First Slump

For the last six days a shattering cough has been sending shrapnel into the walls of my skull. My eyes burn, my throat has white spots, and Fevers vie with Chills in a vicious turf war for my interior thermostat. A touch of the old Mongolian Death Flu, it seems, and about time, too: five weeks on five hours a night has finally caught up. But why now, precisely, on the heels of the in-laws? It is as if in their wake they had left a power vacuum, and all my agents of resistance, suddenly underemployed, had scattered to the four winds, abandoning the capital to the barbarian hoards.

These are the Dog Days of parenthood, the end of the Rush, the beginning of the Slog. Everyone has been sick. Benjamin continues to wheeze and splutter in his sleep, with small shrieks rising like arias above a symphony of bleats, snores, groans, and gaspings, always resolving to that falling down gutter drunk rasp hack rattle breath that has become his signature. His breathing is a Soundman's sample box: it includes breaking glass, surf slapping against a reef, fists against jawbones, flesh against blacktop. And on the rare occassions he isn't busy running through his sound effects, he gets vertigo, hands shooting into the air, eyes suddenly wide and fingers stiff and spread, the gesture of a man falling off a cliff backwards, or a vampire taking virgin blood: the Moro reflex. Does it help that Wikipedia assures me that the Moro phenomenon is apparently the only unlearned fear in human newborns, and that "its absence indicates a profound disorder of the motor system?" Fact: the boy is afraid. The boy is afraid, and I'm sick, and Catalina is tired, and our cats are neglected, and our friends are bored, and the neighbor is exhausted from listening to diaper changes and everyone that was going to congratulate us on our child has already done so, and now winter's coming and it will be six irredeemable months of gray slush until finally, sometime mid-may, we can finally think about going outdoors again, at which point Benjamin will be too big to carry and I'll need to wait until he can carry a pack before I even think about hiking again.

Worry is something I like to consider containable, if not totally extinguishable. If by some motherly afflatus you think that bilirubin comes heralded by a diaper demon in greasy green curds, well, don't worry, just find out: talk to the doctor, look online. To my surprise, turns out that the Worry problem is promulgated as much by too much information as by too little. Our pediatrician takes calls seven days a week, we have massively knowledgeable friends to call on (some of them doctors), we have access to all the information on the web, we are awash in technical books on Babies and their Multifarious Travails. But just as a hypochondriac will subject the Merck Manual to the most liberal and creative exegesis to convince himself with near certainty that he suffers half a dozen tropical ailments, in spite of the fact that he's never left the continental United States, so the new mother will tax the powers of her creative imagination in weaving a web of potential illness around the natural, statistical variations in her baby's functioning. Dr. Sears says "do no worry if your baby has the occasional green diaper." Hey, did you see that green diaper today? Think we should call the pediatrician? Further questioning reveals no reason, formal or anecdotal, to suspect that the green diaper is any cause for alarm, nor that the boy has had more than one, nor that there is any sign that the boy is feeling bad. Still.... It's those "Still..."'s that get you, the lingering suspicion that you're missing something. This is exactly the kind of suspicion that the academic is trained to cultivate, is rewarded and published for cultivating: we are professionally conditioned to detect obscure and unfathomable patterns amid reams of dense information (novels and criticism, on the one side, math texts and journals, on the other.) Though in context this skill set has its points, it happens to coincide with a clinical definition of paranoia: the finding of patterns in places no patterns exist, the seeing of structure in the void.

So that's where things lie this week. Benjamin is fine. Monstrous, but fine, a blooming, melon-cheeked boy with powerful lungs, intelligent eyes, and a whole suite of coos and clucks he breaks out in his moments of 'quite attentiveness' (baby book term.) He slays church ladies by the dozen. Catalina is fine. Tired, and a little paranoid, but doing well, heroically managing a few pages of Jameson and the New Marxism between diaper changes, sneaking out to poetry readings, catching Shakespeare in the park, tutoring ESL, a beaming, radiant woman in the full bloom of first motherhood. Even Carl the Grouch is fine, a little grimy, perhaps, in need of a shave and haircut, but basically, in spite of his cough and his deadlines and his ennui, a man who feels lucky to be where he is, a lumbering oaf a dad who secretly loves the chance to coo and glooble with his child. This Slump isn't so bad. It's just a trough between crests, a topological corollary to the fact that those crests exist at all; an artifact of being able to ride those long rollers with style and pleasure. And this is how we're taking them, sputtering, mouths full of salt water, Need whipping the surf, the Steady State looming like a reef, as we cruise from novelty to familiarity and watch adrenalin dovetail with endurance. Grouchy as fishwives. Tough as urchins. Happy as clams.