grunts and squeaks

In the end, I spent nearly 48 hours with Rachel, Kehry, and little Louisa, who is not yet two weeks old. When I walked into their cozy home on Saturday afternoon, she was sprawled along a nursing pillow on Rachel’s lap, head tipped back, eyes nearly closed, limbs draped heavily in every direction. It was the most iconic, adorable portrait of a milk-drunk newborn imaginable. I put down my bag, sat down next to Rachel on the couch, and cried.

I don’t know why. Maybe I cried for her tiny perfection, or her abundant black hair, or her intimacy with my sister who had been so recently transformed into a mother. I think I cried simply for her incontrovertible thereness -- she had not been there before! It boggles the mind. 

Also, I had not known that I would love her right away.

Being at their house brought me right back to the time-out-of-time mode that defines life with a newborn. Day and night become less meaningful concepts; the world is reduced to a room, or a couple of rooms, where the ins and outs of nursing, sleeping, and diapering dominate the agenda. Being in newbornland elicited vivid memories from my own first days of motherhood: sitting with day-old Frances in our packed up Philadelphia apartment that sweltering June, admiring her golden skin, distracted by how very hard our futon couch suddenly seemed. (But really, after an episiotomy, what sitting surface isn’t cruelly firm?) I remember the novelty of being attached, of our bodies operating in tandem. At times it felt oppressive, relentless (especially at night), but at the same time I could not ignore the strange ache that set in my arms if we were separated for more than an hour or so. 

But there was plenty of breathing room between me and my niece, who is ultimately not my responsibility, and so being in her presence was a simple, easy pleasure. (A window into the joys of grandparenthood!) Louisa did make me think also of my own parents as they must have been when we were born, young and beautiful, tired out, admiring us as we flung our arms wildly around in a bassinet. I thought of my in-laws, imagining them hovered over a tiny Mike: watching his irregular breath fill his belly and then draw his delicate ribcage into relief, fingering his toes, nuzzling his head, laughing at his baby grimaces and worried brow, relishing the smell and feel of him, perfect and precious.

We were all so once. My husband, who is off talking about Hegel at St. John's College; my neighbor Barbara who was widowed last year and loves to garden; Miss Bernadette the mail carrier who always has a kind word and regularly delivers our mail to the house next door. We were all covered in soft, paper-thin skin, possessed of impossibly tiny fingers and toes, unable to lift our heavy heads. 

Doesn't it change things somehow, to look around and remember that we were all once exquisite, small, and helpless, too?