BABY

friday dispatch: on infinite desire and finite me

It is midnight. Soft wailing and cries of “Mommy …” bleed through the walls of our dark house and catalyze an electric surge through my body. My lizard brain is way ahead of my eyes and limbs and prefrontal cortex on this one as a primal urge to make the crying stop, now pulls me out of bed and guides me down the hall. A particular child of mine has been refusing to had difficulty sleeping lately. I had hoped this was the night for us to finally get some much-needed shut eye. Maybe tomorrow night.

I hold, I rock, I pat, I sing. She writhes and protests, her cries intensifying. My lower back aches from lifting and carrying this 30-pound toddler for the past hour. Needless to say, I believe my lower abs have officially exited the chat.

I offer snacks. I play music. “I want baby,” she moans.

In case you’re thinking at this point that “I want baby” is a simple request, I assure you it isn’t. For weeks now, my husband and I have been trying to decipher, decode, deconstruct, and demystify whatever specific, historically-bound meaning of the word “baby” lies behind our daughter’s pleas—is it a doll? a stuffed animal? a song? does she want to be held like a baby? do we have any books in this house about babies?! FOR GOD’S SAKE, WHAT IS “BABY?!”—but to no avail.

1:30 a.m. I am getting tired, really tired. My legs and arms are fatigued now from the physical effort of trying to soothe my daughter, and my head throbs. I want to cry but literally can’t, it would require too much energy at this point, so I try to disassociate instead but the thoughts keep coming: Why is this happening? What’s wrong with her? What’s wrong with ME? Stop, please, just stop crying! STOP! Jesus, what do I do? I hurl a rejected graham cracker across the living room and slam my fist angrily into a throw pillow.

“I want baby …”

I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach as despairing helplessness overwhelms me. It is now 2:00 a.m. I give up and turn on Bear and the Big Blue House, slumping into an uneasy and uncomfortable sleep on the too-small-for-both-of-us loveseat. How many episodes did she watch before I “woke up” and put her back in her bed (something I don’t even remember doing)? I’ll never know.

In the morning, I will wonder if I failed by phoning it in and throwing on the television. Maybe I shot myself in the foot, blasting my toddler’s retinas with blue light in the depth of night. But it’s the only thing pretty much guaranteed to work, I will think to myself. What the hell else am I supposed to do? Let her scream until I get a friendly visit from CPS? But actually, I know it really doesn’t matter. My mom still tells the story about how she would flip on the Chia Pet infomercial with me during those godforsaken hours of the night/morning—and hey, look at me, I turned out fine. No. issues. whatsoever. At least, none I can trace directly to watching too many Chia Pets time-lapses.

No, it’s not about the TV. It’s also not about the noise, or the loss of sleep, or my irritation at the Man Snores droning on from the other side of my bedroom door, or even my fear that the neighbors will hear all the crying and think God, what is she doing to that kid? It’s not about my daughter at all, despite my concupiscent instinct to blame her for keeping me up all night. Beneath all of that is something else: a desire of my own, desperate and nagging, to find “baby” (whatever “baby” is) and give it to my child, this luminous creature in my arms who wants “baby” so much. In short, to be capable of meeting her needs. And slamming head-first into the iron law of my own physicality—my arms can’t hold you anymore, my back can’t support your weight anymore, my eyes can’t stay open anymore, my brain can’t keep my emotions in check anymore, it’s two in the morning and I just can’t do it anymore—that is much harder to accept than the fact that I’m going to be tired and cranky at work tomorrow.

Caryll Houselander calls it “the humiliation of being oneself.” I must say, humiliation feels like a good word for it: a mother who can’t even stay awake and lock in enough to help her baby stop crying? What a weak piece of shit you are, madam. Yet, though I accuse myself for a hundred different failures, even this is a defense against the painful shock of the bare truth that my goodness and generosity have an impenetrable outer edge, a solid black line separating me from this bottomless need, radiating like white heat from the squirming, hollering imago dei on my lap.

Käthe Kollwitz, Municipal Shelter

“You are a thirst in the flesh, an incarnated thirst,” writes Thomas Dubay. A sentence that has clung to me like wet linen since I first read it all those years ago. “You are”—I am—a thirst in the flesh. An embodied desire. A being already in motion, an arrow already drawn back on the bow, movement embedded into life. A living want. A living need. And so is she. Herein lies the paradox of every human soul: I am infinite, and yet tragically bounded; unlimited in my desire and my capacity to receive love, sclerotic and cramped in my capacity to give it. My child gropes wildly, needing all, and I stiffen in self-absorbed impotence. Miserable one that I am … Who will deliver me from this body of death?

I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares, writes the Bride in the Song of Songs,

"I will seek him whom my soul loves.”
    I sought him, but found him not.
The watchmen found me,
    as they went about in the city.
“Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”

In the streets and the squares of the our own homes, mother and child meet. Both needing, both seeking, neither finding. We rise from our beds to wrestle with God in each others’ arms and night after night are bested by Him; I am her watchman, and she is mine. We both inquire—with tears and kicks and scratches and muttered curses—after the Lover who alone gives rest … and sigh.

Maybe tomorrow night.

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