September 14, 2009

You are asleep on my chest on the couch. The living room is dark and cool and outside it is still too warm for mid-September. The coffee table is currently a dumping ground for all things Thisbe: pacifiers, an old and battered "Dr. Spock" book, a Moby Wrap instruction manual, a rattle, the camera.

I took you to Baby Talk at the Community Center today. I had just nursed you and figured you would sleep through the entire meeting quite peacefully, but you had other plans. Eyes wide open and sucking my finger the whole time, I had to bounce and jiggle you through a community educator's extended swaddling metaphor. She wrapped a baby doll in five different blankets, each one representing some form of motherly protection; then she unwrapped each layer, giving examples of ways she failed at different times to nurture her baby in the most positive manner. All I could think about was how quietly the baby doll laid there for all that swaddling and also that a baby would certainly overheat with that many blankets around its little body. Does this mean that sleep deprived me has no room for metaphor?

Two nights ago you were a lamb, waking at 4 or 5 hour intervals and nursing quietly. It felt like the peaceable kingdom in our bedroom and I was so proud not to have to wake your Daddy for help. Last night you were possessed by an altogether different spirit, screwing up your face and wailing until the screams became choked gasps from the back of your throat. Even after feeding (my pinky in your mouth, Daddy sliding in the syringe beside) you did not want to sleep. Only if you were laying belly down on my chest, my pinky in your mouth, would you calm enough to snooze.

So much of our time is devoted to trying to find a pattern in all of this. Should I wake you to feed? How long should I keep you at the breast before giving into syringe feeding? Are you getting enough food? Too much? Were you over stimulated during the day or did you get too much sleep? We are academics looking for a pattern where there is none, searching for a way to understand you when you have yet to understand yourself. God grant us patience.

But I will say this. My dear friend and poet, Kiki Petrosino, gave a reading in Minneapolis on Saturday. It was a reading I thought I'd be able to attend and a part of me was very sad to miss it. Kiki was one of the best poets at the Workshop, and she was one of the first to have a book published. I will read you the poems in it because they are hilarious and filled with foods you will someday eat but the point is this: I have been quite horribly jealous of Kiki and her accomplishments (horribly proud too--the two can go hand in hand). But on Saturday I looked at you and I thought: this is what I created these last nine months (excuse the hubris) and Thisbe, you are so much better than a book with a glossy cover. You shudder in your sleep and smile and blink and make gasping tiny breaths when you eat. Thisbe, your howl is so much louder than all those words, laid down together in a book--and though I haven't found the meaning in them yet, it will come and maybe I will miss these days, when your sounds were still a foreign tongue.