Holes
I haven’t been able to look at Twitter since Uvalde. I opened it, by default, and when I realized who the pictures of smiling 10-year-olds were, my brain just sort of stopped. It’s like standing on the precipice of a bottomless hole. Everything is blank and quiet except for an urgent chanting, NoNoNoNoNo, that I recognize to be my own voice, one of self-preservation, telling me not to look. I know that if I take a step closer I will be lost in it and so I back away.
A hole is not a good place to be. You can’t do anything in it. You can worry harder, you can hold your baby more tightly than he wants and stay awake at night to watch his chest move with breath, but it doesn’t get you out of the hole. There are many such holes around me now, that have opened up in what I thought to be stable ground in the weeks since my baby was born. News that once mattered to me intellectually has gained a sharp physical edge. The formula shortage draws pictures in my mind of tiny hungry mouths, the overturning of Roe v Wade triggers dread and panic as I imagine trying to take care of a baby I didn’t want. The images that show up are histrionic, maudlin, utterly unhelpful. They make me use too many adjectives. I don’t think they make me a better person, just a more fearful one.
The most immediate change I’ve seen in myself since becoming a parent is more fear. When they cut me open I was very calm (the morphine, oxytocin, and fentanyl probably helped) and I remember being perplexed as I looked into Anthony’s restless eyes. What was he anxious about? Then they pulled my baby out and I was jerked from the meditation of practicing my bravery. They told me he wasn’t breathing and so they couldn’t delay the cord cutting like I’d asked, but that didn’t matter anymore because all I could think about was whether he would be okay, and what if he wasn’t, and there are no thoughts after that.
He was okay, but I would find so many more opportunities in the following weeks to fear that he wasn’t. The slight jaundice that they had us keep an eye on gave me plenty to Google and a reason to ask myself over and over if we should go to the emergency room. The horribly-named SIDS became a fixation for me, something that I was afraid to learn too much about for fear of falling in the hole, but felt compelled to study so that I could do everything possible to prevent it. The only way I could get to sleep one night was by looking up the statistics around dying in a car crash and reassuring myself that this was much more likely than the baby dying in his bassinet. I didn’t talk to Anthony about all this because I didn’t want him to be in the hole too, because it’s an insanity hole, and if he were to legitimize it with any measure of understanding, it would be too real.
If my baby died, I would die too. It’s not a suicidal thought, it appears calmly but incontrovertibly one night as I lie awake listening to his irregular newborn breathing. Is this postpartum depression or is it love?
“It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds,” says Samantha Hunt in an interview about her story, A Love Story. Mothers as makers of death — dramatic and, perhaps, true. Mother-writing is so heavy when it’s not chirpy and pastel. I read Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson, Elena Ferrante. I learn that my dark night fears are ordinary, maybe the most predictable part of this whole parenting thing. I think that I would like to be a mother without fear if only to be original.
Guns surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of death for American children in 2020, which makes my soothing fantasy of the three of us being wiped out on the highway a little less soothing. When I think about the people who are anti-abortion and pro-gun in this country, my nebulous fear coalesces into personal hatred. My thoughts are un-Zen. I do not wish for them to be free of suffering. I want to inflict suffering upon them, with my own hands.
Something has to be done, though what, exactly, can be done by me is unclear. My body isn’t up for protests yet, so I’ve donated money and am helping to organize a bake sale but like many people, I feel like I’m floundering in mourning and rage. That’s the problem with holes, though, they are not the places to get things done. Justified horror is good when it leads to social action, but it can just as easily make people want to flee or barricade. Fear provides parents the fuel to be self-righteous NIMBYs, to segregate schools, to look out for their own at the expense of the world.
“The supply of fears is inexhaustible and you have to swim through it, I guess.” I eventually did talk to Anthony about what I’d been thinking about, outside on an evening when the sun made the park blaze with color and death felt far away. “Maybe the situation’s not so good, and you have to acknowledge it, of course, but then what? You have to continue.” Anthony’s experience with grief eclipses my own and he knows something about continuing that I haven’t had to learn.
This past week, the baby somehow forgot how to poop. He strains and cries and tightens his stomach muscles to push but doesn’t relax his rectum, so the poop stays inside. It’s kind of funny because it’s so dumb, but his distress is real. I bicycle his legs and jiggle his butt while he screams like it’s the worst thing that could ever happen. Our shared relief when he farts is sublime.
What I’m Cooking
Spring greens, ginger & coconut soup
A very simple and forgiving soup that is a great way to use all the seasonal greens in the farmers’ market right now — I used a mix of dandelion greens, spinach, and broccoli rabe. The greens add some bitterness to the soup that is matched by the spices and strong coconut flavor.
Thank you for this . . . .