good
Snow falling. We are quiet, too. The sky is quiet. The trees are tentative. The boy is strapped to my chest as we walk. I get to walk again. He falls asleep every time.
Most of the time we are inside. Steve wakes early, sees Rosie off to school while the baby and I pretend to sleep. Some nights sleep is scant, some nights I wake feeling like all I do is lie in bed with a tiny boy pressed against me. He doesn’t — he shouldn’t — know how to roll but he rolls toward me. He reaches his arms out their full six inches to feel if I’m there. Steve runs on the treadmill while the boy and I move in and out of sleep. When Steve opens the bedroom door, sweaty and calm and very awake, I’ve done a morning feeding and am off to take my shower. When I come out, the boy is changed, dressed, and Steve is making juice or already at work from home, the baby in his left arm, tapping away at his keyboard with his right index finger.
Then Steve goes to work — last week only for two-hour stretches, to see that I’m okay between tears with the feedings. This week he’s been gone for four-hour stretches. Four hours with the boy and the snow, sitting in our chair by the window, walking around the house with him strapped to my chest. He’s not the kind of baby who likes to be swaddled. Rosie was, still is. This boy takes a minute of grunting strapped to me before he submits to the contours of the sling.
He likes to flail his arms as he sleeps. He wakes and stretches, his back arched, his chin doubled, making grunting sounds, his face turning red in a flash. I hold him in my hands and he stretches past 180 degrees, his eyes looking upside down at the world. Just now he is stretching. If he wakes in his sling, he lets out a wail, strapped and unable to stretch. Whatever did he do inside of me, both of us so squished.
What I love is when he wakes, stretches, his face assuming one hundred or so expressions before he settles on calm awake. I love his hands, how he doesn’t really know they’re his but he’s learning, he holds onto me as he eats. I love changing his diaper, seeing him as he was born, his chicken legs kicking. At first he cried loud enough you could hear it in Ohio when we changed him, but now, sometimes, he seems to like it. He stretches out his legs, he makes cooing sounds, he stares at the fascinating wall. He stares at light. When he’s crying and life seems too hard, I tell him that it’s still better that he’s out here in the world because, look, out here he can see.
People have been asking how it’s going, and they ask if he’s a good baby. How it’s been going: of course it is wonderful, our boy is alive and we have a roof over our heads and our world has sprung open. And also of course it’s difficult, as it would be for anyone: there’s just so much to learn, and our life change is huge. Is he a good baby: of course, he tells me when he’s hungry, as he should, and he tells me when his stomach hurts and when he’s cold, and he tells me clearly and often. Is he an easy baby? I wouldn’t say so, but I’ve never had a baby before. Does he sleep through the night? No, but he’s not supposed to. These people mean well who ask these questions, but I have no idea how to answer any of them. Our life is good and beautiful and plentiful, so we are well. And also having a new baby is hard — all this work, day and night, to keep a tiny groaning human alive, and in repayment not even a smile yet. It’s a complicated and beautiful time, inside this house that looks unchanged from the outside, surrounded by snow.
