Cut and Run
My son's bris scarred me more than it did him.
by Kris Malone Grossman
March 29, 2007
Which is exactly what I did. After sneaking upstairs with Zev, whom I swaddled in a blue plaid receiving blanket and then tanked up with one final pre-op nursing, I popped a Vicodin and chased it with champagne, realizing I still wasn't fully on board with this thing. If I were, I wouldn't be weeping, or feeling as though an outmoded, patriarchal rite were about to disrupt, perhaps irrevocably, my fragile new maternal bond with Zev. For the past eight days, I had lovingly anticipated his every need, had scarcely allowed him away from my own skin, all the while knowing that I and my misguided husband conspired to present him to a knife-happy man in a multi-colored shawl. "I'm so sorry," I whispered to Zev, now milk drunk and dozing, thankfully unaware his package was about to be permanently unwrapped.Since I'd issued him into the world, I had examined his every fat pucker and fold, down to his tucked-in penis, a veritable capped and shrouded acorn laid atop a tiny, wrinkled fig. It had seemed protected, as swaddled and safe as he was now. And in less than an hour, just as Ed had cut the cord connecting us, Zev himself would be cut and hence, issued into the world of men.
Ed walked in. "Time for the anesthetic," he said — the one stipulation I'd dictated when granting the bris wish. He took Zev, who I wouldn't hold again until after the deed had been done.
Baby-free and indefinitely unmoored from the rocker for the first time in a week, I waddled downstairs to find more champagne. Someone had spread a bright-blue wool tablecloth over our dinette in the eat-in kitchen, through whose windows I could see that a light snow had begun to fall — clearly a portent of the violence we were fixing to commit. My mother-in-law, Melanie, who was arranging lox, sliced tomatoes and clutches of dill on doilied serving trays, told me no one would mind if I hibernated until it was all over, that during Ed's bris, she had sequestered herself upstairs in the master bedroom with a feather pillow over her head so she couldn't hear him cry — by far the bris' most chilling feature. I myself did not flee to the bedroom, though I did allow my own mom to refill my plastic champagne flute more than once, in hopes a buzz would mute Zev's wailing, which began the moment Ed took him from me. Torture enough to hear one's baby cry; I did not flee to the bedroom, though I did refill my plastic champagne flute more than once. horror show to know those cries would only escalate. I tried to remind myself: the entire occasion, from the bris itself to the naming ceremony, in which all of Zev's family would play a role — holding him, reciting prayers, discussing the meaning of his name — beat having some harried, sleep-deprived intern whisk him off to the corner of an antiseptic-smelling nursery for an impersonal quickie slice. Mohels were experts, could even perform freehand. Besides, they rallied to give their patients a pacifier repeatedly dipped in Manischewitz.
A tradition I was especially grateful for when everyone gathered round the dinette, where the cheery Mohel laid screaming Zev, our howling wolf pup, into the hands of Ed's father, then commenced to pray out loud. Ed, visibly discomfited when the Mohel then strapped down Zev's chubby wrists and ankles with cloth restraints, squeezed my hand and quietly apologized to me for what was about to be done, just as I had to Zev.
©2007 Kris Malone Grossman and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Kris Malone Grossman earned a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and has taught writing at Hofstra University. Her work appears in the anthology The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change. She makes her home in Ridgefield, CT, with her husband and three sons. |
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