#newborn

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.

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.