A call to our family physician got us an appointment that I hope will answer some questions. Both Lily and I are going crazy. It would have been nice to have Ryan tag along, but again, I’m not going to bring it up.
One feeding, a diaper explosion and two outfits later, we were on the road, heading to the doctor. Ryan remembered that it was his day to watch Lily, called to apologize and said he’d meet us there.
More than an hour after his call, I tried to stay away from a bunch of sick children in the waiting room. I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for the doctor or Ryan to appear. Ever the optimist, I gave my dear husband a call. “Hey, you anywhere near?” I asked in my neutral, just-checking-in voice.
He answered back with the force of a megaton blast. “No, I’m not anywhere near! I’m working, okay? I would think that you could handle taking the baby to the doctor alone. I wanted to make it, but there’s some stuff going on.”
I’ll say. Our little nuclear family has had another explosion. Man down! Man down!
“No problem,” I said, although there was definitely a problem. My man was losing his mind. Ryan’s business had always been pretty much his life, but now I was worried that it would be the death of him, too.
Something would have to give, but right now I was more concerned with getting Lily well so that she and I could get some sleep. She had to be as tired as I was. Or at least as tired as I knew I was going to be when I looked up and saw my mother-in-law coming into the doctor’s waiting room. And she was smiling.
Oh, Ryan. Why?
For a moment, a millisecond perhaps, the Queen seemed normal and I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d just pegged her wrong. She was wearing her sugar-cookie lip gloss and wheat-colored linen suit. Her open-toed Coach slides matched her bag. She was one hip grandma, to be sure. As I softened toward her, her words rained down on me from where she was standing above us, like a bucket of hail.
“Well, look at you! You’ve lost what, two, three pounds? I can see it in your face. Definitely in the one-fifties again. Good girl.” She patted me like a stable horse before plucking the baby from my arms. A woman chuckled behind us while flipping through a six-year-old issue of Sports Illustrated. Her husband, a little plump himself, looked on in horror while trying and failing to hold in his own stomach. I felt his pain. And mine, too.
“Hello, Liz. You needn’t have come, though I do appreciate it.” Did I appreciate it? Yes, I did. I think. I didn’t like it, necessarily, but I did appreciate it. She was my family. “I know you’re not much for doctors. You don’t have to stay. We can meet for lunch later if you’d like.”
She glared at me at the mention of lunch. “No, thanks, dear. I’m not hungry. I usually fast lunch from the approach of spring through the end of summer. Then I have a big salad for dinner. You should try it. Even when I miss my walks, it keeps the numbers down. Besides, this is what grandmothers are for. I wouldn’t think of leaving.”
I didn’t have to ask which numbers she was referring to. The same digits that had made my morning, of course. Liz would have needed a sedative, though, if she’d seen the numbers that I’d rejoiced at today. Her scale has never gone that high. Ever. Not even when she was pregnant with Ryan. “Doctors didn’t just let you eat for two in my day,” she’d said when I explained that my doctor recommended that I gain at least twenty-five pounds with Lily since I’d been underweight by their chart when I conceived. Now that I’d added another fifteen pounds to that, Liz and Dr. Thomson were last on my list of people to see.
The nurse called us back just the same. “Lily Blackman?”
I tried to take the baby from my mother-in-law, but she was already up and sashaying down the hall with my daughter. She moved like only a former model can. Liz looked very comfortable chatting with the nurse, who was about her same size. Lily was weighed and had her temperature taken and we were led to an examination room. Once inside, Liz whispered to me that the nurse had four children and that perhaps I should talk to her to get some tips.
My throat tightened as I remembered the tips that my friends had tried to give me when Ryan and I had first started dating. “This thing with his mother, how he always talks about her, always calls her on the phone? Don’t you think that’s weird?”
In too deep and stupid enough to think such things endearing, I didn’t think it was weird. Now? We’d left weird a year ago. We were firmly residing in the desert of madness and I needed a drink of water.
Living water.
Lord, please don’t let me act a fool with Liz today. I know that she means well. Show me how to love her.
There wasn’t long to contemplate that thought. Dr. Thomson entered the room with a big grin. His booming voice filled the room with Caribbean notes that reminded me of the preacher who’d presided over Dana’s island wedding. The good doctor shook the Queen’s hand. “Morning, Grandma. Nice to meet you.”
Queen Liz didn’t look very happy to have been so easily identified as a grandmother. Most people took her to be my aunt or friend. Though she was obviously disturbed by his greeting, Liz gave him her best smile just as well. “Hello, Doctor.”
Before I could explain about Lily’s problem (and my problem, all fifteen, no forty, pounds of it), the doctor picked up my daughter and cradled her as though she were his own grandchild. “Fussing, are we? No sleep for your mother? That means less milk for you, young lady, which is no good. No good a’tal.”
Lily promptly smiled and fell asleep as she always did with our doctor, who’d raised nine children of his own. Sometimes I wanted to ask him how much he charged for house calls. At least maybe I could take a nap. At present, my spare thirty-minute block of the day was spent doing workout DVDs. It had worked this week though, so I couldn’t complain.
“Coughing?”
“No.”
“Just crying then?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“Before feeding or after?” Lily whined once. He bounced her one good time and she went quiet again. Amazing. He should bottle that for Ryan.
“After.”
Dr. Thomson nodded, then looked over his glasses at me. “Have you lost weight?”
My mother-in-law beamed. “Doesn’t she look good?” She gave me an affirming look.
The doctor gave a disapproving one. “Tracey, now is not the time for dieting. I told you that. Trust me, the weight will stabilize after the first year of nursing. Right now, though, you are building your daughter’s brain. Your body is holding on to fat reserves so that it can make milk. Your daughter doesn’t have colic, honey. She just doesn’t like the skim version of her food.”
Words escaped me. I just sat there, blinking. Could this be true? Had my dieting turned Lily’s stomach? Sure, I tried to avoid nursing her after I worked out because some of the books said it soured the milk, but surely I wasn’t starving the kid. I mean, look at me!
My mother-in-law recovered much faster than I. “So what you’re saying is that perhaps it’s time to switch to formula so that both mother and baby can get what they need? It’s the only sensible solution based on what you’ve just said.”
Dr. Thomson peered over his glasses. “It is not the only sensible solution, Grandma. It’s not even a solution that I want to consider at this point. I realize that in our generation, breast-feeding was frowned upon, but my goal for all the mothers in this practice is to breast-feed as long as possible. For a year, at least.”
Liz looked faint. “A year? Why, that’s downright…strange. The baby will be walking by then. Talking, practically. It’s gone on too long as it is.