September 7, 2007

• I’m a Mommie.

  BACKSTORY — The year leading up to the birth of my first child:

  The summer

  between ninth and tenth grades featured movie star fantasies, Tijuana bibles, cocker spaniel

  puppies, a blackberry cobbler with too much black pepper, and a trip to Galveston.
  In the tenth

  grade, I was prevented from studying Latin, my mother gave me a 3-speed record player for my

  fourteenth birthday, and I had a frightening experience with an IQ test.
  Along with some complaints about life

  with my step-father and his old maid sister, I relate a brief retrospective of my unhappy school career

  and do a little bit of foreshadowing after telling about stealing my best friend’s boyfriend.  In the next episode, he and I go all the way.

  Even though we didn’t have to, “Ford” and I
  got married, had an itty-bitty
  
  honeymoon, and set up
  
  housekeeping together.
  My husband and I, aged sixteen and fourteen respectively, became
  
  emancipated minors upon our marriage.
  In the spring after our December wedding, we moved to
  
  Amarillo, where my husband found his first job and had his first extramarital affair.
  Readers’ reactions to that impelled me to post a little piece about
  
  neurochemistry and penis size.
  Then came
  
  another inept suicide attempt, which I survived and gave birth to
  
  my firstborn child.
  

  

  He was seventeen and I was fifteen.  I was in love with him, but disillusioned about love and marriage, afraid of my husband and already growing bitter about love in general, but completely overwhelmed with a different kind of love for my baby.  We had no crib nor cradle for her.  Her first bed was a drawer from the dresser, laid across two kitchen chairs set next to my side of the bed, where I could reach out in the night to touch her.

  In the first weeks after we took Marie home from the hospital, I wanted to breastfeed her. I think I was in there three nights, unnecessarily, but that was SOP at the time.  Listening to her cries coming from the nursery tore me apart, and I was out of my bed and down the hall to rescue her several times, before one of the nuns got there to scold me.  I had been reading Dr. Spock and a couple of other, less well known and less helpful, baby books.  If there was a La Leche League, I wasn’t aware of it.  I figured that breastfeeding would be more economical, I had read that breast milk was more healthful for babies than cow’s milk, I knew that I had been unable to tolerate cow’s milk when I was a baby, and I wanted the best for my baby.

  My doctor (the same idiot who was at home having his dinner when Marie was born) thought I was too young to breastfeed.  The nuns in the hospital didn’t support breastfeeding, so my daughter was bottle fed in the nursery before being brought to me for nursing.  That got her used to the effortless flow of milk from a rubber nipple, so she took a few days to learn how to nurse.  That wasn’t easy for either of us.

  My breasts became engorged.  I got a small hand operated breast pump with a rubber bulb, but by then I already had mastitis in the left breast.  Marie was about three or four weeks old when I yielded to the doctor and my mother and switched her to bottle feeding.  The formula was the same one my mother had fed me and my mother-in-law had given her kids:  a 13 ounce can of evaporated milk with a tablespoon of Karo corn syrup and enough tap water to fill a quart jar.  I shudder at the thought of it now.  At least she was getting vitamin drops, and I started her on baby cereal when she was about six weeks old.

  Ford, her father, was the opposite of helpful in caring for the baby.  He did carry the diaper bag when we went out.  My first diaper bag was an old attaché case I’d found discarded somewhere, but before long I got something more conventional with a larger capacity.  Ford wouldn’t feed Marie or change a diaper.  He didn’t want to be in the same room when I changed her.  He couldn’t bear to hear her cry, and responded to her cries with anger:  “Shut that squalling kid up!”

  On one side, I was being told by older women that picking her up every time she cried would spoil her.  On the other side, I was being told by her father, “If you don’t shut that kid up, I’ll kill you both.”   She had colic, a perfectly normal crying response to the discomfort of
  gastric and intestinal gas until a baby learns how to burp and fart.  

  Her father’s violent anger turned her normal colic into a life-threatening emergency.  My mother-in-law said she had always given her kids paregoric.  I looked it up:  camphorated tincture of opium.  A little bottle cost $3.60, I had to sign for it at the pharmacy, and it was doled out in doses of three drops in a bottle of formula.

  Before she could even sit up alone, I started strapping Marie into a rigid plastic seat, a cheap knockoff of the popular InfanSeat.  I kept her within reach of whatever task I was doing whenever she was awake, and she often slept in the seat, too.  I learned to cook and clean house with her propped on my hip.

  When Marie hurt, I hurt.  If I was frightened or worried, she became fretful.  The closeness between our baby and me angered Ford.  He had been used to getting all my attention, and he wasn’t at all gracious about giving any of it up.  After he had hit her in the face a few times while I was in the bathroom or out at the clothesline when she started crying, she cried every time she saw him.  That just angered him even more.  When I reacted with appalled incredulity at his hitting her, he responded, “It was just a slap… with my open hand,” as if that explained it and made everything okay.

   
  We lived in that little house through the winter.   At Christmastime, the local newspaper offered free “Santa Claus photos.”  Kids were invited during certain hours to come to the news office to sit for a photographer.  Parents were given one 8×10 portrait and encouraged to buy a package of other sizes to give to grandparents or mail to distant relatives.  All the kids’ photos were published in a special holiday spread, with captions that included what they wanted Santa Claus to bring them, along with their parents’ names and home address. 

  My mother had clipped the picture from the paper.  She gave it to me the last time I saw her, when I went to Kansas for my reunion with Marie in 1979, along with a lot of old family photos and pictures from my childhood and from Marie’s, and I scanned it.  The blemish on her cheek is on the photo, not on the baby.  She was flawless.

  That publication was probably how the insurance salesman found us.  He called on us one evening after dinner.  We sat at the kitchen table, where he spread out a bunch of papers and talked about security, budgets, and estate planning.  Along with a handful of insurance brochures, he gave us a free budget book, about the size of the school workbooks I was accustomed to.  He left, disappointed, after he’d established that our budget wouldn’t stretch to cover insurance premiums.

  I remember sitting at the table later, laughing with Ford over some of the columns in that budget book, such as “vacation and travel,” or “college fund.”  He was earning $40.00 a week, before deductions.  Take home pay was a little over $30.  Each column in the budget book had a suggested percentage.  The only one where our real budget approximated the suggested percentage was, “housing.”  It recommended 25%, and our rent was $35.00 a month.  My food budget ever since he’d gotten that job and we had enough money to budget for food, was $10 a week, somewhat less than the suggested percentage.

  Beans, cornbread, pasta and potatoes were the staples of our diet even before we had the added expense of canned milk for the baby.  I bought a pound of cheap fatty ground beef each week, and divided it into fourths before freezing it.  A quarter pound of beef could make spaghetti sauce, gravy to serve over bread or potatoes, or meatloaf when stretched with oatmeal and boiled barley.  Once in a while, for a special treat, I’d broil a couple of patties to get some of the fat out, and serve them over a slab of cornbread, smothered in chili seasoned beans.

  One evening, I had two hamburger patties in the broiler drawer under the gas oven, and Marie was in her seat on the kitchen table behind me as I started to pull open the broiler.  Ford was in another room.  Marie started to fuss, and I turned to quiet her.  When I looked back at the broiler, the drawer had slowly rolled all the way out, assisted by gravity and the slope of the floor.   I reached to catch the drawer, an instant too late.  It fell off its track, hit the floor and splashed hot grease onto the insides of both of my wrists and halfway up my forearms.  Blistered second degree burns made everything more difficult, from changing diapers and washing dishes to brushing my hair and hanging wash on the line.  I kept bumping or scraping the blisters, and they took a long time to heal.

  Ford invited three of his old buddies over for a New Year’s Eve party at the end of 1959.  The Fabulous Fifties were coming to an end, and the ‘sixties hadn’t gotten into their swing yet, but those times when the nines click over to zero are always something momentous.  Joe, one of the cutest guys in town, on whom I’d had a crush in school, and two other guys, came over and brought beer and wine.  I served popcorn and homemade cookies:  cheap refreshments.

  None of the guys brought a date.  They sat around drinking, bullshitting, and playing records.  I spent a lot of the evening in the bedroom, soothing a fretful baby and getting her to sleep.  After she fell asleep, I drank a little wine and started bopping around by myself to the music.  Ford was always a reluctant dancer, and I have always been unable not to respond physically to rhythm.  Joe liked to dance, so we did some bopping together and got into some older dances, the Charleston and Swing.

  Ford drank himself sick, staggered into the bathroom to puke, then collapsed across the bed.  The other two guys passed out on the couch.  Those three had been drinking while Joe and I were dancing, so although we were both drunk, they had gotten way ahead of us.  A record came to its end, and Joe flopped onto the straight dining room chair that was the room’s only seating besides the old horsehair chesterfield.  I stood there a while, swaying on my feet as I caught my breath after a fast dance.  Joe asked me if we had any slow songs, and I put on my favorite album, Only the Lonely by Frank Sinatra.

  He stood up and we danced through several of the songs.  Then he sat back down on the straight chair and pulled me onto his lap.  We talked quietly, and I cried and told him about how scared I was of Ford and why.  He held me and I cried on his shoulder.  I have always been a cheap drunk  One or two drinks is enough to get me impaired and nauseated, and I have never been a happy drunk.  Alcohol is a depressant, and I don’t need any help to get depressed.

  Sinatra was singing Where or When and Joe was kissing me, when Ford came storming out of the bedroom.  He yanked me off Joe’s lap, shoved me out of the room, woke his other two buddies and threw everyone out, then came into the bedroom and beat me up.  Until then, there had been half a dozen or so incidents when he’d slap me or punch me once and then stop.  That was the first extensive beating.  I stifled my cries, terrified that if I woke Marie he would hurt her, too.

  The next day, when Ford woke and found me on the couch, he expressed surprise at my injuries.  He didn’t recall beating me up, but he did remember seeing Joe and me kissing.  He said if he’d beaten me up, I’d deserved it, and if that Joe ever came around again, he’d kill him.

  • 2:57 pm
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