Alexander Jones

Failure to Thrive

Pleasantly ensconced in our bedroom, lying back on plush pillows, baby sprawled across my expanding middle, I channel surfed instead of mingling with my wife’s family and friends in the rest of the house.

Clicking through the channels, I was a Roman emperor at the gladiator games, deciding who lived or died.

A twenty-year-old sitcom I’d never watched. Click.

Political pundits punditing. Click.

A comedian, marginally famous during my youth, doing a standup routine, trying to recapture… whatever. “Comeback Bore” on a banner behind him.

I paused, thumb hovering over the arrow button.

Jesus, this guy looked terrible. Long, scraggly hair; too thin, his determinedly unhip leather jacket draped over his shoulders like he was a wooden coat hanger. Way, way too much cocaine, maybe really good cocaine, too much booze, too many girls… hadn’t there been a paternity suit or a sleazy scandal? Something… hopefully he’d enjoyed the height of his fame. Was his comedy routine more reflective and contemplative now that he’d become a rueful cautionary tale, maybe with some hard-earned, middle-aged wisdom thrown in?

Okay. 

I dropped the remote and saw with immediate irritation that it landed too far away to retrieve without disturbing my carefully engineered cocoon.

I didn’t know my own strength. 

My son, five months old, healthy eater, dedicated sleeper, thrower of fits, stirred against me and issued a whiny, breathy, sighing cry. Milk breath.

Not awake yet. 

I rocked my body from side to side, getting my stomach swaying, my underused obliques driving the undulation, and he hissed a sour burp, smacked his lips, and subsided back to sleep.

Close call.

Someone, one of her friends, or one of her friends’ husbands, someone with whom I’d probably already engaged in a superficial but not entirely unpleasant nonversation brayed too loudly out in the hall.

I stared at the door, willing it not to open. When it didn’t, I returned my focus to the TV, saw the audience laughing, and realized that I’d missed a joke.

I reached for the remote.

Did I leap for the remote?

Did I lunge, plunge, pounce, dive, or, much more likely, lurch for the remote?

The baby, sleeping, relaxed, calm, angelic? beatific? toppled from his roost on top of my gut, slid sideways down the sloping expanse, onto my lap, off of my lap, tumbling head first to the polished teak floor that had convinced my wife that this was the house, our home, that we probably couldn’t afford.

I caught him before he hit the floor and pinned him between my forearm and the side of the mattress, grabbing one little foot with my other hand a microsecond later. 

I watched with dismay as his head, like a giant pendulum, swung into the side of the bedframe and his forehead smacked the burnished oak. My wife liked wood appointments.

I’d killed him. I’d killed him. My son, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

His shriek pierced the air, and spiked my eardrums.

I hauled him up by his ankles, grabbed his live, thrumming, squirming body, and got him upright and facing me. 

His face was squinted and bright red and getting redder and redder as he wailed, kicking and punching. Hard to believe so much noise came out of that little body. Not a trace of self-reflection or doubt or hesitancy; babies are nothing but instincts and id and I’d hurt him and now he was screaming, screaming in pain, so much sharper than the usual cries for bottles and attention.

I clutched him to my chest and cradled his head and rubbed and patted his back, rocking him, all the things that usually soothed him back into calmness or sleep, but this was different. He’d just have to cry it out and I’d have to let him, let him get used to the knocks and thumps that make up a life of physicality.

I clutched him anyway.

I was happy he was alive. I was always happy he was alive, smiling and waving his fists and laughing made up for the babbling little shit factory I’d always, rightly, imagined having a baby of my own would be like. 

But this was different. My tears were imminent, and I rubbed at the edges of my eyes with the back of my hands, releasing a deep breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Holding him against me as he shrieked, the door opened, and a woman, one of my wife’s aunts, maybe… no, an older cousin, something… poked her head in, didn’t say anything, and retreated, not closing the door. 

A moment later my wife entered.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, he woke up and just started crying.”

Lying. Lying, lying, lying. 

Lying to erase what I’d done as much as I could, lying because I didn’t want to admit that the remote control was more important than our son and I’d maybe come close to killing him, lying because I didn’t want to deal with being a bad parent, lying because the welt that would inevitably form from him hitting his head would be out of sight, underneath the mop of hair he’d been born with so my wife wouldn’t be likely to find it. In other words, lying because I could get away with lying. 

“That happens sometimes, you know. Here, let me see him,” she said, and I passed him to her, gripping his flailing little body by the waist so she could grab him under the arms.

“Shhhh.” My wife held him against her chest and rocked him, stroked his face, and leaned into him, whispering, ignoring the crying and thrashing as she bounced and comforted him. 

A closed feedback loop system. Two’s company, three’s a crowd.

I heaved off the bed.

“Where are you going?”

Pulling on my sneakers, I said, “Out.”

This is exactly where I went, smiling and nodding at people, forcing myself to maintain a normal, definitely- not- crazy- person pace across the kitchen and then the living room, though I didn’t take my eyes off the front door, not even for a second.

Finally outside.

I gasped for air.

I needed a cigarette.

I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in ten… no, twelve years, but that didn’t matter. I needed a cigarette, the rich carcinogenic vapor, so much thicker than air that it takes purposeful concentration to inhale would calm me down.

Not killing my kid, that would calm me down.

Not being a parent, that would calm me down.

I walked. Off the porch, across the lawn, down the driveway, stepping around the guests’ cars packed in, until I reached the pavement of our street.

I could keep going to the end of the block, around the corner onto the main avenue, walking to… where? To the train station, to a train that would no doubt be waiting there just for me, then onto the bright lights of the big city, and then to… where?

Freedom?

Where was that? What was that? Back to the bachelor pad I’d had as a bachelor? Back to having abs? Attempting to keep a plant alive on the windowsill in the bathroom? I’d once seen some stupid movie about alcoholics where the counselor tells someone that if he can keep a plant alive for a year then he should get a cat and if the cat and the plant are still alive a year after that, then he could think about dating.

That simple linear upward path from plant to cat to wife and now, child, appealed to me in the same simplistic way I was told that getting good grades in high school would help me get good grades in college which would help me get good grades in grad school which would help me get a good job which would make me a productive financial engine for society.

Or something.

In reality, the plant died, probably poisoned by shampoo suds sluicing off me onto it while I showered, and the lines between school and work and being a snug cog in the machine were blurry, and...

…now I’d just nearly killed my son.

He’d almost died once before. For the first week, a week and a half after we brought him home from the hospital he’d been fine, but then he’d started missing his marks for growth and weight gain. Each visit to the pediatrician, more closely spaced together than normal because she wanted to observe him more often, brought a heavy dread, especially once she’d sprung the term ‘failure to thrive’ on us. He was failing to thrive, health and growth not taking hold, so we were going to the doctor more and more urgently to hear that he was failing to thrive more and more frequently. Eventually, it turned out that we weren’t feeding him enough, that the instructions we’d gotten from the hospital had a miswritten number and once we upped his allotment of powdered gruel, he sprouted and plumped up and thrived.

Likewise, I was ready to be a father and I was, for the first little while, but now, a little further out, I had trouble that I wasn’t having when he’d first been born. My son hadn’t been eating enough, maybe I hadn’t been nourished enough either, both of us getting the proper liftoff but without booster rockets to sustain the journey. 

I was falling back to earth, yawing uncontrollably, the mission scrapped, the ship veering off course, hopefully not about the crash into a populated area and taking out innocent people as collateral damage.

The Air Force always has fighters ready to fire anytime NASA does a launch, just in case a satellite or a shuttle goes rogue.

I couldn’t deal with this happening again, which it certainly would, driven by a moment-to-moment inattentiveness there was no cure for, no vigilance against inevitable stray thoughts that would catch my fancy like a cat swatting at dust motes highlighted by a ray of sunshine in an otherwise shadowy room.

He was better off without me.

My wife, holding the baby to her chest, playing with him, and managing to beam down her happiness, accepting if not oblivious to his wounded crying, looked free, like she’d found her happy place.

Not me. 

I didn’t know if there was a life I was meant to be living, but this couldn’t be it.

I shuffled my feet, standing in front of our mailbox, trying to figure out what to do.

It was a nice night, a nice night for a walk; clear, moon and stars visible. Perfect night to abandon my family, I wouldn’t even need to go back inside for a jacket.

So, I walked.

A few feet. Then I turned around and returned to the mailbox, absentmindedly running my fingers along the corroded aluminum.

I couldn’t leave.

I didn’t want to stay, either.

Feeling uneasy about parenting wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t anything special. I wasn’t…

Free.

Back in the bachelor pad, or even before it, in the previous few bachelor pads, or before that, in my college dorm room, or before that, in the room I’d fashioned out of my parent’s basement, back in any of these locations I’d been certain of my freedom to be anything, do anything, be a rock star as soon as I learned how to play the guitar, be an astronaut, a football player after I bulked up, or king of the world or… whatever… operating under the idea that, the less stuff you do, the more stuff you’re free to do. If you do nothing, you can be anything; as soon as you start doing stuff, the opportunity costs prevent you from doing other stuff.

I still needed a cigarette.

Something.

What I needed, was to have not just nearly killed my son by reaching for a remote to rewind a joke uttered by a comedian who wasn’t all that funny twenty years ago when I was a kid who believed I could be anything as long as I did nothing.

Having a kid was doing something, and going into the city in search of some mythical good time that I’d never quite had even when I’d lived in the city was something I couldn’t do as a result.

Maybe this was where I did belong.

But maybe endangering him was proof of just how far I hadn’t progressed as a responsible adult.

But I wasn’t a bad enough person to leave.

Was I?

My house was full of people I didn’t want to talk to.

So, I stood there, drumming my fingers on the mailbox instead, tapping my foot against the line where the dry grass of my lackluster, neglected lawn ended and the pavement of the street began.

Nowhere to go.

“What are you doing out here?” my wife asked, coming up behind me sometime later.

I’d seen her coming in the reflection of my neighbor’s rear windshield, but I hadn’t turned to her, though I wasn’t bothering to act surprised, either.

“Nothing.”

“Yeah?”

I shrugged. I’d calmed down, a little, until I thought of the thud my son’s head made against the bedframe and the sick feeling that I’d killed him bubbled up again like curdled milk.

“People can see you,” she said, pointing at our living room window.

“I’m fat and I’m not invisible.” Being insolent instead of playing dumb.

“They’re looking at you standing here like … I don’t know what. Asking me what you’re doing out here, looking like you’re waiting for a late bus.”

I shrugged again. “I’m standing here.” If I had a cigarette, the answer to that question would be obvious. Instead, I just looked like an anxious weirdo. Her family could think whatever they wanted, but they’d be right if that was what they were thinking, which irritated me for some reason.

“Why?”

“How’s the baby?”

“He’s okay, I calmed him down. My cousin’s got him.”

“He freaked me out. Crying like that.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know, just … crying. Loud. Hard. More than usual.”

“Babies cry.”

“I guess.”

“You are freaked out. Did something happen?”

I hesitated. Is confession good for the soul? Had she figured it out? Maybe she’d found the goose egg forming above his wispy hairline and was allowing me to confess. What if she found it later, or tomorrow?

“Nah, everything was fine.”

“You have to get used to him crying.”

“Yeah, I guess.” I guess I had to get used to him crying. I guess I had to get used … to him.

I should have been at the stage when sublimating my desire to hear the comic into focusing on my son was at least automatic, if not yet wholly natural. Plant, cat, wife, child … hive mind? Surrendering the self to be poured from a solitary cup into the ocean, to dissipate into family…

But no. I had to be an individual. I had to have my own needs and wants and I needed to reach for the remote at just that wrong moment, asserting this moment of narcissistic individualism just to hear a slightly better-than-mediocre comic, whereas when my wife, when she was feeding him or changing him or comforting him or just… being with him a bomb could go off and she wouldn’t notice.

“You know, it’s going to be tough. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.” 

“You keep saying ‘yeah’ and ‘I know’ and ‘I guess,’ but it doesn’t sound like it. I mean, he can’t even crawl yet. Pretty soon he’s going to be pulling books off shelves and waving around anything he can get his hands on.”

“I don’t know, I just…”

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter.” She leaned closer to me, smiling with amusement. “A couple of weeks ago I was strapping him into the highchair, and when I went to secure the tabletop part of it, I pinched his hand.”

“Ouch.”

“He went nuts, and I was sure that I’d crushed it and broken all of his bones and that I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you and…” 

“And what happened?”

“Nothing. He cried for a while and ended up with a nasty bruise. For a minute I thought about covering it up with makeup, but you didn’t even notice.”

Was this an accusation?

“Point is, sometimes he cries and sometimes we freak out.”

“Just get over it?”

“Just get used to it.”

“Alright.”

“Are you coming back in? Better yet, why don’t you walk to the convenience store and pick up a couple of bottles of soda.”

I followed her back inside.

Alexander Jones has short fiction and poetry appearing in Akashic Books, Bastion Magazine, Crack the Spine and DASH, among other publications. His nonfiction was recently anthologized by 2Leaf Press; multiple short stories he’s written have received honorable mentions in Writer’s Digest’s Annual contests and an essay he wrote won GoRail’s 2012 contest. He has a BA in English/ Creative Writing and a second BA in History. He works as a metal fabricator and lives with his family in New Jersey.