After the playroom, Daisy draws a bubble bath for Holden in a freestanding marble plunge tub that looks like an exorbitant piece of jewelry. She’s singing “Octopus’s Garden” and making his hair into a sudsy mohawk. I hand him a rubber duck.
Lately, Holden hates bath time with me. He’s grown out of his Frida Baby Soft Sink Baby Bath and has gotten so restless in our deep tawny tub, a soft twist of limbs and need. I’d put baths off for a day or two, too tired and terrified to fight with a jar of Jell-O. (“Infants can drown in as little as one inch of water. Your vigilance saves lives,” Dr. Brooke says. SUID, Sudden Unexpected Infant Death.)
But he somehow loves bath time with Daisy, and honestly her tub is way better than even the finest Home Depot renovation in Stuy Town. She’s supporting his back with one hand and lathering on tear-free shampoo with the other, all while maintaining a decent rendition of one of the odder Beatles hits.
The door is cracked. Daisy barks orders at a mousy girl with braided pigtails. “Caroline?” This girl looks too young to be a mom, at least a mom in New York. She has an adorable face, like theshellacked winner of one of those child pageants but grown-up. “Um, hello? Caroline?” Daisy says, more bite in her voice.
“It’s Claire,” she corrects Daisy.
“Be a doll and grab us Holden’s Petit Bateau robe?”
I hand Daisy a towel from a warming rack. She gets Holden out and wraps him, snug and toasty. Claire comes back with a monogrammed terry-cloth robe that makes him look like a miniature mogul. Daisy hands Holden back, clean and cooing. “You’re good with him. Just let it be fun sometimes?”
I am delighted that Daisy has turned out to be a baby whisperer and that Holden doesn’t smell like a public changing table, but the moment still lands like a paper cut. Not jealousy exactly, just a small, sudden pain.
—
That night, I rocked Holden asleep in the nursery, pressing my lips to the damp curls at his temples. I tried, again, to give him my breast. He went rigid. I reached for the pump, the bottle, but his tiny fists flailed, spitting out the nipple, twisting his head like I was wasabi. That’s when I noticed Daisy in the doorway. She set down a sleek bottle of top-of-the-line organic baby formula imported from Switzerland. On her way out, she said, “Give it up, Em. He needs you whole, not perfect.”
With Holden passed out, belly full of Swiss formula, I go upstairs to Daisy’s place. Willa, the almond mom, strolls the living room offering us all the magic mushroom brownies left over from the sparsely attendedSomewherematinee.
“It’s a subtle high, totally suitable for breastfeeding,” Willa explains. “Harper helps me grow the pods in her Pretty Petals Little Gardening Lab.”
Audrey declines with a single word: “Gluten.” Maya, buried behindan infrared mask, is telling Audrey about a tantric breath-work class happening tomorrow. “It’s my literal dream to climax without anybody touching me,” Audrey says. Olivia surprises all of us by popping half the tray of brownies.
Two hours later, we all sit on the shag carpet sharing a charcuterie tray and a bottle of wine while watching a live stream of our babies on the BabySense Smart Monitor. Olivia is as high as a teenager hitting an apple bong, nibbling cornichons and intensely studying the bloodied red marks all over Maya’s arms and back from cupping therapy.
“Did Satan do that?”
“Try Jasmine in the detox spa,” Maya says.
“I think my baby is Satan,” Audrey says. She picks up one of Sloane’s gender-neutral American Person dolls, studying it. “God, I’d rather rip off my arm and gnaw on my own flesh than play with dolls.”
The confession springs something in all of us, a scab Daisy forced open.
Brit: “I’m so fucking bored.”
Maya: “I’m angry all the time.”
Audrey, who hasn’t slept in days with Sloane’s incessant crying, jokes, “I googled SIDS…out of hope.”
Brit snort-laughs. “I almost peed myself.”
That makes Audrey, tipsy from the vegan-friendly organic rosé, let loose and laugh, her lips bright and chapped pink, tousles of reddish hair falling onto her face.
We all look at our babies fast asleep downstairs. “Sometimes I look at Arlo and I see all the things that I can’t stand about myself,” Maya says.
“I see my mother,” Olivia says, studying her girls in adjacent cribs.
“My old nose,” Audrey adds.
A moment, then: “God I love her more than anything,” Brit says, looking at Quinn wiggle in her princess onesie.
“I’d die for that little monster,” Audrey says, looking at Sloane, a pink puff of restlessness in an egg-shaped crib.
“He’s my whole heart,” Maya says, gazing at Arlo in his Kith onesie.
“I want to eat his thighs,” I say, looking at Holden, the most miraculous bundle I’ve ever beheld.
