restless

I’m restless. My son has been asleep for over an hour. I don’t really know what to do with myself and today is not the first day that this has happened. I should be grateful. I should be organized and have a plan but I feel a bit as if I have stepped off a carousel and am not sure which direction I came from or where to go. I want to do everything... at once and be relaxed while I do each thing. I want to read a book. I want to watch a movie. I want to make hot cocoa. I want to do yoga. I want to pump milk. I want to call people. I want to read the paper. I want to paint or write or clean something. Instead I start things and then stop and start another and get lost somewhere along the way. I love that he takes naps. I love that things seem to ease up a bit but somehow I don’t feel as useful as I did before. Before it was simple. He was what I did...all the time. No decisions. Simple. I was essential. I was the lap, the base, the home, the boob. Now I don’t know what to do. He’s too independent and he’s only 10 and half weeks old. Oh good, I think he is waking up….now I don’t have to decide what to do….I just know. I just take care of him.

ordinary

It’s Friday night, 3 days before Christmas and I have to go out to pick up a gift at circuit city. I hate the box stores but it’s the only place where I can find this. So I leave Jorg with some of my precious pumped breast milk and head out into the unusually mild night. It’s dark and raining. It makes me sad that we haven’t had any snow yet and while driving the 15 minutes to Williston, I trace it all back to our consumerist lifestyle. I have an urge not to go to circuit city, not to buy this thing. But it’s too late. I already paid for it over the internet. I pull into circuit city. There are mounds of people. Nobody really looks like they are having fun. Duty shopping. Guilt shopping. I go to the pick up desk. There is a man behind the counter. He is probably in his late 30s or early 40s. His name tag reads Victor. He looks like a nice person. He is tidy, his red circuit city shirt tucked carefully in. He’s cordial, even keeled as he types in the necessary information. He doesn’t seem bothered by the rush of the holidays, the florescent lights the incessant Christmas music blaring forced cheer. I start to wonder about him, how he got here, who he is, what he wanted to be when he grew up. Then I think of his mother. Somewhere he has a mother and she has loved him. She carried him around inside her. She dreamed of him. She labored for him and held him in her arms and wondered who this little person would be. She named him Victor. Now here he is in front of me. He is just a man to me. I have to ask myself, am I really ready to let Lukas grow up in this world. In a world where he can possibly become ordinary. He is so special to me. He is so special. I suppose Victor is still special to his mother. Perhaps that is what mothers are for.

the hand that knocks the cradle

You are only 9 weeks old and already we are trying to get you out of our bed. We put the wooden cradle right beside us but you are still too far away for me. In the beginning I wanted nothing more than to get this little creature out. He pecked and punched me. He stretched out and pushed me off to the edge of the mattress. He is so sensitive to movement and sound that I had to move with such care that my muscles would tense up. I still don’t understand the term “sleep like a baby”. It’s for your own good, I have to tell myself. The other night Joerg rolled over and landed on his little fisted hand and Lukas winced and whimpered until I woke up and pushed Joerg off. So you see, it’s for his safety. It’s time. Isn’t it? You’re not too little to be alone…are you? If only you could speak. I am used to you in bed now. I am used to your warm little body…the skin contact….how your small hand reaches out to touch my collar bone…making sure that I am still there before you fall into a deep sleep. I love that so much. I hadn’t realized how much I loved it until last night, when I lay with you just a few feet away, but in your own bed and I heard your tiny hand knocking the side of the cradle, checking to see if I was there….and I wasn’t….and I cried. How can it all go so fast? Someday you will no longer check. Some day you will know that I am not there and you will learn to sleep without me.

protection

It hurts to care about another person this much. You are two months old and life has suddenly gotten so much harder for you. You had your first vaccinations today. You came into the doctor’s office having never known pain like that existed and you left red faced and crying, confused, convinced that being a body is a difficult task. Convinced that I could no longer be trusted. Later, when you awoke you cried in pain. It was a new cry to me. It hurts to hear it. Now we put you to bed alone for the first time. Why are we trying to get you on this schedule anyway? You’re just a little baby, but I guess we have to. It is for you. It’s for the best. It’s time for us to be grown ups about it all. You grow up and I grow up too. As you stretch, so do I. But it takes so long to get you to bed that by the time you are asleep I will be tired anyway. Maybe I should just go to bed. I can’t take the crying. I want to protect you from all this. But I can’t protect you from life. Life has pain in it. I am sorry little one. I am so sorry. There is no vaccination for that. We can't protect you from everything.

pumping

I just spent 10 minutes with a machine sucking my nipple. I know, it sounds pornographic but really it’s for the well being of my child. It’s also for my own future independence. We have to make sure that he will take a bottle so we start pumping and feeding now. I warmed the bottle for Joerg and passed over my hard earned milk. He sat on the couch and gave it to little Lukas who greedily gobbled it up without any awareness that the food source was a plastic container and not the flesh of his loving mother. I wasn’t supposed to watch. I wasn’t supposed to even be in the room for fear that my smell, the smell of the real thing would cause him to wail for me. He would cry out “imposter” “phony” “fake” as he fought the forced bottle. But I couldn’t stay out of the room. I couldn’t allow a feeding to happen without me. How could it? I peeked around the corner and Lukas didn’t seem to mind at all. So I crept into the room and sat on the chair across from them. He ate without any notice of me. He simply drank and looked up at his father…his stray hand tapping the sides of the bottle. I wanted to take it back….put the milk back in…it’s my milk. I’m the food source. I am your link to life. Love me most. Need me most. I complained all along that I feel like I am nothing but a boob to him, that I want my body back. Well, here it is, ten minutes strapped up like a cow and I can have it back. But something doesn’t seem natural about all this. My son sits across from me drinking my milk from two days ago while I pump out more milk for him to have two days from now. He looks over at me. He is trying to understand the world, to make sense of things. I am supposed to help him understand this world. How can I when there is so much that leaves me baffled? What a strange place we live in. What strange things we do.

separate

My relationship to time has changed. I rush everything. I feel constantly that I will be interrupted. He is crying now as we speak. A little gasping and sucking cry that will surely rise into a more desperate wail. I want to go and rescue him from his little wooden cradle…pick him up and tell him that it will be all right and I am here. But I know that I can’t always be here. I won’t be able to pick him up forever and I don’t know when to teach him that. Is it too early at seven weeks? He is so little, so small, so in need. Why do I have to teach this terrible lesson? Why can I not simply sit with him at my breast day and night….perhaps because this is not the way the world is? I have to introduce him and prepare him for the world and the world is not a soft boppy with an eternal food source at your command whenever you wish it. The world is not simply soft arms that hold you. But is he too young to face this difficult lesson? There are so many theories about this….”let him cry, it builds independence.” “Pick him up for the first six months and it will give him a sense of well being and confidence for life.” “Put him on the breast.” “Don’t comfort feed.” I guess that it is up to me. I have to make this call. If I always go to him and hold him when do I have a life? I am a separate being. I need a little space. How do I take it? When I get it…how do I relax into it? I feel this constant rush.
Oh sigh. I hear him cry and in his cries I hear him saying
“I’m so lonely.” “You don’t love me.” “Please listen to me…I’m so sad…I’m desperate…come get me…please…you’re a terrible mother.” Then he is quiet. What made him stop? Is he already learning the lesson? That he is separate. That inevitably we walk this journey alone. No matter how many people we love and who love us, only we can walk in our shoes. Could that be why he is crying….because somehow, since he left the womb, he is slowly coming to understand this sad truth. Maybe I will go to him. Maybe it is enough of a lesson for today. If only I could protect him from this. If only I could make it not so.