Breeding and Writing: Giving away your baby

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–by Tracy Lucas

 

Sending my kid to daycare by himself that first day was hard.

I could easily have shouted directions at the (very capable) teachers for longer than the school day.

How were they going to know what he meant by his nonsense syllables? What if they cut his food the wrong size? Would he go to sleep for them without a fight when they didn’t know the phrases we use to get him settled? If he choked on his lunch, would they snatch him up in time or be distracted by the roomful of other kids?

What if he came home with a bruise, and I didn’t know how it had gotten there, and we ended up in the emergency room with some kind of internal hemorrhage?

Okay, that last one was a bit of a stretch. Doesn’t mean I didn’t think it.

And I wholly trusted this daycare. It’s the only one in town, out of twenty or so contenders, that my husband and I felt at peace with in the first place.

But I had created this kid from scratch. That’s a hard feeling to explain to someone who doesn’t have children, but that’s what happened. I married a guy, and just because we did the dirty one particular night, an entire person popped into existence.

This micro-person couldn’t do anything at first. I always thought that babies were nonverbal and slow to walk, but could pretty much do everything else. Unh-uh.

We had to show him not to scratch his eyes out with his little baby fingernails. We had to help him poop a couple of times. (Trust me; you do NOT want to know.) We even had to teach him to swallow; anytime we fed him pureed whatever, he would open his mouth in shock at the new texture and let it all dribble down his slimy, drooly little neck.

And apparently, for the longest time, and we’re talking months, babies don’t have enough motor control to grasp. To grasp! I didn’t know that going in. All the pictures of the infant tenderly curling her fingers around the mama bear’s pinky? Well, yeah, happens occasionally. Hanging on to things that are useful? Nope. Not this baby. He would fly into a violent rage in hopes of procuring his pacifier (we call it a “plug” at my house) and alerting us that it had gone missing. Most of the time, we found it. In his hand.

Many of our early conversations went like this:

Me: “Here ya go, buddy. Hang on to it this time.”

Him:  (greedy sucking-sucking-slobber-slobber)

Me: “Let’s just go over here and see if…”

Him: (caterwauling like a buckshot banshee)

Me: “Oh my God, calm down, it’s okay. Where’d it go? What happened?”

Him: (screaming, puffing, huffing, choking, red, pissed, raging psychobaby)

Me: (frantic pacing, tearing apart couch cushions, head verging on combustion)

Him: “AAEEEEEEEEeeeEEEEEEaaaGGGHHHooooAAEE!!”

Husband: “What’s his problem? What are you doing to the pillow stuffing and the cat?”

Me: (crying, sure of my failure as a parent) “WHERE IS THE FUCKING PLUG?! HELP ME!”

Husband: “Um. Yeah. It’s in his left hand again, goober.”

At least, that’s how I remember it.

We literally taught this child everything. He came out as a GI tract with attitude, and we worked on him daily until he turned into the walking, talking, dangerously adorable, smartass, veritable child that he is today.

It was baffling to think of dropping him off for eight hours and let someone else be me. Because that’s what it was; it wasn’t that I didn’t think other folks had cool things to show him, it was that the daycare workers were my real-world replacements. They were going to do everything I was used to doing for him, and it was guaranteed they weren’t going to do it my way. There’s no way they could! They had only known him for mere hours, and now I had no choice but to trust them to keep him alive and return him in safe condition.

He was going to have experiences I couldn’t fill him in about later, and memories of things I had never seen. He was going to fall and I wouldn’t be able to reach him; he’d get comfort elsewhere. He was going to learn words I didn’t teach him, try snacks I hadn’t made him. I was going to miss some major firsts.

He was going to live without me.

That’s the real fear for any parent; that our child will do just fine on his own, exactly as we’ve intentionally raised him to.

Releasing a piece to an editor is not so altogether different.

We want to send a five-page cover letter explaining that Mom isn’t really like that, it’s just a piece of fiction, and by the way, we were drunk when the piece was written, so if some things sound a bit stupid, please be gentle. We want to qualify our work with bio credits and educational abbreviations, and make sure editors know we are the experts we pretend to be.

We know our writing better than anyone else ever could.

We were there the day it came into being, and we know the thousand other ways the ending could have gone, the phrase we didn’t pick but almost did, the names and where they came from, why they mattered. We want to qualify our decisions, so the editor will see things our way and make them the way we would.

It takes an editor two seconds to delete a line you made with your blood.

You send off a poem or a story and hope for publisher approval, but what you really want is just that: flat approval, not criticism or reworking. You want it to be the best, most perfect thing ever and to wow the publisher in charm and wit. After all, if it wasn’t perfect, you didn’t send it, right?

It’s hard to let others show up out of the blue and insert themselves. The piece changes. It’s almost always an improvement, if you can look at it objectively, but of course you can’t (well, not without some serious practice.)

The problem with change? Even when changed well, things which are changed are never the same. That’s so obvious, so self-defining to say, yet we fight the concept all the way. It’s a hard thing to step up and be edited, and I’m not gonna lie, it hurts to take your hands back off of something you’ve fashioned from clay. Sometimes a lot.

But is the piece—is my baby—better for it in the end?

If you’ve done your job well, it’ll stand. If I’ve taught my kid enough about how the world works, he’ll make do and form his own relationships with the new folks. It’s the broader sphere the writing/child has to exist in, not the creator’s own.

Yes, letting go is hard as hell. It’s terrifying.

But that boy came home from daycare yesterday singing “Wheels on the Bus”, which I’ve never taught him; talking about Dora, which we’ve never watched; and asking for marshmallows, which I’ve never fed him for fear of choking.

And he was smiling all the way.