By Kathleen Hawes
Fall 2016 Kaplan Award Winner
Sometimes I get worried that I have a brain tumor. Occasionally while I’m driving down a narrow two lane road and there are no cars to be seen, I get confused. I’ll look at the yellow line dividing the two lanes winding in front of me and suddenly I won’t be able to remember which side of the road I’m supposed to drive on. What if I’m driving the wrong way? I’ll panic, worrying that if a car comes from the opposite direction, we’ll have a head on collision.
This confusion has happened so many times that I have created a rhyme in my head to ensure I stay on the correct side of the road. “Right is right, right is right,” I’ll chant to myself. But then sometimes I can’t remember which is left and which is right. Or even more strangely, what is left and what is right. I’ll stare at my hands on the steering wheel, knowing I’m a lefty, searching for that left hand to give me guidance or tell me where I am. After staring confused at the bizarre conglomerate of pink flesh attached to the steering wheel, I’ll vaguely recognize the left hand. But even as I do, I’ll wonder what that means. What if I was on the other side of the road driving? Would this still be my left hand? It reminds me of that young age when, staring at yourself in the mirror, you are still baffled by the prospect that your left ear is your reflection’s right ear. It’s still you in the mirror. How could that be your right ear over there? The newly learned concepts of identical and symmetrical blur together, the lines of where things begin and end seem like gibberish, and suddenly the bathroom floor beneath your feat, floats away.
Eventually, the instinctual part of me — the feet that have systematically walked on that ground for 36 years, or in the case of the road, the hands that have driven a car for twenty, will pull my brain out of this confusion, and I’ll remember how to steer the car to the side of the road. I’ll turn off the engine and sit there for a few seconds until objects begin to make sense again.
I’ll see my right hand with the gold snake ring given to me by my mother. I’ll see my left hand with the lump on my middle finger from pushing too hard with pencils in grade school. I’ll look over at the road and finally I’ll know where I have to go.
I’ve tried to remember when this driving problem began. It must have been sometime after that day in the bathroom stall before right before my shift started. I sat on the toilet, watching helplessly as the blotchy pink lines dampening behind the plastic window of the pregnancy test, took on the unmistakable shape of a perfect red plus sign.
It was the same day Maggie killed a dove in the back courtyard. I was leaving the bathroom when she had slinked inside with something in her mouth. Purring and wrapping her tail around my ankles, she had placed the dead bird at my feet. Its head was gone. Maggie killed birds all the time and it had never bothered me before. But that day I got so mad I kicked her.
Later I found a shovel, and instead of tossing it in the dumpster, I buried the dove in the courtyard by a birch and some daffodils.
That was also the day I replaced Irish whiskey with club soda and tossed my Camel Lights in the trash. The first of many sad goodbyes:
Goodbye coffee.
Goodbye hair dye.
Goodbye delicious imported cheese.
Goodbye pants with buttons.
Goodbye eyes of men that follow your movements as you saunter down First Avenue.
Goodbye sleep.
Goodbye parties.
Goodbye friends.
Goodbye handsome stranger who holds your hand in Thompson Square Park — surrounded by eager tulips pushing up for the spring.
Hello:
Pregnancy books, pregnancy blogs, and pregnancy chatrooms. Hello trying to fit the cost of the latest light weight baby stroller and 100% organic crib mattresses into a waddling bartender’s budget. Hello dirty floors of free clinics on Avenue D, stoney faced nurses who look at their watches more than your eyes. Hello trudging up fourth floor Brooklyn walk-ups with thirty extra pounds weighing on your knees, strangers at the bus stop groping your stomach, and endless screaming matches with the man from the park—who though still a stranger, now takes up three quarters of your once lovely spacious queen size bed. Hello bleak subway rides on the L train, sweat smeared nightmares littered with mangled baby parts, and waking to a skyline that once gleamed with promise, but looks now more like a dirty prison.
I remember watching the other pregnant women in my First Time Mother’s To Be conversation group all seeming so happy, sipping their herbal teas and rubbing their bellies contentedly. Did no one else want a glass of wine? Why had nobody else developed a stress related twitch in their right eye?
I couldn’t figure out why I was not glowing like the rest of them. And even though I also spent my evenings devouring magazine articles which discussed the consumption of seafood during the third trimester or blogs debating the pros and cons of weening with unpasteurized milk, when I would look at my newly formed figure in the mirror, I saw an imposter. Someone who had slipped through the cracks and tricked fate into letting her become a mother.
***
Then there had been that incident with the diamond earrings. I had not been able to stop staring at them. Even with the bustling nurses and the beeping of the heart monitor. Even with the incessant prodding from latex fingers, and of course the searing pain which radiated deep inside me pushing it’s way out from between my legs.
The earrings had peeked from either side of the white surgical mask hovering above. As they glinted under the florescent lights, my eyes followed them with a mixture of envy and awe, as though they were two lavish north stars, guiding me through the darkness of each contraction. I had never owned a pair of earrings like that. And while I pushed, and screamed, and begged for an epidural, I tried to picture what the man looked like who had purchased the earrings. Handsome no doubt. I imagined him pointing them out in the glass case of Tiffany’s,. The salesman smiling approvingly as he placed each one gingerly in a velvet lined box. And I wondered if after this last push, if I would ever get to be the kind of woman who received a gift like that.
After it was all done and I lay deflated on a hospital bed, I saw the surgical mask removed, milky skin, and the flash of a white smile.
“Good work Doctor!” the nurses crowded around, patting the woman with the diamond earrings on the back.
“Thank you!” the doctor said, her face aglow. She turned to pass my newborn son like a gold trophy she’d just won to a nearby nurse. The nurse shook her head. “My shift is over.” She pointed at her watch.
And then of course after all of the other babies were born and there were gleeful exchanges in my New Mothers Group about how much everyone was enjoying breastfeeding or how much closer they felt towards their spouses after the birth of the perfect cherubs, I could not help but think they were all lying. I was consumed with shame because I hated every moment of breastfeeding and I worried that I might not love my son as much as they loved their babies because unlike them, with their attachment parenting convictions and never ending streams of angelic patience, I was thrilled to get away from a smothering and what seemed like insatiable infant, even if it was just to walk to the store, or take the bus to a coffee shop.
Once after coming home from a doctors appointment, I parked my car, locked it and walked two blocks away before I realized I had left my three week old baby in the backseat. Another time I took my son for a walk and left a baby bottle warming over an open flame on the stove. When we got home, I could hear the smoke alarm from the first floor hallway. The plastic bottle had melted and the entire apartment was filled with fumes and black smoke.
After a while I stopped attending my mothers group unable to stand the pitying glances on my back while I’d search madly for diapers I’d forgotten to pack, or as I would struggle, red faced and sweating, to strap my son into his complicated baby sling. I also stopped riding the subway, sure that I could hear strangers whispering about what an incapable mother I was, how I should have put a warmer hat on my baby, or that I was holding him the wrong way — making his head wobble. We stayed home a lot. The twitch in my eye got worse. I thought a lot about what I had buried along with the dead dove in the courtyard that day.
Most of us anticipate that with the birth of a child, parts of life will be put on hold.
Maybe it’s a career, a plan for the the future, hobbies or travel. But we fumble through it with the hazy promise that someday we will no longer have to pack the diaper bags, and that agonizing over weight percentiles or developmental milestones will eventually become distant memory. And while the whispers on subway rides do lessen with years, and in their place invaluable wisdoms grown, there are some of us who will still occasionally find ourselves spinning down an empty stretch of road, wildly searching the air for a missing left hand.