My littlest boy is nine days old.* We still count his age in days, though soon it will be in weeks, then months, then years.
Soon, the vivid and visceral memory of his birth will begin to soften around the edges. I will have to rely on my written account to remember how it went. Right now it still has me in its grip; I replay it, often. Processing, processing, sorting and polishing and filtering and shaping it into whatever space and form that it will take in my long-term memory. Right now it is still immediate, raw. I can just about remember the height of the pain, which is like a cold wind blowing across an exposed nerve, dry ice. I can clearly remember the look on the doctor’s face as he pulled out the baby: eyes a bit startled over his surgical mask, the baby very purple, making no sound, and I am there and smiling and also shaking from the effort. I remember my first shower, about two hours after – the water weakly flowing, not very hot, my uncontrollable shivers. It was good to be clean, but I was depleted and exhausted and so, so cold. The nurse handed me toiletries through the curtain, helped me towel off. Someone – a nurse? the Professor? – put my socks on for me.
Quiet moments in the hospital come to me in snippets. Very bad tv, usually on, usually muted. Savannah, my night nurse who was oh-so-Southern and wore her short auburn hair in pigtails. Alison, my day nurse, sweet, very quiet. Ms. Harris, my daytime CNA, a delightful shuffling older woman who dropped her clipboard with a loud clatter and said “Well, that needed to be on the floor.” She called me “My darling” and “sweetness.” I need to take your temperature now, sweetness. Meredith, who I didn’t see again after moving from my laboring room to the postpartum recovery room, apparently called the postpartum nurse’s desk asking the baby’s name. In the early part of labor, when I was still coherent, we’d told her we didn’t have a name yet but that the boys called him Zippy. When she heard we had decided upon Craig, she sent word through my postpartum nurse that she liked Zippy better. The nurse winked when she told us, to make sure we knew it was a joke.
The nursery nurses bathed the baby just before we were discharged. His head smelled so sweet. They had parted and combed his hair – oh my goodness, that little part in his hair. I dressed him in his going-home outfit, which had been Jack’s; pulled him up close to my face, inhaled the gentle scent of Johnson and Johnson’s. Then he spit up all over himself and me. Neither one of us has been clean for more than five minutes since then.
The last week since we came home from the hospital have been good, wonderful. Caring for the baby has been easy – I am an old hand, this time around. He eats well – nursing still brings on toe-curling pain, but past experience tells me it won’t be for much longer. The only way out is through, I chant before each feeding. Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, can’t go around it, gotta go through it. Boy, though, it’s been like three months since I had a moment of existence that was without some sort of pain or other. I don’t know who designed this process of reproduction, but I can think of some ways to improve it.
I nurse for about 14 hours out of every 24, still, though he’ll get faster at this pretty soon. With my remaining 10 hours, which I get in chunks that range from half an hour to two hours, I snooze, or shower, or putter around the house doing small, non-taxing things. There are linens draped over every chair-back and horizontal surface – baby blankets, burp rags, dirty discarded onesies, little socks. Although it is a formidable foe, I am determined not to let the Unending Laundry defeat me: I have a goal of doing two loads a day, every day, and I manage it in my tiny bursts of time. Pretty much all other household tasks, including older child-care, have fallen to the Professor, who performs them with good cheer. Managing the high-energy older boys is not so easy, especially now that family have all gone home, but we are muddling through. The weather has been cooperative, so we tend to just kick them outside. That is not always a fool-proof solution: the other day, the Professor had to extract one of them from a thicket of thorns in the undeveloped lot next to ours, and more often than not as they come in and out of the house, they let the dog escape. But, like I said – we muddle through. Everyone’s fed, clothed, and alive – I call that a Win. Jack needs a new pair of shoes and a haircut, Liam usually has his underwear (and sometimes his pants and shirt) on backwards, the dog is so under-exercised that he is constantly underfoot and panting for attention . . . but nobody’s starving or bleeding or missing, which is good enough for now.
Our last baby. I’m savoring him, in spite of the household chaos. He was nine days old when I started this post – now he’s ten days old. Every day a blessing.
*If you don’t know the old nursery rhyme, it goes like this:
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old Some like it hot, some like it cold, Some like it in the pot, nine days old.