Still Life, With Plum

Last night of prescribed writing about parenting. Good; it's beginning to feel a bit like taking medicine. I have been doing it so naturally, so often; I think the main lesson learned is to be a little gentler with myself and not quite so controlling of my subject matter.

I said I would write about my cab ride, and so I will. It is illustrative of a truth I am trying to catch hold of these days, which is that the very rough moments are exactly that: moments. But as the rough moments are occurring, when I am riding atop a tidal wave of bad behavior, or preverbal frustration, it is impossible to remember this. Which is why I keep reminding myself of the fact in calmer waters. I am hoping it will one of these days sink in.

So I needed to get back home after a lovely morning out, and after a brief flirtation with the notion of the F train, which stops at the end of my street, I surrendered to a New Yorker's mundane luxury: the taxi. As a child of the suburbs, where the build-up to the acquisition of the driver's license reaches ludicrous heights, I played along with my peers, although I didn't really share the excitement. Somehow I knew that once I had the little plastic ticket to freedom, there would be, from where I was at the time, nowhere to go. And sure enough, I spent my one licensed year before leaving for college doing what suburban kids do, probably still in this age of the $5.00 gallon of gas: driving around. When I got to New York and realized that for dollars in the single digits I could be chauffeured around the city like a queen, I was hooked.

I like the subway, too, for the same primary reason: I don't have to drive. But with a cranky 4-year-old, exhausted, hungry baby and a stroller, the cab won out on this occasion. The trip started out fine. The cab, easily hailed, pulled to stop at my feet. (Will I ever get over feeling like this is a little bit magical? I want to go. Here is my car!) The stroller folded with the tap of my foot into its neat little package and was deposited in the trunk. Keep in mind I am holding the baby while hailing, folding, depositing and loading: holding her under one arm like a football.

We get in. Lily buckles her seatbelt. I put on mine. Baby coos at driver. Lily takes bite of nectarine, baby starts to scream. Lily finishes last few bites of nectarine, baby continues to wail, we realize that baby wants nectarine, but there are no more. I take pit and hide in ashtray on door; baby acquires inhuman strength in desire to get to, and pry open ashtray to get pit. She fails. I remember I have one small plum. Baby cannot eat plum as is baby, and has two tiny teeth, so I take tiny bites off plum, remove from my own mouth, and feed to baby, who suddenly seems as though she has not been fed in last three months. In about 10 seconds, plum is gone. Pit is hidden in ashtray with larger cousin pit, and baby again starts screaming. I have bits of plum on my shirt and in my hair. Baby is covered with red plum juice. Baby accidentally smacks in Lily in face while flailing around to get to ashtray. Lily starts wailing too. cab driver turns up radio.

As I am sitting in the back of the cab, sticky with plum juice, which is staining items of clothing on all three of us, listening to my two children screaming, the steamy air oppressive inside the cab, which appears to have no air conditioning, the baby thrashing around miserably on my lap, Lily accusing me of letting Annika "hurt my body, which is not allowed at school," my head starting to pound, trapped in the back seat, literally strapped in to my fate, stuck in traffic that has no visible end ahead, I am able to leave my head for a few seconds somehow, to step outside the experience and observe me as an outsider would, an outsider excepting the cab driver, whose strategy is to pretend that we don't exist by regular increases of radio volume.

This is a terrible moment, I observe as the outsider. There is nothing you can do right now.

It was a zen moment, then. I gave in to the awful wailing, the thrashing, the stickiness, the waves of loathing emanating from the frontseat, my own misery.

This will not last forever, I repeated, as we sat dripping in the humidity. But it kept lasting, and in desperation, I told the cab driver in a virtual scream to be heard above his radio that I had recently learned that the sound of a baby crying is used as a means of torture in prison camps. They pipe it into cells, I explained, and he neither acknowledged I was speaking, nor lowered the volume of his radio.

But just then the traffic cleared, and the driver sped up, and in a blink of an eye we were home, and I tucked the baby under my arm, and took the stroller out of the trunk, and ushered Lily up to the curb, and said thank you to the driver, who gave me the merest hint of a nod, and stood on the sidewalk in front of our building, and exhaled.

And now, a day and a half later, it already feels like it happened to somebody else. A moment, Not a good one. But a moment just the same.