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Bringing up baby
How parenthood turns you into the sort of person you used to love to hate
BY SUSAN RYAN-VOLLMAR

MY PARTNER, LINDA, tells me that the birth of our daughter, Helen, has turned me into a better person. I’m patient. I clean up after myself. I don’t protest when she puts Pride and Prejudice in the VCR. I slow down at yellow lights.

I’m not a better person. Each of these changes can be attributed to sleep deprivation — a temporary (I pray) condition of new parenthood. I slow down at yellow lights, for instance, because I am so consistently tired, it’s as if I am going through life drunk. Not pleasantly drunk, but I-should-have-stopped-two-drinks-ago drunk. And I’m afraid of getting in a car accident.

I don’t see how this makes me a better person. But I do see how it has turned me into the sort of person I previously loved to hate. Pre-Helen, when I got trapped behind a minivan traveling at the speed limit on city streets, I would go nuts. Once I was actually pulled over by a Cambridge motorcycle cop who’d witnessed me careen wildly around one of those goddamn idiots on Mass Ave, in Cambridge, just outside of Porter Square. The only reason I didn’t get a ticket is because I confessed to the officer that I’d been stuck behind the van since Teele Square, in Somerville, and that all I was trying to do was get to work before it was time to come home. The cop actually sympathized with me and let me go without a ticket. Now I’m that driver. Except I’m in a 1989 Nissan Sentra instead of a late-model Honda Odyssey.

FOUR MONTHS AGO, I spoke English. Now, I speak in the language of goo-goo. My statements all sound like questions? I emphasize random words in my sentences. I repeat myself. I repeat Linda. I mimic Helen’s squeals and talk them back to her as if they were real words.

I used to marvel at the stupidity of mothers who spoke this way to their babies. You want your kid to learn to talk, I’d think. Then stop making shit up.

Now I’m doing it. And I can’t stop myself.

SOMEONE I KNOW — okay, she’s my sister — had two cats, Toot and Amos, that she doted on before her daughter Amelia was born. Now she has one cat. That’s not because the other cat died. Well, maybe it did. The point is she doesn’t know. When my sister moved back to Boston from San Francisco, Amos was prowling the neighborhood when it was time to get packed into his travel cage and get in the moving truck. So she left him behind. I was so shocked by this that I actually discussed with Linda the possibility that my sister had some kind of personality disorder. I mean, how could leave your cat — your cat! — behind like that?

Now I know.

Before Helen came, I thought I loved my dog. I’ve given her about 57 nicknames. She weighs 86 pounds, and after she had surgery to repair her ACL ligament, I carried her up and down three flights of stairs for weeks, without complaint, when she needed to go outside. In 12 years, Linda and I have taken exactly one vacation without Hocus. And she would have come with us on that one, but after researching the possibilities, we learned that if we flew her to Ireland she would have had to spend the entire vacation in quarantine.

When we brought Helen home from the hospital, Hocus greeted us at the door. I’m ashamed to admit this now, but as Hocus put her snout up to Helen’s face, my exact words, which I can’t remember, contained the utterances " fuck " and " it’s the big needle for you. "

HELEN HAS ECZEMA. Not a little-rash-on-her-elbow eczema, but full-blown, her-head-looks-like-it’s-on-fire eczema. Linda and I have already spent hundreds of dollars on skin-care products in search of something strong enough to ease her itching without stunting her growth. Last weekend, during a family cookout, I waved one of our purchases — a $20 bottle of lotion made from hemp seeds, by a company called Earthworm Herbals — in front of my sister-in-law, assuring her it would cure her five-month-old daughter’s cradle cap.

I pulled the bottle from Helen’s diaper bag — a Vera Bradley Villager.

The bag was a gift Linda and I received at our baby shower.

The shower was catered.

We took three hours to open all the gifts.

There were lots of Volvos and minivans parked outside.

THE BABY SHOWER gave me my first glimpse of the transformation to come. I got another one a few days before Helen was born. She was big — my doctor estimated she’d be about nine pounds (at birth, she actually weighed 10 pounds, two ounces — no, that’s not a typo) — and I wasn’t showing any signs of going into labor. During a routine fetal-monitoring test, two heart decelerations were detected. Helen, apparently, was sitting on her umbilical cord, which is something most babies do. But most babies don’t weigh 10 pounds, which, as it happens, is just enough heft to slow down, if not cut off altogether, the supply of blood coming through the cord.

" Keep track of the baby’s movements, " my doctor advised. Telling someone who’s pregnant to keep track of her baby’s movements is a little bit like telling someone with high cholesterol to track the flow of blood through his or her heart. It’s impossible to do. You start imagining things. You lose track. You eat five chocolate-chip cookies and drink a tall glass of Coke real fast just to get things moving. You make yourself crazy.

My mother dropped over for a visit the evening I was given the directive to keep track of Helen’s movements. I was completely out of my mind. I told my mother that if her love for me was a mere fraction of what I already felt for this little (well, big) baby — a being that I’d yet to meet — then I was truly sorry for all the mean things I’d said and done to her over the years.

It was a Hallmark moment. I thought my mother would be moved. Instead, she cackled and hooted, " Well, you should be! " Followed by more wild cackling. At the time, I didn’t understand her reaction. But I get it now.

My mother already knew what I’m only now discovering: I’m toast. It’s what happens when you have a kid. And my mother, of course, is enjoying my torment in a maternal-schadenfreude kind of way. Which I guess is funny. But I would have found this entire story — difficult daughter apologizing to mother on the eve of her own daughter’s birth — absolutely intolerable pre-Helen. But what do you know? I’m living it now.

Susan Ryan-Vollmar can be reached at svollmar[a]phx.com

Issue Date: May 23 - 30, 2002
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