of these people, though I enjoyed following their trials and victories vicariously through Jack, similar to reading a soap opera summary at the end of the week—all plot, no emotion. And for now, the Dallas drama would keep Jack distracted from my lack of a new contract. Despite my rising contribution to our household income, my husband had always worried that one day the bottom would drop out of my chosen career, and I didn’t want to give him any inkling that his worries might be coming true. Besides, things were tense at Corstar Corporation, where Jack had recently been given a promotion to management at the New York affiliate TV station, along with stock options that might, one day, knock us into the upper class if all went well. But getting kicked upstairs had given Jack an eyeful of the inner workings of Corstar, and firsthand knowledge of the sordid underbelly had been keeping him awake at night ever since. Promotion—good; underbelly—bad. I figured my news could wait until it turned into good news. That was me, the Can Do! Girl, Little Miss Silver Lining all the way.
“Hi, Ms. Nancy,” I said as the petite woman opened the door of her home.
“Becca doesn’t drink her milk,” she said glumly. “I don’t like to waste it. You tell her, next time, she drink it.”
How’s that for an end-of-day greeting? I thought as my smile froze on my face. “I don’t force her to drink it at home,” I said. “Maybe her tastes will change, but until then…”
“She need milk for strong bones and teeth,” Ms. Nancy said wisely. I wondered if her parents had forced her to drink milk when she was a kid. Wait, milk in China? No, but rice—she’d told me about that, how her parents had warned her that each grain of rice left in her dish would be a pockmark on the face of her future husband. Amazing the twisted way we raise our young.
“I didn’t ask for milk,” Becca said, looking up from the table as we swept into the kids’ playroom—a converted sunporch. Ms. Nancy ran a tight ship, the toys taken from their bins one at a time and all homework completed before play could commence. I loved her for that, for instituting the discipline that I never could seem to enforce in my own home. “Mom, you said I don’t have to eat something if it’s going to make me sick, and I said I didn’t want it.” That was my eldest daughter, eight going on eighteen.
I rubbed Becca’s shoulder. “You know I’m okay with that.”
But Ms. Nancy was shaking her head in disapproval. “All my children drink their milk.”
Not wanting to take on Ms. Nancy, who, I admit, sometimes frightened me, I asked about homework, and Becca assured me it was all done, except for her reading, which she insisted on doing with me every night. A child of ritual, Becca valued our reading time, and sometimes, as I dozed off to the sound of her mellifluous voice, I worried that she didn’t know how to read in her own head. Then again, Jack said I worried too much about Becca.
When she was born, Jack had been so smitten with her that he’d immediately wanted to get going on creating a second child so that Becca would never have to be alone. I worried that Becca subconsciously longed for those days when she was the only one—the object of all our affections. A first child leaves an indelible blueprint on a family, the entire pregnancy experience, when a mother is so hyperaware of movement inside her, careful and vigilant about diet, weight, exercise. I’d been taking prenatal vitamins before I even conceived Rebecca, though with the other two I remembered vitamins every other day or so. Jack came along to the doctor’s office for checkups, marveled at the little alien bouncing on the ultrasound monitor and even read the parenting magazines in the office. Jack left work early to attend Lamaze classes with me and we read each other the more inspired passages from What to Expect When You’re Expecting.
And then, the big-deal day, those first twinges of discomfort, similar to the onset of a menstrual period. The rudeness of the nurses when they learned I’d come to the hospital without being dilated enough, the walk back to the parking lot to get my coat, an interminable journey that took years off my life, I swear, as people looked on in horror, mothers pulling their children away when I had to lean against a cement pillar, and breathe with tears rolling down my cheeks.
“This sucks!” Jack said as he helped me back along the crosswalk to the hospital.
“Take me back upstairs,” I sobbed. “I think my water broke.”
A few contractions later, I was being eased into the dignified stage of labor and delivery, toted along on a gurney and an epidural of pain candy. Aaaah, the beauty of the epidural, the chance to give birth, to enjoy it and not hate the little dumpling whom you’ve been planning and prepping for so intently for nine months.
Our first daughter was born with a shriek of annoyance, a very clean baby, which she maintained through life, never drooling, rarely spitting up. I remember the smart set of her rosebud lips as the nurse placed her in my arms. Becca’s steely-gray eyes stared up at me, and although the childbirth info claimed that babies could not focus because of the silver nitrate drops put in their eyes, our Becca was quite focused, her stern gaze demanding answers. Who are you? she asked as she stared carefully at Jack and me. What am I doing here? How did I land with the two of you as parents? Do you really know what you’re doing?
Of course, we didn’t.
But we did our best to fake it. I will never forget the high anxiety in the car as Jack and I drove our first baby home. I kept turning to the back to check on her, sure that her silence meant she was sleeping, but Rebecca was awake and alert, eyes open as the world flew past her windows and the grill of a truck loomed in the back window, which she faced. “I can’t believe we’re taking a baby home,” I said to Jack.
He turned toward me, looking as if he’d never met me before. “What do you think is going through her head? I mean, what’s she thinking?”
“Rosy, warm thoughts, I’m sure,” I said. If I was correct, those rosy thoughts faded the minute Jack pulled into a parking spot across the street from our house. Becca started fussing and crying, her little head twitching and writhing in her car seat like an imprisoned nonagenarian. By the time we crossed the threshold, she was in a howling jag that didn’t stop for four months except for the occasional break to nurse or pass out from exhaustion.
“I read that the average newborn sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day,” Jack said. “Becca seems to be crying more than she sleeps. What’s up with that?”
“Is it colic?” my mother asked me one day when I was pacing the floor with the baby, reducing her bloody-murder shriek to a disappointed howl.
“The pediatrician said that colic only occurs in twenty percent of babies,” I answered. “Not that it would matter, as there’s no real treatment for colic, anyway.” Short of earplugs for the parents. And I mean those heavy-duty earphone types that you see the crew wearing at Monster Truck events. Although our baby Becca would nap in the morning and come alive with flirty eyes and cooing in the afternoon, she shriveled into a wailing wench by the dinner hour, crying and shrieking inconsolably until well after midnight.
“What’s her problem?” Jack asked me one night, genuinely concerned over our baby’s discomfort.
I just shrugged, feeling inadequate because I didn’t have an answer. I had researched the proper dimensions of crib bars and the most stimulating mobile colors for infant brain development (black and white), but I’d never anticipated having a baby who was less than content and blissed out. Jack signed us up for a newsletter that would teach us about the stages of development Becca was going through, and we studied it like budding behaviorists, sure that the answer to our inadequacies would be explained in the cheerful articles on gross motor skills and cognitive development. “Soon your baby will be grasping at things,”
