Look How Happy I'm Making You

Grow Your Eyelashes
 
We are all in love with the baby. We, meaning the #4 bus community, weekdays at the seven o clock hour, on our way to work and school and early morning errands. The baby wears a royal blue puffy jacket and a striped knit hat. He tracks our shopworn, overly articulated faces. Despite how we caper tilting and bouncing our heads, scrunching our lips and wriggling our noses, working our hands into frantic waves the baby gazes at us with his grave baby face. He is chary with his baby gift of a grin, a palm in the air, a mimic, obliging just often enough to lend hope to our campaigns. The father is charming, an early-thirties smiler with warm eyes and skin. Perhaps South American, his soft voice generous with the vowels. Strapped to the father s chest, the baby flaps his arms. There is something of a bird in him, both cautious and confident. Something of a bird, and a sad little clown, and a medicine man, and all of the possibilities that are open to a baby. We look at him longer than we would look at anyone else we don t actually know and he will not say, or even think, that it is rude to stare. 

I say that we are all in love with the baby, but probably there is someone on this bus who is not. Probably someone looks out the window, or at the affable father, or at her own lap, and thinks, goddamn that baby. This person is not swayed by the miniature hands, the swollen cheeks, the exploratory chirps not swayed by this new human, welcomed as if he belongs to all of our delicate hopes and magnanimous impulses. As other faces soften, she hardens hers. I am willing to believe that there is such a person in our cozy bus community, with the chatty women and the tenderly grizzled men, and the driver who says So long, little guy when the baby leaves, borne aloft by his father.



We are trying, my husband Kevin and I. If only that meant we were trying to teach a monkey to do sign language; or trying out this new robot that

POLLY ROSENWAIKE has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, The New York Times Book Review, Glimmer Train, New England Review, The Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The fiction editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, she lives in Ann Arbor with the poet Cody Walker and their two daughters.

A frank, smart, poignant-without-being-sentimental story collection.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Los Angeles Times

[A] debut collection of stories that should be required reading for all women of childbearing years. . . . Precise, quirky and magical.
Cathy Alter, The Washington Post/The Lily

Armed with wit, tenderness and candor, Rosenwaike helps obliterate any taboos that may still exist surrounding the tribulations of women s reproductive lives.
People (Book of the Week)

A beautifully written and beautifully conceived series of stories about, well, conception about the harrowing and mundane and profound ramifications of trying to extend the species. Among the thousands of books for prospective and new parents, I doubt any will make you feel more understood and less alone than this one.
Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See

Whatever your stance on becoming a mom, you ll want to read this book.
Bustle

  The stories in this collection of short fiction explore every facet of motherhood fertility, pregnancy, the baby-years, the flipside (childlessness), and more treating the most intimate details of women s lives with ruthless attention and tender care.  
Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink

Offers a candid look into one of the most intimate choices a woman can make with humor and heart.
Glamour

I rejoiced in this collection. A radical, unflinching cycle of stories that radiate with truth and depth and care. I could weep for how good it is to see such rich, profound narratives about women s reproductive lives. Happy tears.
Elisa Albert, author of After Birth

This polychromatic assortment of fictional tales plumbs the wonders and woes of the maternal."
O, The Oprah Magazine

Rosenwaike s stories turn the idealized Madonna view of childbearing on its head.
Ms.