Meat. Meat-Meat-Meat-Meat-Meat. MEAT! I am acting like an idiot, chewing on 12-month-old Henry’s plump thigh as we lie on the sofa, and Henry is guffawing. His twin brother, Gus, is chortling too, as he pulls my hair. Being undignified never came easily to me—until I had children. I always knew I wanted an audience, but I never realized I was willing to burp on command to get one.
Today, as I boast about Henry’s fascinating ability to pick Goodnight Moon out of a pile of books or Gus’ dead-on impersonation of an ambulance siren, I sound like every other delusional, besotted mother. But it wasn’t always so. Far from it.
If ever there was anyone who should have been swept away by that tsunami of baby-love, it should have been me. God knows my husband and I went to enough trouble to get them. It took seven years and $50,000 worth of infertility treatments (amortized, that’s $25,000 per kid). Not to mention the eight months of nausea: The month after their birth was the only time in my life I’ve been fashionably thin. So presumably as soon as they were born I would have had The Moment—the violins, the Cupid’s arrows, that Broadway-musical swell of emotion new mothers always talk about. I waited. The Moment did not come.
The truth is, babies—all babies—scared me, and mine were no exception. There were lots of bodily fluids, and they might come at you at any time. (Being naturally squeamish, I stole several boxes of surgical gloves from the hospital after they were born, so convinced was I that I could not change diapers without them.) And then there was the way, before I got pregnant, mothers would hand me their children who would take one look at me and burst into tears.
My own children were born premature and shriveled; at three pounds each, they barely added up to one regulation-size baby. In the neonatal intensive care unit, I hovered over their incubators, watching them glow under the sinister ultraviolet lights, waiting to be smitten. Not only did these small people not look related to me or John, they didn’t look related to each other. Henry was entirely bald and pale as a grub, with skin that immediately flushed crimson with the slightest exertion. His head was the size of a cantaloupe, and he was constantly ravenous. Augustus, who is so mellow he has to be jostled to keep him from lapsing into a coma while eating, had a thicket of black hair that stood up like a bottlebrush, and an olive complexion like no one in either of our families (John would not shut up about how much he looked like our fertility doctor).
“You’ll be taking them home as soon as they reach four pounds,” the NICU nurse told me cheerfully. Four pounds? The roast chicken I had last night for dinner was bigger than that. And I’m supposed to do what with them? While my sons were still in the hospital I kept having my favorite recurring dream, the one where I forget to feed everything in my house. Every night, I would watch all my plants and my golden retriever wither and die. Every morning, I would wake up rigid with anxiety.
Finally, after two weeks, my sons came home and friends would ask constantly, “So, are you in love?” I think I offended them by being honest. Love them? Not by any definition of love I had at 40. I could only love someone I knew, and I didn’t know them. It took months, many months, for them to become particular—not generic babies, but My Babies.
During those first few months, as I went through those simple yet relentless everyday tasks that add up to motherhood, I learned something interesting. It had been a mistake to think that I had to go through all those years of infertility treatment because I needed a child that belonged to me biologically. I feared that without the DNA connection, I might never have felt the love. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The love, the real love, comes not from DNA but from the wrestling-on of the onesie, the relief of the burp at 2 a.m., the clipping nails and the nose-suctioning and the fabulous silence that spells satisfaction when the warm bottle reaches the trembling lips. It is in the process of caring, not the process of gestating. But nobody could have told me that as I was shooting another vial of Fertinex in my ass at 6:00 in the morning.
So when did I know I was in love? It didn’t happen immediately, and it didn’t even happen all that quickly. But it happened. We may tell our friends we loved from the beginning, but we all have that moment of realization when we know for sure. For me, it was this. Henry and Gus were sitting, transfixed by one of those videos mysteriously claiming to boost your child’s IQ while cheesy hand puppets cavort to classical music. I own the entire boxed set. Anyway, one of the puppets took a watering can and watered a limp flower-puppet, which then stood at attention.
Henry guffawed, in his startling baby basso; Gus tee-hee’d. If they could have slapped their knees, they would have. I have no idea why this was so hilarious. And it was hilarious not once, but every single time they watched that damn tape.
And that’s when I knew: My children are not me. They have their own minds, their own little thoughts. One of the great journeys of life is getting to know those closest to you. Normally I hate to travel. But this is one journey I love.
Judith Newman is the author of You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother.
