It is 6:39 pm on “black” friday. I just woke up from a sweaty post partum nightmare which was too graphic and horrible to explain but somehow ended in something like an orgasm and shooting back pain?
Most of my sleep since I gave birth has come in these 90 minute hot flash naps, and I savor each one even though I feel like I have been tossed around a hot slimy machine and have to crawl back into consciousness each time I wake up with an even more bruised body, each body different from the one I closed my eyes to.
Now my hips are slightly curled up away from the bed, the pain lighting bolts shoot up my spine if I lie down flat or sit.
A few naps ago I woke up coughing and emptied my entire bladder into the lavender adult diapers I was wearing.
I haven't been able to show my baby my face yet, because I have been wearing a baby blue or or baby pink mask to shield him from the cold that I brought home from the hospital with him.
Usually, I’d start the story with the part about him being born, but I’m starting with this very real and concrete moment a few days later because it is the part of parenthood we hide and which disappears behind the photos and the birth announcement. It is the part that leaves parents trembling and asking the moon and their hands and any higher powers they have access to; how am I going to do this? Who is going to take care of us? How does anyone do this?
We have built a new person and we did it in the midst of a dramatic meltdown of emotional, physical and psychological stability and control. In the chaos, moments of serenity emerge;
The first time my two sons and husband are all in the living room together, laughing and eating and acknowledging the changed arithmetic in us being four, happened today.
Or the euphoric calm of the moment after birth when I saw his dark hair emerge from a crevice at the very center of my being, out of a waterfall of pain and light - the nurse saying, look in the mirror, your baby is almost here! I looked at that little bit of dark hair on the pale skull, maybe only the size of a sand dollar at that point, surrounded with what looked to me like a folded up kaleidoscope of blue gloves bright lights, blood and tools, all spiraling from between my legs in every direction. I focused on that sand dollar, the color of the hair like the grey stones I was just looking at that very morning in a photo my son brought me of him and his dad on the beach in Oregon. A little lighter than slate, Not yet silver. I looked at the color and pushed out of curiosity and an urgent need to see the rest of the head, and when he slipped out with the blood and pearly white coating of my insides, and the flurry of moments and sounds shuttled him into my arms, and little eyes opened to the world, they too were that beach rock grey and Zoe James was born.