“What’s it like?” – the answer

14Jul08

On February 12 I had a baby. She was three weeks early, proving that only her agenda mattered now from the moment my water broke in our bedroom at home. I wanted to go to bed; she wanted to come out and play. Labor was incredible – long and scary and boring and empowering and painful. Throughout I marveled at all the things my girlfriends hadn’t told me – details that I wouldn’t have wanted to hear, events I couldn’t have conjured in my wildest imaginings. I’m still grateful to them for that.

In the end, after 23 hours of waiting and working, the doctors took her out through the window. The moment I saw her face, it was as though an atom bomb had been dropped on my life. Everything had changed in an instant – the man sitting next to me, holding my hand was not just my husband but my daughter’s father. We had a daughter. Her tiny red face was angry above the drape, mouth open with her cries. She was shaking her fists. We cried with her, not angry but joyous. Those cries were our daughter’s! We looked at each other, then back at her. He disappeared to watch her be weighed and measured. I lay alone on the table, listening to the doctors talk about my beautiful baby girl. The midwife brought my camera to me and showed me the pictures of what had just happened. I was in awe of my daughter; in denial of what had happened to my body. I scrolled back to the pictures of my daughter.

He returned with her in his arms, swaddled tightly. He hushed her and cuddled her to him; comforting her for the first of many times in her life.

They sewed me up, which took much longer than the delivery itself. I felt only tugging; I was nauseous but completely fixated on the tiny face in my husband’s arms. I was aching to hold her, finally touch her. It wasn’t until about thirty minutes later that I finally held her in my arms – in recovery, I lay half-immobilized while nurses poked at my new incision, checked my blood pressure, surveyed the edema in my legs and face, held a basin out for me to be sick in.

I didn’t care – I was watching my baby girl squirm and blink sleepily at me. I didn’t feel as though I knew this stranger; I’d never seen this face, this mixture of my husband and myself. Then she stretched – first her arms, long and perfect, and then her legs, and the movements were so familiar that it was as though they’d sprung from my own limbs. How many times had I felt that movement over the previous months, extending within me? Suddenly I knew her wholly, completely. My child.

She began to cry again, and I looked at the nurse, afraid. What was I supposed to do now, with a crying baby? “She’s hungry, I think?” It came out as a question, not as the statement it was in my head. My voice was small.

The nurse smiled kindly. “Go ahead and feed her; she should be quite alert for it.” I didn’t know how to begin; I stared at her blankly. My husband hovered, unsure of how to help. She helped me position her and I fed her for the first time, shocked at what my body could do, what it suddenly knew to provide, astonished that it was easy. She fed for forty minutes, exhausted and hungry from her long day, watching me the whole time, eyes bright and drinking everything in.

The hospital was boring and exhausting, and I didn’t get food for two days. We slept pretty much continuously, as much as she let us, and I learned to walk again, hobbling down the hall to the nurses’ station to hand in her birth certificate information. The nurses applauded.

She had her first hearing test and a few shots in the nursery, and I cried. It was the first time we’d been separated in nearly ten months. Visitors came and went. Finally they let me eat again, just in time to be discharged. We packed a cart full of flowers and gifts and our suitcase and a diaper bag and a carseat, now full of baby.

The nurses insisted I ride in a wheelchair, and I sat uncomfortably, my jeans landing right on top of my incision. It was the first time I’d been dressed in four days. We got to the car and I got into the front seat, even though every cell in my body was calling for me to sit in the back to ensure that she was breathing all the way home. We drove slowly, joking a bit, alone as three for the first time. He quoted from Knocked Up – “I’m not going any faster than 12” – and I laughed, holding my incision. We got home safely and he unloaded the car while I stood uncertain in the kitchen, staring at the tiny person in the carseat on the island.

The house had never smelled so good or felt so calming to me.

Our first day home was an endless stream of visitors, coming and going and coming again. Family did laundry, cleaned, brought food. A pink mountain of gifts formed in the living room next to the Pack&Play that had been waiting so expectantly for the past month. I watched it all, medicated with Vicodin and dozing continually. I repeated myself, slurring my words with medication and exhaustion. I probably sounded drunk.

At 9pm the house was suddenly empty and quiet – just us three. She slept peacefully in my arms, snoring lightly. “Who is this baby?” we asked each other the first night. “When are her parents coming to pick her up?”

We suddenly were unsure of everything – should we go to bed? Stay downstairs? Where do we put her, with so many options? Bassinet? Pack&Play? Crib? I was unsure of how to navigate the stairs with staples in my abdomen; the sixteen steps seemed mountainous. Finally my husband helped me slowly, slowly up the stairs; I was out of breath when we reached the top. We slept fitfully in our bed, awakened every few hours (or was it minutes?) by her tiny cries, pulling her to us immediately to comfort her, feed her, change her.

The days after that were messy and long and funny and scary and sad and joyous and busy, and they blended into one another seamlessly, an endless Groundhog Day of diapers and breastfeeding and the tiny weight of a baby – my daughter! – in my arms. We didn’t sleep, we ate when others brought food and we watched each other begin to parent in shock.

As the days went on we got to know each other, and we got comfortable. We figured out how to make breastfeeding work for us, and diaper changes became as routine and thoughtless as brushing teeth. We learned to give her baths, and delighted in her splashing, the defiant round tummy proudly protruding.

We took so many pictures that storing them became ridiculous. We started to sleep a little. We grew to know her cries and how to respond; what magic steps and shooshing noises would calm her. She took naps lying on our chests, matching her small measured breaths to our own. Then one day she was lying on her back, kicking and flailing at the air, and I spoke quietly to her. She looked in my eyes and she smiled.

She smiled, and it was all worth it, all forgotten – it was the moment in The Giver when Jonas first sees red – spectacular beauty that, once seen, cannot be forgotten or stored away and you only need more – you cannot describe it, exactly, there are no words. She coos and talks and smiles, and those early days without sleep and spent painfully hobbling are hazy, something that perhaps happened to someone else, long ago.

She is ours; we have a daughter. Everything is different.