Simon took him aside, murmuring, as I struggled back into my coat, trying not to wince. “He really seems to be annoying you, these days,” Mom observed, to which I could only reply: “Okay.”
“Please don’t do that, Lois. I’m just saying you need to be careful what you say around him, how you say it. Children pick things up.”
“Yeah, they do—and you know what? I actually want him to pick up how there’s more people in the world than just him, and sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to, ’cause that’s just life. Besides, you know how he is—all ‘no Nay-Nay, no Nay-Nay!’ until we leave, and then suddenly you’re the best thing ever. It’ll be the same tonight.”
“That doesn’t excuse your behaviour, Lois. You’re his mother.”
“Uh huh, and nothing excuses me, like nothing excuses him, either. Must be genetics.”
I regretted saying it the instant it was out of my mouth, not least because of the glance my mom shot me then, so much more hurt than angry—but right that very moment Simon reappeared, timing suspiciously on point, sporting that too-cheerful smile he puts on whenever he’s trying to defuse tension (a lot like Clark’s fake “Disney smile,” come to think). “I’ve set him up with Make Mine Music on your DVD player, Lee, and he’s got bacon,” he said. “We should probably go, right?”
She nodded, eyes still on mine; I wanted to look away, but didn’t. “Tell him goodbye, though, before you do. Don’t just disappear.”
“Of course.”
(Of course.)
“That didn’t sound good,” Simon observed, carefully, on our way down in the elevator. “Talk? Or just forget about it?”
“Forget,” I replied, still staring resolutely forwards, studying the dull, scratched inside of the elevator doors like I thought if I only did that long enough, a reflection would appear: not mine, perhaps, but somebody worth looking at. Already knowing, however, that I probably wouldn’t be able to.
Do you ever wonder when you started to hate yourself? I felt like asking Simon as we sat there in our favourite sushi restaurant, waiting to order. Except for the fact he’d most probably answer: No, but I do sometimes wonder when you started to hate yourself, let alone why—a question I knew damn well I’d never be able to answer, at least not in any way he’d find enlightening.
I was thirty-six when I fell pregnant with Clark, old enough that the gynaecologist judged my womb “geriatric,” and on the night I went into labour he was already two weeks overdue, so they’d been talking about inducing me the next day anyhow. I weighed more than two hundred pounds at that point, a lot of it fluid, and my hands were covered in pruritic urticarial papules and plaques, a rash often found in first-time mothers—benign but incredibly uncomfortable, like tiny, crunchy, air-filled subcutaneous blisters that hurt anytime I moved a finger. There’d been
a series of scares in that last month, everything from a sugar test hinting at prenatal diabetes to a false water breaking, but now we were finally at the precipice. Things were going—well, granted, I had nothing to compare it with, but it seemed all right, probably because I’d taken the epidural the minute they offered it to me.
On one of my second or third pushes, stuff gushed out of me in a flood without any hint of warning, like I’d pissed myself, so suddenly I didn’t even feel embarrassed; Simon held my hand as I bore down then stopped to recoup, whoop-gasping, before bearing down once again. And that’s how it went from then on: repeat, repeat, repeat.
Thirteen hours later, Clark had crowned but little else and the doctor could feel his neck starting to twist, as if he couldn’t decide which way to face while exiting. She recommended a caesarean, which I’d wanted to avoid, and eventually I signed off on it. I remember being wheeled into the operating theatre, sobbing like a drunken maniac and apologizing to everybody I saw. I remember the frame around my hips, a sheet placed so I wouldn’t be able to watch them cut me open, them lifting Clark free and putting him in my arms. He was covered in my blood, slightly yellow and swollen, eyes bulging like a bemused frog’s; his full head of black hair was plastered down, and he held his hands up to the light, fingers spreading delicately, whimpering. Nine pounds eleven ounces: “the little stud,” they called him. A friend had knitted him a cap with a skull and crossbones on it, which he wore for all his first photos. He couldn’t latch on, probably because my breasts were so massive and deformed—five years later I’d have to have a breast reduction, because they never quite deflated—which meant the nurse literally had to hold his head in place while I nursed him for the first time, half-asleep. The hangover lasted for days.
It was traumatic, for both of us—but then again, birth always is. In another era, neither of us might have survived. What I’m trying to say, though, is that I never resented him for any of it, never suffered from post-partum depression the way some of my friends did, never blamed him for the pain or the irreparable damage to my body, the staple-studded scar that ran twice as long as normal under a stomach pendulous enough it was impossible to clean without help, so it became infected almost immediately.
He was my child, a part of me, and I recognized that immediately; we lay in bed together for what seemed like months after, rarely separated by more than a few feet. He smiled early, laughed early, crawled early. When I wanted him to sleep, I’d put something I’d worn into his bassinet, knowing the smell would comfort him; when he heard my voice, his eyes lit up. I never doubted that he loved me, or that I loved him.
In my darkest moments, though, I have to wonder: how much of our affection, as parents, is for the child we think we’re going to have, the child we think we’re entitled to, instead of the one we actually end up getting? I mean, I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments.
That future I saw for Clark, though, when he was a baby . . . that was gone. It wasn’t coming back. That left only the present, which felt unbearable on occasion, though it wasn’t, because nothing was. Sad but true.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Simon offered, and I shook my head. “Wouldn’t want to waste your money,” I replied.
“Hey, it’s mine to waste.”
“Oh well, okay. No wonder we don’t do our own taxes.”
We’d already established there wasn’t anything showing in Toronto worth enduring two hours in a movie theatre seat, so edamame and assorted sushi rolls plus a bit of mild flirtation, followed by whatever we’d PVR’d earlier in the week, seemed like the next best thing—good for an hour or so, anyhow. Still, as we walked home, I found my mind sliding back to Mom: the impossibility of a last word, ever, when both of us were just so certain we knew better—about Clark, about life. About each other.
“I just wish she’d admit I might occasionally know what I’m talking about, that’s all,” I told Simon, closing our condo door behind us. To which he basically shrugged, moving to flick the kettle on, and pointed out, in return: “But she wants what’s best for Clark, right? And it’s not her fault she doesn’t know what that is, any more than either of us do—it’s uncharted territory, here. We’re all feeling our way, Clark very much included.”
“. . . Yes.”
“So.” A beat, then, while the steam gradually mounted. “If what you resent is her wishing you wouldn’t push him quite so hard, I have to be honest and say on that particular issue, I kind of agree: he’s a kid, first and foremost. Self-control’s always gonna be an issue.”
“Most kids grow out of it, though. He . . . might not.”
“He will. Slower than some other kids do, probably.”
“‘Probably?’”