Two Kisses for Maddy_ A Memoir of Loss & Love - Matthew Logelin [46]
Tom spent the next few minutes convincing me that this woman wasn’t really a slave at all, just a kind soul willing to volunteer her time to help someone in need. I really wanted to just start this parenting thing on my own, but after the long day, I didn’t have the energy to put up a fight. I agreed to allow a doula into my home to help me with Madeline. Besides, getting a good night’s sleep wasn’t the worst idea.
When my hoped-for savior arrived at the front door, I instantly concluded that a doula was more like a hippie-nanny hybrid than anything else. We spent most of the night sitting on the couch, talking about the kind of things strangers discuss. She shared with me her strong opinions about natural birthing methods, natural medicine, and, naturally, raising a child. She picked a parenting book up from the coffee table. “You may as well throw this in the trash,” she declared.
Now, I probably would have agreed with her a few weeks earlier—I was a firm believer that most parenting books are useless. Humans have been raising babies for over two hundred thousand years, and during most of that time there were no doctors, doulas, books, or websites to help them figure it out. But at that moment, her pronouncement left me seething: the book she held above her head, the book she suggested was garbage, was the last book Liz ever held in her hands, and she saw it as her parenting bible. I didn’t say anything to the doula because I knew she hadn’t intentionally tried to piss me off, but I took it as my cue to exit and try to get some sleep.
A little while later, I woke up to silence and walked from my bedroom into the living room to find her still sitting on my couch. I looked around and was surprised to see my house a little cleaner than it had been when I went to sleep. Even more surprising was that I’d only slept for two and a half hours, and I had missed just one of Madeline’s diaper change/feeding cycles. If this doula had generations of baby knowledge, she sure didn’t share any of it. She didn’t suck at what she did, but I’d had such lofty expectations for her that she was never going to live up to them. She did teach me an alternative swaddling technique that was rather impressive, but otherwise I found her services basically useless.
The next night’s slave wasn’t a slave at all. In fact, she was an extortionist. This second doula was at our house for twelve hours and things went pretty much the same as the night before. In the morning, before she was to leave, she informed me that her services cost sixty dollars per hour. “US dollars?” I asked, only half kidding.
She didn’t think I was very funny. As I tried to multiply 12 times 60 in my head, she blurted out “Seven hundred and twenty dollars.”
Seven hundred and twenty dollars for supposed help that paled in comparison to the actual knowledge I had gained from the doctors and nurses at the hospital.
But the doulas did do one thing for me: they gave me confidence. Confidence that lack of sleep wasn’t as big an issue as everyone told me it would be, and confidence that at sixty dollars per hour, my emergency fund would run out far sooner than we had anticipated. Most important, because the doulas didn’t provide any precious advice or information, I was confident that I would be able to take care of my child on my own. I still didn’t really have all of the answers—or even know the questions, necessarily—but I now felt sure that I could become the great parent I wanted to be. Besides, Madeline seemed pretty easy, just eating and requiring a diaper change at regular intervals. In the hospital, she had been a fragile doll in an incubator, wires attached to her body, feeding tube in her nose. But after two days at home with her all of that seemed to disappear—she was simply my kid. I knew I was never going to be perfect, but I was going to try my damnedest.
I made a check out to the doula while she used a green Sharpie to write her name, address, and phone