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November 25, 2002 - Monday's Child - Part II
I want to tell about the day before, the week before. In the middle of the week, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Toby and I took to the bed in the yellow nursery and made love to each other. I wanted to say that, to not forget that still, sunlit moment of two together. Saturday I remember little. I think Toby went to services and I stayed home. After sundown our friend Sandra came down from Boston - she is actually another old acquaintance from Baltimore days - and we went for pizza. Violet joined us, and we went to Waterfire, which I still haven't found the time to describe here. Downtown is filled with rivers that flow between stone banks above ground, and the rivers are filled with floating cauldrons, which are filled with firewood. A dark boat helmed by dark-clad figures drifts among the flames, replenishing the wood as it goes. Speakers are strung everywhere and the whole downtown fills with the scent of woodsmoke and the sound of haunting music and every time they stage it it's one of the most beautiful experiences we've ever had in our lives. This Saturday, though cold, was no exception. The four of us strolled together to the strains of Gypsy guitar music. I carried Ruby, swaddled tightly in a blanket, and her small pointed black face poking out drew many admirers, as usual. I ached a little, but it was good to be out in the night, with the flames and the music and the people. Sandra stayed over and Sunday we had bagels and fish and blueberry waffles and fruit salad. Then we went for a long drive down to Westerly to see the ocean. So on the day before my daughter came into the world, Toby saw to it that I could take the sea into my eyes. If I close them I can see it still. The wind was brisk but we went right up to the edge of the water. We drove some more. Sandra slept - I remembered what it was like to work weeks, and how good it felt to sleep in the car on Sunday. Our last stop was a wildlife refuge, where we walked through the fields to a vast pond covered with waterfowl. We sat together on the wooden observation deck, roamed the pond's edges in the sunlight. It saddens me that Toby and I weren't more affectionate with each other on this the Last Day. But it seemed rude to carry on in front of Sandra, though we stole kisses while she slept and little squeezes when she wasn't looking. We walked back to the car, shuffling our feet in the fallen leaves. We took Sandra to the train. We did a little grocery shopping. Night fell as we drove home. I wish I could remember what we talked about. I cooked something - a potato, maybe? - and called my mother, and from that point forward you know. So. Monday morning. XXXX and I alone, waiting for everyone to arrive. We work on eating. It's gray outside, a flat gray stretching as far as the eye can see. It is the most beautiful day I've ever seen. Toby finally shows, clean and carrying a rose. I wonder who the flower is from but in my heart I wish above all for it to be from him. And it is. My parents arrive. Not merely parents any longer. Diana, stuck in New York, sees the photographs and says we all look like angels. I wish I could remember what they said to me. I know it was good. Violet comes later, fills the space in her arms she's been saving for nine long months. Everybody visits with the baby. They all leave and I sleep, waking in the night to miss Toby fiercely. I don't regret having sent him home - the hospital is pretty quiet but it's still chaos - but I miss him so terribly much until I see the rose on my bedside table. Slender and brave, it seems to be guarding me, watching over me as I sleep, and I am comforted. She stays in the room with me all the time, except at night. Then they bring her in to me to be fed, and as exhausted as I am I come alive when I hear them wheel her into the room. Tuesday, so early, she comes to me and as tired as I am I sit up with her until 2:43, so she can end her first twenty-four hours of life in the same place she began it - in my arms. Tuesday. Five AM now. Here is my baby, my love. The sun shows itself today and we stand at the window and I sing a morning hymn to her: Golden breaks the dawn From the eastern sun Like a man of brawn Set his course to run Birds above me fly Flowers bloom below Through the earth and sky God's great mercies flow. Give me daily bread While I do my part Bright skies overhead Gladness in my heart Simple wants provide Evil let me shun Lord God at my side Til the day is done. I get as far as "simple wants provide", and choke, and let the tears come. She is really here, mine to cherish, protect and love. Every morning now, I sing her this song. Mom and Dad come by again. More pictures, beautiful pictures. Dad is going home now and I hold him so tightly, I love him so dearly. The day is dizzying and long. I keep her in the room with me most all the time. The phone rings a lot, many people come and go, it all blurs together. Wednesday and we're supposed to leave at 11. It takes a lot longer than that - we and our pale yellow baby have taken a detour into the nasty world of jaundice. I skipped over jaundice in all the books that I read, because I didn't know that every baby gets jaundiced, to a degree. In a nutshell - my circulatory system no longer purges the wastes from hers. These wastes - which will eventually be broken down by her liver - collect in her intestine, and she can only purge herself by having a bowel movement. But - she can't have a bowel movement until she's taken in some nourishment to move things along. And the milk hasn't really come in yet, and though we're trying as hard as we can with the breastfeeding, there's only so much you can do until the milk comes in. They send us home, tell us to give her a little formula to move things along. Part of me hesitates to do this - we've worked so hard on the breastfeeding, and offering an easier-to-suck bottle nipple can throw a monkey wrench into the breastfeeding process - but I know that it's best for her. She takes the formula eagerly, sicks a lot of it up, but Toby wakes me at 2 AM with the exciting news flash that our baby has pooped. Every time I change her now, I remind myself how eager we were for her system to get started. And every time she screams I remind myself how lucky we are to have her screaming with us, here at home, and not screaming in the neonatal intensive care unit while we stand helplessly by. The rose, Toby's rose, my fragrant sentinel, snapped at the neck on the car trip home. I cried and cried until I realized that I was home now, this flower's work was done, Toby himself would be there for me in the night. I dried my tears and left the rose to dry out on the mantelpiece. Thursday morning. Toby's got to teach at nine. And the baby needs to have bloodwork done, first thing, to check the bilirubin levels. So, my very first day home from the hospital, mind you, begins with a mad scramble to get out the door before 8:00 in the morning. Mom's here, but despite specific instructions not to drive a car for a week, I decide it's less stressful for me to drive than it would be for me to give her directions. A raw, frigid, rainy morning. The four of us head for the pediatrician's office, where we find out we should have first gone to the hospital to have blood drawn. Toby, who spoke to the doctor to make the arrangements, is absolutely beside himself with guilt and recrimination. He has half an hour to cross half of Providence on foot to get to his class and he says, I feel like a murderer leaving you here. Long story short - la petite checks out fine, Mom and I drive to the hospital for the blood check which is also fine, and finally, my milk comes in and things can finally start flowing through the baby's system. Or almost. This was the worst crisis point, I think, of those early days. Just when my baby desperately needs the milk the most, just when it actually comes in at last, it makes my breasts so hard that feeding off them is virtually impossible. As I said to Toby, could you suck something off a stone wall? I was absolutely frantic, called the hospital for advice, and did eventually manage to relieve the pressure and get things going, as the welcome mountain of full diapers that soon began appearing can attest. Oh what a week. One of those whatever-can-go-wrong-will. The car was iffy about starting. The toilet backed up, and, unbelievably, we didn't have a plunger. Some person sent Toby some textbooks to review. These arrived in huge boxes by the dozens, a tower that grew higher and higher every time we opened our front door, a nightmare right out of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Lucifer the cat was "lost" and for a few horrible moments we thought he'd finally jumped off the back deck and was lying broken on the pavement below. He was discovered roosting like a broody hen in the spare-linens drawer under the baby's crib. But it was a beautiful week too - golden yellows of fall at last, arriving just in time to greet her and vanishing on the wind by the week's end. And our baby? What is she like? She has strict instructions from me to look as much like Toby as possible, and she seems to be carrying them out. I see his nose, and, amazingly, his distinctive, high-forehead hairline. Of course her deep blue eyes are the same color as his, but there's no way to know if they'll stay that way. Her hair is the same color as his, too. She looks like pictures of me as a baby, Toby says with mild surprise. At the hospital she has two facial expressions: the wise owl, when she's quietly awake and round eyes roll in a small round face, and the sour lemon, which is when she's unhappy. Sometimes the little mouth curves in a smile, which I call the "hundred monkeys" effect: as the hundred monkeys with the hundred typewriters must eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, so the changing expressions of her face must eventually arrange themselves into a fleeting smile. Her face - eyebrows to chin - is the size of the palm of my hand. As for me, I've recovered beautifully. I haven't exactly been down there to check things out, but after a week it feels as if nothing ever happened to my nether regions at all. Insides are doing OK, too - I remember reading a statement from one lady who said no one ever told her that after she had a baby her insides were going to feel as though they'd been scraped across a cheese grater. Best of all, I fit into the pants I wore before I got pregnant. I still weigh quite a bit, but it's pretty darn great about those pants. A happy shock, too, leaving the hospital and getting back into the dress I wore when I was admitted and having it just hang off me (at least in front). Emotionally I was much more fragile. Crying and crying, though it is tapering off now. Cartoon violence on the television horrifies me. An image of the Twin Towers flashes on the screen and I cradle my head in my hands. At the supermarket the sight of the ground hamburger and sausage patties in the meat case starts the waterworks flowing. The supermarket is fraught with peril, actually - every song they play over the sound system reduces me to a pool of tears. Just as I did in the early days of my pregnancy - when, without exception, I cried over some thing or another every single day - I've enjoyed being so emotional, so open to the world around me. And now that my darling has arrived safe and sound, I can finally talk about the fears that I did have during the pregnancy. I was afraid to even write about them - as if bringing them to light might somehow make them more likely to be true. First of all, I got this crazy idea in my head to worry that my baby might be one of those very unfortunate (or fortunate, I guess, depending on how you look at it) "intersexed" people. Why I should think that my baby might turn out to be a hermaphrodite, I don't know. But I did worry about it. As far as the birth, two things worried me. First of all was the horrifying specter of the C-section. Ladies in my weight class are more prone to needing these, and sometimes there are circumstances that make them unavoidable. But the idea of my body being cut open really bothered me, and I am so glad it never came to that. Next: when I was in junior high, the school nurse examined the back of every child for scoliosis. I got sent home with a note telling my parents that I had a curvature of the spine, which my parents dismissed as bunk. So did I, until the "what ifs" started a few months back. What if I did have a curvature of the spine, and because of it the administration of an epidural would be impossible? There was no way to know, I felt, until I was actually in the presence of the anesthesiologist. So I sweated this one right up until the moment those sweet, sweet drugs kicked in. And then there was the time in Maine when my toenails turned purple and a quick search of the Internet turned up a charming little autoimmune disorder called "blue toe syndrome" - with a high incidence of second-trimester miscarriage. False alarm - just bruised toenails from hiking. So, all fears came to naught. Time to start grooming a fresh set. In retrospect, I am so glad that I didn't get obsessed with being pregnant, or with the birth itself. Even had the birth been a horrible, 18-hour surgical ordeal, I still would have had to come home and start the real work of caring for this tiny, precious child. The pregnancy? A lark. Losing 50 pounds? Literally, a walk in the park. Labor? Intense, but temporary. Caring for her? Tough, and forever, and starting as soon as she's born, ready or not. I am so grateful that my pregnancy did not exhaust me, that my labor did not enervate me, that my postpartum recovery did not drain me to the dregs. Yes, I'm tired, and there are moments when I feel completely overwhelmed, but for the most part we're all doing fine. My mother told me she'd had more than one sleepless night wondering if I could handle labor and birth. Diana I could see doing it, Violet too, but you - I wasn't sure about you, she said. It's simple - it wasn't a choice. One way or another, my daughter was going to be born. I could make it easy on myself, or I could make it hard. On a totally different note, Ruby suffered a terrible ordeal. When Toby brought us home from the hospital, I asked him to bring Ruby down to the car, because I knew once we got in the house my dear small dog would quickly be lost in the shuffle. So he brought her down, and she hopped in the backseat of the car with us, and, after four days of looking at my tiny, tiny daughter, my dog seemed absolutely gigantic to me. Clearly, she was glad to see me - Mom said she'd been pining for me - but I felt that something wasn't quite right with her, as if she were withdrawing from me. We were upstairs - Ruby and I - taking a nap together. When I woke up, she was hot as fire and limp as a dishrag and I had to shake her several times to wake her up. I was frantic - what was wrong? Lots of problems. First of all, she'd eaten cat food during her stay at Violet's. This made her vomit, which made her dehydrated. To make things worse, when my father brought her back from Violet's, he didn't know he was supposed to get her food, too. I checked her food and water dishes. Both were empty. Given fluids, food, and lots of TLC, Ruby quickly recovered. Everyone made much of her and apologized and she seems OK, but I am so sorry! I can't finish this without mentioning something that's been weighing on me heavily, even though I've had a longstanding policy of not setting down the most intimate details of my married life. Simply this: as a woman who's just given birth, I am hardly supposed to be in the mood for love, and yet I don't think I've ever felt so powerfully compelled to take Toby to bed. He feels it, too. The few moments we've taken have had a dimension to them entirely new and which I could never begin to describe, except to say that we both view our lovemaking differently having seen that life itself can come forth from our joining together. I know my body needs time to recover, but right now six weeks seems like forever. Friday night. First Sabbath. Three candles instead of the pair I've always kindled on this night, and it's astonishing how much light is added by this one tiny flame. And for the first time Toby says the Friday night blessing for the children. For a girl, it's May God make you like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. Quite straightforward but I don't think I've ever been so moved by any ritual of the faith that chose me. Days and nights. The hardest work I've ever done in my life. So different, though, when it's for the right reason. For her. |