Early days: a retrospective

Maybe it's the upcoming milestone birthday (five years!) or maybe it's because we visited friends with a newborn recently, or maybe it's reading Erin Shea's blog posts about her new baby, but I was thinking about the early days of life as parents, and all the things I never wrote down because when you're in the thick of it there's just too much everything and nothing going on to manage to parse it into paragraphs. (And I applaud Erin for doing just that. She's amazing.) So, on the better late than never principle, let me try to remember...

I remember sitting in the pediatrician's office looking down at my tiny pink-skinned baby in his blue blanket in his gender-neutral green carseat, thinking that he'd never be two days old again.

I remember going to another doctor's appointment with a slightly jaundiced baby who had a tiny, tiny hint of nappy rash. I was a little teary.
  "We've only had him three days, and he was so perfect, and I feel like we've broken him," I said to B; my rock, my compass.
  "He's not broken. He's just getting a little lived-in."
That made me feel better.

I remember taking him to show him off to my erstwhile office. My female co-workers oohed and aahed and dandled. "How's nursing going?" they asked. "It hurts," I said, unabashedly rubbing my nipples through my shirt. They laughed, but not in a mean way. More in an "I've been there" way. Funny, I had assumed that everyone in southmost Texas would think I was crazy to breastfeed - the numbers there are pretty bad, after all - but they didn't.

I remember sitting up in bed, nipples throbbing, seeing the days and weeks stretch out before me - days and weeks when I was going to have to keep doing this every two hours, no matter how much it hurt - and feeling hopeless.

Our apartment was tiny and filled with summer light. We sat on the floor a lot, because a changing table seemed like an extravagance, and I was paranoid about him rolling off the bed, even from day one. (In retrospect not a bad stance. He was a very active baby.) I gave him a sponge bath sitting on the floor in the living room, in the sunlight by the window where it was warmest. He screamed his head off and turned purple. After washing his top half, I had to stop and nurse him to calm him down, before proceeding with the bottom half. Later I realised that the UPS man had come to the door, and hoped I hadn't given him an eyeful as he passed the window.

I discovered daytime TV, watching all the birth stories and bringing-home-baby shows that I had never seen, nor wanted to see, while pregnant. I tutted at all the mothers labouring flat on their backs, and eating ice chips, and having the inevitable complications that turned into emergency c-sections, and I teared up and wept copiously at the birth every single time.

I remember lying on the bed trying to play sleep chicken with the baby: I'd close my eyes in the hopes that he would imitate me, and whoever fell asleep first was the loser. He won a lot. When I discovered that I could nurse him while talking on the phone, I felt like such a pro; when I found I could nurse him while standing up and swaying vigorously, to get him to sleep, I felt as if I'd invented electricity.

The days went slowly, because we had nothing to do. We were far from family members and didn't have friends with babies, but we muddled through and made it up as we went along, the three of us. It was a strange time, measured in three-hour chunks, full of resting but often not restful. Everything was new, but I was oddly comforted by the feeling that I was doing what women have done since time began: lying beside my baby and feeding him and marvelling at his very existence.