Babies

Birth Story Part 3

| Jade SV

This morning I made muffins for breakfast while B. slept in with the boy. This is not at all our usual arrangement, but B. was up with the babe from 5 till 6, and then I settled him into sleep, and then I was awake and hungry. Also, it is it’s own pleasure to cook alone in a quiet kitchen with the radio playing. We picnicked on the rug with an eye on the boy who was sleeping in. I allowed myself one moment to rue all that sleep I could have been getting. We ate and then, my idea, stripped down to have sex on the rug, super quick, before B.’s work departure. But the boy woke up, and we had to rush the finish, and so my O was skipped over. Again, not at all our usual arrangement. I jumped into bed to scoop the boy, still breathing hard, and even my hand still scented with me, and he immediately latched on and began nursing. Seconds before my husband gasping behind me his hands on my hips and now my son, his mouth on my breast.

My body.

My body gives pleasure and sustenance; my baby wants to be held more than he wants words. And B. and I also often need each other’s touch more than each other’s words. It’s easy to forget that; the boy can subsume all our physical energy until we shrivel and snap at the other. Now that it’s getting chillier I stand under hot showers for a long time.

My water broke in a huge, hollywood gush on a Tuesday evening.  The second B. touched a knife to the frosting of a red velvet cake it burst out of me, soaked my dress, pooled on the chair and ran down our slanted wooden floor. There was not a reason that this night was special, and yet we had both made an effort to treat each other. I had cooked dinner; he had brought cake.

We called our midwife and doula, and they said, go to bed, go to bed, go to bed.

I began to clean. B. shooed me into bed. He read me a few pages from Fellowship and then I suppose we fell asleep because the contraction woke me. It was a tectonic pain. Period cramps the tremors to this deeper than bone shifting.

I didn’t want to wake B. yet. I peed, I think, returned to bed. Could not lie down. Went onto my hands and knees, breathing and rolling forward and back and then B. was awake too.

And it began and it did come in waves and then in between there was stillness. My labor was long and slow; the contractions never gathered into one rush of sensation, not even in the very end, always they were five, six minutes apart. At the fastest it was three or four. Every push was a decision to push. In that way he was moved millimeter by millimeter through me. Finally, my midwife said, “Would you like to feel him?”.  And she guided my hand and there was his head; rock hard and covered with hair. I cried. He was so close. He was in fact going to arrive. But still, it would take hours more to move him out of me.

I threw up a few times.

I did not feel closer to God or the universe or a higher power, as I thought I would. I did not feel that the curtain between life and death had thinned and that I was in the land between. I did not feel closer to the miraculous. I did not transcend my body. It was the opposite. I was only my body. I was held in it, caught in it, could not imagine a land beyond it. I stared at my belly and tried to imagine where he was inside me. Had he left my uterus? Was he in the pelvic tunnel? Where was he? I wanted to know exactly. His heart beat steady and sure. My cervix did exactly what it was supposed to; thinned and softened and opened. He moved and he moved; fractions of millimeters at a time. My uterus squeezed and released. Squeezed and released. Cups with bendy straws were held in front of my face and I obediently sipped and then buckets were held for me to spit up into. I paced and sensed B. trailing behind me. I pressed my forehead against a wall and he pressed into my lower back. We paced some more.

I lay on my side half conscious while the contractions pulsed through me. I dozed through them somehow. A cold washcloth was pressed to my forehead. Someone massaged my foot; my hand. The day began again. I listened to the movies we played with my eyes closed; Blue Crush and The Neverending Story. I heard B. and our doula and our midwife talking; they in their own dance of care for me and care for themselves and care for each other.

“Do you want to go outside? Walk around?”

No!

I gave up on pants. And then underwear. I wore only a shirt. I crouched and bore down and pooped little dark curlicues in front of everyone. I puked and I puked. I sat backwards in a chair while B. or our midwife or our doula pressed into my back. I sat on the toilet and contracted there; peeing and pooping and spitting up. My feet were swollen and I hated the sight of my fat toes beneath the horizon line of my belly.

They put me in a hot shower and I laughed at how good it felt.

I floated in the warm birth tub.

I asked B. to put on Paul Simon’s Graceland which I hadn’t listened to in years and years but with the first notes of the album, I said, “Oh no. Turn it off.”

I tried to open my sphincters by singing.  B. and I were alone upstairs and I relaxed my throat and I don’t sing really ever and we circled the floor and these noises came from me and B. trailed me and I heard that he was crying and I knew he was deeply moved and he said something like, “So beautiful.” He told me later that as we drifted through the rooms, he was listening to these incredible sounds coming from me, nothing ever like them before, and at the same time seeing the objects in our home, most of them given or made by people we loved, and he was overcome by the love and the beauty and the depth of our life.

And the boy’s heartbeat was sure and steady. And my body kept on doing just what it was supposed to. Just very, very slowly.

They call it posterior labor, or back labor, the baby flipped so that its weight, its back doesn’t press into the front of my body but into my back. It’s slower than standard labor and more deliberate. A baby born in this position is called “sunny side up” though I think when he came out he was on his side.

I didn’t feel mythic or beautiful. I was sweat and piss and skin and hair.

I did what they told me to do, when they told me to do it. At least I tried. I believed what they told me. I gave myself completely to their care. I abandoned myself, my baby, to them, and that was the gilded net that held me. This is what kept fear or doubt at bay. I was moving my baby through me. He knew what to do. B. and our doula and our midwife; they knew what to do. My body knew what to do. I knew nothing.

The only conscious decision I made in the whole thing, my only exertion of will came at three in the morning, after what we called “the big sleep” when the midwife went home for awhile and the rest of us slept for about three hours. I went alone to the bathroom and decided that it was time to start pushing. And I squatted and began the long, slow pushing of the babe.

The last morning the game changing visit from the acupuncturist. My energy went up, my contractions came stronger and closer together, the babe in my pelvis; I felt the weight of him there; something to push into. The midwife brought my hand to his head and I cried.

I lay on my back on my bed. B. by one leg, our doula by the other, the midwife next to us on the couch. When a contraction came, I said, “Ok” and B. took one leg, and our doula the other, and then the midwife put her finger just inside me to show me where to push into, and I grabbed my thighs and lifted my head and grunted and pushed and then it was done, and we waited again for the next contraction.

I paced. I crouched. I stared at my belly.

We moved to the couch upstairs and somehow there I could really push. The midwife, “Do you want to see?”

Yes, but mistake! All that pain and just the barest oval of his damp, dark hair. It’s too small a hole, I thought. And, This is going to hurt.

Finally she said, “One more push like that and we’re going down to the tub.”

The push did more than she thought it would.

“Okay, we have to move now.”

To his great frustration, I wouldn’t let B. get in front of me on the stairs because I could not pause. I felt the baby as if his head was already out of my body. B. helped me into the tub and I draped my body over the side. I think I shouted out, “What do I do?”

And she said push, and I did and the pain was everything, mind scrambling, there was nothing to grab on to, there was no thought, it was a flash that lit my brain up and left not a single shadow to duck into. And then there was one more, and my mind skittered like a bead of water on a stove, and again, there was nowhere to go, but then it was done. And they handed him to me. And he was tremendous. Huge and solid and real.

Relief.

Wonder.

A quieter sweetness than I expected.

The rest is the simple miracle of it. The afternoon light in our room with the yellow ceiling. The water in the birth tub turned murky and I felt like I was sitting in the primordial swamp of all creation. My boy my boy my boy. B. beside us. Our boy. The women cared for the babe and for me and after some amount of time B. held him while I showered and there were clean clothes for me, and the women cleaned the rooms and I held the boy and we called my mother, but I can’t remember the words. It was dark then. The bed with fresh sheets and the babe measured and weighed and tended to, and the women left us with kisses and promises of return the next day. The cat re-emerged but she was frightened and had scratched a bare spot into her chin. We went downstairs briefly, to B.’s mother’s apartment to show her the boy. She had waited there through her worry, resisting her urge to knock on the door.

I ate a little chicken and hummus and salad because B. couldn’t handle it if I went any longer without eating but I was not hungry. The house was silent. We lay the boy between us on the bed and stared at him; the adoration that has been repeated for millenia. We eased into sleep. I woke up at dawn and my guys were asleep beside me. Finally I was hungry. I walked up to the kitchen and fried two eggs and ate them with toast and butter and watched the sky lighten outside of the window. I felt scrubbed clean and more awake than I had ever been. And everything was scrubbed clean; brighter and fresher and lighter than any day had ever been. I went back to bed and the next time we woke it was into the first morning to include the boy as, I hope more than anything, will every day for the rest of my time here.

Three months and eight days.

| Jade SV

Next to me are three squares of salted dark chocolate on a small china plate with pink roses that belonged to my great-grandmother, a glass vase of marigolds, Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight series, and my nursing pillow with a slip cover on it decorated with whales. Just a second ago, the record stopped playing Nina Simone’s “I Shall Be Released.” I’m crying. The boy is with B., my mother and my step-father. B. has swooped in to rescue me and has promised me an hour which by now only has 35 minutes left in it. I poured a bath downstairs but I have a feeling if I get into it it will be with the boy as part of his bedtime routine. I want to be eating chocolate and reading Eclipse while in the bath while listening to Nina but here I am.

When my mother called to tell me the boy was crying and I should come meet them and my previously planned hour alone disappeared it was like a gate shutting. But then when I found them and scooped up the boy it was a relief to be close to him again.

It’s been a rough few nights. He’s waking up every two hours for the first time in a while but also I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m not sleeping during his intervals and when I finally am slipping off he wakes to eat. Add to this the cat who’s enjoying some kind of summer revelry and the nights have been constantly interrupted. This leaves me with little patience for B.’s dark flashes of mood, my mother’s earnest emotional conversations, and none for myself. I feel like I’ve just spent this whole day figuring out how to get the boy his rest and now it’s evening and it’s as if I haven’t actually spent time with him, only spent time at him, trying to rock sway bounce him into naps. When I was walking up the stairs for my hour in the house he was in B.’s lap smiling and shouting in his new strange language and I was instantly jealous. Where were our smiles today? Also guilty–have I just been hounding the poor kid all day to eat and sleep and not leaving him any time to just be a baby and coo at the universe?

I carried him and he was a part of me and now he is his own person.

Last week I went to yoga for the first time, a class for both pregnant ladies and post-pregnant ladies. It was my first time back since giving birth and I was completely unprepared for how it would feel to be back in that room. The teacher told the room to put our hands on our bellies and feel our babies there but he was gone, somewhere out on the street with his father, with me watching the door to see if they would appear, needing me, or my milk.

24 minutes until they get home.

I could just move around the world then, with my baby, not alone, but still a complete unit. Now when I am alone, I am not alone, part of me is always with him. Is this endless then? Infinite? To never be whole onto myself again? Dear lord, I think of the trips I went on while dismissing my mother’s worries and I can’t imagine him being gone for those weeks and months. How I might live a daily life while he flings himself around the globe? Or forget the globe, the city. The neighborhood.

The joy and the love are beyond words. And so is the vulnerability.

This is it in terms of entries. There is only one more to come which will be my birth story. Maybe a mistake to write this on such a teary, over-stretched day. I am jagged for sure. Just too tired. As simple as that, but sleeplessness is like cocaine for my emotions. It amps them up, gets them chattering, and then crashes them hard.

I know it’s too soon to come to conclusions and in a month, let alone a year, I’m sure I will know a million things about being a mother that I don’t know yet, but for now, today, this week, it is this…that what I feared was exactly true: I am not alone anymore and it’s not possible to be fully alone ever again.

And it is both the great toll and the great joy of this new life.

Fifteen minutes. And yes, I want more time, and yes, I’m already missing them, B. and the boy. My guys. I’ll kiss B. and kiss the boy on his head and we’ll bathe him and play his music box and get him into pajamas and then I’ll nurse him and then B. will swaddle him and rock into sleep and we will spend a tired hour or so on the couch with my phone on speaker beside me transmitting the quiet buzz of his sleep. Then B. and I will climb into bed and eventually the boy will wake and when I pick him up he’ll press his legs into his bum like a frog’s, one thumb in his mouth, and his eyes won’t even open really as I settle him into me, tummy to tummy, and he will nurse with his eyes closed and one intent fist by his cheek and another hand holding my shirt, and then I will re-swaddle him and rock him back into his bassinet and this will repeat a few times until morning when I will know he is actually awake because when I look sleepily into his bassinet he will look up at me with bright eyes and a big smile. When I was pregnant i used to greet him every morning, but not out loud. I simply thought thoughts at him and that was how we communicated. But he is here now, outside of me, and every morning, every single morning of his life so far, he is happy to see me and happy it’s morning and happy to be in his body. Sure, as he should be, of being loved.

One minute more.

Two months and two days.

| Jade SV

The massacre in Charleston has made it hard for me to write. As has the continuation of this campaign; the horror of the burning churches. I have been in the land of milk stains and breasts and this tiny baby boy and sleep and burps, but what do I say about the world that is happening…because though this began as a very private space I can’t help knowing that there are people out there reading. And that has begun to slow me down. It seems too small to write the everyday life I’ve kept on living, but that’s also the truth of it: that I have simply kept on living that life. And there, there’s that thing. That I could forget and remain tucked away from the news. That is a thing; a property of whiteness. To live essentially untouched and know that you are not the target. My sadness can be real but I am not kept up at night by fear for my new son’s survival in this country.

Race often silences me.

I realized the other day that though I know myself as multiracial, my son is not, won’t. That is a thing about the way race moves and pigments shift. Infant faces change of course and who knows what ethnic markings may emerge, but regardless, I do know he will know the unearned and very real privileges of whiteness. As, I suppose, I have.  I thought by the time I had a child I would have figured out my language of racial and ethnic belonging, but I haven’t. I wanted to, but I’m still unsure. I think mostly my whiteness embarrasses me; feels linked to old hurts, old mistakes, things I did, my estrangement from my family of color always feeling like my fault.

Even more embarrassing is that a small, but real part of myself hoped for my child to deliver me from whiteness…to exert the other family genes and give people pause when they saw us all together. This hasn’t happened.

But also, whiteness itself is kind of embarrassing. The way it’s both smugly and naively unaware of itself. The way it just takes and takes and never asks if it should. The way it does not see how it foolish it looks or how little it knows.

The news of the massacre shocked me and then my brain shied away from it. I retreated back into my cave but I’ve done this many times when I didn’t have an infant to care for.  I cried exactly once over it and could have cried longer but swallowed it up and then I went and bought a coffee and walked in the rainy park with the boy and B.

Everything is very comfortable these days. B. not working yet, and making me these glorious plates of food and we walk three blocks and are in a park, and our home is cool and comfortable and I forget to see how weird and gross the class and race dynamics of this neighborhood have become. B.’s whiteness is complicated by his parent’s immigrant views of the world and by having spent much of his childhood in non-white spaces. My whiteness is complicated by my brown father. But the boy? If we continue to live here? If we raise him here, where the only people of color are employees? Where the rich wear charity run t-shirts and listen to NPR and actually say things like, “My dear friend, who happens to be Black/Asian/Latina.”

I am raising a boy who will become a white man.

How to complicate it. I’m not sure. But at least I’m feeling it again; the ache of the murders. At least piercing the veneer of this place. That needs to happen. And now the boy howls, and I have to walk away. In two days the Fourth of July. How to complicate that? That too seems like a thing that needs to happen.

Two months today.

| Jade SV

A collection of sentences today because I’ve started many entries that never get written; the days that begin so slow and gentle, like now, even the garbage truck out front seeming like a soft, summer sound, and then come to this sudden close, me wondering where all the hours went. It’s officially summer now because public schools are out. And now that it’s officially summer it means that I officially begin to worry that September will come too fast.

The boy, who very kindly slept so as to give B. and I a quiet breakfast, stirs. He stirs by raising both arms straight above his head in triumph, he shakes his head from side to side, one arms lowers into a fist under his chin and the other lowers more slowly in one long straight line. I bet he’s making me a faster, more accurate typer.

He is two months old today. Does it mean that at three months we’ll cross some border out of this magic land?

I decided yesterday that when my mother came over I would make my new mama friend an Israeli salad, a thing of sliced mango, and a batch of muffins. I also planned to fix the mobile that disintegrated a week (or more?) ago. Also, to join my neighborhood listserve so as to go hunting for a bouncy chair and a nursing chair. Also, fix the storage problem on my phone. And write my godmother. Also, send these photos to my other friend that she’s going to use to make a set of illustrations for this very project. And return my friend’s phone call. Also, find an air bnb for a few nights for me and B. in the end of July. And…there was something else but I forget.  Oh yes, make two doctor’s appointments. And I owe three baby gifts.

There was this night in his first week before my milk came in when I sat with him in the moonlight, in a creaky rocking chair, and I sat and began to tell him the story of himself and just sat there crying.

I think I keep writing that moment over and over.

Two months! B. just pointed out that the boy is officially bigger than our cat.

The problem with the days when I try to get specific tasks done is that every time I’m holding him I’m thinking of when i get to put him down. So by the time I get to the end of the day, the tasks somehow undone, I also feel disconnected from the boy, and then the whole thing becomes a haze. It’s also true that yesterday had many magical moments sprinkled throughout. I’m been getting a little emotional. Moody. A little rollercoaster-y. He’s in a new sleep pattern that’s leaving me a little…weird.

Also, I’ve been meaning to tell how I did officially have sex, but that was a few weeks ago, and is kind of old news by now.

And there’s this whole bit about Father’s Day.

So I’m going to stop now. Because I am trying to get to this new mama gathering which I think would be very good for me to get to. The way B. nodded when i said I was thinking about going made me think that perhaps it would be more good for me than I realize. Did I mention that I’m also really happy?

Oh, and I’ve also been meaning to write and think about resources and support for new mamas. And my relationship with my boobs.

I did have a moment of total wisdom and surrender this morning, though. That I would just do one moment at a time and see what comes. I’m deciding right now, and declaring, that today is in fact the first official day of summer.

6 1/2 Weeks.

| Jade SV

I was wrong. Sleep is everything.

Best not to think this sentence:  “All I need is one full night of sleep.” Because it can only be followed by this one: “You’re not going to get that for a long, long time.”

I thought I could outmaneuver all those sleep warnings. I thought I could break down the day/night industrial complex. I thought all it took was the right attitude.

The thing is that I really can’t blame the boy. His needs are too pure. I can’t steal sleep from his wants and rhythms. But from B.? It’s not in the middle of the night, but in the morning, that he can, at times, become my sleep nemesis. I think I do for him too, but I don’t want to assign him my own character defects. It is he that has the power to give me more sleep. He who can take the boy for a walk. He who can pace with him upstairs while I fall back asleep for that precious hour more. I would like to say that I think graciously of his needs in these moments but the laws of scarcity apply and sometimes, well sometimes if sleep were money I’d rob a small child of their candy fund just to get more of it. These are the moments when I glimpse the borders of my own basic kindnesses.

I’m immensely disappointed about all this. Not the tiredness itself, but to have fallen into the most obvious of new parent modes. Also, yesterday we ran into another set of parents whose babe is only two weeks older than ours and they get six and seven hour stretches and I walked away from that conversation saying to B., “We need to get serious about a bedtime ritual.”

Evening as it is now is something that comes on us suddenly. The day moves along at a meandering pace; morning and afternoon seeping into each other until suddenly, as if we’ve been dropped over a hidden waterfall, B. and I find ourselves sweaty on the couch at 8 o clock, 9 o clock, 10.  He is bare chested. I’m in my nursing bra with one flap open, a nipple airing out, and the boy, having finally fallen asleep, lies before us unbathed and still in his day outfit. You’d never know it though, looking at him. No signs of the long day show. Instead, he makes sleep look good, lying there, a gorgeous being straight from the cosmos.

We had talked earlier of the movie we would watch. The emails we would send. The random tasks that we’d accomplish with great satisfaction. Instead, we lean gently into each other so as to keep our sweaty skin from touching too much of the other’s. We kiss. Say, “Good job,” with a laugh. And then we assign the first shower, hurrying towards bed, the clock already running down towards the moment when the boy will stir sleepily, stretch, still looking adorable, until, very quickly if not intercepted, he’ll begin howling with all the unmitigated fury of his need to survive. Sometimes, if B. is the one to bring him to me, I think in my hazy sleep that I already have in my arms. I hear his cries, and feel the shape of him in my arms and then fumble around blearily to find him in the covers.

He is fed, and held upright to help with the gas, and then rocked back to sleep, and though I know how the next sleep cycle will end, he gets me every time–the look of him a mighty balm against the raw edge of the interrupted night.

6 weeks old.

| Jade SV

I should be sleeping. I should always being sleeping, apparently, and I’m tired of this command/objective/goal hanging over me every time the boy drifts off into his gorgeous slumber. (Nothing quieter than a house in which a baby is sleeping.) It’s true that the failure to nap can leave me ragged and here I am writing about it again but I’m also just tired of the whole thing. It’s all anyone ever warned me about, and it’s the first question people ask, and aren’t there other things to talk about, be warned about, strive for?

I’ve had a low lying unease these last few days, and I think now it’s because the brand-newness is wearing off and I’m hearing the slight whir of routine. I don’t want the dazzle to go but it’s already going and I hate it. Yesterday I cared for the boy all day. I mothered. I fed and rocked and burped and walked and smiled, even, but it was more like work than like discovery and I know, I do know, this is fine and what’s going to happen some days but I’m still sad to be leaving those first early weeks. They were a shock yes, but they were also tremendously exciting. Every damn thing was a monumental achievement. Now the boy is crying more, and I do what I can, and I walk to the park, and I shift from shoulder to arm, but it’s not necessarily a thrill and sometimes (often) I’m not sure what to do and I have to remind myself of the simple fact that babies cry sometimes without us knowing why,

There’s a shift happening. We’re waiting for this growth spurt everyone talks about. B. thinks we’re on the edge of it. I don’t know. The boy eats and sleeps. And also, there’s my body.  The initial recovery is coming to a close. I’ve pretty much stopped bleeding which means that my uterus is back to it’s former size. It means I can swim again, think about running, exercise, sex.

Sex.

Also, sex.

Ok. Sex. But what do I do about my milk-filled breasts? I don’t want to wear a boring black nursing bra while doing it for the first time since, but what’s to stop this personal sprinkler system of mine from being switched on? And what if it’s not as good? What will I feel? What will he? And also, a hesitation I don’t know how to name…how to welcome anything in when the last major activity there was the boy’s head and sensations that left my brain scrambling for, and not finding, anything in the pain to grasp onto.

I’m just not always so good at transitions. I’m a little scared and a little sad. I want the technicolor. I want the way it was when B. running his hand through my hair was intense, ultimate bliss. Fulfillment in itself. Everything in every day was so much there was nothing more to want. I liked being the version of myself that didn’t ask for more from a day. I want to keep her.

39 days old.

| Jade SV

Today, B. and I solemnly pinky swore to the following items:

1.) To seriously lower our standards in regards to anything house related.

It’s pretty spotless right now, and the fridge is always stocked, and our laundry being done and, here, in week 5 (week 6?) B. is crashing. He needs to do less.

2.) To nap during the day!

It’s getting ridiculous. We’ve been told an infinite number of times to sleep when the boy is sleeping and we keep on not doing it and then we get crabby and tired and slip into circular conversations that don’t even count as arguments. In these, I talk about his “tone” and he talks about me not not hearing him. This goes on too long until we kiss, shake and make up and realize that while there is a kernel of truth to each of our points, mostly we’re just being stupid and acting just like the boy does when he’s too tired and doesn’t know what he wants and thus complains about every damn thing including his favorite things. (Which at this point I think are milk, cuddling, and wiggle time.)

3.) To build flexibility into our plans.

This is huge, and every time I do it, so liberating. What this looks like:  Friend says, “Do you want to meet up on Sunday?”, and I say, “I’d love to, but is it ok if we check in that morning and then decide?”.  And then Friend says, “Yes, totally,” and  I say, “Thank you!,” and then when Sunday comes around and I got no sleep the night before and the poor boy is stuffed up and breathing in too much air while he nurses (sounding exactly like a piglet at my breast) and then spitting up and he’s exhausted and crabby too and we just can not get out of the house and all I want to do is watch the rest of the Planet Earth “Great Plains” episode while he blows snot and drips milk all over me I can cancel on Friend without feeling horribly guilty.

4.) Be more honest with guests.

Aka, if Friend is over and the boy suddenly falls asleep and he’s really out, then we say to Friend, “Please enjoy watching our marvelous boy sleep while we go downstairs and do the same.” Ideally, then Friend and the boy bond. I can’t say. I’ve only tried this one with grandparents and god-grandparents and since they love every single second with the boy they’re not really a reliable test case.

Of course I am now breaking rule #2 because the boy is sleeping and I’m here awake and I’m so hyper and excited to be able to write and then putz that I have no interest in lying down. Also, I ate a brownie and drank an iced coffee not that long ago and am feeling like a super hero. Also, I really want to watch Insurgent with B. on the couch. And not be nursing while we eat the pizza he’s making. And send a few text messages. And make shortcake cause we have raw cream from a Jersey farm and I bought strawberries and I want to eat strawberry shortcake. For this last one though…I have a hunch that those berries will end up whole in a bowl, some cream poured over the top, a spoonful of sugar, and I’ll call it a delicious day while trying to simultaneously nurse and cuddle with B. and watch the movie that I seriously doubt we will get to the end of and actually all of that is sounding pretty dreamy. In my wildly ambitious grocery buying today I even bought a few lemons to zest. For the shortcake.

Yeah.

If I open that bag of flour, I’ll write about it and title that post “Flour Day.”

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.

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.