notes on seven and a half weeks
I’m still scared going outside, but in our house I’m not afraid anymore. I can’t be continually afraid. Like continually noticing the sensation of clothes on your skin.
In the beginning we had to learn a new language. There is still fear now, but it comes after 53 days of knowing that we have been okay. I had a nightmare last night I whacked his head on the edge of a cafeteria table.
I am often afraid of hitting his head. Once a bottle fell out of the fridge and hit him on the head and that was his second pout just before he wailed. It hurt. I hurt him because I was not superman, I didn’t knock that bottle out of the way. I was holding him and inside the fridge something fell. The world is so dangerous. (Note: Once I protected him from a falling can of chicken broth.) The tonic water fell out of the fridge and the brunt of it went to my shin, or at least I hope so because it hurt. I kicked the dogs out of the way, racing to a place to sit down and nurse.
Nursing: comfort, antibodies, warmth, nourishment. He sometimes wants to stay there all day and I let him. In these arms is safety and contentment. Remember that.
In the beginning Steve wouldn’t leave the house for even ten minutes, nor would I. I would race to school to pick up rosie and come back and he would look so calm but we both admitted complete fear. The baby could explode at any point. Anything could go wrong, but not if we had each other. In the beginning, you have to learn everything from scratch. Everything. The baby needs to sleep just a little bit longer while I learn.
Then Steve left for two hours, Henry one week old, to take Rosie to her tutor. The anxiety over holding a living helpless thing, you can’t think about it all the time, you can’t think about the clothes touching your skin all the time, but then Steve was gone and the baby choked. He made the most beautiful face as he searched for air, his mouth in a tight O, his eyelids shut and taut. I drained away. The strength in my arms, gone. I don’t know what I’m doing. This creature could die. He might as well die now before I feel too invested, I remember thinking that then.
I have hit his head on two door jambs while turning corners out of a room while holding a baby who has no neck control in one hand and trying to turn off the light with the other. I hit his head on the inner roof of the car while trying to get him out of his carseat to nurse him while he was crying, his face red, his tongue curled back. I am a careful person, and babies are sort-of heavy and awkward to hold and fragile. When I take off his clothes there are red indents where his clothes touched his skin. There was a red mark where the tonic bottle fell, though it faded within a few minutes.
Putting on his small clothes for the first time: Steve did it, I couldn’t. I felt like I was going to snap his arm. I tried to take the baby’s tiniest shirt off of his newborn body, tugging it over his shoulder and then over his head, not completely sure that his head wouldn’t fall off. As we changed him he would scream, freezing and vulnerable, his body trying to stretch out for the first time.
We were all so frail and fragile, my chest bleeding, sitting on an ice pack for the stitches, the new baby light as a kitten on my chest in the hospital. Hospitals hold too much trauma at every turn. They hold too many stories that get scrubbed clean when patients leave. I was exhausted and high on hormones and couldn’t sleep and my husband was there in the husband chair in the corner of the ugly room. A man came in to clean the blood out of the bath tub. We’d just watched Sunshine Cleaning the night before. There was a snow storm that I saw through the window blinds of the hospital.
My boy. A brand new baby. It’s taken this long to even realize that what I have is a son. Don’t take me seriously when I say this so soon: I want one of those again right now, those new babies. I feel like I didn’t see it for what it was, and I’m not seeing this for what it is. I can’t see it while I’m in it, the hormones and the lack of sleep and the feeling like I’m just about to fall into a nap or come out of one. I can’t focus on the awe enough, having a baby in the house, a life you better believe I fought for.
In the beginning there were too many logistics and too much pain to see this moment and that moment. You must be having so many feelings, my dad was pushing me to talk about the feeling of having a new baby that first day. But it wasn’t feelings, it was logistics. How to put a carseat in the car. How to hold a carseat without dropping it while opening a door. How to nurse without bleeding. How to get water when I’m thirsty and feeding a baby. How to let a dog outside to go to the bathroom while holding a baby who shouldn’t yet go outside. What I did feel then was toward my husband: in love with him, for the way he looked at me, what we had witnessed together, what we were trying to figure out together. I thought he would know more than I since he’s done this before, but it’s been fifteen years and look we’re new at this together, a team in a new way.
Each day it’s just a phase. Capture it. We do this six more times and the baby is walking. Two months old. We do this six more times and the baby is talking, calling our new names.
