It began with my sudden lack of interest in fruit and vegetables, replaced by intense cravings for fish, especially tuna. After eating so much of the canned stuff and so many tuna steaks, my husband James drove across town for sushi-grade. Sweet James, always so supportive.
The birth itself was easier than I ever could have expected: I was high as Barack Obama in college, and Kevin slid right into the hands of Dr. Sarin, who was deaf in one ear and almost blind. The doc declared Kevin a very healthy baby and excused himself, as he had to get to the little boys’ room — it seemed a rather urgent matter. Kevin, James and I quickly decided, did not look much like either of us. His face was broad, his ears high and rather pointy, and his head seemed a great burden on his small fragile body.
He was also kind of furry.
I thought maybe it was a hallucinogenic side effect from the drugs, or an effect of post-partum depression they didn’t get into in the prenatal classes. I was comforted by the well-known fact that all babies are ugly — they don’t turn cute until a good two or three months in, after they grow into their skin and those gummy crusts stop forming around their eyes.
Later Kevin and I sat together in the rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom, which overlooked our quaint residential street. He slept, his tiny body rising and falling, covered in fine dark hairs. But instead of revelling in the overwhelming joy mixed with fear mixed with joy of becoming a parent, as I expected to in our first quiet moment together at home, I was struck by a flashback from my childhood.
A stray cat had a litter of kittens in an empty flowerpot in our garden shed when I was nine. Their eyes were sealed shut, their bodies pink and vulnerable, and they squirmed and mewed, bumping into each other in a carnivalesque display of fear and confusion. My younger brother and I tiptoed in to watch them, knowing we shouldn’t touch, probably shouldn’t even look, as we had heard that if you touched baby kittens their mother would abandon them and they would die.
There was something about Kevin — about the way he looked but also the aura coming off him, the way he felt in my arms — that reminded me of those kittens.
Kevin must have felt my body tighten with these thoughts, because he woke up and began to cry. And as if I had predicted it — or worse, willed it to be so — his head began to wobble in that baby feline way, his voice high-pitched and almost squeaky.
It wasn’t until little Kevin started coughing at three weeks old — retching was more like it — and spat up a glob of breast milk with hair in it that James articulated the concern I had been afraid to. We were in Kevin’s room when it happened, James holding Kevin after a feeding while I reattached the boob flap on my maternity bra. One second the baby was quiet, serene, the next he’d stuck his neck out in a strained, awkward way, and his throat started bobbing up and down as if he were trying to cough something up.
“Why is he doing that?” James asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”
When the glob came up, wet but textured and landing on James’s shoulder, it was almost definitely a hairball. I tossed it in the diaper bin as quickly as I could. James’s ears turned red, spreading like a quick rash to the rest of his face, in contrast with the sunburst yellow paint we’d used on the baby room walls.
“That isn’t normal,” he said slowly. “I don’t think that’s normal.”
But what is normal, really? It was a concept I’d grappled with for years in my psychotherapy practice. I’d seen everything: cross-dressing impulses, Oedipus complexes, a girl who wouldn’t stop scratching herself. I’d decided normal was a tyrannical term invented by unimaginative people.
“No such thing,” I said, lifting Kevin from James’s arms and leaving the room.
James was a ceaselessly optimistic person and normally did not acknowledge a problem until it was so big and bald that the people around him started pointing it out. I was the opposite: entirely practical, if a bit cynical, always on the lookout for potholes in driving and in life. I, for example, had been reluctant to try to conceive in the first place, anticipating a million different ways to mess the kid up. I was also the one who told James that his parents’ marriage was falling apart; he had chosen to ignore the fact that his parents refused to make eye contact at the dinner table and that his mother’s right eye twitched whenever his father talked about work at the university. But James took the news well enough coming from me, and when his parents separated three months later he was grateful to have had some warning.
This time I tried to subscribe to James’s way of doing things, because the stakes were so high for the both of us.
At the grocery store, the cashier scanned our organic bananas and, noticing Kevin in his stroller, bugged out her eyes as wide as they could go. “What a beautiful little . . .” I waited while she trailed off. “Boy!” she said. “Oh, he is so clearly a boy. He’s perfect. Look at those little ears.”
I said, “This apple is bruised, I don’t want it.”
When James’s mother Stephanie came over, she clucked about “taking time for yourself” and “maintaining an identity outside of being a mother,” things she failed to do and credited with the dissolution of her marriage some forty years later. When I held Kevin out for her examination, Stephanie suggested dabbing some breast milk on those crusty eyes of his and asked if I would like an herbal tea.
On Skype from Hawaii, James’s father Bert said, “Jesus, that is one ugly baby!” Then he laughed in his gruff, throaty way, blaming it on the connection, which promptly fizzled out. James and I reminded ourselves that his father was an egomaniac who liked to push the boundaries of acceptable humour. Kevin was meowing again, so I took him to his room on the pretense of changing his diaper. What James didn’t know was that Kevin preferred the litter box I kept hidden in the closet; he was uncomfortable with leaving his scent out there in the open.
By week eight Kevin was squirming out of his Precious Mountain Golden Turtle SleepSaver Seat and Swing and darting to the window to jaw-click at the birds on the telephone wire. He started sharpening his nails on our couch. James was staying later and later at work, and I was drinking. But that was okay because Kevin wasn’t interested in my breast milk. He’d started catching flies on the patio; he was clearly ready for solids.
Dr. Sarin saw nothing wrong. “Regular heartbeat, healthy appetite, regular bowel movements, teeth already coming in,” he said, looking down at us through eyeglasses that were half an inch thick. “You Canadian mothers worry far too much. When I was a little boy growing up in the foothills of the Himalayas, you didn’t bring your children to the doctor unless they were dead or dying. Go on now, find something else to be anxious about.” He shooed us out of his office before I had a chance to ask any further questions.
I drank an entire bottle of red wine and called my best friend Annie, who lived in New York.
“My baby is a fucking cat,” I told her, slurring my words slightly.
“You mean in terms of personality? Affectionate but solipsistic?”
“I mean an actual cat.”
Silence. I pictured Annie running her hands through her short brown hair, maybe staring out the window of her condo. I laid on the living room couch, the empty wine bottle and a pile of used tissue paper beside me. It was a while before Annie finally spoke.
“Well, hon,” she said. “You’ve always liked cats.”
It was true enough. In our long, circuitous journey towards parenthood, James and I had taken in, at various points: an overweight Persian named Darling, on loan from friends spending a year in Japan; Scooter, an aged tabby who had outlived our neighbour Simonetta; and three different Siamese fighting fish, each of which were ultimately consumed by flesh-eating disease. James had always wanted a dog but I was allergic, so we finally settled on having a baby. We were pushing forty by then, and I was shocked to see those blue lines materialize on the pregnancy test stick after just two months of trying. Part of me had not expected to conceive easily, or at all.
“Do you think this happened for a reason?” I asked Annie.
“It’s possible,” she said thoughtfully. “It’s entirely possible. I say, go with it. What else can you do?”
I drifted off to sleep on the couch, thinking again about those kittens. They had not stayed in the garden shed for long. One morning I went to check on them before school and they were gone, the flowerpot empty. When I asked my little brother Trey about it, he cried. He’d taken one out to play with while I was at ballet class, and blamed himself.
I showered and threw on the blue bathrobe James bought me for our last wedding anniversary. My hair still damp, I poured myself a sober cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table to wait for him. It was time to talk about Kevin. About the unconventional but not entirely unpleasant situation we’d found ourselves in. About what we wanted out of life, and why we wanted it. About the man coming by that afternoon to install the kitty door.
Weaving between and around my ankles, Kevin purred.
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