Journal Excerpt

One of my favorite moments with E happens after she’s fed. We’re sitting in the rocking chair, baby comforter at my back, feet up on the rocking stool. She latches off, mouth agape and head full of silky hair rolling back on my arm, limp and happy, the soft folds of her neck exposed, her eyes closed. Her eyelashes are wondrously long, so long they curl at the ends, so long pieces of lint get stuck on the ends, like a dusting of snow. I’ll be watching her, not making a sound, listening as her breathing gets heavier, and then suddenly she’ll smile in her sleep. It lasts just a moment, a big goofy drunken-old-man smile, and then she relaxes back into sleep again.

I don’t know how she truly feels about life most of the time. It must be hard adjusting to the world after the safety of being inside. I think a lot of how she is these first few months may be her reconciling herself to living here, on her own, in the world. But her private smiles make me think she must be happy, even content, and I catch them like secret little gifts in the night.

Mental Energy

“Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things… And the God of peace will be with you.” – Philippians 4:8-9

I’ve realized that since staying at home with the baby all day, I have a lot of undissipated mental energy. I’m like a periodic quadraplegic. I spend much of my day nursing, or carrying her around because she won’t be calm any other way, without any real freedom of movement. Depending on which side I’m feeding her on, I can’t even reach over to get a tissue from the shelf near the rocking chair where I nurse; she’s been finicky during feeds lately and will latch off if I move too much. I’ve figured out this way to maneuver the remote control for the heater with my toes. Soon I’ll learn to paint holding a brush in my teeth like Joni Eareckson.

So I just sit around, or pace around, all day while my mind runs along ahead. It took me awhile to realize that my mind needs to occupy itself; that in a vacuum it will start to fill itself with all sorts of things. I stew. I get down about myself, or what my life is coming to. I worry about my next rotation, which I never used to do—I was one of those people who never knew if they were on call until the night before. Now I dread returning on a whole new level. When I’m feeling yucky at six a.m. after a bad night, I now think that in a month I’ll be getting dressed for work at this time, instead of just wondering when she’ll go back down so I can get in a morning nap.

I start to escape into imaginings, sometimes scary things, sometimes scenes from novels I replay over and over (I believe I have memorized entire passages of dialogue from certain books). I sit there feeding and rocking and enacting whole epics in my head. I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise!!

In all this stewing, it’s surprising how often I forget that there is any higher power in life. I have to kick myself into remembering. D says it’s because I live such a unidimensional life, and it’s true. Your mind becomes what you feed it, and when you don’t feed it anything, it runs around like a naked banshee on a deserted island. You lose touch with reality, particularly spiritual reality, pretty quickly.

I feel often like I’m searching for the holy grail of the balanced life. I’m either always working or now always with the baby, never normal. I keep waiting for life to get normal. It’s not normal to always be in scrubs, just as it’s not normal to always be in pajamas. D says you have to make your balance. As best you can anyway. This means I need to feed my mind something true, something good. I need to get dressed, to get out, to reach out to the friends who for some unknown reason still stick with me. I should think upon God for some time each day, even if it’s only praying for E as she feeds and wondering how God made her with such tiny fingernails. I think I can start there.

Observing

”I’ve decided the reason Sam’s so gorgeous is that God knew that I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with this shitting and colicky little bundle if he looked like one of those E.T./Don Rickles babies.” –Lamott

I like to stroke her hair softly while she nurses. Maybe it’s because people tell me it’s supposed to all fall out at some point—I keep expecting to wake up one day finding her bald with soft black strands strewn about her like fallen snow. Her hair is possibly even softer than her skin, certainly silkier, and spirals out in geometric perfection from a point at the back of her head. I think to myself, one day this hair will be gone, and she’ll grow back new hair, but it won’t be this hair, the hair that was wet in my body, the hair that crowned for an hour before the rest of her followed into the world.

I like to feel for her fontanelles, the soft spots on her head where her skull bones have not yet fused, markers of her vulnerability. One day the little triangular windows will close, but for now it’s frightening and exhilarating to think I can feel her brain. If I had an ultrasound probe I could cast in sound and look around.

The other day we put her down on the ground on her belly, naked. She could do brief little push-ups and lift her head in a bobbing sort of way, but even though it looked like she should just crawl right off the sheet, it was clear she couldn’t, and then it struck me what a small, helpless thing she really was. Sometimes the force of her personality—her alertness, stubborn cries, zany smiles—is so strong that I think I honestly forget that.

I think about the things she teaches me. Like how to be vulnerable and utterly helpless. How to exude a beauty and joy that comes of a complete lack of self-consciousness. How to relish eating and splashing in the bath. How to sleep with great abandon, head flopped back, mouth open, body slumped into mine, breathing like a little Darth Vader. She does all these things simply by being, and there is a purity and clarity in it that I’m trying to memorize before it disappears. On one hand I can’t wait for her to start speaking; on the other, she speaks more purely now than any other human being I’ve known.

Journal Excerpt

I wonder if she is capable of loving me. I wonder if I really only love and understand God in the same baby sort of way.

She is starting to make more sounds now, like someone who has taken up the oboe and is trying to blow a few notes. She mostly squeaks, like a slightly deflated rubber toy.

Journal Excerpt

Last night I had just finished feeding her and putting her down to sleep at 3:30 A.M., just finished getting settled back in my warm blankets next to D when she started crying again, around 4 A.M. I thought all sorts of grumpy, loathsome thoughts during the walk over to the nursery. The little booger. I turned on the light and saw that she was awake. As soon as I leaned over the crib, she waved her arms wildly and broke out into the biggest grin I have ever seen; I think if she could have laughed she would have. I thought, okay, fine. I’ll pick you up.

She has definitely begun to smile real smiles, not just gas-smiles. For some weeks now she also liked to smile while her mouth is full of nipple, but that didn’t seem to count either. Now she sees us and smiles, or smiles when we smile and laugh at her, real smiles that go to her eyes. It’s quite amazing.


She has little elvish sideburns, long and soft and pointy. She is like a baby Arwen.

Journal Excerpt

I don’t think E and the cats are aware of each other’s existence yet. It’s quite comical, really. E wails herself into a round red beet and Chloe just lies there lazily licking her paws or dozing on her back with her privates displayed. I think Winnie sees her as an obstacle to her never-ending goal of lying on my lap whenever physically possible. She sort of walks up to me and gazes at E’s bum, as if trying to think of a way to wedge herself around it. I thought this would all be over once you stopped being pregnant, she’s probably thinking. She usually settles for plunking her front end on my lower lap and letting her back end dangle off.

E, from her end, seems to be unaware that she lives amongst these huge, moving furry white-and-black creatures. I tell her sometimes it is like she is in a zoo, look at the animals! To her they must look like bovine-colored mammoths. But she seems to sort of stare past them. They are mysteriously beyond her range of vision.

Today while we were nursing, Chloe was overcome with her desire for physical contact (that seems to be her only waking state, actually) and jumped onto the corner of the rocking chair we were sitting in. After turning her big self around a few times, she plunked down in the corner with her butt towards us, huge tail swishing back and forth right across the side of E’s head like a big black boa. The baby squirmed a few times and I laughed before kicking the cat off.

I keep thinking about the day she will suddenly notice they live with her. My mom says she will grow up thinking she looks like a cat.

Exhaustion

“We had another bad night. We finally slept for two hours at 7:00 A.M. What a joke. I felt like thin glass, like I might crack.” –Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

I read the phrase “savage exhaustion” and liked it. I now say it over and over to make myself feel better.

There are a few levels of tiredness. There’s the kind you get after pulling an all-nighter, which produces a sort of euphoria. You feel great about how you pulled off that paper, or that you’re bonded to these campers for life or that the boy across the campfire might really like you. You feel like you could probably write ten more papers or work up the nerve to go talk to the boy.

Then there’s the kind that happens after you finish a few thirty-six hour call shifts, that leaves you feeling worn down and suddenly aware that you have dirt under your fingernails and oil in your hair. You realize your life is wacko because you haven’t worn anything but scrubs for the last week and you keep hearing your pager going off in your head. You feel slightly snappish and grubby, but then you go home, turn off your phone and sleep for twelve hours and awake feeling better (and starving).

Then there’s the sort that happens after you haven’t really slept for six weeks. You pass into this new level of nirvana, a world in which you’re so chronically tired you stop realizing you’re tired and just become weird instead. You’re sometimes too exhausted to sleep. Things start to lose proportion. You become highly irrational and unpredictably emotional. You decide the long hair must go because tying it back every time you get up at night is somehow intolerably irritating. In fact, you should just shave it all off to avoid the hassle of blow-drying. You resent all people who sleep through the night, primarily your husband. On the outside you might look normal, but really you’re just trying very hard.

This is where I am glad for my pit-crew, cheerleading team. The folks who drop off meals, wash my dishes and take out my trash, hold the baby for awhile so D and I can go out and pretend life is normal for a few hours. My husband who forgives my moods and reminds me the world will not end if the baby cries a few more minutes so I can finish brushing my teeth. We’re just about reaching six weeks, the time when people say things get easier. Woo hoo.

Sometimes

“People kept trying to prepare me for how soft and mushy my stomach would be after I gave birth, but I secretly thought, Not this old buckerina. I think most people undergoing chemo secretly believe they won’t lose their hair.
“Oh, but my stomach, she is like a waterbed covered with flannel now. When I lie on my side in bed, my stomach lies politely beside me, like a puppy.”
- Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

Sometimes I read something that makes me laugh and laugh and then I stop laughing and think wow, that hits the spot.

Laughter

One of the most unexpected things about the baby is how much she makes us laugh. Sure, she is so perfectly cute it should be illegal, but when I think about her I mainly want to laugh. Before a feed when she roots so earnestly over her shoulder I worry her neck will sprain, usually to the wrong side. Over here! Other side, other side! When her hands clasp tightly together over her chest, eyes closed as she sucks—Lord, take not this breast from me (sorry to a particular reader; I can’t avoid the b-word). And then when she’s done feeding, one hand pushing me away while frowning with bottom lip stuck out as if to say, get that NASTY thing away from me, you NASTY woman. And her drugged-out post-feed highs, head lolling back with eyes closed and mouth slightly agape, arms hanging limply at her sides. I can pretty much do whatever I want with her then. Like pick out her nose boogers and the bits of milk collected in her neck folds.

All that entertainment, and only during feeds, though I have to say that accounts for the majority of her waking existence. Also pretty hilarious is watching her poop, a task which any parent of a newborn will tell you is a big deal. Good poops, happy baby; no poop, gassy and fussy baby. She approaches this venture with the appropriate degree of solemn concentration: brows furrowed, lips pursed, chin down, fists clenched, arms and legs straight. And hold. As her face gets redder and redder. Cracks me up to no end.

She can even be funny when she cries, her whole face frowning as the most pitiful how-could-you-do-this-to-me sound emerges. Or when she wails and holds her breath so long her face looks like a crumpled red tomato and I think the world must be ending. Far be it from her to do anything half-heartedly.

The fact that I am making up conversations in my head with a preverbal infant probably means I don’t get out enough and/or will one day wake up having forgotten the layers of the cornea, but oh well. It’s worth it. And a lot more fun.