Author: Jade SV

32 days old.

| Jade SV

I really don’t like it when people stand over me while I nurse. It’s the bride phenomenon all over again. Did I write about this already? At my wedding it was as if I was moving in a force field. Everyone stood a few feet back from me, staring and grinning, and I felt their love and excitement, but also wanted to remind them, “You can still talk to me.” The force field is back, and stronger. Sometimes it’s because people don’t want to come too near the open boob. This I can respect even though it’s still irritating. But I think it’s something else too.

I feel like I’m being nudged to the periphery. I know I’m still loved, but am I now also inconvenient? Perhaps it’s a speed thing. I don’t have any. We are a slow moving unit, the boy and I. We can’t keep appointments. We can’t work the crowd at the picnic. It’s creature comforts now. Eating. Sleeping. Staring at the leaves on trees. He, and thus we, don’t go anywhere if he’s tired or grumpy or upset. The feelings must be dealt with, can’t be shunted aside for the sake of a schedule. He, and thus we, don’t conform to the world at all. We move at the pace of need. It is indeed the great simplification. And yes, it’s freeing, but it can also be lonely.

At that picnic gathering I noticed the re-grouping; the mothers and children in one area and everyone else simply someplace else. This is what people talk about with this country; we segregate our mamas and children. We just don’t seem to be good at multi-generation living and I always preached about how it would be different with me when I had a kid but now I’m seeing that it’s not only up to me.

In the first two weeks everyone wanted to come and we wanted very few because in those days the color of the green leaves were electric against the blue sky and set me buzzing with joy, but also everything was charged and everything saturated and in that state of being a simple conversation could use an entire day’s worth of energy. And so we nestled into our cocoon of three and put off visits. But now I’m and craving that company and B. says just ask for it and I’m trying but am surprised by this feeling of distance.

My friend said that when I’m nursing it can be intimidating. In part because it appears so intimate. I suppose it is. (I don’t think I’ll ever forget one moonlit night in the first week when I was in the rocking chair by the window just looking at his face and weeping.) But it’s also been made mundane by the sheer number of hours, and I spend enough time doing it alone to want the company. As i’m writing this I know that I did this too, with the first round of friends to have kids. Saw them settle with their babes, and then shifted away because I didn’t know where to place myself in relation to them.

But now that it’s me I don’t want to be moated off from the world. I suppose it’s time to get a lot more vocal, and begin to send out invitations into this new land of ours.

One month old.

| Jade SV

Mothering so far is mostly in my body. There are the thoughts, yes, but those are simple and straightforward. I am happy. I adore him. This works for me. I am shocked in fact, by how uncomplicated my reaction is. I tested myself last night. You are never going to stop being responsible for this person. You have years and years ahead of you of caring for his needs. How does that make you feel? And my answer? Fine.

I don’t know why it’s fine for me, and where this lack of ambivalence comes from. I’m kind of amazed by it. Once again my notion of being a feminist setting me up for a whole other set of experiences. I thought I was supposed to feel confined and trapped by having a child. I assumed that that was part of the deal and The Issue I was going to wrestle with. I get that I’m only a month in and that there’s always time for the angst to come in, but it’s not here yet. Mostly my mind is as calm as it felt this one night on mushrooms when it went as still as a lake surface in the very very early morning. That night I had a clear visual for it; saw the water’s surface and the ripples vanish and it was a sweet little relief.

In week one, I was thinking a lot about the language around having kids; how it’s treated as the most normal, traditional, conservative next step. Boring, almost, a dead end, an end of romance, an end to excitement and adventure. I’m thinking here of the endless sitcom jokes, the routines of stand up comedians, the snide New Yorker cartoons, the dialogue in movies, the asides of single, city dwellers in bars. And then I thought of those shelves of self-help books; how to be happy, how to be fulfilled, how to meditate, and I imagined telling the world, “I have a way for you to feel happy, to heighten your senses, to bring joy and love to you that you had not previously imagined. It will calm your insecurities and ease your anxieties. It will make your fears about ambition and success seem silly. It will make you braver.” If this was a book, or a diet, or an exercise regimen, or a retreat, or a pilgrimage; people would take it, would seek it and save for it. But the it here is simply this: deciding to care for another person for the rest of your life. And the world scoffs.

The only thing I don’t like about my mental state is that it’s making it a whole lot harder to get here, to the screen and the keyboard. When I’ve gotten those pockets of time there’s always been something I wanted to do a whole lot more. Like shower. Or stretch. Or eat without a guppy fish attached to my boob. Or, best of the best, take a walk by myself. It’s my body right now. Those are the needs and wants and pleasures. I had no idea how physical parenting would be. (I can’t believe he just woke up. One second, he looks blissfully asleep on the lap/nursing pillow and the next he’s regarding me with that one whale eye of his, unfathomable and of another realm. Now he’s yawning. Now protesting. Now pooping. Now contemplating my armpit. His profile is the best.)

But yes, not an existential existence these days. Parenting is in my back muscles and in my arms; my spent boobs and my chest marked with tiny scratches because somehow cutting his nails is the impossible task for us. It’s in my butt after too many hours sitting, and it’s in the milk dripping from one engorged boob while he feasts on the other.  And so, this entry gets ended not by content but by need. What the lines don’t show is that this entry took about two and a half hours. In between the paragraphs, there was a poop leakage that I somehow got his ear into. There was rug time when he wiggled and I stretched. There was a shower break during which he decided to start howling the second the water went on. There were a few burps and two spit ups. And of course, there was nursing, switching from one side to the other. So I end here because what I need most is to free myself from beneath this (now) sleeping babe and get my shoulders un-hunched and get my legs moving and pray for me that he doesn’t need to nurse again before I get some movement.

20 days old.

| Jade SV

B. says I need sleep so I’m not going to write this today.

I’ve been slowly watching a documentary about dolphins for the last two hours because I pause it every time the boy makes too much of a commotion for me to focus on it. It’s gotten kind of dull anyway because it’s testing whether dolphins have a “higher” form of intelligence, aka existential awareness. Awareness of self. I’m tired of everything having to be proved all the time; isn’t it obvious that they do? Just as it’s obvious that this son of mine is both of me and completely independent of me.

Today I made a resolution. When someone asks me how it’s going, I’m not going to mention sleep. It’s just a shortcut answer. But B. is now whispering at me from the stairs. I really do need to sleep.

But, how’s it going?

Well, it’s life altering, and very quiet all at once.

Off I go. It’s windy like autumn and good nap weather and I want to spoon with B.

13 days old.

| Jade SV

No time to waste. The babe is asleep on the pillow wrapped twice around me. He fell asleep on my boob and then I accidentally coughed him off of it. He likes to sleep with the source just an inch from his face. The last few days he has decided that he doesn’t want to be put down ever. Also, that he would like to be fed often. Very often. The result is that I have had him pressed into my body or close to my body for days on end on now. I am becoming ever more tightly bound to him; like my body is hardwired into his. I wake up at literally the smallest of noises from him. I know his smells. Can sniff out changes to his physical self long before I see or touch them. Yesterday while I was nursing in the park, I tried to use my teeth to pull my coat better over him and B. laughed, “That was very lioness of you.”

For most hours of the day there is this magnetic pull. To be close to him. To be the one on watch. Last night, B. was going to stay on the couch with him for the first sleep shift and I went down to the bed. At first the cool, empty sheets were a sweet, exhaled release and then, very fast, I was tense and finally had to accept that the only way for me to sleep was to take the couch. To be closer to the babe.

But then, of course, this pull is exhausting. My muscles always engaged, the drag of the tide, I am not simply me in my body. It’s hard to find full ease because I am hooked in perpetually to the babe’s needs and moods. I keep on catching myself clenching my jaw. I don’t want a day with the babe to be an endurance test, but I’m not sure how to get away from this being a measure of stamina…the countdown to the moment when all of a sudden I need a moment alone. The baby book’s advice is essentially to surrender fully to this time. That it passes. To treasure the long nursing sessions. In essence, to accept that my role is to nurture and feed and comfort this new person. The frequently repeated advice is that there is nothing I need to do right now; care for the babe and sleep when he sleeps. But what about what I want to do? I traded a precious hour of sleep last night for an hour on the couch with B. and two episodes of Louis. I think this counts as a need.

I was nursing lying down the other night, and asked B. to touch me. Not to turn me on, but to run his hands through my hair, down my back. With the first pass across my head, I shuddered with the release and tears came to my eyes.

In the park yesterday, I lay on the grass and sent B. to do a loop with the babe. The setting sun was on my face and my spine sank into the grass.

And yet, after too many minutes, I was lying with my face turned to watch for B’s return.  When he did, I heard the babe crying, and then all I wanted, needed, was for him to be unstrapped and delivered to me.

I’ve been peed on twice this morning. Worth noting that not until the second pee did I feel the need to pull off my dress.

I stand in the shower for a long time easing muscles open. And generally, it is the one place I can’t hear him when he begins to cry.

My body is not my own. Is my body not my own? And then of course, there is the simple fact of loving this being so much it leaves me completely speechless and awestruck. I cry daily.

I don’t know what day it is.

| Jade SV

Ok, so maybe I’m not going to call him The Traveler. That might have been a sun cresting dramatically over the roof tops after a sleepless night kind of moment.

But everything is like that right now. Heightened. Colors are popping. Smells. Thoughts. Feelings. And this expanding of all things is happening in exact relation to what is technically the shrinking of a day’s radius. Or rather, that would be how I used to think about it–a shrinking. What I see now is more like an intense magnification. We have zoomed all the way in. B. and I care for the babe, and we care for each other, and that saturates the frame and fills the days. I can see every pore on our boy’s nose and I am transfixed.

There is an intensely traditional pattern to our days right now.  My boobs are the source, just as my body was the source. My body needs tending, and my boobs need to give, and in order for all that to happen, I need B. to cook and to lift things and to fill my water when I’m pinned beneath the babe for hours of a day. Sometimes I envy him his freedom of movement. He had a work meeting this morning. Outside the house. He went grocery shopping. I haven’t carried cash or keys for days. And sometimes he envies me my milk; the power to soothe and calm our boy.

But biology is creating specific roles for us. I feel intensely the woman here, and he the man. The past few evenings we sat down to dinner late. Or late for us. The house was quiet. (Now that we’re playing the radio less, I notice how truly quiet our block can be.) And he’s been there without a shirt, and I’m there in some bra/shirt array, and the boy is asleep beside us in the rocker, and our conversation has turned to the work B. is going to begin looking for now that he’s on the verge of graduation. And I’m nodding going, “And then what did he say?”, and suddenly we are characters in a play set a half century ago in Brooklyn.

I don’t mind it though. Before the babe, I used to have trouble calling us adults, and certainly calling myself a woman. That is gone now. I am grown. And it feels like everything I thought it wouldn’t: powerful, sexy and exciting. There is nothing middle of the road about this. I didn’t have to fear some sitcom version of our lives. This is something else entirely.

4 days old.

| Jade SV

At four days, a few lists…

Things that don’t matter at all anymore:

-Being cool.

-The size or shape of my belly.

-The clubs, countries, venues, concerts, festivals I didn’t go to.

Things that are still complicated:

-In-laws.

Things that I now worry about a lot more:

-War.

-Baseballs falling from out of nowhere in a clear blue sky in the park on a beautiful day.

-Another human being’s breathing.

Cool new things:

-Super power heightened senses. Everything is in hyper color, and I can smell even better than my first trimester.  I sniff out changes to my baby’s body like a proper member of the animal kingdom.

-French kissing. It’s kind of like of those kisses when B. and I were fifteen, except that even then I was thinking about the next base. Now the kissing is the complete act and it is its own magic land of sensation.

-My boobs have the power to sustain life.

And then one day a boy is born.

| Jade SV

Yes, the birth story will come. Soon maybe. Although words in relation to time have whole new sets of meanings. So I say soon not knowing what soon will be exactly. The sun is rising. The boy is asleep. Just like when he was within me, night is his time and he quiets with the beginning of the day. B. is asleep too. Typing feels like coming home after a long journey in a far away land. It is familiar; a place of total comfort, but fundamentally changed since the last time I lived here. Because I am changed. Profoundly. On a cellular level. On an atomic level. I have not been this changed since my first twenty four hours of knowing I was pregnant.

And so I begin today what will be the last chapter of The Secret Pregnancy; what they call The Fourth Trimester, the first three months of the boy’s life. The boy, in these entries, I’m going to call the Traveler. He’s in stripes at the moment. Very seaworthy.

Another Week; Still Not Full Term

| Jade SV

I’m telling myself that it’s nothing, but yesterday and today the babe has been much quieter than normal. Often we have quiet days, and then come evening, it begins it’s rolling and sliding and pushing. I like it when the skin at the top of my belly moves like it’s being pressed from the inside by a windshield wiper. And Saturday we had a raucous day all the way through. Maybe the babe just wore itself out, and Sunday was the time for rest. But last night was subdued and not even dark chocolate today had much of an effect.

My midwife and I are talking and texting, of course, and for now it’s some fetal movement monitoring for me, simply counting it’s shuffles and kicks, to get a sense of it, and then we’ll just see what’s next. Deep deep down I think that all is well, but how quickly the fear becomes an acid thread. It doesn’t nag, it burns. My image for it is the poison saliva from the Alien movies when the creature’s mini-jaw stretches forward from the giant gaping jaw to snap at Sigourney Weaver’s quivering profile and between its teeth we see one thin, clear, viscous line that we know by then has the power to burn through metal, and of course, skin.

Funny, to be reminded of Alien in this moment. It’s one of favorites, but at the top of my not-allowed-to-watch-while pregnant movies. (Also on that list: Rosemary’s Baby and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) But one could write a whole lot about the mother theme of those movies. Remember the third movie? I personally will argue passionately that the third trumps the second by far; a feat perhaps also only pulled off in the Die Hard series. I’m not going to dissect the mother politics here, though I’m getting a strong urge to break my rule and watch the first movie. Which would perhaps be a mistake.

So yes, there is this acid thread, but there is also the grandma circle of love that I was pulled into this morning in the gym locker room.

The water aerobics class must have finished just before my laps did, and as soon as I left the shower area, I turned a corner into a whole bevy of them calling to each other between lockers and bathroom stalls. Maybe grandmothers everywhere are like this, but I associate them with Brooklyn–women who do not care what others think about them, who talk loud, keep you in conversation as long as they damn well please, and give unsolicited advice.

“Bev come here and look at this beautiful belly.”

They were all clothed or in suits and I was standing mostly naked with the tiny, scratchy gym towel around my hips. They did not mind one bit, chattering around me, fluttering me with, “Bless you” and discussing my pregnancy amongst themselves.

“Not her first? But what about that line?”

(This about my linea negra, the darker line drawn by my hormones up to my belly button, where it stops, shifts over half an inch, and then continues up to the north pole of my global stomach.)

“That’s normal. And see how her belly button has popped? Her first. So cute.”

“She’s got some time though.”

“She’s still carrying high.”

“Gorgeous, honey. God bless.”

One stood outside the bathroom door while I peed to explain the yiddish word “naches.” As I squatted, she told me that it means joy, but a joy that one can only be given by your children. She wished me many naches. We said goodbye, but then when I went to my locker, she was in the same area putting on her coat. Resistance would have been futile. No matter that she was fully coated, once I let slip that I was a teacher, she sat down, “My back hurts”, so as to be more comfortable for our chat. I was still naked. I like it when women really talk to each other. Her daughter carried triplets, one of which she revealed eventually, “I didn’t want to say it to you”, died a few weeks before they were due. The one that died was named and buried and the two remaining sisters always hold that they were three originally, visit their tiny sister’s stone. The twin sisters were followed by twin brothers, all of them over 5 feet 10 inches tall. Also, Sean Carter, aka Jay Z, was her student in high school. She didn’t like him at all.

Earlier, when I was getting ready to swim, I saw a woman with a long grey and white braid strip off her suit and bathing cap, and take her wheeled walker to head slow to the showers, stopping to drink water, no towels, her hips and skin a lunar landscape. At this gym, there’s a separate girl’s locker room, and also family locker room, and that’s all fine except that at my old gym I used to get a kick out of the little ones who stared, completely hypnotized, at all the bodies passing by. When that gym was busy, the locker room held a lifetime of female bodies in it–from babe to crone. It was a deeply comforting thing to realize my own body simply had it’s own place in the array of bodies rounded, scarred, and healed. As it was again today.

When the naches woman was ready to leave, she leaned over and gave me a lipsticked kiss to the forehead. As a farewell, she told me, her parents always said, in place of goodbye, “Live and be well. And so, live and be well.”

The Week When I Try To Stop Counting What Week I’m Up To

| Jade SV

My last step in making stock is taking that big pot full of vegetables and meat and of course, the glorious broth itself, and pouring it through a strainer into a larger pot. I’m left with stock, and the spent vegetables and bones go to the garbage.

Yesterday I accepted that no amount of nesting is going to make me ready to parent this living, breathing being, but I was determined that at the very least I would get every last thing done in order to be ready to give birth. This determination had me walking to Duane Reade at 7:30 PM to buy bendy straws and giant maxi pads, and then popping over to my food co-op for lime froze fruit bars (which they didn’t have; which nobody seems to have; this neighborhood has officially gotten too fancy) and arnica pellets. Also, an onion, bay leaves, and chicken parts for the stock I planned to make and then freeze and then, of course, be ready. For giving birth. To a human being. It was on the walk home from this last round of errands that my eight hours of constant buzzing energy finally crested and washed away, leaving me yawning at every step.

Home, and thankfully, B. was all over dinner. I got the pot of stock going. We ate. Watched Broad City. And then he went to bed.

My brain, however, would not be still. It skipped over birth and landed on today, and how I would fit writing, swimming, seeing my mother, and heading to school for a student thing into a block of time that could reasonably hold two (maybe three) of these activities. As a visual for this brain activity which continued well into the middle of the night, I offer a child playing with a set of blocks for hours, obsessively ordering and re-ordering them. It must have been three in the morning, and I was sitting there peeing, going, “Well if I swim until 10:15, and am downtown by 12, then I can write at 1:30 and…”

This morning it began again, immediately, but I stretched and meditated and got some calm going. I went up to the kitchen, put a piece of bread in the toaster, put the strainer in the sink, and proceeded to pour 3/4 of my pot of stock straight down the drain.

There was a lot of screaming. I’m saying “motherfucker” more than I used to and this seems like an odd time to develop that habit.

I stood, kind of laughing, still muttering, “Fuck, motherfucker” while picking chicken off the bones.

Until, finally, came the sadness and the thing that I’ve been avoiding with all this whirlwinding about.

Today, three years ago, was the day my cousin died. My mother tells me that one way to say it is, “He died of suicide.” To try to find someway to show that he was a victim too, that it was a thing that took him, not simply an action he took. It was outside; he was found in the morning, and my uncle says the tree itself was beautiful as was the grass and the light and that he himself was beautiful. He always was. At some ages, startlingly so.

My cousin struggled for years. We all saw how the movements of a day did not work for him. Interacting with us required great effort; as if his skull were a prison from which his thoughts and feelings could not escape. It feels like we all failed him; that we were a clan in the most ancient sense and that we lost one of our own to the predators outside the hearth. Or that we were supposed to be his net, and we let him slip through.

In the days after he died, I felt like the air itself was pressing down onto my shoulders. All I wanted to do, my image of comfort in that week, was to be on my hands and knees under a table. I wanted the table to take the weight; I wanted to hide there. B. pointed out, “Like a child; that’s what children do.” I guess so, but I wanted to disagree, explain it again, say, No, it’s not a comfort-child thing, it’s that the air was heavy and if I was under a table then the table would help me carry it. For me, it was a literal, not a symbolic, need.

When I meet my mother today we’ll walk to the river and have a prayer and a remembrance there. Yes, that’s what that particular pocket of time was for; the thing I was shuffling around and penciling in. Really the only thing that matters. But I am writing now. And I think I’ll swim. And I’m crying as I type and I remember that there is no readiness; that these flurries of activity are what I do to distract myself from the wheeling of a universe that I cannot understand and whose forces can take me at any time; sweep me out of a day and bring me exposed and face to face with the giant infinite expanse of what it means to be alive.