Lee Gutkind - Oh, Baby: True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love

Copyright 2015 Creative Nonfiction Foundation. All rights reserved.

Stephen Church's Four Early Lessons in Parenting originally had a section appear in River Teeth under a separate title and is reprinted by permission of the author.

Terrance Flynn's Baby Card originally appeared in Sycamore Review, Fall 2014, and is reprinted by permission of the author.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Lisa Belkin

My first son was a few days old, and I still hadnt surrendered to the new reality. The line between then and now is brightest in retrospect, and my mind hadnt figured out what my body had already guessedthat life was not the same. I still thought I was in charge, that I could make plans, that time was mine to control. Ha.

About a week or so into motherhood, I left the house with my babyjust the two of us for the first time. In preparation I fed him, changed him, dressed him, put him in his stroller, then gathered up a manuscript I was editing and navigated my way to a bench in the courtyard of our apartment building. It was a short walk, but suddenly everything along the way was either an obstacle or a threat. The dog down the hall, whod been a friendly, galumphing creature just the week before, now looked downright menacing. The toddler he belonged to was no longer tiny but towering, his fingers full of germs. The elevator could get stuck. Or worse. The sky was too bright. But it also looked like rain.

Once through the gauntlet, my plan was to somehow rock the stroller with one hand and scribble notes with the other. I figured that yesterday hed napped at this time, so that must be his pattern, right? Babies, Id heard, were all about patterns. Also, there was work to be done, a remaining deadline from my receding life.

I had barely gotten my bottom on the seat when Evan began to cry. Wail, actually. Shriek and scream.

Maybe, with experience, I would have known that the sun was in his eyes, or his blanket was too heavy, or he was testing out his lungs, or sometimes babies just cry. Maybe, with experience, Id have waited it out and not minded if people stared for a few minutes. Id have understood that this would pass instead of feeling it to be a declaration that I was a failure as a mother. But Evan was the first baby Id ever held, ever nursed, ever parented, and in that moment it felt as if nothing would ever pass. In the first weeks and months each everything was its own foreverevery doubt, failure, realization, and revelation felt as though it had always been and would always be this way. He would cry into eternity. I would never write another word.

So I gathered up my things and I fled.

I wish, now, that I had lingered. Not just on that bench, but in that chapter. From my current perch, twenty-four years later, I realize that there is no forever in parentingjust blinks and hiccups, a staccato blur. Figure out one thing, and another challenge roars. You keep the balls in the air and the plates spinning and the feet stepping one in front of the other, and the days melt into nights, then dawn into days again. Every so often, during one of those dawns, you realize you are somewhere else entirely. Not in babyland but in toddlerhood, not new and unsure but confidentand now unsure about completely different things.

I am a writer. Looking back, I am stunned that I didnt write any of it down. Thats the best way Ive found to hold a momentby putting pen to paper or words to screen, a permanent sketch for when memories fade. Yet I wrote almost nothing of those days, and now I recall them as though through a fog. When did he sleep through the night? How bad was the colic? Why cant I remember his first smile?

I wish I had written because then Id have it captured, held in amber, sharp instead of fuzzy, real instead of hazy stories. And I wish I had written because, Lord, would it have helped. I am a writer because I think with my fingers; I make sense of my world during the pulses it takes to transfer a thought from brain to page. As a new mother, for the first time in my lifethe only timeI was too enveloped by an experience to write about it, so it knocked me flat.

It would also have helped to read the writing of others. To have truly understood that this experience was not mine alone. But when Evan was born, that wasnt the way it was done. Parenting was still a silo, you and your experience parallel to but not touching all the others around you. You talked to friends, yes, sometimes, when you had the energy and inclination to be honest. You wrote in your diary, ditto, maybe. But the era of we-are-all-in-this-together had not quite dawned.

That is why I thrill to the new ways. And they are stunningly newblogs and websites, an era of confession and counsel in which entire communities of strangers unite in capturing the moment and the message that no one is alone. A generation is letting their memories go out into the universe and, simultaneously, holding them tight. Memories and observations that would otherwise be lost to the haze of sleep deprivation and hormones are captured on a screen. In this world, affirmation, confirmation, sympathy, and advice are a page or a click away. It is imperfect, suredont get me started on some of the commentersbut its upside is exhilarating. (The rest of the commentersmost of the commentersare wise and generous.)

You hold in your hand a result of this changed world. Its the kind of collection I wish had existed when I was in the thick of it. Filled with confession and compassion, chronicling all of it, making it clear that the early days are both singular and universal. When Elizabeth Anne Hegwood describes kissing her infant sons velvet hair, willing him to stay a sweet baby; when stay-at-home mom Erin White confesses the unexpected rage and loneliness she feels at the sight of her wife getting dressed for work; when KC Trommer recalls the love, sublime but also common, she feels upon first seeing her sonthey speak to me. They speak for me. They speak to and for us all.

Alice Bradley

Making the decision to have a childits momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Elizabeth Stone

You may have heard this quote before. Maybe youve used it yourself. I heard it before I was a parent. I know that it was pre-parenting because I remember regarding it as if from a great distance. It seemed like a curious but probably accurate insight. Sounds reasonable, I thought. You love your child, who is indeed, once born, outside the body. Sure, I can see that.

Then I slept until noon and went out for a long brunch. I imagine. I cant remember much about those days, but what I do remember involves brunch.

Years later, as a new mother, I heard this again, this heart-outside-the-body quote. I understood it at that moment, absolutely and completely. I saw how unbearably tender an idea it is, and how horrific. Oh my God, I thought.