Like A Weaned Child Is My Soul

 O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;

like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the LORD

from this time forth and forevermore.

-Psalm 131

I am sitting here with this Psalm, and suddenly I am getting this flashback of all what it has been like to breastfeed three kids. You see someone breastfeed, just flip that baby under the cover and look it’s that easy—but it’s not. I start thinking about all the engorgement, the disabling pain in those first few weeks, then the slight discomfort every time a feed is delayed or skipped. The times it’s been hard to get them to latch, and I’m desperately jiggling them into every position I can muster and mashing my nipple into their mouths. The times it’s been hard to get them to wake up enough to feed, and I’m ticking their feet, rubbing their backs, pressing cold baby wipes against their faces.

I remember pumping, desperately trying to relax enough to get a let down, in that resident clinic room, hearing the charts go “plop, plop, plop” into the box outside the door and knowing patients are right outside waiting and complaining, hearing someone bang on the door, staring at the pile of charts on the table still waiting to be dictated, and just sitting there with the pump going. I remember pumping in bathrooms and showers, in the upstairs locker room at a grocery store, fumbling with tangled tubes, searching for outlets, trying not to waste a drop of milk while positioning bottles on edges of sinks and seats. I remember walking to that pumping room across the hospital with the hospital-grade machine in attempts to revive a dying milk supply.

I don’t have anything against formula; the older two were both on formula by various points. But I think about all what it has been and is like, and I would do it all again, if only for those times afterwards, when they latch off and just lie there and hang out with me afterwards. They have spoken, my body has adjusted and answered; it is a rhythm, a dance, a language we alone share. And afterwards, they are incredibly still. Their bodies just melt and curl into mine. At nights Elijah drifts to sleep this way, his closed eyes mashed into my chest and his limp arms tangling with mine. In the mornings he leans back and stares at me, smiles and shows off his three chins and does his gargly-speech. There is usually some farting and pooping too. I think, if he could, he would live his whole life right here, like this.

I often feel like I have to get stuff. I have to understand it, to figure it out, to analyze and parse. If I don’t, I get anxious, or frustrated. But today I am thinking about how humility is a gift. To know how far above me God is. To not need to know anything else, except that he is here with me. And he has fed me. And he loves me. And I can be completely vulnerable and completely safe. I’ve always thought, it’s a shame Elijah won’t remember these moments. But I will, and I think God has given them to me so I can understand a bit of what it is like to be with him.

He Has To Be The Loveliest Bald Person That I Know

Going From Two To Three

Going from two to three has been harder than going from one to two. Intuitively this makes sense—you’re going from man-to-man to zone; you’re outnumbered—but somehow we didn’t expect it. There was a lot more trepidation going from one to two; we couldn’t quite wrap our minds around it. What do you do when they both want to be held? What if one cries and disturbs the other one’s nap? What if they both need you at the same time? Does the universe just end?

In retrospect, with two we still had a good amount of control. Three, on the other hand, heralds a whole new way of parenting. A mother of five once told us the toughest step was two to three. After three, she said, it was all pretty easy. D hypothesized it was because you learn a new skill set with three that you then more easily carry over to four, or five. I hypothesized that said skill set was, well, not caring. Letting go. Giving up control.

That’s what it feels like with three. The middle one cries on the ground for thirty minutes while you’re nursing, because the baby just has to feed. You leave the baby for the oldest one to entertain/irritate because you have to make sure the middle one gets more soup into his mouth than onto the ground. There’s more mess, more crying, more slightly weird outfits because you didn’t have time to debate whether purple polka-dotted tights match a grey striped shirt.

People remark on how the third baby seems so laid-back. Come to think of it, each baby seems to have gotten more laid-back. We always thought it was lucking out in the genetic lottery, but it’s probably also that we’ve both become more laid-back. My friend who’s a first-time mother doesn’t want to bring her baby out until he’s had vaccines—ours has already gotten sick twice courtesy of his siblings. I was trying to keep them from spreading their colds until I actually saw her cough directly into the baby’s open mouth, and then I gave up. We made our first baby adhere to a strict EASY schedule; we pretty much just remember to feed our third every three hours. Often he eats while two other kids are crowding my lap and stroking his head.

D cites a study which found that the moms who were most stressed were those with three kids. Moms of four kids were actually less stressed; the study hypothesized this was because they simply learned to care less.

Is this all a good or bad thing? Unclear. On one hand, we try to make sure we each get quality time alone with each of the kids. We still plan and prepare as much as possible and have learned it’s okay to hire more help. On the other hand, there’s a certain level of entropy and chaos we learn to embrace, and it doesn’t mean there’s any less happiness or joy. It just takes us thirty minutes to get out the door—can she bring her bunny? But then can he bring his doggie? He wants to wear his grey sneakers but can only find the left shoe and insists on putting it on his right foot. Why again does she have to wear a jacket? Wait; where is the baby?—but I guess that’s how it is these days.

Arrival, by Water

He arrived in the early morning the day after my due date, just as the other two had. I was in a tub in the birthing center at the hospital, leaning back against D’s arm, and the midwife put him on my chest after he came out underwater. He was still attached to the cord inside me, and the two of us floated, wet and naked, him wailing, me in a state of extreme relief that the last twenty minutes of pushing was over. The three hours of contractions beforehand had been less painful than I remembered, but the pushing was worse by far, partly because the midwife talked me through doing it slowly to avoid tearing—which was more than worth it afterwards, though I wasn’t thinking that at the time.

He pretty much looks like how our other two looked when just born. In fact, I did a line-up of their newborn photos and D scored less than fifty percent correct.

Life since his arrival has been a long, meditative walk through a hazy landscape marked by three-hour feeds, chronic sleep deprivation, and physical soreness. There is an element of refreshing simplicity, where I just exist and enjoy remembering the things I had forgotten about newborns: their involuntary facial grimaces. The way their lips open and twist diagonally when rooting. The way their hands float around, disconnected from their bodies; the lint that gathers between their fingers. The fine coating of hair over their bodies; the boniness of their butts.

But then it’s easy to feel lonely and down. The constant head-achy lack of sleep can make anything look dismal and irritating, and it’s easy to complain about the constant throbbing discomfort of engorgement, the soreness that makes me wonder if my pelvic floor will ever return to normal, the strange waterbed-like quality of my deflated stomach. And it’s a bit scary to wrap my mind around taking care of all three by myself eventually.

The baby has been surprisingly easy to take care of: he falls asleep on his own without a fuss, already gives me four hours between feeds at night, rarely cries during the day. The other two have been much harder. They have both gotten sick with fevers during the past week. It’s been harder to meet E’s particular demands and answer her million questions when I’m tired. E.e. is clearly going through adjustment issues, crying when I can’t hold him due to my chest hurting or having to nurse, acting up with whomever else is taking care of him.

It’s a day-by-day thing at this point. I try to be thankful—that I have milk, that the soreness has been better than in the past, that the older two have been nothing but affectionate and loving to the baby despite their lives being upturned. That I have plenty of support from parents and D. I take showers, which as my surgical resident once said, really does equate to an hour of sleep. And I remember, for better or worse, that this stage will pass soon enough.

Perspective

It gets harder with each successive pregnancy to be in the moment. The first time around, it’s all a mysterious journey navigated with great anticipation of what’s around the corner. Labor seems almost worth it for the sake of finally getting to meet the baby. You can’t imagine what it’s like having someone drink milk from your body. It’s all slightly mystical.

By the third time around, it’s like I see the pink strip on the pregnancy test and boom—I see the thirty pounds coming on over nine months before taking another six months to lose it all. I feel the contractions again, the engorgement, the grouchiness of sleeplessness. I can guess what the baby will look like when it comes out: a pink, scrunchy elderly Asian alien. If I squint hard enough I can even see the months of pureeing and spooning food, the inevitable toy-throwing and bickering, the potty training.

It’s not that I wasn’t happy to see the pink strip—all our pregnancies were highly planned-for, desired events we didn’t take for granted—but somehow in this aerial, fore-shortened view it’s easier to see the hard things. I have to work harder to see the good moments; to remind myself that those moments are different each time, and not let them pass me by.

I guess that’s how it is with parenting in general—you get so eroded by the mundane, difficult things that it takes effort to recall the good things. You have to develop ways of doing that, like cataloguing those memories through writing or pictures, making an effort of sharing that with your spouse instead of complaining, or just getting a break away so your perspective shifts.

In Psalm 139 it says, “in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them”—he truly sees everything, not as we think we do through our pride or jadedness or postulations—yet he is fully present with us in every moment. He doesn’t discount what is happening because of what will happen; he doesn’t see what happens to us relative to what happened to someone else.

I think that’s where I’d like to be with this pregnancy. To not just see the baby as the reason it’s harder to be rested at night, to clean stuff off the floor, to hold the other two in my lap. To be more in the moment, good as much as bad. To arrive at a place of anticipation not out of ignorance, but even knowing all the difficulties that will come, is harder, but I think means more. One day I may look back and even miss all this. Or maybe I’ll just be glad I can fit into my old jeans again.