Stowaway

Our ad was very clear. I specifically asked for ONE crew member, because this a small boat, we live in close quarters, and there’s no room for a whole mess of people.

So I was pretty annoyed to find out we have a stowaway. And this situation’s been going on for weeks. More than three months, from what I can tell.

I smelled a rat when our food started disappearing. Sour pickles, chocolate, salty nuts. Whoever this bum is, he or she’s got a hell of an appetite.

And he’s not pulling his weight, either. If I’ve got extra mouths to feed, I want a little help around here. Doing the dishes, standing watch, or just picking up Silas’ Legos off the floor. I don’t ask for much. But this joker just stays in his comfy little dark place, taking warm baths and eating my food. Getting fat on my dime. By May, this guy’s gonna be huge. Eight, nine pounds at least.

It wasn’t easy catching the rascal. For one thing, he’s only about the size of my thumb. Plus he’s pretty wily, and he never makes a peep. We finally snapped a picture using sonar. And here’s the proof:


Look at him. Lounging around. Relaxing. Sipping amniotic fluid, with no thought for the future. I can tell you right now that when he comes out in May, things are gonna change around here.

For one thing, a good night’s sleep will be a thing of the past. And then there’s the diapers. The long, dark tunnel of diapers, from which we may never emerge.

As of next May, we’ll be a family of four. And Sereia’s gonna need more bunks.

Problems With Intentional Movement

We’ve been planning this trip all year. We quit our jobs, moved across the country, and invested two months of time and money into making Sereia seaworthy again. We splash this week, and we hope to move on board by Saturday.

There’s just one hitch. At nineteen months, Silas isn’t walking or talking yet.

He cruises around with great confidence, just barely holding on to something solid. He babbles incessantly, with rhythms and intonations that sound increasingly like speech. His eyes are bright and focused, he makes excellent eye contact and his hunger for books and music is insatiable.

But he doesn’t point to what he wants. He doesn’t wave “bye-bye.” He has no recognizable words. And he can’t yet walk on his own.

Peter and I have been through the full spectrum of emotions about all this, from breezy confidence (“Einstein didn’t talk until he was four years old!”), to despair (“Holy crap, what if he’s a ‘TARD?”). The journey has been all the more harrowing because we are alone out here, with no family or trusted friends to confide in. The people we know in New Zealand are new friends, the kind that say, “I’m sure everything will be just fine!” and then tactfully change the subject.

Recently, we determined to stop wasting time with fear and guesswork, and consult a specialist. We drove three hours to Auckland, so that Silas could play for an hour with a developmental speech therapist. Her verdict: he’s not a ‘tard. But his language is significantly delayed.

“Have you heard of dyspraxia?” she asked.

Limp with relief at the notion that I wouldn’t have to feed him with a spoon for the rest of my life, I barely heard what she was saying. But then she explained.

“I’m not saying this is a diagnosis—it’s too early to diagnose this, and I’d like you to see a pediatrician—but what I’m seeing is leading me to think of dyspraxia. Essentially, it’s a problem with executing intentional movement, so the late walking is related to the late speech. Think of speech as a very complicated dance between your tongue and your lips and your mouth. If the child has a hard time coordinating his legs, then you can imagine it would be a difficult to coordinate all the different muscles you need for speech.”

“But it’s not cognitive?” I asked again, my voice breaking.

“Not at all. From what I can see, Silas is a bright and curious little boy. But while other little children will pick up speech patterns automatically, Silas may need to be taught how to move his mouth, or point his finger.”

She pulled out a stack of handouts. “Here are some exercises you can do with him at home, to encourage him to point and talk.”

As she went through the materials with us, I scanned ahead. It was pretty small-scale stuff, like blowing bubbles and popping them with an index finger. Nothing you couldn’t do on a boat.

Because of course, now Peter and I are faced with a choice. Do we pursue our plans, go sailing, write articles, compile a travel book? Can we give Silas the help he needs while living on a sailboat? Or do we need to make a screeching U-turn, get jobs, move to Auckland, and save our pennies for speech therapy several times a week?

What, asks Darwin’s Puppet, is best for the baby?

Could it be, say… circumnavigating New Zealand? That way, we’ll be near the coast, and we can pull the plug at any time, move on land, and get specialized help if we need it. It would be a great chance to learn about our new country, and it should make a fantastic story. We can pop bubbles and do speech exercises as we sail. With periodic consultations, and the assistance of research libraries along the way, I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to help Silas learn as we show him how to live an adventurous life.

First stop, Auckland. Silas has an appointment with a developmental pediatrician on August 27th. And we’ll arrive there in the most appropriate way. It is, after all, the City of Sail.

Puppet

Yesterday was a rainy day, so we stayed inside, watched a Harry Potter movie, and baked brownies. Then, because we are kind and generous parents, we gave Silas a little bit of brownie for dessert.

As it turns out, this was spectacularly ill-advised.

Feeding a decadent chocolate dessert to a toddler is like treating a mental patient with crack cocaine. At first, he took it well. Our little Silas continued banging his pots and pans together, and if he was smashing them so violently that ragged shards of metal were spraying the kitchen walls like shrapnel, it wasn’t so you’d notice. At eight thirty, he fell asleep, to all appearances like a normal human child.




I can only assume that for the next few hours, he entered his pupal stage. Silently, while we slept, he excreted a fibrous material out of specialized glands in his anus that served to shield him from the outside world. As metamorphic life forms are known to do, Silas spun himself into a cocoon.

And then, at two o’clock in the morning, he hatched.

The screams that detonated in our apartment like a nuclear bomb blast were not those of a human child. These were the half-strangled, guttural howls of a wild animal, a savage troll, a bug-eyed swamp thing from hell.

This was not my son. This was The Baby From Beyond The Grave.

We tried everything. We changed his diaper. We gave him something to drink. We brought him into bed with us, and tried to cuddle him to sleep, at which point he kicked me in the stomach and nearly castrated his father with his sharp little baby knees.

And here is where I really resent being a mother. Because while the calm and logical centers of my brain were saying things like, “Take the Devil Child and put it outside, in the car, where the sub-zero temperatures will make it sluggish and docile,” the brain-damaged Mommy centers of my brain were saying, “awwww, my poor little boopsie.” And then I was cuddling it. The screaming, shrieking, Baby from Beyond the Grave.

I have a theory about all this. As is common to many victims of prolonged torture, I am not the same person that I was before I became a mother. For example, I now cry when I watch Harry Potter, because it feels unbearably sad to me that Harry doesn’t have a mommy and a daddy. And whereas I used to find ghoulish delight in movies about violent death and dismemberment, I now have to turn them off. Because somehow, having a child has pried open my cold and dried-up little heart, wedging in a direct pipeline to the pain and joy of being alive.

It's terrible. No longer can I base my life decisions purely on irony and self-involvement. Now, despite my worst intentions, I am forced to feel.

How did this happen? It’s simple. Essentially, Nature employs the same techniques as religious cults and nefarious police forces everywhere. First, there is a long period of psychotropic drug use. For the Manson cult, it was LSD. For mothers-to-be around the world, it’s a potent cocktail of estrogen and progesterone, all the better to prepare the brain for complete annihilation and re-programming. Then, there is the experience of childbirth. This is a bloody and violent act, much worse than the comparatively refreshing “waterboarding” that has Amnesty International in such an uproar. And lastly, new mothers are subjected to at least six months of intense and continuous sleep deprivation. Repeatedly denying sleep to a captive is a powerful tool for torture and mind control, actively employed by secret agents from the KGB to the CIA. It is also used with great success by so-called “babies” who demand to be fed several times during the night, and who refuse to just eat a cheeseburger when they’re hungry like everybody else in the world.

Since my reprogramming, I can no longer think for myself. Every crazy plan, every selfish impulse, is forced through a filter which asks, “Is this what is best for the baby?” If it isn’t, the plan is rejected, even if it involved large quantities of good times, mixed drinks and tropical sunshine.

I am a puppet, with Darwin’s hand up my ass. He’s forcing me to protect my offspring and ensure the survival of the species. But he hasn’t said anything about earplugs. And I’m buying some. Today.

MAMA BEAR

Well, that little nautical love affair lasted for about an hour and a half. On Monday, as I may have mentioned, the diesel heater failed to light. The night was freezing cold, but that was OK. We were boat people. We were snuggling together in our berth like hot cheese, while the enchiladas and milk cooled in the bilge, or some such horse shit. And… hey! The toilet and stove worked great!

On Tuesday, the head broke. Again. Back to peeing in a bucket. While squatting and peeing on the freezing cabin sole, I began to have second thoughts about the bohemian glamour of yachting life.

By Wednesday, Silas’ cough was worse, and he was starting to sound like one of those wheezing babies in a made-for-TV movie about the dreaded plague. I took him to the doctor, and she noted that his ears were inflamed from congestion. She prescribed amoxicillin. Amoxicillin has to be refrigerated, but since we are carefree bohemians, we just sealed it in a plastic Ziploc bag, and stowed it in the filthy hole we call our bilge. We were essentially living in a refrigerator anyway, so surely that would work just fine.

Thursday and Friday, we didn’t work on the boat. Thursday was taken up with cleaning and repairing the borrowed house we’ve been living in. This entailed such projects as re-gravelling the driveway that we’d managed to tear up, replacing the electric tea kettle that we’d managed to melt, and replacing the $200 bottle of Courvoisier VSOP cognac that Silas had spilled all over the floor while batting it around like a wounded mouse. Yes, I did say TWO HUNDRED dollars. French imports are rather pricy in New Zealand. (And Silas’ new name, by the way, is “VSOP.”)

Friday was intended to be a day off, a “date” day, in which we enjoyed our boat and each other while our baby was occupied in nursery school. However, the romance was blighted somewhat by the fact that I still had to pee in a bucket. Also, by that point I’d caught Silas’ cough, and every time I was overtaken by a violent fit of hacking, I wet myself. Thank you, natural childbirth.

People are always saying that “being a parent is the most wonderful thing in the world!” Then they look at me expectantly and wait for me to chime in. Either they’re lying, or I’m a bad person, because I don’t really see it that way. Parenthood, as far as I’m concerned, is a lot like having a multiple personality disorder.

Friday night is when things really started to break down. Silas launched into one of his gurgling cough episodes, sounding like the consumptive heroine of some Puccini opera, and Peter lost it. He started frantically mopping at the walls with a rag. “This is dumb, this is bad, what were we thinking?” he started muttering to himself.

I peered at him from the galley. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s cold, it’s wet, our boy is sick—LOOK AT THIS CONDENSATION— this isn’t healthy, what were we thinking? Why are we doing this?” The right side of Peter’s face started to twitch alarmingly. He kept wiping the walls with his rag, trying to soak up all the moisture before it made his baby any sicker. But Sereia’s just an old plastic boat. The battle against condensation is futile.

Peter was already high on Dad chemicals. And then I felt the shift.

Just like that, Antonia receded into my unconscious, forgotten like an old childhood memory. And in her place, came... MAMA BEAR. Here is the thing about MAMA BEAR: you write her name in all caps, or she will rip your fucking head off. When you think of MAMA BEAR, you do not think of Teddy. You think Kodiak. You think eight hundred pounds and ten-inch claws.

“Don’t you even start with me,” I growled. “I am on a razor edge here, and I am THIS CLOSE to moving off this boat.”

Peter and Silas just stared at me. I didn’t even sound like myself.

“What you don’t seem to understand,” I snarled at my beloved husband, “is that I WILL GNAW OFF YOUR FUCKING ARM to keep this baby warm and dry.”

Peter blanched. “One week,” he urged me. “We’ll give it one week. Just give it a week, and we’ll see how it goes. Then if you want to move out, we’ll move out.”

I took a breath. MAMA BEAR retreated, and Antonia agreed. But Saturday morning, the skies opened up, rain poured down on Sereia, and winds gusted to thirty knots. We had this stupid idea that Silas and I would leave the boat during the day, so that Peter could work, but we didn’t really make provision for stormy weather.

So there I was, cuddling my sick baby in the main berth, while Peter poured diesel into our tanks. The floor lockers were opened up, so we couldn’t walk on the cabin sole. All the portholes were closed to keep out the rain. My head started pounding from the fumes. But there was nowhere to go. We were trapped. Silas started coughing.

And MAMA BEAR charged out of her den.

People who undergo a psychic break describe a feeling of unreality, as though they are moving in a dream. There’s a guy in New Zealand who’s just been convicted of stabbing his girlfriend 216 times with a pair of scissors, and that’s how he described it in court, as though he were looking down on himself, observing his own actions from afar.

Floating on the cabin ceiling, I watched as MAMA BEAR collected her baby, and held him out of the rain as she stormed into the marina office. I watched her make phone calls in a cheerful human voice, looking for a furnished flat to rent, short term. I watched her drive out to the rental, a cute little cottage with heat, refrigeration, and hot water. And I watched her rent it on the spot.

Peter was furious, at least at first. “I thought we were going to give it a week!” he protested. It isn’t cheap, after all, to rent a marina slip and also a furnished apartment. Puts a hell of a dent in the cruising kitty.

“It’s a done deal now,” I replied. Antonia had returned, and she was throwing Silas’ clothing into a bag. “Why didn’t you tell me how you felt before I agreed to rent the place?”

“It’s no use,” said Peter woefully. “You can’t argue with a mother when she feels her baby isn’t safe.”

Truer words have never been spoken. What is it they teach you when you go camping in the woods? Never, EVER get between a MAMA BEAR and her cub. Because before you know it, she’ll tear off your arm.

It’s much safer to let her rent her an apartment.

Reptile Mom

I can remember breastfeeding Silas when he was about four weeks old, cuddling his warm little body close to mine, and thinking idly about what would happen if I just stashed him in the freezer. Later in the afternoon, Peter would come home from his walk, shrug off his jacket and turn to me with a loving grin, asking, “Where’s the baby?”

“What baby?” I’d respond, engrossed in my book.

An hour would pass. Maybe two. Then, after awhile, I’d look up, smack my lips expectantly and say, “Could I get a snack? I think there's some ice cream in the freezer.”

The resulting horror show, of course, would send shivers up my spine. For awhile I worried that I was losing my mind, that these ghoulish fantasies were the result of a profound personality disorder. But in retrospect, I think I was just being a good mom.

It’s not that the sick little movies have stopped. They haven’t. Take the baby out for a walk, and my brain flashes images of a speeding car and a mangled stroller. Pass an angry-looking dog on the street, and I wonder what life will be like for my son with no arms and a chewed-up stump for a leg. Push him on the swings, and I imagine pushing just a little too hard, his plump, eighteen month-old body hurtling across the playground like an errant football.

A mother loves her baby with a deeply primitive, reptile love. There have been shady-looking strangers who checked into our backpackers, with missing teeth and shifty eyes, and I found myself considering how easy it would be to claw out their eyeballs with my bare hands. Now I understand that the movies in my head are a constant scan for danger, a way for my imagination to detect and head off any potential threat before it even begins to make trouble.

And now, in a few short weeks, we are planning to move our baby on a fiberglass boat and sail him through eleven hundred miles of open sea. Reptile Mom, as you can imagine, is having a field day. The fears, though they number in the zillions, can be roughly organized into the following categories:

1. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN DROWN TO DEATH

a) You can sink the boat,
b) The baby can fall off the boat,
c) A freighter can hit the boat, causing both a) and b) to occur simultaneously,
d) You can be struck by rogue waves, waterspouts, tsunamis, maelstroms, riptides, and/or the Ire of Poseidon.

2. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN BE EATEN ALIVE AND/OR POISONED BY VARIOUS TROPICAL ANIMALS

Such animals include, but are not limited to:
a) Sharks (various species),
b) Giant squid with really gross tentacles,
c) Rabid dogs,
d) Deadly sea snakes,
e) Venomous centipedes (I’m not kidding. They have them in Fiji.)

3. WAYS YOUR BABY CAN DIE OF SICKNESS AND/OR MALNUTRITION

a) Eating tainted food (including but not limited to: Hepatitis A, E. Coli, and Salmonella),
b) Eating brain-eating worms, (See related post)
c) Eating paint flecks, underwater epoxy, and/or fiberglass (with or without acetone),
d) Eating Spam.

4. MISCELLANEOUS THREATS

a) Being brained by a hard object down below,
b) Being roughly detained by the Fijian military dictatorship,
c) Sunburn and dehydration,
d) Falling coconuts,
e) Pirates.

But I’m looking on the bright side. We have no refrigerator on board, so it’s very unlikely I will freeze our baby. The chances of getting hit by a car while at sea are exceptionally remote. And if a shark tries to lunge at my little boy?

Well, then it will have to tangle with Reptile Mom. And I’ll kick its fucking ass.