From her birth-day, poured as if from a pan of batter into the crib (although I can assure you that was not the experience at the time)
to one who could go — and sleep — anywhere
to this bright spark who craves attention and entertainment (here looking at me at her grandparents’ house).
What is it like? It is a complete rethinking and re-experiencing of the passing of time. It is giving up the ego and going with the flow. It has, I realised yesterday, taken me ten weeks to unwind from my paid employment. That’s one week for every year I’ve been working there, plus an extra week. The recession of the minutiae of employment has allowed for the minutiae of baby-care to come to the fore. Come mid-October, I shall have to juggle both. I do not quite know how I am going to do this, other than that it will be different from anything I’ve done before.
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).
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.
I was not a ballet girl, nor a jazz girl, but a highland dancing girl, who did the Saturday competition round along with her classmates. A lot of sewing took place in order to make those performances happen (the old-style kilt had many many separate pieces, all of which were subject to regulations; it has since been superseded by what we called the “summer uniform”). The mothers who sewed were in demand from the other mothers (who also sewed, but not to the industry standard of that first elite tier, one of whom owned her own knitting machine on which she made tartan dancing socks). So it was that, at the age of nine, I regularly travelled across town with my mother to the welcoming home of the other mother who cut and sewed my new kilt. Everyone in that house was large, Irish-descended and friendly; even the outside guard dogs that stepped aside to let us in.
While the fittings took place, the other mother kept my mother updated on stories of the local dancing scene: the sorrowful divorces, the ungrateful children, the bitter fallings-out between teachers and their senior students. For the first few sessions my mother was able to distract me by encouraging me to look at the black velvet and devotional paintings in the living room, or even turning a blind eye I while I wandered up to the master-bedroom to touch and thus undulate the water-bed that dominated that space. However, after a while she must have decided that the flow of gossip could not be staunched, and introduced me by way of a quiet talk on the car-ride home to the east Christchurch equivalent of what’s said in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Today is the day between the harvestbaby being four weeks old and the harvestbaby being one month old. You will allow me the micro-focus of that level of detail, I am sure. I am sure, too, that neither the señor nor I can remember much prior to these four weeks. I was pregnant, I think, and at work. I had no road-map.
It is well known by his admirers that my old boy Arthur is a terrier of surpassing manliness, in an anthropomorphised world where, yes, this house attributes gendered values to its animals for fun. Truly, he is the Thomas Wyatt of Norwich Terriers: hunter, wooer, courtier, diplomat and poet (the last one wholly metaphorically). Whoso list to hunt, he knows where is an hedgehog.
That is the first fact.
The new baby takes happy comfort from a pacifier as she makes the transition from feeding to sleeping, or winding to sleeping, or staring at shadows and bright colours to sleeping. However, she can also with mighty power spit the pacifier distances both large and small.
Our dogs are gradually rejoining the new household. The harvestparents had a double burden of care, not only with the unexpected arrival of the harvestbaby, necessitating a rapid transfer of the dogs to them, but also by all the bitches coming into season within a few days of each other (as is the way with cohabiting mammals of the same species). The return of Arthur and Eddie took the nearby household arrangements off crated rotation, and now Fern has rejoined us for good. She has filled out greatly following the weaning of the puppies and now has that cobby look for which Norwich Terrier breeders strive in the just-shy-of-eugenics manner that is the anxious mode of the dog fancy.
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.
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).
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Dispatches from a Domestic Front
21 August, 2010
in at home, commentatrix, we are family
And just like that, I have a two-month-old baby.
From her birth-day, poured as if from a pan of batter into the crib (although I can assure you that was not the experience at the time)
to one who could go — and sleep — anywhere
to this bright spark who craves attention and entertainment (here looking at me at her grandparents’ house).
What is it like? It is a complete rethinking and re-experiencing of the passing of time. It is giving up the ego and going with the flow. It has, I realised yesterday, taken me ten weeks to unwind from my paid employment. That’s one week for every year I’ve been working there, plus an extra week. The recession of the minutiae of employment has allowed for the minutiae of baby-care to come to the fore. Come mid-October, I shall have to juggle both. I do not quite know how I am going to do this, other than that it will be different from anything I’ve done before.
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