Fourth Trimester

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.