Summary
Michelle has just had a baby, whom she's named Jason, but as she lays in the hospital bed, the fact that she's a mother hasn't quite sunken in yet. Jason's scrunched red face looks alien-like to her—nothing like the idyllic, rosy-cheeked icons of Gerber. The baby's father, Des, is no help. He shrinks away from the baby the moment he sees him and declines Michelle's offer to hold him. Michelle is also stressed out by the midwives attending to her, impressing the importance of regular breastfeeding so that the baby gets enough colostrum early on. Des offers to leave her side to buy a disposable camera, "the closest he’d come to apologising for taking [her camera] down to Cash Converters" (97).
Michelle takes Jason out of his crib in the middle of the night and lays him down next to her, against the direct advice of the midwives, and sings little improvised songs to him. She can't stand the hospital environment, the cold, sterile, uncomfortable way of everything. It keeps her up, and though she's tired during the day, she's wired at night. The next morning the midwives continue to press her on whether her milk has come in yet; it hasn't. Michelle is worried that her baby hasn't begun to feed, has barely opened his eyes. Meanwhile, in the next room over, a new baby wails and, according to his mother, feeds "too vigorously" (98). The other mother peeks in on Michelle on her way back from the courtyard where she secretly smoked a cigarette and confided that as soon as she got home, she'd put hers on formula. The midwives assure Michelle that she should just keep on going with the colostrum until the "let-down reflex" (98) kicks in, when Michelle's breasts release or "let-down" her milk.
On Monday, while Michelle is allowed to take a short walk around the courtyard, she spots a flier for family portraits at the shopping mall across the street from the hospital. They offer a five-dollar family portrait every Tuesday. Michelle would like to take one with her, Jason, and Des. She asks a nurse about it, and the nurse says they're there every Tuesday, but she'd have to wait until the following week, because the doctor doesn't feel she's ready to be discharged so soon. Michelle tells the nurse she feels fine, but even as she says it, she's in a lot of pain. She suffered tearing and perineal trauma during the birth, and the stitches are still healing.
Michelle holds back tears as she washes Jason. She's afraid to cry under the watchful eyes of the midwives. One asks her if she's got the "baby blues" (101) but Michelle assures her she does not. She reflects on who she was before Jason was born, and to her, that person "seems like a dopey, thickheaded version of who she’s become now" (102). She thought that Des would rise to the occasion, but he has failed her. At first, she was grateful to have him there; he was a dose of normalcy in the midst of all the strange chaos of the birthing room. But when the going got tough, Des disappeared. He left her side and went off to a vending machine, only reappearing after Jason had been born. In that moment after, watching Des with his empty Gatorade bottle, his uselessness crystallized for Michelle, and "she couldn’t believe she’d ever needed him for anything" (104).
Michelle knows that Des has a court date coming up, even though he hasn't told her about it himself. Someone came to serve him a summons at their house. Later, she rooted through his wallet to see what the charge was, and it was aggravated assault, which explained the cuts on his hand. He explained them away as a post-soccer scuffle, but Michelle knows that he has three priors, and when he's convicted, he'll go to jail instead of being on probation again. After the incident where he was served, Michelle was out wearing one of his sweaters when she found a receipt in the pocket, showing that he recently bought tea, chips, dip, and condoms. When she sees this receipt, she remembers the night he brought her chips and dip and then left the house to be on his own. She remembers thinking how considerate that was of him; now she realizes that in addition to concealing his legal troubles, he's been cheating on her.
When Des visits Michelle that Monday, she tells him that he has to come the following day for the portrait. Des asks if she'd be allowed to leave, and she tells him that she wouldn't be discharged until Thursday at the earliest, but that she'd be able to get the portrait before lunch on Tuesday. Des then tells her that he has a court date on Thursday, so she says that he'd have to get his mother to pick her and Jason up from the hospital. Des is very non-committal about it all, but Michelle takes charge of the situation. She tells Des to buy something for Jason to wear to the portrait. To her chagrin and disappointment, Des arrives the next day with a baby-sized leather motocross jacket for Jason. Michelle knows he bought it with her baby allowance from their shared bank account, and she realizes that Des will never grow out of his childish ways, because he doesn't even understand what he's doing wrong.
Michelle recalls the first time she met Des's parents at a barbecue at their house. Des was working a court-ordered community service detail, and his parents regarded the whole situation as cute. His father laughed and referred to him as a "naughty boy" (107), and that's precisely how Michelle sees him too—she just doesn't see the humor in it. She takes the painkillers she's saved for the occasion, and when Des shows up with the leather jacket, they load up the pram and head across the street. The midwives look on in disbelief as Michelle leaves the clinic. She tells them they'll be back by lunch.
They cross the street to the Coles and find the photographer lounging with a coffee, reading a paper. Michelle asks for the "five-dollar family" portrait, and the photographer jumps into action. Michelle carefully takes a seat; her stitches are killing her, even after the painkillers. She arranges Des and Jason exactly how she imagined them. The photographer snaps the photo, and baby Jason finally fully opens his eyes for the first time. Michelle blinks when the flash goes off, and she asks to take another. She takes the leather jacket off of Jason and throws it behind a bale of hay. The photographer snaps another photo, and Michelle knows that this is the one she'll buy, frame, and send copies of to her family.
After the second photo is taken, Jason begins to cry, loudly, for the first time since he was born. The shock of opening his eyes and finally seeing the world puts him in a state, and his cries engage the let-down reflex. Michelle feels her shirt dampen with milk. She covers her chest with her cardigan and begins to feed to Jason for the first time, fluidly, like an instinct; she feels between them a moment of recognition. Des is mortified by her publically feeding Jason, but she can barely hear him. The enormity of the moment drowns him out.
Analysis
Another story taking place predominantly in a health-care setting, "Five-Dollar Family" describes the days following the birth of Jason, during which his mother, Michelle, struggles to get him to breastfeed. Feeding Jason is just one among Michelle's many challenges, including her realization that her boyfriend, the baby's father Des, is cheating on her, and that even if she forgives him for that, he's wholly unprepared to help raise Jason. But she may not even have the luxury of deciding whether or not she wants Des in Jason's life, because Des has to face a judge for aggravated assault mere days after Jason is born. With his priors, she knows Des will likely go to jail. "Five-Dollar Family" is a story of resilience in the face of disappointment, of growth, independence, and the sublimity of motherhood.
The theme of disappointment isn't even solely associated with Des. Before the reader really understands who Des is or his involvement with Michelle, Kennedy writes, "Her baby’s face looks squashed and red, startling in its strangeness. The photo on the baby-oil bottle looks more like what Michelle had expected to give birth to: a chubby little baby with bright rosy cheeks clapping its hands together, a cute wisp of hair curled up on top" (96). The baby doesn't look like a "commercial baby." He's not air-brushed rosy-cheeked and perfect, but he is hers. Michelle is disappointed and anxious about how her own body seems to be failing her and Jason; her "let-down reflex" is coming late, and she can hear the new mother in the room next to hers succeeding where she feels she is failing. The neighbor's baby feeds easily and cries like a baby should. But Michelle's Jason is quiet, and his eyes remain closed to the world.
Then, once Des is properly introduced, Kennedy positions him firmly within the constellation of Michelle's disappointments. She went into the birth with ideas of how things should be based on both commercial images, birthing videos, pamphlets, and Lamaze. In other words, Michelle had consumed media that portrayed motherhood and birth in a certain idyllic light, and it all gave her hope that, once presented with the baby, Des would change his ways. He would not only step up as a father, but he would want to and do so on his own volition. Before the birth, Michelle would "browse mistily through those cards at the newsagent that showed guys with their shirts off holding little vulnerable babies, expressions of adoration on their faces; guys who looked like models, but still" (102). With that short, subtle qualifying clause about all the men looking like models, the narrator indicates the artifice of all the media targeting expectant mothers.
In the end, Michelle and the baby just have each other, and a major arc of the story is Michelle realizing that she doesn't need Des, nor has she ever. Kennedy writes, "every time she turns her head towards the plastic crib she will feel the same aghast realisation jolting her, the same rush of disbelief, terror and happiness" (100), and this seemingly contradicting combination of terror, inexplicability, joy, and beauty is strongly gestural to the sublime. For Michelle, the gravity of Jason's existence is enormous; for Des, it's an inconvenience. It's something he can use in court to try to and convince the judge to let him off with probation again. Michelle thinks, "he’ll get his solicitor to stand up there and use her and Jason to try and duck the sentence" (105), even though Des doesn't respect her enough to tell her that he might have to go to jail before she can even get home with the baby.
The story ends in a crystallized moment of connection forged between Michelle and Jason, as Des shrinks away to nothingness, his protests of her breast-feeding in front of Coles "like someone you’re hanging up on, going small and high-pitched and distant as you put the phone down" (114). A major symbol of the story is colostrum, the nutrient-rich, antibody-rich production of the mammary gland preceding normal lactation. As the photographer snaps the second photo for the portrait, Kennedy writes, "Michelle can feel it—this will be the one she’ll choose. She’ll put it in a frame, up on the shelf next to the cards and miniature teddies. Make some copies for her aunties. The feeling sealed, at least, like evidence; a feeling that appears out of nowhere, thick and sweet and full of mysterious antibodies" (112), referring to colostrum. The story portrays an instinctual, natural connection between mother and infant, a synchronicity of their biologies that suggests an almost spiritual provenance.
