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.
