I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (10 page)

Our hostess had just emerged from another costume change when she heard it too. She walked slowly up and down the aisle and stopped at ours. My husband caught her eye and eased the attaché case out from under his seat. He opened it carefully. Through juggling, the switch had been thrown on his tape recorded which contained his Home-taught Spanish records.

“You are the bravest man,” said the hostess, grabbing his arm. (What was so brave about apprehending a recording
saying, “You are standing on my burro’s foot”?)

The rest of the girls crowded around him as though he had just discovered a cure for cracked heels.

On the return flight, we’ll be traveling on separate airplanes. I’ve thought it over. The two alternatives beat this.

I stood on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street in New York at last with my arms outstretched and said to my husband, “You are looking at a woman who has been liberated!”

“Put your arms down before someone puts a cigarette out in your palm,” he said dryly.

“Really,” I said, “do you realize this is the first time in years we have been on a vacation without the children? No more dried eggs on the dinner plates. No car pools. No telephone. No eating at 3 in the afternoon because of ball practice. We are free! Stand up straight, dear, and don’t slouch or your spine will grow that way. What shall we do first?”

“Let’s look for a restaurant,” he said.

“Good idea. Take Mother’s hand before we cross the street. You never know when some crazy man will try to crash a light. Where was I? Oh yes, being free. You know, some women are so child-geared they can’t forget they are mothers. This is sad.”

“What about this place?”

“It looks all right, but just to be safe order cheese or peanut butter. You can’t go wrong with cheese or peanut butter. The men’s room is over there. I’ll watch your coat. Don’t sit on the seat and don’t forget to flush.”

“Well, I’m back,” said my husband. “Did you order?”

“Yes. Did you wash your hands?”

“Really now.”

“Here we are. Don’t forget your napkin. And don’t
talk with food in your mouth. They filled your milk glass too full.”

“You don’t have to cut my sandwich for me,” he said irritably. “I’m quite capable of cutting it myself.”

“Habit,” I grinned. “Creature of habit. What was I talking about?”

“About being free of the children.”

“Speaking of children, did I tell you what your son said when—did you kick me under the table? Now, what does Mama say about keeping your feet on the floor?”

“If God had meant for me to wipe my feet off on people, He’d have made them out of plastic,” he said mechanically.

“Right. As I was saying. We have a whole week to be free of kids. Let’s go out and do some shopping for them. I saw this four-foot African drum and a Chinese wastebasket with a red dragon on it that would be perfect. I mean if you buy something that fits in your suitcase, they might think we don’t love them.

“Isn’t it great being liberated?”

In case you are keeping score, I missed being named Mother of the Year by three votes (all cast by my own children), I was not named to the Olympic Dusting Team, and I was laughed out of the Pillsbury Bake-off. (My husband ate my Tomato Surprise and said, “Why don’t you flake off?” and I thought he said “bake off.”)

However, at the 1972 meeting of the doctor people in Passaic, New Jersey, I was named as the woman who had the longest post-natal depression period in the history of obstetrics.

After fourteen years, I was still uptight about toilet training, upset because the stretch marks wouldn’t tan, and depressed because I was still in maternity clothes.

My favorite story on motherhood came to me through the mail. It involved a mother who had it all together. She was a model of virtue, a paragon of womanhood. She had six children, whom she counseled with great wisdom
and patience. She was never too busy to listen and to talk with in a cool, calm way that was to be envied. She managed her house with quiet efficiency, her personal life with equal stoicism, and she never appeared to be frazzled or overwrought. She thrived on crisis and trauma, smiled in the face of disaster, and through it all remained peaceful and ever-smiling.

One day she was asked how she did it. She was silent for a moment, then she said, “Every evening after the children are in bed, their clothes are laid out for the next morning, their lunches are readied and the lights are out, I fall to my knees beside their beds and say a prayer to God. I say, ‘Thank you God for not letting me kill one of them today.’ ”

Motherhood … thy name is frustration.

Five years ago if someone had told me I would be lending a hair dryer to my son I would have laughed until I got a stitch in my side.

His hair always looked like an unmade bed. The wind parted it. Five fingers combed it. And when birds began to make a nest, we had it cut.

Then one day, all of that changed. The nation went unihair and my son went with it.

It would be nice to report that by this time parents have become acclimated to long hair on their sons. They haven’t. Everywhere I go, the first question is, “How long is your son’s hair?” I regard the length of his hair as a graph to my parental control over him. In June 1971, I used the heavy-handed parental approach. I told him I did not go through eighteen hours of labor to give birth to a pre-historic Cro-Magnon. He compromised by having the barber wave the scissors over his sideburns.

In September 1971, I used the humiliation route by telling him he looked like Prince Valiant with a two-dollar permanent wave. He was flattered and borrowed my setting lotion.

January 1972 was the year of the direct approach. I set him down and asked him point blank what he was trying to achieve. He said his long hair stood for his individuality. I asked him to get his individuality trimmed as it was falling into his chili. He declined but said he would keep it out of his eyes, which produced an affliction whereby he would snap his neck and for a brief moment you had a clear view of an eyeball.

In March 1972, I decided to compromise. If he would get a haircut, I would let him in the house, reinstate him
in the will, and let him put a yellow bug light in his reading lamp. He refused.

This month, I conceded defeat. I told myself that I had seen boys with longer hair (or were they girls?). I told myself that there were worse things than having a son with long hair—like having a tooth grow through your ear, or an eighteen-year-old who wasn’t toilet-trained. I told myself I would have to get with it as this is a new generation and they must set their own style. After all, didn’t I wear Mickey Mouse hair ribbons? I was in the middle of telling myself that it was a fad and that in a few years he would be as bald as a Marine sergeant, when he went by the door and snapped his neck so that I could see he was conscious.

“Hey, Mom,” he said, “we’re out of hair spray.”

I bit my lip. I’d give it one more try. If chaining him to the bed and playing Wayne King waltzes in his ear doesn’t work … then I’ll adjust.

Something has got to be done about the ratings of movies. No one understands who goes, who waits in the car, who is admitted over sixteen, under seventy-five, or who must be accompanied by Rex Reed.

The way a GP movie rating was first explained to me, it stood for “General viewing with parental consent.”

After the first GP movie I saw, I figured it meant Bambi kept his clothes on but he cussed a lot.

Now, after seeing several GP movies with the children, I have come to the conclusion GP means “Go, but Push the Popcorn.”

Let me explain.
The Hawaiians
was a GP movie with
Charlton Heston. I trusted Charlton. After all, hadn’t he read the Bible on the “Ed Sullivan Show”?

When a woman faced attack on the ship coming over, I shoved our youngest into the aisle and said, “Get some popcorn.” When Charlton crawled into bed with Geraldine Chaplin, I turned him around toward the exit and said, “Get more popcorn.” As the hero stripped and climbed into a public bath with six or seven nudie natives, I yelled out to the lobby, “More popcorn and wait for fresh butter.”

During the showing of
Patton
(which was also a GP), I sent the kid out for popcorn eighty-two times, plus I had him check the pay phones for possible dimes, make sure our car lights weren’t on, and check the men’s room for his father’s Ruptured Duck discharge button from World War II.

My kids say they do more walking during a GP movie than the ushers and besides all the other kids have seen it and said there is nothing wrong with it.

I was reared in a house where my dad canceled
Liberty
magazine because they carried ads for trusses. I was reared in an era where
Gone With the Wind
made headlines because Rhett Butler’s parting words were, “I don’t give a damn.” I was reared in puritanical times when you walked across the street to avoid passing in front of a burlesque house. (Now, they’re closing burlesque houses because they can’t compete with GP movies.)

I should love to blame somebody … anybody … for not building censorship into movies. It would be easier. But maybe movie makers are trying to tell us something. Maybe they are putting the responsibility of saying “yes” or “no” back to the parents where it belongs and has always belonged.

I can’t tell you how “Donna Reedish” I felt the other night as Mother and I checked out a GP movie the kids
wanted to see. The screen was dark and quiet. A couple giggled. I saw them kiss softly.

Mother leaned over and whispered, “Go out for popcorn, Erma.” I stomped up the aisle, grumbling, “All the other mothers have seen it and said there was nothing wrong with it!”

I never understood why babies were created with all the component parts necessary for a rich, full life … with the unfinished plumbing left to amateurs.

If it was a matter of money, there isn’t a mother in this world who wouldn’t have chipped in a few extra bucks to have the kid completely assembled, trained, and ready to take on long trips.

As it is, mothers stumble along trying to toilet-train their babies by clumsily running water to create an atmosphere and holding sea shells to their ear to suggest rushing water. I used to turn on every faucet in the house and showed slides of Lake Erie while the kid sat there unrolling johnny paper.

I even used to threaten them. I had one kid whom I vowed I would send to the Army with diapers. I threatened him with other things too: a bed with a hole in it, a bicycle with portable plumbing, and an alarm system that rang when wet and lit up a sign on his back that read,
LOOK FOR THE RAINBOW
.

The whole affair was pretty ridiculous. But then aren’t we all when the most important thing in our lives is succeeding vicariously through our children?

Now I note that a new “training kit” has come on the market guaranteed to cut toilet training time up to 90 per cent. (With some kids that adds up roughly to two weeks before football practice.)

It’s a little throne with a built-in music box. When the baby has performed … and not until … the music box rewards him with a little tune.

I first saw it in the bathroom of my next-door neighbor, Gloria.

“Hey, that’s terrific,” I said. “What does it play?”

“ ‘The Impossible Dream,’ ” she said dryly.

“Then, you’re having some success with it?” I asked hopefully.

“Not really,” she said. “Todd isn’t too swift. The first time I put him on, he sat there frozen and scared like he had just been asked to fly the thing to Cuba. So I explained to him, ‘Todd, if you do your thing you will hear music.’ ”

“Did he understand that?”

“Not a word. He sat there a couple of hours and finally
I took him off, went to the kitchen, got a glass of water and poured it into the bowl. The music came out and Todd clapped his hands and danced around like he was seeing the circus for the first time. Then I put him on it again and he sat there for another couple of hours.”