One afternoon while Ryan was on campus taking an exam, and I was ravenous for sleep, she escaped into the hotel hallway. After her fourth or fifth attempt, I lunged and grabbed her shoulders, digging my nails into her thick skin. Although I was delirious and swollen, the moment felt eerily rehearsed as I flipped Irelyn over and pinned her against the mattress, holding my daughter, white-knuckled, against her will. I was filled with love and also mysteriously with hatred.
A violent film reel unraveled in my head, featuring all the ways a mother loses her composure, strong and big enough to smother a child. The physiological urge to release anger in some unfettered gesture was like the fantasy of releasing doves turned vultures from a cage. I imagined gouging out Irelyn’s face with my own claws. Later I’d revise the movie in my head, borrowing savage punishments from cautionary tales for children, as far back as the German and French writers our ancestors likely read—the Brothers Grimm, Heinrich Hoffmann, Hilaire Belloc. Little Suck-a-Thumb’s hands were mutilated by the maniacal tailor while the mischievous Max and Moritz were ground to bits in a feedbag at the farmer’s mill for their impish pranks.
In this literary spirit, my own father used cautionary tales as his number-one parenting strategy. According to him, mole people, mutant humanoid beasts, lived in our basement. Our “mole room” was a dark subterranean compartment where, pre-divorce, my parents stored Christmas presents and other keepsakes they wanted to protect from our dirty, pilfering hands. Similar to but distinct from the science fiction slaves in the 1956 horror film The Mole People, ours oozed black slime. My dad warned me about these murderous rodents, cloaked like humans but whiskered like rats. My father knew how to wield power over us. With such playfully terrifying ruses, who needed rules? In our adult lives, when mole people entered the vernacular as the label for homeless citizens living inside New York City subway tunnels, the indigent subterranean dwellers seemed conjured by my father’s imagination. My dad was unusual, born during the Great Depression, much older than my friends’ parents. Cultural mores have largely changed by now to match our increasingly sentimentalized version of childhood. Instead of scaring or punishing naughty children, Pete the Cat sings them a groovy song.
But the physiological experience of raising children has likely not changed much over time, nor has the dire need for catharsis. In pre-Disney versions of “Snow White,” the princess’s biological mother—not her stepmother, in fact—demands her daughter be killed, and further yet, she requests Snow White’s lungs and liver served on a platter at dinnertime. Sometimes, even when consumed by the purest love, I’d imagine eating Irie up. God, we love our children, but God help us, even the most sacred relationships are not immune to flashes of violence.
Mothers are taught to take deep breaths, to walk away, to lock themselves in bathrooms. Maternal love is what teaches us the art of restraint. That day in the Extended Stay America marked the beginning of many years spent “holding” Irie. She gazed back at me, perhaps watching that same horror film in reverse, each act of violence being undone, ending with a little girl fully intact, not yet corpus delicti. Sedate, merciful, and ready to sing me a song, Irie seemed always to emerge unscathed, resilient, rising from the ashes I had created with my fire.
Immobilization proved to be exactly what we both needed. I’d hold her at bedtime, and at playdates, and on days she threatened to blow our house down. Sometimes I’d clutch her more savagely than usual, and as if practicing a strange kind of acupuncture, it remedied our pain. As Irelyn and I developed our holding ritual, I came to recall my own father immobilizing me during childhood tantrums. He would become my straitjacket, straps stitched from his long arms and legs. Just as babies are swaddled, older children collect composure in the warm embrace of strong limbs, except when restraint makes them an easy target for abuse.
One day when my friend Jill and her children visited from a wealthy suburb of Milwaukee, I could not vacuum, dust, or hide enough clutter to prepare for their arrival. I gritted my teeth for hours before she arrived. After she’d weathered the long drive, and we’d sent the kids to play, she checked in to find them using Fern’s doctor kit, including a bulb syringe for sucking up baby snot. She grabbed it from her son’s fist as if he’d been caught with a heroin needle, and she replaced it with a sanitized toy from his diaper bag. Later, when we searched for costumes in the basement, she tried not to gasp out loud when she saw “the laundry project.” At the park, when Irie misbehaved and I cornered my own daughter against the fence, holding her there, syncing our breath, I could see that my life on the wrong side of the tracks had stunned Jill. When she left Oshkosh, she appeared frantic but relieved, like she’d just missed colliding with a freight train.
The transition from one to two children would prove the largest upheaval in our ever-growing family, as we switched from providing undivided attention to multitasking, and I was already exhausted, but also eager for my hormonal fix. The rush of childbirth would carry me through the summer, I reasoned, if I could just force Leo to arrive. Ryan and I tried sex, when Irelyn
