he was born a week ago today, a week and 12 minutes ago.
it’s hard to photograph someone who’s in your own arms. there may be a lot of photographs of steve. as i peck this with one hand. henry’s beginning to stretch out his body and really open his eyes.
(my twin brother is on the left; i am on the right)
He has these big, gentle, expressive hands. He folds them together like a gentleman sometimes when he’s nursing. He reaches out to the big fuzzy air with them. He presses them against his face and softly pokes his eyes out. They follow him side to side like some hula dance. He composes in the air.
funny with family in town and a NEW BABY i haven’t found time to be on the computer, but there’s so much i want to record here. some photographs for now. babies flicker in their features so much at first, and they change as they unswell from the work of being born. one photograph is definitely not enough. i write this one-handed, this perfect new healthy strong gentle real unreal creature cradled in my right arm.
We were at the hospital this morning at 7 a.m. and there’s been a lot of progress and they said they think it could be today. Today! We’re back home now, trying to figure out what’s a real contraction and what’s a Braxton-Hicks and what that all means.
One of the pregnancy books in our house has little gray boxes on some pages with the heading “Dad Tips,” and then it goes on to give an insulting token piece of advice, something like If your wife looks tired, perhaps do the dishes for her, or, Once in a while your wife will appreciate when you ask her if she needs some help with the laundry.
In pictures of births we’ve seen in our birthing class, the husband is right there. He’s wearing a grimy white t-shirt and unfashionable shorts and he’s balding, and he looks helpless beside his wife but he’s there nonetheless, holding her hand and rubbing her back and giving her water to drink. He has the perfect look of concern on his face, a face without irony and without any sense of a separate self in that moment — he’s feeling his wife’s pain intimately.
In birthing class one night, the husbands and boyfriends were taught things to say and not say during labor.
Do not say: You look tired / This is taking a long time / I’m tired / My back hurts / Don’t scream so loud / I could really use a drink.
Do say: Your body is beautiful and strong / I love you / You can do this / I’m right here / Can I rub your back / Can I get you some water / I love you / I love you.
But I think it’s difficult to learn this level of empathy, to be the supportive figure nonstop for the entire labor and for any pain during the pregnancy. A nearly complete selflessness. The birthing class teacher, a doula, told the story of walking into a house where the husband was in the kitchen taking work phone calls while his wife was in active labor. Maybe, stereotypically, women are better at putting aside their needs for the moment to serve the greater good of the family.
All through the pregnancy, Steve, who is already compassionate, probably because he was raised a mama’s boy and because he’s done this parenting this for a while, has been growing more so. He makes me popcorn if I ask for it. He brings the laundry downstairs and back up again. He does laundry if there’s nothing in the basket that it looks like he might ruin. He drives the car when we’re both in it. When we’re sitting down and have to stand up and he’s nearby, he reaches over to help me up. He takes the dogs for walks and throws a ball repeatedly until their tongues are drooping out the sides of their mouths.
But also this pain, the pre-labor back pain and the hormones and fatigue, it’s pain that one person endures in the interest of both herself and her partner. And that takes an incredible amount of empathy for the partner to understand. Other times when I’ve been sick, I’m not one to cough louder to make sure that people hear me, and I’m grateful for any small gesture of sympathy but I don’t seek it out and don’t really feel that I need it — at least I hope that’s true. Our relationship is not built on coddling. But in this last trimester of the pregnancy, if Steve’s not right there being understanding and asking if there’s anything he can do when I’m in pain, I feel incredibly, incredibly alone.
So last night when we are waiting for Rosie to get out of her tutoring session, and Steve drove her there and I’m in the passenger seat, and then my stomach starts to cramp and then my back starts to cramp and it’s been an hour sitting still in the car and then he accidentally drives over a huge bump in the road and I bite my tongue and swear, that’s when everything feels wrong. There’s a joke about the swear word where I want there to be sympathy. There’s talk of something small when I want a hand on my back or in my hair. And I’ve said that I’m hurting, but I didn’t say it right or loud enough, and I often don’t know how to say what I need — or, rather, we’ve had this conversation before many times and there’s that fine line that’s sometimes crossed where spelling out what you need makes the action of the giver less genuine, so I can only imply. And men, stereotypically, aren’t known for being attuned to subtlety and so I don’t expect him to hear in my breathing that I’m in pain or to see in how I’m stiff in my seat that I’m hurting, and I don’t want to add drama to this life so I try not to cry. We pull into the driveway and I do cry trying to gather the things from our grocery trip from the car that are too low down to reach and too heavy to lift plus my bag and my laptop, and I feel pathetic while Steve’s far away, he’s dealing with the dogs in the house. It’s a lot to ask of someone who is his own person to constantly be wondering how he can help this person who has up to this point been her own person and is now surprisingly slow, sluggish, and weak — all those adjectives in the name of carrying a blue upside-down person that he helped create.
I get inside and I cry slumped over the counter even though the pain has subsided, and he rubs my back and that’s all I needed, I can barely stand the attention of even this small gesture, but it’s all I needed, to not feel like I’m hurting alone.
What are you doing? I’d ask Steve, who’s been fiddling in the garage each day.
Nothing.
Nothing?
Filling buckets with ice, he finally offered.
Why?
Just because.
Yesterday I walked outside to this:
Baby come OUT. We say this a lot. And as randomly as possible, to try to skeer him out. We tell him the world is beautiful out here. / And also, I’m proud that he’s still in. It must be cozy in there. I’ve kept him safe this whole time.
It’s not nesting, more like hosting that I feel. This guest is coming, and he’ll be staying for a long-long time, and my family’s coming as soon as we call them with any news. Once all these people come, I won’t want to be cleaning my closet out, and I can’t see any point when I will want to once this baby-permanent-guest arrives, so yesterday I cleaned out my closet. My mom cares about windows and how clean they are, so yesterday I cleaned (only the smudgiest) windows. I want the baby’s room to be able to get as dark as possible in the day for naps, so this past week I made white curtains with window-blind material on the back. I don’t know when I’ll be able to do that once the baby comes, so I did it on a deadline. Not because I can’t survive if every crack in the tile isn’t scrubbed with a toothbrush, but because I want to be a good host. I made my brother vegan cookies and put them in the freezer. I bought my mom the kind of tea she likes to drink every day at 4 pm.
I wear black all the time, to trick the eye. I don’t feel enormous to myself, but I know that I’m enormous to other people. A friend called me after two years of silence because he had to tell me that he saw my photo site and that I’m pregnant. Another friend, less tactfully, yesterday: well you look relatively good, considering.
I tie my own shoes, even the boots with lots of laces. I bend down to pick up dirty clothes. I empty and fill the dishwasher. All these tasks I thought would be impossible are strenuous but not impossible.
For all that we’ve wanted this, there is no way to know exactly what you’re wanting, or to know even if you’ll like it. All nine months there has been hestitation. Will I be okay when my life changes in this way that I forced into existence and nurtured as best as I could, blindly and with only faith that this growing belly is going to offer up a prize? I have been hungry, starving, for people to say how wonderful it will be and that I’ll be okay. But at this point, we have been preparing for so long, it’s just time now. There is so little hesitation anymore. Now it’s like sitting in a theatre waiting for a play that was supposed to start, it’s a couple minutes late, we’re all fidgeting in our seats. (Baby come OUT.)
Rosie got the pink slip that allows her to drive on the roads with us. It didn’t seem like it was going to be stressful to me before, but when she asked if I would drive with her, suddenly I couldn’t let myself in that car. After all we’d been through to get here, nine months pregnant, almost in the clear, it suddenly felt incredibly stupid for me to get in the car with someone who had only driven four times. She was insulted and sullen. She insisted she was a really good driver — she’s been on the roads with a driving coach who has his own brake and accelerator on the passenger side, and apparently he didn’t have to use the brake last time she drove (only last time?). She has this way of seeming so mature and overconfident. So Steve drove with her without me, and he stopped her from narrowly turning left before the cars going straight had passed, and he didn’t get to stop her from not stopping at a stop sign, though thankfully no one was close enough to hit them. Last time she was with her driving coach, she texted at a stop light — and the driving coach said nothing. Steve drove with her this morning and she was concentrating on her make-up in the rearview mirror and so missed the fact that a light had turned green until a car honked and swerved around her. The world feels incredibly precarious right now, and the rules suddenly feel so important. I feel like wearing a whistle and blowing it at anyone who bends any rules at all. I just want to be good. I just want this baby to come out on time, and alive, and to never get in a car ever, ever.
