tires him out. And he falls asleep. And you can’t bring yourself to rouse him. But then when he wakes up he’s too frantic to nurse right.”
“Yes!” Relief floods Kristin’s face and she looks at me as if I’m psychic. This lasts for about a second until the relief is replaced by a look of puzzled disappointment that is very familiar to me as Kristin realizes that she might not be the first woman on earth to nurse a child.
“Okay, remember what I taught you? About putting the two pieces of the puzzle together?” If we were in one of the hospitals where I consult right after delivery, I could touch her and demonstrate what I am talking about. Instead, using my own breast, I have to mime the lesson I gave her when she attended one of my classes, about pulling Todd and her breast together at the same time. “Remember, Todd has no neck muscles. You have to shove and hold. Keep the pieces together.”
“I thought I was doing that.”
My cell phone starts playing “Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA. Dori put the song on as the ringtone because I started sobbing halfway through Mamma Mia when Meryl Streep was singing to her bride-to-be daughter about letting her childhood slip away. Maybe it was because of the thermos of margaritas Dori and I had sneaked into the afternoon matinee, but I lost it when Meryl, wondering what had happened to all the adventures she’d planned to have with her daughter, answered herself, “Well, some of that we did, but most we didn’t.”
As the song plays on my phone, I tell Kristin, “I’ve got to get this. Work on Todd getting a good latch. Just shove that mommy muffin as far as you can into his little mouth, okay? You have my number. Call me if things don’t improve.” I make myself turn away even though I see another fifteen minutes of questions in Kristin’s eyes. The one thing that can pull me away from being an endless source of reassurance to my moms needing help with their children is my own child needing help.
Miraculously, I catch the call in time to answer, “Hey, punkin.”
“Ee-yeah?” my daughter responds in the tone that makes her sound like an annoyed drug addict, both testy-hostile and nodding out. It is a tone she uses only with me.
“What’s up.” She can’t even summon the energy to make it a question.
Instead of shrieking, What do you mean, “What’s up”?! What have I been screaming at you about? What have we been waiting for for the past sixteen years!, I bank the anger that flares up at her cavalier response and invoke my inner Zen Mama.
Zen Mama is made of Teflon. Delayed-adolescence annoyance and college jitters expressed as surly crabbiness slide right off Zen Mama. Zen Mama understands that her only child’s extreme bitchiness is a necessary and natural part of the separation process. Because Zen Mama has been reminded repeatedly for the past two weeks that her child is one day away from being eighteen, or “legal age,” as said child prefers to call it, and can vote, drink in certain states, be drafted if she were a boy, sign a binding contract, and run her own life, Zen Mama sounds like Hal the robot as she repeats a version of the bulletin that she has been hammering into her daughter every day for the entire summer: “Aubrey, you can’t put me off another minute. I’ve already had to get two extensions from the university, and now tomorrow is the absolute last day we can collect the money from the trust fund to pay for your first year’s tuition without having to pay a huge late penalty.”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
It helps me to pretend that my only offspring has either just landed on Earth from a distant planet or has suffered a head injury. “ ‘That’? That, Aubrey, is your college money. That is your education and ticket out of here. We have been waiting for this day most of your life.”
“Well, you have.”
“I have? What does that mean?”
“Uh, I really gotta go. Tyler needs me to set up the coffee for tomorrow.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, shift into my highest gear of über–Zen-Mamadom, and say, “Aubrey, I sense some reluctance on your part about going to college. Sweetie, if you’re not ready, you know, we talked about gap-year options. Gap years are getting really popular. You can get credit for working on an organic