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.

February 23rd, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

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.

February 20th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment

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.

February 18th, 2010 | Category: inward | Leave a comment

February 18th, 2010 | Category: apparent | Comments (2)

February 17th, 2010 | Category: house | Leave a comment

February 17th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (2)

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.

February 17th, 2010 | Category: apparent | Leave a comment

In five weeks he grew three and half inches. With no stretch marks or anything. Everything grew, his ears his legs his fingers. Or everything except, Rosie promises she learned in Science class, his eyeballs, which will stay the same size his whole life.

THIS is three and a half inches.

That’s an extra length of half his leg that he sprouted right before my eyes.

February 16th, 2010 | Category: henry | Comments (1)

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.

February 14th, 2010 | Category: henry | Leave a comment