About a Girl

Three weeks ago I was leading this:

And just a week later, I was in circumstances rather different:

The infant pictured is of course the harvestbaby, whose early arrival — three weeks before her due date — thus reduced my transition from employee to mother to a mere four days.  Now neither the señor nor I can remember much of the world before she was born, although echoes and soundings continue to filter in through my work email, which I read as one might read a letter written in another century.

She was stunned at birth, and so was I, meeting her unfocused gaze that cast a sightline back up a body whose maternal functionality had not let me down, even as the effects of an epidural meant my timing in the second stage was not all it ought to have been and her delivery was assisted.  I had done what I never expected to be able to do, mentally if not physically, and she was the tremendous result.  The pediatric team gave her oxygen and her Apgar scores rose to 10 by the third round.  We spent ninety minutes or more next to her while she lay prone in an incubator, pushed up on her elbows and talking in a language that she seemed to have brought with her into the world (one of her uncles later compared it to R2D2).  We put our hands in through the incubator and touched her.  Her eyes never ceased to flick back and forth, watching with that infantile vision the room and everything in it.

I have been spared a range of post-partum ravages by her small size, and have had the unexpected experience of losing all but one kilogram of my pregnancy weight in just a week.  We are thus far achieving the goal of feeding her exclusively from the matrilineal source, albeit mediated by expression and the bottle much of the time, waiting as her tiny mouth and head catch up with supply lines of disproportionate scale and volume.  Our midwife (whom I cannot in all our experiences praise highly enough) assures us all will eventually be well.

Now I have the winter and the early spring at home to give her my exclusive attention before that responsibility falls to the señor for the remainder of our leave entitlements.  I cannot quite articulate the wonder that we feel at all that brought us her, or the delight that inheres now she’s here with us.  I have more stories to tell but they must now fit in around the restructuring of the day to follow her pattern.  She, as the melancholy little song goes, is all, and everything else is small.

Tagged as: baby