The Motherhood Affidavits Read online

  THE MOTHERHOOD AFFIDAVITS: A Memoir

  Copyright © 2018 by Laura Jean Baker

  Some of the material in this book was first published, in different form, in Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, and War, Literature, and the Arts. Permission to use that material is gratefully acknowledged.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request

  ISBN 978-1-61519-439-1

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61519-440-7

  Cover and text design by Sarah Smith

  Cover illustration by CSA Images/Printstock Collection

  Author photograph by Kim Thiel

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First printing April 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Ryan, my steadfast supplier

  Contents

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  PROLOGUE: HIGH WATERS

  1: The Walmart Heist

  2: Brown-Sugar Skies

  3: The Bandwagon for Animals

  4: Bedside Manner

  5: Hell’s Lovers

  6: Stargazers

  7: On the Lam

  8: Sawdust Days

  9: Ultrasonic

  10: Boiling Over

  11: Criminal Procedure

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  This memoir blends public and private lives. Our family story is carefully constructed from personal archives, including but not limited to journals and other writings, photographs, videos, and firsthand accounts.

  Stories of Ryan’s work in criminal defense have been corroborated through Open Records (Wisconsin Public Record Law, enacted 1982), an abundance of discoverable evidence, court proceedings I personally attended, and news coverage of high-profile cases.

  Ryan used these theories, themes, and client details when presenting openly to district attorneys, judges, and juries, as a means to frame his clients’ defenses. Although Ryan’s clients were not afforded anonymity in court, I changed their names and (in some cases) identifying details to protect their privacy. I also took modest artistic liberties in developing scenes, such as reframing reported speech as dialogue and using my own descriptive language, but I have preserved the facts of all cases. Everybody appears as him- or herself throughout the book. I have created no composite characters or events.

  As Thomas Larson writes in The Memoir and the Memoirist, “To write a memoir is to be selective.” This story covers an eight-year span of time, from 2008 to 2016, such that I excluded facets of our lives for efficiency and thematic cohesion. Through a meticulous writing and editing process, I have attempted to render our story in as true a fashion as artistically possible.

  There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.

  She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.

  She gave them some broth without any bread;

  And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.

  —Unknown

  PROLOGUE:

  High Waters

  June 2008 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin—birthplace of OshKosh B’gosh; birthplace of us—would end up the wettest on record since 1897. Playgrounds were muck pits at best, cesspits at worst. A University of Wisconsin–Madison entomologist advised residents to pump or siphon standing water. At this rate of rainfall, rotting lawns were predicted to breed March flies, fungus, gnats, and mosquito eggs into critical excess.

  Ryan and I had just embarked on our new lives as outnumbered parents: two adults divided by three children. The sunshine season lay un-calendared before me, liquid and lustrous like a gasoline rainbow. No essays or quizzes to grade. No paycheck either. Just a four-year-old daughter, a two-year-old son, their baby sister, and a used minivan with windows that worked and air-conditioning that didn’t. Ryan was grinding away for a small law firm in Milwaukee, commuting 160 miles per day.

  My kids and I needed free, dry entertainment. The ominous incubation of bug babies seemed an extension of our ongoing negotiations with the out-of-doors. On several instances in summers past, we’d been shooed away from our Lake Winnebago beach for E. coli warnings, and today’s forecast predicted more rain. We’d already been to the YMCA once. We were costumed out. Our firstborn, Irie, had dressed her little brother in a faux-fur kitty-cat ascot—one of her many whims—and forced him to crawl around in it, though by now he could run upright.

  The best I mustered in my one-mother brainstorming session was the McDonald’s PlayPlace. By baby number three, eager to keep the children occupied, I didn’t cringe at indoor germs. Never mind Staphylococcus or fecal matter. Parenting does not afford us the luxury of puritanism. What’s the big deal about leaky diapers in those fast-food crawl spaces?

  Instead, I worried over money. How meager a purchase would justify admission for two? Was that little box of McDonaldland Cookies stamped into the shape of the Hamburglar still on the menu for less than a dollar? On top of our refrigerator we kept “the coin jar,” actually a wedding gift, a hand-sculpted clay pot with two lovebirds on a chipped lid. In need of amusement, we’d often count pennies and dimes into snack-size baggies.

  The sky looked thunderously purple as we left on our outing, clouds swollen—pregnant with rain—though I didn’t bother to pack umbrellas.

  As soon as we arrived and spent $1.05, a deluge of rain began hammering the floor-to-ceiling PlayPlace windows. Irie and Leo clambered up the slide against one-way traffic, creating a pileup of squealing bodies with instant friends. A smattering of grandparents, mothers, and other caretakers slurped milkshakes and sodas, listening to pandemonium reverberate off the big red plastic tube.

  As with Irie and Leo, I breastfed Fern on demand—everywhere, including the plastic swivel chair at McDonald’s. Midwives had identified me as a likely candidate for postpartum depression, given my medical history. Instead of contracting the baby blues, though, I’d been struck with a serious case of the baby yellows, one long, exhilarating trip I hoped would never end.

  Since Irie’s birth in 2004, I’d come closer to solving the mystery of why motherhood pumped me up with such joy. The intimacy, the purposefulness, and the promise of a blank slate were among the plausible explanations, but most important was my new chemical makeup. Oxytocin, the “love drug,” had compensated for my lifelong serotonin deficits. Oxy au naturel was better than anything the pharmaceutical companies had invented—and, for me, equally addictive. Proven to counteract adrenaline, the baby-making hormone had completely rebooted my mental health. I felt electrified and tranquilized simultaneously; I lulled my babies, and they lulled me.

  Perhaps that was why I watched in wonderment as rain surged up under the door between the playland and the parking lot with remarkable force, a sudden high
tide urged on by gravity. Within seconds, the McDonald’s PlayPlace was a wading pool. I thought I was watching a movie. I unlatched my breastfeeding baby calmly, as if a bathroom sink had simply overflowed. But a server rushed toward us, insisting we evacuate. With two children in soggy socks, another in a portable carrier, I huddled at the main entrance alongside fellow patrons, calculating how fast we could sprint if I goaded Irie and Leo with fun, games, and merriment. But by the time we reached the car, we were soaked to the bone. Fern, at least, was damp but not waterlogged beneath the gingham canopy of her hand-me-down car cradle. I called Ryan at work.

  “We were at the McDonald’s on the frontage road, and the playland flooded.”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Ryan said, and I was forced to reiterate the melodramatic truth. “Shit, OK. I’ll leave right now.” We quickly clicked good-bye. If Ryan didn’t act fast enough and the deluge continued, Ryan worried we’d be separated in the coming days.

  As the children and I drained into the upholstery, Irie said, “It’s like being at the car wash!”

  “Yes,” I said. “Or Niagara Falls.” Ryan and I had honeymooned seven years earlier in a cheesy motel with a heart-shaped Jacuzzi a few blocks from the famous cascades of water, eating cheap food we paid for on credit, blessing our marriage on Maid of the Mist, but this water plummeted from the sky instead of over the Niagara Escarpment. Clouds clenched, groaned, and broke historic floodwaters as if from a bottomless amniotic sac.

  I tried turning from McDonald’s onto the frontage road through a cataclysm of water where the asphalt dropped. Other vehicles, mostly cars, forged through depths up to their hubcaps, headlights submerged like alligators’ eyes. I maneuvered through crisis as my brain dispensed oxytocin in calm, liquid surges, alongside a quarry where the road was high, but every time we reached a T intersection, our minivan careened again into the floodwaters. On Ninth and Ohio, a bar owner stood knee-deep in waders, as if fishing.

  “Stop the car!” he screamed. “You’re making waves!” Water billowed against the breakwater of his establishment, Andy’s Pub & Grub, sloshing and smacking. I called Ryan again, and he warned me of being swept away in a current. It seemed possible: we stalled and bobbed in a truck’s wake. The rain pelted the windshield as I revved through the churning brown vortex onto a side street. An auto body shop, cutely labeled Automobile Hospital, dark and seemingly defunct but nevertheless like a beacon of light, appeared. Nestled alongside the south entrance was a measly ramp—an incline of no more than twelve inches. We coasted up onto that wedge of gravel like a boat up onto the shoreline.

  The lagoon at South Park, retention ponds, and creeks were overflowing, making a dirty bath of the entire city. Yards, gardens, and sidewalks blurred indistinguishable from our natural boundaries—the Fox River and Lake Winnebago, which literally means “people of the filthy water.” Locals affectionately refer to it as Lake Winne-septic, and today we were all swimming in it. As Ryan neared Winnebago County from Milwaukee on Highway 41, his was one of the last vehicles allowed to pass before police closed all four lanes. Water sluiced up from the ditches over the road like schools of river eels. When he gained on Oshkosh, he took his chances at the first exit. Lane markers refracted beneath the water.

  “I felt like I was in one of those mazes on a kids’ restaurant menu,” he said. “Every drowned car was a dead end.”

  White-knuckled and gritting his teeth, Ryan wondered if driving his Nissan Sentra and its $325-per-month payment into the floodwaters might be a blessed setback. Our comprehensive plus gap insurance policies would cover the loss. The Oshkosh city manager and governor of Wisconsin declared a state of emergency. Half of Oshkosh homes would be pronounced variably damaged; three-quarters of the streets were impassible. A Canadian National train derailed at a washed-out bridge, and the accident led to an oil spill. Our house on Hazel Street, one block from Lake Winnebago, built in 1888, suffered only a dainty rivulet of water in the basement, which flowed right back into a hole on the concrete floor. Every small stroke of luck buoyed our spirits.

  A year earlier, we’d escaped our short life in Milwaukee, one of the most dangerous and the most segregated city in America, according to census reports. In Bay View, where we’d rented an apartment, businesses were robbed at gunpoint, Irie’s Radio Flyer trike was swiped in broad daylight, and the skittish driver of an armored car, replenishing cash at our nearest ATM, once pulled his gun on me and my stroller of babies. Everybody in Milwaukee lived on the brink of hysteria. Life in Oshkosh would be different—a good, wholesome place to raise a family.

  Ryan killed his long commutes talking to colleagues on his cell phone. Fellow lawyers in other states convinced him that if he started his own law firm in Oshkosh and lasted two years, he’d be self-employed forever. “It’s Wisconsin,” a friend told him. “You can be the OWI guy.” Just about everybody was known to operate a vehicle while intoxicated.

  By the Fourth of July, a month after the flood, gasoline prices had vaulted to $4.18 per gallon. Between the car payment and the price of fuel, we were spending more than $1,000 per month on Ryan’s transportation. A truck driver once chased him down Highway 41 in a fit of road rage. What if he’d been murdered? Would he have minded? “I’ll make sure to set you up with a nice life insurance policy,” he always joked. But mileage became his stock answer as to why he was quitting his job, and the June flood was another good justification for leaving Milwaukee. Fathers should be near at hand, in case of emergencies. Ryan resigned from his first law job in July and left officially in September.

  The day after the flood, the Oshkosh Northwestern headline read WASHED OUT. Better that than washed up. I wonder now, on those arduous drives, how many times Ryan conjured up the worst solutions—burning our house down, running away and changing his identity, if not simply jumping from his office window—to our already looming money problems. “Poor at the bank; rich in love” remained my naive philosophy. Ryan and I seemed to have boarded little rescue boats coasting in opposite directions. I cast my anchor toward Ryan’s unrelenting hopelessness, and he cast his toward me, as we worked hard to remain compatible. At the end of each day, though, the burden of family morale fell heavily upon me, the idealist and dreamer.

  So much damage was yet to be uncovered after the flood—warped infrastructures, rust, mold, mildew, and all the chemical breakdowns inside our houses and schools. The Northwestern reporters tried to keep up: WINNEBAGO COUNTY’S CLEANING TAB AT $13M AND CLIMBING. In that same issue, editors printed a cartoon of a man and woman in a raft labeled OSHKOSH FLOODING. She is smiling, and her thought bubble reads, “All through bailing. Looks like we’ll stay afloat after all.” The man, however, is looking up at a tsunami labeled CONTINUED STORMS, eyes bulging, mouth agape. I might have taken this for a sign, but I could not have dreamed how Ryan’s impending career in criminal defense would alter the trajectory of our lives.

  Casework in criminal law was readily available in 2008—the least lucrative but most efficient way to start a legal practice, especially for a family man with a mortgage. On September 17 of that year, Ulrich Law Office would be inaugurated in suite 812 of the First National Bank Building on Main Street in Oshkosh. Ryan accepted work like a beggar, taking up alms, welcoming into our lives not just town drunks but drug dealers, heroin and meth addicts, thieves, violent men on the brink of homicide, and mothers who birthed their babies but failed their real-world maternity tests.

  As the onslaught of rain turned to drizzle, I opened the sliding doors of our van. Ryan had enlisted his parents to retrieve us in their all-terrain truck. We were waiting.

  Fern, though no feline, mewed for milk. Hunkered on the rear bumper, I cradled and breastfed my baby girl again, as Irie and Leo saluted strangers in kayaks and canoes paddling up Michigan Street. As a child, I’d visited Wetlands and Waterways, a permanent exhibit at the Oshkosh Public Museum, dozens of times and often wished I could see Oshkosh at the end of its Ice Age, a wish that seemed to have come true. We applau
ded passersby in their makeshift dinghies. In the summer of 2008 and forever after, floods were earmarked as our meteorological frames of reference.

  “Can we swim?” Irie asked in that moment, perched above the first flood of her short lifetime, and I almost said yes. Fern at my breast, I was buzzing with the thrill of motherhood, recklessly invincible and wide-eyed. Later that night, I’d breastfeed Leo and Fern together, one “baby” per breast, worth the double shot of oxytocin. If I had traversed this historic flood, I could do anything. Jacked up on survival, I felt ready to baptize all of us by plunging headfirst into the floodwaters of euphoria or oblivion—whichever came first.

  CHAPTER 1:

  The Walmart Heist

  Derek Green and Allison Shaffer engineered their first Walmart shopping heist by hiring a babysitter for their newborn daughter, Destiny; borrowing the babysitter’s Chevy Astro minivan as their getaway vehicle; and looting, along with the rest of their spoils, a case of Milwaukee’s Best Ice—the Cadillac of Wisconsin beers—to pay the babysitter, fair and generous compensation, depending, arguably, on how many beers she would drink per hour.

  Unfortunately, their babysitter must have been on duty elsewhere the night Green and Shaffer planned their encore caper. Destiny, fledgling conspirator, accompanied her parents, Daddy at the helm of her hand-me-down Cosco stroller. Along the dark frontage road, cars seethed and snow flurries churned a full mile until the family arrived at their destination. Inside the whirlwind beyond the sliding doors, where hot met cold, Shaffer selected a cart, gripped the handles, and ambled into the superstore, followed by Green, the baby, and the baby carriage.

  Did they wave to Walmart greeters or clerks as they maneuvered toward Baby & Toddler, a slow-motion shopping spree, which Shaffer had expertly rehearsed, hands like soft paddle wheels? She propelled the cart forward, pulling baby clothes—Gerber Onesies, fleece leggings, and Garanimals hoodies—into the belly of the shopping trolley. This cart could hold eighteen thousand cubic inches of merchandise. Maximizing the space, not minimizing the cost, was the object of Mama’s concern. With each little stocking cap, Shaffer’s heart pumped frantic hyper-oxidized blood to her brain. She felt awakened, even as baby Destiny snored beneath her frayed canopy.