Salad Baby

When we’d put off her first bath embarrassingly long enough, I finally placed the wailing newborn in my parents’ oversized stainless steel salad bowl, on their deck, in the fishhook of August heat. I counted to ten: a newborn bath should take about as long as roasting a marshmallow, or dipping cantaloupe in chocolate fondue. 

 “Delay” is the recommendation for the bath in the hospital. Always late to the party, we “delayed” almost an entire moon cycle, until Mercury was in bath-e-grade. During a particularly ragged 3AM feed, I paced in the thinning dark, nursing her while walking to stay awake, when suddenly, the vanishing stars became didactic. Orion lashed my consciousness with his scar-crossed belt: BATHE HER! (Ya know-it-all-male-bastard, how about you get your ass down here and try?). The Big Dipper dangled like Damocles sword, an accusatory oversized diaper pail. Aren’t you going to at least DIP her in something water-like? I was a trash parent, wasn’t I? I could handle this. 

With the baby draped over my shoulder, I hunted through the cabinets for something usable. It seemed safe enough: stainless steel is gleamingly nontoxic. You can’t really slip or drown in a salad bowl, unless you try very very very hard, something newborns are not known for. For me, a diehard vegetable-aholic, the bowl held congenial associations, if you find Earth Bound mixed spring lettuces and cucumber comforting. 

Once the sun rose and I “filled” the bowl, she just barely fit in it, the water displaced along the line of her belly, and the WTF look spreading across her face like a second, way less satisfying dawn. Try new things with infants in the morning, right?  If you can call placing someone in dishware with an inch of water in it bathing, it was successful, ish. I couldn’t tell if I was resourceful or completely useless. 

That postpartum summer, no matter how much I cried, there were more tears. Looking out at the bay from my parents’ long dining room table, patting the baby on her bum, with its satisfying thwack thwack– showing the gulls and any other observant flock animal SEE I AM SOOTHING HER AND IT IS AUDIBLE– I realized the bay had all the qualities the diaper companies advertised, which flaunted the superiority of their actually-just-like-the-rest-of-them products: Ultra Absorbent! Leak proof!! Non-irritating! The bay was all those things, too. It had room, infinite room, for more salty droplets. No “We’re full here, sis!” So I kept crying. As if simply doing an owed duty. When you are slightly damp most of the time tears don’t make that much of a difference, they just kind of flow into your breast cracks and join the gang.

The three year-old tracked and caught bugs who had been confused into stasis by the reflective light of the big window, as I was, and then tossed them at me. “I understand,” I said, “You have big feelings.” “No,” he said, “I have a praying mantis.” 

The second time with a newborn you feel you should be better at everything. It’s not true. Though perhaps somewhere in the backdrop is the confidence that even if you suck, and you still don’t know how to bathe a baby, they will make it through regardless.

In the hours when dawn was just pulling out her paintbrush, I thought about another kind of parent who got in the bathtub —or, if they were truly extra earth-mother-y, in a babbling stream—with their newborns, herbs and flower petals floating on their perimeter.  A candle oxytocin-booster, or moonlight that highlighted how very CIRCADIAN they were. Instagram had a whole collection of such mothers, making the rest of us feel bad about our mildewed personal hygiene events. All the bathtubs I’d been around seemed lined with mushrooming grime. A place I would not linger, but would only visit quickly to soap up, like a public restroom that smelled like the previous user. 

Now, I wish I’d let myself be held by the water, so I could hold the baby in the water, both of us suspended in time. Instead, I’d raced through showers to get to the next round of breastfeeding, a job I could do. I looked out at the sky a lot, as if it was an informant. Who or what would tell me how to be? For sure the horizon was a safer space to scroll, opinionless except when it mandated a bath, bullhorn of my inner knowing. 

The ambient clouds in the summer sky were honestly just like me: a collection of  breasts shape-shifting and amorphous and engorged, no real pattern. The big boys made huge bubbles with a soap wand my husband had built from tubes and strings– also breast shapes, but full of rainbows– and they floated off over the beach grass and into the stratosphere. Would I float, next? 

When the three year-old’s moods were especially dominant, he threw books at me. Lest I wonder what I had taught him to do with his feelings– throw words, really fucking throw words. Every evening, I had a big summer salad and a wine, before the tsunami of cluster-feeding hit and the stars wavered. It was my touch stone. I was afraid of the long nights, but I also welcomed the ability to feel lost without justification. 

Growing up, my house was the Salad House. Before it was Salad, it was Cut Veggies Central. Friends came over for dinner all the time, thanks to the generous hospitality of my parents who believe in dinner like some people believe in Jehovah and Christ, and whatever else there was, there were always veggies. In and through the forgettable margarine and tofu-dogs stages. 

 I didn’t think this was weird until friends commented. “Your parents always have vegetables out! Do you have salad EVERY night??” Did their parents not? Was parenting ever separate from vegetables? Can anyone see their home life clearly before friends Op-Ed about it? Does YOUR family bathe in dishware? No? 

To this day I don’t really understand calling something a “meal” that lacks vegetables. It shocks my system. I didn’t even see that perception as cultural. Until once, when I was traveling in rural Thailand, an elder explained to me through a translator that they avoided vegetables at all costs and mostly lived off the chicken meat because vegetables were heavily sprayed, and contained  the most pesticides & human-made poisons and would kill you quickest. 

And to think I had hooked my salvation on veggies, the way some people bragged that they ate fat-free yogurt, a modern american tragedy. My bio children are 97% sourced from parsley, garlic and avocado. 

Here’s what won’t harm your baby: not bathing them for a long time after they are born (also, your garlic breath). 

I’m going to say we waited weeks, until finally we noticed or allowed ourselves to notice what had been cute milk dribbles was now unpasteurized cheese in her chinlets. We figured we could raise our very very very low bar and bathe the “is she really still a newborn anyway” newborn. It’s time. How many weeks was she? With your first you are a metronome, counting time against their every heartbeat. With subsequent babies, you’re probably just guesstimating their post-gestational age after day 3, with the confidence that no one else knows how old they are either. 

With our first child, the midwife at the postpartum home visit– BECAUSE THEY VISIT YOU AT HOME AFTER YOU DELIVER– showed me a 16-step process to bathing our baby in the shallow bathroom sink. 

After she left I looked at my husband and said, “I’m never doing that. That has steps!” and he shrugged and gave me space to parent the way it felt right. When I went into the bed to recover from the bath demo, he laid the baby face down on his forearm and gently sprayed him in the kitchen sink with the detachable faucet meant for intractable dried pasta at the base of your pot. The baby kicked and crunched his legs as the soap ran off, and his butt dimpled. “We can just do it like that,” he said. “Great, you’re in charge!” I sobbed. 

And so it became his job. Both our babies were born in the hottest season. We wiped them down a lot. But the bath was not in the syllabus. Eventually, we dropped the course entirely, before God could review our paltry transcript with her celestial uber-parent smirk.

In no newborn care literature did they suggest you could bathe them in an extra large salad bowl, but it felt perfectly right. A friend who had lived to the ripest old age of 104 had told me she had slept in a dresser drawer lined with cotton batting for most of her infancy. You could use what you had. You could rely on what was already in circulation.

My husband had already had two babies by the time we had babies together. He is a “use what you have” guy to a fault, if he had faults, and had observed me, like every other first time parent, frantically trying to figure out what “things” I *needed* in advance of our firstborn– All of them? None of them? Capitalism was a funhouse mirror!

“You know,” he said, “Babies don’t really need anything. Besides Diapers.” 

But–  Really? What about that cute azure squirting whale for a tub toy, that looked a little bit like it was having an orgasm out of its fontanelle? The ultra-organic washcloths, with a non GMO duck-face embroidered on it, that played white noise if it stayed in a drawer too long?  Wasn’t your parenting at least partially proved through which THINGS you had? In that way, was parenting any different than anything else? 

Here was the deal: I didn’t want to need things, but I wanted to have them. I was the north star resisting the south pole. And when we did their slap-dash bath, a style continued to this day, I thought, is something wrong with us? Shouldn’t we have that specially sized baby tub– I can order it on Prime RIGHT NOW and it will be here by tomorrow? With its little mesh saddle and matching rubber fishies, with the color-coordinated bungee cord so you never lose it, and it can’t swim the fuck away with your mind? 

My husband is well aware, annoyingly, blazingly sure, that what you buy says nothing about your worth, talents, or parenting. He continues to hold that line for us, and our occasionally squeaky-clean four children. 

That day, with Orion’s star studded belt out-spangled by the regular sunlight, he and my three older children and my parents all watched me bathe the baby in the salad bowl while she howled and I cried, and cried. The three year-old threw a chapter book at me, but at least he was getting on in his literacy. 

My beautiful husband asked, in a hushed way to keep me from the blade of self-criticism, “Would you like me to do it?” And I shook my head. I could do this, I could bear the self-consciousness and self-judgment, and be rinsed in the elements to be more elemental. Here, outside. In the family home, on the old deck, with the fat bees laughing.  I could feel the fire-alarms of love going off in my heart at what it means to have people whose wellbeing is in our hands, but also in the sky’s hands. I could lean into and over the holy circle around which my family had always congregated, and make this baby fresh, and start again, which is all parenting is– every day, starting again.

To The A-Hole In The Pool Lane, Before My Cesarean

When I was 8 months pregnant and my rogue pinky toe was broken, a lane-hogging swimmer, an older man with a bushy mustache and an algae bloom of chest hair, tapped my shoulder blade percussively as I clung to the pool wall after completing a lap. "Maybe you should go in the slow lane instead?" He suggested, huffing his water droplets all over me. 

"Or maybe you should go in the asshole lane?" I replied, as if trying out the next general theory of matter. In it, people like him would show unprecedented atomic density.  I held up fake binoculars and sought bluer pastures across the plastic separators. 

His black fins sent torrents of water sloshing over the perimeter of the pool, making it impossible for someone to swim even a near distance behind him. Would you swim in the wake of Cuisinart blades?  The asshole always needs to make a splash.

He blinked, pushed off the wall, and began his next flailing lap, propulsed by his self-righteousness, which was as pronounced and visible as an Achilles tendon. As a slightly anemic and very pregnant person, it took me as long to catch my breath as it had to swim the 25 yards. Maybe he was right. 

My overstretched bikini bottom (but do you honestly buy another one this late in pregnancy? My theory is always: no) dragged behind me when I dove under the water, and the refracted light was a coronation on no one, nothing. I loved that moment before I ran out of breath, which would go on to characterize 98 percent of my birth.  
In truth: the asshole lane is open longer than all of the others and is always crowded, because every row is theirs and (your) time is nothing (and not in the liberating way) to them. They are not hard to spot, like a hammerhead shark in a jelly jar. Most are ableist, sexist, and notably horrible at the breaststroke. The dividing line painted down the middle of the pool floor-- which stands for basic principles of sharing & caring -- is irrelevant. Why notice what doesn’t apply to you?  

I’ve heard that same tone of surety when (some!) OB's in the MIC speak to clients, or to me. Pretending to be a lifeguard, their suggestions are too often demeaning threats. In order not to drown, we might contort around their ego’s deliberately exaggerated and space-hogging crawl. Or we accept the ladder they are holding out, despite not having signed up to be saved. 

My baby hung from my belly in the water, the weight lifted off my back and legs, and my uterus felt, briefly, like it could evade the ravages of gravity. I tried to focus on the beautiful things behind and ahead and the sharp peck of chlorine in my nose. I imagined all the children who had peed here, their low-grade biohazard (parenting, you realize pee is the least worrisome bodily fluid) dissipated by the paradox of harsh chemicals that keep us, the public, somehow healthy enough.

It's a terrible thought that you might not make it to the end of the lane, to the touching of the  wall that weeps differently, to your recovery breaths. That you might not recover. It's a terrible thought that, confident you could cut through the sensations, you might just dematerialize, decompose, drift apart like spit fronds in a rushing river.

But assholes energize me. No sooner had he made his next pivot than I lapped him. Mild Anemia be damned. My baby, whoever they were, should know how to handle assholes too. And definitely never to be one. As he crashed towards me, panting, more donkey than dolphin, I tapped his shoulder blade (like unto like) before he completed his final stroke. Should I pee right there, to highlight my announcement? What could he do? The chlorine would not protect his dignity.  

"I'm 8 months pregnant, asshole," I reported. "How fast would you swim if you were carrying three chain-saws?” I pushed off with the non-broken foot, and began a languorous doggy paddle just ahead of him, moving slowly, awkwardly and flaccidly enough that each palm, on its downstroke, gave effleurage to the baby's uterine domain.  He spluttered at me. I was a Noh performance, on quaaludes. He could wait. 

Originally, I planned to give birth at home in an inflated pool, perfect blue, the plastic elephant in the room. Instead, half-submerged in the lukewarm water, I felt like someone was driving a stake up into my pelvis. “ASSHOLE!!!!!” I might have yelled at God, who quietly made more room for me to be me in our shared aqueduct. 

At the darkest midnight of my labor, where I expected to experience a deep surrender to the tide, everything felt crass, debilitated, sharp. The wrong direction, the wrong texture. But wasn’t I in the optimal medium for the smooth, fleshy baby to wrangle its way out, traveling from original waters to expressly recruited tap waters? Wasn’t my body sort of made for this? 

In those brutal hours begging for mercy in the birth pool, I cried: the fucking waterbirth website lied! If this is reduced pain, what is pain? If this is maternal satisfaction, what is misery? The water trembled, my husband gave counterpressure like a boulder gives to the earth, but the baby–yield and breathe and holler and whistle-blow as we might– would not change lanes. There was no other lane but the one we were traveling. 

Later I knew: it was too slow. I was too slow, then too fast, too fast. Later I understood: the light was coming through anyway, dazzling, dappling, broken, salvatory, an invisible coronation. The baby was not supposed to come out in that context. The asshole was not supposed to make way for me, nor was his wake supposed to christen me as anything lesser than a powerful being encasing a powerful being, albeit in an underwhelming nylon bikini. Sometimes, the pace is not up to us. Sometimes, our most heroic gesture is to swim in the other direction, displacing the space our old self was suspended in. 

***
AFTERWORD

**Because I’m a labor doula, I want to differentiate my experience from the data:  the waterbirth website didn’t lie at all. There are many deeply positive effects of laboring and birthing in water. However, we can feel betrayed in our birth when our experiences differ radically from what we hoped or expected. I would recommend waterbirth to someone who is interested and for whom that is a safe option. My first baby experienced a cord prolapse, a very rare medical emergency, and was born (thankfully safely) by emergency cesarean after a homebirth transfer.

https://evidencebasedbirth.com/waterbirth/

She just needs a flower

My 4 y/o completely lost her s*&t on the cold-ass street, jellyfishing and refusing to not refuse to walk. We were about to miss pickup for my 7 y/o from his DOE school bus, which waits for no one, and I was not feeling her not feeling it– like, at all.

But then this shopkeeper stuck his head out of the flower shop, in front of which her fit was unfolding with impressively vast limbic inflection for someone only on her 1200th day of life or so. He asked, “Does she need a flower?”

The surprise cut her off from her operatic emotional outburst. Well of-fahking course she does! THAT WAS THE PROBLEM ALL ALONG! NOT ENOUGH FLORAL TONES AROUND HERE! She stared at him, too much of a yes to say yes. “Be right back!” He reassured me. My frustration was carbonated. No prob! Timely! He popped back into his expensive-as-all-high-hell flower shop. The door jangled. I could not afford these minutes, but I could not afford to not have the flower happen.

We stared. Sure enough, jangle-jangle, he came back out with a fat-petaled purple tulip and peach-pink rose, dewdrops still in formation, and handed them to her with a robust smile, and that salesman inner knowing that I would buy overpriced plants from him for the rest of my days. “Hope it works!” he winked at me.

She took them, awe creeping across her face: “My favorite clolors!”[sic]- and she sheltered them in her jacket all the way to the bus, fit interrupted, fit forgotten. “Look!” she whispered to the flowers, or to me, or to everyone. The wind *clolored* in her face a deep wounded red, but the flowers were and remained perfectly intact and undisturbed.

I could milk this experience for analogies forever, but a few things stick out:

1. When the emotions are too big to bear, give someone a flower.

2. When the emotions are too big to bear, a little act of beauty can help a whole lot.

3. He totally didn’t need to give her the flower.

4. If you want people to buy shit from you, help them through a very tough moment.

5. It was March and he had a sign on his shop door that mother’s day was May 14th. Plan ahead!

#parenting #emotions #beauty #protips #tantrums

My Regards to the Monitor

Hours after I had the baby, Dr. F told the monitor near my face that it was very sick and would need a blood transfusion. I felt bad for the monitor, such a rough start to the day– it was only 5:30AM. 

I could smell life: some people were having toasted onion bagels with cream cheese falling out the sides or hospital hazelnut Keurig coffee which burned their tongues. Other people were being transfused. The monitor had worked hard all night in emergency childbirth. For what? 

Minutes later, when the monitor didn’t respond or react to his announcement, I realized he meant me, I was very sick, he just hadn’t thought to look down 45 degrees to where my face was.

I didn’t think I could get up from the hospital bed anyway. The fact that the bed could be completely broken down was the only reason I had confidence I’d ever not be in it. My sacrum was one with the thin padding they referred to as “mattress.” I tried to explain this to Dr. F but it came out like this: “OK.”

I wasn’t on drugs, exactly. I mean drugs were in me– morphine, and rights to tap the pump further- but I felt nothing like a person on them. It was like the drugs were scoping out my vascular system, an apartment they were considering renting, but it turned out the infrastructure was kind of shitty, and there were exposed wires in the kitchen– so, no.

Dr. F left to go make other statements other places, and some family who were around held my hands and tried to show me pictures of the newborn in his little bin, and that was helpful, because in theory there was a beautiful tiny fighter of a person who had come out of me and he was in a different room, that was all.

I didn’t actually understand what transfusion meant or why I was suddenly sick except that emergency surgery is always a roll of the dice, so when the doctor eventually came back, I asked why and how and what, and he nodded at the monitor. I guess his procedure was not the rushing and yelling kind of transfusion that I remembered from the show ER. But oh how I wished George Clooney was here, because he would definitely take my questions, or blink compassionately at me with his lifesaving and only-slight-egotistical big eyes.

Being inside the ambulance hearing the siren is very different than being outside. On the streets, your adrenaline and empathy stirs, even raising hairs, and you are fleetingly aware of some of the most profound human misfortunes, and maybe cover your ears. Inside the ambulance, you are the peristaltic movement of misfortune. You are misfortune’s etiology. You may have had your last toasted bagel, and you reckon with that in a metal box traveling at the highest permissible speed. 

When Dr. F came back back for the third time, the monitor had gone to sleep. In my memory, he apologized. He didn’t want to wake up the monitor. It’s against hospital policies for postpartum people to get satisfying naps, but monitors, no problem. They need a little recovery time. But also: I wasn’t sick. It was a mistake. They had retaken my iron. My iron levels were fine. Lab error. Oops. Happens sometime. My blood was red. The sky was blue. The sheet was white. And the baby was alive, and I was going to see him, in his little incubator box, his little eyes programmed to find my eyes, and stay. 

**

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Ticking Time Bomb, Little Life

I was walking in Prospect Park with the 11 week old baby tied to me in the wrap, “helping” her sleep, which requires myself not sleep. Those two words always together, like Ernie & Bert: SLEEP + NOT. Anyway, if you sleep, life wooshes you by, right? You miss autumn’s golden filaments. Your rights to complain are nil, and other mothers hate you but pretend not to. The scariest thing is about to happen to me but right now the scariest thing is: will she sleep?

Sleep when the baby sleeps, they say with a chirp. Surely said by folks who drug their babies into long stretches of sleep, and then drug themselves into the same. Or how about shut the hell up when you’re not asked? That’s right, parenting advice column, I’m talking to you. And have you checked out the first gold filaments of autumn? No, that’s right, you haven’t. Too busy catching up on sleep. Nature’s not going to wait for you, honey.

Somewhere along the way, my brain switched to thinking about career writers, to a NYT’s review I’d read. Since, along with not sleeping, I was not sending out my writing, this seemed like a natural way to bash my self esteem. This particular writer’s character described her life as hurtling indifferently through space strapped to a ticking time bomb.

I felt that. Or maybe it was just a regular old breeze, with no message attached.

To keep things quaint, a couple of ducks screeched—hurtled— from the sky into the lake.

Hey, ducks! I said.

Well, because it’s a well known fact that ducks are anti-social assholes, they didn’t have the common decency to even quack back. Fine. I kept walking. A couple passed me, both heavily tattooed, both with eyes glued down to their respective phones—while on the most beautiful path in the park on the most beautiful day the autumn could come up with.

ASSHOLES, I thought, chock-full-a judgment. Look up!

Well, no sooner did I dish out advice, my nose nestled into the baby for a hit of that Baby Smell, when I felt one foot go out from under me, the ground rolled and threw me forward. I hit the path with my one hand out, the other trying to tuck the baby’s head somewhere completely safe, maybe back into my womb. About to know what it felt like to crush your own baby.

I felt myself bounce, roll, and then I was on my back, in a pile of the season’s first unglamorous dry brown leaves, looking up at the tree canopy, quiet rustle of leaves.

The tattooed couple (I LOVE YOU BOTH) came rushing back: oh my god oh my god oh my god, they spluttered. Even at that moment my judgment stood tall:  HAVE YOU HEARD OF KEEPING CALM IN OTHER PEOPLE’S EMERGENCIES HO HUM IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A SECOND CAREER YOU GUYS SHOULD NOT BE EMT’s BUT ANYWAY.

Are you ok is the baby ok are you ok is the baby ok is she ok are you, you —baby—you—baby?

i guess if her head was smashed they wouldn’t ask, would they? Or would they?

I think so? I was not sure if I was speaking or thinking. The baby lifted her mighty head on her mighty neck from my chest and began to wail. So she was not dead. She was not bashed.

They knelt by my side, and I had a tour of their tattoos.

CAN WE HELP YOU?
Surely they were not yelling, but the ducks began to.

Yes, but SHHHHHHHHH.SHHHHHH. SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS.

Because, of course, she had fallen asleep just before I fell.

They helped me sit up, nervously.

REALLY ARE YOU OK?

REALLY I AM NOT.

I checked the baby. I checked her like she was the last one boarding Noah’s arc, an audition before the flood. Body parts. Sound.

Her hair still stood up straight, as if she’d been electrocuted in a lightning storm.

I think I’m OK, I said. But if you can give me a minute, I think I’m in shock. If you could just stay with me a minute..

SURE SURE SURE, they said, reminding me of the nervous blabbering goose in Charlotte’s web.

It was the middle of the day, I could not have been more in love with them than I was with my husband when I agreed to marry him-- for being on that path at that moment, and for having the impulse to kneel and assist.

We sat up. I checked her again.

They pointed to the stick like it was the true ASSHOLE VILLAIN of this story. It was a very small but thick stick, the size of my pointer finger. No wonder I had not seen it.  No wonder looking up is not always the best way to go through life.

I was pretty sure my ankle, which has been rolled approximately a million times in my almost four decades, was going to suck.  But for now, it could hold my weight.

I’m going to walk, I told them, and was hoping for drum-rolls, angels clapping, a “NOT THE BIGGEST ASSHOLE, ASSHOLE” type award.

ARE YOU SURE DO YOU NEED TO GO SOMEWHERE? They rose with me and offered what they could, which was company. They picked the leaves out of my hair gingerly.

I wanted to let them continue on their tattooed way, so I could be alone with the fact that one of my biggest fears had just passed. I had fallen with her tied to me. I could have injured or killed the baby. I did not injure or kill the baby.

My mama stunt double had jumped in and taught me how to fall just so in an instant. And yet I knew she could have just have easily been busy elsewhere. I was glad I had not been on my phone, texting my husband something snarky or desperate. Then, my asshole status would have been confirmed. This was an innocent fall, holding my babe, smelling her, appreciating her ticking time bomb-ness, which some stick sought to detonate.

I thought of innocent people dying in innocent ways, surely long before they felt their work was done.

Sometimes all it takes is a stick, like in a zen master’s parable, to untangle you from the drama of yourself.

I walked very very slowly out through the park, checking every footfall, nursing my daughter on a bench along the way while guys in rasta gear smoked spliffs unapologetically across from me. I looked for signs she’d become demented or maimed that the filter of shock had not revealed. Was she missed a hand, some skin somewhere, was her jaw unhinged?

But she was just herself.

Nursing felt like the holiest thing since the nativity manger.

It is easy, when it happens, to respect how life changes, or can, in an ordinary, stick-in-the-path instant.

Of course, we don’t perceive that all our instants are like that: tiny capsules of mortality, which we are forced to swallow, until the one we gag on.

We can lurch to the ground anytime, causes obvious or not, warning signs obvious or not. There may or may not be passerby’s who can help us; the circumstances may be dignified, or they may be rather banal. My Tai Chi teacher in Thailand, for example, slipped ironically in the bath tub—chi doesn’t provide traction— and died of concussion. Her gentle hands did not brake her fall.

Sometimes, we fall down fatally in bathtubs. If that isn’t an asshole death what is?   Only in literature might a death mirror a life in its poetic-ness. More often it’s a duck screeching into a bottomless dark lake.

Perhaps appreciating how slippery our lives really are should make my steps heavier, more decisive. NOPE. Lighter, tentative: can I commit to this if there are no guarantees? If fortune cookies are just, well, highly processed cookies?

I’ll be right here with my sneaker hovering, hormonal sweat trickling down my back, scanning the path for sticks with legs.

I had a baby; that’s what having a baby is: SLEEP, NOT. Once a pregnancy gets rolling, there’s a biological commitment to making a person, but how that person will be formed, its destiny, what will go right and wrong, is not up to me or you or the ducks or hills or trees or leaves.

When my daughter came out, she was examined and swaddled, but I’m pretty sure what they did back there, under the bland gaze of the pediatrician, was strap on the bomb, adjusting the buckles to suit her tiny form, and start it ticking.

Like the umbilical cord, these straps soon aren’t visible. But just as no person can (as of yet) come to be without having been tied to a placenta, no life can exist without premise of explosion, matter returning to matter, crumbling leaves to crumbling leaves, breathy trees to breathy trees.

When I get home with her, I sit on the couch, a little dumb. I drink some tea, and as my shock wears off, the ankle sets off sirens of pain. I can hardly put weight on it as I go back and forth on my domestic circuit, my son naked and yelling at me from the couch “I won’t listen to anything you say ever!” and my infant daughter, tripped by his asshole cortisol spouting, screams for an hour and a half straight. I yell at my son, no better for my scrape with mortality.

I call my sister, embarrassed, and confess to her that I am only calling her so I don’t keep yelling at him, while he launches himself off the couch over and over, knocking the paintings and photos sideways, like our lives. And the baby quivers from her own screaming, and I quiver from how exposed and exploded and present I feel.

Tomorrow we will walk that path again. I will apologize to my son, and explain. We will kick asshole sticks to the side, chipmunks darting, the weather temporarily just fine. I will be slower, hold her body even tighter, smell her head with one eye straining to see the ground.  But there will still be that thing I will miss, the stumbling. The tattoo’d folks will pass, nothing to see here. But I’ll hear the ticking, barely masked by the soft sound the leaves make.

Experiment in the Essay #6-- God's Paintbrush; #52Essays2017

After heavy snowfall, some New Yorkers look for signs of God in how swiftly the crosswalk slush piles clear.  We are-- most of us-- cynical by nature; not soaking our shoes on our commute is really all we need to find a modicum of faith. 

Today the deep, wet imprint of boot soles near the curb, a black puddle at the base, confirms for us we are IN FACT the forsaken people, at least for this week. Cynicism spreads again, so fast it could hold professional development trainings for the Flu Virus.  

I, however, look elsewhere for signs of God: in how readily the pinwheel of my mind slows down, how mercifully God's hot morning breath eases off the exhale, so that I can come up with a plan.  In this case, a plan about my kids' school situation. 

In NYC, you're well served to put your offspring, real and imagined, on (pre)school waiting lists when your newborn's first cry pierces your ears.  Think of it as substitute for the calendar reminder on your phone, albeit a bit tactlessly loud.

There's a wait-list for the wait-list, in infinite delay, like the staircase in an Escher painting which morphs into a flock of birds who won't ever land. 

However, my husband and I are not the types to think ahead sufficiently.  We're more apt to relish in the baby's cry for its own sake, and then deal with each looming life necessity as it approaches-- a bigger headache for not having anticipated its arrival.  When you choose this path, you need to be optimists by default-- because if you aren't, not only is the glass half empty, but you spilled half on your new laptop.  Double-sucky. That kind of regret.  

So I've got preschool on my mind for my 21 month-old. 

I'm rushing along faking a careful pace, the New Yorker way, on the icy sidewalk, late to work; my head is months ahead, considering the administrative job I might be selected for. This involves me getting more money and responsibility (good things), but less time with my offspring and step-offspring, and the choice hurts. 

For my youngest, I am hunting for a preschool anywhere close to my job to maximize time with him. Anywhere. We could commute together, read books on the train. Problem? I work in Flat Iron district, aka Flat-Broke Ironically district.  The relative cost of a bottle of water--$3 for the mini-- tells you about how much you'd get bank-yanked for the cost of early education. While your kid gets a head start, your ATM withdrawal only lets out long unproductive whistles. 

However, a few buildings down from my work, there is a storefront artsy preschool-- I think it's actually called Preschool of the Arts. Capital A. Like you could have a Preschool of Math and Sciences (Sorry, honey, we ONLY count and measure here), or Preschool of Economics (Sorry, sweetie: mommy and daddy had to drain their bank account to send you here, so consider this your higher ed!).  Fantastic. A girl can dream...

I peer in to the PoA window and see a bunch of strollers empty in their front room-- it's sort of a lobby but doubles as their arts library.  Not sure if this means this is the kind of preschool where the parents or caregivers must stay on during the day.  The lined up strollers remind me walruses sunning themselves on a huge rock. 

A friend told me some sea mammals looks innocuous, like these strollers do-- friendly if dinosaurian-- but are so viscous that a single dominant male kills all the other males so he can have all the lady sea mammals to himself.  And then he just chills on a rock gloating.  This is why you should watch nature videos.  This is why you should mind your metaphors.  Though I've heard preschool is pretty ruthless too.  And alpha strollers are definitely a thing. 

I'm ruminating about this geographically desirable preschool, which there is no way we could afford unless I harvested and sold an egg from my ovaries to solve the fertility issues of some poor other mom who desperately wants a kid who could then desperately want this kid to attend said artsy elite preschool and so on....when I see their bookshelves.  

The bookshelves are built so the book covers, not the spines, face out, a style we've copied in our apartment by deconstructing my old futon and mounting the frame low on the wall.  My son's favorite thing to do is to pull all the books out and leave them on the floor.  So very literary, he just wants to be among all the stories. They are the best thing to slip on, way better than the tiny hot wheels cars, which I somehow find in my bra, in my backpack, in our little cooler-- babies are closer to squirrels than we acknowledge in the tree of life.  

But these preschool bookshelves-- I can't help but snoop in their collection. I make myself later to work needing to know what they choose for their edifying library for these young creative types.  

This is one of my oldest and most unbreakable habits. If you invite me over to your place (no pressure) and station me remotely near your bookshelves, I will no longer even hear the things you're saying to me. I'll nod in the right places from years of practice-- tuning people out to commune with the books-- but don't be fooled.   

I'm quietly reviewing your library, and mooching in my mind, taking mental notes on how my own shelves could be more, better.  The books we have in common are our real kindred pulse.  If I have nothing to talk about with you but we own many of the same books, then we can sit there and nod at each other awkwardly and sip our drinks because there is a more important subterranean bond.  It has to do with how we exercise our imaginations, our literary liaisons.  

But these preschool bookshelves should tell me something about the place-- how multi-cultural, how cool, how conscious. Of all the outward facing titles, the one closest to the window, and most dominant is: "God's Paintbrush."

Come again?  

For the literal minded, the cover features a thick paintbrush, like you might use on your apartment walls, and an even thicker rainbow. 

Now, ignore the way the word "God" alone can make me prickly for a moment-- and it's not because I don't have a belief system of my own. God is the backrest suppled right when your lumbar is fatiguing; God is that cup of tea you somehow didn't finish but thought you had, the dregs of it, the pure bitter twitch, just enough punch to get you through the 45th phone call to your arcane insurance company; and yes, God is the mercy that lets you realize your fuck you's are not best spent here, on these unhelpful cogs in the machine; yes,  God is that force that causes you to dream of your husband's ex-wife as a benign, clueless barnacle, who just wants to tag along and do normal shit together, like shopping trips-- God; god is the way your husband looks right after he falls asleep, when his hands relax-- or when the baby flings his arm open to hug you, a trick he's learned will get your to squeal-- this, this, this--God, yes, God-- 

But, "God's Paintbrush?" The image of the rainbow on the cover has no variation from standard rainbow spectrum (Is God Boring and Predictable?), arcing across a cloud-free sky.  I know where this book is heading: "God with HIS paintbrush makes all the pretty colors of the world..."

I'd rather see a tropical storm, God going grey, God brooding about the weather systems, God branching out from tidy saccharine displays to a more muted, more ambiguous color scheme, God ruminating, from a place of great peace, I'm really not sure which way this is heading, folks, hope you don't mind my own ambivalence toward humanity, I'm not looking out for you, in particular, not any more than I'm looking out for the walruses or pigeons or slush piles, I'm just here, grand backdrop, ultimate mercy....but enjoy preschool sweetie, they have some good books--

....because in Preschool at least they'll make sure you wash the paint off before it seeps into your skin; that you have a reasonable snack at a reasonable time of day, a fake nap, rotate activities so different parts of your mind are stimulated--a predictable life that bespeaks an orderliness in the macrocosm that the microcosm is conveniently reflecting, most particular in how it educates its young.  That and teddy grams.  That and apple juice.  That and shape sorting.   That and learning the rules.  

I pushed the rules in Preschool.  I was a bit ungodly. I bit a boy's finger in our sharing circle, a boy I like and who liked me. I didn't want his hand on my chair, right?  I can still feel his pinky bone between my teeth, and how startled both of us were.  I don't think I drew blood, but it was a feral choice.  God's rainbow quivered, blanched. 

Did you know in some parts of the world, in some cultures, people pray all day long?  That's their day job?  You know what they're praying for?  Please let my son or daughter get into the preschool of choice, let my child find god on the bookshelf, not in, say, heroin, let my child remain chosen and say all the right prayers in the right order, o merciful merciful God who plays favorites transparently....

"God's Paintbrush." By the time I finished just those two words i had completely ruled out the preschool OF THE ARTS which I couldn't have afforded anyway, not with three times the salary I'd be making.   Because here's the thing. 

I don't want my son to be told what God does with her paintbrush.  I don't want my son to look up at the sun blistering through the barely clearing clouds and think, "Yup, there goes God, chez artist!" I want my son to come to his own conclusions.  To look up a the weird beauty and say to himself, "Damn, only God's paintbrush could do something that startling!"  But not because someone told him a story, you see.  Because with his own god's eyeballs, with his own only-so-free mind, with his own creative sensibilities, he saw the majesty the world sometimes coughs up, and called it like it was.

You could say I was judging a place by that cover; you're right.  (It's a stupid cover, K?) You could argue that I didn't look further: maybe that book was more like I imagined than like I feared.  I slowed down the rest of the way to work; I didn't slip on the ice, my mind raced less.  Ribbons of rainbows cut through the slush eddies.  People uncautiously continued using their phones despite the hazards on the sidewalks, making calculations, calls, and for all I know, prayers, putting themselves on preschool wait-lists in a timely, non-sarcastic fashion.  

I pulled open the heavy door to my office building. That post-storm sun behind me was god's little wink; his paintbrush is never fully rinsed, she's always finding that bit of canvas that needs just a touch of this, just a tiny bit more of that. It'll still be imperfect at the end.  I'll leave it to my son to tell me one day the things god has painted, maybe.  First, I gotta find him a preschool.