Kate's Cottage and the Post Office

I wrote this essay a few years ago, and thought I would share it here.            

           I close the front door to O’Rourke’s Post Office after I tuck Maureen and P.J. into bed, and in the morning, the dollhouse door is open.  I wonder if the latch is loose, perhaps slipping open when my kids bound through the house after they wake up.  I close the door for the fifth time this week while they are getting ready for bed.  P.J. is brushing his teeth in his white flannel pajamas and I ask him if he knows why the door is open.

            “I check it in the morning,” he says shyly, with his dolphin toothbrush sticking out of his mouth.  I imagine my four-year old son peeking inside in the morning, right after he goes to the bathroom and just before he comes downstairs.  O’Rourke’s Post Office is part of P.J.’s town built in the nook between his and his sister’s bedroom, a room littered with wooden trains, plastic trucks and Lego buildings.  Building the Post Office was a family project.  Now it sits down the street from Kate’s Cottage, a dollhouse I built eight years earlier under radically different circumstances, at a time when I didn’t know if I would ever become a mother or have a family.

I built Kate’s Cottage when I was pregnant with Maureen.  Entering the third trimester of my third pregnancy, I had hoped that this baby would survive.  My first pregnancy ended in a full-term stillbirth, the second in a first trimester miscarriage.  My husband John and I had recently moved from Chicago to St. Louis and lived in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in a town where we had few friends and no family.  Pregnant and lonely, I wanted to build a dollhouse instead of shopping for nursery furniture or cooing over tiny baby clothes at stores designed to appeal to the giddy and romantic notions of expectant mothers.  I was terrified of losing another pregnancy, and building Kate’s Cottage was perfect a perfect substitute for nesting.  I could have spent this time looking at real estate, but wasn’t ready for the commitment.  I needed a child before I would be ready for a real house.

Losing Ada wasn’t supposed to happen to me.  I was twenty-nine and in perfect health.  I did water aerobics through the whole pregnancy, only ate the healthiest foods and didn’t touch soda or coffee.  I had access to some of the best prenatal care in the country.  I thought that unexplained, unexpected stillbirths occur in developing countries, not in the heart of downtown Chicago to overeducated women like me.

A few days after Ada’s memorial service, John and I went to the hospital’s child loss support group.  I saw the sign on the door, and thought if I didn’t go in, perhaps I could fly around the globe like Superman and turn back time to before Ada died.  But I was grief-stricken, not delusional, so I walked into the class.  Like many people who have experienced a major tragedy, I divided life into before and after.  I felt like I was living in a black and white movie, after having lived in color.  I ached for the time when green and blue and yellow would replace the gray.

Women told their stories.  A red headed woman from a large family lost twins and described the shame she felt for not being able to reproduce when everyone around her was fecund.  A couple in their late-thirties lost a beautiful boy after years of infertility.  Like Ada, their son’s death was unexpected and unexplained.  I understood the general idea of support groups was to commiserate based on the theory that pain shared hurts less than pain bottled up.  Yet, this group made me feel worse as I had a new list of things to worry about: fertility issues, chromosomal abnormalities, or someday I might be too old. 

As I listened to more women talk, I slipped into a trance, to a far away day in the future, when I would have kids.  I tried as hard as I could to see myself in five or ten years, when my family would be complete.  It was a vague place, with no color or scent.  As hazy as it was, that blank place kept me from total despair.  Someday, I won’t be so miserable.  Someday, I’ll have a family.

            The day after the infant loss support group, I needed an emotional boost so John and I went to the Shedd Aquarium.  I decided that getting out and about would be more healing than sitting inside and crying in a corner.  At the aquarium, we were surrounded by dozens of elementary school children on a field trip downtown.  I watched a six-year-old boy put on an otter costume as a docent explained how the layers of an otter’s skin protect it from frigid water.  That little boy and all of his curious classmates affected me more than women with infants in strollers and toddlers padding along with their stance widened by a diaper.  I didn’t want a baby: I wanted a family, a family John and I could bring to the aquarium and read Winnie the Pooh to and teach to ride bikes and play Candy Land.  I wanted to go to high school graduations, have Thanksgiving dinner with my kids when they come home from college, and plan weddings.

            Watching the little boy in the otter costume was my nadir.  John saw me—both heartbroken and amazed—and wondered if we should go home.  I wanted to stay, not because I enjoyed suffering, but this was filling the gaps in my imagination from the night before, when I tried to envision my life a decade later.  What I had missed was now tangible.  After we had been at the aquarium for two hours, John and I sat in the back of the dolphin and beluga whale show.  I watched the kids watching the animals swim and jump overlooking Lake Michigan.  Their laughter and energy was contagious and I was happily lost in the reverie of having my own busy and creative brood.

Dreaming of having a family and making it come true were two different tasks, and the power of positive thinking could not outweigh my fear of losing another pregnancy.  After Ada died, my obstetrician said to wait six months before trying again in order to give my uterus time to heal.  I obeyed, and then became pregnant right away.  This pregnancy felt great—too great, in fact.  I didn’t have any morning sickness and I wasn’t tired at all, all of which I saw in hindsight as signs of a miscarriage that didn’t self-abort.

In the second winter after Ada’s death and in the third trimester of my third pregnancy, I found Kate’s Cottage on a website from a shop in Derbyshire, England.  The dollhouse kit seemed perfect.  I had just quit my job as a project manager with one of the Big Six accounting and consulting firms and I needed something to keep me busy until the delivery.  My new high risk-obstetrician in St. Louis patronizingly smiled when I told him about the dollhouse.  He must have been amused I had quit the life of a corporate road warrior and was building a dollhouse, a hobby for homebodies.  I felt like a loser, trading my frequent flier accounts for wallpaper paste and wood glue.  I was living in a new city with no job, no friends, no baby, a husband who worked endless hours in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and combined student loan debt greater than the cost of my parents’ four bedroom suburban house.  In the asset column of my life, I had a kit to make Kate’s Cottage.

Kate’s Cottage cost an irresponsible sum, with shipping from the U.K. costing half as much as the house itself.  The kit weighed at least thirty pounds and took six weeks arrive on my doorstep.  I imagined it traveling by slow boat across the Atlantic.  Kate’s Cottage, unlike formal and fussy Victorian or Queen Anne-style dollhouses, looked like it belonged in a bucolic small town.  With a cheerful white exterior, exposed wood beams and a red brick foundation, Kate’s Cottage looked like the home of Huckle Cat, a character I would later meet in P.J.’s favorite book, What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry.  Kate’s Cottage was cozy and warm, like a home I hoped to have.  I imagined children playing outside in the lush, green field, running up and down the cottage stairs, and then sitting by the kitchen hearth while the mother warmed cider on the stove.  Kate’s Cottage was kid-friendly, too.  No room would be off-limits to messy children.

For three months, I channeled my grief and fears and hopes into this cozy miniature home instead of preparing my own nest.  In my real life, my first pregnancy had left me with everything I needed to take care of an infant: a crib, sheets, pajamas, a car seat and more.  In the world of Kate’s Cottage, the only furniture I had was a bed and a table my Aunt Pat had given me as a girl for the dollhouse my father had never finished.  Beyond those items, I didn’t care if the dollhouse was empty:  I wanted to build and paint and create, to have something to show for those spring months in case my womb failed again.

            I bought cedar shingles for the roof and oak-patterned paper for the floors.  Afraid of exposing my fetus to possibly disfiguring paint fumes, I worked on the back porch in the warm spring days.  Even though the outdoors provided more than ample ventilation, I wore a fume mask.  I double gloved my hands lest the chemicals seep through my skin and cross the placenta.

When I ran out of paint, I went to the hobby shop after one of my twice-weekly obstetrician visits.  In the parking lot, Kenny Loggins’ song “House at Pooh Corner” came on the radio and I sat and cried.  I was terrified about losing another baby.  In the last days of my pregnancy with Ada, I had looked at the date on my yogurt and I’d happily thought:  I’ll be a mother before this expires.  Now, I couldn’t picture my life beyond my due date, good or bad.  I couldn’t buy yogurt or milk or bread.  We ate out all of the time because I couldn’t stand the possibility of my food having a longer shelf life than my unborn baby.

            I plugged along, finishing Kate’s Cottage with a big belly, a few days before I went into labor.  Maureen popped out with her fists curled into tight little balls and her arms shooting straight out to the side, strong and muscular compared to Ada’s flaccid limbs.

            “It’s alive!” I said, as if I was not expecting her to breathe.  The doctor cut the cord and gave my baby to the neonatologist who was clearing the meconium from Maureen’s airway.  I was not wearing my glasses and I couldn’t focus on the baby from where I was sitting.  I couldn’t walk over to the table to see her as my legs were paralyzed from the epidural.  Maureen was looking at the wall and I couldn’t see her face.  She was only ten feet away yet it felt like a chasm between her bed and mine.  No physical feat could bring me closer.  I didn’t mind the distance.  Just don’t let her die, I thought.

After ten minutes of confirming Maureen was a robust and healthy baby, a nurse handed my daughter to me.  According to the infant loss books I had read, the moment I held my new, healthy baby was supposed to be filled with rapture.  It wasn’t.  It was filled with fear.  I counted each breath and feared my breast pressed against Maureen’s nose would suffocate her.  The New York Times ran an article about mothers whose children have a near-death experience.  While their children quickly rebound from a rare illness or a major car accident, the mothers spent the following months anxiously reliving the near miss.  As a mother who lost a child, I thought minor incidents were near misses, that my daughter was narrowly defeating death.  Hours after Maureen’s birth, I was wakened by her cough.  I lifter her, patted her back, and she spit up a mucus ball the size of a strawberry.  I was convinced I had saved her life.  If I hadn’t picked her up, I was sure she would have choked to death on her own phlegm.

Like many new mothers, I wasn’t prepared for the lack of sleep, the baby’s constant crying and my overwhelming sense of incompetence.  I also wasn’t prepared for a second wave of grief from Ada’s death, as I now had a tangible reminder of what I had lost.  Maureen’s real milestones and Ada’s missing ones were the same.  I was living in a neutral zone, trying to balance the joy I felt with Maureen and the sadness I felt for Ada, yet feeling neither fully.  When we took Maureen to a restaurant for the first time when she was a week or two old, a mom with a toddler and a preschooler came up to me and gushed about my beautiful baby.  This initiation to motherhood—chatting with strange women about sleepless nights and breastfeeding—was bittersweet.  I was happy to finally be in the club and painfully aware this was what I missed with Ada.

Maureen’s crib was next to our bed, and the dollhouse sat neglected on a table in the second bedroom until we bought a five bedroom, ninety-five year old house around Maureen’s first birthday.  Kate’s Cottage moved to the guest room on the third floor of our new home, sequestered away like a museum piece.  When I was building Kate’s Cottage, I joked that if the baby was a girl, I would give it to her, and if it were a boy, I would keep it for myself.  In reality, I never visualized children playing with it because I couldn’t imagine actually having kids.  I thought of it as Ada’s dollhouse, to be put up on a shelf, never to be touched.

When Maureen was a toddler, she would visit Kate’s Cottage on the third floor, gently opening and closing the doors, as if she knew it was sacred.  She would lift the roof and peek at the brass double bed with the wedding ring quilt my Aunt Pat had needle-pointed for me two decades earlier.  Maureen’s friend Spencer was not as gentle with Kate’s Cottage.  One day, his little fingers poked out the acetate windows.  Maureen and I were both silently aghast.  Spencer’s mother, who was usually quick to correct her child, didn’t seem to notice what he had done.  Perhaps to her, Kate’s Cottage didn’t appear to be the treasure it was.  I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything.  I didn’t want to make too big of a deal out of the damage: I’d rather have kids who occasionally wreaked havoc than live alone with the illusion of perfection.  I took the plastic windows and put them on the top of my dresser in my jewelry box for safekeeping.

The winter before Maureen turned three, our family was busy planning for P.J.’s arrival. I soldiered on, creating a life-size nursery for the first time.  John and I ripped out the worn blue shag carpeting and cleaned the pine floor underneath.  My friend Gwen painted his room with animals from Eric Carle’s books.  P.J. arrived that spring, born the day after Easter.

The four of us moved to Seattle a year and a half later, and Maureen wanted Kate’s Cottage to stay in the cardboard moving box in our unfinished basement.  Our new house was half the size of our old one and there wasn’t an ideal place to keep it.  Maureen didn’t want her toddler brother poking it apart like Spencer.  I agreed – I didn’t want to see the dollhouse destroyed by busy little fingers, either.  When P.J. turned four, I thought he would treat Kate’s Cottage respectfully, so I brought it upstairs where he later created his town.  The idea of keeping Kate’s Cottage a museum piece had passed.  I didn’t want to be like my mother who keeps all of the special stuff hidden away and never used.  Kate’s Cottage belonged in the world of the living, not left pristine from a bygone era.  I wanted Maureen and P.J. to see the dollhouse while they were still kids, not see it later as something I kept hidden from their childhood.

P.J. and I carried Kate’s Cottage up from the basement and put it in the nook between his and Maureen’s rooms.  P.J. found a little blond doll in a pile of toys and put her on the front porch of the dollhouse.  He rearranged his train tracks so they would pass the house so the doll could watch the trains chuffing along.  One day, as P.J. was saving the little blond doll and Kate’s Cottage from an imaginary fire, I found the old dollhouse catalogue from England.  P.J. and I poured over its pages for bedtime reading.  He studied the houses, shops, garages and gardens, imagining all of the things he could add to his town.  Of all of the buildings, P.J.’s favorite was O’Rourke’s Post Office.  Maureen wasn’t interested in looking at the houses: she would rather play chess or read about Captain Underpants than futz with dolls.  P.J. loves to build more than anything else, and I thought making the post office would be a good mother-son construction project.  He could paint and wallpaper and help me glue the walls together.

Once we decided we were going to build the Post Office, P.J. looked at furniture in the catalog.  He was most interested in the appliances.  “It needs a washing machine,” he said, skipping over the pages of Edwardian dining room sets.  We ordered the house, a washing machine, a new bed and two dolls online, and went to a local dollhouse shop to look at the extras.  While Maureen sat in a corner looking at the dollhouse books, P.J. examined paving stones for the sidewalk and roofing and flooring options as if he were a contractor shopping in a minature home improvement store.

The box with O’Rourke’s Post Office arrived three days after we had ordered it, most likely carried on a direct flight from London to Seattle.  I dragged the heavy box into the living room and opened it before P.J. came home from preschool.  P.J. was disappointed that I had I opened the box without him, but I coveted those first moments alone with the woody scent of the fiberboard and the smooth texture of the floors, walls and roof, exactly as it had been eight years earlier.  My small partner and I fit the pieces together using masking tape for the dry run.  We tested the doors and window frames to make sure they fit in the right places.

When it came time to prime the walls and floors, P.J. was less interested.  Frustrated by the foam paintbrush, he decided he’d rather go to the park with his dad and ride his scooter.  Maureen, who loves art, suddenly found this previously boring project worthy of her attention.  Her desire to work with me was a dramatic turnaround from a few days earlier when she missed the school bus, a tragedy of major proportions in her second grade world.  Her day was ruined and I was the villain.

Maureen and I spent the better part of a Saturday peacefully priming the walls, the memory of our argument fading as we worked together while listening to music.  Sitting in the kitchen, she wore a red plastic smock as she rolled the paint on the walls and floors, while I painted the detailed storefront.  Working on the post office was a balm for Maureen and I, just as working on Kate’s Cottage was a balm to me years before.  We trimmed the wallpaper with small pink handled scissors instead of with the X-Acto knife I’d used eight years earlier.  P.J. picked the brick wallpaper instead of the grey stone for the exterior I preferred.  Maureen painted the doors and windows peacock blue—not the color I would have chosen, but not much of life is what we choose.

Over the following weeks, we continued to paint the walls, stain the shingles, and glue the house together.  John wired the house for electricity, and P.J. tested the lights, each one as they were installed.  P.J. pasted the oak-patterned paper to the floor.  The result was a little lumpy -- far lumpier than anything in Kate’s Cottage, but that’s okay.  This dollhouse isn’t mine.  It’s ours.

The kids cleared a spot in the extra room on the second floor, and John and I carried the Post Office upstairs.  To my kids, building the Post Office was simply a neat family project.  To me, it was the other side of the mountain, the time I tried so hard to picture years ago.  I wish I could go back and talk to the woman I was in the infant loss group, the woman crying at the aquarium, the woman building Kate’s Cottage.  She could never comprehend the complexity of Maureen and P.J., but I wish she could see her future home, the walls of her dining room covered in preschool art work, Legos on the floor, the chess board with pieces in mid-game.  I wish she could see O’Rourke’s Post Office, as it sits in the town, protected by the firemen and down the street from Kate’s Cottage, whole again with its windows back in place.