Authors: Sarah Bird
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
G
et out! Martin? Martin called? I thought Next swore they would kill him in this and his next ninety-nine incarnations if he ever contacted you again. Are you sure?”
I study the number on my phone. “Well, he was breaking up. A lot.”
“But he said, ‘Oh, hi, hey, it’s me, Martin, just checking in to see what you want to do for dinner.’ ”
“I think I heard his name.” The longer I look at the number on my phone, the more it starts to remind me of the number of the dad of the preemie twins.
“But you recognized his voice?”
“Kind of.”
What I recognized was that even though the words were garbled and mostly missing, from the first syllable that the caller spoke some switch was thrown in my reptile brain and my heart shifted into overdrive, thudding with a high-voltage mixture of surprise, fury, and hope. Since Martin’s voice was the only one that had ever been able to reach that switch, I’d concluded that it was him.
“Reception was all weird and wobbly.”
Dori shrugs indulgently. “Nerves. It’s a big day.”
“Yeah.” I take the absolution she is granting me for being a pathetic dork.
“Gary has a friend who sounds really nice.” Gary is a Match.com date who’s turned into Dori’s regular, two-nights-a-week guy.
“Thanks.” Gary’s friend gets brought up whenever Dori thinks that I am tragically hung up on Martin and need to move on.
By the time we reach Parkhaven Medical Center, where I hold my classes, I’m 95 percent certain that the caller
was
the preemie dad. A blast of polar air whooshes when the front doors slide open. We trundle onto the elevator and as it inches downward I do what I always do before I teach class and put everything else out of my mind—Aubrey, the preemie dad, Martin—and focus.
As usual, the basement annex is chilled to exactly the same temperature as the pathology lab next door. On summer days, I enjoy a break from the asphalt-melting heat. Today I can’t seem to warm up and wish I’d brought a sweater.
Five minutes before class is supposed to start nearly all of the folding chairs Dori and I set up have been taken. At the back of the room, Dori helps a few stragglers sign in. She checks that they’ve registered and paid, then loads them up with handouts.
Most of the twenty-nine parents-to-be are coupled up; a lot are well-off: husbands checking iPhones, wives sporting French-manicured toenails and linen blouses fresh from the cleaner’s. Some are less well-off. A couple in their late teens slump in the back row. Mom runs a tongue stud across her front teeth. Dad, in oversize jeans and a hoodie pulled up to hide most of his face, glances around, then retreats like a turtle back into the safety of his hood.
A teen mom comes in with her mother. The teen mom is slutty-beautiful with a sullen Elvis Presley sensuality. She turns away from her mother, curls herself around a phone, and starts texting. The mom glances at a young couple in the row ahead of her. They’re holding hands, heads tilting together, as they study the handouts. She-Elvis’s mom’s face tightens and she sits up ramrod straight, as if the couple’s settled, successful married state is a rebuke to her. I want to go to the mother, take her hand, and tell her that although she and her daughter believe that every bad choice the daughter has ever made in life is her fault, it’s not. It’s really, really not.
Everyone speaks in whispers. They all have the awkward air of people trying to avoid eye contact in a proctologist’s waiting room. From the back, Dori raises her arm and shoots a big thumbs-up, signaling that everyone who’s signed up is present and paid for.
“Hi, everyone. I am Cam Lightsey.” I launch into my spiel and, the way they always do when I step in front of a class, all my worries disappear. I am doing what I do best on earth, the one thing I have no regrets about. After a dozen years teaching this class, I have honed and fine-tuned it like a stand-up act.
“Welcome to Breast-feeding One-oh-one.” I hold my phone up. “Let’s all practice cutting the cord,” I say, turning my own off.
“Just by coming today, you all are giving your babies the best start in life they could possibly have.” As I say them, the words come alive and so do I. I become a funnier, bawdier, warmer, wiser, all-around better version of who I am.
“I’m here because I am exactly the person I needed after my daughter was born, and there was no one like me this far from the city. Eighteen years ago, the choices in Parkhaven were, you could either go the hard-core route that insists you have to breast-feed until the junior-senior prom. Or you go with formula and your kid ends up with a dozen bodies buried in the backyard.
“I assume that you’re here because, like me, neither of those paths works for you. Maybe you’re here because you’ve heard I’m not a lactation hard-liner, but that I’ll help you succeed at breast-feeding your baby. Maybe you’ve heard that I’m not gonna tell you you have to quit your job or divorce your husband if either one gets in the way of nursing. Or maybe you just heard that, at some time during the class—not saying when—I’ll probably touch my breastesses.”
The guy in the hoodie grins at his girlfriend: This is exactly what he’s heard. She swipes at him playfully. The whole class relaxes.
“I didn’t have the help I needed, so I flunked breast-feeding and I thought I’d failed at something as basic as peeing. I’d look at pictures of refugees living in boxes and they all had a kid plugged in. Women who’d never seen a book could breast-feed, and there I was. I could annotate a bibliography. I had gone to nursing school. But I couldn’t breast-feed.
“A lot was happening in my life around the time my daughter was born. She had colic, serious, serious colic. I had postpartum depression. My husband left me for a cult religion.”
I wait for the glances to skitter up and ricochet off my face, gauging the depth of this revelation. Decide if I am joking. They see that I’m not.
“Yeah, Next. It wasn’t Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, but it wasn’t the Unitarians either.”
I don’t know what it is about the truth, but telling it is like having a noisy generator cranking away in the background suddenly go silent. As always after my big overshare, the barometric pressure in the room drops and everyone listens, really listens, for the first time.
“Nothing was the way I wanted it to be with my first, my only, child. Not one thing was right. If I’d had good help, though, if I’d had me, breast-feeding could have been my one right thing. I am going to give you the information you need, or tell you who can, to make it right for you.”
At first, it made me feel too exposed to talk about myself. Especially the part about losing my husband to a cult. So I tried substituting “another woman.” Even “a man,” but anything other than my own exact, specific, bizarre truth never connected. Never made the pressure drop the way the true, inexplicable, utterly humiliating, nonlinear randomness of life did.
“I’ve been a lactation consultant for fifteen years. It’s a silly job. When I meet people, they either think it’s some tech job or, if they do know what a lactation consultant is, the guys ask if I need an assistant. So I just say I’m a spy.”
Hoodie Boy laughs out loud and a few of the other dads join him. Now we can start learning. Next to truth, humor is the most important element.
“I’m not here to rip on formula. I was formula-fed. I don’t hate my mom. That’s not what caused the obvious emotional scarring.”
They laugh again. This is a good group.
“I’m just here to give information. I’m sure you all have researched the car seat, the crib, and the monitor. Anybody know how much formula costs?”
Lots of shrugs. No guesses. No one knows the answers to any of the truly hard questions. Cribs, monitors, Boppies, organic washcloths—hell, breast-feeding, breast-feeding classes—they’re so ultimately incidental. It’s too late, though, to tell any of these young parents, brimming with the most concentrated, aware love they will ever feel, that of the millions of decisions they’ll have to make as parents, the only irrevocable one has already been made. It was made when they picked a person to have a child with.
“At least twenty-five dollars a can. On sale. Usually it’s closer to thirty. If your baby is average and goes through ten cans a month, that’s two hundred and fifty dollars. Minimum. That’s a car payment every month. Here, I’m going to pass around this wheel. Check it out. Just dial in what formula costs for different time periods.” I whirl the wheel. “Oh, look, three weeks and you’ve got an iPod.”
I walk down the aisle like an evangelical preacher going out to lay on hands and pass the wheel around.
“When I first started teaching, I’d lead off with a big download about immunity and antigens and lower rates of sudden infant death and less plastic in the landfill. All very true and, eventually, I will get to some of that, but since there are whole organizations out there already telling moms they can express world peace, I figure that you’re probably looking for a different approach. So I start with the shiny baubles.”
The teen mom in the back row has taken control of the wheel and is checking out what each day of breast-feeding is worth, as if someone will be handing her a gift bag every time she unbuttons. I think of this girl with her sneering Presley beauty that will turn sloppy, her life ended before it can begin, all because she never escaped Parkhaven, never went to college, and I tilt off balance for a moment. More than anything, I want to speed over to Tyler’s roach coach and free my daughter this very second.
Peninsula. I have to get her to Peninsula.
I yank myself back on track and return to the podium. “Hey, I saw a formula ad the other day that said, ‘Now even
more
like breast milk.’ You know what is
just like
breast milk?” I look around the room. “Breast milk.”
A wispy blonde in pink yoga pants, the straps of her sports bra showing at the neck of her top, puts her hand up hesitantly. I know what she’s going to ask just from the way she glances at her husband, seeking his permission. “Is there any … Does a woman have to be, you know …” She makes arthritic hands in front of her chest.
“No. This is not
Juggs
magazine. Size really does not matter.”
Another hand goes up. It is the teen mom. Flecks of black polish dot the stubs of her chewed-off nails. A tiny bell hanging from the ring on her thumb tinkles. “My mom”—she gives her mother a die-bitch look—“told me that formula is more complete nutrition and that breast-feeding is just in right now, but that it’s a fad. And my boobs’ll droop if I do it.”
“A fad? I’m sure that Joseph was out trying to find a convenience store open at night to buy some formula for Mary.”
The mother folds her arms over her chest and I make a note to myself to schedule some extra, free visits with her daughter.
“Breast-feeding won’t make your boobs droop any more than having a baby will. But it will help you lose weight like a speed freak.”
I wince inwardly and search the room for any possible speed freaks. There don’t seem to be any candidates, but you never know. I make a note to myself to remove “speed freak” from the routine. The last thing I want to do is alienate any mother or father trying to do right by a child.
A Latina with the bone structure of a Slavic supermodel says, “My doctor told me that I would have to pump and dump for five days after I had even one drink.”
“Really? Five days? I’d like to know where the formula company sent that doctor for a cruise. No, the rule is: If it’s in the head, it’s in the milk. If you feel drunk, don’t nurse. But nursing is not like being pregnant. You can eat sushi; you can change the cat box. Just don’t eat the cat box. A drink or two is not going to hurt your baby. In fact, a beer now and again might increase your milk volume.”
Two young women, whom I assume are sisters because of their identical sloping chins, give each other party-girl thumbs-ups.
“
One
beer,” I emphasize. The sisters press fingers against their lips to suppress naughty-me grins.
Without raising her hand, a large woman in a tight-fitting top that makes her look roughly thirteen months pregnant starts speaking in a loud voice. “I have a whole different deal. This is my second”—she pats her stomach—“and my first one wanted to nurse all the time. Twenty-four/seven. Nonstop. My nipples were like hamburger meat.”
In the front row, the husband of the woman in yoga pants glances back at Hamburger Nipples, shudders, and shakes his head to dislodge the image.
“Yeah, and your husband might want to have sex three times a day. But we don’t always get what we want, and we don’t let ten-pound people make the decisions.” Then I tell her, tell the whole class—mostly, though, I tell myself—my mantra: “There’s a reason that God gives the little people to the big people.”
I start in on the lecture portion of the class with this basic fact: “Women have two breasts because all mammals have one more teat than the average litter. And it looks better in a sweater.”
Clutching the weighted doll in the crook of my arm, I use Lady Gaga and my own breast to demonstrate the football hold. We cover colostrum, letdown, engorgement, and, the holy grail of breast-feeding, the good latch.
We watch a video that features a new mother having a beatific, transcendent nursing experience. I take a seat next to Dori as the infant’s fuzzy head roots at his blissed-out mother’s breast and I narrate. “Breast-feeding is exactly like that. Except that you’re late to work, the baby was up all night with croup, your sitter just called and said she locked her keys in her car, and your two-year-old, who you’re pretty sure has head lice, is in the bathroom trying to flush the cheese grater down the toilet. Other than that, it’s all serenity and bliss.”
A few seconds later I remember that I forgot the trust agreement for Aubrey’s tuition. I whisper to Dori, “I’ve got to zip back to the house and pick up the papers we’ll need at the bank. Could you finish up the class? I’ll come back for you, then we’ll pick Aubrey up from here. Okay?”
“Sure.”
I pause the video to tell the class I have to leave early. “But don’t worry about breast-feeding. Like everything else we do as parents, we will have a million opportunities to screw it all up and another million opportunities to make it right. If I can’t help, I know someone who can. So you don’t need to worry about nursing.”