twenty-five

Day One: The Infinite Pint

 

 

 

It’s my first day out of the hospital and I’m feeling pretty wrecked.

Haven’t even had a chance to check out my new slice, but I have run my fingers over it and I will tell you, they need a little extra room to remove the frank breech types. Seems about five inches or so. I’m okay with the scar in principle; I just don’t want to see it yet.

My husband frantically runs out to the store and comes back with $700 worth of groceries, which must be his form of nesting, like when I was nine months pregnant and decided to order twenty-four Magic Erasers and remove every mark on every wall in our house. We don’t just have everything. We have three of everything: three jugs of prune juice (it’s been five days since I’ve gone number two), three boxes of every Lean Cuisine I like, three bottles of three different kinds of gas drops for babies, three tubs of pasta salad from the deli counter.

Despite having birthed a baby and a placenta, I still appear almost as pregnant as when I went in for surgery, which I wasn’t expecting. I had deluded myself into thinking that despite my above-average weight gain, I would waltz out of the hospital not totally back to normal, but at least in my chubby jeans. No. I look virtually the same, except maternity clothes look terrible now, because they are designed to highlight the bump, which is exactly what you don’t want unless you like people asking you when you’re due and having to lie and say, “Next month. So excited.” My legs are still so bulky that my ankles and knees are hard to differentiate from the overall fluff of leg flesh. My wrists are sore, so I wear one of those carpal tunnel splints on both hands. My new giant shoes don’t even fit, so it’s slippers full-time. When the baby takes a nap, I sit in bed with my laptop and order some men’s dress shirts from Target because the old clothes aren’t even close to fitting and the pregnancy clothes all feature a new mom’s worst enemy: empire waists.

Because of the baby’s jaundice, I nurse him every two hours or more. In between, we take him out for a little sunshine in ten-minute increments as prescribed by the hospital pediatrician, and then it’s back to more nursing. Nurse, burp, diaper, sunshine, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes it’s kind of nice to find yourself living a cliché. Deliriously happy and deliriously tired mom, that’s me. Mom. I’m someone’s mom. He is my son.

You know the surreal sensation that accompanies being pregnant, what I always think of as a Talking Heads moment (“You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”)? It’s magnified a hundred times when one day there is no baby, and the next, there is your baby. At times I think to myself, “Surely, this isn’t real. This has been fun, but I wonder when Nate’s parents are coming to pick him up.” I don’t mean this in a detached way, as in, I better get on Prozac because I don’t love my baby or feel connected to him, but the opposite, something more like winning the lottery but still buying generic catsup the next day because it hasn’t sunk in that you’re loaded.

For someone who wasn’t baby crazy, who didn’t really get babies at all, who never actually held a baby until I was four months pregnant and snuggled Cassandra’s baby for a minute or two, I do all the disgustingly mommyish things actual moms do, like smell his head and take pictures of him incessantly and become convinced that I’m not biased at all but that my baby actually is extra adorable with fantastic hair and an exceptional disposition, which he surely inherited from his dad.

The sensations I’m having now, the baby “high” and the rubbing his velvety arms and the crying because I can’t poop or sleep and the sad-sack thoughts when I catch my bloated reflection and the dreamlike smacking myself over being his mom and him not being in my stomach anymore but instead sitting there in his bouncy seat, I know this has all been said and done and felt before. Maybe by you. But instead of that taking away from its value, somehow, today, it seems to add to it. Instead of scoffing at the human experience, I’m just giving in.

I remember when we were walking along the beach in Avila trying to decide whether to have a baby and thinking there aren’t that many main courses on the menu of life. Despite wanting to be terminally unique, at some point you just have to order the chicken or the steak. Maybe the surf and turf. Because there are only so many entrées at the cosmic table. And here I am with my baby, like a billion and a half mothers before me, and we all want to hear that our children are chunky monkeys, and that we are not, and that’s where I find magic where I least expected it, right in the schmaltziness.

It feels so good to have what the rest of you are having. I’m happy I’m actually welcome at the table, even if I don’t quite have a grasp of the table manners yet. I earned my seat not by being special but just by being deliciously ordinary. All I really have to do is eat what’s in front of me, a bite at a time. All I really have to do to be a good mom is love this creature, which I do despite my fears that I couldn’t.

The feelings are so sweet that maybe I’ve skipped right to dessert. There aren’t many offerings here, either, and that’s the best part of motherhood so far, that we’re all telling the same stories and delving our cold spoon into one infinite pint of baby bliss.