I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(28)

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“She’s way too small,” the doctor said to my mother in 1975, examining my tiny body. “This is a case of failure to thrive.” The way she recalls it, he wrinkled up his whole face and looked down at her like she was a two-dollar whore who had been starving her baby on purpose and using food money to buy liquor and weapons.

With the benefit of hindsight, we all know now that my babyhood was merely a preview of my particular body type. (I wasn’t so much a late bloomer as a non-bloomer.) But my mom couldn’t have known that with her first child. I was pale and scrawny, all white hair and invisible eyelashes and see-through skin over impossibly delicate limbs—the genetic opposite of my curvy, tan, brunette mother. Under the doctor’s shaming gaze, she felt accused, defensive. So, as she tells it, she said:

“Failure to thrive, my ass.”

I suspect time and my mother’s flair for storytelling have streamlined this conversation, although I hope she really did say that.

Mom scooped up all zero pounds of me in my OshKosh B’Gosh romper, tossed me into the backseat of our Buick, and took me home to prove a point. Then she made a batch of homemade banana pudding. Not the kind that comes from boxed powder. The kind where you slow-cook a custard out of cream and eggs and sugar and then toss a few bananas and some Nilla wafers in it for decoration. For months, she fed me this concoction every day.

Now, before I show you the “after,” I want you to imagine the “before.” Picture the scraggliest little baby you can. Bony legs, stick arms, and a wild tangle of blond floss stuck on top of what must have been an awfully skinny skull for the doctor to be so grim about it.

Now.

Are you ready?

This is how the pudding diet worked out:




How glorious is that? Look at my grip on that bear. I probably ate him after this picture was taken. And look at my HAIR. It’s like it saw how round my cheeks were getting and poufed itself up just to keep things proportional.

At my next checkup, the pediatrician said I was thriving quite well, and my mom—thank goodness—tapered off the banana pudding.



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It was with that “Failure to thrive, my ass” determination that I loaded carrot cake into my face when my baby’s survival was threatened. Such a small, simple thing to do—eating cake. But God, that cake was holy. I willed it to get where I wanted it to go, through me and into the baby. Take, eat—this is my body and a huge dessert, given for you. This is the first of so many rituals I will perform to protect you. I will buy you fluffy shopping-cart seat covers. I will make you wear the biggest, ugliest bike helmet. I will secretly disable the radio in your first car and allow you to think it’s broken, so you won’t have any musical distractions when you start driving. I can’t stop anything bad that might happen to you, but I will make all the motions, say all the prayers, eat all the cake.



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It worked, for a little while at least. For a couple of weeks, John and I carried on the mundanity of life with our son—bath, dinner, books, bedtime—as normally as we could while I went on a linebacker’s diet. I forced down giant meals of chicken potpie and milkshakes (urp), and at night we lay in bed, John’s hand on my belly. “What’s going on?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t tell whether the baby was growing or I was just getting plumper from the steak and cake.

Eventually, the situation my doctor suspected was confirmed. My placenta had given up early and begun to calcify, cutting off access to nutrients. If we didn’t do a C-section pronto, it would begin restricting oxygen, too. We had made it as long as we could. “Do you understand?” my doctor said, squatting in front of me where I sat with a monitor strapped around my stomach. “Yes,” I said. “It’s an emergency, but a calm one.” She nodded. “That’s right. A calm emergency.”

We had twenty-four hours to get ready for surgery, and in that time, we rallied the troops. Our favorite sitter came over to take care of our son. My parents and my in-laws came to town. We made reservations for lunch the next day. That’s the crazy thing about a scheduled C-section. You put it on the calendar, you go about your day, and then you just show up. There’s no labor, no waiting around, no counting contractions. You can do anything you want before your C-section, really. Except eat. No food or drink before surgery.

So while the whole family sat around a table at our favorite neighborhood restaurant, ordering burgers and salads—and oh heck, it’s a special occasion, why not? Light beers!—I sat alongside them, not eating. The mood was festive, and rightly so, as we’d been assured that waiting for an operating room wouldn’t cause any further trouble and that as long as we got the baby out within twenty-four hours, everything would be fine. A baby was coming! But I felt detached from everyone around me at lunch. I could try to pretend everything was fine, but I couldn’t convince myself the danger was imaginary. It was real.

I smiled and sipped water, thinking, I will never be pregnant again. This is it. How many hours until we go? I am so hungry. My baby is even more hungry. My baby is starving and it’s all my fault. I took all those fertility drugs and made this poor baby live in my stupid body that’s not even safe. What if the baby’s not okay? What if I had died? What if I could still die? What if this was my funeral lunch? Can anyone tell I’m thinking these things? Smile! That sandwich smells so good.