Quiet Mountain Essays
Copyright©,2004
I am...
by
Tracy Willard Caldwell
I wake up from a dream about teeth. Scratch that, a nightmare. I remember from Psych 101, teeth
dreams are about sex: teeth falling out means sexual impotence. But this dream is about teeth coming
in. My son’s teeth. At one year and one week of age he has eight teeth. Scratch that, eight and a half.
Since the age of five months, he has been teething almost continually, with brief respites to remind us
that his true personality is not that of a whining, drooling, unhappy infant. Dreams about teeth
coming in means I am afraid that we are about to have a ‘hard day’ together.
I am a stay at home mom two days a week. I am a college professor three days a week. Scratch that, a
visiting assistant professor three days a week. I am a wife seven days a week. Scratch that, I try to be a
wife seven days a week. Somewhere in there, I am still me, I think. Something has to give. It’s usually
me.
I first really got to know how selfish I am while I was pregnant. For the first part of my life, selfishness
was something that got me where I needed to go: college, graduate school, professional employment,
sanity. Suddenly, I wasn’t just me anymore. I was me plus one. It hit me when I was four months
pregnant and my husband went out for a drink after work. I sat on the couch being me plus one.
Eating healthy, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting. I tried to be calm, serene. I was
stressed, angry. I wanted to take the baby off, and run around, eat chocolate, have a glass of wine, fall
down the stairs, anything, anything just for me. But no dice. Because I wasn’t just me anymore. I was
tired, I was cranky, and I was getting too fat.
I lost 40 pounds to prepare for getting pregnant. I was finally a ‘normal size’ just when I conceived. I
went to the doctor and said, “Listen, I read I can get away with gaining only twenty pounds, that’s my
goal.” She said: “You have to gain thirty to thirty-five pounds. And you can’t stay on your low-carb
diet. It’s not just you, it’s the baby.”
I gain twenty five pounds in the first three months. I am so exhausted for the first trimester I sleep on
the floor of my office when I am not in class. I don’t even care if students come in and see me there,
curled up, fetal. I am me plus one.
I gain fifty-five pounds during the pregnancy. I have a cesarean section because the baby won’t drop:
cord in the way. The day after the surgery I force myself out of bed and creep painfully down the hall to
the scale. I am excited, the baby is out! I climb onto the scale, like trying to reach the summit of K2. I
am triumphant when I make it. I slide the weights around, I frown—I slide them around some more. I
have gained five more pounds. I creep back down the hall and buzz the nurse for more painkillers. My
stomach feels like someone has poured gasoline on it and lit afire. But it’s my pain. It’s just mine. Me
minus one. The next day a doctor comes in and checks the incision. “This might hurt a little,” he says.
He ‘has’ to push down on my stomach (the part with the gasoline fire) and try to force out some of the
blood still in me. He does this. I want to kick him in the head but I am too tired. Scratch that, I want
to kill him.
I start to hate everyone. I hate the nurses who bring my pain medication ten minutes late. I hate the
nurse who makes me take a shower. I hate the nurse who takes out my catheter. I especially hate the
nurse who takes out my IV, because she doesn’t tell me that without the IV I can only have oral
painkillers, which don’t really stop the fire that burns in my abdomen whenever I move. I hate my
husband because he can move around at will. I hate myself because I am supposed to feel great. I hate
myself because I really love my husband and it’s not his fault he can move and go.
More then anyone, I hate my son’s pediatrician. Three hours after he was born she came into the
hospital room to report the results of my son’s first physical exam. “Do you know why I am here?” She
asks. The room is full of my family members. My chart says I suffer from clinical depression and
anxiety. I have been taking anti-depressants all through the pregnancy. “We think your son might
have Down Syndrome,” she says. My mind goes blank. My husband only barely stops himself from
leaping from my bedside and throttling her. . “You might want to have a test”, she says, “to make
sure.” My husband says no. I say yes. I have anxiety. I have depression. I have a hatred of the
pediatrician. Four days later we find out he does not have Down Syndrome. We change pediatricians.
I think about trying to get her fired or putting out a contract on her, but I am too tired.
Because of the cesarean, because of depression, because I am not a good mother, my milk refuses to come
in. This is a hospital that advocates breast-feeding. Scratch that, this is a hospital of breast Nazis.
Every three hours the nursing consultant comes in and puts my son to a nipple. My nipples are flat.
My mood is dark. He cannot suck; I can’t make milk. On the third day he gets the hang of nursing, or
I do. He sucks. Nothing comes out. I am a bad mother. “He’s getting colostrum, don’t worry,” the
nursing consultant (Nazi) says. He loses a pound a day in the hospital. He gets no formula from the
breast Nazis. On the fourth day I start to lactate. He eats every hour. He never sleeps. For the first
year of his life he never sleeps for more than three hours at a time.
We go home two days early because I am a trouper, because I walk early, because I suck up the pain and
try to get home, where I think, mistakenly, I will be happy. We go home. I miss the breast Nazis. I
miss morphine. I keep a breast-feeding diary. My son spends the next four months eating almost every
hour. During the first three weeks my nipples bleed. The pain is so intense, my husband has to put his
leather wallet between my teeth as my son latches on, so I won’t scream out and scare him.
I get up with him all night. I hate this and I love this. I can remember sitting in a breast feeding chair,
so exhausted, I know I will fall asleep while he is nursing, so I wrap sheets around us and prop the
Boppy around us, and pray he wont roll off my lap as I doze. I become familiar with all the different
kinds of darkness: midnight darkness, two AM darkness, the five AM bleeding light from the sun
coming up darkness, post partum darkness.
When I was seven months pregnant, my husband went to the psychiatrist with me. The psychiatrist
had a little computer show to explain what might happen to me after the birth. “There is an eighty
percent chance your wife will have baby blues. There is a fifty percent chance your wife will have a deep
postpartum depression. There is a ten percent chance your wife will suffer from post partum
psychosis.” Scratch that, there is a ten percent chance your wife will go stark raving mad. I know this
will never happen to me. Scratch that, I think this might happen to me. I am a bad wife.
When my son is four months old, I am on the phone with a computer technician trying to fix my web
browser and my son is on a chair next to me. Taking his body into his own control for the first time,
he flings himself off the chair headfirst onto the floor. Scratch that, face first. There is blood
everywhere. My tee shirt is covered with my son’s blood. I am immersed in guilt. I run around the
house, I try to stop the bleeding. I call my husband. He rushes home and plucks my son out of my
arms. I go stark raving mad. I take a knife and go into our pantry and cut two lines into my legs: to
remember. I am a bad mother. I keep the bloody tee shirt like the mother of a virgin keeps the bloody
sheets of her daughter’s marriage bed, to proclaim she was a virgin: see? I keep my shirt: I am a bad
mother: see?
My psychiatrist tells me I need to get more sleep. I look him straight in the eye and laugh. My
psychiatrist starts to ask me if I think I have bipolar disorder. “You’re asking me?” I think. “No,
Absolutely not,” I say. I don’t want to be bipolar. I am a bad patient.
I have a job interview. For a real job; staying, not visiting. I lose sleep before I go because I am nervous
about leaving the baby. Not for him, for me. I need him. I lose sleep on the plane. I lose sleep once I
arrive half way across the country, ready for a day of interviews. I become truly manic for the first
time. During the eight hours of interviews I talk non-stop, except to the president who wants me to
talk, but I don’t feel like it so I don’t. I explain myself in complicated and often contradictory ways. I
teach a class. I am brilliant. I talk to the faculty of the college, I am intelligent. I talk to the Vice
President of Academic Affairs, I feel it is important to say “I suffer from Chronic Depression.” I talk to
the head of the department. I think it is essential to mention “I used to live in an abandoned building.”
I teach a class. Everything falls into perfect place, I am amazing. I am the best teacher in the world. I fly
home. I don’t get the job. I call my psychiatrist. “I think I am bipolar,” I say.
I do some research and find out there is a twenty five percent chance that I will pass this disorder on to
my son. I am a bad mother.
I think about my own mother who I thought was a bad mother when I was a kid. She used to go
around saying all the time to people; “I am a teacher, and artist, a mother and a wife”. “SHUT UP!
SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” I would think. Then: why is ‘mother’ third? Now I know. It’s because you
can’t be everything at once, you can only be one thing at a time. Maybe. Maybe you can be all things
all the time. I can’t.
In my meeting with the president of the college half way across the country, he sits in his chair and asks
me to tell him in five minutes “Who I am.” I think about this for thirty seconds. The best thing I can
come up with is “I am my mother’s daughter.” He doesn’t get it. I am a bad job candidate.
My son just celebrated his first birthday. He is happy and healthy. In almost every picture of him he is
grinning ear to ear. I am still married. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my son’s mother. I am my
husband’s wife. I am a teacher. I am still me. It’s all good.
Contributor's Notes...
Ms. Caldwell holds a Ph.D in English from Stony Brook University, and presently teaches at Siena
College in Loudonville NY. Her research interests revolve around cultural constructions of the
cannibal (particularly the female cannibal) in literature and film, using psychoanalysis to
investigate connections between 'cannibalism' and identity formation. Ms. Caldwell will present
the following papers in October 2004 : "Threat in Rider Haggard’s "She" and Bram Stoker’s
"Dracula”, at the Central New York Conference on Language and Literature, Cortland College;
and, “Voyages, Voyeurism and Validation: 19th Century Travel Writing and Cannibal
Encounters in Africa”, at the International Society for Travel Writing Biennial Conference: The
Voyage Out; October 21-24.
