from Our Babies, Ourselves, p. 146

In more affluent Western industrialized nations, parents assume crying is first and foremost linked to hunger. In fact, some women in these cultures often end breast-feeding and turn to bottle-feeding because they believe excessive crying by the baby means he is not getting enough nourishment from the breast. But researchers know that early crying has a broader range of functions. It can be stopped by various methods, and food is not always the solution. In the 1960s, an era in America when parents were advised to let babies cry, Wolff ran a series of experiments to figure out just why these kids were so unhappy. He tried a pacifier to determine if oral gratification, without nourishment, would calm a screaming baby. It worked. He next tested a series of newborns with wet diapers. Wolff put clean diapers on half and put the wet diapers back on the other half. Both groups were quieted and didn’t seem to care if the diaper was wet or not. Wolff concluded that babies simply like the stimulation and physical sensation of being changed. He then questioned the idea that babies cry when they are cold, and so placed some infants in cribs heated to 88 degrees and others in cribs set 10 degrees cooler. Those in the cooler cribs cried more frequently, indicating that warmth, too, can reduce crying. Wolff investigated this notion further by layering some babies in clothes, covering others in various positions with blankets, and lightly swaddling others. Their reactions varied; some cried when covered tightly, others liked it tight. Finally Wolff tried the classic parental response to a crying baby. Using a group of crying babies who had to be artificially fed by tubes into their abdomens for medical reasons, he fed them this way until their stomachs were full and waited to see if satisfying their hunger would quiet them. Surprisingly, a full stomach did not stop these infants from wailing. Wolff also discovered that simply picking them up worked perfectly well as a cry-stopper, even if they were hungry and waiting to be fed. In general, he concluded picking up a baby, giving it a pacifier, or feeding it — not for the nutritional value but for the physical contact — worked best.

As most parents intuitively know, crying is not just a signal of hunger. Even in newborns, it communicates much more — the need for touch seems to be especially important; and clearly a crying baby is announcing its internal state and calling for some sort of change.

I love this book, it just has so much evidence inside. And I love the image of this man, Wolff, running around in the warm dark with 20 babies, sticking pacifiers in their mouths and putting their soaking wet diapers back on. I know it must have been more scientific than that, but really it feels like something out of a story, some strange story where a man is trying to get all these babies to stop crying and learns at last that they just want to be held.

January 29th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Comments (1)

(I’ve been updating my iphoto and exporting almost 7,000 photos from last year onto an external hard drive. I’ve finally had a chance to put the week’s photos up on flickr.)

January 28th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

I didn’t know that Rosie would cry when she saw her brother for the first time. Really sob as she held him.

Feedings are every two hours, but oh that means every two hours start to start. Which means that, if he’s nursing for an hour, I have an hour to not nurse him before I nurse again. This morning I nursed him, put him in a sling, picked up some clothes, cleaned the kitchen, made oatmeal, and he asked to be nursed again before I’d had a chance to eat. And lunch didn’t happen.

I didn’t realize I’d only have one hand for most of the day. Typing is so slow. Thinking is slow when I type so slowly. Googling is slow. But yes I can read. I can read with one hand so well. I read actual books, whole books, with plots and denouements.

But it is difficult to do dishes with one hand. I pick up a lot of clothes with my feet. It is impossible to bend over the washer and scoop out clothes and put them in the dryer with one hand. Thank goodness the boy seems to like the rumbling feeling of the dryer when I place him on top of it (I am projecting here. I don’t know how to read him just yet).

The dogs have not made one false move. Today Joon gently put her head on the pillow beside the boy as he slept. She very gently licked his hand. Moby has not jumped on me as I’ve held the baby. He waits to be told to be let up on the bed if I have the baby in my arms. They are good to him and respectful. I knew they were smart dogs, but I thought their jealousy would take over and it hasn’t.

I didn’t know that nursing would feel like glass shards cutting through my nipples. Apparently this is more common for fairskinned people and redheads, and on the internets it says it will get better. Someday in the next three months, if the baby and I haven’t cried ourselves saltless by then, it will get better, I will get calloused.

I don’t even care if he’s mine biologically. When the midwife put him on my chest, I didn’t even see what he looked like. I don’t care what he looks like. I’m already over wondering who he looks like. He doesn’t look like me or Steve, he looks like himself. If the doctors had given me a decoy baby I would have been just as content. It makes me realize that adoption, if it were possible for us (it’s not, or at least without a big fight, for complicated legal reasons), it would be possible to love a child that way, too. I just thought I would look down at this new baby and see that he was my son, but I look down at him and feel connected, but mostly I see that he is very much already his own person.

I am intimidated by him. I laughed at myself when I thought this the other night — only I would be intimidated by a three-week-old baby. But I’m startled by his will. He tells me what he wants better than I think I’ve ever been able to tell anyone what I want. If he wants me to walk around, he lets me know. If he doesn’t want me to nurse him lying down, he fusses. If he’s hungry he demands food. He has so much strength to keep himself alive, it shocks me. I thought he would come to me more helpless, but he comes to me ready to coexist with all his might. I thought that if I didn’t hold his head like an egg that it might snap off, but, while he has typical newborn floppy neck, there are some muscles, it doesn’t snap off.

I knew it would be exhausting, but what surprised me is the exhaustion from all sides. I’m still recovering from labor — it takes six weeks to stop losing blood, and my intestines and other internal components that left- or right-aligned for a bit have to shift back to center — and still feeling frail and creaky is exhausting. The pain of nursing is demoralizing. The intent attention on one small being is a meditation on a fixed point all day, everyday, and his life depends on it. Waking up every two hours to nurse or change diapers or console is disruptive, even if the nighttime feedings are already often my favorite time of day. And everything is so new, the learning curve is so steep, each everyday detail takes attention as if I were learning to walk again: how to get toothpaste on the toothbrush while holding a baby, how to go to the bathroom while holding a baby, how to sleep beside a baby, how to time dinner so the baby doesn’t wake hungry right when we sit down to eat. And yet if I were to explain this time, these first three weeks and nine minutes, I wouldn’t say it’s exhausting. We’re alive and enraptured. Very alive, and constantly cuddling.

The bounty of love from others. The food and gifts and cards and emails and visits. I had no idea people care so much and know me so well–and know just what to do. Despite feeling a bit cooped up for the winter, I feel very much not alone.

January 27th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)

January 26th, 2010 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

from Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith F. Small (pp 8-12)

Unlike apes, who hang from the trees with long arms and walk along the ground balancing their weight on the surface of their knuckles, individuals in the human line stood up on their back legs. … [H]umans, and our ancestors, have used bipedal walking as the primary form of locomotion. That switch to bipedalism eventually brought us the pain of childbirth.

…

The sacrum, the lower back, is wider and thicker and it angles into the pelvic opening to help support the internal organs in a creature with a shifted center of gravity. And so, right in the middle of what should be a clear hole for infants to pass through, there is a point of the sacrum coming radically close the the pubic bones of the front of the pelvis–a detour sign for emerging babies that arose when humans stood up on two legs.

…

And so the infant enters the birth canal at a side angle, twists to accommodate the midsection, flexes the head down to bypass the squeeze at the sacrum, and ends up coming out face down. Since the outlet faces more backward than downward, the baby also has to bend a bit and thus comes out at an angle facing the mother’s back. The shoulders follow a similar path, dipping and twisting; but since the head is then already out, this requires the execution of a head-body twist…

January 26th, 2010 | Category: book | Comments (1)

I am a body to the baby, with fluids and hormones and arms.

At night his eyes don’t close unless mine are closed next to him. My breath is slower. The breast pump is beside us, and when it’s on I hear his breath change–race–to match it.

I am a body with food inside. He is a strong suckler–the doctors are amazed by the strength of his mouth around their latex-covered finger. I have been stunned by his strength, left bloody and cracked and crying by his strength. The pain is extraordinary. I see his mouth coming at me and my brain hurts. I cradle him so gently and coo and dig my toes into the floor. I practice yoga breaths until I am a windy day on his forehead. And rainy, crying.

The lactation specialist tells me to feed him my milk from a bottle (nipple confusion! nipple confusion!) for three days to give myself a chance to heal, dried blood on his face. A weekend of grief, certain that my boy will love plastic more than flesh because of this rough start. Hormones are everything. And sleep, too. I kneel on the kitchen floor and cry. I cry in bed listening to the milk machine, which hurts me, too. Two ounces at a time. Once the milk was pink but now it’s cream.

I air out my flesh at night but last night my body cried, milk all over the fitted sheet, one towel and then another between me and the baby. I folded and folded the towel to keep him dry, the milk came out warm but in our drafty house the bed feels cold so fast. Milk all over, but none would go in the bottle, none in the boy’s mouth. We wake exhausted and hungry, one ounce ahead and then one ounce behind his wants, and his wants are his needs.

Body and spirit. He’ll know I’m tense because my milk won’t let down. I breathe. Still cracked. I stare at his face and think of milk waterfalls and painless milk and milk baths and milk boy skin. Soon boy we will be back to skin to skin.

January 25th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)

The name Henry won because I loved it even after it had been through a war.

1. I didn’t pick it. Steve and I came to the relationship years  ago with some dream names for our babies. Steve’s boy name was Henry. I like to be the creative one (I’m whining as I say this). I wanted a name that came from somewhere in the ether that I pulled into being, not a name that someone else suggested.

2. I had no idea until very recently that Henry and Hank were related names. But I knew that Steve had a Grandpa Hank — or more specifically a step-grandpa Hank. (Steve’s dream baby girl name is his grandmother’s name. And he’s pushing already, if we have another boy, for him to have the name of his father. That seems a little much, though he insists these names aren’t after the people, he just likes the names). What I know of Grandpa Hank is he was an abusive alcoholic who pretty much abandoned his children and who liked to pee just about anywhere. Not a positive namesake. And the thought that anyone, especially Steve’s stepfather, would think that I chose the name Henry because of that alcoholic man, that would be unbelievably inaccurate. It took me the full nine months to come to terms with the relationship between the name Henry and the infamous step-grandfather. And each time I said the name Henry as a possible baby name and someone said Hank my heart would sink. Please no one say Hank.

3. Because, familial connotation aside, I don’t like the name Hank. It sounds like something you use to blow your nose. It sounds like a swear word. Steve says that males may like the name more than females — it has a swift sharpness and toughness about it, he says, but I don’t hear it. In a way our compromise is that he got his dream boy name as long as he insists along with me that the name Hank is not attached to our boy.

4. The name Henry is getting more popular. It’s in the top 75 names this year. I was hoping for a more unusual name. But I also wanted a name that could blend into a poem, that didn’t poke out as too unusual and change the fabric of the poem. And I’d never known a Henry. But a couple of days before Henry was born, a friend wrote to say that her friend just gave birth to a boy that they named Henry. It seemed like the name was everywhere.

5. The name means nothing poetic. It means something like ‘Ruler of the house,’ which I also hope won’t be true in our house. Though my name means ‘Owner of the land,’ so I shouldn’t talk.

6. Steve and I went to the elaborate Catholic wedding of his cousin and his cousin’s wife a few years ago, and a couple of days before I went into labor, his cousin’s wife wrote me to say that her husband left her and their son Henry when he was six weeks old. Just to let me know, because I sent her a card with both of their names on it. And their son Henry was born on January 6, a year exactly before ours. That name became doubly cursed and compromised. At that point, I seriously thought that that name was out.

We had our shortlist of names that we took with us to the hospital. Henry was on the list, as was a name that I thought might fit a boy who — I am generalizing here — seemed sensitive, and a name that fit a boy who seemed to blend into me, and a name that was more sharp yet sort of effeminate. Four names to choose from. I wanted to see this boy to know. And Henry was born and he came out so strong yet also careful. The name Henry feels like that to me — it has a gracefulness to it, I like how my mouth moves through it, the H sound, the delicateness it takes to say the N right next to the R, and the diminutive quality of the E sound at the end. And we in this house, we love our underdog stories. So the name that came from behind and that was hammered from all sides, it became the name that best fit the energy of the new boy. It really fits him; I haven’t looked back.

January 22nd, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (2)

Rosie said last night that she’s seen in movies how people are changed when a baby comes. She cited “Waitress.” You guys don’t seem very changed, she announced. (She’s a tough crowd.)

Steve told her that in the movies those people weren’t ready for for the change, and the change surprised them. We were ready, our lives were prepared for this.

I told her that our lives already changed, we already have kids. Steve was, according to the way he tells it, detaching from reality before Rosie was born. She brought him back to earth, away from heady philosophy and typical 20-year-old selfishness. When I met Rosie I was a rich Catholic super-educated privileged selfish 23-year-old. It took a massive pivot in my sense of the world in order to be the person this particular nine-year-old (and her three-year-old drooling sidekick) needed. Rosie brought about the biggest change in me, more than anything else in my life.

I also told her that a lot changed in order for us to choose to have Henry. We were changing as we were deciding to go through IVF, to love one another under such trying circumstances, and changing as we prepared our home for this person we hadn’t met yet.

I also told her that often change happens afterward — the baby comes and then a year later the parents are ready to alter their lives. Or it takes that long to kick in.

What I wanted to say is that I have changed since his birth, even if the change is visually subtle. I feel incredibly grateful: blessed. With all the chaos and pain in this world, one healthy boy survived inside of me and came out whole and strong. Since his birth, I’ve stood in the shower and cried for all the women who went through the nine months of transformative tending and then the pain of childbirth — to give their baby up. I’ve cried for all the mothers in Haiti giving birth without even a hospital, under circumstances so much more chaotic than what they had pictured.

Just after Henry was born, my friend gave birth to a 1 pound 5 oz boy who is right now fighting for his life, and so there is no way I can be so terribly upset that my nipples are bleeding from the trouble I’ve had nursing. I am not opposed to adversity, and I believe that we are given the lessons from which we can bear to learn, but at night the shoulders of this new boy stick out from the blankets beside me, and he’s managed to squirm so close to me that our breath is touching, and I am awash with gratitude. I feel connected to all the mothers and babies, and shocked by this kind of love that is for one boy but really, without trying, it’s for everyone.

January 20th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (2)

Not red, but reddish.

His eyebrows are gold, his eyelashes are clear like Steve’s.

Around his temple it’s pretty orange, and on the back of his head it’s brown.

Though Jack was born with light brown hair and then it fell out, like most baby hair does, and in its place grew in the whitest blond.

And it’s hard in photographs to gauge his hair color because the lights in our house turn everything a little more gold, but when I go into the color settings and add more blue for accuracy, his skin starts to look sickly pale.

So he has to be seen in person, that’s the point.

January 15th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)