ten
Because just as it seems like I cannot be separated from reality anymore, that I cannot exist like this for one more day in still-too-tight sweatpants with dogs eating pacifiers and laundry rotting like compost piles all over the house and my oversized t-shirts smelling like sour milk and sitting one more time in baby pee on the bed, things shift.
Ten pounds, my mom said, is the magic number. I’ve also heard six weeks is the magic age. Maybe we’re born just a bit too early, I’ve read that. With such large heads, we need to get out still all a little premature. The fourth trimester is what I’ve heard it coined — those first three months when the baby is still just trying to establish equilibrium.
Ten pounds last week and six weeks old in a few days, I made dinner and did laundry for something other than the baby’s bum. For four nights in a row Henry has slept — though intermittently, as babies should so that they can be fed — for over seven hours. Last night he fell asleep on my chest at 10:30 and didn’t wake up until 3. Four! and! a! half! hours! straight! We nursed and shifted around for an hour, his eyes so beautiful and dark in the dark room, then he was back down again until 6 for half an hour, then down again until 7:30. And in these four nights, Steve has only gotten up only once to change a diaper. I am knocking on wood, of course, but four and a half hours straight of sleep!
And at this point babies start to smile: there have been hints, I feel so shy when they happen, maybe-maybe smiles, especially in the morning after he’s slept and eaten. Even blind babies smile, I’ve read.
There are cardinals in the dawn redwood in our front yard.
He just makes more sense now. I can read him better. What is it my love, I say. What is it my sweet love, my good boy. He looks more and more beautiful to me now. These days it’s still so early in our new life, but we’ve passed a point, we’re no longer so divorced from reality. Yesterday I ventured out to the mailbox, all the way to the end of the driveway and back! with the boy in my arms, and Steve gone for five hours, me and the boy out in the world together, and I didn’t fear he was going to explode.
