For Crying out Loud

This will have to be quick and dirty this week. My mom’s going into surgery for cancer, I’ve got a bunch of students working on essays, my infant son is surviving a bout of indigestion, a couple of friends are getting married, and my Senior Project student was presenting last week and has turned in her final paper. None of this would matter but many of the above were crying at me one way or another to help them or I was crying at them. Now today’s writing is, as you’ve guessed, about crying. I’ve heard a great deal of it lately, including that an artist whose muse pulled her access and of a good friend who’s been drunk for about two years and is surprised that both his personal and professional life are suffering. It seems to be endemic of this point in Spring. Maybe the fine weather has us all up too late, but it seems like everyone’s crying these days.

Have you ever noticed that in movies if any director wants to indicate a condition of squalor in, say, a Third World country, a run-down apartment house in the ‘hood, family distress, or a really bad attack of the Blair Witch, the sound cue is a crying baby? Don Delillo in White Noise even included a section where J. A. K. Gladney’s son Wilder (pay attention to the names) cries for hours. The child just wails and keens, a sound that Gladney ( a professor of Hitler studies) says was “a sound so large and pure I could almost listen to it, try consciously to apprehend it, as one sets up a mental register in a concert hall or theater. He was not sniveling or blubbering. He was crying out, saying nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness. This was an ancient dirge all the more impressive for its resolute monotony. Ululation.” (78).

Babies crying is almost an archetypal metaphorical language for something being very, very wrong. It triggers in most adults a sense of concern, depression or at least unease so strong that when played a tape of a baby crying, most will misjudge the length of the session by at least 200%.

The last time I nearly cried was about 4:30 am on the second day of a 48-hour, every-two-hour feeding blitz that showed no signs of slowing or stopping. A friend of mine, a Mister H, suggested (mind you, after hours of imbibing) that I’d become boring because I was recounting the hours Connor awoke the night before. Okay, not the most exciting discourse, but Connor has been crying a lot lately – sometimes every two hours. And it sure as hell is of interest if you’re the one trying to figure out why. As Dan wrote, it seems the baby he had a growth spurt and then some stomach distress. (for a detailed account about these misadventures and vast quantities of poo, go to: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=59775710&blogID=256753693&Mytoken=EFAE5B16-F659-4931-A013F10A65E817BC43895339P .

That much sleep deprivation is enough to make you weep in frustration. I’m not a weeper. I get pissed off, cranky, and impossible, but I don’t cry. I’m like the razor-packing chick in Neuromancer whose tear ducts are rerouted for her permanent shades and she spits instead. I spit, fume, grumble, grouse, groan, yell and throw things but it’s all a form of crying. Poor Dan, who has taken over a good portion of the daily operation here, spent a week ducking and dodging before he read me the riot act and told me in no uncertain terms to settle down or do my own goddamn dishes. We all have our own way of expressing distress.

Tracy Hogg, in the ever-famous Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, has a whole chapter on crying and in a separate block writes “A CRYING BABY DOES NOT EQUAL A BAD PARENT.” This is a useful book with a section from page 80-87 on how to interpret infant body language that I think they ought to send home with you from the hospital. But that message, that a crying baby is not the end of the world or a symptom of bad parenting is invaluable. Babies cry. It’s what they do, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear.

So to all my friends, thank you for your understanding, and to those I’ve spit on, I apologize, it’s my bad temper, and it’s a crying shame.

Creature Feature

Dan and I were watching TV Sunday and Cold Mountain came on. Dan describes the scene in his blog: (http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=59775710&blogID=248403239&MyToken=5355b6e6-9d1f-4fc3-a0fe-ab97b53bc0e8)
where marauders are hassling Sara. In order to get her to tell them where she’s got food hidden, they take her sick baby out of the house, lay him on the snow and unwrap him, shivering and wailing, while she screams. It made me physically ill – like "sick-to-the-stomach, I-feel-hot" ill. Later there’s a lot of killing but neither that, nor the bloodbath of the next movie I watched (Underworld: Evolution), had me as physically affected as that scene. Now, Natalie Portman’s a great actress and it’s a great scene, but I suspect there’s more to my almost hurling than cinematography.

Two things thus occurred to me. Last week, I used the word “visceral,” to describe this new state of parenthood because it occurred to me how much of my life now has to do with bodily things. From the time those two itty bitty cells get together, this is a totally physical ride. Mother nature takes good care of it, too, honey. I was stoned as a Pfish fan for the first two or three months on happy hormones, alternately nibbling on ginger and wolfing down five-course meals, giggling and glowing and pretty happy about my barely swelling midrift. The intricate dance of cells turned those two into a lizardy thing from deep in human evolution, into an ET-looking thing, and slowly but surely added eyelids and lungs and all that useful stuff. I didn’t have to think about a thing, not even wrapping the little critter in that waxy coating to protect it from the waters in which it would live. The whole process goes on autopilot til one day the baby wakes up the ole bod and says “’kay, I’m done here!” The muscles begin to squeeze in upon themselves and low and behold, you have the beginning of the rest of your life laying on a slimy mess on a table, squalling and blinking. Of course, in my case, this process likely would have perfectly killed me and the baby had things gone on naturally. Don’t think I don’t think about that or about how weird it is that I’d have gladly given my life for this critter to have a shot at his.

The second is that I am well and truly caught by the short ribs for the rest of my life over this child. He will be my greatest strength and my Achilles heel.

Friends with children have tried to explain to me what it’s like, either as I was protesting that I didn’t want to give away my freedom or because I was scared that the time conflicts of being a career mom would grind the last bit of joy out of my bones. They said things that made me think of pod people in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” – “just wait, you’ll understand.” Shit, no, I didn’t want to “just wait” to understand why you have a kid! I wasn’t going in drinking the Kool Aid, thinking it’d all be all right once the oxytocin takes effect. Bollocks! If I was going to have kids, it would be when my intellect said it was a good idea, not because some raging hormone eased my stress over being hamstrung like a Spring Turkey or dosed with Happy Mommy Hormones like a Stepford Wife.

So let’s see if I can explain what this is, having chosen with eyes wide open to purposefully put myself at an economic disadvantage, surrender my body to a biology that doesn’t give a damn about higher education, and walk into a new social standing that has almost no physical freedom. Parenthood has no real world benefit: it’s expensive, noisy, time-consuming, cuts into your drinking schedule, alienates your friends, makes you fight with your parents over stupid stuff, screws up your favorite toys (like Jon Stewart says when your baby puts fecal matter in your DVD player), ruins your sex life and generally lays waste to your cool factor. Still, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

It will probably sound cheesy or “drink-the-koolaid-ish” but having a child is like finding out that chocolate cake is really good for you, or that world peace is possible, that we’re not alone in the universe and there are really little green men and they do come in peace. It’s like something you’ve wanted for a very long time that you didn’t know you needed finally coming true. And you love it with your very bones. And it’s right.

That’s all I got. Think I’ll go play with the boy, watch his eyes and seek the divine.