pirate boy
I wish there were a way to have this book!
(Pirate Boy, or, Adventures of Henry Warrington)
We found it online the night after Henry was born and we googled his name. The delight! Our new beginning, and an adventure already begun.
Archive for February, 2010
diminutive
I am getting better at saying, I would like to go out and buy those shoes, but maybe tomorrow.
I am good these days at recognizing that if I go to the grocery store with a long shopping list and then the baby starts to cry, well he’s probably hungry and I should abandon my groceries and head back to the car so no one sees me trying to figure out a silicone nipple shield. The boy can turn in a blink from smiling to storming. I am just going to go out to get some bananas, I tell myself, hiding from myself my very long list. Then if the bananas are in my cart and he’s still hanging out, staring at the fluorescent lights, then maybe I’ll just try to get some apples, too. So far this system has worked to get me out of the house.
I think often of a Simone Weil quote my friend added to her online studio index recently: Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.
My full attention, staying in each moment. It makes these days small. I surrender to one thing at a time. I watch my baby eat, and watch and watch. It calms me. This is a phase where nothing gets done. I lately love the feeling inside myself of feeling attached to something and then cutting it loose. I want to write here more, but it is often nearly impossible to both remember what I want to write inside this hormone-riddled brain and to find the time when I have two hands to do so. I cut this string and that string, watching what I had thought the day would hold float away. I feel my breathing calm, my ability to stay in the moment widen. A baby is here.
body before
I buttoned up a pair of my old pants today. They were the biggest pants I used to wear. In my lightest time I could pull them off without unbuttoning them. I bought them when I was my un-pregnant fattest. Today I tugged on them until they came together, indenting my waist on the way. But I! am! in! my! pre-pregnant! pants! Technically.
But it’s amazing, the body returning. Sutures fastening, hips folding back toward one another, skin cells shrinking or disappearing or whatever they do to subtract again. Only seven weeks ago my body, like an accordian, exhaled a baby. And now it’s collapsing. We are collapsible, adaptable.
new lens
I hold him and, looking down, I often think I’m looking in my younger sister’s eyes as a baby, and in my own eyes as a baby, and at my brother’s mouth when he made certain expressions, and at my older sister’s face shape a long time ago — I can’t know if he’ll look like any of us when he grows up, but I see flickers of all of us in him. He really is mine. And he also looks like Rosie fifteen years ago, that seriousness in her forehead and the shape of her lips. I see Steve in him, too, in dozens of ways, but what shocks me is when I see my siblings, so far away but in my house at last.
I think we have the cutest baby, Rosie said. Does everyone think that?
I suppose everyone does, and that they’re all right. We can’t help it, it’s the hormones, we’re hooked. And too, I’ve been looking at a lot of baby pictures lately and they all look pretty similar. Our physical eccentricities come out later. For now, this baby is cute in the way that all babies are cute.
Oh okay and also look at that tender forehead, those invisible eyebrows, his perfect mouth, those perfectly chubby cheeks. Look at that sweet countenance, earnest eyes, how he folds his hands as he eats, and look at that reddish hair. Ack, I’m a goner. Because I look at him, he looks like the most beautiful creature, then I photograph him and the photograph often doesn’t capture that. He’ll look cute in the picture, but he won’t glow like I see. It’s my eyes, these newfangled mama eyes, they now see perfectly.
onions
I can only conclude the boy does not like onions. Add that to the list of dairy and soy: my diet is more restricted than even when I was pregnant. I can eat a little cheese, but no latte. A half a cup of soy was enough to disturb his sleep. And on Thursday, after onions in my lunch and then a whole onion in a tomato sauce I made for dinner (it was a lot of onion, granted, way too much for the sauce, but we had no vegetable in the house, not a single one, not even frozen, and I figured it was close enough to a vegetable that we might as well eat a lot of it), the boy was up for fifteen hours straight. He would try to sleep and then jerk awake as if he were being dropped off a cliff, his arms flying above him to try to save himself. Grunting and then crying, his face red and his tongue curled back. Nursing him didn’t soothe him, though he tried repeatedly to see if it would help his stomach. He’d kick and claw me as he suckled.
This is when two people are necessary. Steve holds him and walks him in circles around the dining room table, shifting him from one position to another, trying this sling and that, trying the boppy chair and the graco swing, to see if it will help. Then there’s that look in his eyes and I take over, nursing and cooing and singing. I wanted to record it, the sound of his crying, just an hour of it to post it here. It’s a never-ending siren.
In the dark, it’s midnight and he’s been going strong since lunch and there’s no sign it will stop. Sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark with a broken cry in my arms, exhausted and all of us helpless, I think for just a second that I’m holding an old radio that’s gone haywire. I picture as if in a dream what people do to old radios that don’t stop sounding — throw them across the room. I picture that old brown radio with the spiders inside now in pieces, everyone depressingly satisfied.
But it’s a baby, even in the dark when I can’t see him, and so I give him to Steve. We do this passing between us like a relay in the Olympics. Because just when you think you’ve tried everything and maybe you should just put him down and go put tennis shoes in the dryer and lean against it until the cycle is silent, another person can scoop him up and try something you hadn’t thought of — something simple you cannot find inside the echo of your own tin brain.
Often when he’s crying I am quiet and warm and try to access inside of him that still small voice. Often when he’s crying Steve will try to override the chaos inside the baby with external chaos — walking briskly with him, rocking him swiftly, blasting music. Thursday night, the music worked. I think it was M.I.A. very loud at midnight in our dining room. And suddenly the boy was silent, and then he was asleep. He slept for over six hours, sweaty. When I touched him he curled back into himself like a tentacle of some animal in the sea, leave me alone, onion mama, until my poops aren’t green.
lent
In the near-empty church that echoed with baby cries, the priest put ashes on Henry’s forehead (from dust you came to dust you shall return). Sin, the priest said, is anything that brings you further from your highest self. Henry hasn’t sinned. I’m not even sure if he is, by technical or philosophical definition, human — having no language or self-consciousness. I hated seeing the ashes on him. It felt like a marker for something I can’t imagine will ever happen. He’s still perfect. He is the opposite of sin: he brings us closer to our best selves (and, in his worst moments, he at least teaches me patience).
We came home and, over take-out thai food, which is perhaps the opposite of what one is supposed to eat on ash wednesday, we talked about sin. I daren’t share others’ perspectives on their sins, but it was a deep and powerful conversation. And it helped me to understand what sin is more deeply, apart from what anyone else might think–the sin is so particular to the person who feels burdened by it. My sin, I said, is that I get afraid: I get afraid of people, I get skittish, I like to stay in my house where it is safe. I get afraid of making art: it takes so much bravery to face a blank page and to write or make out of thin air. It’s easier to say I don’t have enough time, or to make something small, like a teeny tiny blog entry — which, I know, is something small that also accumulates, and I know that sometimes it takes bravery to write and then to hit that blue Publish button, but it hurts more to free-write: to go deep down and out and all over without any idea where I’ll land. I need the blindness of free-writing to push me to new territory everywhere else, but it’s sometimes tiring and dizzying.
Fear of people and fear of the page: both these fears repel me from accessing a deeper and calmer self. So for lent, I’m going to a new-mothers group in town, and for lent I’m free-writing for half an hour each day while Steve tends to Henry. I’ve often joked that Ash Wednesday is my favorite holiday, but it is: I love to think of us as dust. I love to scrub away the parts of myself that don’t add beauty. Though I did wipe the ash off of Henry’s forehead as soon as we stepped out into the night.
prayer
There has been more praying inside lately.
Feeling at the mercy of. And without logic.
Medicine is an art, not a science — and if that’s true like the doctor told me this week, well then everything is an art,
and art is prayer — it’s tuning in, plus surrendering, plus attending to.
Because there’s a boy who depends on me for everything, and I know close to nothing. And I’m too gray inside to just do what the books or parents say. Like never before, I have to intuit everything.
The craniosacral therapist lays her hands on Henry’s head, very gently, and he chills the heck out. She does it in another spot and he cries. He’s just an animal, squawking every hour for food, and yet there’s so much else coursing through him and around him that I can’t see.
The priest lays her hands on Henry’s head and I cry. I have flashes of car crashes. I hold him over concrete in my arms. I’m half-awake, crossing traffic in the mornings and he’s asleep on my chest.
I’m too tired and small. I feel myself surrender to whatever that is that makes him smile in his sleep when the woman touches his head.
His head is so beautiful it startles me. I believe in beauty — its necessity.
previous posts
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
search
recent photographs
