Elisa Albert - After Birth

Mostly I read celebrity blind items, stalk successful acquaintances, check the prep time for adzuki beans, look at headlines, make the bed, scroll through surreal early pictures of the baby, tiny terrifying thing. Generally waste time as though there are endless tomorrows.

Here’s Mina in a band photo circa 1988, wearing thrift shop clothes. Not fashionable thrift shop clothes, mind you — filthy, ill-fitting thrift shop clothes. Hair’s matted. They’re under a fire escape in an alley, brick walls close around. Kelly is squatting, cold. Stefani stands over her, arms crossed. Mina leans back against a wall, indifferent and apart, glancing over at the camera like it’s an unattractive stranger requesting a hand job. She would have been around twenty, then. The youngest. Cheeks like pillows.

A dimly lit video of a reading in a bar, her voice gravelly and worn. I love how she isn’t all toothy, doesn’t exclaim and prance and coo and spin that do you like me gosh I really hope you do because I am very likable shit, which seems in a lot of women to get only higher-pitched as years unfold. She doesn’t care whether or not you like her. She’s wearing an ugly T-shirt, her hair is dirty. She’s not worried about whether you think she’s pretty. She’s reading a poem. A good one. You can get on board or you can go fuck yourself.

And here: vaguely embarrassed in an interview with a preening blogger.

And here: forty-nine seconds of grainy footage from a club in Eugene decades ago. The sound is bad. She’s in the back, barely visible, playing her bass sideways, eyes closed. Like she’s trying to forget about the audience. Like the audience is a mild inconvenience. Stefani apes for the camera from behind the drums, and Kelly screams at the mic, attacking her guitar, disturbed and desperate. They never made it past those clubs, never moved beyond those small shows. But a lot of people who saw them felt transformed. Bootlegs circulated. One band formed in homage got pretty big.

Here: on a gray day in Maine, the author photo. Hair blowing across her unsmiling face. Muddy boots.

Okay. Enough. Something else. Recent study shows national 12 percent increase in male-fetus miscarriages during the month following the World Trade Center attacks. Scientists discover a type of stress hormone secreted in the brain while subjects surf the Internet. Some bitch on a Southwest flight smacks her baby for crying; heroic flight attendant immediately takes custody of baby. Woman updates her status with a brief, misspelled plea for forgiveness before driving herself and her four children off a bridge. The bees continue to disappear. At least 120 dead bodies lie frozen all along the peak ascent of Mount Everest. Woman with fake smile tells odorous tale of egg donors, gestational surrogates; accompanying photo showcases twin “miracles” trussed like holiday turkeys.

I stare at the screen this way for a while. Delicious, terrible inaction. And soon enough it’s time to get the baby from Nasreen’s.

Just want to sit here instead, in the fading light from the big window, in the sonic embrace of the speakers. Nasreen takes good care of him. Nasreen knows how. It’s good for him there. Better, even, probably.

There’s a curt email from Marianne about the dissertation. How’s the thinking coming? Any commitment to any particular focus?

Simultaneously I yearn for the sweet munchkin — what have you accomplished today you terrible wench why aren’t you with your munchkin don’t you know your munchkin needs you get off your fat ass and GO — and continue to sit here, precious peanut in someone else’s arms.

Does Marianne actually think I’m working on my dissertation? Does she think I give a flying fuck about my dissertation? It’s all I can do to bathe occasionally, keep the house reasonably tidy, feed us, launder, get some sleep. Literally: all I can do.

Like I give a shit about my dissertation.

Your creative energy is being utilized elsewhere , a kindly massage therapist informed me as pregnancy wore on. Then she hugged me, did some acupressure, some Reiki.

So the dissertation thing is pretty much a lie. But you need an identity, some interest and occupation outside of having a kid, you just do. Otherwise the kid has to be your sole interest and occupation, and we all know how that works out for everyone.

Our house was probably owned by some terrible textile executive at the end of the empire. I imagine him depressed, insolvent on the cusp of the Great Depression. He shoots himself in the head, a letter on the desk for his wife (the second; the first died in childbirth) and one for his mistress (a scullery maid, perhaps?). The den must have been showered with blood and brain, the children screaming, the house cursed, any lurking unhappiness here simply the result. Places hold things; you have to be an asshole not to acknowledge that. Bodies, houses, earth: feelings, energy, spirit. Deny them if you must, they don’t care. Call them what you will.

It’s got built-in bookshelves and delicate gold-leaf floral wallpaper so old and faded it’s gorgeous once again. Before we moved in it had sat empty for three years after the very last of the maiden aunts died at ninety-seven in a nursing home. It’s got original windows and deep mahogany pocket shutters. The kitchen must have been state-of-the-art, a real point of pride back in 1920, when the future looked bright. The fledgling brood so full of promise, the young couple expecting their first child, laughing together, all life’s horrors still to come.

At the baby’s sixth-month checkup a pediatric nurse asked a series of robotic questions— have you thought about harming yourself or the baby are there guns in your house has the baby’s father ever threatened you are you depressed in any way . I didn’t say I imagined shooting myself twenty times a day. I didn’t say I took strange, enormous comfort in these visions. I said there are no guns in our house . I said um I guess a little depressed sort of yeah . She made a decisive mark on my chart, sent in the doctor. Nice guy, vegetarian, makes intelligent small talk while he does his exam, doesn’t try to sell us on all the vaccines all at once. Told me to get as much help around the house as we could afford. Told me to find a group.

No idea how to find help, but okay, a group. Drove up to Albany a couple times.

Lots of the women in the group had surgeries, too. They either didn’t speak of it or they spoke of it as perfectly normal, which, I guess, hey, it is. They spoke of Zumba, stroller recalls, nursery schools, new hibachi place out by the mall.

Who knew motherhood could be a mostly material experience? We’d sit in Starbucks rooting around in pastel-camouflage diaper bags for chew toys and muslin wraps while women without babies gave us endless dirty looks. Me and this one silent, dark-eyed woman the only ones breastfeeding; the others busy with chemistry experiments: powders, cold packs, bottles.

The poor babies were beside the point, like half-forgotten elderly consigned to our care. The girl babies looked like drag queens: ruffles and bows, a flower-and-rhinestone headpiece. One thusly adorned kept giving me a hilariously cranky look like can you believe this shit? She was cool. I winked at her like sorry, honey, I know, but it’s not forever, I swear .

One of the moms had elective surgery because she just didn’t really like the whole unknown part and really wanted him to get here in time for his first Christmas . Another, a marathoner with the calves to prove it, called childbirth unnecessary .

Drag queen’s mom said I’m not that great with pain and Dave was just grossed out by the whole thing, so we decided just get it over with . She went on to tell about how she was administered a muscle relaxant by mistake mid-surgery. When she realized she couldn’t breathe, there was madness trying to get the baby out before it got dosed and she very nearly died on the table and the kid was in the NICU for a week but we got a free room out of it and they were suuuuper nice ’cause Dave said they were worried we might sue .