A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews! I always love to get them.
Chapter 3
The Artemis Journal
October 20, 2012
Births
Outside Our Region
DARCY: William Prentiss Darcy IV and Elizabeth Gardiner Bennet, New York, NY, a daughter, Emma Bennet Darcy, October 5, 2012.
Lizzy, Will and Emma returned home from the hospital after a couple of sleepless nights and two days jammed full of tests, questions, and visits from the pediatrician, the lactation consultant, and various other specialists (1). They settled joyously and tiredly into trying to figure out everything about Emma. Will took the week off from work to pitch in.
Lizzy's mother, Lillian, had offered, with obvious reluctance, to come to the city to assist. Lizzy and her parents had patched things up, more or less, after the rocky period around the time of Lydia's OD five years before. They had never acknowledged their role in Lydia's problems. Lillian was still drinking too much. Even so, Lizzy and Will had agreed that it was better to keep the channels of communication open, while not getting together too often. So Lizzy had thanked her and declined, to everyone's relief.
Instead, just after they got home from the hospital, Lizzy phoned her parents and suggested that they try their first Skype conversation so they could see Emma. Lillian and Tom had Skyped with Jane and her kids before, but they still didn't seem to have the hang of it. Lizzy tried for 45 minutes to guide them through it over the phone, her mother repeatedly asking, "Isn't this supposed to be a video call?" and "I can't see you! Can you see us? Can you hear me?" Finally they figured out that the camera plugged into Tom's ancient computer was broken. They decided to try again another time.
That first week, Lizzy and Will spent a lot of time staring at Emma, who was the most beautiful baby in the history of the world. They both talked a lot about how amazing it was that they had created this beautiful, wonderful, beautiful, incredible thing, this new beautiful, beautiful person, together. They carefully inventoried her body parts to see how she melded the two of them into one. She had Will's ears, and Lizzy's eyes, Will's fingers, Lizzy's nose. Or so it seemed at this early stage.
During Emma's second day at home, a visiting nurse came to the apartment to make sure everybody was OK. Apparently this was standard procedure at the hospital for first-time mothers. The nurse had a checklist—crib, check! Diapers, check! It was very basic stuff and Lizzy found it borderline insulting. But then she realized that of course there must be parents who didn't have any of these things, and truly weren't prepared, so it was a good idea for the nurse to ask (2).
Will held Emma often so Lizzy could rest, and changed diapers with some skill apparently acquired when Georgie was a baby. Lizzy struggled with the changes at first, especially cleaning off the foul, sticky black meconium the first few days, but she quickly got so much practice that diaper changes became routine. She had wondered if she'd feel grossed out by it all—so much poop, all the time!—but the frequency with which she had to deal with all these bodily secretions cured her of her squeamishness in a surprisingly short time.
Maybe this acceptance was also partly because Lizzy was confronting her own biological self in a new way, starting to have a different way of looking at her own body. While she sat on the sofa with Emma attached to her breast for hours every day, she really, truly understood for the first time in her life that she was a primate. Her breasts were practical, useful things, not things to worry about aesthetically—were they big enough, or high enough, or pretty enough? It didn't matter, if they were doing their job.
She and Will didn't talk about it directly, but she could see that Will was affected by the physicality of the experience, too. Before Emma was born, there had been times when he had seen her in extremis—in bed, experiencing pleasure. But now he had also seen her in extremis in pain, in labor. He'd seen her when she was utterly physically vulnerable, every part of her out there for him to see, and he hadn't been, and wasn't now, repulsed. And strangely, she wasn't embarrassed, either. There was nothing left to hide anymore. Their relatively unchallenging life together as a couple had never exposed them to each other this way. It was pretty intense.
And speaking of intensity and biology, Lizzy had a lot of intense biological needs. She was starving, she was dizzy with exhaustion, she was bleeding, she was dripping and oozing, and she had aches and pains in weird places. Will went out a lot to buy all the humiliating things she needed right away, no time to have them delivered: cream for her hemorrhoids, pain relievers for everything that hurt, lanolin ointment for her nipples, pads for her lochia. Damn it, why hadn't anyone thought to mention that she'd basically have her period for six weeks after Emma was born? Will also went out to get Lizzy her favorite takeout foods and grabbed meals from the hot table at the nearby organic market. Unfortunately she always had to leave off the hot sauce because it might get into her breast milk. Ugh.
Together, Lizzy and Will spent hours trying to find the Rosetta Stone, break the cipher, unlock the mystery that was Emma. What did that cry mean? Was that a happy sound? Why was she screaming? Could she really be hungry again so soon? Would she ever start sleeping like a normal person? What was that weird bump/rash/crust/fur/flaky stuff, just right there? Fortunately, it was all very, very fascinating, because otherwise it might have been disgusting.
Emma went through all of her new baby clothes in about five seconds and they couldn't wait for the laundry service to wash them or she'd be left naked for a week. After some investigation, together they discovered that deep in the bowels of the apartment, there was a little laundry area with a front-loading washing machine and a dryer. Lizzy didn't know how to use the washer because she'd never had a fancy front loader, and Will didn't know how to use it because he'd never used any kind of washing machine before.
"Never? Not even in college?" she asked, utterly dumbfounded.
"What? No. I sent my laundry out. What's the big deal?"
She shook her head and sighed.
They found the washer's instruction booklet and Will read it to Lizzy. Then he had to run down to the drugstore to get a new jug of laundry detergent because the one they had was so old that the liquid had all dried up. But even these mundane things were a fun new adventure because they were all part of welcoming Emma into their lives.
Will had emailed friends and family photos of Emma from his iPhone while they were still at the hospital, and the good wishes started rolling in.
"I'll have Ahmed send out birth announcements, OK?" he asked Lizzy, who was looking intently at Emma's perfect little toes.
"Huh? Oh, sure, whatever. You can choose." Yet another detail she would have let slide because it didn't interest her in the least.
"Well, do you want to have a formal portrait go with it, or an engraved card, or...?" He sounded like he knew exactly what he wanted but didn't want to reveal it, exactly.
Lizzy smiled at him, sure there must be some rule about this in his prep school etiquette book. "Oh, I know you'll pick the right one. I'll leave it in the capable hands of you two design mavens."
"OK, we'll just send him your personal contact list, then?" Will asked, pulling out his iPhone to get things done.
"Yeah, OK. And, uh...well, I hate to bring this up, but do you want to send one to Georgie?"
Will's happy smile dimmed considerably, and he put his iPhone back in his pocket. "Yeah...I'm not sure that would be a good idea, to re-initiate contact. But anyway, I don't know where she is right now," he said glumly.
Lizzy put Emma in his arms and leaned against him. She knew that a new little girl in his life could never make up for the loss of the first one, but it was worth a try, at least.
A long parade of pilgrims came to pay tribute to the new princess, bearing food and more gifts. Jane, Charlie, and the boys came to see Emma the very first weekend, and Jane drove all the way in from Westchester again later that week just to make sure everyone was doing OK. Lydia came by to meet Emma and to hang out during the day a couple of times. She could do that because she was a freelance graphic designer and she was between jobs.
Charlotte dropped in after work one day to meet Emma, but she couldn't stay long because she had to rush off and pick up Chloe from her family daycare. Will's cousin Richard also blew through on his way to something or other, bearing a giant teddy bear and takeout teriyaki and blinding Emma with his fluorescent floral tie. He promised to bring his wife Eleanor to see them soon. Aunt Maddie called and told them she would come as soon as she could.
It was tiring to have all these visitors in only one week, but it was also great. Lizzy was grateful for their help and for the chance to share her and Will's joy with their visitors. This first week and into the next, she had a hard time walking properly, and, even after the grossest bodily secretions of the first few days had mostly dried up, her body didn't feel quite right, like things weren't fitting back together the same way. And she supposed they weren't. For sure all the same bits were there, but in different places than before. But with so many people around to help her the first week, she did OK even though she didn't feel normal at all. Her village was really coming through for her.
After that magical first week, Will had to go back to work. WPD was still working on the big windpower deal with the Danes, and they had a lead on something interesting in Hong Kong. There was no way around it, he had to get back to the office. They needed him.
His first day back at work, Will was really excited for Lizzy and Emma to come to WPD's offices so that everybody could meet the baby. So they all rode down to the Midtown building in the car that picked him up every morning, Emma howling in the fancy car seat, and then headed up to his office on the top floor. From her car seat, now safely installed in the fancy stroller, Emma continued howling in the elevator all the way to the top. Lizzy had been up for a couple of hours with Emma in the middle of the night and she knew she looked like crap, but she figured that the folks at the office probably weren't going to give her a second look anyway in the face of all that deafening splendor. She took Emma out of the car seat and held her, and that quieted her down.
And of course Lizzy was right that they only had eyes for Emma. Ahmed gushed, "So this is the little one we've been hearing so much about! She's beautiful! Can I hold her?"
They passed Emma around, first to Ahmed and then to Giovanna, Will's staff assistant, who left a big red lipstick kiss on her forehead. Then it was on to Carmen the executive VP, Dan the CFO, and Monica the CTO. The rest of the floor soon emptied as everyone squeezed into Will's office suite to get a look at Emma and to pat or pet or tickle whatever part of her they could reach.
Soon Emma got overwhelmed by this flood of attention and started to cry, naturally, so Will laughed and said the show was over for now. He and Lizzy went into his office, where she sat on the leather sofa and nursed Emma while Will gazed contentedly at them.
A couple of minutes later, there was a knock on the door and Ahmed stuck his head around it saying, "Will? Oh, sorry..." as he flushed bright red and quickly withdrew. Lizzy guessed he didn't really want to see his boss's wife's boob.
"Sorry, Ahmed, sorry. Just a second—" Lizzy called as she dug around in the diaper bag and pulled out the nursing cape for its inaugural use. She covered up and Will let Ahmed know he could come back in.
"Sorry," he said. "I just wondered if you needed anything."
Lizzy smiled. "No, thanks, we're fine. But I did want to thank you for the basket with the chocolate-covered fruit last week. It was just what the doctor ordered. And the photos look fantastic."
She nodded toward Will's desk where there was a row of eight pictures of Emma in various poses: on the scale in the delivery room just a few minutes old; swaddled in a pink-, blue- and white-striped hospital blanket and wearing a little stocking cap, squinting; looking at the camera from Lizzy's arms with her big, unseeing blue-grey baby eyes. It wasn't like she had done anything very exciting in her first week of life. Will had emailed the pictures to Ahmed on Friday, with specific instructions about framing. They were very large photos, and Lizzy imagined visitors standing up to peer over them in order to see Will when he was behind his desk.
Will smiled. "Yeah, I guess I went a little overboard there, but they were all so perfect."
"Well, please let me know if I can help. You know, we just love babies in this office." Ahmed headed back to his office.
By way of explanation, Will said, "He and Phil are trying to adopt. Hope it works out this time."
"Yeah. They'll be great dads," nodded Lizzy. She pushed back the cape and they watched Emma nurse, eyes closed, little hand on Lizzy's big, round breast.
Will tickled Emma's foot and said, "Emma, this will all be yours someday. I'll teach you everything there is to know about wind turbines, and photovoltaic cells, and wave energy technology. And all about the economics of renewable energy."
"Oh, great," laughed Lizzy. "No pressure. Don't listen to him, Emma. You can be whatever you want when you grow up. Right, Will?" She nudged him. His own father had pushed him really hard to take over the family business, and he had done so, albeit not very happily.
"Yeah, that's right. Find your own path, Emma. The sky's the limit," he said wryly.
Lizzy snickered. "OK, but let's start with the basics. First, let's get a handle on this sleeping thing. After that, we'll work on the foundations of bowel control. Pee-yew."
So the designer leather sofa got its inaugural diaper-changing use that day, too. Lizzy threw the portable changing pad down on the cushion and unsnapped the legs of Emma's romper while Will got out the diaper and the wipes. It was a big disgusting blow-out, poo stretching up nearly to Emma's little umbilical cord stub.
"Oh, look, sweetie. Our love made manifest, just like we said," Lizzy joked.
That week, with Will back at work, the new family tried to settle into a new routine. Since Will was gone all day, Lizzy was now on her own, trying not to break the baby. All the help she'd had the previous week dried up. Lydia got a new client who needed a big design project finished ASAP, so she had to stop coming over. Jane made a mid-week trip from Westchester, but the 60-minute drive was just too long for her to do all the time, and besides it was disruptive for her and her boys. It was still out of the question for Lillian to come visit, and Mary hadn't even acknowledged the birth announcement. There wasn't anybody on Will's side of the family to help, either. All of Lizzy's friends were at work during the day, and to a woman they were so busy that there was no way she could ask them to take time off to give her a hand. So much for her village, apparently. Anyway, Lizzy thought, she was resourceful, and she'd figure out a way to cope.
She wished Emma had come with a proper instruction manual, though. The closest thing Lizzy had to one was the two baby books Jane had recommended to her, each with a very different style. One was very touchy-feely and suggested natural remedies for things and made a point of telling you when you needed to worry and when you didn't. The other read like it was written for medical professionals; it was all business, nothing about feelings at all, just the facts. The problem was that Emma didn't always behave the way either of the books said she would. So in that sense the baby books were both like instruction manuals for a slightly different model of baby from the one she had.
Lizzy phoned Jane, her chief baby consultant, with a lot questions, but she tried not to call too often because, after all, Jane had her own babies to take care of. She had other friends to call when she didn't know what to do—Charlotte and Vanessa among them—as well as Aunt Maddie, and she did ask them for advice, too. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they didn't, but, like the baby books, they all had very strong opinions on the care and feeding of the baby. It was a little perplexing, so mostly she relied on Jane's suggestions because at least she had scientific studies instead of just magical thinking to back up her claims.
On the one hand, Lizzy thought, Emma was perfect in every imaginable way. Not only was she smart, beautiful, and strong, but she was a real champ at doing what a newborn was supposed to do, according to the book: she cried, pooped, peed, and nursed. Constantly.
However, on the other hand, one thing that Emma did not do the way the books described was sleep.
During the day, she would fall asleep when she nursed, which was every two hours for half an hour. She'd sleep for about 15 minutes, and then be awake till her next nursing. If Lizzy tried to move her from the nursing pillow to her crib, she would wake up and cry. Jane had said all the research showed that getting infants to follow routines was really important, so Lizzy tried to put Emma down for naps three times a day at exactly the same time. But Emma wouldn't sleep when she was in her crib. This was an interesting puzzle. Lizzy decided to let her sleep on the nursing pillow on her lap and to hold very, very still while Emma slept. Lizzy played with her iPhone in the meantime, surfing the web looking for information on infant behavior.
During the hour and 15 minute increments that Emma was awake, Lizzy changed her diaper, lay together with her on the carpet in the living room floor, looked at black-and-white picture books, and did educational activities that the baby book suggested. When Will came home at 7 or 8 o'clock every evening, he got the full poop report, and he took it all in with great interest.
At night, Emma would sleep a little longer at a time, but she still woke up, like clockwork, every two hours, to nurse. And she only slept from 10 to 6. Weren't babies supposed to sleep 10 or 12 hours a night? That was one of the few things both books agreed on.
Will had never been a morning person; Lizzy was well aware of that. It turned out that he was not a middle-of-the-night person, either. Once he was asleep, he just didn't wake up. So every time Emma woke up and cried during the night, Will's sleep was disturbed, yes, but he didn't wake up enough to do anything about the crying. It was left to Lizzy to get up, drag herself to Emma's room, nurse her in the rocking chair, put her back in the crib, and slump back to bed. This had been difficult the first week, but Lizzy had persisted because one of the baby books and Jane both said that it was important for the parents to have their own separate space. As the second week wore on, the situation became more and more intolerable. Lizzy couldn't see why the baby had to be in a separate room, so she got Will to roll the crib into their bedroom. That way at least she didn't have to leave the bedroom in the middle of the night.
At the end of the week when Lizzy took her to the doctor for a well baby appointment, she asked about the sleep thing, urgently. The doctor checked Emma out and said there was nothing wrong with her. No colic, no acid reflux, nothing. Babies just did this sometimes, she said.
Lizzy called Jane, her outside consultant, who also told her that this was "within the range of normal behavior for a newborn." Great.
She asked Jane, "What do you do when your boys don't sleep?"
Jane said, "No, Aiden. Don't put your finger in there. What? Oh, no. We actually have the opposite problem, which is that the boys sleep too much sometimes. It's really inconvenient—I can hardly get out the door some days because they just keep on sleeping. Isn't that ironic?" She laughed.
Lizzy didn't think it was funny or ironic at all, actually.
During Emma's third week, the sleep issues were really starting to wear Lizzy and Will down, although Emma of course seemed just fine. Will was dragging, even though he didn't actually get up during the night, and it was even harder than usual for him to get up in the morning.
"Why don't you just go sleep in the guest room?" Lizzy asked. "You don't get up during the night anyway, and I don't have anywhere to be in the morning. I can take the hit for the team this time. The doctor says she'll grow out of it. It's just for now."
"Are you sure?" Will asked. "I want to do my part."
"Oh, yeah. There's no reason for both of us to be basket cases," Lizzy reassured him.
So Will started sleeping in the guest room, at first just on nights when he had a big meeting or something important planned at work the next day. That way he could be semi-coherent at the office. As time went on, he started sleeping in the guest room all the time so that he could function at work.
Lizzy had never slept very much before Emma was born. She was used to sleeping from midnight or one until 6:30 a lot of the time. But she was also used to sleeping straight through, and deeply, during those five or six hours. This was different. She wasn't getting any REM sleep at all—hadn't had a dream since Emma was born. As Charlotte said when she came to visit one evening, if someone treated prisoners of war like this, waking them up every couple of hours, they'd be in violation of the Geneva Convention and get arrested for war crimes.
After three nearly weeks of this, Lizzy was sure she was starting to slide into sleep deprivation-induced psychosis. One morning at breakfast, Will held Emma, feeling pretty fresh from having slept in the guest room. Meanwhile, Lizzy slumped over her cornflakes, haggard, with dark circles under her eyes. He asked, "How are you doing? Can you keep this up?"
She groaned and said, "I don't really know what else I can do..."
Will said, "Do you want to hire someone to take Emma at night? What do you call it, a night nanny or something?"
Lizzy glared at him. "Are you serious? Pay someone to stay up all night with our baby?"
"Well, it's an obvious solution, right?"
"Sure, if you think it's OK to pay someone to carry out your most intimate biological functions. Can I hire someone to pee for me in the middle of the night, so I don't have to get up to do it myself, too? Anyway, I'm not sure if she'll take a bottle. She refused it the one time I tried when my nipples hurt too much from her chewing on them."
Will shrugged. "OK, your call."
Finally, Lizzy determined that the only way she would survive this inhuman treatment was to abandon the crib and plop Emma down in the middle of her and Will's California King bed. That way when she woke up to nurse in the middle of the night, Lizzy didn't have to get up, and could just give her the boob and go back to sleep, too. Lizzy also started putting Emma to bed for the night by lying down with her at 10 o'clock to nurse in bed and then falling asleep with her.
Co-sleeping was also cozy and nice. It had its disadvantages, though, most of them involving Emma's incredible ability to take up the entire bed and to wake Lizzy with all her wiggling, snoring, and kicking. Plus, one of the baby books put co-sleeping high on the list of "top ten things you must never do if your baby is to survive to adulthood." The other book had it as number one on the list of "top ten things you must do to bond properly with your baby."
Around this same time, Emma started really throwing a fit when Lizzy tried to put her down during the day. Papasan swing: no. Crib: no. Blanket on the floor: no. Stroller: no, no! Car seat: never! She wanted to be held all the time.
Lizzy called Jane and asked what she should do. "Oh!" said Jane. "She's a high-need baby. That's challenging, but normal. It all fits in with the sleep issues, too. Psychologists think those things are related. She just needs lots of touching and holding, loads of love. You'll be all right."
"So basically you're saying I have to superglue her to my body."
"Well, I wouldn't say that, no..." Jane prevaricated. Actually that was pretty much exactly what she meant, Lizzy found, when she read about "high-need" babies on the Internet. They couldn't be serious, right?
It took Lizzy a while to give up on the idea of taking Emma out for long walks in the stroller, but she did, because the stroller just made Emma madder. She put away the papasan swing, and the baby bouncer, and all the other gizmos Jane had told her she needed to get. After trying everything else in her baby gear arsenal—various slings, a few different kinds of baby wraps, a different stroller—Lizzy reluctantly pulled out the awful, plain, navy blue Baby Bjorn baby carrier with the shiny reflective strips on it. She had to stare at the instructions for a while before she could figure out exactly how to put it on and where to put Emma inside it—it was complicated, and she was really, really tired. But after wrestling with it for about ten minutes, she got Emma in there, cuddled face-in right up to her chest, and suddenly it was quiet. At last, silence.
From then on, the fancy stroller sat unused in the closet. She bought a $10 little foldup umbrella stroller at the drugstore on the corner and threw the fancy diaper bag into it whenever they went out, pushing it along like a little phantom baby while Emma was safe in the baby carrier. The waterproof pads and the huge stack of cloths also got a quite a workout due to Emma's leaky cloth diapers, while the beautiful, sparkly, useless baby things from the baby registry gathered dust. And Lizzy started wearing Emma on her chest pretty much all the time, inside and outside of the house.
Maybe it was because Emma was feeling more secure, but after a week of this she started napping better, or in a way that Lizzy could live with, at least. At 9 o'clock and 1 o'clock, with Emma still in the baby carrier on Lizzy's tummy, Lizzy flopped down on her back on the bed or the sofa. She could doze lightly sometimes during these naps, cries of "Sleep when the baby sleeps!" echoing in her ears. Which of course was basically never. But fortunately, Emma—then and only then—slept like a log for at least an hour.
This seemed more manageable to Lizzy, as if things were starting to turn a corner. They began to venture out more for short trips during the day, to the park, to cafés, and to bookstores. She was tired, but she knew it wouldn't last forever. Emma would outgrow this. Besides, there were only five more weeks of maternity leave, five more weeks of bonding with the baby, so she should try to treasure it all, get as much of it in as she could while she could.
Friends and co-workers continued to make short visits in the evenings after work, bringing food and conversation, and that was nice and kept her sane. Elena came by to meet Emma, and Lizzy was pleased to see that Elena was just as warm and delightful and loving with the baby as it had seemed she would be in her interviews. That weekend Aunt Maddie and Uncle Ed and their girls, Hannah and Sadie, came to meet Emma. They all properly pay court to the little princess, and everyone had a wonderful time.
The fourth week of Emma's life, something really catastrophic happened that, for Lizzy, put her struggles with sleep and new baby-ness more generally into some much-needed perspective.
It was Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City on October 30. The forecasts were bad enough that Will even stayed home from work, and it was a good thing, too. Lizzy and Will and Emma huddled together in their apartment and looked out as the trees in Central Park whipped around, cracked, and broke off. Trash cans and various other different kinds of urban debris crashed frenziedly down the street for hours. A few hardy, risk-loving souls stepped outside, mostly to take their stir-crazy dogs out for just a minute, before rushing quickly back inside. The windows shook and the rain pounded down. It was like watching the end of the world from a skybox in Yankee Stadium.
Of course, nothing really terrible happened to them safe in their Uptown cocoon. All around them, in fact all up and down the coast, the devastation was terrible—downed power lines, flooding, destroyed homes and cars, trains and traffic halted, deaths—but not in their little island of privilege. Instead, all the destruction was concentrated in the parts of the city that could least cope with it: Downtown, the housing projects on the water...It was all just too awful for words. What was a little sleep deprivation compared to that?
After the storm was over, Lizzy was desperate to go check out her old Downtown neighborhood. She had heard that there was no power up to 39th Street in the days (and, eventually, weeks) after Sandy, and that her old neighborhood was blacked out and wrecked. In The Times she saw a story featuring one of her former neighbors. He was one of the hipsters hanging out in the evenings at a Chase ATM to charge his phone and get internet service. She didn't know if it would really be a good idea for her to go Downtown with Emma, or how she'd even get there with the trains stopped and traffic so bad and who knows what sewage and stuff all over the streets. So she stayed home, and sent the Red Cross a huge boatload of money, which was all she really could do. She felt helpless.
Hurricane Sandy worried her a lot. It made her think about all the crazy things that could happen in life, things you would never predict, things you couldn't possibly control. Who would have thought that New York City would be totally demolished by a hurricane, of all things? As if September 11 hadn't been enough. How could she keep her baby safe, when the world was such a dangerous and unpredictable place? That week she sat and held onto Emma a lot, kissing her head and thinking that she would never let Emma move away from home. Ever. College? Forget about it! At least she still had four more weeks of maternity leave.
By week five, even though the sleeping situation was a lot better than before, it was starting to wear on Lizzy more and more each day. For a while she put off doing anything more about it because, after all, what was it to the problems other people were facing out there right now? And travel around the city was still pretty tough.
But finally she couldn't stand it anymore. She knew things were dire when she fell asleep at 10 o'clock on election day before the presidential race was even decided, instead of staying up late to watch the returns come in. Will was worried, too, and so they decided to insist that their pediatrician, Dr. Garcia, give them a referral to a specialist at the pediatric sleep center in one of the big hospitals. This one, fortunately, had had its generator higher up in the building, so it hadn't lost power during Hurricane Sandy.
The doctor ran a bunch of tests, electrodes bristling from Emma's poor little fuzzy head, and concluded that, in short, there was nothing wrong with her. She didn't have apnea or any other sleep disorder. It was just a developmental thing, and she would grow out of it. Lizzy and Will would have to adapt and live with it for now, the doctor said. Basically, even though Lizzy couldn't possibly stand it anymore, she had to keep on standing it.
Lizzy was both relieved and unhappy to find out that there was nothing wrong with Emma. She was relieved because in the children's wing of the hospital she had seen a lot of really sick kids, and she knew how very, very lucky she and Will were that Emma was healthy and developmentally typical. But of course she was unhappy that "nothing wrong" apparently meant that there was absolutely nothing she could do about this intolerable situation.
Naturally Lizzy refused to go down without a fight. She ordered every book on Amazon about babies and sleep, and read them while Emma was busy not sleeping. All of them said not to try their techniques until the baby was more than four months old, so that was no use.
She consulted with Jane and Aunt Maddie, and got tips from them and from the Internet on what might help Emma sleep more at night and during the day: soothing music, darkened rooms, baby massage, aromatherapy. Sorry, she was not going to try acupuncture on a baby. But nothing worked.
As she did with most things eventually, of course she also called Charlotte for a reality check. Charlotte was at work and was a little distracted, but she still tried to answer Lizzy's question.
"She still isn't sleeping, huh? Yeah, Chloe did that for a while. She wouldn't go to sleep and we'd stay up half the night singing her 'A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall' over and over again. I don't know, sometimes babies are just like that. You got her checked out, right?"
"Yeah, nothing's wrong, apparently. So what did you do? I've got to get some sleep."
"Umm...I probably shouldn't admit this, but basically...we used mommy's little helper, Benadryl." Lizzy could hear Charlotte's keyboard clicking as she talked.
"What? You gave your kid drugs?"
"No, no, it's perfectly safe. It's an antihistamine. Cures whatever ails you. Well, I guess she was a little older, too."
"I can't believe you did that." Lizzy was aghast. It said very clearly in all the books as well as on the bottle that you weren't supposed to give Benadryl to kids under age six years.
"Oh, come on. Nobody will admit it, but everybody uses it. Maybe not Jane. But it's like co-sleeping. I bet you 75% of people co-sleep with their babies, but they all claim they don't because you're not supposed to do it. All parents have dirty little secrets like that."
"But..." spluttered Lizzy, unwilling to admit that she and Emma were co-sleeping.
"Well, you asked." Lizzy could practically hear Charlotte shrugging over the phone. "I guess you'll just have to live with it for a while, if you're not willing to use the magic potion."
So Lizzy hunkered down and continued to live with it, feeling like she was living underwater, and sinking lower and lower into the briny depths.
Even in her fog, though, she knew it was important for them to get out and do stuff. Going out was tricky to plan because of the napping and feeding schedule, but Lizzy and Emma took forays to the bookstore, and to Emma's interminable number of well-baby checkups. There was a fun new specialty tea place a couple of blocks away and they went there for herbal tea breaks so she wouldn't be tempted by the super-caffeinated coffee at Starbucks. They even attended a new moms' group at a community center a few blocks away. She'd found it completely by chance when she saw a flyer on a telephone pole outside the center. That was kind of nice, commiserating with other new moms about feeding, sleeping, pooping and crying, and how their babies did too much or too little of each.
At home, Lizzy found herself doing loads and loads of laundry that required immediate attention, too urgently to wait for the laundry service. For a while, she tried to cook without catching the baby carrier on fire. But finally she gave up on that and either ate delivery or just made turkey sandwiches from groceries delivered from the market.
By this time, Lizzy and Emma had started hanging out mostly in the gigantic white living room, the biggest and brightest room in the apartment. It had ceased to look so much like a mausoleum and started to look more like a Jackson Pollock canvas: white with splashes of bright color randomly flung all over the place. The rainbow-striped baby gym lay on the carpet next to the coffee table, and the sea-foam green changing table from Emma's bedroom sat in the corner by the fireplace, clashing with the fancy white cloisonné vases on the mantelpiece. Piles of Emma's clothes were stacked up on the Danish modern chair next to the changing table, and piles of washcloths for wiping up messes sat on the side table for ease of use. Occasionally Lizzy found a little sock hanging from a lamp or some other unlikely place, and had no idea how it had gotten there. Three mornings a week she rushed to pick everything up so that the cleaners would have some clear surfaces to vacuum and dust after she and Emma had scurried out of the apartment to get out of their way. But five minutes after the cleaners left, it somehow already looked like a baby bomb had just gone off.
Will came home late several nights that week because of the Hong Kong deal. WPD was in an intense investigation phase, trying to get more information about the firm they were thinking about investing in there. Because of the 12-hour time difference between New York and Hong Kong, the only opportunity to talk on the phone was at 9 o'clock at night, 8 o'clock if the Hong Kong folks came to the office early. One night he even got home after Lizzy and Emma had already fallen asleep, so they didn't see him at all.
That Saturday morning while Will was off playing squash, Vanessa, her friend from the women lawyers support group, came over with her little girl, who was now 10 months old. Lizzy looked at her with new eyes because now she knew this was what Emma would be like in only a few months. Baby Tory was interested in the books and mementos scattered around the living room, and Lizzy realized they would need to babyproof the place soon. While Lizzy and Vanessa sat on the sofa, Tory was crawling around really fast, pulling up and cruising around the edge of the coffee table, looking ready to walk at any second. She had bright dark eyes like her mom's, and Lizzy could tell she was going to be a smart one, also like her mom.
Lizzy chuckled, handing Emma over to Vanessa, "So, there is some hope that one day Emma will do more than lie here like a log."
Vanessa laughed, too. "Yeah, faster than you realize. And then you'll wish she'd just sit still for once. I'm dreading the day she starts to walk." She paused, looking up from Emma. "Are you doing OK? You look tired."
"Yeah, it's a little rough right now. The first five weeks have been difficult. No sleep."
Vanessa nodded sympathetically. "Nothing serious, though?"
"No, the docs say we just have to wait till she grows out of it. Anyway, how are you? You look good. I love your new do." Vanessa had previously straightened her hair and worn it Michelle Obama-style, but now she was wearing it really short, clipped close to her head. It looked dramatic and fabulous.
Vanessa smiled. "Yeah, it's a lot easier to take care of this way. No time to go to the hair salon anyway. Plus, I just sort of decided to let it all hang out at work. Yes, I'm a mom. Yes, I'm Black. Deal with it."
"How's it going? Are they giving you a hard time?" Lizzy asked. Vanessa was trying to make partner at one of the big New York litigation firms. She had been in the top ten in her class at Yale Law School, clerked for a Federal Appeals Court judge, and then been heavily recruited by the BigLaw firms. She was destined for great things.
"No, it's not all bad. Actually that was one of the things I wanted to tell you. Do you remember the firm got sued after Mona Berg didn't make partner, like, ten years ago?"
Lizzy nodded. "Yeah, they said she was too 'animated' or something, right? God forbid a woman should talk too much."
"Yeah, and then she sued them for sex discrimination and won. So they finally hired more women, but nobody could last in that environment for very long. Now the partners are desperate to retain women, and they finally put some new family-friendly policies in place. They just started offering a part-time track to partnership. And I decided to try it out. I'm the first one at the firm."
"Wow! How is it so far?"
"So far so good, I think. I'm working half time, only 40 hours a week," Vanessa smiled ironically. "I just started a few weeks ago, but I'm much happier. Basically, before, I never saw Tory. I handed her off to the nanny first thing in the morning and came home after she was asleep. Michael is still doing that, actually. We had a babysitter for the weekends, too. I just thought, what's the point? Why have kids if you're never going to see them?"
"How are you feeling about it? Are you worried about what it might mean for your career?" Lizzy asked, thinking back on the conversations she'd had with the support group so many times. Paula wouldn't be happy.
Vanessa handed Emma, who had started to fuss a little, back to Lizzy. "Yeah, I guess I'm worried. But I just couldn't live like that anymore. We'll see whether I can live like this, either."
"Yeah," nodded Lizzy. "Yeah." She realized she needed to start getting her head around going back to work. At least she still had three more weeks of maternity leave. Wait, only three more weeks?
Lizzy had taken Emma down to her office the week after she was born, and everyone had been suitably impressed by Emma's beauty and prowess at being a baby. Gina, her staff assistant, had squealed and jumped up and down, and Kyle, her second-in-command, had asked if he could take a cellphone picture to send to his wife, who just loved babies.
After that visit, they had left her alone for one entire week. Then the phone calls had started. They had questions about the location of important files, or who to call about particular issues, or if she could make a call for them to one of her contacts. This hadn't been too much of a bother at first, but gradually it had become more difficult as her sleep deficit had grown.
Kyle called her with a question about an ongoing case when Emma was about five weeks old. He wanted to know where some documents were. Maybe she had them on her laptop.
"Ummm..." she blithered. She knew she should know where they were, but she just couldn't remember anything anymore. Was this what they meant by 'baby brain'? She hoped it would get better soon. She dug around on her laptop for a while before emailing Kyle that she didn't have what he was looking for. Maybe he could find a hard copy in her filing cabinet.
After about five conversations like that, the phone calls had stopped coming. If Lizzy had been less tired, she might have missed work more, but as it was she hardly noticed.
Six weeks after Emma was born, Lizzy went to see her OB/Gyn, Dr. Dasgupta, for her own final post-natal checkup. While Emma sat in her car seat on the floor and screamed until her face turned purple, Dr. Dasgupta asked how Lizzy was doing. She said it was normal to feel tired, was satisfied that the lochia had finally stopped, and had her get up in the stirrups for one last pony ride. After Lizzy got dressed again, the doctor came back into the exam room ready for a very serious discussion. She asked what method of birth control Lizzy and her husband planned to use now.
After Lizzy had stopped laughing, and then had checked to make sure that her pad had done its job, she said, "Well...we're already using two excellent methods. Sleep deprivation, and co-sleeping with Emma." She hadn't meant to reveal the co-sleeping part, but the doctor didn't seem to be worried about that.
Dr. Dasgupta turned to hand her a flyer about Kegel exercises, and then reminded her she couldn't use anything hormonal until she stopped nursing. She ticked off the long list of forbidden methods: the ring, the pill, the patch, the injection, the implant...basically anything Lizzy had ever seriously considered using.
"So what you're saying is that I can use...?"
"An IUD or barrier method. Diaphragm, cervical cap, or condoms and foam."
Holy crap. Back to condoms after all this time? Not that it was all that relevant at the moment. Lizzy decided on an IUD and made an appointment to have it inserted. This was not the time to take any unnecessary risks.
That evening over dinner, Lizzy told Will that Dr. Dasgupta had told her it was OK for them to have sex again now. They both laughed until their sides hurt.
Then Will stopped laughing and asked, "Wait, do you want to?"
Lizzy skewered him with a glance and said, "What, are you out of your freaking mind?"
He didn't ask again after that.
Oh, my God! Only two more weeks of maternity leave left!
By the start of the seventh week of her maternity leave, Lizzy knew she had to get serious about going back to work. But she was starting to have some unexpected nerves about it. Some of her worries seemed kind of normal to her, and based on what she heard from her friends and the women at the mother's group, she thought they were probably pretty common. Emma had just started smiling and interacting a little instead of lying around with an unfocused look in her blank blue-grey eyes and making those weird alien newborn faces. All the hours of hard work might begin to pay off. Emma wouldn't always be an unresponsive little lump—she would be a real little person! How could she leave her now? Especially not in the hands of some stranger. Even a background-checked, expert-with-babies, highly recommended, kind, caring stranger who had now come to see Emma several times, and whom Emma seemed to like just fine.
And that was where her concerns might be starting to get a little weird, she thought. As much as she was missing her job—and she was, every time she saw something in The Times about an interesting legal case—the hurricane, and the sick kids she'd seen in the hospital, and all of life's other uncertainties made her feel like it wasn't totally safe to let go.
When she tried to think all of this through logically, she just couldn't do it. And that was the last thing that had her really worried about going back to work. Lizzy's brain was still really, really...what was the word for it?...not sharp. Emma was sleeping better than before, but all the weeks of extreme sleep deprivation had left Lizzy unable to form a complete sentence some days. And it seemed to be getting worse, not better, as time went by.
Kyle called her that Monday, excited that she'd be back soon and thinking about how to start handing some things back to her.
"So, that's where we are on the Al-Harazi case. What do you think? Do you want to keep going in that direction?" He paused eagerly, waiting for her evaluation.
Lizzy replied, "Uh..." and realized that she had kind of dozed off in the middle of what he'd been saying. She had no idea what he was talking about or what the right thing to do was. "Yeah, that sounds great. Good work," she finally said.
After that conversation, Lizzy decided to test her mental acuity by attempting the Monday New York Times crossword puzzle as Emma was nursing before her morning nap. She did OK with Monday, the piece-of-cake, ease-yourself-back-into-the-workweek puzzle. So she decided to up the ante by pulling out her stack of old puzzles, ones she'd been saving for a rainy day, and giving Tuesday and Wednesday a whirl. Tuesday went fine. With Wednesday, though, she hit a wall.
Try as she might, she could not remember a three-letter word, starting with an O, for a crumb or small piece of food. Oat? No, but close. Ogre? That was four letters and also wrong wrong wrong. This was not good. She needed to be at the top of her game to do her job. How could she go back to work if she was this discombobulated? What was she going to do?
She called Charlotte to see if they could talk. Fortunately, Charlotte had half an hour to meet for coffee during the afternoon, so Lizzy took the subway down to a midtown coffee shop near Charlotte's office. Will always wanted her to take the town car when she went out with Emma, but Lizzy preferred to take the subway when it was possible because Emma screamed so much in the car seat. She didn't lie about it to Will, but she figured that what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.
Emma seemed interested in watching the flashing light and dark in the subway tunnels and stations as she rode on Lizzy's chest. Of course nobody gave up their seat to Lizzy. This was New York, after all.
As Lizzy stepped out onto the platform, an older lady with blue hair put her hand on Lizzy's arm and said, "You really shouldn't take him on the subway, dear. This damp air isn't good for baby's little lungs."
"Yeah, OK," said Lizzy, giving her a suspicious look.
Charlotte had just turned the corner and was approaching quickly as Lizzy reached the door to the coffee shop.
Lizzy said by way of greeting, "Hey, just got some free advice about how to raise my kid from a little old lady on the subway. A New Yorker looking out for her neighbor! How about that?"
"I know! Isn't it amazing? There's nothing like a baby to get a New Yorker to open up."
After they had sat down at a table and given the waitress their order, Charlotte pulled her wobbly old chair over closer so she could get a good look at Emma. Lizzy quickly shoved back from the table a little to keep Emma from knocking over their cups. Emma wiggled and waved and cooed at Charlotte.
"Char, I can't believe you went back to work after only six weeks of maternity leave. Here I am at seven weeks, and I still feel like I can't walk right. You are Superwoman!"
Charlotte took Emma's hand and calmly said, "Lizzy, I told you why I did that."
"You did?" asked Lizzy, surprised. She didn't remember it at all.
Just then the waitress came back with their drinks, a huge coffee for Charlotte and mint tea for Lizzy, who still wasn't allowed to have caffeine. She looked on enviously as Charlotte poured milk into her coffee from a little metal pitcher and tore open a couple of sugar packets.
"Yes, I did," Charlotte continued, "I had to go back to work right away because I didn't get paid maternity leave, and I only had two weeks of sick time plus two weeks of vacation days. We couldn't afford for me to take any more time off, especially since I earn more than Liam does. And he couldn't take paternity leave because his company's policy said it would have to start right when the baby was born, but that was when I had leave. We couldn't afford for him to take unpaid leave, either, because we wouldn't have been able to make the mortgage payment. Then it was practically impossible to find daycare for Chloe because she was so young."
"Oh, my God, Char! That is just...inhumane. I am so sorry."
"It was horrible. Oh, well, I guess I shouldn't complain—aren't there some cultures where women are out working in the fields the next day?"
Lizzy nodded, "Yeah, and there are others where you're hardly allowed to get out of bed for the next, like, year. It doesn't make it any better."
Charlotte poked her coffee with a wooden stirrer for a few moments. "Well, it's possible I didn't tell you the whole story about why I went back," she admitted.
"Oh, Char, why not?"
"The money thing, of course." The money thing came between them in lots of ways now, even though they never talked about it. Or maybe exactly because they never talked about it.
Things had been tough for Charlotte's family since the financial crash in 2008. Her parents had made a lot of money when they had sold their family company, Lucas Safe & Lock, to Will's company in 2006. But they had foolishly invested most of it with a friend of a friend, a guy who claimed they could get a massive return really fast. His name was Bernie Madoff. Thanks to that decision, they had lost just about everything. Now they were struggling to keep afloat during their retirement, relying on their small remaining nest egg. Charlotte and Liam, who had benefited a little from her parents' financial windfall initially in the form of some help with their down payment, now couldn't count on any help from them at all.
Lizzy and Will, on the other hand, basically had no financial limits. The crash had affected them, too, but only in the sense that Will's, er, their, net worth had fallen from eleventy-seventeen hundred gazillion dollars to eleventy-five hundred gazillion dollars or something like that. The asymmetry made things very uncomfortable between Lizzy and Charlotte sometimes.
"Char, it's also possible you did tell me and I just didn't understand what a big deal it was. Four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks—before Emma, it probably would have sounded all the same to me."
Charlotte shrugged. "Maybe. I don't really know anymore. I'm so tired that I can't remember a damn thing."
"I know the feeling," Lizzy laughed. "My short-term memory is totally shot."
"Well, anyway, thanks. How are you doing? Isn't your maternity leave about up?"
"Yeah, I'm supposed to go back week after next. Wednesday we're heading to Artemis to see my parents for Thanksgiving. Just one more week of leave after that." She wiped some tea off of the front of the baby carrier holding Emma to her chest. Fortunately the tea had bypassed Emma's head, but anyway it was tepid by now. No harm, no foul.
"Supposed to?" Charlotte never missed a thing. "You mean you might not go back?"
"No, I'm going back. It's all set. Got a nanny ready to go and everything."
"Do I hear a big 'but' in there somewhere?"
"There's a big 'butt' right here, dahling," Lizzy pointed to herself.
"Come on, answer the question."
"No, I'm definitely going back. You know what that job means to me. The idea is starting to freak me out a little bit, though. The practicalities of it." Lizzy looked down at her tea and grabbed Emma's flailing hand as it came close to the cup.
"Yeah, I know. Well, I can talk you through it if you want. Do you have a pump yet? All that stuff?"
Lizzy nodded. "Pump, check. Other stuff, not yet."
"Time to get a move on, then!"
"Yeah, great, I'm going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe," Lizzy said, making a face.
Charlotte got a funny pinched look. Lizzy realized she had put her foot in it again when she mentioned buying clothes. Damn money.
"Well," said Charlotte brightly, "will you look at the time? Back to work. Check!" she called.
"You go on ahead if you're worried about being late, Charlotte. I'll get it this time."
"Not a chance, Bennet. Halvsies."
When the waitress, an older woman with some kind of Eastern European accent, came over to deliver the check, she said, "You know, you really should not carry baby around all the time like that. You will spoil him. Too much holding is bad thing."
When Lizzy returned home, she discovered that she had locked herself out of the apartment. She had to ask David, the doorman, to let her in.
When Will came home from work that evening around 8 o'clock, they sat down to eat takeout pasta for dinner. He had picked it up on his way home because Emma had had a rough afternoon and Lizzy was too tired even to order delivery. She nursed Emma while she tried not very successfully to eat with her left hand.
"How are you doing? Did you two have a good day today?" Will asked as he let Emma make a little fist around his big index finger.
"Yeah, about the same as yesterday. Poop, pee, nurse, nap, poop, pee, nurse, nap, repeat ad nauseum. Oh, and I had coffee with Charlotte."
"Sounds thrilling," he laughed. "Glad you got to see Charlotte. It might be good for you to get out more, talk to some adults." He looked at her more closely. "Is everything OK?"
"Yeah. Well, sort of meh, actually."
"OK, what's going on?"
"Earlier today I was sitting in the living room nursing Emma, and I started to think about how I would have to pump at work, and how I would manage that, and whether I could really think through a complicated legal case the way I'm feeling right now, and I completely freaked out."
"What do you mean? Is pumping really that hard? I mean that seriously, I just don't know what it's like."
"No...I guess that's not really it. It's mostly the thinking thing. And also, it's just...it's really hard to think about leaving her. I mean, I love my job, and I'm really looking forward to going back, but I also have this incredible, uncontrollable urge to be with my baby. I don't see how I can be away from her for so long every day. I know I'm going to worry about her all the time."
She switched Emma to the other side, which was a relief because she could eat with her right hand now.
Will said, "You know she'll be just fine with Elena."
She nodded, tearing up a little. "Yeah, intellectually I know that. I just have this fear that if I leave Emma with someone else, I won't be able to stop something horrible from happening to her. I know it's not rational."
"Hey, it's OK." He stroked her arm comfortingly. "What specifically are you worrying about?"
"Well, she still won't take a bottle, so how will she eat?" Lizzy had started pumping and freezing breast milk to build up a daytime supply, but what if Emma wouldn't take it? "And what if she won't sleep? And what if she misses me all day and cries and cries?"
"And what if it all works out fine, instead? Let's not borrow trouble."
She nodded and kissed Emma's head. "OK. You're right. It's only—I never felt this conflicted about the idea of going back to work before."
"It'll be OK. We'll work it out."
And Lizzy knew they would, too. She just hadn't expected it to be so complicated.
Footnotes:
(1) In the US in 2013, a woman generally stays in the hospital for two nights after she gives birth, provided it is an uncomplicated vaginal birth. In most hospitals, the baby is taken to the nursery at night for observation, and nurses bring him or her to the mother during the night to nurse only if the mother requests it. Nurses also wake the mother up every couple of hours to check her vital signs, all night long. A father may stay in the hospital room and sleep on an uncomfortable fold-out chair during this time. I imagine Will got an actual bed, though, in some kind of luxury birthing suite.
(2) European readers may be interested to know that mothers and babies are pretty much on their own after they are sent home from the hospital. Other than the visiting nurse described here, which is not standard in many areas of the country, no health worker, caregiver, or helper is provided by the hospital, insurance company, or national health service. The latter is because, of course, there is no national health service. To the extent that new mothers receive advice from a professional such as a lactation consultant, it generally happens during the short stay at the hospital, at a post-natal visit to a doctor, or by a private caregiver whom the mother must find and pay for out of her own pocket. Mothers also receive no instruction about, or therapy for, perineal recovery other than a suggestion that they might wish to do a lot of Kegel exercises. All of this means that women rely heavily on books, the Internet, and their friends and family for information about how to care for their babies, and also have to rely on friends and family for assistance with daily care of a newborn.
Please drop me a line below if you have any thoughts about complicated friendships or other things in life that aren't as simple as you might have once thought. I promise to respond if you sign in so I can PM you back.