On my drive to and from a state forest to meet a friend for a short, sweet, snowy camping trip this weekend I listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adechie's short story Zikora. Most of the story takes place in a hospital, where Zikora, a powerful DC lawyer originally from Nigeria, is giving birth to her son. His father abruptly left the moment she told him that she was pregnant and refuses to answer her texts and calls. The only family with her is her mother, severe and quiet in the corner, nearly ready to slap her if she screams too loudly or otherwise exposes her vulnerability before the assembled nurses and doctor.
I was rapt. The reader was great. The raw descriptions of the indignities of labor, delivery, and postpartum tenderness had an immediacy that took my breath away. I might have sighed and grumbled and even yelled at Kwame, his controlled, frightened voice recognizable in the mouth of the female reader which emerged tiny and tinny from my phone's speaker, nestled in my lap as I crossed muted green-gray Central Pennsylvanian hills. Clearly Kwame is not a real person. Yet I raged at him all the same. He looked so good on the outside; inside he was useless.
But when all the feelings that a short story that touches on single motherhood, misogyny, mother-daughter resentments, abortion, racial disparities in maternal mortality, an infant who cannot latch and screams at the breast, and at least three or four other issues that naturally send a woven ribbon of anguish, anger, tension and love straight through me had settled and calmed before the quiet trees and brilliant cold stars at night, I was left with a palpable, awed closeness to my own first days with a newborn babe.
The world became small all around me. I ceased to be interested in much that happened outside my house; there wasn't any available brain space in addition to what was required for nap schedules, breastfeeding adjustments, diaper changing and laundering, worried tracking of weight gain and ribcage-exposing sharp baby breaths. I was always sticky. My breasts became enormous, hard and engorged; my milk didn't come in until the fifth day. Our bodies' boundaries blurred. I wanted to touch my baby's skin all the time, and when I grew exhausted and couldn't stand to hold her for a moment longer and handed her to another pair of eager arms, I grew impatient to have her back. Sometimes the not-having-her felt like a physical ache, more acute than the fatigue and worry.
Everything that mattered in those days fit inside a room. Time felt like one long day: there was daytime and nighttime, but very little distinguished them from one another.
Babies grow, and gradually one is able to reconnect with the world outside that room. Night reacquires its blessed significance. Weekdays and weekends, summer and winter, each becomes meaningful and distinct once again, and when they do, one is more than ready.
The only other time that mirrored that degree of world-shrinking was when Mike was sick. Other people did things outside our windows - they took vacations, argued about politics, planned to have drinks with friends and went for long bike rides. Not us. After the stem cell transplant, day and night blended together, stitched together loosely with routine gestures of care: assembling the IV meds, applying cream to the strange rashes that a baby immune system could not prevent, taking his temperature, bringing his meds. We were on a tiny island where time slid by strangely. Like with our first newborn baby, we were beset with worry.
My children will go back to school for the first time since March over the next three weeks. I am thrilled for them, especially Beatrice, to finally be with other children - yes, definitely, thrilled - but I am also sad to say goodbye to this particular island we've inhabited and decorated and refined together for nearly a year.
Not long ago Gabriel reflected that the quality of time has changed since the pandemic started.
It feels like it's been forever, and it feels like it's been no time at all.
Does it ever. We talked about it, speculating that without external markers of the seasons like sports games, music performances and holiday parties, without places to go throughout the day to mark morning noon and night, time slides by undifferentiated. We don't register it passing the way we used to.
All we really have these days, he said, is weather.
Truth. But also, weather isn't too shabby, Gabriel! The sky is pretty nice. I can't get enough of it.
(They all roll their eyes when I start talking about the sky.)
The other thing we have is our connections to one another, which run deep and deeper still. Do our arms ache when we aren't together? Probably not. We could all use a break for sure. But I know the attachments we share and the rhythm with which we move through our days of work and school in this snug little house (punctuated by screams when the wifi drops out, or someone's favorite spot is taken, or the dog tears a misplaced book to bits) is precious to me. It's weird to say it, but I love this island. I love the sound of my children's teacher's voices in the next room. I love movie nights and lazy pancakes on the weekend and feeling like a hike is a major outing. I love our little pod of neighbors and I love the intimacy the island has gifted all of us.
I'm excited to walk Beatrice to school next week. But I'll miss her.
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