1476785864 (N) by Elizabeth Isadora Gold

Author:Elizabeth Isadora Gold
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

8. Community Building

In Which We Finally Realize These Babies Are Here to Stay

From Elizabeth

December 12, 2010

Yesterday was really fun! Thanks, Melissa, for hosting. I can’t believe the babies played, rather than lying around like a bunch of fish. It was way more relaxed not to have to deal with bitchy waitresses/bartendresses/other people. Now that many of us are going back to work, we’d like to plan a night out? Heidi, how’d it go yesterday with back to work and daycare???

“Where’s our lasagna now?” This became Danny’s cri de coeur as we approached Clara’s three-month birthday and the end of the “fourth trimester.” We still needed help, he thought. Feeling good for the first time in over a year, I was more confident.

I could fit into my favorite dark-green, straight-leg, no-stretch jeans (I don’t fit into them anymore, though. What happened?). They were tight over my belly, but I could button them, walk, and sit on the subway on the way to work. When people told me I looked great, I believed them. My C-section scar only hurt sometimes.

We no longer obsessively worried if Clara didn’t make a sound for an hour or more at night. We were all sleeping, not eight straight hours, but enough. On Christmas Day, visiting my family in Philadelphia, Danny and I watched all of Marathon Man (Jews on Christmas; we do our best) with my dad, as my mother prepared Hanukkah dinner for the rest of the family. Clara shocked me by nursing and dozing through the whole movie, like a little baby was supposed to do.

“Is it safe?” the Nazi doctor kept asking Dustin Hoffman, cranking his teeth with pliers, and we squealed and giggled in horror. Clara sucked, glug, glug, glug. I could get used to this mommy thing if there were even occasional easy days like this.

That night, my family—aunts and uncles, my grandfather and his lady friend—came over, lit the menorah, and ate latkes. Mostly, everyone admired the baby. It had been a whole month since they last saw her on Thanksgiving, and she required another full examination.

We had a good night. Pediatrician Aunt Barbara approved of whatever it was we were doing to keep Clara gaining weight and making eye contact; my aunt Cheryl brought five bulging bags of baby clothes that had been marked down 75 percent at her favorite designer-clothes-for-less chain. At ninety-three, my grandfather was so happy just to be there, to see this daughter of his granddaughter, named after his beloved late wife. My dad played the cello for Clara that morning, the same Bach suite he’d set words to for me when I was little. Between the cello and Pop-Pop Lenny’s declaring Clara a shayna punim, I was done. My emotional cup overflowed.

A day later, the East Coast was blanketed with what the newscasters insisted on dubbing Snowpocalypse. Our block isn’t plowed! Don’t try to come home! Heidi emailed me. You’ll freak out! (Exclamation points Heidi’s own.) We stayed on in our hotel for a

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