cribchronicles.com

thirty-six hours ago, as the sun was coming up on yesterday and Oscar was burbling on my shoulder, i started a post. i have just now found time to return to the computer – me, who has for years considered herself congenitally unable to go more than three waking hours without checking email. apparently, in embarking on this journey together, both Oscar and i have umbilical cords to disentangle ourselves from. his – which is clinging by a thread at this point – seems to be less traumatic for him to shed. :)

i am, however, enjoying myself, in these early days of carting the wee bundle about the house and town. and i am noticing things. sleep deprivation enhances certain powers of observation.

observation one: the personage the child resembles most is neither me nor Dave, but the Buddha. right down to the oversized earlobes and the smugly peaceful smile. in Oscar, the latter is merely infant gas, i’m told. but it’s a look so few of us ever achieve in adulthood…i find it kinda meditative just to be in its presence.

observation two: nursing bras deserve the “world’s most unflattering piece of lingerie” award, hands down. even in competition with the rest of the ancient, nondescript cotton skivvies in my closet, these peekaboo wonders – already lanolin-stained and stretched out of shape – are nasty ugly. no wonder breastfeeding is a moderately reliable form of birth control during the first few months after delivery – i suspect the bras just scare folks off sex entirely.

observation three: Oscar’s stroller has big bike wheels and bouncy suspension, but it’s no match for Charlottetown’s sidewalks – the child is threatened with shaken baby syndrome just getting to the corner. i’m stunned that i never noticed the broken-down state of our civic walkways before. or how fast small-town traffic can seem when one has to push one’s offspring through it.

observation four: there appears to be an inverse relationship between the size of one’s baby and the number of hands required to do anything. Oscar is lighter than a bag of groceries. and yet, despite how easy he is to heft, his wee floppiness makes me, newbie mother, profoundly handicapped in accomplishing said hefting while trying to do absolutely anything else. his still-slow sucking means it takes three hands just to breastfeed. i can sit myself down with the nursing pillow and a nice glass of water and a book, and then spend the next hour pumping a breast with one hand while trying to hold the slippery baby on my lap and keep a nipple in his mouth with the other, ten yards of my displaced shirt bunched bizarrely under my chin, all the while staring longingly at the water and the cover of the book. i memorized the back cover of a magazine the other day during one nursing session, but still have no idea what might have lurked inside.

i hear all this gets easier. rumour has it that one day soon i’ll have him slung under one arm, feeding happily, while i type my great novel with one hand, drink (virgin) margaritas with the other, and entertain the kitten with a cat toy clenched between my teeth. sounds great. maybe i’ll even learn to nurse effectively without having to strip flat down to the nursing bra – the popularity of public breastfeeding leads me to believe this is possible. but the learning will have to be gradual.

and if my boy grows out of his Buddha-gas-smile in the process, i’m in no rush.

forgive me – i am now about to become one of those parents lamented, scorned, and laughed at by…well, everyone. or at least everyone without children of diapering age. i am posting about poop. and Oscar just christened me.

everything seems like a bit of a tragicomedy to me these days. we’re still in the hospital, Oscar and i, and he’s still learning to nurse, still alternating between gaining and losing weight, still being tube-fed some of the time. i am stunned, daily, by how much time it really does take to feed a not-quite six-pound human. people mentioned this before, but as it wasn’t my time being sucked out of existence, their message didn’t really sink in. i’m an efficient person, after all, when i want to be. but apparently babies are not especially interested in efficiency.

here, i exist in a spiral, like a planet consistently spinning slightly closer to its sun and shortening its orbit. the Bon & Oscar orbit consists of a series of activities: change baby–toggle breast at baby–nurse baby–wake baby–tickle baby–toggle breast at baby again–change positions because arm and/or baby fell asleep–burp baby–change baby again–wrap baby–pump breasts–clean pumping equipment. it’s a consuming cycle, and being goose-stepped through it by a daily series of nurses with different temperments and different opinions about what precisely would be best for Oscar gets hard on the head after nine days.

so tonight, when i hopped up – or at least maneuvered myself off my Bride-of-Frankenstein perineum – to change my wailing son an hour into the attempted feeding cycle, i wasn’t really thinking. the nursery curtain was pulled for privacy, and my hands were full of squirming baby, so i left my shirt up and my swollen, pinata-sized breast hanging free to airdry during the feeding intermission. i peeled off the tiny diaper, wiped the offending emissions that had been distracting Oscar from his dinner, and – just for a second – left his little pink bum uncovered while i reached for another cloth. Oscar chose that moment to project more orangey poop than had any right to be hiding in someone that small all over his fresh diaper (lying uselessly beneath him), his sleeper, and my bare skin. i nearly managed to deflect some of the spray by grabbing a corner of the clean diaper as a block, but succeeded only in getting the rest to decorate my jeans rather than my chest.

i have never before had anyone poop on me – i don’t swing that way. and while i figured that major bodily fluid coverage would happen eventually between me and my offspring, i hadn’t imagined that the eventuality would be quite so explosive, or so public. half-naked and feces-bedecked, i was forty feet down the hall from my room, my tub, and any clean clothes.

the weird part is, after a day of really erratic feeding and some deep surges of terror, paranoia, and weepiness in me about Oscar’s sudden onset fussiness, the baptism by baby poo didn’t bother me much. it was warm, hardly smelly. it covered me like a Jackson Pollack work, in a monochrome burst of vivid orange. and it was funny. i giggled, then laughed aloud. the release obviously offered Oscar relief, because he stopped howling and looked up at me with his sage baby stare, blurry and wise. he has no shame yet, no sense of dignity to get offended by functions he does not yet control. and standing there, covered in poop, i found him the most marvellous creature alive.

i just hope, if he ever reads this later, he forgives me for telling anyone.

i’m new at this publicly pregnant thing.

wandering (waddling) through the aisles of Canadian Tire today, absentmindedly looking for some kind of contraption in which to store the overgrowth of plastic bags that has taken over our mudroom, i noticed people looking at me funny. not unkindly, just…intently. expectantly, even. it took me a minute to realize that my protuberant belly – and not my haircut or the spinach in my teeth, as feared – was probably at the root of the gazes. i offered a vague smile up to the strangers. they beamed in return. and then they swooped. and the questions, complete with belly petting intense enough to warrant a slot on the sports channel, began.

it seems there are four basic queries that everyone – or at least every female between the ages of forty and ninety-seven – considers herself obliged to ask of a visibly pregnant woman. the script is preset: ‘when’s your due date?’ ‘do you know what you’re having?’ ‘is this your first?’ and – if question three be answered in the negative – ‘what do you have at home?’ i’ve spent most of the very pregnant part of this incubation in a maternity hospital rather than out in the wide world, so i’m only now, at 35 weeks, starting to see this pattern emerge. and i am only beginning to process my answers into a litany suitable for strangers.

it shouldn’t be complicated. i’m due on the 18th of May (to which i inevitably get either a comment on what a nice time of year that will be to have a baby, or a raised eyebrow at the vastness of my belly so far in advance of due date). i’m having a little boy (which reaps much praise, though i suspect/hope most would be equally banally enthusiastic if i were having a girl). and no, this isn’t my first. but what do i have at home? well, no one. a kitten? i tried that deflection, which got me looked at severely. in the discourse of public pregnancy, one apparently does not stray from the acceptable script.

but the script does not really have room for my answer. we had a son. his name was Finn. he was a 26 week preemie, sprouted with tubes and incomprehensibly loud machines that tried pointlessly to keep his collapsed lungs functioning. he grasped our fingers in tiny hands, fingertips black from lack of oxygen. he had his father’s toes. he delighted us, and changed us…he made us parents. and he died in my arms at 11 hours old, last April.

now it is April again. Eliot called it the cruellest month, but April has been kind to me so far, this year…i am big of belly once more, and free suddenly to roam about the world at will. the baby i’m carrying is far along enough to be born safely and without major complications, should he decide to come soon. i am happy, full of grace. and still, i am stumped, when it comes to this script about babies – this public discourse of cheery questions and belly patting. there is no polite way to announce to a perfect – and perfectly benevolent – stranger in the middle of a grocery aisle that my firstborn died. the stranger doesn’t want that information. she doesn’t really want any information about me as a human being, though there is no rudeness intended in the exclusion: she wants to participate in the ritual conversation my belly invites her into, pat said belly, wish me luck, and disappear, never to see me again. me, i find myself wanting to disappear in the middle of the conversations.

and yet, perversely, i delight in the normalcy of them. i didn’t get far enough along in the first pregnancy to really experience them – i was whisked out of public and into a hospital just at the mysterious “is she pregnant or chunky?” phase of bodily blossoming. and when i was confined to bed at 25 weeks in this pregnancy, somewhere underneath my terror for the baby and for us, the everpresent fear of being heartbroken again, there was a much more mundane little voice whining quietly “poor bonnie.” i expected to be in bed for the rest of the pregnancy. and i secretly grieved the rites of passage, however irritating in practice, that i thought i’d miss out on again – the belly patting, the unsolicited advice, mostly just the general goodwill extended to those carrying the next generation. i also grieved the fetching red maternity shirt i’d saved up for but still not gotten to wear because it was too huge.

i wore it yesterday. it stretches now, over the belly – i almost missed its window of wearability. and the cashier at the market asked me the usual questions, and i lied. and felt plastic, and strange…but safer, less exposed. this baby is not my first: i’ve been through labour, had my milk come in, gazed into the small face of my newborn. but i left all that out. i smiled, and said “yes, it’s my first.”

i don’t want to dishonour Finn by pretending he never existed. he was my first, and he was wanted, and loved. those who know me know about him. but what i’m realizing is that the discourse of pregnancy is not about him, or me, or even the new baby-to-be, not as individuals: these women with their shopping carts and their questions are not asking to know me. they are initiating me, rather, into public motherhood, wherein my child (and my interactions with him) will be the focus of plenty of inane inquiries and repetitive questions and proud sharing of minutiae. all of this will be a first for me…and i am ready and waiting, and kinda psyched.

but i don’t think i’ll mourn the end of all this belly patting. :)