poo on them. When you go to work, you have coffee breaks, and you’re allowed to eat lunch without a squirming ten-pound weight in your arms. When you go to work, even the most evil, obsessive, work-addicted partner believes that you have a right to four consecutive hours of rest at night.
One night, about a week after we arrived in Sussex, I had an intense dream in which I took on Caroline. It was a real humdinger, sort of
Working Girl meets The Bionic Woman
meets
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
Lots of impressive fight moves on my part and some pathetic
gibbering on hers. “What kind of a weakling are you?” I shouted, arms akimbo, laughing loudly with impeccable red lipstick and glossy hair blowing wild in the breeze. “You
just
work? I can juggle a small child in one arm while wrestling a fresh-killed deer into the freezer with the other and looking up cases on Westlaw with a pencil stuck in my teeth.” To demonstrate my general superiority, I turned cartwheels, produced ten-inch knife blades from my elbows, and finally punched her in the gut with my stiletto heels. It ended with her begging me on her knees to return to Schuster—“with a raise.” Very satisfying.
The truth was, I couldn’t imagine how I was going to go back to the office in three weeks when I was unable to lift a cup of tea to my lips without spilling the whole lot on the floor. I would have to be able to brush my teeth, walk in a straight line, and speak in full sentences at Schuster. These seemed, quite frankly, unimaginable feats.
Still, cornered by Tom, I phoned the small, pristine daycare center we were inspired to choose by the wife of one of Tom’s colleagues (“They have care-cams!”) and arranged a preliminary visit to help Samuel acclimatize to the place. Schuster was allowing me to go back part-time for the first month—a ludicrously humane decision for a Wall Street firm, particularly in a recession—so we could ease ourselves slowly into our new life.
That was the plan, anyway.
My mother-in-law was, of course, horrified at the thought of what she called “group child-care arrangements” (“Won’t he become terribly
aggressive?”
) and disgusted by my sordid careerism. She also made it quite clear to me, when she phoned to speak to “my son Tom,” that I was basely dragging him down.