Beaver’s Pick
Laura Mazzenga

Photo Credit: Via Tsuji/Flickr (CC-by-nc-nd)

I’m in therapy. Technically, it’s one incident that landed me here. The baby started crying, and it wouldn’t stop. I forced myself out of bed and pulled it out of the bassinet. I let it nestle in the crook of my neck, bounce in my arms, and spit down my chest. I don’t know for how long. It wouldn’t take formula. Shushing and humming seemed to infuriate it. Jake said he woke up and saw me, arms extended, shaking it like an old piggy bank.

The next morning, I sipped my coffee black and pretended to look through the bay window at a passing bird. I watched Jake fidget behind me in the reflection of the glass, trying to find his words. Finally he said “Um, about last night.” That’s why we’re here.

The office is in the same building where we consulted with a fertility doctor two years ago. It couldn’t be more different from that sophisticated suite we visited, with screens emerging from flat surfaces and espresso on demand. There was so much hope in that room, and whether or not it was false, I liked the feeling of being there.

Family therapy was my suggestion, but I’m questioning it with each minute that passes. It happens in a tiny room on the ground floor, with a drab color scheme of browns and grays. It smells of day-old soup. The therapist is a thin, fragile lady with round frames on her powdered face. She wears pastel cardigans and speaks in a soft voice that I imagine all therapists were instructed to speak to patients with. She sits across from us, behind a small, lamp-lit desk. There is a window behind her desk, too small for me to even fit through, which faces the parking lot. I see a dumpster just a few feet away and wonder if that’s where the soup smell is coming from.

She starts the session by asking how life has changed for us since we became parents. I hate her first question, but I run through the list. No sex, no sleep, no sanity. Today, I could barely find a bra under the heap of diapers and onesies and burp cloths my own stuff was buried under. I’d love a cocktail, a cigarette too. I could go on, but I already sense that these observations aren’t being received well. I stop myself and course correct, say something like “less time for me.” Jake nods and puts his hand on my lap, as if we’ve had this conversation before in private. He says that it’s been “particularly tough on Marla.” The therapist wants to know more about that, but I can’t find words that will satisfy either of them. What I really think, I am not ready to say. I think the baby and I have a mutual dislike for one another.

In the hall, I can hear the faint ding of the elevator, the sound of the doors opening and closing. I can’t help but envy the people out there, with medical problems that have solutions. Bad joints can be replaced with artificial knees and hips. Dermatologists can scrape off a troublesome mole. Plastic surgeons can laser off belly fat or chisel down a bumpy nose. But there is no cure for this. I want to go back to suite 306, where the pretty people are, with the lattes and the jazz music. Even if they will lie to me and tell me I have a chance at my own kid, I’d prefer it to this.

The shaking incident comes up halfway through the session, but only because I bring it up. Jake and the therapist had been waffling, dancing around it for twenty-five minutes, so I put us out of our misery. I shook the baby, I say. I am waiting for the questions to start, the same ones that have been swimming around in my own head, which I have no answers for. I expect I’ll be escorted out of therapy and taken directly to some inpatient facility to get my head examined properly. There’s no way I’m going back home.

But the therapist looks caught off guard by my admission, frozen for a moment, and then her eyes dart from me to Jake. Maybe she thought she’d have to slowly work that confession out of me, and I’ve taken that opportunity away from her. If there’s a certain choreography to these sessions, I’m certainly disrupting it. Jake shifts ever so slightly next to me, and I hear his chair squeak.

There looks to be a trace of empathy in the therapist’s eyes, but it’s intended for Jake, not me. She nods slowly and leans forward in her chair. She tells us that shaking is dangerous because babies’ craniums aren’t fully formed yet. They’re soft, so when you shake them, the brain bounces around in the head without anything to absorb the shock. Jake listens like he’s never heard this before, but of course we both already knew this. All new parents are warned of the dangers of shaking a baby. Is this what we’re paying $220 a session for, I joke. No one laughs.

Again, I have said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Jake is looking down, his neck a deep shade of crimson. His knee bounces, while the rest of his body is oddly still. I look past him, to the framed photos on the therapist’s desk. They are all of her and the same woman, in various places: sitting on the beach, at some event in cocktail dresses, lying on a hammock with a furry dog between them. No kids. I wonder how she could possibly be qualified to tell me not to shake my baby.

Session two, Jake does most of the talking. He has come prepared this time, summarizing the whole history of our failed attempts at IVF, and the subsequent adoption process. He is the person who keeps track of details. He knows all the dates, all the specialists and procedures, the amounts of money that corresponded with each exhausting step in the process. I remember less. I wanted a baby, more than anything, but the memory feels so distant it’s paper thin. It’s like when someone tells you of something you did when you were drunk. You were there, you know you did it, but you can’t touch the memory in any meaningful way. All of it, the miscarriages, the doctors, the poking and prodding and inserting, even the disappointment, feels like a distant dream. I can only remember suite 306, when I still believed I’d make a good mother.

What I had wanted was a baby of my own by 33. Preferably a little girl. I would name her Sienna. What I got was a three-month-old boy, a virtual stranger off a waiting list. He looked so alien—bald with bulging gray eyes that always drifted desperately beyond me. We named him Nicholas. By the time we got him, I was 36 and it was already too late. The grueling path we’d taken to become parents had already changed both of us. It had made Jake ashamed and passive. It had made me sarcastic and inconsiderate. One of us would have probably left if that baby hadn’t arrived when it did.

I am still here though. There is a gentle tap on my forearm, and I realize they are both looking at me. Sorry, I say, I’m tired. This time, the therapist seems annoyed. She doesn’t smile, but instead she flops back in her oversized chair as if I’ve exhausted her too much to even sit up straight. It has always bothered me that the doctor gets the nicer chair than the patients. We are sitting on creaky high-backed chairs that wobble when we move. I notice a piece of cardboard shoved under the left leg of my chair. I don’t remember the chairs in suite 306 but I imagine they were ergonomically designed for women struggling with fertility. She says she would like to know how I see myself as a mother. I look at the clock above her head. Still fifteen minutes left.

I give my clumsy answer, trying this time to be honest. It’s been hard for me to see myself as a mother, I say. I still don’t feel like the baby is mine. The therapist writes something on her pad, then looks cautiously from her notes to Jake’s face. He does that close-lipped twitch that passes for a smile. It means I’ve said something less than satisfactory. It means “sorry about her.”

The therapist reassures me that people often panic when they finally get the thing they have wanted for so long. It’s overwhelming. She says it’s natural to feel depressed that being a mother is not what I thought it would be.

I suppose she is right. It’s not what I thought, because the baby isn’t mine. We all know it. On some level, even the baby knows it. I want to tell them that I feel lonely, and that every time I walk into the room the baby seems to detect my smell and wrinkle his nose like the room is filling with noxious gas. In my arms, he is a fussy, squirming thing, never content. I don’t want him, and he knows it. I want to run away, leave both of them, but I don’t even have the guts to do that.

Thanks, I say. I think you’re right.

On the way home, Jake cuts someone off on the highway, then curses under his breath when they honk at us. I am sure it’s because of something I did or didn’t say in therapy, but he won’t talk to me. I wish he’d yell, or do something to show that he’s in pain too. I’d give anything for a good fight. But he’d never do that. At some point, around the third miscarriage, he stopped saying what he was thinking.

Session three, I resolve to tell the truth. I won’t let Jake or this holier-than-thou therapist bully me into saying what they want to hear. I’ll be real and raw and fearless, no matter how much it hurts me, or how much it scares them. The only trouble is that we are doing some ridiculous show-and-tell exercise, which feels like another attempt to get us speaking from scripts. We’ve been asked to bring in photos of the baby and discuss our selections. We are to say how the photo makes us feel, why, and what we perceive as obstacles to our fulfillment as parents. The therapist warns us to avoid blaming language—“you” statements—and instead focus on our individual experiences/feelings as parents—“I” statements. I practice in my head.

I am not good at bullshit nursery school hand-holding exercises.

I find it impossible to express myself without getting steamrolled by two sets of judgemental eyes.

I want to run away and leave this entire nightmare in the past, before I do something I can never come back from.

Predictably, Jake goes first. Always prepared and eager to please, Jake has brought exactly the photo I expected he would. It’s a photo his mother took from the week we brought the baby home. In it, he’s sitting on the couch, cradling it robotically beneath the white muslin blanket it’s wrapped in. He is smiling, but I know that particular smile means he’s nervous. His mother is the type to stage photos with frilly pillows and accent pieces to “add dimension.” She’d been sliding around furniture and adjusting lighting. She’d put a vase of lilies in the background, making sure everything was perfect for the photo. The only thing she’d forgotten was me. Not that I cared.

This photo makes him proud to be a father, he says. It makes him want to be a better person for his family. Looking at it now, it occurs to me that the baby looks a bit like Jake. Just by chance, they have the same coloring. In the future, people will probably say things like “he takes after his father.” I don’t have the same Nordic features. I’m darker, with wiry hair, eyes that are a shade shy of black. I look like the one who doesn’t belong in the family.

When the therapist prompts him about obstacles and fears, he keeps his eyes on the photo, his voice shaking as he speaks. There is a worry in his heart that he will be raising this baby alone, he says.

“I feel like Marla is not giving this baby a chance,” he says.

I am stunned. Somehow Jake has found a loophole around the language rule. He found a way to attack me while using an I statement. I want to attack him back.

I never had a mother or anything that even resembled unconditional love.

I wanted to start my own family more than anything.

I can’t help my past, just like Jake can’t help that he was raised by a cow who wears pearl necklaces and talks down to busboys.

Instead I present the photo I picked. It’s a close-cropped photo from the christening ceremony, just before he was dunked. I hadn’t wanted to have a christening—we aren’t church people—but his mother insisted. He resembles a little old man in the white collared onesie I got him, and for once he appears content in the priest’s expert hands. It went as these things always do. The priest takes the baby, holds it underwater, everyone watches with bated breath, waiting for him to lift it out. Then the baby emerges, sputtering and crying, but alive and saved. The guests applaud, relieved.

What are you feeling, the therapist wants to know.

During that sliver of silence, when the baby was underwater, I could finally breathe. I felt the air fill my lungs completely, and my heart expand. Relief stretched over me like a warm blanket. I never wanted it to end. Looking at the photo, I can almost inhabit that moment again. I run my fingers over the baby’s glossy image, his face and hands, the lip of the water basin just barely visible at the bottom of the photo. I’ve been chasing that moment for weeks and months, but I can’t get there.

“I think Jake is right. I cannot do this,” I say.

They tell me I am strong. That I am so much more capable than I think.

There is nothing you cannot do, the therapist says.

You have everything you could ever want, Jake says.

Those are not I statements, I want to point out, but the therapist is relentless with the script. Why. The next question is why do you feel that way.

Most nights when he cries, I squeeze him so tight that he can’t make any noise. I feel his arms struggling to free himself, fighting against me like a weak little puppy. The more he struggles, the harder I squeeze. Sometimes I feel bad after. Other times I’m just more angry. But I always let go, eventually.

“I don’t trust myself,” I say.

There’s something in me that’s growing stronger, more powerful everyday. It’s suffocating that other part of me, the tender, loving part. The part that would let go and stop myself before it’s too late. Every day the hopeful girl from room 306 gets smaller and smaller. And the angry, orphaned, resentful, infertile version of me expands to take her place. Soon there won’t be any way to contain her. Soon the old me will be gone.

“I’m scared that something will happen, something of my control. I will hurt it.”

I’ve said it, I think. It’s all on the table now and there’s no taking it back.

The therapist takes a long breath, removes her glasses and uses the corner of her cardigan to wipe a smudge. When she puts them back on, her face is rearranged, from confusion to understanding. I sense a shift in the room and automatically I feel better, an ounce lighter. Jake has turned his head to look at me, but I’m pretending I don’t notice.

The therapist rarely takes notes, but now she’s scribbling on a pad, nodding with more certainty as she goes.

“I’m writing you a prescription,” she says.

She slides it across her desk but I don’t touch it. The letters are long and neat, but my eyes won’t focus. I’ve been on plenty of meds in my life. Clomiphene citrate. Xanax. Bromocriptine. Paxil. I am certain there is no prescription for fear that I will strangle and kill my baby.

Lack of control is a common struggle, she says, and it’s typical among new parents.

I want to interrupt her. She’s misunderstood, again.

But now Jake has chimed in to agree. He is nodding and squeezing my hand in that really genuine way and I can feel his relief that we have finally found the source of my neurosis and a pill that can fix it.

The photo explains a lot, she goes on. You’re afraid that you’ll fail as a parent and leave your child in a vulnerable position. That some kind of harm will befall him because you aren’t doing enough. “That’s why I recommend these exercises,” she says, clearly proud of herself for her unfounded diagnosis.

I am so pissed off that one hot angry tear slides down my cheek, followed by another, then another. Jake tenderly wipes them away. The therapist beams and praises my vulnerability. She says that the raw emotion I’m sharing is where healing becomes possible. I think she might actually start clapping. Jake gathers me in for a hug. I love you, he whispers. It’s going to be okay. He hasn’t said that in months. When we separate, his smile is toothy and pleading. It begs me not to correct him.

I give a brave nod and swallow my feelings, tucking the photo into my back pocket. I can’t bring myself to pick up that Rx paper from the desk, but Jake’s eager hand extends to take it before I have a second to waver. We stand and say goodbye, Jake holding onto me tighter than he did on the way in.

Thank you, I tell her, smiling through tears.

Inside I am screaming, as the last trace of that hopeful mother-to-be fades away.

Laura Mazzenga is an MFA student at San Diego State University and the associate editor at Fiction International. She writes short fiction and non-fiction, and is currently finishing her first novel. Email: lrmazzenga[at]yahoo.com