Halcyonish

The baby is six weeks old, which is both a predictable and astonishing outcome, depending on where my perception is temporarily alighting.  Some moments are very long indeed — night-time cries the longest of all — and yet the days and weeks canter by.  I cannot stand to be away from her for very long, and lament the thought of the shortening weeks before I return to my customary bread-winning.  This, it seems, is a near-universal emotion among either mothers of a certain age, or mothers whose babies are a certain age; I forget which.

I forget most things, to be honest.  Family, friends and strangers ask me questions and my famed articulate wells of argument dwindle after just a few words.  By the evening my ability to speak in diplomatic periphrasis is utterly gone.  Since I don’t go out much, this doesn’t altogether matter, but it is a strange, dreamlike state in which to be, one I recall now as characterising much of childhood.  I know what I want to say, but can only feel rather than express it in words.

That, of course, is the baby’s predicament too, although she doesn’t know it to be such, and gurns, burps and generally sparkles her way through the handful of waking hours that are not taken up with the triple-cycle of feeding, burping and changing.  Her charm, though surely subjective, is entirely complete so far as her father and I are concerned.

The baby-business of the day is scaffolded by laundry, eating (since feeding the cry-hole demands feeding the cake-hole first) and fretting about money, and these activities in turn occur in the setting of what might be described as a gay social whirl.  Even the dog-averse have braved the hairy onslaught at the gate thanks to the siren call of the harvestbaby.  Visitors are both sustaining and challenging, presented as I am in this milky wonderland of linen and puppies and all the stains to which baby flesh is heir, and of which it is the source.  Thus rolls the familial juggernaut.

It’s a world of wool and cotton and soft fabrics, of things made by hand or picked out at length or swept, by handfuls, from the on-sale shelves.  It’s a cruel commercial trick, these shops that prey on hormones and anxiety and this aesthete’s love of primary colours, and I more-or-less a sucker who needs to stay out of such premises except on sale day.  The five-zero stretch-and-grows that were her daily wear in the weeks after her birth are too small; how long before the four-zero garments follow suit?  As she grows, I shrink, calories paid out in making breastmilk and my waistbands slipping at the back.  I dress her up daily, even if we stay in the house, a composite habit from my childhood dressing of dolls and my own ideas about what very little girls should wear (lots of stripes and other geometric prints, as wide a variety of colours as possible, but not all at once).

I may well have lost my mind, but in the best possible way, letting it go for the sake of baby, friends and whanau, coming up occasionally to attend to work matters and to keep some memory of my former life.  I’ve experienced the semi-well-meaning interrogations from strangers (focused mainly on what I am feeding her and the future of the birthmark she bears over one eye) and the balancing game played by loving family: to advise or not to advise?  What I thought of as my privacy has largely gone to be replaced by this fluid, contingent identity: it changes as rapidly as a growing infant.  I forget my concluding remark. Here instead is what I was singing her today, excusing the theism as wishful thinking.

Tagged as: baby