Exploiting My Baby

And I think I am finally ready to tell the story about the rabbi, my estranged mother and a bag of shit, and how this only partially holy trinity converged at my home one Tuesday afternoon.

When Buster was eight days old, we invited a rabbi over to circumcise the kid. My husband—not a Jew—was okay with the snip-snip but thought it was creepy to turn the whole situation into a party. Fair enough. So it was going to be just the two of us, until he started suggesting it might be nice to have my mom there, my mom who I haven’t talked to in over a year now.

Just before the baby was born, a package arrived addressed to the unborn child from “Grandma Strasser.” Inside were a hand-knit orange stuffed dinosaur, a tiny sweater with pockets and a hood, and a powder blue blanket. Though she hadn’t called me since my brother told her I was pregnant, it looked as though she had been knitting ever since.

I cried my fucking eyes out with that orange dinosaur in my hand because I was hormonal, and it was a week before my baby was due, and my mother was reaching out in her own stilted way, and while it would be nice if she could say “sorry” or “I miss you,” I stood on my stoop fully aware that some people speak with yarn.

That woman let me down in such a profound way that just the sound of her clearing her throat too loudly makes me want to toss her purse out of a moving car. Try as I may, I haven’t been able to process the backlog of anger at her even after all these years, which has made me an impatient, puerile, irrational daughter. Yes, the woman put me on many a Greyhound bus when I was in elementary school, but I don’t know how to stop making her pay, so I just stop talking to her.

Also, when we went to the rabbi’s Web site, there was a checklist of things we needed for the procedure—gauze pads, kosher wine, ointment and other items the acquisition of which was impossible as I could still barely get up and down and my husband couldn’t leave me alone with the baby. I was a mommy and I needed a mommy. I really needed my mommy.

My husband calls her for me, and as he predicted, she accepts the invite on very short notice, offering to pick up everything we need plus a platter of bagels and lox. I can hear her voice over the phone, and the tone suggests something like enthusiasm, maybe even exuberance. It heartens me that my chronically depressed mom would not only sound elated to hear from us but would also drive five hours from Vegas to see her new grandson at the drop of a yarmulke, salve in hand.

So, with the rabbi and my mother heading our way for the afternoon ceremony, my bowels, which as you already know have been stopped up, finally decide to work after more than a week.

At this point, I can’t bend, lift or twist. So, I sit there on the potty with my head in my hands just trying to think my way out of this mess. The rabbi and my mother are converging on the place in half an hour, my week-old son is stirring in the next room with his dad, and I am hovering over—and up—Shit’s Creek.

I am not now nor have I ever been one of those women who impresses guys by being really open and carefree about their gas and bodily functions. Even writing this makes me vaguely uncomfortable. Sometimes I wish I was that fart-in-your-face girl (I honestly hate even typing the word F-A-R-T), but there came a point in my twenties when I realized two things: I don’t dance, and I don’t enjoy talking about gas or bowel movements. When I embraced being fundamentally inhibited, it changed my life. I am not the girl pretending to think gas is funny or grimacing my way through the conga line at a wedding.

While I have few, if any, emotional boundaries, I make up for it by being private, almost proper, about the physical realm. I would like the world to believe that I don’t poop but instead excrete waste through my skin, like a frog. Never have I indicated in any way to the Mister, up until this moment, that anything noxious ever comes out of my ass, but now I’m screwed.

“Baby,” I yell, sheepishly, “I have a problem.” That’s when my husband rushes to the bathroom door. I start sobbing because I’m freaked out and exhausted and I don’t want this magical Jewish ritual to be marred by the smell of feces wafting through the house, my feces, and I certainly don’t want my husband seeing, smelling or experiencing my waste in any way, but I’m out of options. I wash my hands like I can cleanse myself of this whole situation.

He hands me the baby and runs to the garage for some sort of drain snake. I try to place my thoughts elsewhere, so that I can easily delete this memory in the future. I bounce the boy and look out the window at Koreatown.

There is some running back and forth from the garage to the front door, to the bathroom in back. I hear him call the plumber, who can’t make it until tomorrow. He calls the hardware store to see if they have a larger snake; they do not. I bounce the boy and watch the clock. Fifteen minutes to go.

It takes my mind a moment to process (again, drugs, lack of sleep, major surgery, sudden life-changing transition to motherhood, heavy emotional family issues about to be addressed, impending removal of my baby’s foreskin).

There it is. My husband walk-running around the side of the house carrying—as one might a goldfish won at a county fair—a bag of toilet water and the offending, drain-clogging crap that he has somehow liberated from the bowl.

This is all my fault, I tell myself, for not better orchestrating my life, for having a breech baby and a C-section, for moving to this old house just weeks before the baby’s birth because I couldn’t make up my mind any sooner, for all the chaos of unpacked boxes and curtains not hung. I want everything to be slender and clean and tucked away and predictable, but I can’t go back and I smell Buster’s fuzzy head just to get a hit of the good stuff.

Until now, I didn’t even discuss going number one with my husband and now I’m anxiously running to the front door to find out how it went when he hand-delivered a bag of number two to the trash can out front.

Before the rabbi arrives—a bearded man right out of Central Casting—my mom shows up. She has been driving for hours, so her lime green linen shirt is a bit rumpled, but I can tell she has dressed up. She is carrying a lavish platter of bagels, cream cheese and lox for fifteen, as well as a bag with doubles and triples of all the items on the rabbi’s list. When she opens the door, I hug her and point to the baby, sleeping in his bouncy seat perched on the sofa. She strains to keep a neutral expression on her face, but tears are landing on her shirt. She doesn’t make a move to wipe them away, because her face is still trying to say, “This is no big deal.” I hand her the baby and she cries right onto his blankie, which she must recognize from her months of knitting it.

And just like that, we commence making small talk about Buster, his dimples, will his eye color change, does he know what terrible thing is about to happen to his pee-pee. We have a nosh. Like the unspoken agreement never to discuss the contents of the bag, my mother and I silently conspire to act as though the past year, and many of the years before that, have not been crap.

The rabbi arrives, and dips a cloth into some wine while gathering the four of us to talk about the “covenant” and the idea that a circumcision happens on the baby’s eighth day because there is no eighth day of the week and so the concept is to transcend the earthly plain. Or something like that. I don’t know. Anything a guy with a long beard who has done fifteen thousand snips has to say seems deep. And we give the child a Hebrew name—David—because my stepfather’s last name was Davidson and I know this will make my mom happy. When my stepfather was around, I could deal with my mother. He was a buffer, like the baby will be.

At the rabbi’s request, my mom holds the baby and lets him suck on the wine-soaked corner of a cloth. This is anesthesia, old school and Old Testament style. The baby is sucking on that Manischewitzsoaked rag like maybe his gentile half is taking over, which gives us an easy laugh.

After looking around, the rabbi sets up shop on my desk, because that’s where the sunlight filters in and he wants a clear view. My husband holds the cloth in the baby’s mouth as the rabbi does his thing. Thirty seconds later, with barely a peep from the boy, it’s all over.

Before leaving, the rabbi gives us instructions on how and when to apply the ointment and tells us to bury the foreskin in the dirt to show God we are earthy. It feels like I’ve been sucking on a wine cloth of my own, but I’m just tipsy with a double shot of relief and gratitude; my husband not only fixed the toilet, but he duct-taped over the mom problem, which can never be truly repaired but can at least be patched and repatched. Now she isn’t just my mother but my son’s grandmother, and I would be an asshole to rob my son of his grandma because I can’t forgive her.

He tells us to stay calm, always calm, so your baby will do the same. This isn’t always easy for me, because I love that little fucker so much that the idea of making a mistake, of not knowing what he needs or failing him, the worry that something may be broken in his body or mind that I can’t fix, the idea that I don’t have the patience or sweetness or wisdom to deserve him, well, that is the big bag of shit my soul carries around.

The rabbi leaves. My mom heads back to Vegas, careful not to overstay her welcome. Later that night, as we’re eating leftover bagels and cream cheese, I send my mother a photo my husband took of her holding Buster, tears dotting her green shirt, mouth slightly turned down at the corners, staring down at her first grandchild. She e-mails back, “Please keep the pictures coming, love Grandma.” And we bury the foreskin in the front yard.