I tried to do what my mother said. As the baby slept in her bassinet, I lay down and closed my eyes, listening to the little sucking noises she made, her little sighs and coos. Trying to sleep was pointless. I sat up, leaned over the bassinet, and breathed in the baby’s milky, powdery scent. A little doll, my mother kept saying. And she did look just like a doll—those realistic ones they make with wrinkly faces that cry and gurgle at regular intervals, and even poop and pee. Dolls made to train little girls for a life of servitude.
“I will never buy you one of those ugly dolls,” I promised her.
I got up to change the pad—still so much blood. Was it possible to bleed for a whole year?
I felt heavy, dense, as if my bones were petrifying. I put my face up close to the bathroom mirror. Somehow, I’d aged two years in the weeks since her birth. Lines had appeared around my eyes overnight. I could see my old woman’s face, the roadmap of wrinkles I would one day have, right there, superimposed on my current face. This is what happens when you have a baby: you instantly grow old. No one tells you this. They keep it a secret so that you’ll perpetuate the species.
I lay down again and cried so hard, I grew sleepy. And then I became aware that I was falling asleep and instantly woke up. It didn’t matter anyway, because then the baby began to cry, and hers was not a cry that could be ignored.
I leaned over the bassinet as she screamed, fists flailing. I picked her up, rocked her, sang to her, offered her my breast. That didn’t go well, either. I was so tense, the milk wouldn’t let down. I could almost feel it curdling in my chest. She sucked and sucked, and when nothing came out, screamed in protest. I put her back on because that’s what the delivery nurse said to do: just keep putting her back on. “Never, never, never give up,” the nurse had chirped, and I wanted to ask her if she knew that was Winston Churchill’s pep talk to the British. If the British could survive the Blitz, surely I could suckle an infant—was that what she meant? Suck, suck, scream. Suck, suck, scream, until I wanted to scream myself. When the milk finally dropped, it felt like fire. That’s another thing they don’t tell you: breastfeeding is pain. Breastfeeding is torture. Worse, the baby didn’t seem to like my milk. The first few sips always made her lips pucker as if tasting something sour. It was the stress, I told myself. It was infecting the milk, making it rancid.
We went on like this for days, weeks. I don’t think I slept at all.
I thought I might die.
*
People can, you know. Die from lack of sleep. Once I read about a man in Italy who couldn’t enter REM sleep. Doctors pumped him full of powerful narcotics, hooked him up to machines, hypnotized him. Nothing worked. He began to lose his memories, his ability to walk, to speak, until one day he just died. When they opened his skull, his brain was full of holes.
My brain was becoming a colander. Strange, random images flitted behind my eyelids: books in languages I couldn’t read, a puddle of red wine on a white counter, aquarium fish on their endless loops around the tank. I would hear old rhymes and voices from my past: my mother, childhood friends—Mary, Mary, quite contrary… He loves me, he loves me not… Are you sure… I think I’ve made a mistake… I would prefer not to… Lucky, lucky, you are so lucky… lucky, ducky, plucky… Then I would snap back to the present. What? I would think. Was I going crazy?