thoughts

There were fourteen minutes left on the timer.

“I can do this,” E said. “Ten minutes to finish, three whole minutes to carefully get to the second floor and back, one minute to spare.”

“And when have you ever known this to take ten minutes?”

“Oh, it takes you longer?” She remarked a little “hmph” to herself and set about her initial task. I could not help but watch her progress out of the corner of my eye with the rest of it glued to the screen and its ticking clock. She performed her duty steadily, just as I do, but a little more delicately. Her hands are more deft. Marching band member versus rocker. One of us has subtler fingers.

Subtlety has its applications. We were five minutes in and, though it did not look like she was halfway done, she also had not blown it all by being too forceful. That’s why she was the one doing the doing and I was the one doing the watching. I forced my eyes back up to the clock, as if the weight of my stare on E’s fingers might burden them down in her task. Hers always seem impossibly delicate to me, even though I have seem them hammer nails and move earth. Years ago I hardly could believe the one would bear the weight of my ring, but there it was glittering at the edge of my vision.

The clock ticked. We both watched the screen in silence as it panned across crowds of people breathing the same cold air as we were breathing but miles away. It was not going well for the woman the cameras were currently focused on, her fists pumping against the night as if trying to piece the dark and cold and slip away.

She let out a pained howl. The crowd cheered politely. Eleven minutes in, now, and just three minutes left. E was not finished.

“You aren’t going to make it.” My voice was still husky from all the commotion earlier in the night. “You could just stay.”

“I’ll be fine,” she mouthed back to me as she adjusted her grip.

Two minutes. I looked down to see E had finished, but she had yet to make a move. If it was me, I would be moving. Better to put things into motion. Pull the pin out, let the grenade lend you some urgency.

Seventy-five seconds. How long just to climb the stairs? E began to shift her weight, gathering her feet below her. Sixty. The count began. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. She rose, balanced, and crossed the room to the stairway with the stride of a dancer or a cat. All arches and flexed muscles, power hidden beneath lithe grace.

She disappeared through the archway. I hardly heard her on the stairs. Maybe she chose not to climb them after all. Maybe she had resigned herself that she wasn’t going to make it, and was just watching me as I watched the numbers close in on zero. Forty-two. Forty-one.

Twenty. Still enough time to descend the stairs and fit her body into the seat beside me, neatly filling the negative space. One day you stop being your own unit and the way you hold yourself starts to suggest the people that are meant to be surrounding you.

Ten. Nine. Eight. I stopped expecting her face to emerge from the arch at the front of the room. Seven. It was fine. Six. The mission was what mattered. Five. Four She would come back when she could come back.

Three. Two. One.

It was not the first new year that we would not open with a kiss, but at least the baby was asleep.

E returned at 12:02, blithe to the fact that her walk up the stairs with a limp, milk-drunk baby had taken the full three minutes she originally prescribed after draining the bottle rather than the fifty seconds she gave herself.

“Did I miss it?”

“No, it’s still 2014.”

“So I missed it. The ball.”

“They didn’t even show the ball. Just lots of awkward kissing. No more of that woman’s caterwauling, thank goodness. I’m surprised it didn’t wake her while she was drinking her milk? She’s down?”

“Totally out.”

We did not kiss. E whisked into the kitchen, in search of the champaign. Then we watched the Koi channel while everyone sipped champagne until I turned into a pumpkin at 12:58.

Happy New Year!

I come to you this evening traumatized. I am not the author who wrote to you about an innocent, chiming bee last night. I live in a harsh new reality.

In a word, the difference is: poop.

Yesterday I experienced my first live baby waste incursion. EV6 and I were just hanging out in the middle of the floor, bouncing around, when suddenly I discovered an incursion from the diapered zone. Before I could take any action, it reached out to touch my leg where it was uncovered by my shorts. The inside of my thigh, to be exact.

My leg! An important part of my body I would prefer not to live without, but I would I need to burn it? Perhaps just soak it in a chemical bath until an entire layer of skin melts away to reveal a new level of epidermis that had never experienced the horrors that the one before it had so bravely defended against.

I won’t – nay, can’t – say much more about the reconciliation process that allowed me to cleanse and reclaim my fully-functioning thigh. All I will note is that EV6 seems to take no notice of my distress, nor is she distressed herself by the proximity of excrement to her own chubby thighs. No, in fact, she seemed to be quite entertained by the process.

Not me. For me, there is only terror. Every time I see a hint of that smiling poop face, hear a whisper of that disturbing gurgling noise in the diaper area, the trauma is upon me again. There is no safe time or space. As long as there is a baby near – any baby – then it can happen again.

I know I cannot be alone in this fear, yet at the same time I honestly don’t know how we’ve come this far as a human race while each generation is faced with this challenge not only to the sanctity of our bodies, but also of our minds.

Despite all of the hilarious and challenging things that happen in your home when it houses a newborn baby, I haven’t found the right way to articulate any of them for you.

Last Sunday night as our midwife drew our baby out of the womb she was purple. My father and mother both warned me – “The baby will be weird colors. It will be alarming.” It wasn’t. She was lovely and purple fading to pink like a violet, wailing all the way with a wide mouth and a broad nose. In her face I saw my father’s mother smiling at me for the first time in twelve years.

There was no card in the camera. All these things they tell you to remember – remember the onesie and remember the paper you want the footprints on – and not one list said “remember to put the card in the camera.” So there are no purple pictures. E didn’t see it, either. It’s one of those memories, those crystalline moments, that resides only in my own mind.

Minutes later I was sitting in a rocking chair with this tiny creature wrapped in my arms, singing her the song I had been singing to her in the womb, a song about grandmothers and taking things for granted that I wrote while crying.

She did not cry. Not then, but afterwards. The entire way to the nursery for her first checkup and all throughout as I sat with my head resting against the other side of the glass, fighting off sleep. Eventually I was satisfied that she would not stop crying anytime soon and I returned to E’s side to wait to hold her a second time.

The next day I did not want to put her down. How could I put her down and miss her face for an instant? I am writing that here for posterity, as since then I’ve found plenty of reasons to put her down, but the recovery room is a honeymoon and I had never seen a newborn before in person. I didn’t want to miss anything.

The first night at home was hard. I told E I would take the night shift, only waking her to breastfeed – after all, she had done all of the hard work in the past day. But I kept falling asleep in the rocking chair, coming to as my head dipped forward on my neck, afraid I would drop her. I would set her down in the crib, knowing full well she would wake up as soon as she noticed my arms were gone, and sleep fitfully on the floor for three or five minutes at a time until I heard her cries and quickly scooped her back up. I have stayed awake through blogathons, benefit concerts, and music festivals, but never was every minute so hard as that night.

I wish I had written every day last week, but what would I have said? That swaddling was easy when we were in the hospital, but impossible once we returned home. That I quickly learned how to change a diaper and don’t gag at it the way I do whenever I’m tasked with cleaning a toilet. That I am spouting constant puns at her, an endless stream, narrating her every move with pith. That after our most frustrating night so far I played Amanda Palmer singing Carole King and Maurice Sendak’s “Pierre” and cried softly as I sang along. That I decided Curious George was too facile and with bad grammar, so I am reading her The Tempest instead.

My daughter is eleven days old and she now looks like my mother’s mother. It’s uncanny, actually, to peer down at a new human being and see an old one that you can’t have back even while knowing this this moment, too, will pass and never return.