I remember everything
about the day we brought home our first child--everything except the weather.
Already the world seemed to have contracted around us, a flexible, transparent
bubble in which my husband and I and our son were sealed. And in this new,
smaller globe of ours, the weather was determined by our son. If he was healthy
and not running a temperature, our weather was fine, but if he were ill or
feverish we had dismal weather. It was as if our world had suddenly been
conquered and was now being ruled by a very small god.
Our son was named
Benjamin--after my grandfather, the great love of my childhood. I went everywhere
with my grandfather. In a family that appeared to disapprove of the very
existence of females, he preferred them. When my brother arrived, my grandfather
alone was not stunned with delight, and our outings went on as before.
Fortunately, Benjamin
the child took after his namesake. He had the same blue eyes and blonde hair,
and, as it turned out, the same temperament, which was also my temperament.
There must have been uncountable times during each day of his infancy when
I looked at him and thought--but thought is not the right word-- believed,
without knowing I believed, that I had my grandfather back. The child had
somehow retrieved one of the two most important people of my childhood, one
of the two people now lost to me, people I could not recover, not even in
dreams. I was ecstatic, if ecstatic is a delirious enough word to describe
the sensation I felt, as if a stone wall of the universe, hidden behind the
sky, had opened and let one of my magic beings come through. |
But what works once does not always work twice. When my daughter
was born, we named her after my grandmother, May Levine. My grandmother had
lived with us when I was a child. She had long silver hair that hung down
her back in a braid, and the tip of the braid was brown. At night, when my
parents slept, I would take my pillow and creep through the hall and when
I reached the foot of her bed, I would slowly crawl up toward the head of
the bed, and then settle in for the night. My mother tried to stop this,
but she would fall asleep first, and so in the morning, I was always discovered
in bed with my grandmother.
She fought with everyone. She
fought with my grandfather, who had in turn menaced her with a gun. She chased
my father around the kitchen because he had threatened to hit me. She fought
with me because I did not make my bed on time and was "killing my mother."
She was a creature of high drama made up of lowly details like unmade beds
or unswept floors or stained dresses, and she loved me. Even when I came
home from college, she would see me and begin to cry with happiness. Someone
who loves you as desperately as my grandmother loved me means everything
to you. And so I named my daughter after my grandmother: May. It seemed a
simple and natural thing to do. You celebrate the person who is gone by bestowing
her name on a new being. That should be all there is to it.
Of course, there
is a restriction. If you are Jewish, you are not to name a child after a
person who is still living. I have asked for explanations of this and received
many, some complementary, some contradictory. Among other things, I have
been told it is bad luck to name a child after someone still alive; the gods
or the fates may decide two such people aren't needed, and doom the older
one. The child may disgrace her namesake, or vice versa. I have never heard
an explanation that quite satisfied me, but this is not the point. The fact
of the prohibition--do not name a child after a living person--points to
psychological complexities involved in the naming process, and I was to become
aware of many of them after the birth of my daughter.
Unlike her brother,
May was not a quiet baby. She often woke during the night, crying inconsolably,
and only talking to her and touching her calmed her. Because she would often
begin to cry ten minutes after she had been put back in her crib, I took
to lying on the floor, half beneath her crib. Then when she cried, I would
reach up with my hand and feel for her knee or her foot or her hand and she
would be quiet. I grew quite used to sleeping on the floor. May was beautiful,
if bald, and she and I seemed well on our way to becoming that strange beast,
half- mother, half-child.
I adored her.
But there were moments when I looked at her and felt an odd annoyance, as
if she had just done something to disappoint me, and because I could find
no explanation for what seemed to me an utterly aberrant response, I was
increasingly disturbed by my own reactions.
And then, as she
grew, I began to have more trouble with her. For no reason, I would find
myself looking at her bald head, and I would begin to feel the already all-too
familiar annoyance and then real anger. "She's bald!" I said to my mother.
My mother said, "Don't worry. No child ever starts kindergarten with a bald
head." Later, I complained because she didn't talk. "When can she talk?"
my mother asked me. "Your son is always talking."
I wondered if
what was wrong with me was what other people recognized as post partum
depression, but when I went to a psychoanalyst, he said that was not my problem.
My problem. If it was not post partum depression, then I was like a wild
animal who rejected one of her young. There was no reason for it and nothing
could be done about it; nothing could stop it.
I do not mean
to say here that I was always angry at May, but I was often angry, often
incapable of feeling sympathy, often outraged, as if she had done something
or failed to do something. But what could a six month old child, or a one
year old child, or a two or three year old child possibly have done? My responses
were incommensurate to anything in reality. As time passed, they grew weaker,
and then, without warning, they would suddenly come back and I would once
more feel as if I had taken leave of my senses. |
