This page is reserved for Heidi's musings on motherhood.
My thoughts are staying in my brain
Billy has changed so much already in this first month, just as I'd been warned by other new parents. When I look at his newborn photos, he looks like a completely different baby. Before I forget them, I want to record some brief impressions:
One of the things Simon brought me to snack on at the hospital was a bag of little gingerbread men. Somehow, I came to associate them with the scent of Billy's head. Everyone talks about the lovely smell of newborn babies. I don't know if it was what they washed him in, but Billy's hair in particular smelled so sweet, just like a ginger biscuit. It was one of the first terms of endearment I used with him, my little ginger biscuit. That and pumpkin seed seemed the most fitting, somehow. Something about the shape of his face.
The thing I loved the most about Billy right away was this alien quality he had. I was sure he'd come to me from another planet. He seemed secretive and protectively sealed off from the outside world, especially in the way his eyes and mouth were firmly shut most of the time. Every once in a while, maybe when he was nursing, he'd tentatively open just one eye and look around the room, as though it were the eye of a submarine on a spy mission, furtively gathering intelligence and hoping no one would notice. I imagined it as a sort of alien space probe; after recording its data he'd shut it firmly again and process what he'd seen back down in his little primordial space cocoon. He still does this sometimes, keeps one eye closed while nursing and looks all around with the other one, but it has a much different quality. These days he looks like a suspicious pirate when he does it -- guzzling away at the breast, he seems to be checking out the room for potential thieves of his beloved milk.
Another thing I noticed about him during those early days of nursing in the hospital was that the outer rims of his ears were (and still are) lined with little dark hairs. Maybe he's a bit of a circus freak, but I'm guessing it's the remnants of the lanugo that covered him in the womb. I know that hobbits are supposed to have hair on their feet, not their ears, but it still made me think of Billy as some kind of creature from Middle Earth, with a little secret stash of hair where it's not really supposed to grow. It seems to be the last remnant he carries of a former identity, the life he left behind in the magical realm from whence he came.
The hair on his head was so, so soft. I couldn't stop stroking it; it was so velvety. His hair is still soft and fluffy, but no longer as luxuriously so as when he was first born. It's growing in quite a funny way at the moment. It's getting longer in the back, but not really on top, and he's developing bald patches on the sides, where he rests his head when he's lying down. He's looking a lot like a fat skunk with a wispy mullet. Well, babies can get away with a lot of strange styles and still be very cute.
The biggest change, of course, is how much weight he's put on! The whole shape of his face seems so much rounder, and his chins have multiplied. When I take him off the breast and he's fully satiated, he reminds me of some fat, debauched Roman emperor, creamy milk dribbling down his face and into the rolls of fat on his neck. It's amazing how quickly he can go from howling (apparent) starvation to utter lacto-intoxication. Simon's convinced that he's smiling these days, though I'm still not sure if it's just wind. The one time you're sure to see a smile, though, is when he's drifting off to sleep after reaching this state of drunkenness off the breast.
I've developed names for the various personas he takes on while nursing. It's really a shame that I'm the only one who gets a proper view of him while he's doing it, because he reveals so much of himself while engaging in his favorite pastime. The very first nursing nickname was given to me by Susan Storey, the lactation consultant at New York Methodist: the barracuda . Billy came into this world hungry , with a little mouth programmed to attack anything that came within its vicinity. One of the first sensations I had that he knew I was his mother was when he was crying and I'd start to put him on the breast; he'd give one last, pathetic little "waaaah" to everyone else in the room as I placed his meal before him - as if knowing what was coming, but wanting to prove a point anyway - then he'd turn his head towards it and, honestly, snarl in anticipation before cramming it into his already vigorously moving little mouth. When I was still sore this absolutely murdered, as if he did have the razor sharp teeth of a killer fish hidden in his gummy, groping little mouth. Such an incredible mouth, with a life of its own. I used to love holding him up against my shoulder and watching him rooting, his wet mouth gently bouncing off anything fleshy and non-nipple like the exploring eye of a snail. These days his rooting has become much more insistent and strong - he bangs his whole face against me like some kind of crazed hammerhead shark. If he's hungry while I have him in the Baby Bjorn, he'll howl while bouncing his mouth against me, producing a sound that is comically like a 1950s boy pretending to be an Indian, though not so comic for him I suppose. The other early image I have of him nursing is the sleeping fish . Even in a deep slumber, Billy would periodically start sucking - perhaps dreaming of nursing, or just practicing his deeply instinctive reflex - as though he were some kind of bottom-feeder fish, sleeping but unable to stop moving its mad little mouth. Suck, suck, suck, snoooooooooze, suck, suck, suck. This is something he still does sometimes when we are side-lying and he's done nursing, but wants to keep nibbling in his sleep. It's my cue that I can finally slowly, quietly sneak away if I want to, leaving him with his sleepy little post-feeding echoes.
Billy's nursing repertoire has expanded greatly as he's grown older. Sometimes he looks right at me with his eyes wide open, eyebrows raised as he's drinking, as if saying, " Am I allowed? " Like he can't quite believe it's all true. And then there is the thirsty scholar , when he knits his brows and stares straight ahead in deep concentration, as if examining and analyzing every detail before him while he drinks. He sometimes becomes an annoying drunken sailor , when he doesn't know whether or not he's done. He'll turn bright red and cry while simultaneously looking for and rejecting the breast, his hot face bouncing around like crazy, going completely berserk. My personal favorite at the moment is the Olympic speed skater , when he lies across my lap with his head thrust forward, the rest of his body falling into perfect speed skater form, taking long, even gulps like he's going for the Gold. That and suspicious pirate - his one eye darting nervously around, guzzling milk like he's shoving treasure into a sack - are perhaps the most endearing.
Speaking of the devil, guess who's suddenly ready to nurse? Here's a final image for you - howling banshee...
The moment I need to begin with is our discharge. This, more than the actual moment of birth, is what will stay with me the longest. Since it had taken all day for the girl next to me to be discharged, we were both unprepared for how quickly and chaotically it all happened. In our haste to pack things up we seem to have lost certain important items, including Billy’s birth record. We forgot to dress him as well, so we were frantically pulling off the hospital garb and putting him into the little outfit I’d brought when they came to get him. It was visually kind of a shocker to see him in something other than the standard-issue white body suit, hat and blanket that he and all the other babies had been sporting around since birth. I’d brought a body suit with little green turtles on it (from Granny, I think) and a yellow swaddle-me blanket. The yellow, bright like an egg’s yolk, was particularly striking. I had only ever seen him in white, and the color made him seem more like an actual baby than just another part of the strange community of wailing newborns in the nursery.
The nurse who came to wheel him down in his little plastic bassinet was the crazy fascist Phillipino woman who had stood over me the morning after my C-section and ordered me to get out of bed by myself. Despite her cruelty, we had developed something of a rapport and she did seem pleased to be the one to see us off. She wheeled him out of the room officiously, while we tried to coordinate 6 different bags (between Simon and Max, who had come to help us out). Simon stopped at the desk to drop off some paperwork, and the nurse urged me to come with her as she raced ahead to the elevators. I was confused about what was going on, but I didn’t want to leave Billy, so I followed her. She seemed to think that Simon and Max would surely follow us, which they eventually did, but only once the elevator had already come and gone and she hustled us onto it, suggesting that it might be a while before another one came and that they would meet us in the lobby. I was too confused and groggy to argue. I figured that she had to wait down there with all of us until the taxi came anyway.
So imagine my surprise when, as soon as she had me settled into a lobby chair, she handed me Billy, said, “He’s yours now, Mommy Fischer,” smiled broadly, and left me there alone in the lobby holding this little baby in my arms. I was stunned. It was the first time I had entered a truly public space since midnight of the 4th. After the crazy, yet cozy world of the Mother & Baby ward, the lobby seemed so immense. I felt that Billy and I were suddenly bombarded by noises of the indifferent, mundane world. When that nurse handed him to me, a little golden yellow package, and then left us there in that space…I don’t know if I will ever experience this particular feeling again ever in this life…the enormity of what had just transpired – there I sat alone in this crass world with this infinitely beautiful creature in my arms, mine alone to protect from the madness around us – the fact of my motherhood suddenly hit me full force in a way that it hadn’t at all through the routines and drug-induced stupors of the past few days. I saw this little face, Billy’s foggy newborn eyes, his mouth forming strange, unspoken syllables like some secret language, his being slowly trying to emerge from the mysterious depths, and I burst into a strong flood of tears.
Someone in the mezzanine, a construction worker perhaps, dropped something really heavy and it let off a huge bang. It startled me, and it reminded me of the London bombing that Simon had told me about that morning. The feeling of our isolation and my need to protect beautiful Billy from everything terrible in the world took on universal proportions, and the tears really started flowing. So I sat there, holding my yellow blanket baby, sobbing and sobbing in the hospital lobby, taking my first steps towards recovery from the trauma of what had passed and acceptance of who I had become in such a short space of time. Max and Simon were pretty concerned when they found me this way. I was too choked up to try to explain that I was in the full throes of what was probably the most poignant and beautiful moment of my entire life. Still, when I think about it, or even see that shade of yellow, I can easily bring myself to tears. I’m hard pressed to think of any other memory that has the same effect. Perhaps the wedding, that moment when I first stepped out of the hotel and realized I was a bride as everyone in Capileira started shouting, “Guapa! Guapa!” That moment, more than the ceremony itself was what really thrust open the floodgates of emotion. Similarly, that moment in the lobby had much more impact than my first sight of Billy, in which I was simply dazed and unsure of what was going on. It’s amazing how unpredictable these moments of radical new identity often are.