Elisa Albert - After Birth

The local NPR affiliate is replaying some Gifts of the Magi special. Think only of what you have , booms a beautifully deep and frayed male voice, and give no thought to what you lack.

Hey , Bryan says later, before I go up to bed. Mina is passed out on the couch, Zev on her chest. The fire embers are still crackling. Level with me here. Do you think she’s, like, depressed?

Uh… yeah.

Do you think she’s, like, okay? Because I said I’d come back, but I can’t stay forever.

I think it’s not normal to have a baby and be by yourself.

She’s not by herself. She has you! What am I supposed to do!?

You’re supposed to hang with her. You’re supposed to marvel at how nuts it is. Be indulgent. It takes time. That’s it. Keep her company. Feed her.

I am indulgent. All I do is support her. Yesterday she starts in crying out of nowhere, tells me she’s exhausted and she needs to find a humane way to kill them both. It’s bananas. And I don’t know if this whole thing— he grabs his own tit as if to offer it to me —is really helping. Why not give the kid some formula and get on with it.

That’s not what she wants.

She’s lost her mind.

She’s not the first.

Are you some kind of witch?

Yup , I reply, and stare him down.

Waddling through the final days of pregnancy, exhorted to take long walks, I stumbled upon the Utrecht Historical Society Archive, which is a warehouse next door to the Utrecht Architectural Parts Archive, which is an even bigger warehouse, where you can find all manner of the most incredible old doors and windows and decorative ironwork and stained glass and lighting fixtures and clawfoot tubs and plumbing accessories and mantels and fireplaces and radiators and spindles, stair rails, newel posts, moldings, woodwork, and flooring. The kind of place where sensitive grad students imagine the quirky antiheroes of their dreams hang out. In a dusty pile of old periodicals I found a guide to breastfeeding, circa 1941.

Nurse your baby for one minute on the first day. Then nurse your child for two minutes on the second day, and three on the third, moving in this way toward fifteen minutes by two weeks, which is the most time your child should ever be at the breast. Crying is good for their lung development.

I paid five cents for it and waddled on.

Bryan is watching me nurse Zev. Mina is taking a nap.

Does Paul suck on your tits?

If I say yes, I’m kinky and disloyal, but if I say no, I’m a prude.

Do you want to suck on my tits?

Sure!

Sorry.

Come on. You have the prettiest little nipples.

I bare them at him, pleased.

Jew nips. The most delicious.

I sing a soft Misogynists refrain to baby Zev, who’s got all kinds of fascinating new expressions: not shy and won’t apologize.

It’s fantastic, these babies and my boobs.

People don’t want to hear about that, don’t want to entertain it. Vast numbers will watch two naked girls online shit in a cup then eat it, but babies enjoying the living hell out of breasts as supreme source of endless free nourishment and good health for all remains taboo. Explain that to me in a way that does not skirt the historical imperative of misogyny. Go ahead. Try.

I’m good at this. Look at me, nursing two babies in tandem. I’m a damn fine nurse. I am way more than enough. I am everything. Give me a third. Give me a fourth. I am a font. Plenty to go around. Let me sit here, life all around me, in me, through me, down the front of my oversized shirt, forever and ever, amen.

Mina comes in, groggy.

Did you just nurse him?

Yeah.

But now I’m ready.

So nurse Walker.

Okay. She seems a little miffed. Which in turn makes me kind of miffed.

I turn back to Bryan.

So.

Yeah.

Are you going to tell us what happened with you and Cat on New Year’s?

It’s not very exciting.

I’ll be the judge of that.

She was not at all into hurting me and could not for the life of her articulate anything interesting she might want me to do to her. And she kept, like, gazing at me trying to make out, and I was like, no, listen, I want you to squeeze my balls until I puke.

You should write a story about a world in which everyone has to have a baby , I tell him suddenly.

Like, it’s enforced?

Yeah , I say. Think of all the crazy shit people would do.

No crazier than the crazy shit people already do, probably , Mina says. Anyway, you can’t tell a writer what to write.

Sheryl suggests I come down to the city for a “day of fun.” Paul’s all for it. Practically pushes me out the door.

Baby, go. We’ll be fine.

Sheryl wants to get our nails done. She’s consumed with the idea that we get our nails done. I don’t want to get my nails done. It smells like toxic death in there.

Oh lighten up, Ari, for God’s sake. What do you want to do, then?

I can’t think of anything. Or, rather, I can’t narrow it down. I want an empty five-hundred-square-foot studio in Chelsea with someone else’s name on the buzzer. I want to sit by a window in a café with a book and a pen while it rains. I want to take the train uptown to see someone at a party. I want to wear a hat without looking ridiculous. I want to get stoned and try on sumptuous clothes at boutiques. I want to spend an hour at a good secondhand store in Brooklyn. I want to wear something gorgeous and singular to a museum, and meet up with a bad-news lover. Toward the end of dinner (appetizers and a lot of wine) I want him to put his hand lightly on my breast until I begin to get feverish and we have to get out of there immediately, right now, pay, let’s just go, it’s okay that’s a huge tip it’s okay who cares c’mon let’s go. I want to wake up the next day at noon in the beautiful light of his uncluttered space, kiss him goodbye, promise to see him again soon, maybe mean it. I want to go for a walk, to the farmers’ market, sit all afternoon again with a strong latte and again a book, again a pen, aftershocks from last night’s rash of orgasms. I want to see a movie with a girlfriend, talk about what we’re working on, what we’re trying to accomplish, what we’re thinking. I want to laugh. I want a little house in the Catskills where I can lay a futon, burn some sage, shave my head like a penitent, spend my days reading and napping and writing and stretching and cooking in silence. Almost certainly I chose the nunnery in a former life.

So we go get our nails done, Sheryl and I, and then I don’t recognize my hands with their dumb little squares of perfect.

Late afternoon I have coffee with Marianne. She eyes my manicure.

She’d recommended Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering ; I’d found it to be a crock of shit. I talk Susun Weed and Ina May Gaskin and Maya Tiwari and Pema Chödrön.

Please not all that earth mother goddess shit, Ari.

Actually yeah all that earth mother goddess shit, Mari. Actually quite yeah.

I sit up straighter. Those are the feminist writers I consider important now. Feminism without focus on the body, the soul, the relationship between the two — biologically female bodies with distinctly female struggles — is of no interest to me. The body is the soul’s home and expression. The body is everything. To harm the female body is the original and only crime.