#singlemothers

Two months and three days.

| Jade SV

Oh wow, the house alone for a few minutes. I wish I wasn’t this type of person but I keep on getting annoyed at B. for seeming like he wants to be alone, or for not being totally “present” with me, when actually I think it’s just me who wants to be alone. And the other day with my mother, I got annoyed as soon as she showed up to help with the babe. We hadn’t even had a conversation yet. And there I am holding my baby, two months into diapering and rocking and burping and serenading, into putting my immediate needs second when he needs me to, knowing that she did all this for me and more that I don’t even know about yet and really all I should be saying is “Thank you” and instead I’m annoyed.

I’m not sure I’m a person for constant company. And especially not constant company with constant opinions. Because we all have opinions about what’s best for the boy and we’re trying to be polite about it but we’re all a hundred percent sure we’re right. Thus my delay this morning. I went back to bed with the boy because he made it clear to me he wasn’t interested in skipping our last sleep interval of the night which has been a late (“late” as in after 7:30) cuddle together in bed. He’s very wise because in fact I didn’t really want to skip it either, but I was guessing at B.’s thoughts and thinking that he’d prefer us all to laze about on the couch together. I had started baking something and abandoned it to B. and happily went back to bed with the boy, but then spent the rest of the morning mind-reading and deciding that B. was annoyed that I had gone back to bed and left him with the baking. I do think that sometimes he handles the solitude issue by simply being alone while we’re all together. But I should know by now I’m not as good at intuiting his thoughts as I think I am. Sometimes I read his mind and get pissed at him for what I’m sure is there.

B. got offered a job two days ago. And it’s a good job. But it would have him leaving the cave sooner than we expected, and I’m surprised at how sad I am at the idea of him leaving every morning and coming back nine or ten hours later. He and the boy have their own rhythms and patterns completely independent of me and it’s hard to imagine that surviving a standard work week. We’re so used to fathers not being around as the mothers are around, and I am the source yes, but isn’t it possible that the fathers are as indispensable?

The packaging on every single baby item we were given shows a woman caring for the babe. All the internet articles and advertisements and pieces of advice are geared toward mothers and women. I felt for B. during the pregnancy. Where was his baby shower? The public invasion into the life (and body) of the pregnant woman could be too much for me, but there was nothing for B. He wasn’t advised and complimented and courted. There were no rituals to guide him into fatherhood, to mark the huge transition he was about to go through.

When I was a child and imagined myself as a mother it was as a single mother. It was what I knew. And in the midst of our ten thousandth shared decision I’ve had moments when I wouldn’t mind being the sole decider, but I just can’t believe that parenting was ever meant to be a solo affair. Two adults hardly seems enough. We’re trying to fill our house on the weekends; to bring in our friends and family as often as possible; to pass the babe around. It’s good for him and it’s really good for us.

B. told me that he read this study in which people were shown photos of crying babies. Regardless of the gender of the infant, when the viewer was told that the babe was a boy they saw anger, and when they were told it was a girl, they saw fear. Fear being an emotion we want to comfort and anger being one we want to battle. One relative says to us, “He’ll be an athlete.” I say, “Or maybe a dancer.” “No,” she says, “an athlete.”

How to protect the emotional life of this boy. I know we have to work, but can’t there be some swirling pattern of schedules so that we are both here?

My father was not around. I don’t understand yet what makes it possible for some men, so many men, to miss this, but B. has brought fatherhood into my life in a new, magnificent way. Last night, after I nursed and climbed back into bed, I watched B. do the re-swaddling and rocking. Their swaying silhouette was clearly outlined, the boy in profile with his tiny, rounded nose and B.’s face as he watched, and I could tell that he was exhausted and just waiting for the boy’s eyes to close and stay closed. But he kept standing and kept rocking him. He is often more patient than I am at this. My mother told me that only my father, when he visited, was willing to push me on the swings as long as I wanted to be pushed. I watched B. bend and lower the boy into his bassinet, and saw how he was shifting a blanket over him and it made me feel secure right in the center of my chest, in the bone there that connects the ribs, an actual and literal sensation.  I feel cared for by his love of the boy. It makes me feel safe in this time when I am made piercingly vulnerable by my need to protect and love this tiny new being.

I just can’t help thinking that this too, their time, is an essential thing that needs to be protected.

And that’s it. Time to dress and to go.

Week 33

| Jade SV

So what’s it like to have a baby? To birth it, I mean. What will that be?

My mother is worried. This has caught me by surprise. The story of my birth, the story of my conception even, has been told me my whole life, and in the telling, it was mythic and powerful. Surges, Ina May’s rushes, while she stood by a window staring at the Tennessee trees. In the trees, she saw a red, white and black woodpecker–huge, two feet tall, more; a rare bird; no one else but she saw it. In her telling, it was power and force and not pain exactly but something else–sensations of great intensity. I was a summer baby born near Summer town, Tennessee. I was two weeks late. I was huge. Almost ten pounds. Though I did not know that was huge. Like most things in my life, I thought my way was the norm and everything else not. Thus, I thought all women were short compared to my mother’s five feet ten inches. I also assumed I would be five feet and ten inches tall too. And I thought my breasts would be the same size as hers. I remember distinctly the day that I realized they were not growing anymore. I was sixteen. I looked down at my little boobs, and went, Huh. I guess this is all I get. Until that moment I’d just been biding my time; sure there was more to come.

Six weeks ago my mother said, “I’m mad at your baby.”

“Why?” I asked, instantly at the babe’s defense.

“Because it’s going to hurt when you give birth.”

I laughed. “But I thought labor was surges of power.”

“Well…it might hurt a little.”

And then we both laughed.

“That’s the first time you’ve ever admitted it.”

Her laugh is more commanding, but when we get going together, we do take over a restaurant.

My mother and I were a team for most hours of most days of most years of my childhood. Before I could even imagine falling all the way in for B., before I had the capacity to contemplate what sharing a life could be; as in way back when I was a teenager, I only ever imagined myself as a single mother. My mother and I used to ride the train twice a year to Illinois to visit family. She always gave me the window seat. At night, they dimmed the lights in the car, and even if they were awake (and we were all awake) everyone got hushed. This was my absolutely favorite time. I’d put my forehead against the cold glass, watching the blurring, on lucky nights there’d be a moon, and I’d watch for the one orange light, the one window lit in the one house in the clump of trees gathered from the wide and flat spaces of the farms.  I’d tuck my feet into and under her hips while she shifted and tried to sleep. Sometimes we leaned into each other back to back, the counter pressure keeping us propped and curled, coming as close we could to actual rest. In the mornings, we went to the Women’s Lounge to “freshen up”. My mother stretched and groaned and her silver bangles clinked. Once properly ready, we headed to the dining car for breakfast. While we waited for food, she sipped coffee and I ate strawberry jam out of the packets with the tip of my butter knife. Everything outside would still be flat, but sunny now, sharp and shining, the houses white.

“Do you want to play cards after breakfast?”

“Uh huh.”

Everyone keeps saying, “Your mother must be so excited.” And I’m sure she is, and I’m sure she will be, and i know she’s going to be an epic grandmother, but she’s not a grandmother yet. For now, she’s only a mother and I’m her only daughter.