Claiming the Lore

There is so much lore surrounding little babies that it is hard to believe all of it is based in truth, or at least experience, and of course, public health educators have the heavy task of updating the world as to what has been superseded by new knowledge.  So the last three weeks (three weeks!) have been an education of their own in experiencing first-hand some of what is talked about obliquely, indirectly, and with those kinds of knowing ciphers (that word again) in which parents speak.

Wind is one.  Such a innocuous-sounding word, with none of the violence (or ill contemporaneity) of the American “gas”.  Yet whatever air the baby swallows when feeding must be expelled, unassisted if lucky, or by coaxing, patting and vague and increasingly anxious natural magic if not.  Never have I patted one individual on the back in so many different ways; only the dogs might qualify for comparison, and that for entirely different reasons.  The happiness of the whole household — Arthur and Eddie included — rests on the sound of a burp, or succession of burps, and falls away at the screams that indicate the mission has thus far failed.

One night on the ward, the harvestbaby and three babies in adjacent rooms were all windily furious at the same late/early hour.  The duty midwives visited each of us in succession, while the loud, level cries harmonised like a disgruntled barbershop quartet.  Now I am barked at by Arthur (who knows that barking at the baby is forbidden) when the single-baby noise is too much.  He is my mothercraft judge in furry guise.

The judge that sits internally has been the harbinger of the baby blues.  Assuming my ice-fishing plummet in mood this week was the start of something more serious, I went to my doctor, who will monitor me but pronounces all normal at the moment.  That nicely alliterative title, pronounced as babyblues, a single word for a sorrowful hormonal fog, doesn’t do much to describe it.  As her second week concluded I dreamed repeatedly she was starving, or stolen, or spirited into the parental bed and crushed.  I saw in the dark the shape of a pillow against which the señor was sleeping and thought it her: I woke him (asleep myself) and shouted, “Where’s her head?”

I feel, I said to my GP, as if someone is going to come in and judge me and take her away.

Would you like me to judge you? he said.

Yes, please.

You pass.  Okay?

The worst night was the one on which I finally established feeding, which was simultaneous with my giving up, irrevocably I thought, any hope of establishing feeding.  I woke up at cries, at dreams of cries; I kicked Arthur to the floor twice in my sleep and then picked up to feed what I thought was my baby and wondered why she was wearing a prick-eared hat, why she had four legs.  As my old boy righted himself and made his third escape of the night, the señor pointed out that the baby was still in the crib and I was attempting to prepare my dog for feeding.  We considered that in the best interests of everyone’s health and safety, the señor would continue to lead the night feeds.

So here I am, harried and haunted and a bit — but not too — mental, relearning how to live for the sake of one on whose happiness so much of our own now rests.  Every day is different, a reshaping or reinventing of the previous one, just as every day she is slightly different too.  The message comes down the line from friends and family daily: they are only babies for such a short time.  Consume every moment in full.  As she studies my face and her father’s for the sake of first memory, I study hers back; as we sit together with her we offset the excesses of our sentimentality with fragments from our former life. 

Late one night earlier this week she lay on the bed with the señor, staring at him with that expression of infant concentration that we turn ourselves inside out for her to achieve.  It was a perfect family moment: father and daughter together.  I knew what he was thinking; what could be in that new mind?  The señor drew breath to vocalise the notion.  Said he for she, “I want what the dog’s eating“.  Some things, like shared citation, persist as usual.

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