My sweet baby, on this day last year you were cut from my abdomen and the doctor still needed to use a vacuum because your enormous head wouldn’t even fit through the incision. For your first few days you had marks on your head from the suction. I liked to imagine you arrived via the claw machine at the grocery store. You really have grown into your head. Everyone’s been saying it.
I had never noticed Seattle had any cobblestone streets until Google managed to direct us home from the hospital using every single one of them. Your little head was jostling all over in your car seat and I was certain we’d already broken you, before even getting you home. I realized then that the classes we’d taken to prepare for your arrival had been a complete waste of time. They hadn’t told us anything about what to do with a baby – they had taught us only that you would spin your way through the birth canal like Kermit the frog, that dairy in the mother’s diet was never the problem, and that we shouldn’t shake you. They hadn’t even told us that the food in the hospital would be free. We may as well have been taking karate classes.
Normally I won’t post photos of my son here, but as a newborn he was literally a different creature. This looks nothing like him now.
I really only remember fragments from those first weeks, like the day after drinking too much and you can only come up with little Polaroid images in an otherwise dark and uncertain expanse of time. When we had to go back to the hospital two days later because I developed postpartum preeclampsia, I remember waking in the middle of the night. You and your dad were down the hall with the nurses and I was alone in the room, my head all fucked up from the magnesium drip, nobody there with me and I thought that maybe I’d imagined I had a baby, imagined I had a husband. I paged a nurse and frantically asked if I had a family there somewhere. All the drugs made me feel like I was melting into the mattress. It was hard to lift my tongue enough to speak to anyone. I felt too unsteady to nurse you on the hospital bed, like maybe I’d drop you, but the hospital staff wouldn’t let me sit on the floor. They acted like it was the craziest thing they’d ever heard.
I remember that the whole first week home with you was tense because my blood pressure didn’t go back down after we were discharged the second time. I was so worried I’d have to go back to the hospital again, that we’d never get to just be home. When I was eventually prescribed a blood pressure medication over the phone, and I was able to pick it up from the pharmacy, without having to return to the hospital, I finally felt like things might be okay. Like maybe I wasn’t going to die. It was a sunny day in late March, much like today. We wrapped you in a blanket and sat on the porch. It was the first moment any of it felt real.
I do not recommend Target’s blackout curtains
I remember sitting up all night with you, watching Below Deck on my iPad as you slept in my arms, eating an amount of chocolate that I later found out could have been making you sick secondhand, a thing they don’t tell you in any of the pamphlets because they evidently don’t think anyone’s going to be eating that much chocolate. I remember those nights sleeping in the recliner in your room as a very sweet time. After I was certain you were asleep I’d place you gently into your crib and I’d sleep in the chair, maybe 60 minutes here, maybe 90 minutes there. Then you’d wake for food and I’d rock you, your face illuminated in the soft Mediterranean glow of Captain Sandy’s disappointing seasons, until you went back to sleep. You never did cry much at night.
I remember when you were four weeks old, how discouraged I felt each morning when your dad left for work because I had another long day ahead of me of trying to figure out how to get you to stop crying. You hated the stroller, you hated the car seat, we had a handful of carriers and you hated them all. You cried when I rocked you and you cried when I didn’t. If you were awake, you were crying. In desperation I cut dairy from my diet and within 24 hours you had changed. You didn’t stop crying – you still haven’t stopped crying – but there began to be pauses. That first time I rocked you and sang to you like I had been doing for weeks and you actually looked up at me and watched my face, I burst into tears. I guess one of us had to be crying.
I remember the weeks we had to wrestle your arms down as you fell asleep, to keep you from pulling out the pacifier you couldn’t fall sleep without, simply because you had realized you had arms and could do it. In those weeks it sometimes took 90 minutes to get you to fall asleep for what would inevitably be a 34-minute nap. During the final week of my maternity leave we cut out the pacifier altogether, and then we all got sick. It was the hardest week of my life. For those first few nights I had to stand and bounce you until you literally passed out from exhaustion. I’m so, so glad those nights are over. But I would do all of it again, all of the hard times, over and over, just to get you.
I’m so grateful I get the opportunity to experience you growing. It was an experience I wasn’t sure I’d ever have, and it has been so much more challenging but so much more wonderful than I ever imagined. I had crude cartoon images in my mind of what it might be like to have a baby, and life with you has been a fully-animated feature-length film of a tornado ripping through a village and leaving trucks in trees and cows on roofs, and laughter in ears, and warmth in hearts. My shoulders are covered in bruises from your terrible little teeth clamping down on me when I carry you up the stairs. And my life is full of everything wonderful, from you being mine.
Denise Resting 
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