We Need to Talk About Kevin

DECEMBER 13, 2000

Dear Franklin,

When I walked into work this morning I could tell immediately from a malignant Democratic sullenness that “Florida” was over. The sense of letdown in both camps feels postpartum.

But if my coworkers of both stripes are disappointed that such an invigorating affray is finished, I feel a measure more disconsolate still, banished even from their shared, binding sense of loss. Multiplied by many times, this loneliness of mine must approximate my mother’s experience of the end of the war, for my birthday of August 15 coincides with VJ-Day, when Hirohito broadcast his surrender to the Japanese. Apparently the nurses were so ecstatic that it was hard to get them to attend to the timing of her contractions. Listening to champagne corks pop down the hall, she must have felt so dolefully left out. Many of the nurses’ husbands would be coming home, but my father would not. If the rest of the country had won the war, the Khatchadourians of Racine, Wisconsin, had lost.

Later she must have felt similarly at odds with the sentiments embalmed by the commercial greeting card company for which she went to work (anything but Johnson Wax). How eerie, boxing other people’s Happy Anniversary tributes and having no need to slip one in her purse when the date came around in her own home. I’m of two minds as to whether I should be glad that the job gave her the idea of starting her own handcrafted greeting-card business, which allowed her to withdraw to Enderby Avenue in perpetuity. But I will say that the “On the Birth of Your First Baby” card that she made up especially for me—layered with bled tissue in blues and greens—well, it was lovely.

In fact, when my head cleared in Beth Israel, I remembered my mother and felt ungrateful. My father had been unable to hold her hand as you held mine. Yet, offered the clasp of a living husband, I crushed it.

Still, we all know that women in labor can grow abusive, so I’m tempted to admit to having gotten a little hostile in the thick of things, and to leave my confession at that. After all, I was immediately abashed and kissed you. This was before the days when doctors slid a newborn right onto the mother’s breast, gore and all, and we had a few minutes while they tied the cord and cleaned him up. I was excited, stroking and squeezing your arm, nestling my forehead into the soft inside of your elbow. I had never held our child.

But I cannot let myself off the hook so lightly.

Up until April 11, 1983, I had flattered myself that I was an exceptional person. But since Kevin’s birth I have come to suppose that we are all profoundly normative. (For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.) We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations—beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous. If it does not seem too shocking, for the duration of our marriage I lived with one terror: that if something happened to you it would break me. But there was always an odd shadow, an underfear, if you will, that it would not—that I would swing off blithely that afternoon to play squash.

The fact that this underfear rarely becomes overweening proceeds from a crude trust. You have to keep faith that if the unthinkable does come to pass, despair will come crashing in of its own accord; that grief, for example, is not an experience you need summon or a skill you need practice, and the same goes for prescriptive joy.

Thus even tragedy can be accompanied by a trace of relief. The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity (though considering what people get up to, that’s a queer word to equate with compassion, or even with emotional competence). By way of a ready example, take yesterday, Franklin. I was driving to work on Route 9W when a Fiesta turned right, cutting off a bicycle on the shoulder. The passenger door made a pretzel of the bike’s front wheel, flipping the cyclist over the roof. He landed in a position that was subtly impossible, as if sketched by an unpromising art student. I’d already driven by, but in my rearview mirror, three other cars behind me pulled onto the shoulder to help.

It seems perverse to find solace in such misfortune. Yet presumably none of the drivers who descended to ring emergency services knew this cyclist personally or had any vested interest in his fate. Still, they cared enough to inconvenience themselves potentially to the point of having to testify in court. On my own account, the drama left me physically shaken—my hands trembled on the wheel, my mouth dropped and went dry. But I had acquitted myself well. I still blanch at the agony of strangers.

Yet I do know what it’s like to get off-script. Surprise party? Funny I should have cited that. The week I was to turn ten I sensed something was up. There were whispers, a closet I was directed to avoid. If that weren’t enough wink-and-nod, Giles crooned, “You’re going to be surprised!” The second week of August I knew what signal day was approaching, and by the time it came around I was bursting.

Early afternoon of my birthday, I was ordered to the backyard.

“Surprise!” When I was invited back in, I discovered that five of my friends had been sneaked in the front while I’d been trying to peek through the drawn kitchen curtains. In our bunted living room, they surrounded a card table spread with a paper lace cloth and set with colorful paper plates, beside which my mother had placed matching seating cards inscribed with the fluid calligraphy of her professional work. There were also store-bought party favors: miniature bamboo umbrellas, noisemakers that tongued and honked. The cake, too, was from a bakery, and she had dyed the lemonade a vivid pink to make it seem more festive.

Doubtless my mother saw my face fall. Children are so lousy at covering up. At the party, I was desultory, laconic. I opened and closed my umbrella and rapidly tired of it, which was odd; I had powerfully envied other girls who had gone to parties to which I hadn’t been invited and returned to school with precisely these pink-and-blue parasols. Yet somehow it was revealed to me that they came in packets of ten in a plastic bag and could be purchased even by the likes of us, and that devalued the favors more than I could say. Two of the guests I did not much like; parents never get it right about your friends. The cake was sealed in fondant icing like a plastic puck, and flavorlessly sweet; my mother’s baking was better. There were more presents than usual, but all I remember of them is that each was unaccountably disappointing. And I was visited by a prescient taste of adulthood, an unbracketed “No Exit” sensation, which rarely plagues children: that we were sitting in a room and there was nothing to say or do. The minute it was over, the floor messy with crumbs and wrapping, I cried.

I must sound spoiled, but I wasn’t spoiled. Little had been made of my birthdays in the past. Looking back, I feel simply despicable, too. My mother had gone to so much trouble. Her business didn’t make much money for the longest time; she would labor over one card for over an hour and then sell it for a quarter, a price at which her customers would still squawk. In terms of our family’s midget economy, the outlay had been considerable. She must have been bewildered; if she were a different sort of parent, she’d have spanked my ungrateful behind. Whatever had I contemplated that in comparison made my surprise party such a letdown?

Nothing. Or nothing in particular, nothing that I could form concretely in my head. That was the problem. I had been awaiting something large and amorphous, a vast big thing so marvelous that I could not even imagine it. The party she threw was all too imaginable. For that matter, had she brought in a brass band and magicians I’d have still been crestfallen. There was no extravagance that would not have fallen short, because it would be finite and fixed, one thing and not another. It would be only what it was.

The point is, I don’t know what exactly I’d foreseen would happen to me when Kevin was first hoisted to my breast. I hadn’t foreseen anything exactly. I wanted what I could not imagine. I wanted to be transformed; I wanted to be transported. I wanted a door to open and a whole new vista to expand before me that I had never known was out there. I wanted nothing short of revelation, and revelation by its nature cannot be anticipated; it promises that to which we are not yet privy. But if I extracted one lesson from my tenth birthday party, it was that expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

I may have misrepresented myself here. Of course I had misgivings. But my expectations of motherhood were high, or I wouldn’t have agreed to go through with it. I’d attended hungrily to accounts from friends: You have no idea what it’s like until you have one of your own. Whenever I allowed that I was less than enamored of infants and small children, I was assured: I felt the same way! Couldn’t stand other people’s kids! But it’s different—it’s totally different—when they’re yours. I loved that, the prospect of another country, a strange land in which insolent miscreants were miraculously alchemized into, as you had said yourself, an answer to the “Big Question.” Indeed, I may even have misrepresented my feelings about foreign countries. Yes, I was suffering travel fatigue, and yes, I did always fight a hereditary dread before hopping a plane. But setting foot in Namibia, or Hong Kong, even Luxembourg for the first time made me high as a kite.

What I hadn’t realized, Brian had confided, is that you fall in love with your own children. You don’t just love them. You fall in love. And that moment, when you lay eyes on them for the first time—it’s indescribable. I do wish he had described it anyway. I do wish he had given it a try.

Dr. Rhinestein dangled the infant over my breast and rested the tiny creature down with—I was glad to see her evidence it at last—painstaking gentleness. Kevin was damp, and blood creased his neck, the crooks of his limbs. I put my hands diffidently around him. The expression on his twisted face was disgruntled. His body was inert; I could only interpret his lassitude as a lack of enthusiasm. Sucking is one of our few innate instincts, but with his mouth right at my enlarged brown nipple, his head lolled away in distaste.

I kept trying; he kept resisting; he liked the other nipple no better. And all the while I was waiting. My breath shallow, I was waiting. And I kept waiting. But everybody says—, I thought. And then, distinctly: Beware of what “everybody says.”

Franklin, I felt—absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It’s under the spatula, it’s slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee—

“He’s beautiful,” I mumbled; I had reached for a line from TV.

“Can I?” you asked shyly.

I offered the baby up. Whereas newborn Kevin had squirmed miserably on my breast, he rested an arm around your neck, as if having found his real protector. When I looked at your face, eyes closed, cheek pressed against our infant son, I recognized, if this does not sound too flippant: There’s the potato peeler. It seemed so unfair. You were clearly choked up, filled to the back of your throat with a wonderment that defied expression. It was like watching you lick an ice cream cone that you refused to share.

I sat up, and you returned him reluctantly, at which point Kevin began to squall. Holding the baby, who still refused to suckle, I was revisited by that now-what sensation of my tenth birthday party: Here we were, in a room, and there seemed nothing to say or do. Minutes wore on, Kevin would yowl, rest limply, and jerk irritably from time to time; I felt the first stirrings of what, appallingly, I can only call boredom.

Oh, please don’t. I know what you’d say. I was exhausted. I’d had a thirty-seven-hour labor and it was ridiculous to think I’d be capable of feeling anything but weary and numb. And it had been absurd to imagine fireworks; a baby is a baby. You’d goad me to remember that nutty little story I told you about the first time I ever went overseas for my junior year abroad at Green Bay, and I stepped onto the airstrip in Madrid to be obscurely disheartened that Spain, too, had trees. Of course Spain has trees! you jeered. I was embarrassed; of course I knew, in a way, it had trees, but with the sky and the ground and the people walking around—well, it just didn’t seem that different. Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn’t count.

Besides, you would cajole, parenthood isn’t something that happens in an instant. The fact of a baby—when so recently there was none—is so disconcerting that I probably just hadn’t made the whole thing real to myself yet. I was dazed. That’s it, I was dazed. I wasn’t heartless or defective. Besides, sometimes when you’re watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your own feelings, they flee, they elude capture. I was self-conscious, and I was trying too hard. I had worked myself up into a kind of emotional paralysis. Didn’t I just observe that these spontaneous outpourings of high passion are matters of faith? So my belief had flickered; I had allowed the underfear temporarily to get the best of me. I just needed to relax and let nature take its course. And for God’s sake, to get some rest. I know you’d say all these things, because I said them to myself. And they didn’t make a dent—in my sense that the whole thing was going wrong from the start, that I was not following the program, that I had dismally failed us and our newborn baby. That I was, frankly, a freak.

While they stitched up the tearing, you offered to take Kevin again, and I knew I should protest. I didn’t. At being relieved of him, my gratitude was soul-destroying. If you want to know the truth, I was angry. I was frightened, I was ashamed of myself, but I also felt cheated. I wanted my surprise party. I thought, if a woman can’t rely on herself to rise to an occasion like this, then she can’t count on anything; from this point onward the world was on its ear. Prostrate, with my legs agape, I made a vow: that while I might have learned to expose my “private” parts for all the world to see, I would never reveal to anyone on earth that childbirth had left me unmoved. You had your unspeakable—“Never, ever tell me that you regret our own kid”; now I had mine. Reminiscing in company about this moment later, I would reach for that word, indescribable. Brian was a splendid father. I would borrow my good friend’s tenderness for the day.