YEEOWRRR!
My cat commands me as I tiptoe out of the bedroom where the baby has just fallen asleep. He has figured out that if he stands at the door and screams as I come out, I will do anything, give him treats, all the treats, the pot of gold, anything he wants, to keep him from waking the sleeping baby. He hops ahead of me to his food bowl and I follow, grumbling.
“Okay, okay, okay.” He has trained me to feed him to keep him quiet.
Moments later, I’m in the shower. I didn’t expect a shower that day and it felt like a luxury. An unplanned shower. But the baby was asleep, L was in the living room, the laundry was done, the bottles cleaned, supper put away. In the shower, it occurred to me that we are all just giant carpet-bags of trained behaviors, both behaviors we’ve trained ourselves to do and that others have trained us to do. For example, at night, I’ll roll and listen, roll and listen until the baby makes a grunting cry that is more than her usual grumpy whimpers. Sometimes she whispers, “Hoo”, and I know she’s calling for me. At that point, I pop out of bed. I turn on the touch lamp and as soon as that light comes on, she stops crying, because she knows mommy is coming. I have learned to wake up when she cries, and she has learned to stop crying when the light comes on.
Over the next few days, I keep watching to see if there is anything we do that is not a reaction to something outside us, or a reaction to something within ourselves. There is not. I watch the baby learn to grasp, to roll, to furrow her brows as the cats walk past. Eventually she follows the cats with her gaze. Today she laughed as the cat tickled her nose with his tail. I hope she learns to love cats.
Every morning I wake up and I both want and don’t want it to be bedtime again. I am so tired and just want to sleep; I want a few hours to myself after the baby’s asleep, but I miss her when she’s asleep, and I don’t want another day to be over, because the days are long but the months are already going by so, so fast.
Every night, when I’m sitting in bed, nursing my baby, my heart starts clenching, clenching, and my mind is already light-years in the future, and I feel the raw edges of panic. I can’t explain it, but it’s something about sitting in the darkness with all this time ahead of us but also all this time behind us. I bring myself back by looking down at my baby, examining her hair, her brows, her perfect ear, and I hold my breath so that I can see her breathing, her shoulders raising gently, gently. When she’s done nursing, her round little head nods back and one arm drops out to her side as she drifts into sleep. She sighs a little, and then smiles a little, her first step into a dreamworld she knows, a place she goes every night. And with that little smile my panic ceases, because I think maybe I’ve done one thing right today; maybe I’ve done one thing right in my whole life. We’ve given her another good day. Because I already know that, in a few short years, none of us will remember these first months when we paraded a naked baby up and down the hallways every night, stepping on every creaking floorboard in our rental house, laughing and giggling and making bath and bedtime a fun game, a learned ritual that is as much for us as it is for her. Maybe none of us will remember the exact details but this foundation of love and care, joy and gratitude, is something that we will feel as we all grow up, unshakable even on the sad days and the bad days. We will know, in our bones, that we all did the best we could for each other.
L comes in and we complete the last part of our bedtime routine, setting our baby into the crib next to our bed, kissing her forehead, “Moms love you. Good night.”
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This month, I reviewed the marketing copy for my book, Constipation Nation, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield in late 2024. As L noted, it’s s little putting the cart before the horse because all my chapters aren’t even done yet, but what do I know? I’m learning a lot about this publishing process.
Lots more going on in this corner of the world. The poetry podcast is postponed but I may be on an IG takeover. I’ll be doing more virtual shadowing sessions in June and July. And my Media and Medicine project is due at the end of this month…! It’s an essay that hopefully is the start of a memoir/fictionalized version of my experiences in residency.
Until next month, always go black tie.
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