Babymaker

Storytelling

I.

So I didn’t choose this life. Somebody else chose it for me.

I wanted to be in music, but my parents wanted something else. My dad forbid me to go into music, and he kept saying music is a hard life, that you always think success is just around the corner…just around the corner…but it never happens. He had musical instruments, but he took the mouthpiece off the trumpet and stuck it on the shelf in the bedroom closet where I could see it but couldn’t reach it (that was until I got older. When I could reach it, that’s when I found out the mouthpiece was gone. I never knew what happened to it), he kicked the drums in and put them downstairs in the little basement we had under the veranda of our back porch (it was more like a root cellar than a basement), and he did whatever else he did to the other instruments I might have not known about.

When my godfather died, my godmother decided to give her piano away to Dad (he used to be a professional musician long ago and far away). When we first got it, he might as well had stars in his eyes. He sat down and played it, playing old big band songs he used to know and singing with a voice that was like an Irish tenor. He was in another world. He was in love. Nevermind that he couldn’t read music…to his regret. He played by ear.

But a few days or a few weeks later, when I got on the piano and started playing it…and if I played too long or if my playing got too good, he’d yell at me from the dining room table that that was enough and to get off the piano. I immediately jumped up from the piano, because he was an authoritarian. A bossy, occasionally violent one.

My mom, little did I know, had other plans. She would periodically pressure me into going into Job’s Daughters, going to get my ears pierced (because it would look so cute), dress me up to look so pretty and presentable in uncomfortable dresses, tights, and shoes to go to church on Easter Sundays (even though my parents weren’t religious and my dad even said he was agnostic). One or two times, she told me to sit up straight at the dinner table. A couple times, she showed me what a soup spoon was and what a regular spoon was, what a dinner fork was and what a salad fork was, which side of the plate the spoons, knives, and forks went, and so on. I didn’t care.


II.

One day, we went to an outdoor party in somebody’s backyard garden. All the adults were dressed up semi-casually, with the kids running around here and there and supposedly having fun. My parents were there talking to a small group of other adults in a tight circle, wandering every once in a while meeting up with some other people throughout the day. Mom, as usual, was well-dressed and presentable, dressed in such a way that she reflected status and refinement. And she projected an air of sophistication to deliberately make others admire her. Me? I stood alone, walked slowly around here and there, occasionally talking to people for short periods of time, but not being too engaging because I couldn’t relate to them. I was bored.

My mom found what she thought was a good-looking young man a little older than me with money (almost everyone there looked like they had money) and took me over to meet him. I had already made small talk with him earlier in the day, but she made me go over and talk to him further. I didn’t want to. But she optimistically pressured me to do it anyway. So I did with discomfort. We had a pleasantly acceptable conversation, but that’s it.

Fast forward a year later, and we were getting married. All the trappings, the best men and bridesmaids, the church and the invitees, the ceremony and the reception. It was all nice. It was what my mom wanted and my dad couldn’t wait to get rid of me and get me out of the house so he didn’t have to financially support me anymore. We had the cake and the dance, the wedding gifts and the limo, the honeymoon and the house, a two-story Victorian house with the garden and the trees and the well-manicured lawns. It was nice.

My mom would be delighted.

We had food and we had a roof over our heads and we had nice clothes and nice furniture. Except for the house, which was beautiful, everything we had was nice. He had a nice career and a couple of nice cars, he had good friends and a nice family. The winters there were snowy and cosy and the summers were nice and enjoyable. We had a nice fireplace and a nice patio. Everything was nice.

It wasn’t long before I was pregnant. I didn’t want to be pregnant. My mom did, but I didn’t. I had to endure feeling trapped in a body where I was watching slowly morphing into a distended state, feeling sick during the second trimester, feeling sick from the fumes from passing vehicles, feeling irritable from things my husband said or did, wanting to get out and escape. What I wanted was an abortion, but the church I was attending was against it, my mom wanted to be a grandmother, and I felt there was no way out.

It was already enough that my church disagreed with me marrying a non-Christian, but now that I was married, I had to be under my husband’s authority and serve the role as the wife. I was the housewife. My husband worked. I cooked, cleaned, tended the garden (although my husband hired a gardener to take care of the yard around the house and the maintainance man to take care of the upkeep), washed the clothes, managed the kitchen supplies. I did what wives usually did. I didn’t have a job. Being a housewife was the job.

I was at a baby shower and had just got done receiving gifts (from some unapproving women when the time for me to go to the hospital had come. I couldn’t drive my own car because I was starting to go into labor, so one of the women got me into her car and took me. The hospital wasn’t too far away.

They got me into a wheelchair and wheeled me away.

It was a short labor. Before I totally knew it, I had a baby.


III.

I was holding a naked newborn. I didn’t know what to do with it. He was tiny, fragile, and helpless. It really scared me. I also felt helpless. I didn’t know how to take care of babies. I was holding something I was afraid could die from something…an accident, an illness, something. I didn’t want to be responsible. I didn’t want to be held to blame. I didn’t know what to do. But here I was, lying on my back in a room made to look like somebody’s home, holding a life I was terrified of losing.

I slowly reached up and lightly embraced the small person. I was supposed to do that, right? That’s what every new mother does, right? I was so scared. I was supposed to be an overwhelming amount of love for this little being, but all I could feel was fear. What if I do something wrong? What if I accidentally poisoned him? What if he died in the night while he slept? What if something happened while I walked away for a short time? What if he got injured?

There was no love there. There was fright.

In time, somebody…the nurse, the doctor, took the child away (I guess I was supposed to bond with the child) and wheeled me into another room. This room looked like a normal hospital room. It was there I spent the next…what, forty-eight hours? so I could rest and recover, with the nurse coming in with nourishment or with the scary life form for me to be with for a short time. The first time, I held the newborn in one arm and bottle-fed him with the other. Afterwards, it seemed something was wrong. He started crying and I didn’t know what to do. I looked at the nurse terrified. She smiled, took the child from my arms, and left the room. I wasn’t informed on why he was crying. Now I was really scared. I was alone. I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know what was happening to him. I was in the dark in a room with light.

The second time a nurse came in with the child once again. This time I was given the child and the bottle, but she left afterwards. I fed the child alone, but once again after he was finished, he was crying again. I was scared. I didn’t want to call the nurse, but I didn’t know what to do either. I held him against my chest and patted him on the back. I patted him on the back three times and suddenly he burped. Loudly. His head hit my chest and he was out like a light. I was shocked. Is that all he needed? A few more minutes passed by, and the nurse came back into the room to retrieve the sleeping baby.

In time, I was let go from the hospital (too soon in my opinion…I felt like I needed at least one more day) and in the blazing hot sun. I was carrying home an unknown extra person in my arms, not knowing what to do, where to go from here, how to take care of him. I was lost.


IV.

So there I was at home with a newborn. Yes, I did all the mother stuff. At first I tried breastfeeding because I read it was more healthy for the child than formula. I did for a few days until I found out something was wrong. At the end of the week, we took the baby to the doctor for a checkup. When I told him I was having problems. I told him I decided to breastfeed him, that the first few days went well, but there was less and less shit in his diaper to the point where there was nothing in it when I went to change him. He told me I didn’t have enough brest milk to feed him with. He was going hungry. I didn’t like what I heard. I turned away and looked out the window. I really didn’t feel anything when I heard that, but mentally I thought I was inadequate. I was already failing as a mother.

I was told I would have to feed him formula. I didn’t like what I heard. I told him that it would take away something if I didn’t that. He said I could supplement breast milk with formula. I didn’t like it. I wanted to breastfeed him. But I had to resign myself to follow the doctor’s advice.

At first, I started out alternating, giving him formula and breast milk. But I only gave him breast milk once after that. Yes, it did come back, but I pretty much didn’t want to switch back and forth. I just gave up and gave him formula from then on. Too many changes for me to make. He was alright afterwards.

But it was so much of a burden to struggle with the awareness of an extra little life in the house to watch over. It was enough to have been getting engaged, then getting married, then having a honeymoon, then move into a house I had to share with someone else. Now I have a baby. An unusually fast-growing baby. I took pictures of him as he was growing, and I could have sworn that, in comparing them, he had doubled in size since we took him to the doctor.

One day, my husband had a break from work, so at the spur-of-the-moment, we decided to drop by my parents’ place for them to meet the baby for the first time. By this time, he was only a week old.And by this time, they were both growing older and my mother was more attentive in taking care of Dad.

So we arrived on the doorstep and knocked on the door. It was a hot summer day that was waiting for the next month to show up. But since the home was such that, because of an attempted break-in one morning over a decade ago, Dad panicked and spent money he would never spend unless he felt forced to. He had people come out and put bars up outside all the windows. It ended up that my childhood home was the only one on our very short street with bars around the house. And because the original screen was removed and a reinforced screen took its place, well that took care of ever reaching the doorbell again.

Mom came to the door and let us in, the heavy screen opening outward for us to step through the threshold and into the living room (or “front room,” as they’d like to call it. My parents grew up in the South, so they didn’t use the same language everyone else). It was a short walk to the dining room where Dad was sitting at the edge of the table near the yellow-painted kitchen. There we were, me holding the small being, my husband standing somewhat behind me. My parents were *so* delighted to see him of course, but Dad was especially happy. I carefully gave the child to him for him to hold, and he set still limp frame on his right leg, which was left to me. But the reaction to him was disturbing. He was so delighted, so proud, that he referred to him as a manchild. It made me feel like I didn’t exist. I, because I was a woman, was female, didn’t exist. It didn’t seem to bother Mom to disappear, but it just seemed that, because the child was a boy, he didn’t see him as just a boy. He was male. That’s what mattered. To him. Dad was beaming proud. That was not just disturbing…it made me feel like I didn’t exist.

Well at the most basic level, Dad didn’t have a lot of respect for females anyway. But what made it equally disturbing was I wasn’t even silently acknowledged. Mom didn’t notice. My husband didn’t notice. I did. How could I help but to notice the unacknowleged role I played in birthing him? Nevermind I had to do it without anestesia…simply because I was so far into labor that I couldn’t sign my own name off on the permission paper for me to have it. So it was a natural birth. Relatively short as birthing times go, but excruciatingly painful…so painful, I forced myself to keep from cursing my fiancee at the time to hell and back. It was tough to restrain myself and give birth at the same time. Yet I wasn’t here now.

After Dad’s moment in the winner’s circle, he gave the week-old manchild back to me. We all conversed a while longer before my husband and I left and went home. I was leaving my parents, especially Dad, with the awareness that they (he) were (was) the center of the universe.

Meanwhile, I felt erased. And I went home erased. Gone. Deleted. On some level, that sense didn’t leave me.

We didn’t get the same reaction from my husband’s Dad. He was divorced from his mom, but when he held the child, he acted normal. As for him meeting his mom, he met him at some point, but I don’t remember. My husband had a large family, with a lot of aunts and uncles. So such memories could easily get lost in the crowd.

As time went on, my husband was getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home, and we went through the usual routine married people did during the weekdays until the weekend came, and then we did the weekend thing. It was the same as before, except now we had a tiny being in the house that was growing bigger by the day. And I had to adjust to that.

Until I didn’t.

V.

“Where’s the baby?”

My husband was so busy with the whole routine of waking up, preparing himself for work, going to work, staying there from nine-to-five, fighting traffic to get home, relaxing, eating dinner with me, relaxing some more, getting prepared for bed, going to bed, getting himself to sleep…only to wake up and start over again…for five straight days to the weekend. To tell you the truth, we had up to this point lived child-free, so it was easy for him to not notice the baby when he was gone. And he had been gone for about two or three weeks. He was easy to miss.

But when my husband did miss him, it was noticeable.

One day when he got home from work, while I was preparing dinner, he quietly went around from room to room on the first floor. Then he went upstairs and continued his search there. Then he went to the attic. Then the basement. Then he went outside to the backyard. Then he went inside and went through the house to the front yard. Then he started all over again and retraced his steps. I suppose he did a good job searching the place. Meanwhile, I was finishing the cooking and setting the table. And yes, there was no high chair at the table for the baby. There hadn’t been for a while.

So when he scoured the house the best he could to find the child, that’s when he went into the kitchen where I was and asked the question.

“I put him up for adoption”

“You what?”

I repeated the answer.

That’s when the argument started.

Flashback to a few weeks before. I was looking around, considering my possibilities to make myself childless and burden-free again. Having a child to take care of was too much to deal with. I was already living a mediocre life as it stood, and it didn’t make anything better that I was now married.

I searched through my options and looked up possibilities in my city and state. I strategized and pondered…even considered illegal means. All the while, making the formula, feeding the baby, changing his diapers, laying him down to sleep…trying to catch up on sleep myself…plus doing the housework and making breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Time for tv? Forget it. I was lucky for us to be able to afford someone to manage the yardwork outside.

Finally, I decided to get in touch with an adoption agency. Even then, it took some time to research the best options available, so it wasn’t an overnight decision. All the while, I was second-guessing myself, wondering if I should just deal with the problem…for the next eighteen years…or more…or if I should do myself a favor and let him go. It wasn’t easy to make the decision, considering this issue would impact me on a psychological level if I held onto him like everyone probably expected me to.

So I spent days whittling down my choices, even calling my picks, to see if this or that choice was a good one. Needless to say, I was interviewing my picks like an employer interviewing potential hires…interviewing prospects. I narrowed my choices down to two, but by the time I did that, I was so tired, I went into the bedroom and took a nap…while the baby was sleeping of course.

It wasn’t until a day or two later that

Now I was free-ish. It was better, but it was nowhere near where I wanted to be. But at least I had less work.

VI.