Always the Last to Know Page 12

  I hoped the baby would be a boy, because then I wouldn’t have to compare him to Juliet. His name would be Nathaniel, I thought, after one of his ancestors who’d fought for the Union and died in the Civil War. A fine New England name. Nathaniel Robert Frost. Though the pregnancy was a shock, I loved the baby as it wriggled and writhed in me. It was the unknown that had me worried.

  And God, I was tired. I wasn’t quite forty, but I felt eighty. I’d nod off as I tried to read the paper, yawned constantly. My back hurt as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat, and my ankles were swollen. I had pregnancy-induced hypertension, and my cheeks were flushed and hot all the time. I couldn’t sleep, and I had heartburn so horrible I had to keep a huge vat of antacids with me at all times. Even at night.

  I went into labor early on a Tuesday morning. It was brutal. Maybe because I was older, but I felt like I actually might die. Hours and hours of contractions, fiery knives of pain shooting down my legs, my back clenching and spasming. I vomited and had diarrhea, and my throat burned with bile. How could I survive this? All through that day into the night, into the next morning, I suffered and labored and endured. With every contraction, I felt desperate, trying to claw my way away from the wrenching, twisting pain. Was this how my own mother had felt with cancer? How could she have endured it?

  After fifty-four hours of labor and no progress, only five centimeters dilated, they finally decided to take the baby via C-section because “mother failed to progress.”

  As always, my fault.

  “The worst of both worlds,” the nurse chuckled. I was too exhausted to answer. They took me to the operating room and stabbed my back with a needle that felt as big as a chopstick and then, when the epidural had taken effect, sliced me open.

  It hurt. They say you’ll feel nothing, and they lie. As the doctors yanked and pulled, elbows-deep in my body, tears slipped into my hair. Those were my insides they were jerking around! How would the baby be healthy after such a battle? How could I love the little thing when all I felt was failure and exhaustion, literally torn apart by the savagery of childbirth?

  “It’s a girl!” Dr. Haines said, holding her up for a glimpse. I saw a huge, whitish baby with dark hair before they whisked her off.

  “Is she all right?” I asked.

  “Looks perfect to me!” said the jolly nurse.

  John was crying with joy. “Another girl!” he said. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy.”

  “Nine pounds, nine ounces! She’s a bruiser! Apgars are all nines, too. Guess we know what your lucky number is, guys!”

  Another daughter. I’d been so sure it was a boy. I closed my eyes, so wrung out that I started to fall asleep.

  “Barb, look! Our little girl! Isn’t she beautiful?”

  I forced my eyes open.

  She wasn’t very pretty, her head tubular from all that time stuck in the birth canal. She seemed giant compared to how I remembered Juliet, who’d been seven pounds even. The baby’s eyelids were bruised and her face looked swollen. Her little rosebud mouth moved, and she opened her eyes.

  I loved her. Oh, thank God, I loved her.

  “Hello, little one,” I whispered. John kissed her forehead, and put her face against mine, and the softness of her cheek was so beautiful. “Hello, sweetheart.”

  Then she started to cry. She started to scream. I had to turn my head away, because she was right against my ear.

  “Sounds perfect!” said the irritatingly cheerful nurse.

  It was startling that a newborn could make that much noise. “There, there, little one,” John said, holding her close, and just like that, the baby stopped crying.

  “Aw. She loves her daddy,” said Dr. Haines. “Barb, I’m stitching you up, but you can snuggle her in a few minutes, okay?”

  John was crooning to the baby, telling her she was beautiful, Daddy’s little angel, and I fell into a deep, black sleep, unable to wake up for her first two feedings.

  Having a C-section is much worse than giving birth the other way. With every move, it felt as if my insides were going to spill out onto the floor. Flashes of white-hot pain seared through my abdomen. When they made me get out of bed, I fainted. They made me pedal my feet to avoid blood clots, but I got one anyway, which they said was because I didn’t get out of bed soon enough (ignoring the fact that unconscious people do have trouble on that front). My leg throbbed and burned. I couldn’t hold the baby by myself for the first two days, because I was too weak. All I wanted to do was sleep, but they kept waking me up to feed her. I had to have a pillow over my stomach to protect my incision.

  She didn’t want to nurse. She screamed and screamed, her body shaking with rage as I tried to offer my breast again and again. They brought in a special nurse who was an expert, and she wrestled the baby close to me. When she latched on, I gasped in pain. My entire body was drenched in sweat as my sutured uterus contracted.

  Juliet came to the hospital to meet her new sister. That was the bright spot of my six days there. I got mastitis, the cure for which was nursing more. My incision got more sore, not less, but I couldn’t take any effective pain medications because I was nursing. My nipples started to bleed. That was the last straw. She could be bottle-fed. It was fine.

  John picked her name. Sadie. Like a factory worker in World War II. He suggested Barbara as a middle name, to which I said, “Don’t curse her with that.” I know it was meant to be a compliment. But honestly. Sadie Barbara Frost? How would that look on a diploma?

  And so her middle name was Ruth, after his grandmother. It was fine. It would grow on me, hopefully. I didn’t have any other suggestions.

  Looking back, I realize I had postpartum depression. In those first few months, however, I just thought I was a failure.

  When she was asleep, I loved her. When she was awake, it soon became clear that she didn’t prefer me. She wanted John, and he took a partial leave so he could work from home to help. When Juliet was born, he’d taken all of two days off.

  But for Sadie, he was here, and it was helpful. He’d make me lunch and feed the baby, walk the floor with her, take her for a ride or put her in the carriage and tell me to rest and bounce back.

  I didn’t bounce back.

  I was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. The surgery and its complications took a lot out of me, and I just didn’t bond with the baby the way I wanted to. The way I had with Juliet. I had a coughing spell a few days after I came home and tore my stitches, so that fun event had to be repeated.

  I started to resent Sadie, the way she wouldn’t be comforted by me, the exhaustion from the moment I woke up, dreading the long day ahead. When John went back to work full-time, I held Sadie as she cried and fussed—colic, teething, always something—and I’d look at the clock and count the minutes until Juliet would get off the school bus. Then I’d feel that love. I’d find enough energy to make dinner and pretend I was fine, because when my older daughter was around, I did feel so much better, gosh, yes.

  I waited for my second-born to love me the way Juliet had. She didn’t. She didn’t hate me, of course not, but we just didn’t have that special connection. Sometimes I’d see her looking at me, and I swore she knew. What was it about me that she sensed? That I was a fake? That I hadn’t wanted her as much as I’d wanted Juliet? Was I a terrible mother?

  During this same time, Juliet and I became closer than ever. Whether she knew it or not, I think she saved me. The sweet girl would bring me a cup of tea without asking if I wanted one, or she’d pick me flowers from the garden, knowing I was too tired to do it myself. That Mother’s Day, she gave me a card that said, “After intensive research and based on my own experiences, this fact cannot be denied: you are the best mother in the history of the world.” That was also the day Sadie cried and cried; she was teething, so I rubbed her gums, and she bit down hard, slicing my finger with her razor blade of a new tooth. My finger bled a shock
ing amount, and it throbbed for the rest of the day.

  That about summed things up. I kept trying to get my second-born to love me, and everything I did was wrong, whereas my first daughter continued to adore and like me. I tried. I really did. You can’t compare your children, all the authorities said, and I tried not to. I wanted to make room for Sadie. I tried to. But John was her favorite, and my poor body was ravaged by the pregnancy and birth. While I had bounced back in weeks after Juliet, it took nearly a year before my incision stopped hurting, before I could pee normally again.

  Decades later, when postpartum depression came into the social conversation, I recognized that I’d had it with Sadie. It didn’t solve anything, but it was good to know. But once again, something in me had been wrong. Always, always my fault.

  As Sadie grew, our relationship didn’t change much. If she woke from a nightmare, she called out for Daddy, not Mommy. She wanted him to push her on the swing, him to take her to the library on Saturdays, him to make her macaroni and cheese. (They both thought Kraft was better than my homemade version, which I found ridiculous. If there’s one thing a Minnesotan knows, it’s how to make a baked dish with noodles in it, thank you.)

  Juliet started high school when Sadie was two, and the dreaded countdown began for the time she would leave me. Every minute of those four years with her was precious, every drive, every morning when I made her breakfast, every weekend, every little moment we had together. Sadie would go to bed at seven or seven thirty—the earlier the better, as far as I was concerned. I let John read to her at night, telling myself it was only fair, since he’d missed out on those times with Juliet. It also gave me more time with Juliet, who told me about her classmates, her papers, which teachers were better, who was going to the spring dance.

  When she was at school, I’d try to play with Sadie, but neither of our hearts were in it. If I made her a fort, she’d want to be in it alone. She told me hide-and-seek was only fun with Daddy and “Jules.” She didn’t like to bake or knit or pick flowers. If I drew with her, she was lost in her own little world. I’d ask her what she thought of my picture, and she’d say, “It’s nice. Will you make lunch now?”

  But Juliet never let me down, was never sullen, didn’t have sex as a teenager, managed to have a nice group of friends without too much drama. She went to Harvard, and I sobbed all the way back from Cambridge. After that, I visited her once a month, trying not to let on that I needed those visits, that they sustained me. At college, she’d introduce me all around, and she was proud of me. Of me. “This is my awesome mother,” she’d say, putting her arm around me and resting her head on my shoulder. “My best friend.” We’d go shopping and have lunch and stroll around campus, hand in hand. Yes. We still held hands. Sadie only let me hold hers if we were crossing a street, and only because I insisted.

  Juliet was so . . . kind. So generous. I was more grateful than I could put into words. Meanwhile, Sadie didn’t seem to notice me, didn’t take my advice. I loved my second child, but she was her father’s girl, lost in her head, dreamy, unaware of her surroundings, sloppy, heedless of my requests to put her dirty laundry in the basket or bring her plate to the counter. I tried to engage, to feel as close, but she wasn’t interested. When I asked if she wanted me to read her a story, she’d say no, she could read herself, though she let John read The Lord of the Rings to her out loud, a story that so bored me, I couldn’t stay in the room.

  I told myself not to mind. I had Juliet, after all. Juliet who, after graduating with honors from Harvard, chose Yale to get her degree in architecture. She asked if I’d come down for lunch every Wednesday. She met Oliver, who was the loveliest young man in the world. A month after they graduated—Oliver from the School of Engineering, Juliet once again with honors—Oliver drove up from New York City to Stoningham and asked me if he could have my blessing to marry my girl. Me. Not John. Of course I said yes, and he asked me what kind of ring I thought Juliet would like. I pointed him in the right direction, and when she called me the next week, we cried with joy together. (And she loved the ring.)

  Oliver started calling me Mum in a way that made me feel flushed and proud. His mother was wonderful, and when she visited to talk about the wedding, we got along so well! Oliver was an only child, and Helen adored Juliet (as she should have), and asked to pay for half the wedding so it could be as extravagant as possible.

  “I adore them together, don’t you?” she asked, and we bonded over our love of our offspring.

  Juliet and I spent the most wonderful year talking about colors and flowers, church readings and dresses, without a single cross word or bridezilla moment. We went to New York to pick out her dress, just the two of us, because that was how she wanted it, and oh, yes, I cried when she came out, smiling . . . beaming, really. It seemed that just yesterday, we’d been playing in her room, or I was wrapping her up in a big towel after her bath, breathing in the smell of her clean skin, making her laugh.

  My beautiful little girl.

  Sadie was eleven when Juliet and Oliver got married, a tomboy with a sketchbook who said she didn’t want to be a junior bridesmaid, “whatever that was.” It was fine. It was better, really, without a sullen tween sighing dramatically and reading Sylvia Plath as the other bridesmaids laughed and chatted.

  The wedding was every mother-of-the-bride’s dream. Every detail was gorgeous, from the cream and apricot flower arrangements to the delicious hazelnut cake. At the reception, Juliet thanked me for being a perfect mother in front of 250 guests, and said she could only hope to be half as good a mom as I was.

  When she and Oliver moved into their Chelsea apartment, she asked for my help decorating it, “since you have such great taste, Mom.” There was a second bedroom painted in pale blue, my favorite color, and the bed had feather pillows on it, because Juliet knew I preferred them. My favorite tea was always in their cupboard, and Oliver was always wonderful when I visited for the occasional weekend, making us dinner the first night, then sending us out for some “lovely mum and daughter time.” The theater, or shopping, or best of all, just a long, drawn-out dinner at a quiet restaurant with my favorite person in the world.

  Meanwhile, Sadie embraced every cliché of a teenage girl. The weariness, the cynicism, the all-black clothing. She became obsessed with painting, giving minimal effort in her other classes, lecturing me on the importance of art over all else.

  “Really?” I said. “Over medicine? Do you think art is more important than, gosh, I don’t know, saving lives?”

  “Life isn’t worth living without art,” she said airily. Spoken like someone who’d never been sick.

  Honest to Pete. Did she think art would count for more than actual learning? We argued over her mediocre grades, but John always took her side. “As long as you’re doing your best, sweetheart, we don’t care about your marks.” Which was a total lie. Juliet had had the highest GPA of any child from Stoningham in a generation! She got into all eight Ivy League schools! Sadie never even made the honor roll, and it wasn’t because she wasn’t smart. She just didn’t try.

  Then, that boyfriend. Did she think I was blind, the way she looked at Noah Pelletier? He was a nice enough young man, but I knew about teenage boys and what they were after. She only rolled her eyes when I talked about unwanted pregnancy, as if she already knew so much more than I did.

  That was her attitude about anything. Whatever I said, she treated it as if she was vastly more intelligent than I was. If Juliet thought I was the best mother in the world, how dare Sadie dismiss and avoid me, or worst of all, simply tolerate me? Endure me, as if I was such a burden, such an embarrassment?

  Art school. Honestly. It would’ve been one thing if she’d gotten into . . . wherever one goes if one is good enough. Rhode Island School of Design, or Savannah College of Art and Design, with a plan toward historic restoration or something like that. Instead, she went to Pace, a school I’d never heard of, so she cou
ld become an artist. Oh, she had talent, not that it meant anything in the cold, hard world.

  Then Juliet got pregnant. Again, I was included in every detail. She brought me to a few appointments so I could hear my grandchild’s heartbeat. I came down four days before her due date and pampered her, and when she went into labor, I went to the hospital with them, right into the labor room, so welcomed and included, so needed. I held her hand and told her she was strong and amazing and I loved her so much, and when the baby finally came out, Juliet clutched my hand, crying tears of joy.

  A girl.

  They named her Brianna. “After you,” Juliet said. “I know you never loved your name, so we took letters from Barbara Marie Johnson and made Brianna. So she’s your namesake in a special way, Mommy.”

  Was there ever a more perfect daughter?

  And so, as Sadie drifted like a butterfly, living her New York dream of art, poverty and waitressing, my older daughter continued to be my pearl. When Brianna was one, they moved back to Stoningham. Juliet called me several times a day just to talk and invited John and me for dinner a few times each month, and came to our house most Sunday afternoons.

  If Sadie had given me anything more than scraps from her heart, I could’ve done better, but the truth is, I got tired of trying. Sadie had her father; I had my Juliet, and Oliver, and Brianna, and a few years later, another beautiful granddaughter, Sloane.

  John was a bit disappointing as a grandfather, frankly. He was fine when a child was deposited on his lap, but he wasn’t all that enthusiastic. He still worked a few days a week and played golf (the most unimaginative hobby in the world). Twice a year, he went away for a golf weekend with his friends, and I loved being in the house without him. Sometimes he’d go to the city to see Sadie and take her out to dinner and spend the night in a hotel down there, or at her place, once she got an apartment of her own.