Newman - Catastrophic Happiness

In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

For my parents, who taught me love and worry

You know how you feel when you see the RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP sign on the highway? Like there must be an eighteen-wheeler barreling massively behind you, on the brakeless verge of destroying your beautiful, doomed life? You can picture the tiny, rosy-cheeked children screaming, clinging to you since you are, of course, riding in the back with them, the better to distribute string cheese and hand-holding and the occasional contorted breast, bared and stretched toward somebodys crying face, but only if theyve been crying for a long time. About to be crushedall of it. But runaway truck also feels like a metaphor for something. For you, maybe, with your impulsive desire to careen off alone to Portugal or Applebees, just so you can sit for five unmolested minutes with a ham sandwich and a glass of beer. Just so you can use the bathroom one time without having a concurrent conversation about poop with the short person who has to stand with a consoling hand on your knee, looking worriedly up into your straining face. Later, it wont be like this. Youll see the sign, and the nearby gravelly uphill path, and youll think, Thats a good idea, for the runaway trucks. Also, you will go to the bathroom alone.

You know how you know by heart the phone number of the Poison Control Center? Because the children, your constantly imperiled children, like to eat the ice-melting salt and suck batteries and help themselves to nice, quenching guzzles of cough medicine? One day you wont know that number anymore.

One day, the children will eat neither pennies nor crayons nor great, gulping handfuls of sand like they have a powerful thirst for sand, sand, only sand. They will no longer choke on lint and disks of hot dog or fall down the stairs, their heads making the exact, sickening, hollow-melon thump you knew they would make when you knew they would fall down the stairs. They will still fall out of trees and off of trampolines. They will still scrape their elbows and knees and foreheads, and you will still be called upon to tend to these injuries. And you will be happy to, because they will so rarely need you to kneel in front of them anymore, to kiss them tenderly here, and also here.

Rest assured, though, that there will be ongoing opportunity to be certain of imminent doom and destruction. Ticks will attach their parasitic selves to the childrens scalps and groins. Rashes and fevers and mysterious illnesses will besiege everybody. You will still go on a Googling rampage of the phrase mild sore throat slight itchiness coma death. The kids will still barf with surprising frequencybut competently, into tidy buckets, rather than in a spraying impersonation of a vomit-filled Super Soaker on the Drunk Frat Boy setting.

You know how you see germs everywhere? Every last microbe illuminated by the parental headlamp of your OCD? One day you wont. One day you will cavalierly handle doorknobs and faucets and even, like a crazy person, the sign-in pen at the pharmacy. Plus, in a public bathroom, the children will no longer need to touch and/or lick every possible surface. Seriously.

You know how youre tired? So tired that you mistake talking in an exhausted monotone about your tiredness for making conversation? You wont be tired. Or rather you will sometimes be tired, sometimes rested, like regular people are. You wont blearily skim the passage of the novel youre readingwhere the protagonist lies down on her soft bed, between crisp, clean sheetsas your own eyes fill with tired, envious tears. You wont daydream about rest and recumbency, lawn chairs and inflated pool rafts and white hotel comforters. You wont look forward to your dental appointment just so you can recline alone for forty heavenly, tartar-scraping minutes. One day, you will once again go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning. You will sleep as much as you want to. Youll actually be shocked if you dont get to because a child is ill or cant fall asleep, even though now you lie wedged into various cribs and cots, night after night, still as a button, while a small somebody drifts off and snaps awake gropingly and drifts off again. How did we use to do it? you will ask, and your husband will shake his head and grimace. You will no longer be constantly scheming to lie down, tricking the kids into another round of Sick Patient, so you can be dead on the couch while they prod you therapeutically with plastic screwdrivers and the dolls bottle. Im still not better, you mumble now, but you will be. You really will.

One day, youll be sitting on the couch with your husband, reading the Sunday paper, and around the time youre getting to the book review youll think to ask, Are the kids still sleeping? And hell shrug without putting down the sports section. The kids might be sleeping or they might be reading in their beds, playing with LEGOs, stroking the cat, bickering gently, resolving their differences. And you will be awake, even though you dont have to be. I swear it on a stack of attachment-parenting books.

Speaking of the newspaper: you will one day climb back into bed with the heavy wedge of folded sections and an unspilled mug of hot, milky coffee. You will even do the crossword puzzleand all the puzzles youve been saving. Its okay. I know about the newspaper that still arrives constantly now, either because youre in denial about the way you recycle it unread or because you cannot recall your account password and dont have the intelligence or emotional resilience to figure out the cancelling of your subscription. I know you still tear out the Sunday crossword and stuff it into the drawer of your bedside table with the crazy idea that you might get to it later. And you will. Youll open the drawer one evening (to ferret out some birth control, no less) and youll find the archaeological evidence of your optimism: hundreds of puzzles spanning a sizable chunk of the early millennium. And youll lie around doing them in a kind of leisurely, ecstatic trance, eating bonbons and weeping with happiness.

You will have time to run and bike and do yoga and floss and have sex. And sometimes you wont, but it wont even be the childrens fault. Its just that youre lazy. Or doing a crossword puzzle.

You know your body? How its like a baggy, poorly curated exhibit about reproduction? You know how your weaned bosom looks like a cross between a pair of used condoms and Santas sack the day after Christmas? All empty and stretched out with maybe one or two lumpy, leftover presents that couldnt be delivered? It will all get better. The bosom will never again look like a bursting, gift-filled bag of awesomeness, thats true. But it will look less harrowed by motherhood. The breasts, they will tighten up a bit. All of it will tighten up a bit and be yours again to do with what you will. For example, your husband wont gesture to you at a party after youve been nursing the baby. What? you mouth back now, sticking a fingernail between your teeth. Spinach? He shakes his head and points at your front, and you look down to see the elastic edge of your tank top, and how your left breast is hanging over it. That wont happen anymore.