Before the baby was my body getting ready for the baby, a preparation both physical—swollen ankles, leg cramps, nausea—and mental. I worried about everything. What if the fumes from the carpet cleaner in the condo next door came through the vents in our bathroom and poisoned our daughter? What if she was born with some new genetic disorder that they couldn’t catch with prenatal tests? What if the dog hated the baby and we had to get rid of the dog? What if the dog attacked the baby while we weren’t looking, and we had to have the dog put down, and then the neighbors got mad because they all loved Solly and they tried to kick us out of the condo association for being bad parents and bad dog parents and who would want to live next door to those?
“They would understand,” said Ben when, at eight months pregnant, I played out this scenario. “In the incredibly unlikely event that our dog turns vicious and attacks our newborn, I’m sure that everyone will understand why we have to get rid of her.” Solly was splayed on the floor next to the couch, and he reached down to scratch between her ears.
“But I don’t want to get rid of Solly.”
“Then good thing we don’t have to.”
“I feel like you’re not taking me seriously.”
“I feel like you’re not being serious.” My face fell. Ben softened. “Everyone has babies,” he said, which wasn’t true. “People have babies all the time. We’re in one of the best cities in the world, and we have the best doctors. There’s nothing to worry about.”
None of this was true. If we had stayed in New York, or moved to Paris, maybe then at least some of it would be true. But after fifteen years away, we’d moved back to Chicago, forty minutes from Ben’s parents, twenty-five from mine.
“What are you so scared of?”
“I don’t know.”
If I let myself linger—and I tried very hard not to—I did know. What scared me was the being known, the knowing. This baby would forever be bound to me. How would I hide myself from a part of myself? I knew my own mother in ways that I hoped my daughter would never know me. I pitied my own mother, and never wanted to be pitied. I’d seen my mother’s C-section scars and her sweat stains, knew the smell that she left in the bathroom. I’d heard her ugly laugh and seen her swear at waitstaff and watched her cry in the dark at our old kitchen table after spilling her fourth glass of wine. Motherhood was not a role I’d envied. It was not a job I wanted.
But I didn’t not want it either. I didn’t actively push it away. We hadn’t been trying for a baby; I could’ve hidden the news from Ben and handled everything discreetly, but I didn’t. There was a piece of myself I wanted to cultivate, a version of myself I wanted to be. I could pack sack lunches and bring Gatorade to soccer practice, make trifold science fair projects and polish tiny toenails. I could set aside the dissertation that had started to bore me. Best of all, I barely had to do anything. I could choose without actively choosing: here was my body letting us know that we could have this thing, this future, if we wanted it. I could make something of myself, a literal second self, a second living breathing someone who would need me. I supposed it would be nice to be needed.
If I went to the clinic, I would bleed. If it was just the pill, just a needle, just a quick anesthetic, I thought I might have done it. But I didn’t want to bleed. Bleeding would have been so messy, too obvious a metaphor. I was an academic, and I lived in a world of eternal incubation—always one more semester, one more grant. To bleed would have commemorated finality, an active commitment for which I was not dispositionally prepared.
So Clara was born.
WE PUT HER in the car seat and the nurses had to correct the straps, which retrospectively seemed like the beginning, although maybe it was the balloon that was really the beginning, or that the back of the nursery bookshelf cracked when Solly stepped on it while I was putting it together, or my writer’s block, or the stubbed cigarettes the workmen dropped onto our balcony when patching the roof.
“You have to put her feet through here,” the nurses told us as we readied Clara to leave the recovery room, and Ben’s eyes got wide and worried.
“They fixed it, see?” I said.
Ben worried that my milk hadn’t come in yet. He worried about traffic. He had to go to Houston in a week, and his guilt was manifesting as anxiety. He adjusted the blanket that was draped over the car seat.
“We should have gotten one of those specially made covers.”
Clara’s eyes were open. They were a dark blue that would probably turn brown. She had wispy hair and a little birthmark just above her left eyebrow. She looked very small in the car seat, and because of this the whole project of parenthood suddenly seemed manageable.
Still, we stood in the lobby of the hospital, unwilling to embark. Ben frowned, then laughed, then wiped his eyes. He’d never done as well as me on little sleep—on our honeymoon he had to spend the first full day of jet lag at the hotel with the blinds shut.
“Okay. Yes. Okay.” Ben slapped his fist into his palm. “Okay, we got this.”
“Of course we do,” I said, “Now get the car.”
I sat in back with Clara. It was three thirty on a Thursday, which meant traffic, which meant Ben could drive slowly and no one would complain. I felt each stop and start in my pelvis, but compared to the contractions on my previous car ride, it was nothing. I was close enough to trauma that the small things couldn’t hurt me; I could still consciously access each moment of the birth. Clara was thirty-five hours old. I had an ice pack shoved into my massive mesh diaper.
At home we gingerly walked her up the stairs from the garage, leaving our overnight bags in the trunk. She was asleep, and had another half an hour before she needed to wake up and eat—until she was back up to her birth weight, we had to feed her without fail every two hours.
Ben held the car seat while I unlocked the door.
My sister had used our spare key to come by and pick up Solly—she’d brought flowers and hung a banner that read “Welcome, Clara” in pink and purple marker on top of the TV. There were muffins on the counter and casseroles in the fridge. Our couch pillows were fluffed and Solly’s corner freshly vacuumed, almost free of hair.
“We should set up the swing,” said Ben.
“Tomorrow.”
I went to an armchair, lowered myself slowly. It hurt to sit down. The air-conditioning was blasting loud and cold, and the sun coming in from the open blinds hit me right in the eyes. For a moment I felt outside my body, past it, looking down from above. Where am I? I wanted to ask Ben. But I knew where I was; I just didn’t like it. What had we done? Why had we done this? I had a chapter about Gertrude Stein to incorporate into my dissertation. I had a recipe for sous vide rack of lamb I’d been dying to try. With another forty hours, I might beat Ben’s ninja video game.
“I think I need to change my . . . you know,” I said. “Those cold packs we took from the hospital bathroom . . . can you get them? They’re still in the car.”
Ben stood wide-eyed, breathing heavily, holding Clara away from his body, not at all the way the nurses had shown. He kept bending his knees as if he might put her down, then standing straight again, then bending. His panic flickered toward me. What was wrong with us?
“I’ll go down to the car,” said Ben. “And I’ll just leave her . . . ?” Neither of us had yet been alone with Clara. There was always my mother or sister, the button that summoned the nurses on call. But this wasn’t sustainable, this togetherness. I looked at Ben. We laughed. He just had to run to the car for our bags.
I heard Ben taking the back stairs, his weight making the same dull echo that annoyed me when he came home late, or when our downstairs neighbor went up to the roof: a hollow, metallic sound that usually lasted a few seconds, until whoever was walking had made it from the unfinished stairwell to the carpeted hall. But now the echoing continued—light and peppery, like someone walking in stilettos. Tap TAP tap TAP tap. Maybe Arthur from downstairs had a friend. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance and we had missed the e-mail. Clara started to cry.
I popped a breast out of my T-shirt and squeezed. Leaning forward made my pelvis ache. Colostrum eked out of my nipple, orange and sticky, and from somewhere deep inside me a watery red sopped through my industrial-grade maxi pad, wetting my maternity leggings, staining the chair. Clara’s mouth found food. I bit my lip and tried to hold my pelvic floor. The tap TAP tap continued.
“What the fuck is Arthur doing up there?” I said when Ben returned.
“What do you mean? Arthur’s car’s not in its spot. I think we’re the only ones home.”
“Well, then what’s making that noise?”
“If you want me to take her and try . . .” Ben trailed off, because there was nothing for him to try, there was just me and Clara’s slippery gums, and the milk that my body would be making. I’d never been this consistently close to another person. I’d never had this much power. If I stood up, Clara would fall off my lap, off my breast. And if I held her neck just so . . . I had so much control; I had no control at all.
The upstairs banging came again, and when I winced, Ben asked if there was something he could bring me.
“It’s so loud,” I said. “Has Arthur always been this loud?”
Ben studiously examined the casseroles Annie had left in the fridge, pulling up the tinfoil, then re-covering. There was an unfamiliar feeling to the condo, like someone had been here—not Annie, who’d let herself in to make beds and wipe counters, but someone else who had come after. I shivered. I was a disciple of Mrs. What-to-Expect, whose bible I’d dog-eared and underlined and put in a place of honor on my nightstand. She warned of preeclampsia and babies being sunny-side up and hyperemesis gravidarum and complications stemming from an epidural and checking for wet diapers and umbilical infections and SIDS. She said nothing about noises being louder, about the air in your home feeling colder.
“Can we bring Solly back now?” I asked.
“I thought we said we’d leave her with your sister for the first few days.” Ben brought me a pillow, tucking it behind my head. I was still leaking, but at least Clara had latched. I had another forty-five minutes until I was supposed to take my Colax. I hated it when people said “I thought” and meant “I know.”
“I just think it would be comforting to have her here,” I said.
“We’d have to walk her.”
“You would have to walk her.”
“That’s what I meant. Do you want me to look for the nursing pillow? Do we know how long she’s going to eat?”
The noise upstairs augmented, more persistent. “Is there something you can do about that?” I asked him.
“About the mess? About the pillow?”
“About the banging. Can’t you just go talk to Arthur?”
“Megan, I told you he’s not home. There’s nothing to do.”
“Just because his car is gone doesn’t mean he is.”
“Megan, stop it.”
He’d snapped at me. Ben never snapped at me. Ben was even-keeled, the opposite of Annie’s awful ex-boyfriend Calvin, the opposite of my awful ex-boyfriends. I felt a momentary thrill of unease.
And then: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yelling.” He hadn’t yelled, but I didn’t see any use in correcting him. He rubbed my shoulders and the pressure wasn’t firm enough to feel good, just a flaccid, perfunctory tickle. I had to summon deep reserves of patience not to shake him off.
The crashing came again, this time immediately above me. I jumped at the sound. Clara shifted her position but didn’t complain.
“Are you okay?” Ben asked. He was looking toward the kitchen—the opposite direction of the noise—as if trying to meet the eye of someone waiting there. As if there was a button he could press like the one that rang the nurses at the hospital, and when they came, he could throw up his hands. He’d say, “I don’t know how to make her stop,” and the nurses would say, “Have you tried rocking her?” He wouldn’t know how to tell them that the her he’d meant was me.
“Megan,” Ben said, “are we okay?”
He didn’t mean it in jest, but I couldn’t help laughing.
And maybe that was the beginning—the noises from upstairs, the first crack in Ben, my laughter. A dawning recognition that the anxiety I’d felt during my pregnancy was only going to increase now that Clara had come out of me. The dry, itchy skin. The sensitivity to light. The word sensitivity comes from the Old French sensitif, which means “capable of feeling.” In a way I supposed it was good, to know that I was and I could.