In the beginning he would cry and cry and there were thoughts from us — is he manipulating us? A nurse came over and saw me nursing Henry when he was two days old and laughed, He’s ruling the roost! He’s using you as a pacifier! And I wasn’t sure what to believe. A boy. And boys grow into liars and teasers sometimes. I didn’t know how to behold this kind of beauty.

He opens up my arms and releases any tension in my lungs. He does no wrong. He manipulates nothing and no one. His want is his need. Transparency.

Gisele Bundchen had her baby about a month before Henry was born. Ah, my obsession with celebrities. And maybe it’s that English is her second language, but when she speaks, it’s translated to sound almost mythical. Interviewers asked about her birth and she said that it wasn’t painful, she said that she kept thinking, with every moment of intensity, I am getting closer to meeting my child. They asked her what his name is, and she said he has no name, to her he is simply her beloved. She said to look at him is like looking in the face of an angel.

It sounded too cheesy at first, but of all the things I’m supposed to be reading and analyzing, Gisele Bundchen’s words stick with me. Looking in my child’s face is like looking in the face of an angel. Like looking into a clear white sky. Transparency and innocence. It irons out the pain in my shoulders and the dissonance in my heart. He has no name. My beloved. My sweet boy. We are born pure, I didn’t understand until now. This most beautiful boy.

I pictured him fair, and when he was born his hair was wet and dark. And so much more complicated.

And after a few minutes I could picture no other baby: of course my baby looks like this. This is my baby.

But in those first few moments I felt something that was probably exhaustion. A gun shooting, time positively stopping. All these possibilities, and then the target hit: this is my son. This is the one. All the possibilities narrowed down to this. All the guessing, and now he is here. These are his hands and no others. This is his hair, these are his feet. I thought I would be able to identify those feet but I couldn’t. I didn’t know whose feet they were, they didn’t look like mine or Steve’s. I was afraid he would get some awkward visual characteristics that popped out once in a while in Steve’s or my genes, but he came out free of those. All my fears dispelled. A relief and an exhaustion.

I thought to myself that those were Steve’s hands in miniature form attached to the new baby in my arms, and something about that, though I love Steve’s hands for sure, made me exhausted. So the baby doesn’t have my hands. But he’s mine, right? I’ve been carrying him all this time and now he comes out and I didn’t know what he would look like,  and now all the possibilities are narrowed down into one, and these are his only hands.

The midwife shot me with pitocin and started stitching and it hurt. I was so tired. There had been labor pain for over twelve hours and now I was at last lying down without pain, at last he was here, and the needle was in and out piercing more pain. I was so tired and woozy, and they took the baby away. I missed him when he was gone, whoever he was. I wanted to stare at him, I only saw that his mouth was open screaming, and I saw his hands. Is this normal? I asked the midwife about the boy’s loud lungs, and she assured me that it was.

I thought he wouldn’t cry in his mother’s arms. Steve remembers that he settled, but I remember that he cried and that I had no idea what to do. I remember feeling that way several times that night, that he was crying and mad, actually pretty mad, and I couldn’t figure him out as well as others probably could. I couldn’t tell if he knew I was his mama.

It was all so exhausting, and I was sitting on a stained bed and a bag of ice, and the skin on my stomach was flabby, and the boy would not nurse. I couldn’t tell if he was mine or if he knew that I was his, but also I could tell that he was beautiful. I was relieved.

Those were Steve’s hands. Of all the possibilities, I didn’t picture this. People filed in the room and gave their opinions, most saying that he looked just like Steve. I agreed he had Steve’s eyes, but I thought maybe that was my mouth and my chin. Nope, he’s all Steve. I felt saddened. I wanted him to be mine, I wanted to feel that he was mine, but it seemed, that he was not. I felt tired.

Over time, his face has come unswollen and it looks now like he actually has my eyes and Steve’s mouth, and I think that’s still my chin. Biologically, I’ve read, babies come out looking more like their fathers so that the fathers will stick around. And now he is most certainly mine. Ours.

I can picture no other baby being mine except him. I want to have another baby, but I don’t want to have another baby because the new baby couldn’t be as beautiful as this one is. Of course my baby looks like this. This is my baby and no other. There is no other baby I would rather have.

And this, in the sixth week when I was spiraling down, six weeks of pain while nursing almost every hour, six weeks of intermittent sleep, it felt like suddenly his spirit shot forward to show me that he was in there, that this was worth it:

He has been eyes closed or eyes blurry, and now he sees. He stares into something near my eyes when he drinks. And this isn’t a day of this or two days it is each hour of each day everyday for one week and then two and then six and counting, and then suddenly he is drinking and looks up, looks directly in my eyes, and his arm shoots up and touches my face and he holds it there, his eyes right on me, he holds his hand on my face. The greatest love affair of your life. And you thought sex was intimate, someone said to me after her son was born. I am left shy. I kiss his hand. I kiss it again. I don’t know what to do, how to tell him without scaring him that I am here, I am made of skin and bone like he is, both of us made of the same material. He holds his arm up for a long time. My arm would have been tired by this point, almost a minute. Then he returns to drinking. His eyes are blue.

Nine weeks now. I’ve been waiting for that moment again, and I can tell we’re getting closer. He stares at me perfectly and solemnly. He looks completely wise and completely unknowing. His hands open and close and touch my skin and hold my shirt as he drinks. There is no other touch like this.

(Pirate Boy, or, Adventures of Henry Warrington)

We found it online the night after Henry was born and we googled his name. The delight! Our new beginning, and an adventure already begun.

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.

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.