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  But then, who knew what was to come later on? All I knew and cared about was that this long-awaited baby had finally come, and he looked like a cherub in my arms. I was grateful to have survived, and to take my baby home with me. His arrival had been extraordinarily traumatic but seemed well worth it to me.

  Bill appeared hours late to drive us home from the hospital, and predictably, disappeared again within the hour. I cried a lot. Beatrix came home, and fell instantly in love with the baby. My father died ten days later, having never seen the baby, but relieved that I was married at least. I called my lawyer the day after the delivery and tried to have the marriage annulled, or at least to start the wheels turning towards a divorce, but then dropped it for a while, and finally filed the divorce later, after our problems became too much for me.

  Bill came and went for a brief time after Nick was born. He made an unsuccessful attempt to clean up when Nicky was about four weeks old and again later. In the end, his eventual victory over drugs took him long years to achieve, and Nick and I were long since out of his life by the time he did it.

  What ensued after Nick’s birth, for Bill, was a nineteen-year fall down an abyss from which he did not return until Nick was gone. He disappeared out of our lives as quickly as he had come. No matter how good his intentions, and I believe they were, the pull of his addiction was so powerful it could not be stopped. It was like a tidal wave that nearly drowned him, and fortunately for him, in the end, didn’t.

  It was sadder for him in the end than it was for us, because we were able to put our lives back together eventually. And he missed so much. He missed it all, an entire life. He never knew his son, although he returned after Nick’s death, healthy again, and in recovery, to offer me a hand in friendship, and solace both to me and Nick’s siblings. And I was, and am, grateful for the support he gave me.

  At the time, Beatrix and I were left alone with Nicholas, a miraculous gift in our lives. He was healthy and fat and happy and beautiful, and adored. And Bill was gone to his own life. Beatie and I were on our own, with “our” baby, our beloved Nicky. And he was the happiest, fattest, sweetest baby we have ever seen.

  Nick, Beatie, and Beatie’s dolls (photo credit 1.2)

  2

  “I’m Incredible!”

  Shortly after Nick was born, I awoke from the anesthetic after the cesarean, and a nurse asked me if I’d seen the baby yet, and I shook my head. “You haven’t?” she asked, looking amazed, and as though I had a great surprise in store. “Wait till you see him!” She said it the way people talk about a movie star arriving somewhere, whom everyone was anxious to see. She smiled at me and hurried off, and returned minutes later with a bundle in her arms, and put him gently in mine, as I looked down at him in wonder.

  I will never forget the sheer beauty of him, the excitement I felt, that round exquisite little face, and the huge eyes looking up thoughtfully into mine. He seemed the perfect child, and he was so huge he looked months old instead of hours. And at the very first instant I looked down at him, I realized that nothing hurt anymore. I held him tenderly as he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep in my arms, and was overwhelmed with gratitude that he was mine. I had never felt as happy, or as lucky, in my life.

  Nicky was the kind of baby people stopped to admire everywhere you went. He was so big and beautiful and healthy-looking that people had to just stop and chat and ask about him. And as Beatie and I pushed him in his pram, we were very proud. We took him everywhere with us, shopping, the grocery store, church, and he even went to show-and-tell at school, and was a huge success with the fourth-grade girls.

  He had a ferocious appetite from the first, and I was determined to nurse him. My pediatrician laughingly called him “the shark,” there was no satisfying him, and however much milk he got, he wanted more. He was insatiable, and within two weeks, I gave up nursing him. It was a battle I couldn’t win. We put him on formula, and even that didn’t seem to satisfy him, and we had to add cereal to it within the first few days. He ate endlessly, and by the time he was a few weeks old, I cut the top off a nipple and put cereal in a bottle. For some unknown reason, everyone told me it was a bad idea, but it was the only way to satisfy him and get him to sleep. He ate voraciously, which oddly enough, was typical of him for most of his life. It was as though the “regulators” on his “fuel tank” didn’t register properly, and he himself never knew when he was full. Even as a boy later on, he would eat until he felt sick at times (which was the manic part of him). But he burned it off somehow. Although he was chubby as a baby, and extremely round in his first year, once he started running around, he was always wiry and thin, and remained that way for his entire lifetime. But as a baby, Nick was huge.

  He laughed and smiled a lot, slept less than I thought he should, and always woke at night, once, and sometimes twice, to eat. He looked like a little Buddha by the time he was old enough to sit, laughing and chortling, and always anxious to move around, and explore the world around him.

  He was not only “my” baby, but Beatie’s. She would dress him up and sit him amongst her dolls, and play with him for hours with her friends. And at night when he’d wake up, he’d barely have time to cry before Beatie and I would rush into his room, separately, and sometimes bump into each other sleepily on the way in. And then we’d argue for a minute about whose turn it was to take care of him. He was the light of our lives, and I loved sitting with him in my arms, in a rocking chair, holding him while he took the bottle, or singing to him afterwards, as I looked out the window at the moon in the night sky. They were wonderful nights, and precious hours, moments of solitude and togetherness, the stuff of which tender memories are made, and I have many of them. I would sit for hours that way, feeling his warmth as I held him close, his head on my shoulder as he drifted back to sleep, his chubby little arms around my neck as I held him.

  His first months seemed to rocket by, and I was busy with him, and by the time he was six months old, he was sitting up, laughing constantly, and looked like a one-year-old. He seemed to be on some kind of fast track of his own, he was crawling everywhere, and seemed desperate to walk. We bought a walker on wheels, a little seat with a round tray around it, on casters, which allowed him to touch the floor with his toes and move freely. The moment we put him in it, he took off and all hell broke loose. He zoomed from one end of the house to the other, flirting dangerously with the stairs (we put up gates!), and zipping at full speed around every room. His best trick was heading for the table in the kitchen, which I set nicely occasionally. He would grab a corner of the tablecloth and take off with it, escaping at full speed in his walker, and taking the cloth and everything resting on it with him. The clattering and banging of everything falling to the floor delighted him, considerably more than it amused me.

  Nicky was a child who made you laugh. You had to smile looking at him, and he always looked at me as though he wanted to say something to me, and somewhere around seven or eight months, he did. I spoke in Spanish to him most of the time, as Romelia, my Guatemalan housekeeper, did. She doted on him and chattered at him for hours. Beatrix spoke to him in English, and Romelia and I spoke Spanish to him, contrary to everyone’s advice. I was told that bringing up a child bilingually, particularly a boy, would delay his speaking enormously. I was warned that he might not speak anything intelligible for years. But that wouldn’t have been Nick. Nothing stopped him.

  Nick exploded into life typically for him, and began speaking at the same time he started walking. He took his first steps at eight months, careening through the house perilously, and at roughly the same time, he began to talk. And quite sensibly, for him at least, he said words in English to Beatrix, and Spanish to Rome and me. Knowing Nick later on, it made perfect sense. Two languages had done nothing to slow him down. And he never slowed down for a minute after that. He ran all over the house, exploring his world, free of the walker by then, and chattering endlessly, according to his whim, in English or Spanish.

  By the time he
was a year old, he was speaking in sentences, which seemed utterly remarkable to everyone, although I know now that it was an early danger sign, or could have been. I’ve been told since that although all babies who talk early do not turn out to be manic-depressive, most manic-depressives do in fact talk early. And he did. But I knew nothing of those symptoms then, and was understandably proud of him. People would meet him and talk to him, and then turn to me and say, “He’s incredible.” They said it so often in fact that I think he got confused and thought it was his name.

  When I would take him out in the baby carriage, as I still did then, and people would stop to admire him, he would start talking to them and when they’d ask his name, he would smile broadly at them and say, “I’m Incredible.” He was of course, undeniably. We would have long conversations as I strolled him around in the pram, and I’m sure that if people saw me from a little distance, they thought I was deranged, chatting with a baby to the extent that I did. But he loved gabbing with me.

  There were many things Nick loved, his sister, his toys, riding in the car, and music even then. He had funny taste in music for a child, and developed a passion for disco music, which was still fashionable then, and I was fond of it, too. His favorite was Gloria Gaynor singing “I Will Survive,” and he would dance endlessly as we played records in my room. He knew the ones he liked and handed them to me imperiously, “This one, Mommy.” Our first serious argument came while planning his first birthday, when he announced that he wanted a clown and disco music, strange requests for a one-year-old, though he was so large he looked two or three by then, with his blond Dutch Boy haircut, which I did myself, and the excellent coordination that allowed him to move about with ease. And he loved typing on my typewriter, too.

  The things he liked were unusual for a child his age, but even more unusual was the fact that he could articulate them, and even defend his point of view. I tried to explain to him that the clown was not a great idea because most of his friends his own age were afraid of them, and they wouldn’t find the disco music as appealing as he did. I had envisioned a baby party with several children who had been born to friends at roughly the same time, his sister of course, and a few of my friends, and maybe Bill.

  Nick in his walker: five months (photo credit 1.3)

  Nick at six months

  Nick in the pram at six months: “I’m Incredible!” (photo credit 1.4)

  But Nicky and I clashed vehemently about the first birthday plans. He wanted to play my Gloria Gaynor record. And in the end, he did, and we put the clown off for another year.

  He was remarkably precocious for a child his age, and exceedingly good company, although we continued to disagree about his choice of music. I put a record on my stereo one night that he didn’t like, and he was incensed by it. He wanted me to take it off and put on something else, and when I wouldn’t, as he had been on his way to his bath and was running naked through my room, he stopped and peed on my stereo with a look of glee. He made his point certainly, and I had to laugh at the outrageousness of it. It was very Nicky.

  The other ultimatum he gave me at that time had to do with the crib where he slept. He didn’t want to sleep in it anymore when he was exactly a year old, and he made a huge fuss about it. He wanted to sleep in the old twin bed I had put in his room, where I could sleep when he needed me, or when he was sick. But I felt far safer having him sleep in his crib. Because he had walked early, he was extremely independent about roaming around the house, and I was afraid that if I let him sleep in a bed, he’d get into mischief during the night, or before I woke up in the morning. Even then, Nick didn’t sleep a lot. He was often awake late at night, and long before dawn. The crib was a source of comfort and security for me, if not him. But as was the case all his life, Nick was anything but easy to convince once he made up his mind. And a nightly battle began. He solved it very simply by backing up like an Olympic athlete in a long jump event or a pole vaulter, and hurling himself neatly over the side of the crib, and then he would sit happily on the floor of his room, catching his breath for a minute before he took off and dashed out of his room. More than anything, I was afraid he’d break his neck leaping out of the crib, and he was so big and so strong that it was an easy feat for him. So he won, of course.

  The crib went, and at a year he moved into his bed, and I rather optimistically put a baby gate up at the door to his room, which proved to be no great obstacle to him. He learned rapidly how to remove it as carefully as I had set it up, and just as I had feared before he gave up his crib, he then wandered around the house at night, and more often than not, turned up in my bed by morning.

  After the battle over the crib, this was Round Two. It turned out that the bed in his room had only been perceived as a way station of sorts by him, a resting place before he took over my bed, which was the goal he had in mind. He wanted to sleep with me in my room.

  But this time I was firm with him. He had to sleep in his own bed. And that was that. What ensued were months of battles and long, sleepless nights. “Go back to your own bed, Nicky,” I’d say firmly. And he would, looking crestfallen. And he’d stay there for between two and five minutes, and then he’d be back again, begging to sleep with me. I had a big, empty, king-size bed I shared with no one, and it must have seemed ridiculous to him that I wasn’t willing to share it with him, and selfish of me. But it dawned on me even then that I might like to share my bed with someone more adult one day, and I didn’t think it a good idea to get in the habit of letting Nick sleep with me.

  The point was lost on him. And eventually, we “compromised,” i.e., Nick won, but he let me save face by going to bed, if not to sleep, in his bed, and allowing me to go decorously to mine, and fall asleep. He no longer argued with me, or woke me up to ask if he could get into bed with me. He just quietly slipped into my bed next to me, while I slept, and when I woke in the morning, he’d be there, beaming at me. It worked for both of us, I guess, and the truth was, I loved having him with me. I loved being with him, and near him, and cuddling him, blowing raspberries on his stomach, and feeling the silk of his blond bowl cut on my cheek. He was a delicious, irresistible child, full of fun and love, and bright ideas. By the time he was a year and a half old, or in truth, well before, it was obvious that he was extremely bright, and in time we began to suspect he had an IQ of impressive proportions. He did things he just wasn’t supposed to know how to do, and said things no eighteen-month-old child said. He said things that made sense, amused, and endeared him to everyone. Everyone was in love with Nick, even then, and especially Beatie and me.

  Nick at one year (photo credit 1.5)

  Nick at Mom’s typewriter: fourteen months old

  There was one thing about him that worried me then. He never slept, or not enough anyway. Long before he was two, I had come to the realization that I couldn’t give him a nap. If I did, it meant he’d be up all night, even long after me, and I worked late at night. But he just didn’t seem to need much sleep. Another warning sign. Manic-depressives don’t sleep at night, and in time it was to become the bane of his existence for the rest of his life. But at that age, no one picked up on it as anything unusual. I just thought it was a quirk of his, and didn’t worry about it. He was different from his sister certainly. At his age, she had been comatose for hours every afternoon, in fact until she was about six. But not Nick. He seemed to need incredibly little sleep. He fell asleep after I did at night, and was awake before dawn, prying my eyes open, peering into them as I groaned. “Are you awake yet, Mommy?” “I am now,” I croaked. Sesame Street became a vital tool in maintaining my sanity. I would talk to him for a couple of hours, waiting for it to come on, and then plop him in front of the TV so I could get a little more sleep. Getting enough sleep, even as an adult, was challenging around Nicky.

  There was another early warning sign then too, although it’s not always an indication of danger. His reactions to medication. We would go to a rented house at a beach nearby, but to get there, you had to naviga
te an unbearably windy road, and invariably Nicky got violently carsick. I tried all the routes available, short ones, long ones, the mountain road, the windy road closer to the beach. Nothing helped, and I finally decided to try Dramamine on him, and just forge ahead and get there as fast as I could. It seemed the only solution.

  I was warned by my pediatrician that the medicine would make him drowsy, and probably put him to sleep in fact, but he said it would do Nick no harm, so I gave it a try one weekend before we left for the beach. And rather than put him to sleep, it turned him into a whirling dervish right in front of me. He was going 150 miles an hour, talking as fast as he could, and practically climbing the walls. It had the exact opposite of the effect that had been described, and it worried me. When I called the doctor, I was told that that happened sometimes. And it happened again, later on, with an over-the-counter cough/cold medicine for children this time. The same thing. Instead of slowing down, Nick speeded up unbelievably. It is called a paradoxical reaction, and is again characteristic of people who suffer from bipolar disease. That reaction stayed with him for most of his life, with some medicines. Most cold medications that rendered anyone else near comatose would speed Nick up. Coffee, for several years, until he took medications to balance him, nearly put him to sleep. It made me extremely cautious about what medications I gave him, and needless to say, I gave up on the Dramamine, and eventually on the beach house.