In the Pines

Shingles, weathered by white Winters, sap soaked Springs, and the rains of Summer, hug my roofed room in the woods. The interior glows Gustav Klimt gold with ticker tape vines clinging to the layered paint. Scattered on the floor slats is one threadbare carpetbag; one glass milk bottle; one piano bench with skinny legs; one soapbox and one tin coffee can. There is a porcelain dispenser of rainwater and jars for drinking. There is no toilet or television, but a wood stove that sits huffing like a black hog in the corner. There I am, an aged archaeologist of sorts, sitting at a vast vintage desk in a creaky cushioned chair. I wear striped socks, tattered boots, a sweater of black yarn and my jeans rolled up. My hair is coarse as raw cotton; my skin crinkly as used tissue paper, and the irises of my eyes still shine their inherited blue. (I enjoy decorating my imaginings with rustic excessiveness, so please pardon my fun.) Before me, a plain paned window escorts the morning light onto stacks of stories, photographs and letters, which stand like a paper city skyline, bustling with the people and places of my past. I take my satchel from its nailed hanging place and pluck from its pockets a tiny brass pick and brush. I begin to chip, while the howls of dead folk singers drift from my ancient wired headphones, muffling the tinny clinks. Brush bristles sweep up dust, cobwebs and ghosts. I am digging for artifacts and the pre-arthritic bones of my youth.

Now nearly 32 years old, I feel I must make these relics and plant them in the field, see what survives. 

Since the birth of my baby girl nine weeks ago, it has become an obsession: this daily decision to select the parts of my present to join in my future's past. Compelled to pack the present into trunks and suitcases for the unknowable voyage Time is thrusting me through, I wrap pictures and the sleepy scribbles of 3a.m. feedings into poppies and poppies (the flowers for their scent and symbolism, and the plastic bubble wrap for their fun and protection). However, this worries me. Will these things, one day, just make me whine and pine for the past? Do most people trust their brains with the complex work of memory? Do they really expect that the most important stitches along the hemlines of their lives will droop and catch on every passing zipper and park bench splinter, resurrecting memories like patches of perennials in Springtime? I apologize for the messy piles of metaphors…I’m just trying to understand, is this the better life to lead? One without all the hoarding? I'm not sure.  

From the red carpetbag with its leather latch, I lift a 1947 Remington Typewriter and place it on the maple wood. A page from the past begins to tick. 

October 13, 2015

The woolen sky filters afternoon light as a film camera might. Dogs bark at us, the sidewalk travelers. I wear my baby strapped and buckled to my belly. My arms stretch like the ropes of a barge, while my dog, the 37-pound tugboat, pulls me through wooded waves toward the stink of glistening piss. 

Yesterday's rain failed to empty the atmosphere here. With the umbrella hovering over our heads, rain dripped and then dropped all at once, a herd of wild water shoved from the cliffs of the clouds. The holes in my sneakers invited a soak to my socks; the front of my pants darkened to a deeper gray. Curled into her sack, my dry baby slept with bubbles at her lips.

I remove the paper from the roller, turn it over and insert it once again. There is no electricity in this office among the trees (justifying my imagination's purchase of an antique typewriter). For what is Winter without the writing and typing of it?

The leaves, dangling from the spindle branches of the wide-trunked deciduous trees, delight her. They are withering now, floating, blowing into shifting piles. Humidity is already hibernating. It is October after all. Two days ago, the apartment wore her windows above her knob knees. Now we shield ourselves behind innumerable knit stitches.

"Do you think she'll be a botanist?" Scott asks. 

"Maybe." I say with a smile. Though I think most babies love the sight of leaves sifting light.

We have turned a red hook into the plaster ceiling above her bassinet. From it, a basket spills leaves over its wicker sides. Daily, she stares up at the green vines, speaking her vowel sounds to it. 

Within the shallow walls of a piano bench, I leave coffee-stained copies of the song lyrics I sing her. The most worn of these music pages is one unfinished song for which I bellow both day and nightly in my best Lead Belly.  

My gurrrl, my girl, don'tcha lie to me, 

Tell me where did you sleep last night. 

In the pines. Oh in the pines 

Where the sun don't ever shine, 

Tell me where did you sleep last night. 

Just that first part again and again like some howling lone singer on a scarred vinyl record.  

Inside the glass milk bottle, on the backs of discarded grocery receipts, I write notes like these. 

Sometimes she sobs for milk so suddenly that I am startled and I stumble into sitting. When her mouth grasps my breast, she moans in relief like the dryer ending its cycle. 

Today she spread her fingers wide and held it to my squishy skin as she drank from my body, softening this heart into a sweet sauce.

"Why is she sucking on your body?" My five-year-old niece asks. 

"She's nursing. This is how she gets her milk." I say. I am discrete, but my magic trick is amateur to the eyes of a curious child.

In the soap box stuffed with silk, I lift a picture print and stand it up to speak. Baby's 10 1/2 pound frame lays across my feather-tattooed-forearm on the left side of our silver sink in the apartment where we first live as Momma, Daddy and Baby. Scrawled across the cracked-egg-shell-white photo back is this message: You push your feet into the faucet, pitching your belly up and causing your head to point down. I have to work to keep the suds from engulfing your eyes. You're quiet when I dip you in and submerge you, my little sailboat. Staring up at the white wire of lights, you are calm as dawn, but when I lift you out of the warm womb-like water, you cry from the cold no matter how fast I work to fasten a fresh diaper.

The tin coffee can is heavy with coins no longer in circulation, one for every grin our girl gives her daddy and me, and two less for every time I blurt, "yeah, we're just gonna be broke right now." (referring to my staying home and not working.)

In this place of imagined things, there is no paper bag of fingernail clippings, no wine jug of purple placenta, no velvet ring box with an umbilical cord stump rotting inside, and no baby bottle of sour breast milk to remind me of the tangy stench that sticks to the folds of her infant face. In my shack, there can be no pantry of preserved moments ---no jarred memories to retrieve, revive and relive. Just some old sentences and pictures. Now I am writing and photographing, but mostly I am here with her in this apartment of brick and wood, by the wide river, beneath the great maple tree, in the year 2015.

Our First Month

"Where is her head?" 

"In the bassinet." He says. 

I sit up like a flicked spring and begin searching the blanket for my baby. "I know her head is in the bassinet, but where is her face?" I beg. 

"Her face is with the rest of her...in the bassinet." Scott says, grabbing my hands. 

"Stop it! Help me!" I shove him off.  

I pick through the covers with careful fingers. I am poor of sleep. He understands. This isn't the first time I've woken -or half-woken- in a panic, thinking her cries mean she's suffocating beneath me or fallen onto the floor. 

"She's in her bassinet." He says again, waiting for me to wake. 

I turn and watch our daughter wiggle in the dark before standing to take her in my arms. 

Hormones host nightly parties for my fears. There is dancing followed by feasts of violent thoughts where accidental injuries, SIDS and sickness poison this fledgling mother's mind. If she's making lots of noises, I worry. If she is silent, I check her chest for breath. During her first week of life, I hear an erratic, spontaneous soundtrack of the noise her floppy body would make if she fell from my hands to the floor. When this happens, I grip her little limbs and sit surrounded by pillows and soft furniture until the falsity fades. This baby's helpless fragile form has transformed our home's floor into a slippery, widespread wooden weapon.  

"Please promise that you'll be really careful on the stairs." I say to Scott who holds the baby in his lap at the computer late one night. I'm sniffling having just witnessed the two of them falling in my calamitous/nasty/uninvited imagination. He has her so that I might sleep, but I can't sleep, not with a flight of stairs between us. 

"I will." He tell me. "Though, I'm not the one who falls down stairs." He teases. [I fell three times last Fall before finally ordering $40 worth of sticky carpet slabs from the Internet.] Scott is strong and agile. He will not drop her, especially now that I have reminded him to be careful. I tell myself before picking up an old, never before read collection of Jane Austen novels. I bought it in Boston years before, but found the first pages too dry to be absorbed. Below in bed, I open the bulky blue binding and begin reading for boredom. Social etiquette, an old man's will, expired class structures and first born sons, I slog through two pages twice before dropping the classic paper stories to follow sleep. 

The second night we are home with baby, my breast milk arrives in bulk. Bouncing from my puckered breasts, unable to latch, she fits for hours. She must be starving. I rock her while her wails pluck dissonance into my heartstrings. 

"Scott." I whimper. 

"What's up?" He asks, sitting out of sleep. 

"Can you call the pediatrician?" It's late, but there is a nurse on call. "She hasn't eaten for hours." I tell him. "I don't know what's wrong." In the kitchen, he stands squinting in the light. The nurse suggests warm compresses to soften me. I stand over the sink, dripping milk and steaming teapot water for twenty minutes. She then successfully nurses, suckling for an hour. I lay her down and quiet falls, seemingly from the walls, as forgotten dreams, cool sheets and relief welcome me.  

When the dog comes home from the kennel, she smells the dirty diaper bag. She brings me her fur face to be pat, while I sit holding the baby who is no longer in my belly. The dog ignores the infant. When we carry Amelia toward her muzzle, she skirts away, scared. Eventually she goes to her, smelling the umbilical cord -the drying meat at her middle- and the diapered waste on her bottom. She whines the first few times and I fear she's going to hump her, but she doesn't and soon the whimpering is replaced by excessive licking, which we allow a little of.   

Birth was wild, violent and raw -a hunt in a hospital room, but now her gummy grins fill me with this fleet of microscopic endorphins that trample all remaining regret with something reminiscent of a revolutionary spirit. My body made a body and now my body feeds that body. She is real, -alive with eyes like the Atlantic, hair feather soft and a beating heart full of blood and soul. She has a little liver, lungs, light brown lashes and creased legs; pink peach skin that pimples when she sweats and miraculous mammalian instincts to root and stretch. She is a brand new person with purple veins, perfect joints and bone, vocal chords and a rounding belly. She needs me, cries and coos for me. My body made her body and for that we are more than love. We are family.   

Birth

If I have not birthed her by Tuesday they will insert something like a catheter, a midwife explains, with a balloon on the end. The induction tool is then inflated inside my cervix. Labor follows, they hope. I don't want my female insides to swell from some mechanical intervention. I look to the old tales of wives and midwives --to jalapeno peppers, eggplant, raw pineapple; to the application of semen onto my cervix and to bumpy car rides (or pretend ones on the trampolines of neighbors).

Three days before Tuesday, I awake to find my uterus trapped between the molars of a monster. The severe gnashing slows seconds into wincing and near weeping until it releases me and withdraws through the windows of our bedroom. A slobbered sweat stays, a souvenir, until the next fit rumbles and rises from my ruptured core.

"I think it's happening." I whisper, tapping Scott awake.

It is a night of false labor, and it ends curled into the cracks of the couch. The next morning, the storm tip toes back between my pelvis bones and begins stomping, howling. A parade of marching drummers join, toiling until bloody flem falls out. [The release of the mucus plug is just as it sounds.] I go to an appointment at 10 a.m. where a nurse stretches bands across my belly and greases plastic doughnut disks with blue ultrasound gel to track the beats of my baby's heart. Her heart rate is fluctuating. This is good, I'm told.

"Maybe we'll see you again tonight." Sarah the midwife says before leaving the curtained corner.

1:27 p.m.: the first contraction I pen into my red bound notebook
1:39 p.m.: the second

Sunday night, I want sleep to swallow me, but my bed keeps spitting me out. I pace the sidewalk with our black bicycle flashlight lit within the pocket of my blue bathrobe. I have never been more human and yet I probably look like a ghost.

2:17 a.m.: the second to last contraction I record before our departure for the hospital
2:21 a.m.: the last time I write

We drive twenty miles to the sterile sanctuary of western medicine, where the smartest of students save us common folk. I return to the triage room with the cotton curtains, hospital beds and medical machines. Scott helps me strip out of my sweats and pull onto the folded blue johnny.

In another corner, we hear a woman cry, "Please! Help me, please!" Yes, she's driven herself. Yes, she has other children. No, she doesn't know her weight. No, she doesn't know her due date.

"I need some help in here!" A nurse calls out --a shuffling of rubber soled shoes and cotton scrubs. "The membrane has ruptured." She tells the others. The laboring lady cries out. Then we hear a baby cry. Scott and I stare at one another. Shock settles into my soul like a smoke. I submit then to sobbing.

"On a scale of one to ten," Sarah the midwife asks me, "ten being the amputation of a limb, how would you rate your pain?"

I want to say nine. "Eight."

I am 5 centimeters dilated.

"I am not going to ask or bother you about an epidural. If you want one, you need to say it." Sarah tells me. She knows I didn't originally plan to have one, but that I am open to the possibility.

Upstairs in my birthing bed, my toes pitch the sheet into taller and taller tents. The contractions become tidal. I close my eyes to breathe. In the nose. Out the mouth. In nose. Out mouth. In out in out in out...

"I want an epidural." I hear myself say.

I don't like the next minutes. My body betrays me, succumbing to spinal numbness. My mother won't admit it, but there are risks with epidurals. There is an increased chance one will need a vacuum birth, Pitocin and possibly even a Cesarean Section. I know this and yet pain interjects, pleading for relief by a seemingly medicinal miracle. It is a complicated application that requires an I.V., which my inexperienced nurse attempts to jab into my left wrist bone -during a contraction- before giving up and calling a more capable colleague. My punishment, I tell myself.

The anesthesiologist arrives. I sit on the side of the bed.
Have I ever had my wisdom teeth out?

Yes.

Any complications?

No.

He goes to the other side, to where my spine rises like a miniature mountain range. He won't do anything during a contraction, he assures me. And when it's time, he needs me to try really hard to not move. It's too late now, I resign. He is inserting the needle. With an immediacy akin to a hot shower soaking chilled skin, the medicine soothes me into stillness. I lay down. The world seems to quiet. Sarah recommends I rest. She will monitor me from the nurses' station and prepare the midwife who is coming in at 7 a.m. It is just after 6 a.m now. Very soon after she leaves, however, a contraction grips me. She returns, staying to coach me through the contractions that follow. Just before 7a.m., the nurse and my midwife are having me roll onto my left side, no, right, no, left. The machines can't consistently catch the baby's heart rate, I'm told. Sarah decides then that she needs to go in and get the baby's heart rate with something like a tiny cork screw that attaches to the top of the baby's head. It's called Internal Fetal Heart Rate Monitoring. She is calm and so I do not panic, but regret is here now, an enemy as real as dirt. I hate myself, but blindfold my fear and self-loathing with a mask of grit.

"OK, on this next contraction, I need you to bear down and push." Sarah tells me.

I feel trapped by time. There is nowhere to go but through this moment. And so I face it, but tear streaked and scared.

"It's happening." I warn them. I pull on the backs of my thighs and begin to push against the brick wall that is birth.

Sarah calls a code. The baby's heart rate is dipping too much. We have to get the baby out. Suddenly doctors and more nurses stand at the foot of the bed. My eyes are mostly closed, listening to this scene is frightening enough. They have me go on my left side, no, try the right, no onto my knees. The machine cords are tangling and all I can think is, if only I hadn't numbed my legs, I could be standing. A young female doctor is going to perform a vacuum extraction while I push. They can only use the tool three times. After that, well, they don't actually tell me. Sarah is behind the doctors. When I look for her she comes to my side, rubs my leg and offers me her encouragement. The vacuum is attached. I hate this. I really hate this. I hold my husband's hand, but fear I am breaking his slender bones. On the next contraction I need to push, I'm told. The nurse presses the oxygen mask to my mouth. I inhale fast and deep. Get to the baby, breath, get to the baby.

"I'm getting the next contraction." I tell them.

I push then with all of myself. I don't know if anything is happening. Among the doctor discussion, I hear the words, "emergency c-section."

"I'm getting the next contraction." I say then. I am nearly hyperventilating. I might pass out, I tell them, but push anyway. No one tries to stops me. I must push her out. I push. I breathe. I push. I breathe. Push. Push. Push. I feel her head drop from me. Inhale. Push. Her body slides out. Seconds later, she is on on my belly and breathing by herself. She is perfect. She has purple hands and toes and this little coo of a cry. Most of the doctors who helped me birth my baby leave. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the c-section surgeons leave too when they see her. The placenta is pushed out. Scott calls it an octopus. Sarah shows me this organ my body built to house my fetal marvel and then stitches me up.

Amelia May's eyes are swollen and there is a ring where the vacuum clamped onto her little head. Chubby cheeks. Wet brown hair. Fuzzy ears. My body made her. The relief I feel makes me weightless, despite my weariness. I'll revisit regret later. For now, joy prevails.

While I am Waiting

I have such a generous uterus, who'd very much like to not make me nervous. So while I sleep, she quietly practices her contracting. But sometimes I awake to her unmistakable quake and wait for the clutching to dull before rolling onto my left hip and folded arm. The bones within my extremities are drowning in blood. "Insurance," my midwife calls it. A reserve of red for my veins to drink from, were they to thirst after I deliver baby from womb to world. How strange to become one again. To lay on my belly and fear falling down the stairs less. To separate. The day she's due moans like a war horn. When will my loins shake her from me? When will I lay her to sleep in a dry bed of sheets, swaddled in printed cotton, while breath circles her mouth? When will I touch the hair on her head, kiss her cheeks, see her? I am not ashamed to make the claim that perhaps these ten months of witnessing the wisdom of my anatomy as it constructs a person, might be the greatest of my little life's work.

Small

My midwife is concerned that I haven't been gaining weight. I blame my lazy summer appetite, but she's afraid it might be something else and she's sending me in for a second ultrasound. I smile, swallowing the hot guilt as it wafts up from my gut. I try not to cry or vomit or...cry vomit.  

Before I am home, I stop for a steak salad with rice, beans and a side of guacamole. Then I eat an entire pint of coconut frozen yogurt.  

Late that night, Scott and I lie in bed laughing. I have propped myself up on three pillows to prevent the passage of tiny acid bubbles from popping against my esophagus, but I am burping coconut steak anyway. My fingers scan my broadened belly in anticipation for my daughter's nightly dance. I wait, but she's quiet as a wallflower. I am in a lighthouse, searching across the uninterrupted line of the horizon. I see no ships. My hands start to sweat as they shine their dim lights across the placid sea.  
Left. 
Right. 
Down. 
Up. 
Right. 
Up. 
Down. 
Left.

I sit up and hang my legs over the side of the bed, ready to run. I need her body to move inside of mine.  

Why isn't she moving? 
Move Baby. 
Move! 

Sobs suddenly drag me into a drowning ---a self-induced hyperventilation that punches the air from between my shaking lungs. 

My gluttony was too late. I have starved her. 

Scott presses one hand around her and I, while the other searches the Internet. Ten movements within two hours is enough, normal. He reads. Then he feels her move. She is awake and jostling. Perhaps the echo of my weeping reached into her dreams or maybe she was just in there intently listening to the laughter of her parents. I can't tell. I don't know. But I am grateful that she has nudged beneath the sky's blue curtain to poke the triangle of her boat into sight once again. I open my mouth and chase the train of my breath until it is caught and even the caboose is swallowed. I lie back down. 

The ultrasound is scheduled for Thursday. Scott has work. I go alone. In the small dim office, I lay on loud paper and lift my shirt. Warm gel is squirted and cloth is tucked in to protect my sweatpants. The wand skates across my skin and white pixels make moving pictures on the black screen. Click, click, clack, tap, tap, tap, the ultrasound tech types. She prints pictures of my baby's profile. She is practice breathing, I am told. There appears to be no problems with the umbilical cord or the fluid. She's on the small side, about 4 pounds 12 ounces, she estimates. But not in the dangerously small zone for my being 35 weeks pregnant. I thank her, take my pictures and place them into my purse. I am light with relief. 

On the small side. That's ok. She's not too small. Not scary small. 
            
However, the next day I get a call. They want me in for weekly ultrasounds. I will eat more! I am eating more! I want this to be enough. It isn't. Guilt returns to steal territory in my stomach, but I feed it ice cream, butter, bacon, and whole milk anyway. 

Two weeks later, I have gained seven pounds and my belly has stretched two centimeters. Keep eating. Three full meals and snacks.

"It's very important at this point that you eat a lot of protein." I'm told. 

I am trying. And baby rewards my efforts by dancing day and night. 

At my next ultrasound, the tech says to Scott and I, "For being on the small side, she's got some chubby cheeks!" 

"She gets that from you." My husband says pointing.

She does. She does get them from me!  

The Tricks of Time

At night, she ripples my stretched skin from within. A four-limbed fish I will one day size for bathing suits and usher to puddles, lakes and the Atlantic's edge. She sits, splashing salt water, wincing. Waves of brown water fill her rain boots as she stomps down sidewalks. She makes muddy moats with me and pinches her nose as she dunks into the deep-end and leaps from wobbly wooden docks. I take her hiking, breaking on boulders for milk and baby belching. She then curls into my collar bone, sleeping to the sound of steps and the smell of bug spray, sweat and pine. She grasps my fingers to stand and when she is ready to run, I take her to fields of soft grassy ground. She rolls down hills and explores the tops of mountains, staircases, and dusty bookcases. We pick apples and outfits and outings. We follow music and dance to it. I crouch at the bottom of red static slides, catching her beneath the arms. I read her books. I sing her songs. I give her paint and easels of paper. I tie strings of balloons to her doughy wrists and share with her my watermelon, ice cream and stories. She tells me her tales and first fibs and confessions. She asks me her questions and I give her my answers.

I've finished teaching for the moment, leaving the children who ask me daily about the baby in my belly --their little hands reaching to touch the mound in my middle. My days now are mostly solitary and slow. I wait in what feels like the past, worrying time will one day turn on its side and when I see my whole life, years will look thin as inked pages pressed between a worn cardboard binding. When my sister had her baby girl last summer she didn't want to miss anything so she stopped sleeping --not entirely of course, but enough to make you wonder. My sister would stare at her beautiful sleeping creation for hours. I understand it now. From the moment I thrust my biological opus from between my legs and hold her in my hesitant hands, I worry those newborn months will begin to blur and the days will pass not by seconds or minutes, but leap from feedings to changings to rockings --swallowing hours of mid-day nappings-- and lag only during hushed early morning lullabies. 

Many mothers have more than one child. And now I wonder, is it because they hope the repetition will help them to remember? Or perhaps, the second, third, forth times, they will have conquered time, paused it into picnics, printed pictures, lists, recipes, letters and collected cards. Maybe the mothers of many reach middle age with their lives volumes deep, an entire library of minutes, of shiny chronological passages to read when lonesome for the loudness of infant cries, sibling quarrels and the clattering of moments as they pile like dirty dishes in the kitchen sink.



   

I dream she is born with a full set of teeth.

She is a frightening thing. 

I sit on a curved purple velvet couch with a steep padded back. I wait for her eyes to close before peaking over the upholstered wall. No one notices her or me. And so it is then, inside the mystifying maze of my dream state, that I turn the babe around and begin to send her back in from whence she came, up between my legs --as if she isn't done yet. 

I wake before her head enters. I roll onto my side and sink into the soft pillows of my childhood room. The sun curves around the canary colored walls and warms me. I slide my fingers over the firm fruit that flattens my belly button and wonder if anyone else has ever dreamed that dream. 

The nights are strangest. Most mornings, I wake with a specific expectancy for a flat fetus-free belly. As if she is just air I might fart out. My fear of losing her through sheet flapping and sleepy rollovers extends to my worry of complications; of extended hospital stays where they don't know what's wrong just that something isn't right. During the days, I think about names, diapers and how my folds will hold sweat in July. I still stand naked in the bathroom mirror, staring at the sight of nature making a person inside my person. It is fascinating and weird.         

He gives me grapes, pickles and a fresh flower bouquet for Mother's Day. He writes a card that carves a lump into my throat and causes my lips to land on his. He is so excited to be a father. He wants to be the first to call me a mother. He isn't, but he is the first to weigh and water the word with love. 

Tonight, as I sit wondering, she swims and drinks the watermelon juice I have eaten for supper. I have a cough and a nose that clogs and overflows like an abused toilet. I hope I don't embarrass her too much. 

I wonder what it'll feel like to see her and know that I would never send her back in....even if she is a bit busted looking.