#i should say my sadie is less forgiving. healthy of her if you ask me xDD | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

judedoyle · 7 years ago

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Holding the Moon

Most of the time, I think I’ve pretty much gotten over the way Luna was born. It’s not uncommon for women to get PTSD as the result of a traumatic birth experience; it hurts, you’re powerless, and the stakes are life-alteringly high, which is a bad combination. Some women have chronic pain, or lasting injuries that doctors don’t notice or address in time. Some women have permanently injured children. Some women just have memories of being really, really scared.

But that wouldn’t be me, I thought. PTSD is more likely if you don’t see the trauma coming. I hadn’t been blindsided; I’d been emotionally prepared for the C-section ever since my doctor started talking about induction, it was just that I hated the idea. I didn’t lack for support or context; I knew other women with tough pregnancies or traumatic labors. As for Luna, she had bounced back faster than anyone predicted. Yes, we had a terrifying few hours where we were talking in terms of brain damage and heart trouble; but, by the time we left, we were talking in terms of colic and jaundice. I suffered, but I got a week’s worth of painkillers and a healthy baby out of the deal. What more could I want?

That’s how I feel most of the time. Then you have moments like the one at her pediatrician’s, where all the medical poking and prodding -- measuring her length, measuring her head, waking her up to check the whites of her eyes for jaundice -- drove her, predictably, into a meltdown, and the doctor motioned for Mom to come in and calm her down. And which, after a few minutes of routine baby talk, degenerated into Mom standing there whispering “we’re not going to leave you alone again, we’re not going to leave you alone again” into the baby’s ear, over and over.

So, yeah. Apparently it still bothers me. The question is whether it still bothers her. Which, though my husband and mother and most scientific authorities assure me it is an insane thing to worry about, keeps gnawing at me.

Pick up baby, feed baby, put down baby. Pick up baby, feed baby, put down baby. Pick up baby, feed baby, put down baby. If you want to know what it’s like to be a mother, one answer is that it took me three days to get past the second paragraph of that opening section, because: Pick up baby, feed baby, put down baby.

“Attachment parenting” is controversial at best -- its biggest proponent, William Sears, is both a dude and a fundamentalist Christian whose guiding belief seems to be “your baby will be ruined forever if its mother has a job” -- but attachment theory is a whole different beast. One with serious research behind it, and which actually does make sense of rules like on-demand breastfeeding, and baby-wearing, and pick up baby feed baby put down baby, without interpreting them as the wrath of a vengeful God.

Basically, attachment theory says, whenever a baby cries, it is asking two simultaneous questions:

Who among you will rid me of this infernal diaper? (Or hunger, or cold, or heat, or stomachache, I have many needs, for I am a baby?)

How should people treat each other?

The ability to have human relationships doesn’t come built in. They’re too complex for that. The brain has to build the ability out, slowly, by observing patterns. One way it does that is to have the baby instinctively ask a very simple question over and over again -- I have a problem, will you help me? -- and see what patterns emerge in the response.

Babies who don’t get the chance to practice in this way -- babies in bad orphanages, for example, where they’re more or less left to cry all day except for a few scheduled interactions -- often grow up to have behavioral problems. They can have trouble learning basic social skills, like eye contact, or they can have explosive tempers and trouble with emotional self-regulation, or it’s just plain harder for them to be affectionate or sociable, because they don’t have that hardwired neural connection between I am with another person and my pain is going away now.

But it doesn’t take a bad orphanage. Everyone has a different map of humanity, written on his or her brain. Luna is being written. That’s why I had to be there in that NICU, had to make every. single. feeding, whether they wanted me there or not. I had to write in the fact that I would be there; I had to teach her that when someone loves you, they show up.

“She won’t know who her mother is,” is how I tried to express my fears in the hospital. I worried that she had so many interchangeable people around her, there was no way to tell which people were her family. But it was more than that. I worried that, by letting them take Luna away to the NICU, no matter how necessary it was, I was teaching her that the world was just a bunch of interchangeable people. That, sure, her basic needs might get taken care of -- but only half-heartedly, because someone had to do it or was paid to do it, not because taking care of her was fun or rewarding or because people genuinely wanted her to be happy. I worried, not that she wouldn’t know her mother, but that I was casting her out into a world without mothers. That, for the rest of her life, she’d answer the question of how should people treat me with an expectation of pleasant, empty, bare-minimum politeness. A lifetime of strangers, of whom not much could be asked, and less could be expected, with no Mom to alleviate the loneliness; no one central person, no-one who really belonged to her. No-one who could be counted on to show up.

None of this covers the strangest aspect of being a mother, which is how much I love it. Nursing her, changing her, buying unnecessary things for her on Amazon. Keeping a notebook about the consistency of her poo. Wiping adorable little baby voms off her face and/or my arm. I live for this shit. I feel like I was always supposed to be a mother. Bits of me I didn’t have an explanation or a use for suddenly make sense. Just imagine if I had spent less time in life cleaning up vomit and providing unconditional forgiveness to surly, bespectacled men with thoughts on Infinite Jest, and more time providing these services to the sort of person who actually needs them, A Literal Infant.

I didn’t write about this in my last post, because I didn’t know it at the time. I probably could have anticipated it: I was one of those people who actually did experience a biological need to get pregnant, a physical yearning that was beyond rational thought. This need, the dreaded “biological clock,” is one of those things “all women” are supposed to have, or to feel bad about not having, which makes it delicate to talk about. Some feminists are so sick of the pressure they claim the need itself doesn’t exist. Which I know, because I used to be one of those feminists. From all I can see, the “clock” seems to be a random biological quirk, like heterosexuality, or being double-jointed; some people’s bodies just work that way, some don’t, and no-one can really say why it hits one person and not another. I don’t strike most people as maternal. It’s just an extra need your body has: The same way you can need to have a burrito right now, or need a nap, or need to get laid after a long dry spell, you can just sort of need to be someone’s parent. You can put it off -- the same way you can put off sex, or sleeping -- but it makes you miserable. I needed to have a baby for at least three or four years before I had one, yet I was somehow stunned to find out that having the baby felt good.

I didn’t think of myself as traumatized or frightened in the hospital. But I was very, very task-focused, which is what I become when I am both frightened and traumatized. I shut down emotionally and look for things in my environment to control. Always showing up for the feedings, for example. That’s control. And if you have control, then you’re not helpless, and if you’re not helpless, then nothing is wrong, so just shut up and focus on getting to the next feeding, Sady.

But then we were home. And I was sitting by her crib in the middle of the night, feeding her. And I could be there as much as I liked; I was going to be there every day, I could sit by that crib every second of every day, if I liked. I never had to put her down again, if I didn’t feel like it. Right then, when I realized the time restrictions were over, something in my chest relaxed a little. And it hit me: She came. She’s here now. I actually have the baby.

And I started sobbing, and rocking my baby -- my baby, my baby, my baby -- and I had just never, in my life, felt anything like it. That much joy.

While we’re talking biological urges and bodies: A brief, unfortunately necessary note on gender.

I debated how much to gender Luna throughout the pregnancy. Plenty of my friends had to struggle to get their real gender recognized, or don’t have a binary gender. Even slapping a “she” on the baby, this early in the game, could translate to unwelcome pressure later in her life. At the very least, given that I’ve written about her, it would be embarrassing.

That said: We talk about babies being genderless, but you don’t know how true it is until you’re actually with one around the clock. Lulu is a bundle of many and varied needs, but none of them are even remotely related to gender expression. According to what I’ve read, most people don’t even know their own gender until they’re three or four years old, at which point they vocally insist on it. In the meantime, a neutral pronoun, though probably ideal, is harder to teach and enforce with every doctor and relative and pre-K teacher. And that pronoun, too, might change. So I prefer to think that Luna is currently “she,” in the same way that Luna is currently blue-eyed. The eyes will almost certainly shift to brown later on; mine did. The gender might shift, too. There are just certain things about her -- her correct pronoun, her eye color, her college major -- that we won’t know until she’s had time to figure them out.

It’s not like she currently overpowers people with her femininity, anyway. For one thing, she looks almost identical to her father, so much so that a Medieval physician would probably conclude that she was the homunculus meant to power her father. People who see them together tend to default to the male pronoun, just because they’re drawing the reasonable conclusion. For another, I got way too into symbolism during the baby shopping. Luna is a Cancer -- a water sign, ruled by the Moon -- who was born near the ocean. (Born, in fact, near Luna Park, in case you needed help tracking my incredibly unsubtle inspiration there.) A third of everything she owns has a whale or a fish or a mermaid on it, and another third is covered in moons and stars. The problem, I realized too late, is that whales and oceans and moons and night skies are all traditionally drawn in shades of blue. So people who meet her don’t notice the symbolism so much as they notice “oh, hey, this baby is dressed like a dude.”

So mostly, the feminist stance is to just not correct people. She had an entire pediatrician’s appointment the other day wherein the doctor, a substitute for our regular one, kept marveling at how strong “he” was. What a grip! And he could almost roll himself over! Only a week out of the NICU, you say! What a tough little guy!

Well, she is tough. And she might be a little guy. We don’t know. So I stayed quiet, half congratulating myself on keeping her options open, half appalled that someone could go to fucking medical school and still jump to a whole wrong set of conclusions based on nothing more than the fact that a baby named Luna had a blanket covered in pictures of the moon.

So gender is nowhere near as simple or as immediate as we’ve been taught. Motherhood, though. Motherhood felt immediate. It felt primal; it felt like being connected to the secret heart of the Earth. Consider: Throughout history, in every culture we can name, there has always been something -- usually a female something -- that people prayed to about pregnancy and childbirth.

An ancient Egyptian mother, for instance, would have prayed to Bast, the cat-headed goddess of women, war, and perfume. Cats give birth easily and take good care of their kittens; a woman gnawed by the baby-urge would buy a Bast pendant with the number of kittens she wanted engraved on it, and wear it hoping for the goddess’ blessing. In Greece, you prayed to Artemis, the protector of women and girls, who was so devoted to her mother that she caused her no pain at all during labor, and served as a midwife for her twin brother Apollo just moments after being born. You’d ask Artemis to give you a painless labor and a safe baby -- to care for you as if you were her own mother, basically. Yoruba women have Yemaya, the Ocean Mother; all life comes from the ocean, and all pregnant women are under the care of Yemaya.

Luna’s own ancestors would have prayed to the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, who loves mothers and gave birth without pain -- and they would have done so on all sides, maybe; we don’t know whether Brian’s biological mother was Buddhist or Christian or something else, but the odds are about 50/50 -- but, further back, they would also have prayed to Samsin Halmoni, the Three Grandmothers, who oversee every Korean baby’s birth and watch over it until age seven, in exchange for having a nice meal laid out for them on the child’s birthday. And they would have prayed to Brigid, the Irish goddess of midwives and milk, who was called into every delivery room by having the midwife throw open the door and shout for assistance: “Bride! Bride! Come in! Thy welcome is truly made, give thou relief to the woman.” (Later, she would have been St. Brigid, Mary’s midwife, who delivered Jesus Christ and fed him with her own breast milk when Mary couldn’t nurse; this is one of the more delightful features of Irish Christianization, in that all of the old myths were adapted so half-assedly that you could move the little town of Bethlehem to about twenty minutes outside Dublin without anyone taking notice.) Weirdly, the term “Samsin Halmoni” sometimes refers to three old women and is sometimes the name of a singular old-woman goddess, but they’re the same entity in both forms; this is equally true of Brigid, who is sometimes herself and sometimes three sisters who are all named Brigid. So Luna’s stories, though they come from very different places, are connected.

It goes on and on, further and further back in time, all the way to the first cave paintings: A woman with one hand on her swollen belly, and the other hand holding the moon. In the days before Luna arrived, I studied the mythology. In the days after, I felt it; felt myself swimming around in one of the core spiritual concerns of every civilization, a human experience older than humanity, the question of how we got here.

I’m pretty certain that most of this was sleep deprivation. Also, the incredible blitz of bonding hormones, which feels -- as one friend warned me -- pretty much like being on ecstasy. But there were moments when I could’ve sworn I was connected to any woman who ever had a baby, any woman who helped other women with babies, anyone who’d been pregnant and chosen not to have a baby or helped someone else not have a baby, anyone who’d given birth or helped someone give birth, anywhere, ever.

In my last post, one thing other women reached out to me about was the poor treatment by the NICU nurses when I was trying to breastfeed. It’s apparently common. But what I didn’t mention was that the only reason my baby can breastfeed, at all, is a NICU nurse. They honestly thought being separated had ruined the both of us; I had no milk, and she couldn’t recognize my breast, because she had only ever gotten food through plastic nipples. I went in and tried and failed and attended breastfeeding classes and failed and spent hours with the on-staff lactation consultant and did everything she told me and kept failing. It was hopeless. And then Yvette, who’d worked the NICU for about twenty years, and had to come up with a bunch of solutions for a bunch of difficult babies, pointed out the obvious. If she would only eat from plastic, and the problem was that I wasn’t plastic, couldn’t I just... become plastic, then?

She got out nipple shields -- these little rubber condom things women put on to prevent chafing -- and made me put them on. And boom, Luna was eating. The crisis was nothing; everything was fine. That was Yvette. She’d “forget” to clear me out between one feeding and the next, so I could stay there for most of her shift. She’d pretend she was too busy to change Luna’s diaper or take her temperature, and make me do it myself, because “you’re the one who has to go home with her,” which I only learned was probably against the rules when the other nurses refused to let me do it. She taught me to feed my baby when no-one else could. In the middle of Brooklyn, in the middle of the night, there was Yvette, my personal messenger from St. Brigid. I’ll never see her again.

So all hail St. Brigid. All hail, also, Original Flavor Brigid, doing magic milk tricks without the papal go-ahead. Hail Bast and Artemis and Virginmarymotherofgod, even though I’ve spent about twenty-five years in a fight with that last one. (So sanctimonious, my God.) And all hail Samsin Halmoni, and Yemaya, and Yvette-Who-Worked-20-Years-In-The-NICU. Whatever her name is, wherever she comes from, all hail the woman who holds the moon.

Three or four days after we came home, Luna developed an inability to sleep unless I was holding her. I had to nurse her until she went to sleep, and she had to fall asleep right next to my breast. Sometimes, if you waited an hour or so, she would sleep deeply enough to be tactfully moved to a bassinet, so I could eat and shower and go to the bathroom and such. Sometimes, she could be bought off by a visit with her father. But most often, it was just an endless, endless game of trying not to fall asleep so I didn’t drop her, waking Brian up at 3 AM so he could spot me long enough to make sure my hold was secure, nursing every half hour or fifteen minutes or five minutes so she would stay down.

I was right, I thought. The NICU fucked her up. Brian told me not to worry about it, my mother told me not to worry about it, every baby book told me I was out of my gourd. But I was sure that she needed to be held so much because I hadn’t gotten to hold her when she was born. I thought she was still afraid, on some level, that I’d go away again; she was tying me down in one place because she thought that, if given the ability to move, I’d leave her all alone.

I was thinking about all this early one morning, before Brian was up, when I was trying to put her in her bassinet so I could make some coffee. Sure enough, the second she hit a non-me surface, her face started to contort. I knew that it would take about five seconds for her to wake up and start wailing. I put my hand down to stroke her cheek with a finger, the way I did when I could only touch her with one finger, reaching through the walls of the isolette from my stretcher the night she was born.

She grabbed me. Not with her hand; she hooked her whole sleeping body around my arm and grabbed me, holding me in place. Then she fell, immediately and deeply, back to sleep. I still have a photo of that moment; I reached around with my one free hand to grab an iPhone. Her face is perfectly peaceful.

She knows, I thought. Even when she’s asleep, she knows whose hand that is.

She knows me.

So I did it, in the end. My baby knows who her mother is. She knows she has a Mom. Even if I get nothing else right, for the rest of my life, I did teach her that.

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