Baby the Bittersweet

Centripetal Emotion

The baby is a cementer, changer and concluder of relationships, and the baby’s needs a force around which the day spins in a variety of sometimes-predictable ways. We are initiated via experience into all kinds of secret societies. There is the witching hour, which runs any time from four until ten p.m. in our house, when the young cannot be pacified, entertained or settled and mothercraft becomes indistinguishable from chance and magic. There is the fallacious phrase “leg guards” concerning the nappies of a baby not much bigger in size than a newborn. There are the long moments and short hours of a life running entirely on hormones, in which holding a contended baby is the sweetest fix of all. The erratic sleep, strange dreams and rapid mood swings are like being a teenager in love, with the accompanying rising and setting of the emotional sun. Then there is the maternal body that, in spite of the habits of a lifetime, continues to shrink. This last point is in itself neutral were it not for the general bagging and falling down of jeans that were bought to fit. Money is tight, and I’d rather spend it on her (save for buying blue cheese, which never loses its deliciousness after a long abstention).

Au revoir

We said goodbye to our midwife this week, bringing with us a photo for the wall of babies that dominates both her office and the waiting area outside. When we first visited those rooms, caught up in the first trimester’s nausea and fear of miscarriage, I thought all those infant faces oppressive, a culture into which I was both fearful of being inducted and not sure that I would ever get. Now it feels like a community in which we have our membership with one who is clearly the best-looking baby in that whole building. It was sad to say goodbye to our most regular visitor of the last few months, but she read our mind’s present set and said she would see us again next year. (I’m told this is an intention that will ease once the harvestbaby starts crawling and walking.) This is a woman who worked all night to deliver another early baby before delivering ours, who with the señor held me up through the most consuming challenge of my life and who this week first said I should feel not only proud of what we have achieved with feeding but even more so with the now-distant labour itself. Such words are better than any certificate.

Breeders and Feeders

Thanks to the enthusiasm of a reader anonymous to you, though known to me, the first breastfeeding post I wrote was included in the most recent Down Under Feminists Carnival, through which you can browse here.  I have passed the recent World Breastfeeding Week breastfeeding my envoy, much like the weeks prior.  It is now a relationship most harmonious and one to which I look forward (save the scrappy, on-again off-again witching-hour feeds).  The reasons for this are practical as well as emotional and best encapsulated in the phrase heard in all kinds of maternal locales: the baby is the best expresser.  My sense of physical sovereignty, of autonomy, now extends to include her.  Although the carpal tunnel that followed me out of pregnancy sometimes impairs a swift setting-up of the feed, we are enough together in this for her to have lost that survivalist fear that sustenance might not be forthcoming.  Once the bib goes on, she knows she’ll be fed.  All that my care team and friends said — that it would come right with help and time — proved to be true, even as I dwelt in what appears to be the widespread assumption of new mothers: that the encouragement of others is not truth but simply being nice.

It is liberating for me too, this shift to what I usually describe as “working boobs”.  After years of anticipating, containing and managing their aesthetic effects on other people, it is a relief to switch to using them for what they were intended.  I had not realised until this occurred the way in which the intense scrutiny under which young girls fall at puberty, not only from young boys but from the adults around them too, left me with something  like an overhang of self-consciousness concerning the gaze of others about which now I don’t care for the first time.  From gendered markers to gendered functionality is for me a good trip.  This is by no means a universal experience — as discussed in my last post on the topic, for some women, the opposite is true — but it is mine.  I have been thinking as a result about the way in which supporting breastfeeding means allowing new mothers to make this transition and being there for them in their diffidence, their ambivalence, along the way.

Eddies and Whirls

It is wonderful being out and about with the baby but it is easy to overdo it; being a visitor and receiving visitors excludes the quiet reflection that is the introvert’s staple, for one.  We are fortunate however that our friendships are easily stretching to accommodate the baby, given the forthrightness with which some among the childfree opine, online at least, about the social death brought to their relationships by babies and children.  I am getting over my feelings of guilt when I talk about things other than the baby, which is entirely necessary if I am to continue to function in the adult world.  At the same time our friends are warmly tolerant of our desire to talk about the baby, not least when she is sitting there with us.  Harvestbro and I spent a more-or-less blissed-out afternoon tending her, his cautious care as he picked her up reminding me acutely of my own tentative handling eight weeks ago.  Her godmother, above, gives the first lesson on looking good in leather.  Grandparents are here with sufficient frequency that she recognises them, and harvestmother’s singing of lullabies has turned out unique in its calmative and curative powers for a small grandchild.

The dogs continue to refine their roles.  Arthur rarely leaves the baby’s side, while Eddie deputises in this function.  The bitches are happy that we are happy and enjoy having people in the house at all times.  The puppies accept the restraining of their licking, nipping enthusiasm with reasonable grace.  The balance of our housework still tips toward managing them rather than the baby, who brings in less dust, grass and sticks than they.

Retrospective narration confers on all these activities and experiences a serenity and insight they lack in the raw. It is this feature of our experience that leads the señor and I to sense the importance of mastery in all the anecdotes of child-rearing that now come our way, from people we know to strangers on the street. The life-event trifecta of marriage, pregnancy and childbirth seems to have this in common: the importance for those who experience it of not just normalising but universalising their choices. It is as if individual decisions will admit no variety and must be read, after the fact, as causal in success. This is surely magical thinking par excellence, and yet it is so widespread as to be close to universal.

Tagged as: baby