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eih
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Birthday: 9/27/1980
Gender: Female
Interests: drawing; thinking deeply; learning new things; enjoying the outdoors; sleeping cozily
Expertise: succint, organized notes; efficient cooking; composing songs that are rarely finished; consuming good books in few sittings; listening for advice
Occupation: Medical
Message: message me
Member Since:
10/10/2003
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| One of my favorite moments with E happens after she’s fed. We’re sitting in the rocking chair, baby comforter at my back, feet up on the rocking stool. She latches off, mouth agape and head full of silky hair rolling back on my arm, limp and happy, the soft folds of her neck exposed, her eyes closed. Her eyelashes are wondrously long, so long they curl at the ends, so long pieces of lint get stuck on the ends, like a dusting of snow. I’ll be watching her, not making a sound, listening as her breathing gets heavier, and then suddenly she’ll smile in her sleep. It lasts just a moment, a big goofy drunken-old-man smile, and then she relaxes back into sleep again.
I don’t know how she truly feels about life most of the time. It must be hard adjusting to the world after the safety of being inside. I think a lot of how she is these first few months may be her reconciling herself to living here, on her own, in the world. But her private smiles make me think she must be happy, even content, and I catch them like secret little gifts in the night.
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| “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things… And the God of peace will be with you.” – Philippians 4:8-9
I’ve realized that since staying at home with the baby all day, I have a lot of undissipated mental energy. I’m like a periodic quadraplegic. I spend much of my day nursing, or carrying her around because she won’t be calm any other way, without any real freedom of movement. Depending on which side I’m feeding her on, I can’t even reach over to get a tissue from the shelf near the rocking chair where I nurse; she’s been finicky during feeds lately and will latch off if I move too much. I’ve figured out this way to maneuver the remote control for the heater with my toes. Soon I’ll learn to paint holding a brush in my teeth like Joni Eareckson.
So I just sit around, or pace around, all day while my mind runs along ahead. It took me awhile to realize that my mind needs to occupy itself; that in a vacuum it will start to fill itself with all sorts of things. I stew. I get down about myself, or what my life is coming to. I worry about my next rotation, which I never used to do—I was one of those people who never knew if they were on call until the night before. Now I dread returning on a whole new level. When I’m feeling yucky at six a.m. after a bad night, I now think that in a month I’ll be getting dressed for work at this time, instead of just wondering when she’ll go back down so I can get in a morning nap.
I start to escape into imaginings, sometimes scary things, sometimes scenes from novels I replay over and over (I believe I have memorized entire passages of dialogue from certain books). I sit there feeding and rocking and enacting whole epics in my head. I made a promise, Mr. Frodo. A promise!!
In all this stewing, it’s surprising how often I forget that there is any higher power in life. I have to kick myself into remembering. D says it’s because I live such a unidimensional life, and it’s true. Your mind becomes what you feed it, and when you don’t feed it anything, it runs around like a naked banshee on a deserted island. You lose touch with reality, particularly spiritual reality, pretty quickly.
I feel often like I’m searching for the holy grail of the balanced life. I’m either always working or now always with the baby, never normal. I keep waiting for life to get normal. It’s not normal to always be in scrubs, just as it’s not normal to always be in pajamas. D says you have to make your balance. As best you can anyway. This means I need to feed my mind something true, something good. I need to get dressed, to get out, to reach out to the friends who for some unknown reason still stick with me. I should think upon God for some time each day, even if it’s only praying for E as she feeds and wondering how God made her with such tiny fingernails. I think I can start there.
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| "I’ve decided the reason Sam’s so gorgeous is that God knew that I wouldn’t have been able to fall in love with this shitting and colicky little bundle if he looked like one of those E.T./Don Rickles babies.” –Lamott
I like to stroke her hair softly while she nurses. Maybe it’s because people tell me it’s supposed to all fall out at some point—I keep expecting to wake up one day finding her bald with soft black strands strewn about her like fallen snow. Her hair is possibly even softer than her skin, certainly silkier, and spirals out in geometric perfection from a point at the back of her head. I think to myself, one day this hair will be gone, and she’ll grow back new hair, but it won’t be this hair, the hair that was wet in my body, the hair that crowned for an hour before the rest of her followed into the world.
I like to feel for her fontanelles, the soft spots on her head where her skull bones have not yet fused, markers of her vulnerability. One day the little triangular windows will close, but for now it’s frightening and exhilarating to think I can feel her brain. If I had an ultrasound probe I could cast in sound and look around.
The other day we put her down on the ground on her belly, naked. She could do brief little push-ups and lift her head in a bobbing sort of way, but even though it looked like she should just crawl right off the sheet, it was clear she couldn’t, and then it struck me what a small, helpless thing she really was. Sometimes the force of her personality—her alertness, stubborn cries, zany smiles—is so strong that I think I honestly forget that.
I think about the things she teaches me. Like how to be vulnerable and utterly helpless. How to exude a beauty and joy that comes of a complete lack of self-consciousness. How to relish eating and splashing in the bath. How to sleep with great abandon, head flopped back, mouth open, body slumped into mine, breathing like a little Darth Vader. She does all these things simply by being, and there is a purity and clarity in it that I’m trying to memorize before it disappears. On one hand I can’t wait for her to start speaking; on the other, she speaks more purely now than any other human being I’ve known.
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| I wonder if she is capable of loving me. I wonder if I really only love and understand God in the same baby sort of way.
She is starting to make more sounds now, like someone who has taken up the oboe and is trying to blow a few notes. She mostly squeaks, like a slightly deflated rubber toy.
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