Imagine All the People

About a million years ago I lived in Philadelphia and worked at a job that I hated. As I walked through the underground tunnels of the commuter train station every morning, I would pass a newsstand where a woman sat in a small kiosk, selling lottery tickets. And every morning I wanted more than anything to be that woman. Her job, her life–hell, her hair– all looked so much better, so much more manageable than mine.

This was, of course, projection of the highest and most demented order. I mostly knew it then and I truly know it now. Which is why I try not to take myself too seriously when I begin to daydream about the lives of everyone I come in contact with these days who doesn’t have a five-week old baby. Look at her! I say to myself as I stare at the 20-something woman with the flat stomach and the tiny handbag who is ahead of us in line at the ice cream shop. See how she orders whatever she wants? Clearly she’s not the sole food source of a creature whose intestines are as fragile as blown glass. And look at her skin, her waxed eyebrows, her smooth lips. That girl can remember the last time she shaved her legs. That girl is not smearing Lansinoh nipple cream on her lips because she can’t find her chapstick. That girl doesn’t even need chapstick.

But it is more than this woman’s body that has my attention. It is the way the moves, and how she seems to have a general sense of focus, of stillness.  She seems singular, undivided.  I imagine her drive home, imagine that she will be thinking about what she will do that evening, who she might see, what she might watch. Maybe she will take a bath, maybe she will watch a movie. At some point–and this is when I start to tremble with envy– she will go to bed and she will sleep. And she will do all these things without a baby. Unencumbered, untethered.

It is not just the site of the young and the rested that sets me off. I fantasize about the 50-ish man walking his dog on our road (a dog! how quiet! how charming! what an amazing life he must have!) and the 60-ish woman at the table across from ours ( I can just see how she spent her afternoon, how the task of raking up the old leaves around her forsythia bushes left her feeling slightly fatigued and hopeful).

June will be six weeks old on Tuesday. I am in the thick of it with her, “it” being the arduous task of staying alive, of keeping the two of us going. This task is easier than it was with Grace, not because June is easier to care for (where is that swing-loving, binky-addicted second child I was promised??) but because I have something I did not have the first time and that is perspective. I also have my identity, my mother self, and I understand now that the formation of that self was far and away the most strenuous and taxing part of those early months with Grace. Still, though, I fall prey to the fantasy, and the fallacy, that everyone’s–anyone’s– life is preferable to mine.

The girl in the ice cream shop, in case you were wondering, ordered a medium scoop of mint chocolate chip with chocolate whipped cream. My daughter ordered a small vanilla with mini gummi bears and mini m&ms. She ate it while I nursed June, and when she was finished, she ran to find Chris who was on her way to the bathroom. A few minutes later they returned to me–to us–and when I looked up from June’s face to theirs, and back to June’s again I was not thinking of the girl and her freedoms. I was thinking that four is so much more than the sum of three and one. I was thinking that I didn’t know how we would get these girls into the car and up the hill and into bed, but that we would, that we would do it tonight, and tomorrow, and the night after that. We would do it because they are our children. They are our tethers and our weights, and they will be until the time, many many many years from now when they set themselves free and leave me to my work and my sleep, and to my fantasies about the life of a woman I see, a woman in an ice cream shop nursing a baby with round cheeks.