Elisa Albert: After Birth

One was sent home two days post-surgery only to pass out cold in the bathroom in septic shock; they had to leave the newborn with a neighbor they barely knew while they got her to the emergency room with a nicked bowel.

One’s due date had been completely miscalculated, so when they dove in, the baby was underweight, couldn’t breathe on its own, spent three weeks in the NICU.

Yet another, totally affectless, told of a constant numb tingling all up and down her right leg from the spinal and said there’s nothing I can do about it at this point, so why do we keep having to talk about it?

I got lucky , someone said. They only had to use the vacuum extractor .

Yeah, see, that’s why I’m glad we just went with the C , said the drag queen’s mom. I hear those things really mess up your vag .

I asked them if they feel good about their birth experience. They examined me crossly. One giggled.

Birth Experience , she said. Sounds like a ride at Disney.

Feel good about it like, you mean, glad it’s over?

Feel good about it like, enjoyed it?

A few months later I tried another group, thirty minutes in a different direction.

I was to let Walker watch his father and me on the toilet, talk about the toilet, encourage familiarity with the toilet. I was to make sure he ate at least a cup of vegetables every day. There was the possibility of someday locking him in his room at night if he resisted sleep. There was pediatric dentistry to consider. There was early intervention for absolutely anything.

Imagine: I had dared to imagine that we would talk to one another, that the boring specifics of child rearing would be incidental.

I mean, let’s pause to acknowledge that it’s possible to be a good mother while doing other things. You know: multitasking. Scouting the horizon for tigers. Gathering herbs. Stirring the pot. Reading a fucking newspaper.

Even the laid-back granola DIY homestead types were anal shrews about their laid-back-ness. Over email a fight broke out. A sippy-cup brand disagreement devolved into a fight in which one predicted a life of crime for the other’s child. Tireless. Just take care of business, ladies. Don’t make a fucking hobby out of it. Feed the kid, bathe the kid, help the kid to sleep, hug and kiss and smile and hug and kiss some more until they’re too old for that; then just try to model the best behavior you possibly can for the rest of your life, and do it again tomorrow; it’s not fucking science. Find some other things to think about.

I’m not going to pretend my kid is special, like other kids who starve and freeze and get raped and beaten and have to work in factories and get cancer from the fumes, too bad, so sad, but my kid is going to be warm and organic and toxin-free and safe and have everything he wants when he wants it and go to a good college and all is right with the world! Fuck that myopic bullshit. He’s going to suffer. He’s going to get mauled by some force I can’t pretend I can predict. We all live in the same fucked-up world.

Then there were stories about how this or that one just couldn’t breastfeed, her sister gave it up after two months or six months or a year because it hurt or she just didn’t have any milk or come on, enough was enough, or hey, isn’t there all sorts of unfair pressure on women to nurse and shouldn’t it be, like, a choice? Yes, ladies. Congratulations: you have choices.

A chore, trying to talk to these women. You saw them calcifying. You saw them race to this endpoint, then come to a stop and calcify, never to move again.

I practiced my blank stare. How noble of you to plug your kid with some processed milk-derivative shit marketed by the same people who brought the world Oreos, how very feminist of you, yes, every woman makes her choices, absolutely, what glorious freedom we enjoy. Way to stick it to the man. How empowered you are, subverting a basic function of your body. May I shake your hand? You show that body of yours who’s boss! You get on with your bad self. What shipshape shiny master’s tools you’ve got there. How’s the dismantling of the master’s house working out?

A Friday. My shift at the co-op. Box and bag groceries, sort recycled plastic, align merchandise on the shelves. (This last is called, amusingly, “fronting.”)

Naomi is my boss. Twenty-three, dropped out of SUNY sophomore year, lives in an abandoned nineteenth-century savings bank in Troy with three art students and fourteen stray cats. They throw massive dance parties that start at midnight on the last Friday of every month.

She is forever handing out flyers.

Coming Friday? She’s adorable, and makes me feel old.

Gonna try , I always lie.

My second friend was Jenny Jacobson, of the alliterative name and showbiz aspirations. She had an agent, went on constant auditions for commercials, eventually booked an ad for cereal, real big deal. She was a powerful force in the sixth grade, respected and feared in equal measure. Everything turned to shit for her by eighth grade (bulimia, Bellevue), but she was still in her prime when I knew her.

Jenny’s parents were getting a divorce. She had been prepped for the apocalypse with books about little girls whose parents were getting divorced, and with her very own shrink, Henri. They lived in a glass-and-steel penthouse on lower Park Avenue, and her father had this interesting way of staring at me but then looking away when I looked at him. I could actually feel his eyes on my little pubescent ass. And I didn’t not enjoy it, either.

Henri says parents sometimes have to go separate ways in order to do the things they need to do to be happy and successful, and when my mom and dad are both doing the things they need to do separately all three of us are going to be much, much happier, so really it’s a good thing and we’re celebrating and I’m really glad they’re getting divorced because when all three of us are happier it will be even better than if we all stayed together and weren’t as happy or as successful. So we’re having a divorce party and everything.

I almost liked being with her, I disliked her so much. It had an addictive flavor, hating her. One of those bossy little bitches who find a way to twist things so that she’s always a winner, always triumphant, always in charge. Never screwed, never sad, never sorry, never at the mercy of others. One of those self-aggrandizing little bitches who refuse themselves any admission of weakness. Always play-acting that idiotic control. Jenny with her absurd mop of kinky orange curls, her freckles. The kind of girl who was going to spend her life demanding to be taken seriously. And no one takes those girls seriously.

She didn’t scare me one little bit, and boy did that scare her .

She did this thing about my mother with huge watery eyes, being So Very Sorry for me, to imply that my mother was very close to dying — which she was, it was true — and that therefore I was a pitiful wretch.

It must be so very difficult for you that your mom is so very ill , she’d say reproachfully. The know-it-all tone, the superiority (her parents were just getting divorced , which was actually great news), the hierarchy of pain in which I was the winner, and so really the loser. She made me insane. I couldn’t get enough of her.

Yeah, I guess , I said, incapable of spin. (We have lots of delicious Popsicles in our freezer ’cause she gets these huge mouth sores from the chemo, it’s great!) The lights in our house were always dim. My mother spent months dying. Weeks and weeks tiptoeing up to the very, very, very end. It seemed that it could be any day for an enormous number of days.