The news about Ross’s acceptance to TOPGUN was still a month and a half away when Sam was born, and at that point, we were expecting Ross to go out on the boat for a month when Sam was a little less than two weeks old and then be home through December and January before leaving for Afghanistan. He would be gone for the next seven months, a giant, yawning stretch of calendar that I bulldozed over in my head with bright images of Sam getting ready to take his first steps and tottering over into his father’s waiting arms. In September. In other words, I was thinking nearly a year ahead while I held a two-week-old baby whose face was still smooshed like a prizefighter’s, and whose hoarse little cries of “lah, lah, lah!” regularly sent the blood thundering through my veins with the certain conviction that he was dying.
I had the best support system in the world. I know that now, and part of me knew it then. The squadron wives’ club compiled a meal tree and brought delicious, home-cooked meals right to my door every other night for two weeks. Ross was an active and heroic dad, whipping through diaper changes with the speed and efficiency of a Formula One pit crew while I was still terrified of Sam’s circumcision and took eons to slather him with Vaseline. My mother flew out from Texas and stayed for an entire month while Ross left for the aircraft carrier. I pored over two wildly conflicting books on infant care and sleep training, and she mercifully kept turning down the volume on the baby monitor I carried with me everywhere. She cooked casseroles for the freezer and insisted I have a beer and watch Deadwood with her on DVD, and she routinely recited her own list of childcare mishaps, some of which I knew she was exaggerating, just so she could make the point that Doug and I survived and surely Sam would too.
That’s how it looked from the outside, and that’s how I prefer to look at Sam’s first few months of life when I retell it, because the view from inside my head was awful. I heard him crying everywhere, in the white noise of the shower, in the rumble of my car’s tires over the road when I stepped out for a quick run to the convenience store, in the static on the silent baby monitor I was convinced was broken. When he cried, I was sure that he was looking straight into my soul and seeing all the broken trash there, the bent bicycle wheels, the rotting lumber, the stinking morass of my corrupt and useless life that I somehow tricked everyone else into not seeing. I was convinced that his cries were the hopeless wails of someone who knew that fully half of his DNA was poison.
That was the bold, unfiltered flavor of crazy. The light version, and ironically the more harmful because it contained large chunks of truth, was that he was a baby, and babies cry, but that I should also stop and take a moment to reflect on the fact that I had knowingly brought this tiny, perfect boy into the world only to shepherd him through the same absurd dance of loss and longing I had spent my life hating. I would stop and look at him there on his changing table, his chin wobbling uncertainly, his onesie hiked up around his middle, and I would try to imagine finding the words to tell him, “I know you’re sad, I know you miss him, but he loves you so much and misses you too, and he’ll be home soon,” knowing how lame “soon” would taste in my mouth, saying it to someone with no concept of time.
Four a.m. became the designated hour for semilucid mental wandering. While Sam nursed noisily and curled into a soft little ball against my chest, I would stroke the back of his upturned ear and let my exhausted mind drift. I thought a lot about his brain. On the third day of nonstop driving on our move out to California, Ross and I had driven, separately, through Palm Springs, and I remembered the hills surrounding the city covered as far as the eye could see in wind turbines. It was a spectacular sight, and right then, as I watched the early morning sun touch each hill in succession against a backdrop of scudding thunderclouds, I decided it wouldn’t be bad to retire on a windy stretch of land and forest the thing with wind turbines.
I imagined each of Sam’s neurons as a wind turbine, and each austere blade as a dendrite, and then I pictured the dendrites festooned with white sparklers—a chemical signal flaring up in one place and then spreading like an ocean wave as the wind carried it to the next sparkler, the next blade, the next turbine, until you could see the path of the wind across the valley. I saw fingers of light, waves of it, rolling from one horizon to the other. Baby books encourage you to think this way when they emphasize over and over again how fast the beginning brain is, how nimble and plastic. His brain would never be this quick again. Unused turbines would disappear from the landscape, tipping over and rusting and returning to grass. As his mom, I was the wind, or at least part of it. I was responsible for stimulating him, feeding him, protecting his sleep, watching for signs of illness, and not turning him into a sociopath.
At moments like this, my energy flagging, the depression rising up and soaking me, I decided that, as a force of nature, I sucked. It’s embarrassing to admit how far down the well I let myself sink before I asked for help.