Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

Mark was with one or both of his grandparents and, uh, it was pretty gruesome for me until I finally came home. And when I did get home, he said to me either that day or the next day, he said, “Mommy, you made a promise and you didn’t keep your promise.” And I said, “What do you mean, honey?” And he said, “You told me that you were going away for a couple of days to the hospital and you were going to bring home our baby. Where is our baby?” So that was very hard, that kind of thing, because I tried to be perfectly calm and explain that that wasn’t going to happen this time, but that sometime soon we would talk about it and think about it, and maybe we would be able to get a baby for him to play with. Um, after that the family situation was…my mother only wanted to know that I was all right, and that Mark was all right, and that our little family was all right. And she did not want to see me being sad. I mean, she knew. She was a woman, and she knew about this. She didn’t have to see me being sad. She knew. But my father, a guy, he didn’t want to know, and he wouldn’t know, and by saying everything was fine, and by saying, You’re fine, you’re absolutely fine, everything in your life is fine, everything is wonderful, you’re here, it’s good…And in the face of that kind of thing, I simply had to act like I was fine. By the next summer, when I was away with everybody at the shore, my behavior…I can look back now and see that I was irrational some of the time. My temper was out of control. It was very hard living with Francis, my sister. And the kids…if they did anything to Mark…Adam, my nephew, was a biter. I flew off the handle. I couldn’t take very well the happiness of other people with their babies, or even if they weren’t happy with them, the fact that other people had babies who were born the same time. I was not behaving well, I just wasn’t…I guess I deserved a bit of a pass for some of that, because I don’t remember ever being able to sit down with anyone, and that included Mark’s father, and really discuss the depths of my pain at that point. And a special kind of pain and anger that came along with it because I blamed myself. I blamed my body, and it was almost as if a malignant fate, a malign fate was punishing me…punishing me for having spent a whole lifetime being proud of my body because it was beautiful. It’s not that I thought I’d actually done anything wrong, except that it was like an ugly slap in the face, because my body betrayed me, at least that’s the way I interpreted it some of the time. So that summer, I was really acting out, I know I was…I remember I slapped my aunt Beatrice across the face. That’s the thing I remember the most that shows how completely wacko I was. She was an overbearing person and bossy, and she said something to me that I didn’t take well, and instead of just telling her to mind her own business or whatever, I just reached over and gave her a good one across the face. And nobody was going to get back at me either, so I really was able to act out…But how many months later was that? Uh, half a year or so…so I guess the worst of it was over by the time I got home from the shore and, uh, we resumed our everyday life pretty much. And Mark kept me sane, because being together, and I don’t mean…this must sound…If anybody else outside of the family heard this, they would think that I was being a creepy mother, like climbing all over him, but it wasn’t like that at all. It was just good. It was just happy and, um, profoundly wonderful, especially in the face of so many other kids I could see outside and their behavior. Mark was smart. He was interesting. His reaction to some of the things that kids did was very, very funny to me and very cute. He was an observer of things. Where some kids just would come, they would see a big pile of kids falling all over each other and digging, or getting in the mud, and he’d go over and he was interested — very! And he would go over reasonably quickly, but he would look at it all first and then make a decision about if it was something he really wanted to dive into or whether he would think, This is stupid, I’m not gonna do this! And then he would back up a little and wait for some of them to come muddied out of there. So it was good, so good for me to have him, but the next couple of years a part of me always felt unfinished, that I had something I had to do that I really needed to do. I didn’t think he was consciously aware of what had happened. He did not seem interested to find out any of the details, he never ever said anything to me about, Mommy where were you, why were you lying in bed in Grandma’s house? And I thought I had damaged him so deeply psychologically that he was not going to come up with this until he was grown, and then he would blame me for all of these things. But that never happened, that never happened…But, look, I’m sure that seeing me lie there like that couldn’t have been a happy experience for him. I must have looked like a zombie. I must have weighed practically nothing. And the rest of the time, I did not sit about crying, and I didn’t walk around with a mad face, and I didn’t fight with his father, but I used to wait until about two in the morning, and then I would cry quietly and think about the fact that my sister-in-law had a baby, and my sister had a baby, all born, all born at the same time, and I think Barbara Kass and a whole bunch of other people, the Ginigers, the people from the art gallery in New York…And just I didn’t. And so we tried to adopt a child about a year and a half later or a year and three-quarters later. Some friend, no, some relative of my mom’s friend…what was her name? Um, I’m not gonna remember, uh…Dora…Dora Tanner…Dora Tanner had a sister and brother-in-law in Trenton. He was a pharmacist, and somehow, I guess through my dad, the pharmacist called my father and said that one of his customers was a young woman who already had, like, one or two illegitimate children, and Catholic Charities was helping her, and this guy was an Italian boy who worked in a gas station. She was a Polish girl and, um, she was pregnant again, and she didn’t want to keep the child, and she asked him whether anyone in his family wanted to adopt the baby, and, to make a long story short…I don’t remember any of the details…My dad and Joel did all the legal and proper things that you’re allowed to do. You’re not allowed to give somebody extra money or buy a baby, but you are allowed to help with the care and the pregnancy and stuff, you know. So, then I washed all the baby clothes again, and scrubbed and polished the crib and set it up in your room and we talked about having a baby and, uh, I didn’t make too much out of it, but there was talk about it and I was actively setting up a space, and I drove to Trenton with Joel and Grandpa Ray, and they went in to pick up the baby, and Catholic Charities had come and taken it away, and said she would be, uh, um, I just lost the word…um, what they did to Spinoza? Um…she would be excommunicated . She wouldn’t get any more money from the Catholic Charity, and they would see to it that she lost her other children, whatever it was they said. And there I was again coming home…It was a little boy, it would have had the best life any little boy ever had. I was scared to be pregnant again. I was scared that maybe something was wrong with me, and that I would kill another baby, and then I finally had to get a grip on myself. And I said to myself, All right, okay, you’re twenty-five, twenty-six years old, grow up! This is what you’re going to have to do. You want a baby, you’re gonna have to have another baby, you’re going to be nauseous every single day, and if you have to keep that to yourself and not tell any of these morons, these men who are doctors, you won’t tell them, but you’re going to do this and get through it and you’re going to take one more shot at this. And I got pregnant immediately. And I threw up every day several times. But it was the best pregnancy I had because I knew what was ahead of me every day, and I’ll be damned if I was gonna let it beat me another time. Not! And Mark was in school, James F. Murray No. 38 Elementary School. We had moved to a little house on Westminster Lane, right off the Boulevard. And he was five and a half, and he would answer the phone and he would say, “My mommy’s busy vomiting, but she’ll call you back later.” And I would bring him to school and pick him up. But there was one symbol, one experience that showed me that he had…that he was very conscious of having been abandoned by me before. Nana Harriet was supposed to pick him up from school one day, and she came to the wrong door, or came at the wrong time, and missed him. And from then on for the next number of months, I had to stand outside, and Mrs. Brown, I think her name was, Mrs. Brown would hold him up — he was so adorable anyway, and all the teachers fell in love with him; it was very unfair, because they just wanted him right in front of them — this Mrs. Brown would hold him up to the window so he could see his mommy standing out in the street like an idiot, and I would wave at him until that came to an end, whenever, after however many weeks or months I had to do that. And that was a symbol to me that that was…like, we’re talking about an overreaction to just that one thing, and that it stood for all of the other things that he really did remember, that he really did. But this pregnancy with Mark’s sister, Chase, was not horrible in the sense that I wasn’t taken away anywhere. I used a practice that was a very well known, conservative Catholic practice. Dr. Cosgrove Sr. was like, he was the boss of the world. He used to call all the women “girlie,” but these two guys, Dr. Dolan and Dr. Cosgrove Jr., treated me very well, and treated me like I was a normal person and everything was fine, and they were kind and funny and they said to me, You have nothing to worry about, and if there was anything to worry about we would be there every minute, and we would take you to wherever you had to go, if it was a different hospital, and you have nothing to worry about, nothing. The truth is the two of them were scared out of their minds. I was probably the only patient they ever had who…This was a big rich practice. The two of them were at Chase’s delivery, the two of them, the whole labor, they were there. They didn’t move from there. They had resident pediatricians, they had blood people, hematologists. That was the most crowded delivery room you ever saw. And, uh, that was a very happy day for all of us, and I brought her home, and Mark was so thrilled. He was just so delighted with her. She was the best baby. She slept a lot and she was very cute, and finally one day he came home from school, and I used to have to — not have to, I used to try to — arrange her naps so that I wasn’t taking time away from just our time together, Mark’s and my time. But he finally said to me, “Mommy? Don’t you like our baby? You really love our baby, don’t you? You like to be with her, right?” And I said, “Well, sure honey. Why would you ask such a thing?” And he said, “Because she’s always sleeping.” But then everything was very natural really, from then on. She was very good, Mark was very, very good with her. The age difference was such that…I have a picture of him giving his two index fingers to her when she started to walk, she was about, what, ten or eleven months old, and he was helping her walk through the living room. Because he was a big boy…and he had friends and a dog…It was a very, very happy time for me, and my pride, and I hope it’s not just pride, I hope it was the truth — that I did not, as much as it was humanly possible for me, let him be really affected by the other things. There were times of course when I was taken away or when my expression might have revealed my feelings, even if I tried not to show it. But for the most part, he had an extremely happy babyhood and childhood, and, um, the worries I had about him were about his ear infections, and when we moved away, I was very concerned with him in the new school and whether it would be all right, and those are the things that every parent thinks about. He started to get earaches. Um, he would get a cold, or uh…I don’t know whether it would be a sinus infection or just a regular cold, but children’s ears aren’t on an angle like adults’. The tube in the ear on adults is on an angle so that it drains out, and with small children it goes straight across, so the infected material lies in there and becomes…the material lies in there and then becomes infected and that’s very painful, very painful. And he would get them frequently, practically whenever he got a cold, as a secondary infection. And this led to him getting his tonsils out, yes, because that’s what they did — adenoids and tonsils. And that was a serious mistake that I made, and I get bad marks for that one. I made him a promise. First of all, we took him to New York. It was horrible. We took him to Columbia Presbyterian because I was being elitist about where to go, and because I had had, as a child, a horrific experience in Jersey City, so there was no way I was staying around there. But I promised him…he asked me if I was going to be there when he woke up and be with him, and I said yes, and they wouldn’t let me upstairs, and instead of tearing that hospital limb from limb, and screaming and carrying on like a banshee and saying, “I’m going to get my child now! That’s my child, not yours, mine!” which I’m perfectly capable of doing now. Why did I sit there like that? He didn’t talk to me for about two or three days afterward. He wouldn’t talk to me. I’d lied. I told him something, and he woke up in pain, and I wasn’t there. So, I’m a jerk. I did what the adults assumed I would do because I have to do it, and I should not have done that. I should have gone upstairs and grabbed him and been with him. Because I’d promised I would be there with him when he woke up, and because he needed me. And they were wrong, and that would have been right. So I’ve made more than my share of mistakes I’ll tell you that. Ugh!