EAST



…it seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
— Rilke, "The Panther"

 
 
 

4. Bad Baby

Stripped, plucked, and drugged unconscious, my mother was loaded and trucked into the delivery room in the silent pre-dawn hours of the day of my birth. Labor, in 1958, was the exclusive domain of medical professionals; women were not permitted to witness or participate in the births of their children. If there had been a way for my mother to not even be present at my arrival on this earth, I’m sure her doctor would have willingly arranged it.

I once heard of a woman whose anesthesia wore off too soon and whose eyes fluttered open just in time to see a nurse squatting astride the delivery table with a knee pushing down on her belly while a doctor she had never seen before stood between her legs with forceps gripping her baby’s head. I’ll never know if I traveled into this world by those extraordinary means; no one I knew was there to see it happen. My father was out pacing the waiting room like a polar bear in a cage, and my mother, always over-sensitive to medications, would remain more or less unconscious for the better part of the first three days of my life. I sometimes wonder if that is why my destiny seems to hinge not on moments of clarity or brilliance but rather on those occasional strange lapses of consciousness, that gray cloud of unknowing that descends at odd moments and holds you, softly, like a deer held for the hunter’s arrow, while the gods push or pull your life in some unforeseen direction.

Lucille Watkins was the nurse into whose arms I was delivered when I had finally been extracted like a bad tooth from my inert mother’s body. None of us would ever know her name, but hers was the first human smell I would breathe into my newly inflated lungs, hers the first heart I would feel beating next to mine, hers the first voice I would hear singing softly in my air-surprised ears.   

As Lucille wheeled the metal crib containing Baby Girl Gray out of Delivery Room 2B, she mentally noted that she had her work cut out for her with this one. This five pounds fifteen ounces of clench and squawl would be one of the inconsolable ones, it was plain to see, and Lucille quickened her step as she neared the sanctuary of the nursery.

She had seen the mother when she arrived in labor and delivery: a slim, tense, dark-haired, pretty woman with eyes the color of creekwater, young Mrs. Gray had nodded and smiled at Lucille with a respect bordering on deference, that intent gaze intended to communicate that she viewed Lucille as a trained medical professional, not as “just a nurse.” It was a silent signal that some women transmitted to one another in those days, knowing as they did that the men looked down on them all. She will have detailed questions about infant care, Lucille thought, about hygiene and nutrition and temperature and stimulation; she will try to make the doctors take her seriously, and of course, she will fail. It didn’t bode well. That child thinks too much, Lucille thought to herself, and she tries too hard. She won’t be good with babies.  

She had seen it before. Some people feel the wrongness in the world too hard, take it too hard, work it too hard, and they can’t find inside themselves the one thing that babies need most –– that warm voice of the body that says, it’s all right. It’s all gonna be all right. This baby’s done got that from her mother, Lucille thought. She’s taking the world pretty hard already, and shows no immediate signs of letting up, she added to herself, looking down at the minute red-faced being coiled tighter than a spring and objecting full throttle to the injustice of the universe.

Lucille let the door to the nursery swing closed behind her and took the grieving infant into her arms. She liked the midnight-to-morning shift, the other-worldly hours when M.D.’s were scarce and she had her domain largely to herself. “I couldn’t agree with you more,” she murmured to the weeping child. “It’s all upside-down and backwards how you’ve been brought into this world. It wouldn’t be this way if it was up to you and me, now would it.”

Lucille had left home at seventeen, the first in her family to go to college. She hadn’t really wanted to go, in some ways. She loved her blue-green hills, dark woods with bright creeks widening into brown rivers, blue summer evenings shot through with light the color of fresh peaches. Granddad on the front porch cracking jokes, Mama laughing while she rocked a little one at her breast or stitched a hatband on the hats she made to sell at the store in town. And sometimes Mama would sing, her voice twining through the dark trees. 

All the kids played together then, swimming in the river, climbing trees to get walnuts or plums, sleeping at night in piles like puppies. Lucille was the oldest, so she was another mother to them all, taking two or three little ones into bed with her at night, bringing the babies to mama to nurse when they were hungry. It never occurred to her things would ever be different.

Then Mama died birthing Cady, a slow death, bleeding out and burning up with fever for three days, no hospital for a hundred miles, and no money even if there was. On the last day she cried out in agony while all the children huddled together outside in the chill spring air, goosebumps on their skinny arms.  

After that Daddy took off west and Lucille had to be mother to the little scrawny squawling thing, cradling Cady against her thin chest and boiling goat’s milk and honey to dribble between her lips. A visiting lady health worker had come through preaching Modern Science and giving all the women a powdered formula to mix up with water for their babies. Lucille took some for Cady, and the other mothers did, too, the healthy ones who didn’t need it, and Esther Mullins mixed it up with unboiled well water and gave it to her plump Billy who got typhoid and died in 3 days flat, eyes rolling back in his head as peasoup shit ran down his legs and his mama howled like an animal caught in a trap. Lucille followed the health worker’s instructions to a tee and boiled the water every single time, and Cady grew like a weed.

When the health worker came back through in the fall she took an interest in Lucille, who was the only one in that end of the county who heeded her directives, the rest viewing her with the deep distrust for outsiders that was twined through their DNA. They blamed her for Billy Mullins’ death, which they were absolutely right to do, whispering that the powder had been poisoned, which was not true, at least not strictly speaking. The health worker began telling Lucille that she could be something “better” than this, she could “escape” this “poverty” and “ignorance” and have a “decent life.” The health worker would "help" her, there were people she could talk to. Lucille had felt cleft in two by the woman’s words. Keenly she felt the insult buried in the offer, the casual contempt for women like Mama, beautiful iron-strong women who fought for their families with a fierce love and intelligence that health worker would never understand.

But in the end Lucille had been curious. So she accepted the offer of a scholarship that the health worker procured, and moved down to the city to study nursing. Of course she hadn’t realized at the time how this decision would bar her road home, condemn her to a life without roots or center. It was hard to say what she would have chosen had that been made clear. But what was done was done.

Now Lucille performed the procedures she had been trained to perform, bathing the wailing creature, measuring and weighing and prodding and poking her in all the required ways, noting every detail in the chart. In nursing school she had nearly despaired, feeling awkward and false among people so unlike the people she came from; her heart couldn’t connect the way your heart has to connect to nurse a person back to health. But then she did a rotation in the newborn nursery and realized: babies are the same everywhere. Lucille trained as a pediatric nurse and took the job at Sisters of Mercy Hospital. 

In time she married a man who worked down in accounting and had a baby of her own. The man insisted the baby sleep in another room, in a crib with bars like a cage; it seemed strange and wrong to Lucille, but the man became angry if she took the baby into bed with them or even if she went to her in the night. He made Lucille leave her crying and crying, to "train" her, he said; not to "spoil" her. Like she was a dog or something. Then Lucille woke up one morning and found her little one cold and blue, neck wedged between the bars of the crib. Her heart caught fire then and burned like a forest fire out of control, burned every single thing right down to the ground, and when the smoke cleared the man was gone and Lucille was alone. She moved out of that house into a small studio apartment with a kitchenette and gave her blackened heart to her hospital babies.

For thirty years now she had lived alone, working nights, sleeping days, her body deepening and broadening with time like a bright creek becomes a wide river. Quietly she subverted the hospital policies, did what she could to bring each child to its mother, to teach her to hold her little one to her heart. All too often they just turned away, insisted Lucille take the babies back to the nursery so they could "get some sleep." So Lucille would hold them to her own heart, pouring into each new child the river of love that flowed through her, inoculating them, she hoped, against the life that lay ahead among these lonesome strange people.

Now she took this small howling one in her arms, dimmed the lights, and got to work. 

She cupped her palm gently over the baby’s head like the Pope giving a blessing, savoring the sensation of electric life pulsing through the opening of the fontanel. It was a shame people’s skulls had to close up and get hard as they got older, she had often felt. There was nothing like the open aliveness coming out of the head of a newborn, like eating peaches right off the tree. Next she let the breath fill her body and then flow out again easily, effortlessly, in and out, like gentle waves on warm sand. Most people didn’t know how she did it, they just said she had a knack with babies, but Lucille Watkins was the Dalai Lama of Sisters of Mercy Hospital, she could slow her breathing and heartbeat like a yogi, and what people didn’t realize was how naturally the baby’s heartbeat would synchronize with hers, slowing, deepening, syncopating its tiny bird-speed to her broad, slow rhythm. People didn’t realize how babies with their gossamer skin and wide open skulls can read your mind and body like a book, and if you sit there making your to-do list or arguing with your husband in your head that child will never sleep. But Lucille knew, and she knew how to clear her thoughts into blue sky filled with light, and how the light of its own accord would take on a flavor of sweetness that filled the brain and body right down to the marrow of the bone.

The baby’s wails began to waver and subside, tailing off into a soft, exhausted bleat at the end of each outbreath, and Lucille waited for them to quiet completely before offering a bottle of warm formula. It did not surprise her when the child spat out the rubber nipple like it was on fire. She waited four full long breaths and tried again, then eight more breaths and tried another time. The baby’s cries resumed, great keening, gasping sobs, and Lucille stood up, moved back and forth across the room, comforting her to near sleep before offering the bottle again. The entire process repeated itself three times.

It was something that happened only with the insistent ones, the ones whose sense of justice was so precise, whose natural rectitude was so commanding, that they would brook no compromise. This baby knew what she needed. So did Lucille. She closed her eyes and pictured Mama as she was, nursing one of her little ones, sweet milk flowing through her like the light of the sun flows through space. She pictured her own little one, eyes closed in perfect bliss, sweet milk puddled between her lips. Lucille had no sweet milk for this child, but she had something else, she had sorrow like the crest of a wave breaking through her, fathomless sorrow for all the lost mothers, all the lost babies, all the natural losses that ever have been and ever will be, and the unnatural losses, the unnecessary losses, like what this little one now had to endure.

The child took the bottle, still weeping, as Lucille wept with her. Her tears fell on the baby’s cheek, joining the others, one river.

Then she began to sing.

To the uninitiated it was a simple unremarkable thing to hum “Hush Little Baby.” But Lucille’s voice was a deep river with seven colors of brown and silver: mud, silt, riverrock, brown water, clear water, light reflecting off water, cloud; and Lucille could modulate those seven colors expertly in response to the baby’s tiniest reflexes, brightening here, softening there, until she had introduced the baby to the world, the forested, river-fed, clear-skied world perfectly balanced in beauty and contentment.

“Remember this,” Lucille whispered.

The infant slept.

The Forest Glen Garden Apartments were my mother’s personal Gulag, and my brother and I, simultaneously diaper-clad, were her tiny jailers. Whatever forest or glen may once have existed on this spot had been chainsawed and bulldozed into oblivion, and the entire complex looked like nothing so much as a prison camp, the barren, red-brick rectangles relieved only by concrete slab steps and small gray windows barred with venetian blinds that sucked the very light from the sky and the soul from your body.

I have two memories, like snapshots, that congeal out of my general inchoate sense of the grayness of this place. One is of the room I shared with my brother: blank walls of grayish-white; two beds clad in bedspreads of the same plaid, lines of black, gray, and dark red criss-crossing a field of dead beige; a small window, gray, venetian-blinded, looking out onto nothing. In the other image I am at the playground, thoughtfully provided, I suppose, by the men who had obliterated the forest and the glen; above a graded bank of brownish, trampled grass, I am standing beside the jungle gym, my small hands reaching up to grasp the first cold gray steel bar. That’s all I remember. And almost all that I was told, except that my brother once fell into a hornet’s nest beneath the concrete slab steps to our building and received thirty-two stings, and that my mother had always sworn she would never have two in diapers at the same time, and then along we came.

My mother was never meant to be a housewife. She had wanted to work at the State Department, in international relations; diplomacy. Coming from a poor family in a small Virginia town, she had dreamed of studying politics and economics at UVA, but of course women were not admitted in those days, so she went to the state teachers’ college, although she had zero interest in being a teacher; or a nurse; or a secretary, which were the three main professions female students were trained for there. Stubbornly, she took her degree in Business Administration and Accounting, and then moved north to Washington D.C., willing to start at the bottom, to work her way up, just to be a tiny part of the great political and economic systems that moved the world. Having come of age during the horrors of World War II, her cousin blown to bits on a field in Italy, she longed to play some small role in the complex relationships that could promote global peace and cooperation and prevent the devastating slide into war. 

But it turned out there were more jobs in war.  

The only position she could secure was as a bookkeeper at the Pentagon, where for four years she served diligently, with rare intelligence, while being sexually harassed by generals and passed over for promotions in favor of men. When she discovered certain irregularities in the accounting of munitions and materiel shipments to a small Southeast Asian nation whose name most Americans barely knew in those days, she promptly reported them, with full documentation, to her superiors. When she received no response to her report and the improprieties not only continued but escalated, she quite properly filed a second report. 

At which point she was formally reprimanded, told she had violated standard protocols, and demoted to a clerical position. Then she finally agreed to marry my father, got pregnant twice in rapid succession, and it was over.  

She did her best to be a good mother to us; she was assiduous in the performance of her duties. But her heart wasn’t in it.

My mother’s life ought to have been eased and guided by the wisdom of Modern Science, which, having reached the apex of its glorious march toward enlightenment in the late nineteen fifties, was able to provide her with detailed information on the correct care and maintenance of babies. For example, Modern Science had recently revealed that although Mother Nature in her quaint and haphazard way had created elephant milk for baby elephants, seal milk for baby seals, and baboon milk for baby baboons, the optimal nourishment for human infants was the nutritionally perfected mammary output of a large, dim-witted, cud-chewing herd animal. Moreover, although the primitive practice of feeding babies when they were hungry was in some women difficult to stamp out, the good doctors now knew incontrovertibly that grave risks were incurred unless the human infant was fed at precisely 10:00, 2:00, 6:00, 10:00, 2:00, 6:00, 10:00, 2:00, 6:00 (and so on) precisely four ounces of milk per feeding, no more and no less.

To my mother’s sorrow, it turned out that my brother and I knew almost nothing about Modern Science; our screams rent the air both day and night. Our bellies distended with gas, our backs arched in pain, we sucked our allotted four ounces of cow liquor and then as often as not promptly vomited them halfway across the room. By the time my father returned from work in the evenings, my mother looked as though she had been through eight hours of electro-shock therapy. Wordlessly, she would hand one of us over into his arms and slam off into the kitchen to cook dinner, the sounds of pots and pans banging like fireworks through the thin walls.  

Years later, when I graduated from high school, she looked at me and said, “Thank God you’re grown up. I was never good with children.”

Of course, I was a bad baby. By that I mean what was usually meant when tiny children were called good or bad in the latter part of the twentieth century, which is that I could not sleep. Insomnia, for me, was not an adult malady, but a kind of primal sleeplessness, reaching back to the very origins of life.

What was the cause of this? Years of looking inward have produced no answers, and so, like many souls unquiet in the predawn hours, I search the internet for clues. Recently I came across a study that showed that rat pups who were not licked by their mothers had higher stress responses than rat pups whose mothers licked them a lot: their cortisol levels were higher, their startle responses more hair-trigger, their fight-flight-freeze reactions quicker to flare up. In fact, this elevated stress response was not transient but baked in at the molecular level, and unless it was soothed and ameliorated later by licking from some other source –– about which, more later –– it could be passed down, epigenetically, to the next generation.  

Ah, I thought when I read that. Okay.  

But as a pup, the unlicked rat knows no other world. In bed, alone, after dark, images gather in the room. Dreamlike, but not dreams. A little gnarled man hunches on a tricycle, pedaling. Behind him a dark city; looming machine; broken, cluttered, claustrophobic; sharp angles, narrow sharp throats of darkness. Rumpelstiltskin in a Blade Runner world, muttering, il faut le battre le fer.  

Then, at last: a white bird on long wings. Descending through the air, right to left; heron, swan, dove. Trite, perhaps, but what does an unlicked rat know of triteness? All is smoothed away. Simplicity. Light. Air.  

Sleep.

When I was very young, I think, I spent much of my time alone. A child alone is not bounded and held by the more crystallized consciousness of her elders; there is nothing to give shape, limits, edges to her perceptions, and she may find awareness to be a rather billowing, ballooning, metamorphosing thing. A child alone receives the world without question or explanation, without language; and so, lying in bed after awakening, she sees the arm thrown in front of her face and observes that she can both see it and see through it; she watches it grow very thin and then transparent; then suddenly massive, solid, but hopping to the left and then the right as she closes first one eye and then the other. It does not occur to a child alone to think of the angles of vision intersecting at the point of an object seen at close range; a child alone accepts this inconstancy on the part of her arm without remark.

I remember the way sounds would come to me when I was alone in my room, perhaps near sleep on a hot afternoon, perhaps lying on the floor doing nothing. Outside would be the droning of insects and a distant lawnmower, sporadic muffled cries of children playing or dogs barking; the rustling of leaves; the rising and falling sound of cicadas in the trees. As my mind unclenched like a tiny fist relaxing its grip, the sounds would fall into a kind of rhythm, a heartbeat that was profoundly soothing, like the rocking of soft arms, a sweetness washing over me like a benediction. Then, unpredictably, something would shift; the boundaries of self would waver, grow transparent, and balloon ominously; and the sounds of children and lawnmowers, insects and leaves, seemed to be both inside of me and out, throbbing, pulsing in a way that filled me with amorphous fear.  

For a few moments this sensation would hold me in its inhuman grasp; then something would shift again, and I would find that I wanted my mother.

My mother seemed to me to be a being not in the slightest like myself; I turned to her for reassurance not as one passenger turns to another on a ship when the seas begin to heave, but rather as though she were the ship itself. I had a sense of her being solidly constructed and reliable if not warm and soft, and she gave my life not comfort but at least a kind of geometry that I found comprehensible and reassuring.

This geometry was built of the qualities of a mind both logical and literal, in which reason, justice, and decency crystallized into a clear structure, a solid shelter from the storms of consciousness. If my mother’s mind was somewhat lacking in the evanescent beauties of imagination, the sweeping intoxications of love, and the mercurial leaps of humor, it was, at least, also completely lacking in underhandedness or malice. My mother, I think, did not adore me; she did not touch my soft hair or gaze on the curve of my cheek as though they were the sweet nectar of her life. I have no recollection of nestling in her lap or of being enfolded lovingly in her arms. But I have a photo of her stroking the family cat with her features reposed in an expression of perfect gentleness and respect, and I believe that a few times during my childhood she also stroked my head with something like that same gentleness.  

Was there something missing in this, some incalculable absence that can never be replaced or compensated for? The textbook Wild Mammals in Captivity: Principles & Techniques for Zoo Management explains that mammal species can be divided into four basic groups: there are nesters, like rabbits, mice, and other rodents, who leave their offspring for prolonged periods in nests prepared by the mother; hiders, like deer, elk, and the majority of ungulates, whose offspring wait in a hiding place of their own choosing; followers, such as “some ungulates and many aquatic mammals,” whose highly precocial offspring are able to follow the mother within minutes or hours of birth, and carriers –– a category which includes “most primates, anteaters, sloths, and some bats” (and humans, although they are not mentioned here, presumably because they are outside the scope of a text on zoo management) who “maintain constant physical contact with their infants during early development.”  

And then here is the key passage:


Familiarity with a particular species’ pattern of early behavioral development and parent-offspring proximity is essential to its successful management in captivity. Such familiarity allows the detection of deviations from the normal developmental pattern that may indicate problems. Followers that do not remain close to their mother, carrier infants that are found separated from their parents, and nester adults that constantly carry young are all cause for concern.”

So there you have it.  

How did it come to pass, you may ask, that by the second half of the twentieth century American women had been persuaded to raise their children more like rodents or ungulates than like the higher primates that we are? Well, having looked into this question in some depth, over the course of many sleepless nights, I can tell you it has been a long and twisted historical process, marked by massive dislocations, migrations, war, conquest, exile, enslavement, despotism, famine, and plague (not to mention five thousand years of Patriarchy, the scourge of White Supremacy, and the rise of Modern Science.) 

(I should point out here that “Modern Science” (capitalized) and “science” (with a small s) are not the same thing. "Small-s” science is patient, slow, observant, humble, endlessly fascinated with the intricacy of things, and always aware of its own limitations; “Modern Science” is arrogant, peremptory, simplistic, mechanical, and quick to claim authority, particularly over women, children, and other animals.)

And since, of course, if you hope to understand why anything arises or persists in the modern world, you must always remember to ask cui bono, or “who’s making money off of this?” –– I’m going to make the rather obvious point that if an entire human population, from the moment of birth onward, can be made to feel, in a way it cannot articulate, think about, or act coherently upon, that something is missing: that’s great for business!

If you look at a chart detailing the frequency of mother-young contact among captive ungulates, you would probably get an idea of the kind of variation in maternal behavior that existed in the Forest Glen Garden Apartments in the late nineteen fifties. Most of us children could only have dreamed of having a mother as affectionate as a pygmy hippopotamus (in contact with her infant 58% of the time) or even a wildebeest (20%) or a tapir (18%). I would like to assure you that my own mother was at the minimum somewhere between an oryx (12%) and a bongo (8%) while it was only other people’s mothers who were as aloof and unreachable as the Dorcas gazelle (4%) or the dik-dik (1%).  

But this might not be completely truthful.

At the bottom of page 369 of Wild Mammals in Captivity is Figure 29.1, a photograph of a gorilla cradling her sleeping infant in soft, heavy arms. The mother’s face is reposed in an expression of perfect peace and tenderness, the infant’s in an expression of perfect bliss. It is a madonna and child icon more potent, more sweet, more radiant with transcendent love, than any by da Vinci or Raphael, so deep in our DNA is this longing to be held, to be touched; to be encircled in warm arms (an antelope or a hyena, after all, when you stop to think about it, does not feel this the same way that you and I do.)  

When I look at Figure 29.1, and try to imagine how it feels to be that infant, cradled in warm arms, a warm heart beating next to mine, something stirs, moves, sighs, deep inside me. Something nameless, formless, like that time I scooped a handful of greenblack muck out of the bottom of a pond, and was idly letting it sieve through my fingers, thinking there was nothing there, and then saw something wriggling, something scrabbling urgently in the palm of my hand. Something not-quite-fish, not-quite-bug; a shape in the muck, a muck-being, moving, scrambling, forming itself.