After a few minutes, he felt the overwhelming emotions start to dissipate, the way his parents had taught him to deal with any stress, external or internal. You owned it, you put your hands on it and you made it a part of yourself, so that it no longer had any power over you.
He remembered when he was a small child, how his mother had placed her hand softly on his stomach and coaxed him into pulling all of his anxiety, all of his terror and uncertainty, down into his belly, the furnace for his entire being. Once trapped there, she would breathe with him, slowly, confidently, until he had vaporized those emotions. “Feel what’s left?” she asked him, her mouth right at his ear. “It’s nothing. It’s just clouds. And when it moves through your body, to your arms and your legs and your feet and your hands, it tickles just a little bit and then it is gone forever.” She pulled away from him, held his shoulders, and made him stare right into her eyes. “All of it is gone forever,” she said. “And you? You’re still here. You are untouched.” She hugged him and he collapsed in her arms, nothing inside him that could cause pain.
Though the world tried so hard to hurt us, his parents assured him that there was nothing on the outside that could ruin what was inside. “If you do what we say,” his father said, “you will be invincible.” And, whether or not it was true, he believed them without hesitation.
As he stood up to continue his day, Dr. Grind whistled a Tin Pan Alley tune and felt himself again become the person that he needed to be. He leaned the ukulele, unstrummed and silent, against the wall and then walked back to his own office, where the postdocs were nervously waiting for him. “There’s a problem,” Kalina said, and Dr. Grind smiled, unintentionally or not, at having something else to deal with.
“I talked to one of the night nurses,” Kalina continued as they all stepped inside his office, “and she told me that when Ellen Tilton had been on duty in the sleep room, at around one A.M., she walked over to Marnie’s crib and picked her up. Marnie had been sound asleep, but Ellen jostled her awake until she cried and then she rocked the child until she fell back to sleep and then held the baby in her arms for two hours, while other babies needed to be fed or changed.”
“Understandable,” Jill offered. “We talked about this happening. She just wanted some extra time with her own child.”
“It’s understandable,” Dr. Grind admitted, “but that’s not how the family works. I’ll talk to her about it.”
“How?” Jill wondered. “You’ll just say, ‘You need to stop paying so much attention to your baby’?”
“No,” Dr. Grind said, having grown used to Jill’s tendency to argue a position just to see how Dr. Grind might react, as if testing his own confidence in the project. “That would be a terrible way to go about it. I’ll remind her about the goals of the project and the need for us to function as a singular family.”
“You’ll be very sensitive and very charming,” Kalina offered, and Dr. Grind nodded.
“And if she refuses and says that she wants unlimited time with her own baby?” Jill asked.
Dr. Grind threw up his hands. “We’ve talked about this, Jill. We’ll intervene, collectively.”
“That will be the most awkward intervention I’ve ever heard of,” Jill said, almost smiling at the thought of it.
“I’ll talk to her,” Dr. Grind said with some finality and they moved on.
After the postdocs left, Dr. Grind’s thoughts were on Ellen. She had a history of depression, the only parent in the project who had been clinically treated; the staff had been prepared for the possibility of postpartum depression among the mothers, but they had been lucky thus far. They hoped that the collective aspect of the project had lessened the individual responsibility of each parent, though Dr. Grind now worried that Ellen could be finding the unique circumstances to be overwhelming. And yet, as he dealt with most crises, he believed in the best possible scenario, that Ellen had simply wanted to hold her daughter for a few hours, a one-time event, something that Dr. Grind could admittedly understand. He imagined his conversation with Ellen but could not make it coalesce in his mind. He would save the details for later; he would wing it.