Childish Things
by Lori Rohlk Pfeiffer
My husband gooses the red sports car we’ve rented for our European tour and it shoots over the hill like a little rocket. “See, it’s fun to drive!” he says. “Don’t you want to drive?” We are on our way to Brussels. It is the third day into our trip and I am unaccountably tired, like I have been up for weeks instead of merely a 12-hour flight over the Atlantic Ocean. “No,” I say, reclining the seat and pounding my jacket into a pillow. “I think I still have jet lag.”I spend most of the two weeks we have in Europe suffering from jet lag, and the two weeks after we get back to Arizona, too. But I have the final three chapters of my travel book to fact check and edit and I am beginning to panic. The fatigue increases in intensity; I feel like I am slogging through a river with rocks in my pockets, like Virginia Woolf on a suicide mission. The water feels inviting. Or maybe I am Dorothy skipping through the poisonous poppies on the way to Oz. Just a short nap, I think, just a snooze.Then the puking begins. I can’t believe I actually mistook being pregnant for endless jet lag. I am now couch-bound, throwing up anything that passes my lips, anything that touches my lips, indeed, anything I think about. The baby inside me apparently isn’t pleased with any earthly menu plan.“You didn’t do a very good job on these chapters.” It is my husband, standing over me. The ceiling lights hurt my eyes. I feel both cranky and dreamy. “If you don’t like them, do them yourself,” I croak, waving him away.He does. He corresponds with my editor. He proofreads the maps and makes changes and sends everything off. I throw up until my ribs hurt and drag into the office a couple of times a week to look at my computer morosely before taking a pillow into the bathroom to sleep. I have plastic zip lock bags in the pockets of both my coats, in case I get up the energy to go someplace, like shopping or the bookstore, and can’t get to the bathroom in time. But, increasingly, I don’t go anywhere.I quit my day job two years prior to write full time for magazines. I found my first assignment letter in the mailbox, for an article on job burnout, on my last day at work as a public relations director. I took it for a good omen.I was well organized: I set goals, listed target magazines, made monthly and yearly plans and, of course, a five-year plan. I wanted to write a book before I was 35. I didn’t care what it was, as long as I was a published author. And then, I wanted to have kids.Uncharacteristically, the having kids part was rather vaguely thought through. Having had little experience with children, other than babysitting them occasionally, I imagined I would write up until the time I gave birth. After all, didn’t Barbara Kingsolver write her first book when she was pregnant and struck with insomnia? I was looking forward to the insomnia. Then, I would put the baby within arm’s reach in a bouncy seat or cradle and write. The baby would entertain him or herself, first with a variety of baby toys like teething rings and beads, and then with books, small cars, building blocks, animals and puzzles.The extreme morning sickness makes it seem like the baby has other plans. I bounce from doctor to doctor looking for a way to stem the tide of nausea. I look like a poster child for starvation in a third-world country, gaunt cheeks, hollow eyes and ribs protruding over a tiny pot belly. One obstetrician tells me to enjoy my vacation. “I want to write,” I protest, but no one hears me. My days are reduced to watching all three channels on our TV and crying a lot. I try to write but my brain feels like a big fuzzy slipper. I turn down assignment after assignment. My belly grows, but the rest of me disappears.The throwing up subsides a bit after I go to a high-risk specialist and start eating the same anti-nausea pills they give chemotherapy patients. But then they send me to get a heart test because of a murmur and I find out I have a fatal disease.Suddenly, all of my hard work as a magazine writer doesn’t seem important any more. Who will give a rip years from now whether or not I wrote a zippitty-do-dah article about glass blowing, international grocery stores or Mexican pottery? My travel book seems pretty unimportant, too, and it hasn’t even been printed. In fact, all of the writing in all the world’s libraries seems insignificant when I think about dying.I have primary pulmonary hypertension. The arteries in my lungs aren’t elastic enough to oxygenate my body. The treatments are blood thinners and lung transplants. I could go within two years of diagnosis. A person with my condition isn’t even supposed to be pregnant.I correspond with some members of a group of people afflicted with PPH. One woman lives on a ranch in some Western state, more than an hour’s drive from a doctor, longer from a hospital. She blew a hole in her heart giving birth. The baby is okay. She barely survived.I think about the baby inside me not having a mother. I am beginning to feel like I know him. He tells me his name is Max; Maximilian August. He likes to swim inside me, like a little fish. He sticks his head, fists and feet in my stomach, most days. At other times, he twirls around like a cat making itself comfortable on my lap. Only he’s inside.In bed at night, we do Morse code on my stomach. Tap, tap, he goes, making rolling hills on my belly. Tap, tap, I respond, lightly drumming my fingers on his. We talk all the time. I tell him I’m sorry I am dying. I hope I can find him another mommy.“Are you writing?” a friend asks. “Yes,” I lie. How can I explain that my brain feels all like I’ve been hitting the cold medicine really hard and that writing doesn’t seem to have any point anymore? I have been writing professionally for more than a decade. I have filing cabinets full of yellowed newspaper clippings. Who, besides my mother, reads them? I have just been killing trees. I call people I haven’t talked to in ages, friends or fellow writers, and update them on my life: I am pregnant and I am going to die. The only friend my age who can talk about my impending death is Deb. She talks with me for hours about how my husband would raise Max, though she doesn’t think I need to find a substitute mom yet.Deb, a writer too, is the only one not thrown by my other question: “What would you write if you only had a few months to live?”I forget her answer, occupied with my own thoughts. I try to free write, I go to poetry readings, I go to a psychiatrist, I write in long hand on a yellow notebook paper, I try to write late at night, I try to write lying in bed. I attempt different genres. Several short stories languish on my laptop. Essays sprout, but wither away. What would you write if you only had a few months to live?Would you write at all?Max has been listening at the belly-button hole for nearly thirty-four weeks and now he’s out in the world. The delivery was sudden—an unplanned birthday because Max was hanging around upside down, in a nearly empty amniotic pool with the umbilical cord wrapped twice around his neck. The doctors were going to turn him today but I thought something was up and said so. A quick Ultra-sound and I find myself in the delivery room behind a curtain stretched across my chest. Minutes later I hear Max squeal. The cardiologist was there, but was not needed.For the next few weeks, we fall into each other like lovers, cocooning against the troublesome, outside world. I cry every time I hear about a kidnapped or abused child on the evening’s news. Finally, we get cable TV and I watch the listings channel slide by while he nurses, oddly comforted by a menu of what shows I could watch, but choose not to.And tomorrow morning, I will turn on my computer. I do not today. Not most days. And when he naps I will type something up. Yes, maybe, well . . . no. I sleep with the baby. I feel very tired, still, and move as if I’m sleepwalking. My mind drifts while I endlessly change diapers and nurse him, milk dribbling down all my shirts while I imagine that great throngs of cats will camp outside our door, drawn by the sweet-sour smell.I dream about my writer self but just can’t get up the energy. I have friends who went back to work at six weeks after giving birth, but I am still hypnotized by the baby’s smell. We stare at each other all the time, his eyes changing from dark slate to pool blue. I sing to him, even after he falls asleep.Staying home and being a full-time mom is not easy. Seeing my name in print always gave me a little rush, like I was okay, like I’d done a good enough job to be printed. Getting paid for something I’d written made me feel validated. Now, I feel like am merging with my baby, camping out in some unfamiliar territory, utterly lost. One day, we are out for a stroll at the bookstore, when I spy a small blue journal. Just a year-and-half earlier I had gone through the store with my husband and had proudly noted that three of the magazines on the racks were carrying my stories. Now, I feel kind of weirdly detached, as though I were walking through my old elementary school, amazed that nothing seemed to be quite the right size anymore. I wonder how I ever loved this place. It looks impossible, all those books to be read, all those publications to write for.But the journal gleams at me from the bookshelf, even though it is fashioned of suede leather and not at all shiny. It is tidily square and the color of a pastel Easter egg. It has place for a photo. Perfect.I buy it and curl up on the couch during one of Max’s naps, willing myself awake. I inscribe his name on the first page with hopeful script, then turn to page two and begin to write.I want Max to know me, in case I will not be in his life. I want Max to understand how much I loved him, how much I pored over him during our first months together. I want what I write to make my son feel safe, to protect him from skinned knees and bullies and broken hearts, to tuck him in at night.As I write in the journal I become drawn into the day-today details of caring for a baby. I record the way he sleeps (sometimes with his eyes open and smiling) and how his crying makes me feel helpless. How Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” soothes his colic. How, long before crawling, he manages to scoot sideways in crab fashion across the bed. How he turns into a happy, little boy.The journaling seems sentimental to me. The entries would be about topics—childish topics--I would have scoffed at when I was younger and more ambitious, when I swore I would not be one of those older women in a poetry writing class writing about their children.What I didn’t understand then was that, as a mother, you lose the “I” voice and the perspective of a young, workaholic woman. Before, I wanted to be part of the world of money-making and prestige. I didn’t value domestic life or children. Now, I seem drawn to less tangible ways of measuring worth. By recording my baby’s life, my words take on a new cadence. I still feel like my life is ticking away, but my writing no longer matches that frantic speed. I write in long-hand, with a calligraphy pen and teal-blue ink. I feel like one of those Medieval monks, patiently copying sacred words onto a parchment that only a privileged few will read.I have another appointment with a cardiologist, a new one. A second opinion, since the effects of pregnancy on my body have subsided. While the other cardiologist reminded me of Napoleon, standing there with his hand in his jacket and admonishing me “not to worry,” the new one reminds me of Gandhi. He is peaceful. He is sensitive. His daughter has had leukemia. He is oh-so-sorry that I had to struggle through pregnancy with that awful diagnosis. That misdiagnosis.I cry a lot now, but out of relief, not depression. I feel a reprieve. I join again the billions of people ignorant about the cause and timing of their impending deaths. It seems less likely my son will grow up motherless. I feel like everything is going to go back to normal, the way it was before I got pregnant.But it doesn’t. In between the baby and the disease, something has changed. Editors call me. I could write for them, but I take only a few assignments. I spend my days playing with my son. I dangle my feet in his plastic pool while he swims, scooting boats and fish back and forth. We stack wooden blocks and knock them down. We investigate ants and leaves and sticks in the back yard. I get down on my knees and growl like a bear. In public. We hang out with other mothers and their children and drink juice and complain about the Arizona heat.“It’s hot,” I say, fanning myself. “Yes,” Max says. “Sun bright. Hot.” Max drapes his long limbs over me, his blonde hair swirling down over his eyes and in ringlets just behind his ears. Everyone says he looks like an elf. “Mommy,” he says, as if he is surprised to see me. He hugs me tight. “Hi mommy. I love you too!” Even though I haven’t said anything.Maybe I won’t ever be able to go back to churning out magazine stories for money. I now understand that part of my brain is always distracted, always listening for my child. Even when he is gone, with his father to the swimming pool, with our babysitter for a walk around the block, I listen for him. I cannot enjoy the small silences I have.My writing wanders where it will. Spending time with Max, immersing myself in toys and play and nature, makes me think of my own childhood. I write about growing up on a farm and see my mom and dad through a different perspective. I also write about my own development as a mother and a person. I have become more present-oriented; I sit still longer to see what wisdom emerges from my thoughts. When I thumb through Max’s journal and read the entries, I begin to see patterns and a slow succession of fits and starts and successes. Here he said his first sentence. There he learned to walk up stairs. He smiles all the time. He likes books and pretty flowers and bees. The terrible twos seemed to blossom early and fade quickly. Most of the entries I write are positive; my fears and ineptitudes fade as well.This year, shortly after Max turns two, I fill up the last pages in his little blue journal. Then I pick up a new journal, the exact same kind, but in a slightly darker shade of blue, and begin writing again. It becomes clear that I am writing not only about him, but what currently is my life’s work, these childish things.Published in Mamaphonic: Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts, editors Bee
Lavender and Maia Rossini, Softskull Press, Brooklyn, NY, November 2004, pp 72-77.
