Our friends said we both looked radiant.
Another nine months after that, on a cold, rainy day, we left the hospital, Azalea in my arms.
We carefully unfolded our daughter’s little body into her first-day-of-real-life floral outfit, which a friend had given us, and then buckled her into the gigantic car seat, following the instructions the local police had given me when I went to the precinct to learn how to do it right. I sat in the back seat, looking back and forth between Azalea’s sleepy face and the windshield. Is she hot? Is she cold? Are we going to crash?
Walking into our house on Fawnview, I noticed that it was a little musty from the rain and our absence. The cats looked up from their naps. And that was about all the world had to say. I felt like I was returning from a complete body and mind transfusion, barely recognizing a single thing about myself, and yet the walls just stood there, blankly holding up the roof, and the chairs relaxed their legs into the floor, passively collecting dust.
Azalea’s little eyes were fluttering open, and she moved her mouth around—hungry—so I had to find a place to sit in my old house/new life, and remove my melon-size breast from the ugliest bra in the world in order to nurse.
The underwhelming silence of reality’s non-greeting notwithstanding, the first few days of life with Azalea were lovely. People brought us food and wanted to stay and chat, but we shooed them away, too overwhelmed with nursing and diapering and keeping the cats away from the baby to socialize. Azalea slept in fits and starts in a Moses basket on our bed with us. We both carried her in matching slings and blasted Hawaiian music, which she showed us she liked by being quiet or, if she was really enthusiastic, by falling asleep. I sat down once an hour, at least, to nurse. I nursed like crazy, my tiny baby gulping milk from my breast. She looked at me. And I looked back. We looked at each other.
When Azalea was a tiny infant, it was fairly easy to respond to her every chirp with loving affection, even when I was exhausted. Thayer was home, for one thing, which meant that we shared chores, and we could tag-team the nights for diaper changes and for bringing our girl into the bed for nursing.
It was a new world, with our beautiful, perfect Azalea in it. While my approach to motherhood had been a bit detached, the moment I became pregnant, I was flooded with love and a need to protect the life inside me. And when we brought her home and I got to know all her constantly changing Azalea ways, I could feel a crazy mother love brewing in my heart. But soon enough, something else started to grow there, too—a dark seed of discontent, which would soon grow into despair.
I had been working as an adjunct at the nearby university but had taken six months off. Thayer was deep in his work as a hospice social worker, driving his tiny black Toyota from death to death. I was grateful to have the time off, and yet motherhood as an activity made no sense to me. I tried to get excited about cloth diapers and making baby food, but I found that my attention wandered. I went to a couple of mommy-baby gatherings but found the serious contemplation of nap timing and teething remedies painfully dull, and I left feeling lonelier than when I’d arrived, because I just wasn’t into the whole mommy thing. The days were long. I counted the hours and minutes until Thayer came home, and then I was furious at him for having abandoned me.
It’s like this: I was crazy for Azalea, the person. But loving my daughter and loving being a mother seemed like two entirely different things. I felt fatigued by being the one she looked to every time she blinked or cried or felt a pang of hunger. And I didn’t know what to do with her besides love her, which was not exactly something to do, or that could fill my days. So one morning I dressed her in one of the beautiful polka-dotted outfits a friend had given me