a day, baby 21 weeks
6:30 Steve’s iPhone alarm goes off and he gets up and makes a lunch for Rosie. After making sure that she’s up and ready for school, he comes back to bed and she gets herself off to school. I hear the front door shutter closed. Steve got to bed at 2pm and he tossed and turned throughout the night, he needs to sleep.
7:00 — My alarm goes off and Henry wakes up with it. He is calm, he’d been nursing while we both slept since Steve’s alarm went off so he’s not hungry. He smiles when I sit up in bed and he kicks his feet. Holy shit he’s so goddamn cute, Steve says. Henry’s pajamas and the sheets underneath him are soaked from peeing throughout the night in a diaper that doesn’t fit him so well. I had wanted to get up earlier to get to the grocery store for cat food before the day began, but alas, I’ll take a sleeping-in baby instead. And when will I learn that, with a baby, I can’t expect very much out of the day?
There was some sound throughout the night, maybe a dog in the next room, but Steve got up and checked and the dogs were asleep. When he woke up I asked him to let the dogs out of Jack’s room to make sure they were okay and he reported that they were.
Steve slides Henry across the bed and lifts him up, taking him out of the room for a diaper change. They both return, Henry in just a bright green diaper. We lie there for some time, Henry kicking and trying to roll himself from side to side. I feel his belly, the softest skin I have ever felt, and tickle him and kiss his face and kiss his face and kiss his face. Then I take a shower, bringing into the bathroom with me a piecemeal outfit I removed like Jenga from the pile of clothes on my dresser (I’m trying not to leave clothes on the floor these days, it’s my new thing in our tiny cluttered bedroom, so my dresser is feeling a bit heavy). I put on my red and white striped skirt, a gray tank top, a black scoop-necked t-shirt, plus of course my requisite socialist nursing bra.
I check on the dogs and see that Moby is not fine. He’s happy to see me, but he’s quivering, his tail down, and he’s panting. When I was petting him yesterday, he smelled a little like rot on his head, so we figure maybe he ate something dead and feels sick now. We decide to leave the dogs at home instead of taking them on our walk because Moby doesn’t look good. I try to feed the dogs, but Moby won’t eat.
Steve dresses Henry. He’s not wearing one of his best outfits: a navy blue polo shirt with brown pants and socks with monsters on them. We leave for a walk: I wear Henry in my Ergo baby carrier on my back. We walk thirty minutes down to Sweetwaters and get our coffees — mine a decaf iced Americano, Steve a non-decaf one. I also get a morning glory muffin and eat half of it on the way home, giving half to Steve. Henry starts fussing, so with Steve’s help on Spring Street I pivot Henry to my front, snap a flap over him, and feed him. He eats as he sort-of groans until he is asleep.
When we get home I check on Moby and he seems the same. Henry wakes up from the change in motion and temperature and I put him on the changing table. I change his diaper and take off his ugly outfit, putting on a cuter one with blue striped shorts and a brown hoodie. I pack a bag I got at the thrift store with Henry’s changing pad, two cloth diapers in a drawstring diaper sack, some disposable baby wipes, two granola bars, my wallet and my iphone. I try to decide if I should take Moby with me, but Steve promises he’ll keep an eye on him. We’re off to the studio.
Henry and I meet Ana, Steve’s office assistant, at the studio at 9:15. She’s been helping me turn my studio into a livable and artful space over the past week. We get to work moving shelves and organizing materials into bins. I wear Henry in the Ergo on my front, and he eats some and sleeps some and fusses some. Ana gets way more done than I do: Henry’s fussing a lot, so I take him out once in a while and put him in the pack ‘n play until he starts fussing, then put him on the carpet with some toys until he starts fussing, then put him in the baby carrier until he starts fussing. I sing to him the songs that he loves so he is calm. Meanwhile, Ana has drilled anchors into the wall and hung a shelf for plants, she’s vacuumed, she’s organized many bins of beads, colored pencils, inks, and fabric. I work through some stacks of miscellaneous items I’ve left on the ground for a year and figure out what goes to goodwill, what gets thrown and what gets stored. So many letters, old journals, rejections slips from poetry journals, plus a broken portable CD player, a lot of CDs, and yarn so polyester and garish I can’t stand to look at it. I take Henry on a walk to try to get him to go to sleep, and he does, but when I try to put him in his pack-n-play he wakes up. When he sleeps in my studio and it’s just me there drawing, he can sleep in the Ergo or he can sleep in the pack-n-play with much more success than when we’re moving around, vacuuming, and talking. I call Steve and he reports that Moby is 80% better and he’s eaten his breakfast.
We break for lunch. I put Henry in his car seat and drive us to Arbor Farms and we each get a hot roast beef sandwich — $4.99 each for a sandwich I can’t eat in one sitting. I also buy some items I need for dinner, plus two iced teas. We eat outside the grocery store in the shade while Henry tries to grab my sandwich and my iced tea. I give him my keys — the ultimate prize for kids, I’ve heard — and he tries to eat those. When he puts a sharp one in his mouth and I gently pry the keys out of his grip, he screams. He’s tired. I put him back in the Ergo and he immediately nurses himself to sleep.
While Henry sleeps on me, we shop at Ace Hardware next door for some clear plastic containers, spray paint, and a recycling bin. It’s so fun in there, I love that store. We’re busy, sure, but there’s a lot to gossip about. I call Steve, and Moby is almost fully better and he’s now over at the neighbors with Joon, playing with their dog.
Henry wakes up when I put him back in the car, but he’s had a half-hour nap and he smiles at me as I buckle him up. He is calm on the way back to the studio as we talk very seriously in the front about hair products.
I bring a sewing machine up the daunting stairs to my studio in one arm with Henry in the other, plus my purse, while Ana brings up the recycling bin and other supplies. I put Henry in his pack-n-play and he scratches at the mesh and talks until he fusses, then I put him in the Ergo. We start to work on organizing my old drawings and stacks of new paper. We’ve created a shelf system devoted completely to paper, and I can’t imagine anything more inspiring. So much of my favorite material, all in stacks and organized by size. I rifle through some old drawings and throw some away that make me feel sick to look at. But I keep most of them, and I even hang one up. Some drawings are really horrible, but there’s something about them that keeps me from throwing them away — a color scheme I can learn from, or a composition or a freedom. I have so many drawings, what I need is a show so that I can find their core, prepare them for presentation, let the world see them, maybe sell some, and move on. (Right? What the heck am I doing with my life. How do I move from quietly drawing and writing a useless unnoticed blog to being a professional artist?) Ana hangs a painting from last fall in my studio’s sitting area, and I like it. That painting I thought I didn’t like, suddenly I like it. Maybe because she hung it sideways. If I loved the material of canvas and paint, I would love to be a painter. It’s so easy to hang paintings! But I love the material of paper, and that’s a small curse. So many bent and fading drawings, and I just don’t like matboard with glass and frames. Sometimes glass and clean wood frames, okay.
It’s 2pm and Ana leaves for her next job, so I pack a very cranky Henry up with some art supplies I want to take home, plus a drawing from a friend that I want to frame. I promise him that tomorrow it will just be him and me in the house all day long, quiet and calm. We drive the quick drive back to our house as I sing him a song that he loves, and we go in the backyard to say hi to Steve. Steve’s moving massive rocks without a machine, like the Egyptians did it: he has a pry bar, plus slats and metal rollers and is wheeling the rocks to the far edge of the yard. He has a huge comma of a gouge on his right leg. I go inside and fetch him a camera and a tripod so he can document the movement. He kisses Henry and leaves sweat all over the top of the Ergo. Then I walk Henry around the block to try to get him to take his afternoon nap.
We walk down the shady unpaved street and back up, then over to Minglewood and back, but still he isn’t sleeping. Meanwhile our white cat follows us, and I’m calling to him to keep him near us. He looks like a small white rabbit, so earnest, intermittently galloping behind us and smelling some scent or other that I will never be able to detect. Henry still isn’t asleep. It seems I have to read his signs for sleepiness and act on them quickly or else he finds a new wave of energy.
We get home and I change Henry’s diaper and put him in his playbox with some toys while I go on the computer for the first time today. Over the course of 21 weeks, my computer time has really diminished. This is both sad and for the best.
Henry starts to fuss again, so I scoop him up into the Ergo and walk a short block outside while the white cat follows us, and Henry is asleep in minutes. I transfer him to our bed and he doesn’t wake, his weight turning him on his side, and I put the quilt over his body to keep him warm. I turn the fan on to block noise and shut the curtains as quietly as I can.
I rush back to the porch and eat the second half of my sandwich and start to write this very blog post on the computer. Rosie walks in the door, home from school, 3:30. She comes out on the porch and asks for a ride to the library to return some CDs, but I can’t wake Henry, and Steve’s working. Plus the plan was that she’d bike there. She asks if she can go to a choir concert at 5:30 — her friend will drive her (!). I say yes, tell her that dinner will be at 7:30. She goes into the garage to get her bike, and the chain is broken so she gets Steve to help her. I check the sky: the clouds are low and gray.
A neighbor comes over to help Steve move rocks, and I hear in the monitor attached to my shirt that the dogs have barked loud enough, and sure enough I hear Henry start to whimper. I run in and lie next to him to try to get him to go to sleep, and he turns and turns with his eyes closed looking for a nipple to suckle on. I finally give it to him so he won’t wake up, and he drifts back to sleep. I lie there until he’s not suckling as much anymore, remove my breast, and roll away. Then I shake up some paint and try to screen print a drawing on the bathroom wall. I don’t have a squeegee so I try to use a letterpress roller with wall paint instead of acrylic art paint, but the drawing smears. I find a washcloth to wash the paint off the wall when I hear Henry whimpering in the next room through the baby monitor. I wipe the paint off the wall, then I rush in and do the same routine to get him back to sleep, then roll like a terrified ninja out of the bed and rush back to the screen. The paint has dried, my screen is ruined. I scrub and scrub first with the soft side of the sponge and then the harder side, but the paint won’t come up. I leave the screen to dry in the basement, then try to find some paint to paint the mantel and the wall behind it. I’d been spray painting our coffee table a raspberry color the day before, but that raspberry won’t go well with the red on the fireplace wall. I decide I should try to paint it all a taupe color. I think it might look cool if I paint the entire wall, mantel and fireplace bricks and all, that one color, like a Louise Nevelson sculpture. I find a paintbrush and paint tray and roller, and I even find a paint can opener, but I go through all our paint and can’t find the color I’m looking for. I decide that maybe it’s time to organize the paint, build a shelf for it, make our storage area actually be a pleasant place to be. I start taking all the paint out of the storage area and putting it on a sheet on the floor in the basement play room. I find the paint color!
1/3 through, Henry wakes up again. This time when I try to do the routine to get him back to sleep, his eyes won’t close. He’s happy to be awake, smiling and cooing and kicking. I roll him over onto his stomach and he lifts his chest off the bed, then rolls himself onto his back. I cheer and he smiles. We do it again and again. Then I change his diaper. I look out the window and it’s started to rain. With Henry in one arm, I drag a huge piece of cardboard out to the end of the driveway and cover the wood coffee table I’ve been spray painting. The white cat follows me out there while the dogs watch from the house.
I put Henry in his Ergo and try to move paint cans with him on me, but the doorway is too narrow for both of us to fit through, and he starts to fuss from my bending at the waist too many times. Rosie comes home, drenched and exhilarated. She holds Henry while I go out into the garage and spray paint a wooden bin the glossy raspberry color for our mudroom. Then I run downstairs with two light bulbs and am about to change the light bulbs in Rosie’s ceiling light when she calls downstairs to say that her friend is here. She brings Henry down and lies him on her bed while I change the bulbs and try to yell at the dogs to keep them away from Henry.
5:40. I try to call out to Steve from the porch but he can’t hear me. He’s working in the rain on his big rock project with his headphones in. I call his cell phone and he answers. He says he’ll be in very soon, he had no idea it was so late. I read Henry a book, and then another, while he eats them. Steve comes in and takes a shower, then scoops Henry up and changes his diaper.
6:40, we head out to look at a full bed I saw on Craigslist. We walk into a world I don’t want to live in anymore: undergrad girls and their boyfriends, a tiny kitchen, a lava lamp, a rust-orange couch with a bunch of clothes on it. But the mattress is beautiful and barely used, the girl promises that she was the only one who has slept on it for three years, and we arrange to pick it up in a couple of weeks while Henry fusses.
Home, Steve holds Henry in his baby carrier and they walk through the garden and the yard, then he gives Henry a bath while I make dinner. We have local asparagus, and I remember making a recipe years ago with asparagus and pasta. I google ‘asparagus pasta lemon’ and find a recipe that looks good. It involves making a pesto out of everything but the asparagus heads. I chop the heads off, cook the rest of them, then blend them with olive oil and parmesan and lemon peel. Then I cook the pasta and the asparagus heads, and it’s 7:34 but Rosie’s not home. I text her. She says to start without her. I put a pedaheh roll that I made yesterday on each of our plates with the pasta and Steve and I sit down to eat, Henry in his playbox by the bistro table on the porch. Rosie comes home at 8 and joins us on the porch, she says she doesn’t remember me saying that dinner started at 7:30, and we sit with her while she eats her dinner and talks about her friends and school.
Rosie cleans the dinner dishes and gets to work on her homework at the dining room table while Steve walks with me and Henry around the neighborhood to try to get him to go to sleep. Up and down the street, then up and down another, and Henry poops. We go home, Steve changes his diaper, then we go back out to try it again. Henry falls asleep just as the rain starts. I put him into bed and put the covers over him, then go out into the dining room to paint the fireplace wall.
I’ve just cut all the edges when Steve comes into the room with the monitor and I hear a grunting baby. I go in, lie down with him until he’s asleep, then go back out to paint. I start with the paint roller when I hear him grunting again. I put him to sleep. I lie there in the dark, the fan whooshing beside us, trying to relax, trying not to go to sleep. I roll off the bed and close the door quietly but not quietly enough and bring the monitor out to Steve on the porch on his computer and suggest that he could try to lie with Henry if he wakes up again. I paint a little more when Steve comes into get a crying Henry. It doesn’t work, so I go into nurse him to sleep. Then again, then one more time. Henry is really crying now, I can hear his pout, saying consonants for emphasis, Ba Ba Baaaa. This is just a phase. This is a frustrating, temporary phase. Sweet boy. Shush, sweet love. He drifts off, then stays asleep and I finish the wall, feeling like I’ve started a hundred projects that didn’t get done today, feeling the threads in my brain snap and fray a little from all the spinning.
I go out onto the porch with a glass of wine and try to write on my computer. Steve goes out and comes in and says he doesn’t like the color of the fireplace wall. I tell him to be quiet. I let my brain go numb with all the sites I go to that offer no intellectual, literary, or artistic value but that give my brain the pause it needs to push forward. I submit an essay to the New York Times’s “Modern Love,” all the while thinking what a bad essay it is, wishing I had energy to revise it. I hit Send, then walk over to Steve on the porch, the rain all around us, and we eat potato chips and chocolate and watch “Nurse Jackie” on his computer. It’s so good, so bad, just good bad fun. I love the potato chips with ripples in them. I love the balls of chocolate wrappers in my pocket. I have never wanted sugar so badly as when I nurse.
Nearly midnight, heading back to the bedroom, I pass the fireplace wall and hate it, and hate that I couldn’t have known it would be ugly and that I’ve wasted my time. I brush my teeth and take off everything but the thick, boring nursing bra and slide into bed next to Henry. He fusses, then settles. I hear Steve start the shower. I set my alarm for 7 am.
