Jane's Plight

Raising a baby

The sound of a child's crying echoes sharply through the phone. Jane grimaces as she straightens her slip.

"Jane, Matthew!"

The man on the right side of the bed gives a short cry and rolls over. She stares at his disheveled hair and broad shoulders for a moment. Soon Jane looks away and hurries out of the bedroom.

The sound from the phone in the bedroom begins to grow louder as it overlaps with the sound from the child's room. Jane shakes her disheveled hair impatiently from side to side. When she reaches Matthew's room, the area around his cheek is swollen like a red, ripe tomato.

"Matthew!"

Jane rushes to him and hugs him. The child stops crying for a moment. For a moment, he smells the air in the room and Jane's smell at the same time. The child starts crying again.

Jane enters the kitchen and finds a sterilized baby bottle in the second compartment of the large cupboard opposite the kitchen door. The child is still crying. The child's face is even redder. Jane looks at the child's face and then focuses on the bottle again. She finds an electrical port near the sink on the left side of the cupboard. She rushes past the water dispenser and fills the pot with water from the sink's faucet.

Her hand speeds up. Turning on the pot, she looks back at the child. She carefully moves her left arm around him again. Her blush deepens. She looks at the pot, but the water isn't boiling yet. She turns back toward the cupboard and picks up the formula from the counter at the bottom of the cupboard. She concentrates on using her right hand to pull out the modified spoon from inside the formula wrapper.

"Uh-oh."

After several tries, she finally gets the spoon out. With her right hand, she places the bottle body near the formula wrapper and carefully scoops out the formula powder with the spoon.

"Uh-oh!"

More powdered milk powder scatters onto the black counter than goes into the bottle. Tears begin to form in her eyes.

A tear forms in the corner of her eye and slowly rolls down her cheek. The child's crying never stops.

She shakes the bottle of formula. The sound of the liquid moving in the bottle and the child's crying fills the kitchen.

Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!"

For two and a half minutes, her wrist has been shaking the bottle. She is now crying a mixture of tears and snot. The tears are making stains on both her cheeks. The runny nose is slowly spreading down her throat.

"Ouch, ouch, ouch! Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh! Ugh!"

She squeezes her eyes shut hard and opens them. The tears in her eyes are welling up. The tears trickle down to the kitchen floor, but she begins to snort heavily. Now she squints her eyes, lifts the bottle with her right hand, and holds it up to the sunlit window.

She shakes the bottle back and forth for a long 30 seconds. She places the bottle on the counter and touches the back of her right hand to the body of the bottle. She brings her right hand slightly toward her body for a moment and then places the back of her right hand on the bottle again. She repeats this a couple more times.

She continues to snort, grabs the bottle, and brings it to the child's mouth. Suddenly, the child stops crying. The sound of sucking can be heard throughout the kitchen.

"Gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp, gulp."

You hear a regular sound. She keeps blowing her nose and watching the child suckle.

"Jane?"

Behind her back, a man in a robe speaks to her. Her eyes widen for a moment. Her mouth is slightly open, and a snotty sniffle escapes into it. He looks at her for a moment, frowning, then grabs a tissue from the counter and holds it out to her.

"Here, here, here, here, here, here."

She cradles her child in her left arm and holds the bottle in her right hand. The man frowns again and takes back his left hand that held out the tissue to her.

"Side, side, side, side, side, side."

The sound of the child's sucking fills the silence between them. He puts his hands together and looks at her for a moment.

"Wait, Jane, stay right there."

He reaches out with his left hand and wipes her snotty nose with a tissue. At that moment, she bursts into tears again. For a moment, he pauses. He puts his hands together again and looks at her. She is sobbing.

He looks at the liquid in his child's bottle. He pauses for a moment with his hands between his legs. She shakes her shoulders and cries. He takes a small sigh and goes behind her back, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. Two streaks of tears run down her cheeks toward the bottom of her harness. Her snotty nose rushes down the harness as well. Her tears and snot drip down his arms and onto the ground. The man frowns. The sound of her sucking on a bottle and her sniffling fills the kitchen.

"Sideways, sniffle, sideways, sniffle, sideways, sniffle."

The man continues to frown. Her tears and snot continue to pour into his arms.

"Jane..."

His quiet, husky voice rings in her ears, and at that moment she releases her grip on his back.

"John... Sigh."

She closes her eyes tightly. She opens her eyes five seconds later and stops sniffling. He quickly releases his arms from around her, grabs a tissue, and turns to face her, wiping her snotty nose.

"John... sniffle."

He checks the liquid in her bottle again. Then he holds out his arms toward her.

"Let me hold you."

ohn extends his arm toward the child, hesitating a bit. Jane takes the child's bottle as she hands it to John. Her sobbing subsides a bit. She stops crying and breathes easier. John fixes his arm around her again. Jane takes a moment to catch her breath. It's quiet between the three of them. Five minutes have passed.

"Beep, beep, beep."

Suddenly, Jane hears her cell phone notification.

"Beep."

Jane's breath catches in her throat.

"John, your cell phone is ringing."

Jane speaks to John, her voice slightly strained.

"Oh!"

In an instant, John extends his arm holding the child toward Jane.

"You have to go to work, right?"

Jane says to John with a squeeze.

"Yeah."

John pushes past her and walks briskly toward her. He goes to the back closet of his bedroom on the second floor of Burinake to change. While Jane is in the kitchen, John has showered, so he changes his clothes and looks in the mirror.

"Breakfast?"

Jane asks him as she comes upstairs late, holding Matthew in her arms.

"No thanks, I'll grab a coffee on the way."

Jane wrapped her arms around Matthew and continued to stare out the window until John drove away from the house and his car disappeared from her view.Finally, Matthew's chubby cheeks flush with satisfaction.For the first time, Matthew's angelic, chubby, ruddy cheeks accentuate his baby-fine features. He sleeps soundly.Jane cautiously ascends the stairs to the second floor, and before her bedroom, down the hall on the left, she enters a small room with tiny windows lined up like piano keys, letting in a stream of sunlight. Silence falls over the entire two-story house. She gently lays a sleeping Matthew in his crib. She lets out a long sigh. Then she sits down on a small chair in the nursery and basks in the sunlight from the small window. The teardrops on her cheeks dry up and twist her cheeks like leaves that have been dehydrated and are twisting and curling. The strong twisting continues to assault the nerves in her cheeks, causing her body to twist as well. She rises from the chair and walks into the bathroom in a daze. She has gained weight since giving birth to Matthew. Her breasts are larger than they used to be and she is experiencing soreness. She occasionally feeds Matthew, but not much, so she also gives him formula. She turns on the shower and the first thing she does is wet her cheeks, which are twisted and threatening to crack open. The warm water cascades down her body. A wistful, lonely, sad feeling fills in the gap left by the warm water and rises upward toward her heart, a strange, intense emotion that tears at her fragile heart.

Jane wraps her arms around herself, just as she wraps her arms around Matthew, the warm water flying off her body, sending a chill through her. She grabs a towel from the bathroom and roughly wipes herself off, then slips out of the bathroom and into her bedroom. The silence in the house makes her shiver even more. She wraps her arms around herself tighter and tighter, as if to protect her body heat. She doesn't know how many hours have passed. The phone rings in the bedroom.

"Beep, beep, beep."

She wants to ignore it, but she nervously picks up the phone, almost reflexively snatching the receiver for fear of waking Matthew.

"Jane?"

John's gravelly voice comes over the receiver.

"Did you have lunch?"

Jane clears her throat carefully.

"Uh...yeah..."

She answers with a grunt.

"Did you have breakfast?"

She answers John's question reluctantly.

"Uh...you..."

"Do you want me to deliver something to your house?"

She pinches her lips together and barely manages to keep her burning mouth dry.

"Uh...no...“

John's voice is urgent over the receiver.

"Sweetie... You've been so wild lately."

She puts her hands together again, squeezing harder, and answers him.

"It's okay...I'll take care of it..."

John hears Jane's voice over the receiver, hesitant and fading.

"Okay... I've got to get back to work, see you later!"

He hangs up first. Jane is instantly filled with tears. But she bites down hard on her bottom lip with her top teeth to hold back the tears. She crosses her hands again, holding her upper arms in an X, and sits down on the bed near the sunlit window. She has no appetite. I don't feel hungry. None of the things that make up her motivation, her small movements, each one creating the next, are working for her at all.

"Ting-dong!"

The front door bell rings, and she scurries downstairs to the first floor in a flash. She yanks the front door open nervously before the second ring.

"Who...is...counting?"

The sudden rush of sunlight makes it difficult for her to recognize who is standing at the door.

"Jane!"

It's Isabel, Jane's mother.

"Mommy!"

Jane exclaimed, throwing herself into Isabelle's arms. Isabelle, sympathetic to her, quickly put down the pack in her right hand and wrapped her arms around her daughter. Since Matthew's birth, Isabel had seen little of Jane. She had traveled down to Seattle, in the United States, to work on her furniture business. She hadn't been able to be there when Jane gave birth to Matthew, so John's mother, Sara, had helped her deliver him.

"Mommy!"

Jane sobbed in Isabelle's arms. Isabelle cradles her right shoulder, picks up her luggage from the ground with her left hand, and walks with her daughter into the house. The house is deserted. The kitchen across the hall from the front door catches Isabelle's eye at once. She sees formula spilled all over the counter and floor.

"Jane! Here, here..."

Isabelle sets her left hand's load down slightly near the doorway, finds a handkerchief in the left pocket of her top, and holds it out to Jane.

"Mama...black..."

"Yes... yes... I'm sorry... I'm sorry I couldn't be with you..."

Jane wipes her tears with her handkerchief and nods, calmed a little by Isabelle's apology. Isabelle takes both of her daughter's hands in hers.

"It's just that she's my first... Mommy will come more often from now on... Don't worry!"