Essay

The Book Group

by 
Judi L. Silverman

"I'm thinking grilled tuna, rare and thinly sliced, over a bed of baby romaine with grape tomatoes and feta vinaigrette for the entrée.” I balance the phone on my shoulder as I try to spoon gray glop into Steven's birdlike open mouth.  "Served with fresh baguette and sweet butter at room temperature, softened brie and Champagne grapes.  For dessert a pear tart with almond crust."

"My stomach just growled so loudly I scared the dog," Sue replies. "I gotta run. Can't wait till tomorrow. Bye."

"Bye."

Tomorrow the book group meets at my house. Food is central to our meeting. It may be the only decent meal we've had in a month.  I don't get out much these days.  I look forward to our time together the way a lonely woman awaits a hot date.

I chose The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, but we may never get around to it.  Our own stories sometimes take up the whole two hours.

I feel like I'm drowning in my son's illness.  I can’t wait to unload my fear and pain.  It will feel like bursting through the surface of murky water into sun and sucking in a lung full of air. These women are my comfort.  They listen and empathize and tell me how well I handle everything.

"Come on, buddy, just a little more," I plead. Every hour and a half around the clock I feed Steven two ounces of formula mixed with barley cereal.

Steven stares blankly at me.  Tiny veins around his eyes redden with the signs of another reflux.  I leap forward and raise him out of the chair, keeping him vertical so he doesn’t choke.  Forty-five minutes of hopeful effort is now sticky, gray-green slime splattered on my chest.  Steven wails with fright.

Steven has a rare form of gastrointestinal acid reflux.  He bleeds from his tender esophagus and suffers agonizing burning pains. When he doesn’t shoot vomit across the room, he regurgitates into his mouth and swallows, burning his throat raw.  He screams and I walk, desperate to soothe him.  He bleeds from his abraded throat and my heart bleeds with every choking hiccup.  

I carry him down the hall, dripping puke on the carpet.  I’ll bathe him and change his clothes for the fourth time today. 

"It's OK, baby.  Mommy loves you.  It's OK," I whisper into his tiny, translucent ear.  He quiets some.  His frail shoulders slowly relax.  I inhale the intoxicating scent of baby musk barely there beneath the harsh tang of soured formula.

Once he is clean I strap him into his crib. Steven must be kept upright as much as possible. His crib is propped up on one side with phone books, and he is held by a special harness. I snap the apnea monitor belts tightly around him in case he chokes in his sleep.  The monitor shrieks false alarms, but I respond as if each is a real emergency.

 Every morning I perform a test that checks to see if there is blood in my baby’s stool.  Every morning blood appears.  If it continues for another three weeks we will have to go to Hopkins for testing that requires anesthesia.  I pray that this morning there will be no blood.  When I am not preparing food, feeding, changing, or walking Steven, I run in a panic to start him breathing again. All of this is made worse because I abruptly stopped breast feeding.  Now my hormones fuel unpredictable volcanic eruptions of anger and sorrow.

Andrea flies into the room at top speed climbing the crib to look at Steven.

"Is he ready for blast off, Mommy?" she asks.

I told Andrea Steven likes to visit outer space while he sleeps so we strap him in for the ride. She loves this explanation, even though she knows it’s not really true.

Andrea is three and as healthy and active as a caffeinated kitten. She is beautiful, smart and very brave. She climbs to the top of anything, crawls into dark spaces to investigate, or tastes whatever she finds. She is as exhausting as Steven.  There simply isn't enough of me to go around.  “I need a break.  Or someone to help,” I tell my husband, Paul.  We end up fighting.  Despite his insistence that it's too expensive, I hire a sitter for a few hours twice a week so I can have the pleasure of catching up on laundry or taking a shower.

Paul retreats into his job as usual, working more and more hours to escape the stress at home.  Since I don't have a job he thinks I should be able to handle all this on my own. No job. I don’t work. What a joke.  He’s abandoned me to my fate.  It has nothing to do with him.  Making money is his primary responsibility; everything else is mine.  He’s a coward.  He hides from Steven’s pain and my hormonal madness in his financial duty. 

My mother calls.  Her voice is full of concern. She knows I live on full alert with the children. 

"Honey, go see a therapist. I'll pay," she says.

"I know I should, Mom. He could prescribe some kind of Stepford medication to improve my attitude changing me into the kind of wife that would suit Paul."  I sigh inwardly.  "I just don't have the time."

The sitter comes tomorrow so I can prepare lunch and enjoy my friends for a little while. Today I have to go to the grocery store.  It’s an appalling experience with normal kids; with mine it's a dreadful undertaking. Steven is wired to the nine-pound monitor and four-pound battery pack.  Strapped into the infant carrier in the back seat, he screams the whole time. We arrive at the store with Steven soaked in sweat and Andrea running everywhere, touching everything.

On the way home I stop to gas up the car.  Two pregnancies made me fat.  Stress has made me thin.  I bend to the pump.  A man in an expensive suit leans against a sleek black Mercedes while he pays the attendant.  He stares at my ass.  I used to love that sexual gaze the way I once craved Paul's touch.  Now I'm so grateful for the few minutes at the end of a day when my body is my own, I shudder at the idea of further contact. 

Back in Steven's room I hold the fecal stool test up to the pale light filtering through the window. Blood again today.  I enter this dismal fact in his journal.  I record every nanosecond of his life: what he eats, vomits, urinates, and excretes, as well the precise dose and times he takes the five experimental medications. I track how much, or rather how little, he sleeps and the number of false and actual breathing alarms.  It's only noon.  I’m excruciatingly tired, dirty and miserable. I need perspective.  I need to feel grateful for my life. I think of people in Bosnia, frozen and lost in a sinister forest at night.  Frightened.  Starving.  Alone.  Right now the idea of being alone is so appealing it might be worth freezing and going hungry.  I shake myself and laugh. "I will get through this."  Simply hearing the words helps.

Tomorrow is the book group. 

I live so my children can live, so I can serve grilled tuna, rare and thinly sliced, over a bed of baby romaine with grape tomatoes and feta vinaigrette.  Fresh baguette and sweet butter at room temperature, softened brie and Champagne grapes.  And pear tart with almond crust.  I live so I can discuss doomed fishermen whose destinies lie at the bottom of the icy black sea. 

I won’t share their fate.  I will rise like bubbles toward the dim light and break through to the surface, sucking in salted air.  Then I’ll take another breath. And another.

Judi L. Silverman is a stay-at-home mother of two school age children. She began writing a year ago on a whim. Since then, she has completed one essay, two short stories and a chic-lit novel, which she is working on selling this summer.

 

L'ete by Giuseppe Arcimboldo is available thru Carol Gerten Fine Art