This Will Only Hurt a Little(69)
“Marc. I’m not crying,” I said. “Why am I not crying?”
“It’s okay. Just give yourself a minute.”
She needed to be suctioned out a little, but she was perfect. And giant. Nine pounds, seven ounces and twenty-two inches long. She was on my boob, not crying or eating, but just kind of looking right at me, intense and focused in a way that a newborn typically isn’t. I looked at Marc. “She’s my Birdie. Our big Bird.”
It had taken seventeen hours of hard labor and three hours of pushing, and here she was. I had been waiting for her my whole life.
FREE FALLIN’
(Tom Petty)
Birdie Leigh Silverstein was certainly not the first baby in the world to be born, but it sure felt like it to me. I had hired a baby nurse, on the advice of Abby, to help me in the early weeks of the baby. She proved to be literally no help at all. First of all, she hadn’t planned that I would be early, and she was unavailable in the first few days of my homecoming with Birdie, which were the days I really needed someone to try to help calm me down. Then, when she finally showed up to work, I disliked her immediately. I didn’t like how bossy I felt she was, and I didn’t think she was paying enough attention to Birdie. A few times in the night, when she was supposed to wake the baby up and bring her to me to feed, she slept through it, and I was the one who woke up in a panic that the baby had missed her 3 a.m. feeding! What the fuck?! That was her only job! She was supposed to stay for three weeks, but we let her go after a week and half. I was happy to see her go and leave me with my baby. Clearly I was the only one who could take care of her.
I was so overwhelmed and scared and hormonal. My brain never stopped spinning. I was afraid Birdie wasn’t eating enough, that she was sleeping too much or not enough, that the perfume my mother-in-law wore was going to give her asthma, that her belly button was infected, that she was too hot, that she was too cold, that her swaddle was wrong, that my boob was too big, that she wasn’t getting enough milk, that she had acid reflux, that she could die at any second.
My one job in this world was to keep Birdie alive, but I actually had to get another job, too. My other house still hadn’t sold, and now we were totally underwater on it. The housing market was crashing and taking me with it. I had no income. Marc was trying his best, but he was carrying our new huge mortgage and my credit card debt and his credit card debt and the writers’ strike hadn’t been the greatest thing for him and Abby, in terms of new jobs. They had taken a big rewrite job that had been lucrative, but we were in a bit of a situation, financially speaking. Which is how I found myself agreeing to go to an audition exactly seven days after giving birth, for a new Ryan Murphy show called Glee. I would get to sing! And they were aware I had just given birth and was larger than normal, but they were getting the show going right away, and it seemed like it was being fast-tracked, so it would probably be immediate work. I had to wear my postnatal diaper to the audition. I left Birdie for an hour to go sing “Sweet Child of Mine” for Ryan Murphy. I didn’t get the part, obviously.
Back home, I tried to be calm, but I had a very hard time. I didn’t want anyone holding Birdie except for me and maybe Leigh Ann. Marc was useless. He didn’t even try. I felt like I had to essentially force the baby on him in order for him to hold her, and after a while I didn’t even care if he did. He didn’t do anything right, anyway. I did the nighttime routine alone, just me and Birdie. I put her to bed, I woke up with her all night, I fed her, I changed her, I wore her, I took her to my postnatal yoga class with my friend Jennah and her new baby, Killian. When Birdie was two months old, we had to go to an engagement party. We left Birdie at home with my sister. I could only be gone for two or three hours tops, since she would need to be breastfed. Marc immediately left me when we got to the party and when I found him smoking with Lizzy Caplan and some guy friends of his, he was in the middle of saying, “Yeah. It’s amazing. She’s such a good baby and really our lives haven’t changed at all!”
I almost threw up. His life hadn’t changed, sure. I was a fucking wreck. Marc was still going to his Lakers games and to watch football with his friends on Sundays. He even took a guys’ trip to Las Vegas when Birdie was three months old, leaving me alone with her. I woke up in the middle of the night and looked out of our upstairs bedroom window to see three men sitting on my steps, smoking blunts. Seriously. I called the cops, but the dudes wandered off before they got there. I swore that as soon as we had money, I was getting a gate installed. I swore that as soon as I had money, I was leaving Marc.
I filled my days mostly with new-mom stuff, hanging out with the moms I had met in prenatal yoga, and we would go to the zoo or the Grove (an outdoor mall in L.A.) or a baby gym class and lay the babies on the ground and talk until it was time to head home for nap time. I tried to surround myself with as many people as I could, but I somehow always felt alone and scared. Even going to the grocery store was too overwhelming for me. In a Ralphs parking lot, I tried in vain to strap Birdie on in her Baby Bjorn by myself for fifteen minutes until I finally just gave up and returned home alone in tears, unable to complete even the simplest task, getting food for the week.
I finally broke down and told Marc one night that if he didn’t start doing something I was going to officially lose my mind, more than I already felt I had lost it. He agreed and committed to waking up early on Sundays and taking Birdie out of the house with milk I had pumped so I could sleep in. I looked forward to Sunday mornings, waiting all week with the knowledge that at least I would be able to sleep a little and maybe get my brain under control. We hired a babysitter for a few days week whom I really liked, but she got pregnant a few weeks after she started working for us and had that horrible debilitating morning sickness, so she had to quit, which I took as a further sign that I was the only person who was capable of taking care of my little precious Bird. No one else was to be trusted.