Blank looks, baby days

More thoughts on reading and labels

I’ve been consuming vast quantities of fiction, more than I expected, more than I have read on prior maternity leaves. Stories continue to be the only mildly interesting thing my brain seems able to accommodate. Guion has also been reading a lot and daily tries to tell me the profound things he’s thinking about poetry and literary theory, what he’s writing about and what Mary Ruefle says, and I swear, I cannot understand a single word, even though he’s looking right at me and speaking slowly, even though I know his sentences contain concepts I previously would have been able to understand. I look at him blankly and nod. I cannot muster a complex thought. I am a disappointing companion. I only have mental space for the baby and the laundry and the hours of sleep that elude me and the fragments of novels that I pick up and put down. “What do you think: Is poetry the revelator or the revelation itself?” he says, and I look at him and blink and say, “Is the dryer finished, or is it still running?” Still, he is gentle with me, and forgiving, and he wears the baby in the wrap and goes on walks and reads on the sofa and listens to Radiohead or some ambient drone music, and I shuffle around the house, unkempt, looking for a novel or for the baby.

Found her.

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We have been sick, mildly sick, with some run-of-the-mill cold that Felix brought home. It inspires a vague feeling of panic, mostly for Lucinda’s well-being, but we are otherwise fine. I am using many different homeopathic remedies, which I mostly do not believe in, and trust instead in the way that they make me feel like I am doing something useful.

I have a weird perspective on medication. I avoid taking traditional drugs as much as possible (I didn’t take any meds for the past full calendar year, leading up to and then during my pregnancy, not even a single ibuprofen), but I also don’t really believe in the efficacy of the herbal/natural stuff; that all strikes me as a cute form of witchcraft. For the most part, I let mundane sicknesses run their course. They have their way with me, and I submit. This is an irritating position, because I think I stay sicker longer than normal people, but I also don’t get sick that often. I choose to believe that this is a trade-off I have engineered because of my no-drug policy. I believe in, it turns out, a lot of things for which there is no evidence.

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Lucinda is four weeks old now, and reaching her prime in evening fussiness. I forgot about the Witching Hour. What time does it happen? Whenever the boys are home from school and cranky, and dinner is not ready, and everyone is hungry and irritable, and I have not showered, and now there is an infant with powerful lungs screaming in my ear and she will not be put down and she will not be pacified. Having had two prior children, I remember that this, even this, is a brief phase, but in the middle of the crying, when everyone is crying and I want join them and cry too, it can be hard to remember.

I’m also hesitant to label dear Lucinda, and we whisper the c-word (colic) around her, but she does seem to be our fussiest baby yet. I don’t know why this has hit me so hard. Back to my belief in very illogical, magical things, I thought that we’d done our time with newborns and the third one would be easy, the easiest yet, simply because we ourselves were old hat. This does not seem to be the case. I am trying to find peace, to not try so much to problem solve, but to endure, to remember that this too shall pass.

Ruby-crowned kinglet. Photo by Kenneth Cole Schneider (Creative Commons license).

While she was screaming in my arms this morning, I watched a ruby-crowned kinglet hop back and forth on the branches of my Japanese maple tree, whose leaves are just beginning to unfurl. The kinglet is an impossible bird! Its diminutive size defies imagination. It moves in a mesmerizing animatronic way; if you took video footage of this bird, it would look sped-up even in real time. I watched it for several minutes and forgot the screaming for a minute. The kinglet felt like a talisman. Spring is coming. It won’t always be like this. It is Palm Sunday. Hope is on the horizon.

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As an aside on labeling, I felt very moved and seen by this piece on jars and labels—and grief—in the Yale Review by Catherine Lacey, who wrote one of the novels I’m currently reading. She has a compelling way with sentences.

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Currently Reading

• The Biography of X, Catherine Lacey

• The Fountain Overflows, Rebecca West

• The Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti