THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 79
rived. “You can start breast-feeding any
time you’re ready,” she said. “She might
go for it.”
“They said I could wait until
tomorrow. ”
“Why don’t you give it a try?”
Kathy opened her robe. The baby slid
into her armpit. She grabbed her left
breast and aimed it, as a nurse took hold
of the baby’s shoulders and pushed her
closer, and the neonatologist forced the
baby’s chin down, to open her mouth.
Already, it wasn’t like on TV. Kathy landed
her nipple near the baby’s lips. The baby
was asleep. Also, her head was at the
wrong angle and wouldn’t form a seal.
The nurse turned the baby’s shoulders,
and I held the lower part of the baby and
lined it up, as the neonatologist rubbed
a warm washcloth over the baby’s face
to try to wake her. The baby woke for a
second and moved her mouth, then
passed out again. After a while, the neo-
natologist switched to a cold washcloth.
All we needed now was seven more
people and we’d have enough for a
hockey game.
“It isn’t working,” Kathy said finally.
Now what? We had to feed the baby
what she was supposed to eat, every
gram. Or we’d be stuck here, with a
sickly kid on a feeding tube and a mil-
lion drugs, not getting bigger, like Liz-
zie and her brother, in the next slot over.
I got some formula and shook it up
and removed the baby from Kathy’s
arms, then put the rubber nipple to the
roof of her mouth and held her upright,
one hand cupping her head, a finger
firmly under her chin, and she began to
suck terrifically. The baby’s tiny tomato
face fell smushed against my thumb.
Kathy sat there, her gaze going slack.
“Good job, good job,” I said.
Kathy watched me, slumping a lit-
tle. The baby ate, panting between swal-
lows. Then she dropped off, a line of
milk dribbling down her chin, and I
pushed the nipple against the roof of
her mouth once more and held it there.
I kept the finger tight against her chin.
The bottle was almost empty.
She coughed. The siren screeched.
How long did it take for the two nurses
manning the nurses’ station to get out
from behind it? I got to my feet and the
breast-feeding pillow that had been
around my waist fell to the ground. I
took the bottle out of her mouth.
“Is that us?” Kathy asked. “Is that ours?”
I looked over the wires. The nurses
stood on the other side of the cart. It
was the kid next to us, Lizzie’s brother.
Kathy was somehow standing, her robe
still open, her tits not put away.
“Watch his head,” the nurse said.
“Come on, come on,” the other nurse
said. I held my barf towel over my kid
to shield her from the noise. The boy
recovered and the number went back
to green.
Afterward, the nurses turned to
the monitors and conferred. They
touched buttons and asked each other
questions.
Then the first nurse stopped by and
told us what to do if we heard our alarm.
She read the record of apnea events on
our chart, and showed us that our alarm
had gone off an hour earlier, and twice
the night before. I finished the feeding
and wiped off the baby’s chin and we
exited, in defeat, to wait by the elevator.
“Oh, my God.”
“They should’ve told us.”
We went back two hours later and
fed her again.W
e were out of our gourds. We didn’t
know how much to worry. The
baby was in there for two weeks. After
a few days, they sent Kathy home to
sleep, and we used the nicu like a day
care, and at home I painted the little cor-
ner room, my former office, bright yel-
low, and threw out the old window shades.
When we finally got the baby
home, we brought the mon-
itor, too, fourteen pounds, a
shoulder-bag model, which
we slept by and hauled around
for the next month. In those
days, we took pleasure in
knowing that the people who
pitied us were wrong. Our
kid was like an old person
living backward, dying a lit-
tle less every day, trying to
get up to zero. I slept downstairs with
her, so Kathy could heal. In the morn-
ing, sunlight poured in, and the heat from
the radiators made the curtains float. It
was warm.
At first, anyway, having her home
was its own triumph. It was almost
easy. It was almost fun. When the alarm
blasted, it was usually because the lit-
tle sticky pads had come off, and I’dhold her and rock her and put her back
to bed. Alone in the middle of the
night, I discovered that, if I changed
her diaper ahead of the feeding, she
got so hungry she went nuts and ate
too fast and puked. If I waited and
changed her diaper after the feeding,
she threw up from lying on her back.
At dawn, I was so relieved to see the
sunrise, I’d stand beside her changing
table, captivating her with show tunes,
singing into her sock monkey as she stared
up at me—“Oklahoma,” which she loved,
and “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two,”
from “Oliver!” This was before I figured
out that if I hadn’t started belting out
songs at 5 A.M. she might’ve gone back
to sleep. This was before I accidentally
brushed my teeth with diaper cream.
I learned to switch on the music box
and drop softly to the floor and crawl
out of the room, evenly distributing my
weight to keep the floor from creaking.
I learned to ignore her screams and cork
off, with a long splash of barf down my
back, gauging the screams in my sleep—
the buzz saw, the blood curdler—before
getting up again and heading back in
there. By then, her crying seemed ordi-
nary and vindictive. I remember how, on
one of those nights, I fed her two bot-
tles and burped and changed her and
cleaned her barf, and it took an hour and
a half, but I couldn’t soothe her, couldn’t
sit in a chair, kept feeling myself sliding,
slumping over, so I put her back in the
crib, still wailing. I defied her, and put a
pillow over me and dreamed
about her screaming, and
finally picked her up roughly
and brought her, flailing, into
bed. She came to rest about
an inch from my face. I turned
and that’s when I saw, with
a shock, her eyes, as big as
bocce balls, those puffy lips,
how beautiful she was. I held
and kissed her. She’d taken a
break from screaming. I held
her little cheeks and stared into her big
brown eyes, and breathed while she
breathed, telling her everything would
be fine. In the morning, I found a blue
bruise on her neck that I guess I’d given
her the night before, but she’d already
forgotten, or forgiven me. NEWYORKER.COM
Matthew Klam on new-parent madness.