I’ve been kind of obsessed lately with the videos everyone has been making for the It Gets Better project. Tim Gunn, Dan Savage, Sassy Gay Friend; everyone who’s anyone who’s gay has made one. I can’t speak to what it’s like for gay teens, not ever having been one, but I still love the sentiment behind the videos.
I think the concept could be expanded, too. There are many times in my life when I could’ve used people telling me that it gets better: after my brother’s death and my parents’ divorce, all through junior high, after the first time a blue-eyed boy broke my heart –– and perhaps especially after my daughter was first born.
To really understand why the first few months –– hell, the first year –– of Ruby’s life were so hard on me, I think you have to understand the pregnancy. One of my favorite parts of Confederacy of Dunces is Ignatius’ recounting of his “horrifying” Scenicruiser bus trip to Baton Rouge –– because I think that everyone has his or her own Scenicruiser story to tell, that story of woe heaped upon woe that they get some sick thrill out of reliving again and again. For me, my Scenicruiser story is my pregnancy. I can see people’s eyes start to glaze as I launch into the litany of complaints: the miscarriage at 14 weeks followed by an immediate pregnancy with hyperemesis and hypothyroidism and heparin injections and growth restriction and Down syndrome markers and anemia and breech presentation and pre-term labor and my Rh status and on and on and on.
At any rate, it was not an easy pregnancy, and as a coping mechanism, I guess, all I focused on was getting her here, alive and healthy. All of my mental energy went into visualizing a happy end to my pregnancy. And –– thank God, thank God –– she arrived right on time, alive and healthy and perfect, and they put her in my arms, and I thought, “OK, that’s done. Now I can relax.”
Hahahahaha. Right. I clearly wasn’t looking at the big picture. I had not budgeted my mental stores very well, and so I was depleted of emotional strength just when I needed it most. “Only in the world of high-risk pregnancy,” my perinatologist told me later, “do you run a marathon only to be told you have to climb Everest.”
So yeah, suddenly I was trying to parent a newborn with reflux and a milk allergy, and I was completely mentally exhausted on top of the physical exhaustion that accompanies having a tiny baby.
I have a very clear memory of Ruby’s early infancy: She was 3 weeks old. It was the middle of January in Missouri. It was 17 degrees outside. I had to drive to the grocery store. I bundled us both up. I walked outside, the cold burning my nose and ears and fingers. I locked Ruby’s car seat into position in the backseat and then shut the passenger side door. She had been crying almost nonstop since 6 a.m.; it was close to noon, as warm as it was going to get, with only a few more hours of thin wintery sunlight left in the day. As I walked around the car to get into the driver’s seat, I took my time because it was the first silence I’d had in hours. She was still crying, but outside of the car, I could barely hear her. “This sucks,” I thought. “Why the hell was I so eager to have this baby? What was I thinking? I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve ruined my life.”
I truly thought at that moment that everyone who had told me how rewarding parenting was was full of shit. I was convinced it was all some sort of huge conspiracy to make everyone on earth miserable. (I was also hormonal and had slept maybe five hours in the previous two days.) I don’t think I had postpartum depression; even then, I loved Ruby, and I certainly had no thoughts of harming her or myself. I think the reality was just depressing. I really didn’t like parenting a newborn in the dead of winter in small-town Missouri, and I had never seen a newborn grow into a person before –– I was, for all intents and purposes, an only child, and all of my cousins were much older. I needed someone to tell me that it gets better.
Because guess what. It gets better. It gets great.
Now, at almost 4, Ruby is one of my very favorite people. She is smart and funny and kind. She’s a fabulous conversationalist. (In fact, she’s such a good conversationalist that I sometimes forget she’s 3: The other day, she used some word I couldn’t decipher, and without thinking, I said, “Wait, what? How do you spell that?” And she hesitated for a split second and then said, “R-U-B-Y,” because that is the only word she can confidently spell, and I suddenly remembered I was talking to someone who can’t read yet.)
The other night, she and I sat in the gorgeous autumn twilight at the Harrison Avenue Marketplace eating crepes. Mine was bacon, cheddar and tomato; hers was Nutella and banana. Both were delicious, and we were passing them back and forth, and she kept “toasting” me with her crepe and yelling, “Crepe cheers!” When our crepes were done, she climbed up on my lap and hugged me and told me she loved me. In almost every way, that moment was opposite that freezing day in January.
So parents of newborns: It is not a conspiracy. You haven’t ruined your lives. It really does get better.
Who would you like to tell that it gets better?