Park

I've basically hung my entire life on the ability to walk to the park.

That's it; that and no more. Locomotion + green space + no intermediary vehicles.  I've mortgaged myself in any number of ways to obtain and maintain this privilege, and so I take shameless advantage of it.

The park is about half a mile, and somehow uphill both ways.  It's not a particularly prepossessing park- much of it is treeless, and the playground, which is moderately worn, seems to have been set up for daredevil ten-year-olds.  There's the aforementioned playground, a single picnic shelter, a memorial to do with fireman, a baseball diamond, and a vast green space in which dogs- my longtime nemeses- run free.

But it is my park, and, even pushing a stroller, even encumbered by an irritable four-year-old, I can put one foot in front of the other until I get there.

Porch

I am camping out on the porch.

It's a small, glassed-in room with windows on three sides.  It has a daybed, a chair, a single bookshelf, and, inexplicably, a small rocking horse.  Most crucially, I can't hear the baby from there.

We're taking shifts at night, so when I'm not on infant duty, I head to the porch.  The daybed is not particularly comfortable, but it a flat surface, and when I lie down on it I can stare out the window into a wash of green. Most often, what I do on the porch I sleep.  But sometimes, for just those few beats before exhaustion snatches me up like a hawk, I stare out at the branches of the trees.  It's the fat part of the July and they're in full regalia, draped with leaves, stuffed with birds, limned by scraps of a blue so far gone to black I almost miss its color.  When the last of the light drains away, they vanish, but I seldom make it that far.

Fuss

The baby is getting fussier.  This is something I always feared with my last baby, but despite my scrutinizing his every move for signs of colic or psychopathy or demonic possession, my last baby was a vigorously mellow dreamboat.

This one is not.  She's not a hell baby, but she's not relaxed either.  And I was tense enough with the dreamboat.

I am not good at fussy-baby parenting.   Or really baby parenting in general.  My nervous system is pretty finely strung (understatement), so if I'm up from 3-4 AM, say, trying to soothe a fussy baby, I'm unable to go back to sleep afterwards because I'm too flooded with adrenaline. And in daytime,  if I've just put a fussy baby down, I stay clenched and stiff, trying to inch past the moment like the baby is unexploded ordinance.

I know other people are better at fussy baby parenting, because they choose to have MORE THAN TWO BABIES.  GOOD GOD.  And because they claim to enjoy infants.  And because my husband is a whole lot better at it than I am.  Fussy baby down?  Go to sleep seconds later.  Fussy baby in arms?  Doze.  Fussy baby in general?  Stay cool.

I, on the other hand, am a better toddler parent.  Toddlers are much more predictable, comprehensible, and comprehending, and I have lots of practice being patient but firm with toddlers.  I understand them (because I'm secretly a toddler at heart?  I don't wanna think too much about that one).  And I know that at some level they cannot help themselves, so I don't take their garbage personally.

I wish I could change the way I feel about babies, but it feels sub-cortical.  As it is, I'm just trying to get through it.

Last Firsts

Does going through something for the last time sharpen your consciousness of it?  If nothing else, it inscribes the grooves of my anxiety more deeply- if I don't absorb this, the divine and the dull and the heart-opening and the painful, I won't get another chance to do so.

This my last child, barring accident or lobotomy or sea change.  I don't much care for infant care, particularly the bits in which you're unable to soothe a howling, wordless poop machine.  But I feel the yoke of the imperative savor every morsel of this time, merely because these moments -small body, wobbly head, clenched fists, mouth contorted with rage- are rare.

Is infrequency enough for import?

Of course, it doesn't matter what I think.  I'm already past the last first hour, that silver span of time right after birth when the infant stays quiet and you shut up, too.  We're forging forward, gathering speed.

Buzz

I don't know if it's the nature of summer, or of infant care, or of shutting down much the apparatus of your life, but the memories are swarming these days.

It's almost like someone has taken a baseball bat to their hive.  They come spilling out, haphazard, buzzing, flying in no particular pattern.  And they sting- mildly, but every one of them stings.

Flat out on the living room floor, 2:30 PM, 16 years old and playing hooky, watching the sun's bars inch across the floor.

Walking and walking and walking through the summer streets of Bloomington; finding my shirt on the grass where I'd left it the night before.

Practicing after heartbreak; the melted crayon scent of that room.

Practicing after childbirth; a clawing back.

Practicing after a wedding, finger by finger.

Walking through downtown Indianapolis long after I'd lived there, weeping.

Walking circles around a house outside of Ypsilanti.

The last time my father said much that made sense: airport; weeping.

Weeping on planes.

Practicing and weeping.

(Too much walking and practicing and crying!  I regret nothing -and everything.)

The ache of one memory gives way to the mild throb of the next.  They are intensely specific, ragingly dull, searingly pointless.    I do not invite them, but must endure their arrivals and departures.  The people in them are gone, at least as they were.  The places in them are unutterably changed.

Respire

There's a startling unevenness to infant breathing.  I know because I've watched an infant breathe, an activity that bears a not insignificant resemblance to watching paint dry, only five hundred times more fraught.  Yes, you understand that, barring disaster, the infant will keep breathing, and yet each breath, every compact or elongated or misshapen bundling of inhale with exhale, seems like an event.

It's a trick any fiction writer would envy.

I'd forgotten the unevenness, if I noticed it the first time around.  Some breaths are panting and shallow, others slow and stertorous; some are rhythmic, some are not.  There are phlegmy gasps, odd vocalizations, terrifying moments of stridor and, worse, silent hitches, during which your own breath claws its way back into your throat.

Breath evens out over time. Or you watch less.  I can't remember which.

Practice

The bruise on my arm is finally fading.  It looks like I was grabbed- like someone with strong tendons and a strong will wrapped a hand around my elbow and held me back.

In fact, it's where the first nurse struggled to insert my first IV.

I didn't want an IV.  I didn't want much of anything to do with childbirth, though, so I knew when I became pregnant that I had a certain amount of stuff I didn't want coming to me.  I'd hoped my allotment would be less and not more, but that was hee extent of my hope, because hope is my heroin, addictive and profoundly destructive and I try to keep my habits under control.

I didn't have a birth plan, which is a document so drenched in hope it may as well check itself into rehab.

I didn't expect the sequence of events that resulted in my daughter's birth, but I cannot say I was surprised by my surprise.  On my due date, I fell while on my morning walk, tripping over some minuscule unevenness in the sidewalk and landing, with significant but not overwhelming force, on my knees, elbows, and stomach.  Alone and in pain, crouched on the deserted sidewalk of a dead end street during the workday, I called my husband to come pick me up.  He arrived with my son, who had no pants or shoes, and we drove to the hospital.  I did not come out.

Because I'd fallen, my doctor advised induction.  The induction was long and painful but relatively uneventful, and the birth was long and painful but relatively uneventful, and the recovery was long and painful but relatively uneventful.

The thing that sticks with me is how many things had to be done twice.  I delivered at a teaching hospital, and later discovered that the new Residents had changed over three days before.  Every exam was inexpert; every procedure had to be redone, from routine checks to the epidural.   Even my diet was entered incorrectly-  I was a point on the learning curve, and I'd never opt to be that point again.

On the other hand, someone has to be.  In order to perform well, we must practice, and when our performance has to do with hands-on, real life procedures on other humans, other humans must be a part of that practice.  In a way, becoming a doctor must be not unlike new parenthood. You try, and try again.  You never completely understand, but you accrete understanding.  The bruises fade.