Elisa Albert - After Birth

Ari. You have to try and let it go.

Women who deliver surgically are—

Babe. I know.

— thought to suffer from increased rates of postpartum depression, which can include—

What would you like me to do about it, babe? Can you tell me what you want me to do about it?

— feelings of failure, helplessness, posttraumatic stress—

Ari. This isn’t helping.

— disempowerment, disappointment, anger, loss, and frustration.

You don’t fuckin’ say.

At first when she hands him to me it’s like I’ve never held a newborn.

Zev. Squirmy and clenched, like he can tell I’m nervous. They’re just little mirrors. They’re pure. We don’t learn how to lie until around two. The world is no place for these little fuckers, tiny tuning forks. He’s way too soft and scary and what if I accidentally kill him? It’s totally possible to accidentally kill these things.

But, shit, okay, fine: Hey baby. Hey Zev.

How weird he wasn’t anything before she made him. Where was he? Somewhere? Nowhere? Now he’s here and he has this name and he’s a person. Weird. Mina goes to take a shower. I spread a blanket on the floor, swaddle him, that’s better.

She comes downstairs steamy, head wrapped in a towel, wearing a fresh T-shirt.

It’s a whole new lease on life , she says. I lost, like, a fistful of hair. Is that normal?

Completely. Hormones.

Her T-shirt is pink, with a line drawing of a beautiful woman in an enormous hat, smoking a cigarette. The cigarette smoke forms the word MONTREAL.

I can’t get over how normal she seems. Her body. The way she’s moving. I mean, huge tits, soft belly; she gave birth a week ago. But here she is, intact. A week post-surgery I was still incredibly fucked up. Gutted like a fish. Hurt to move, but I tried to lay off the painkillers, ’cause they made shitting impossible, then you were supposed to start with the stool softeners. Five days postpartum my incision opened slightly and I had to go back to the fucking hospital, get the sutures reinforced. A fever dream. In the wrong kind of pain entirely. Everything hurt.

Whoa , Mina says. Where’d you go? You just went somewhere.

I shake it off, busy myself with finishing touches on a big pot of soup.

Bryan’s packing, leaving tonight. I assumed he was the father, the boyfriend. Apparently not.

Friend , Mina says when we’re alone. Off and on. Like a brother. A charming if irritating little brother. I used to tie him up once in a while. Long time ago. He needed a place to stay and I offered. That’s his thing: impoverished artist. I hear from him when he needs money, pretty much. He thought it’d be cool to “experience a birth.” And because I’m retarded I said okay, sort of half thinking he’d want to, like, “be there for me,” which makes me more or less the biggest idiot asshole of all time. Now he’s writing about it, apparently.

Where’s he going?

Austin . She rolls her eyes.

Paul’s at the library, grading or something. Paul’s always somewhere, doing something. Walker’s at Nasreen’s till five.

This is amazing , she says about the soup.

You’re the best , Bryan says, slurping.

Fairy fucking godmother , Mina says.

I’ll bring banana bread, witch hazel, fenugreek, arnica, oregano. Swaddles, spit-up rags. A messy lasagna, zucchini bread from the good bakery. Epsom salts, cabbage, belladonna, mustard seed oil. Gelato, raspberry leaf tea. A small piece of rose quartz. Everything she needs.

Bryan gets up to say goodbye when I leave, and gives me a strong hug, a real hug, takes my breath away. It’s not until someone really hugs you that you realize how infrequently anyone ever really hugs you.

Pleasure , he says. He’s quite the puppy dog.

Later, when Paul gets home, I take a cold, dark, ten-minute walk down to the river. Air feels amazing. Then I clean the kitchen.

You’re chipper , Paul observes.

I look up Bryan.

… [A]n occasionally profound and important writer , according to some critic. Trouble is, he publishes quite frequently.

Think I might actually get out a pen and some Jeanette Winterson before bed. Don’t actually do it, but think about it. Which is something.

Today I take Walker to story time at the library and then to the burger place at the mall, because no Nasreen on Thursdays and I get a little panicked without a plan. He has a meltdown in the mall parking lot as I try to load him back into the car seat to go home. Refuses to be put into the seat. You can’t reason with them. He just does not want to go in that car seat. He freaks the fuck out about getting into the seat.

I look around helplessly. Nearby, a stranger: white girl with stale bleach job whose three kids are perfectly installed in a seen-better-days blue minivan. Bag upon bag from the mega-store. She watches me. I think: fuck it.

What are you supposed to do when they get like this? I ask her.

They don’t pull that shit with me , she says, icy glint in her eye. Then she turns to the kids, lined up in there. Do you? Stares them down hard in those stained car seats. They look straight ahead like cadets, lifetimes of stress disorders ahead.

Eight thirty in the morning. Paul and the baby are already downstairs, already finished with breakfast, me as yet unable to get out of bed.

Phone rings. Mina.

Did I wake you? Sorry.

No. What’s up?

Bad night. Bad day, then bad night, now… just… bad.

The light outside’s wintry and gray, all shadows, and when I finally manage to get up and over there it’s exactly like that inside, too. Heavy. A downshift in key. Like the forest floor. Dark and still and mossy, faintly humming with intensity, scant bits of light filtering through a canopy of high trees. Like no temple that has yet been built. ( Daniel Libeskind is on it , Crispin would say.) Mugs of tea gone cold are everywhere.

They’ve been to the pediatrician, and it seems that baby Zev is not gaining weight. He is, in fact, losing weight. The pediatrician is no help.

He was all, “So long as he’s peeing, we won’t worry. Give him some formula if you’re worried. Do you have a new insurance card?”

But she’s nursing him constantly and her nipples are bloody and shredded, there’s a giant lump in the lefty, and twenty minutes ago she changed a wet diaper and it was pink. Which means he’s dehydrated.

My tits are killing me and he’s starving to death and I’m so fucking tired and I am freaking the fuck out. Can you tell? I am freaking the fuck out. And the fucking midwife doesn’t return calls.

Are you kidding me? Aren’t they supposed to, like, make you placenta soup and sing your praises to the goddesses? Bang a drum or something?

No drum.

It is pretty clear that Zev is failing, in the parlance of infants, to thrive. He looks shriveled, more so even than a couple days ago. Miniature knotted brow. When you’re that small, some ounces are a big deal.

She paces and pats, paces and pats. He’ll settle for a second or two, but then he’s screaming again. That furious impotent infant scream.

It’s been like this all night. Okay, okay, shhh. I keep hearing that line? From “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”? Shhhh, okay. “I saw a newborn babe with wild wolves all around it,” you know? Okay, shhhhhh. “I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it…”

You can’t mistake a new mother holding a baby this way, swaying, bouncing on the soles of her feet, babbling like a brook, for anything else. She is speaking in tongues. The baby calms briefly and wails again.