The Push(18)

I bought the cake from the bakery where I often took her for a treat on our walks. Vanilla-cream icing with rainbow sprinkles on top. She squealed and clapped when I placed it on her high-chair tray, her eyes locked on the single tiny flame.

“Happy!” she said. As clear as day.

“I got that on film,” said your doting dad, holding up his digital camera. Your mother smothered her in kisses and your sister, whom we rarely saw but who had flown five hours to be there, scrunched up tissue paper to make her laugh. Grace, who brought a bottle of tequila with her, cut and served the cake. We watched them all together from the comfy living-room chair, me on your lap, your arms folded across my chest.

“We did it,” you whispered, and breathed me in slowly, your nose tickling the nape of my neck. I nodded and took a sip of your beer. Violet looked angelic in her high chair, her rapt audience, the icing smeared across her face. I felt your nose on my neck again. I took another drink and pulled you up.

“Let’s get a family picture.”

We stood in the natural light from our apartment windows and I held Violet on my hip between us. She felt unusually docile, and I pulled her in for a kiss on her sugary cheek. We smiled as they clicked away. You made her giggle with your duck noises. I held her above our heads as we squealed at one another with wide-open mouths. The three of us, exactly as we were supposed to be.





22





Very soon after her first birthday, Violet stopped sleeping through the night again.

You never heard her right away, and sometimes not at all, but it felt like my eyes opened a few seconds before she made her first noise from the crib down the hall. This unnerved me every time, the reminder that she was still so much a physical part of me. Every two hours she cried for her bottle. After a few weeks, I lined up six of them, full of milk, against the railing of her crib, hoping she’d find one when she wanted it. She never did.

I can’t do this, I’d think every time she woke me up. I won’t survive this again.

I would open the door of her nursery, put a bottle in her hand, and leave.

“Isn’t that bad for bacteria, having all that milk sitting out? Isn’t that dangerous?” you asked when you realized what I was doing.

“I don’t know.” It probably was, but I didn’t care. I just needed her to go back to sleep.

This went on for months and left me ravaged. I woke in the morning with a headache that sat behind my eyes and made my thoughts come slower. I avoided having to speak with other adults for fear I’d make no sense. My resentment of you both festered. I hated hearing you breathe deeply and evenly when I came back to bed, and I sometimes tugged at the sheets in the hopes it would rouse you from the place I so badly wanted to be.

I brought up the idea of sending Violet to day care a few days a week. You’d said early on, before Violet was even born, that you didn’t like the idea of day care. Your mother had raised her children at home until they were five and went to school. You wanted the same for your own. I had agreed, blindly, heartily. I would do the things you thought perfect mothers did.

But that was before.

I found a place three blocks away that had a spot open up for the fall. I’d overheard people rave about it, and they had a camera in the room that let parents watch remotely. The truth was I often felt sad for those day-care babies when I saw them lined up like eggs in a carton in those long strollers, tired underpaid staff pushing them around the city for something to do. But there was research about babies in day-care environments—better socialized, more stimulated, accelerated development, et cetera, et cetera. I sent you the articles every so often. At dinner I’d follow up delicately to emphasize the internal conflict you wanted me to have: Maybe Violet needed more stimulation now? Maybe it’s time? Although perhaps she’s better off at home. For naps and such. What do you think? I’d ask to feign concern, but we both knew the answer I needed.

“Wait to decide once she’s sleeping better,” you’d reasoned. “You’re just tired right now. I know it’s hard, but this will pass.” You had the nerve to say this as you dressed for work, your face bright, your hair freshly cut. I had listened to you sing in the shower that morning.

I was miserable. She and I both were, it seemed. She was gravely unhappy when she was around only me. She wouldn’t let me hold her anymore. She didn’t want me near her. Most days she was irritable and troublesome when we were alone and nothing could soothe her. She screamed so loudly when I picked her up that I could imagine the neighbors next door stopping dead in their tracks. When we were in public, at the grocery store or the park, other mothers would sometimes ask in a sympathetic voice if there was anything they could do to help. I was humiliated—they pitied me either for having given birth to a child like Violet or for being the kind of mother who looked too weak to survive her.

We began staying home mostly, although I lied about this when you returned from work asking for a daily report as she eagerly climbed onto your lap. Confined to our apartment she would scamper around like a scorpion, looking for things to shovel into her mouth—fistfuls of plant dirt, the keys from my purse, even stuffing she’d somehow pull from our pillows. She nearly choked herself blue sometimes. When I scooped her mouth clean, she would flail like a fish out of water and then go limp. Like she was dead. My heart would stop. Her eyes would go wide, and then would come a scream from deep within her, so repellent that it made my eyes sting with tears.