I WAS TWENTY-FOUR years old when Audrey was born. And of all the things that were strange and new and frightening about becoming a parent at a time when I was in many ways a child myself (starting with the sight of one small body emerging from another that’s one’s own—something that’s never wholly real, during all those endless months of pregnancy, until you see it happen), the one familiar part was her being a girl. She looked, people said, like me. And I felt like her. When she cried, my eyes filled with tears. When she was frustrated or angry (looking for her thumb, waiting the thirty seconds it took between when she cried and when I fed her), my own impatience was as real as a baby’s empty belly. If I was sitting down, waiting for Steve to pick her up and bring her to me, and he hesitated first, just long enough to tie his shoe or throw a log on the fire, I would feel like screaming. Come on, come on, come on.
She grew, of course—cut first from the cord, then from the breast, and then (and still) an endless succession of further separations. Her first night away from home. The first (far from the only) time she said to me, “I don’t like you. I’m going to find another mother.” Four weeks when Steve and I went to China as teachers with a group of American high school students and left Audrey with her grandparents, during which time my night was her day and the whole globe stood between us. By the time she was six she was choosing her own clothes every morning (seldom the ones I would have put her in) and heading out into the world for eight hours at a stretch, carrying a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox and a pocketful of friendship pins. And though I would ask her every afternoon at three how her day had gone, she seldom gave me more than a sentence’s worth of information.
With all of that, though, we’re alike. I know which of a caseful of dolls will be her favorite. I know, when we meet a woman carrying an alligator bag in an airport lounge, that at the first opportunity she’ll pull me aside and whisper disapprovingly, “Endangered species!” I hear about the birthday party of a girl at her school, to which she wasn’t invited, and though I don’t cry, I easily could. Like me, Audrey loves to talk, so that now (at times more than my often silent husband) she is my companion and confidante who, settling into the front seat of the car beside me or reaching for the fanciest china teacup at the kitchen table, says with a happy, expectant sigh, “What are we going to discuss today?”
You have a child, and then you think you know what children are like. Who yours resemble. How it is, being a parent. Everything has changed, and will never be the same. There can be no enormous surprises left.
But then maybe you have another child. And it turns out you didn’t really know what babies were like after all. You knew only that first baby. This second one is all new, something totally different. He teaches you about himself, and also—by his differences—about his sibling. That face she made (that you thought all babies make) turns out to be hers alone. Your children are not necessarily dark-haired and dark-skinned after all. (They can also be blond and fair.) As for being a parent: You knew all about raising one child. But all the rules change, raising two.
And then there is that other joy that comes when there is more than one, and that is seeing your two children together. Providing them with the gift of each other.
Audrey had been an only child for four years and a month when her brother Charlie was born. For four years she had been the central—only—star in our small galaxy, and certainly my life revolved powerfully around hers. Every morning she’d bound into our bed, asking us what we were going to do today. Sew doll clothes, make valentines, bake pies? Drive to the children’s museum, play Old Maid all afternoon? We had tea parties with my grandmother’s china. We sewed dollhouse curtains and embroidered hankies. I read her stacks of books at a sitting, and when we were done she’d turn to me to ask, “What do we do next?”
Even the desire for another child came, in part, anyway, out of my endless attempts to give the one I already had everything (including a sibling). I was eager for another child too, and hoping for a boy. But in my heart of hearts, I don’t think I ever believed I would love another child as much as I loved the one I already had: my dark-eyed, dark-skinned, dark-haired daughter, the little girl who looked like me and gave me a chance to relive and (sometimes) rewrite my own childhood. I never had a brother, myself. But Audrey would have one.
It was a good and easy second pregnancy, filled not only with Steve’s and my anticipation, but this time with Audrey’s too. She and I used to carry on conversations with her sibling before he was born: Audrey, lifting up my maternity top, whispering gently into my belly button, and me, in a squeaky, muffled voice, providing the baby’s response. She asked the baby questions about life in utero, but more than that, he would ask her about the outside world, and then she’d hold forth, sweetly and patiently explaining Christmas, or popcorn, or telling him about our house, our dog, the room that would be his. She sang him songs, taught him the numbers up to ten, told him, above all, not to worry about being born. She’d take care of him. Every couple of weeks I’d cook a ham—usually a seven- or eight-pounder—and whenever I got one, I’d let Audrey carry it around the kitchen for a while, before it went in the oven, so she’d get used to the weight of a baby. Pretty soon she was calling our unborn baby Hamhead, and Steve and I did too.
Eventually Hamhead—Charlie—was born. But where my daughter had been instantly familiar to me, my son showed up like a wonderful, lovable stranger. A boy, for one thing. And a big, ten-pound, blue-eyed blond. A child over whom people still express surprise when they hear he’s mine (and the brother of Audrey). They’re that different.
I liked him right away, of course, but where the heart gives over blindly to a first child, this time I held back some. No question about it, my first loyalties were to the child who’d been with us four years already. If he was crying, and she needed me, he was the one who had to wait. Partly that was an instinctive strategy, I think (I never wanted her to see him as having taken her mother away. Better a little motherly neglect, I figured, than sisterly resentment). But it’s also true, the choice wasn’t hard, in those early days. Charlie would have to win my love, earn his place in my heart. And faster than I had anticipated, he did.
He was a sunny, cheerful baby. Almost from the first I let Audrey carry him around—our real-life hamhead—and though wherever we went I’d see people looking shocked to observe a four-year-old toting an infant, I knew she’d be as unlikely to drop him as I was, she was so proud. As for him, he’d never known a life in which he wasn’t carried by his sister, and was accustomed to the somewhat bumpy ride she gave him. Maybe out of self-preservation, he held his head up on his own faster than any other baby I’ve known.
In the first weeks and months after Charlie’s birth, people who knew us, and knew of my deep and single-minded devotion to my daughter, used to ask us how Audrey was taking the arrival of the new baby. Their faces would look worried when they made their inquiries, their tones were hushed, as if what they were speaking of was not the birth of a baby, but an attack of some terrible disease or the discovery of head lice. Over and over they would ask Audrey herself, “How do you like your baby brother?” And almost as often, they would anticipate, and plant the suggestion of, trouble. “I bet he screams all the time,” they’d say. “I bet sometimes you wish he’d move away.”
I understand it’s modern, progressive thinking to talk this way. We are all of us more in touch with our feelings these days, as they say. And once in touch with them, we’re all anxious to express them, get them out in the open. Children’s books about new baby brothers and sisters are filled, now, with older siblings’ feelings of displacement, declarations of hatred, and examples of acting out. (Validating. I think that’s what they call it.) But sometimes I wonder whether being allowed to say repeatedly, “I hate my brother,” doesn’t simply reinforce the idea for a child. She hears the words so often they begin to sound familiar, and true.
As for me, I had started out this business of having a second child with my heart and mind still centered on my first (and worried, lest he become a rival for my affections). But it came to Steve and me, after Charlie’s birth, that the only real danger was not of one child becoming more loved than the other, only of the consequences if the two failed to love and support each other. I saw how Audrey rejoiced over her brother’s arrival, and how little she seemed threatened by it. One more person to love her, and one more person to love, that’s what he was to her.
I didn’t want that to change. So, to preserve that feeling, we handed over to Audrey large measures of responsibility (real, not invented) and tried to make sure that he associated her only with good things and that she saw him as taking nothing from her, only adding to her life. When there were cookies to be handed out, she gave them. When she fell down, he was dispatched (first crawling, later staggering with his first steps) to kiss her. Inevitably, of course, his presence in our lives sometimes meant I had less time for her. But more often he served as playmate, companion, comforter. In the interest of reinforcing those things, I allowed some things I mightn’t otherwise. She dressed him like a doll, put him on a leash and took him for walks, sat him down, for an hour at a time, to learn the ABCs or the names of colors. For his part, he has always been so happy and grateful for her attention he almost never complained. As soon as he graduated from his crib, he began sleeping beside her in the single bed they still share, and when he cried in the night it was (and is still) usually Audrey who calmed him and sang him back to sleep.
Sometimes I’ll be on a tirade (the children will have left their room a mess, or failed, again, to pick up the dirty clothes, or spilled orange juice over the kitchen floor), and the two of them band together like sailors on a storm-tossed boat. And in a way I’ve never really minded. Let me be the villain, sometimes, if it solidifies their alliance.
Naturally, they get fed up with each other sometimes. Charlie breaks the leg off Audrey’s doll. Audrey remarks bitterly that she wishes she had a sister. They stalk off to one room or another. Slam the door. Cry. And then someone must always apologize, look the other in the eye, give a hug. If they can’t do that, it’s back to the room again. Sometimes, then, I might ask the child who’s having trouble: How many sisters do you have? How many brothers? (Even two is not so many that a person can afford to let one get away.)
Charlie knows his sister’s name is Audrey, but that’s not what he calls her. He calls her Sis, or Sissy. I never tire of hearing him speak of her that way, or of hearing her speak proudly of “my brother.” The words have a power unto themselves, I sometimes think. Just as words of hatred or resentment can reinforce the feelings they name, words that speak of attachment and connection can strengthen family ties. “I want to die the same day you do,” Charlie (who’s going through a slightly morbid stage) told Audrey the other day. He simply can’t imagine a life without her.
Sometimes I can hardly bear to look at pictures of Steve and me taken back when our marriage, as well as parenthood, was new. One portrait we had taken at a discount store shows the two of us, holding a five-day-old Audrey, standing in front of a Technicolor backdrop. (We had a choice: ocean, desert, or mountains. We chose mountains.) In the picture both of us look a little stunned, still reeling from Audrey’s birth and the realization that we, and no one else, were the ones responsible for her. Steve and I had about twenty-five dollars to our names the day we had that picture taken, and still I spent four of them on a pair of pink baby shoes that wouldn’t fit for months. We had come to this discount store specifically because they’d advertised portraits for eighty-eight cents. And when I learned that meant eighty-eight cents for each person in the portrait (and Audrey counted) I was actually upset.
No baby shakes its parents to the core the way the first one does. But if our daughter was all thrilling and overwhelming to us, our son was much the same to our daughter. When she came downstairs that first morning to find his head sticking out from under the covers in our bed, where he’d been born a few hours earlier, she said “My dream came true,” and she hasn’t altered her position much since then. The two of them are firmly a pair, and because they are, Charlie (who has never known life without a sibling) will never need Audrey the way she needed him.
What was new to us about our second child was not only his being a boy but, just as much, the fact that this time around we were settled and in control of things. There was a leisurely four-year space between children, a washer and dryer installed, money in the bank for Lacoste sleeper suits. The sound of my baby crying no longer brought tears to my eyes. From the first, I loved Charlie with a measure of ease and detachment I had never known and cannot manage even now for my firstborn, whose pain I still suffer as my own. It was two years after Audrey’s birth before I retrieved the capacity to think about, talk about, something other than her, to walk out the door and leave her with someone else without feeling a stab. After Charlie, life seemed good and manageable. I lost the extra weight I’d gained easily, found a babysitter I liked, and didn’t mind it that she didn’t sing and play with him all morning. I joined the Y, started running, went away for a weekend alone with Steve. During which time, it turns out, our third child was conceived.
But where the news of my first pregnancy had been met with joy from all quarters, and news of the second just as much so, when I told people I was pregnant again, they’d tend to look baffled. “Was this planned?” they would say. “Are you happy about it?” One woman simply asked me, “Why?”
The third time around, there were no new maternity clothes and no nursery redecoration projects. I no longer read books about labor and delivery or infant care. The months, which had crawled by when I was waiting for Audrey to be born, passed without notice, until suddenly it was January and I realized we had just six weeks left until the baby would be born and we hadn’t even talked about his name.
I went to a baby shower for my friend Kathleen, who was expecting her first child right around the time our third was due. My friend Laurie, who gave the party, had asked me if I’d like a shower too. I said of course I didn’t need a shower. We had plenty of baby clothes already, I said, packed away in old Luvs boxes in our attic crawl space.
And then sitting there in Laurie’s streamer-decorated living room, eating a cake decorated with little plastic rattles and watching Kathleen untie pink and blue ribbons, seeing her hold up the stuffed animals and little dresses and the tiny shoes (that, I now know, never stay on), I felt foolishly close to crying. That the arrival of this third child of ours had been so little anticipated or feted. That not once in all the months of my pregnancy had Steve and I sat on the couch together (his hand on my belly), waiting for a kick.
Another friend—a mother of two who manages, as mothers of two children still can, just barely (while mothers of three and more are seldom heard from) to carry on with her career—wrote me a letter about this same point, asking me if there was still some excitement left, the third time around. A third child herself, she said, she was fishing for a reply in the affirmative. After all these years, she still wanted to believe her parents had been able to rejoice just as much at the birth of their third daughter as they had at the birth of the first.
Well, I wrote back, this baby hasn’t even been born yet, and already I think I know some things about third children. (My husband, it suddenly occurred to me, was one.) Third children seldom put on clothes someone else hasn’t worn first. They won’t get held or sung to as much as first and second children. They must learn early (maybe even before they’re born) to make do. If I had to guess, I said (and as it turned out, I was right), this new baby of ours will grow up very fast, always trying to keep up with the others.
I never got around to hanging our old Beatrix Potter mobile over the crib, the third time around, in part because the music box no longer played “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” and I was sick of the tune anyway. I never reviewed my Lamaze breathing. I never got to spend one day lying in bed reading magazines.
But when the moment came, that I felt the old familiar, unmistakable symptoms of labor, my heart raced, the same as it did for Audrey and for Charlie. This time I didn’t care if we got a boy or a girl, blond- or brown-haired, handsome or pretty or neither. And I think now that it will be the total inconvenience of his timing, and the very fact that we didn’t exactly need another baby around here, that I will someday offer to Willy as testimony to the way we felt about his arrival. This time around, all the essential roles had been filled. And of course we loved him anyway.
The day Willy took his first step our whole life changed. Now he climbs stairs and teeters at the top with one foot poised in midair. Now when his older brother and sister play Candyland, he can stand in the middle of the game board, throwing cards in the air. He pulls ingredients off shelves, he makes Cheerios mountains and pours olive oil on his head. He wakes up, shouting, at half past five—ready to start his endless investigation of our decimated house. (“What shall I break?” were the first words he uttered one morning.) He goes to bed at eight-thirty, and Steve and I follow as soon after that as possible. We drop into bed every night with heavy sighs. “Three children is a lot,” says Steve.
I wanted three children, and maybe more. Of course I can’t imagine doing without any one of them. It’s just that right now, life around here is so grueling I have to make advance arrangements just to step into the bathroom.
I lie awake, projecting into our future. In two years, Willy will be the age that Charlie is now—almost three (an age that seems thrillingly mature and independent by comparison). Someday, I murmur to Steve, we will have a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old. Someday they will be five, seven, and eleven. Six, eight, and twelve … I spin the different combinations in my head like a gambler, dreaming of the perfect hand.
I call up a friend who has a child a few months older than Willy (I dial twice, because the first time my son pulls my glasses off. As we talk, he sings into the receiver, which is wet where he licked it. He grabs for my coffee. Points at the record player, demanding music. Gets himself tangled up in my extra-long telephone cord). “How long does this stage last?” I ask her. “When does it get easier?”
“Search me,” she says. “I’m still waiting.”
Our older two children are taking the new Willy surprisingly well, considering. They’re devoted to him, even though (in the last two days) he has destroyed three pop-up books, the right paw of a Gremlin puzzle, and one of Mr. T’s ears. Where once my children used to beg me to play cards or blocks, now all they can hope for, often, is that I’ll get their brother out of their hair. “Mo-om!” they call out, at least thirty times a day. “Come get Will.”
But he doesn’t want me, of course. He’s a wriggler, not a cuddler, and what he really wants are the other kids. He’s a third child: the one I had no time to nurse after the fourth month. The one who got his milk unheated, straight from the refrigerator.
Willy’s the one we were always calling by his brother’s name (it had been so recently that we’d had that other blonde-haired baby boy under our roof). He’s the one we never got around to sending out announcements about, never took pictures of. He grew, like one of those weeds that somehow manage to push up through the cracks in a sidewalk, without a whole lot of close tending. Of course he walked at ten months: He could see this was no house to be a baby in. Not this year, anyway. Better to get moving, to grow up fast. So he did, and he has.
Our third child is a wonderful, cheerful baby, who smiles when his brother bops him on the head with a stuffed animal. Once when he was a few months old I heard a loud noise upstairs, where he was napping, followed by a small peep. I couldn’t go check it out right away because Charlie had just got stuck in the sofa, while Audrey was trying to fold up the hideaway bed with him inside, and somebody had turned on the hot-air popcorn popper without putting a bowl underneath to catch the popcorn. When I finally managed to investigate upstairs, I discovered the bottom had fallen out of Willy’s crib (which is, like everything else he uses, pretty beat up, from the two previous occupants). He was lying on the floor with his mattress on his head, cooing. This is a baby who does not expect life to be a bed of roses.
I tell these stories to friends, smiling ruefully, but they’re sad stories too. I love babies, love sitting in a chair, just rocking them, smelling the tops of their heads, studying their toes, and I haven’t gotten to do those things much this time around. Not that Willy’s suffering: he has a brother who (in spite of the occasional bop) almost never races through a room without stopping to pat his head, and a sister who likes to hold him by the armpits and waltz him around the room to our Cyndi Lauper record.
Mostly I’m sad for Steve and me, that we’re seldom able to relish this time and take it slow, that all we can do right now is grit our teeth and count the months until it’s over and we don’t have a baby around here anymore. And then—oh, will we ever miss it.
The hardest thing for me about having three children is finding a way to be with them one at a time. Used to be, with two, Steve could take one and I’d take the other. Now even when both of us are on duty, we come up short. The books I read to Willy don’t interest Audrey (“If I hear ‘Scat, scat, go away, little cat’ one more time, I think I’ll lose my mind,” she says). Charlie wants to do puzzles. Willy wants to eat them. Audrey draws with markers. Willy scribbles on her picture. Willy wants to go out. Charlie wants to stay in. Charlie and Willy want to watch Sesame Street. Audrey is trying to play the piano. Audrey and Charlie want to see a movie. Willy insists on staying in the lobby, swinging karate chops at a life-sized cardboard image of Rambo. That’s how it goes around here these days.
Being with one of our children—any one, alone—is a dream for me now. I’ll sometimes corral one of them to come along with me on a trip to the dump, just for the few minutes we’ll have in the car together. Every now and then the naps work out right, and I can fit in a game of Cootie with Charlie while Willy’s asleep, or Charlie and Willy will go to bed early and Audrey and I can race off to her room and read a couple of chapters of a book with no illustrations that she loves and Charlie hates. I have caught myself, during those times, with an edge of tension in my voice that comes from knowing how rare this time is, and how much I want to do in it. “Let’s not waste time setting up the Cootie legs in the holder,” I say to Charlie. “Willy’s going to wake soon.” “Hush!” I snap at Audrey. “You’ll wake your brothers.”
Then I try to remember what the point of all this is—namely, just being together and giving whichever child I’m with the gift of my undivided attention. And then I think about the night I spent last winter with my son Charlie, snowed in at the Ramada Inn.
I was supposed to fly to New York City and interview a famous child-development expert who had a new book out. It was going to be a brief trip, but even so, my trips are always hard on my husband and children. So I invited Charlie, the one who had seemed in greatest danger of getting lost in the shuffle, to come along. I extracted the promise from him that he’d be good during my interview, which would take no more than a couple of hours, and packed a satchel full of all his favorite books, plus crayons, paper, and fruit roll-ups, to keep him occupied while I worked. After that, we would see the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, have dinner with friends, sleep over, and fly home the next morning.
That was the plan. The day of our trip dawned cold and cloudy, with light snow flurries, but still we set out around lunchtime for the small, mostly commuter airport thirty miles from where we live to catch our flight to the big city. By the time we reached the airport, though, the snow had turned to ice and the runway was coated. No planes flying out all day, and no way I could make the thirty-mile drive back home. So I crawled at ten miles an hour, stopping three times to de-ice the windshield, to a Ramada Inn a few miles down the highway from the airport and checked in with my son. “Is this New York City?” he asked, looking dubious. (Maybe he’d slept through the plane ride? Maybe the interview was over, before he’d even got to eat his fruit roll-up?) No, I explained. This is Keene, New Hampshire. There’s the supermarket where we sometimes shop, and there’s the car wash Dad takes you to. We’re sleeping here tonight.
Of course the first thing I did was make a call to the city, postponing the interview until the following week. Then I called Steve, back at the house, and told him not to worry. I was so cold from being out in the storm that I unpacked my flannel nightgown and Charlie’s sleeper suit and, even though it wasn’t yet four o’clock in the afternoon, put them on. Then we made a pile of books next to our bed, climbed under the covers, and read every one.
We played tic-tac-toe. We did dot-to-dots. We colored. We took a bath. We sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The motel had an indoor pool, and I, miraculously, had packed a body suit that could pass for a bathing suit, so I went for a swim while Charlie jogged around the pool, calling and waving to me and hiding behind the artificial potted palms. Back in the room, I got into my warm clothes again and ordered a chicken dinner from room service. We set up our food cart in front of the big color TV and watched a couple of shows before drifting off to sleep as the snow piled higher and higher outside our window. Out on the highway, hardly a car passed by. It felt as if the world had stopped.
The next morning I woke early to Charlie bouncing on the king-sized bed. Pulling back the curtains. I could see our car out in the parking lot, completely buried in snow and ice. But the sun was shining. Plows were moving. We’d be out in an hour or two.
We turned on the Today show and saw the child-development expert I was supposed to interview the day before, talking about the problems of working parents. We got dressed and headed for the motel restaurant, where we ate French toast and picked up our paper placemats as souvenirs of our trip. We packed our bags, stuffing in a couple of those individually wrapped soaps for Audrey and a postcard of Keene. We paid our bill and headed out to shovel the snow off the car. We were home in time for lunch.