Second One

In the first weeks after June was born, she would wake in the middle of the night and after she ate, she would just be awake.  Quiet alert, I think they call it.  Later she began to fuss, to be hard to settle after those wake-ups, but for some amount of time that I don’t quite remember (more than a week?  less than two?) she was content to nurse and then just lay on the bed next to me.  I would change her diaper, and put lanolin on my nipples, drink some water, eat a peanut butter sandwich my mother had left on the bedside table.  I would turn on a low light and look at her, and not think about Grace or laundry or lunches or phone calls.  (Chris was sleeping in another room– in exchange for taking care of Grace, day and night, this time around she got to opt out of the baby night shift.)  Often I would read while June nursed or lay quietly on the bed, and when my mother came to take the baby in the morning she would find us both sleeping in a nest of New Yorkers and burp cloths.  I was reading voraciously then, devouring profiles and book reviews, articles about restaurants I would never eat in and plays that would be in revival before I got a chance to see them.  It was all fascinating to me, and I was not too tired yet– my mind and my body knew something about sleep deprivation by now, and about the dark territory of the middle of the night, and I did not fear it, I was not bothered by being awake at 1, and 2 and 3 o’clock in the morning.  After more than three years of caring for a child, I had made peace with the night.

Later I became tired.  Later.  But early, early I was fine.  Early I would feel the wild rushes of hormones, the piercing prolactin love and desire for the baby and I would feel like I could do this forever.  Early everything and everyone was charged– one smell of witch hazel as I wrung it from the gauze soaking by the sink and I wept for Grace’s gentle birth and June’s wild one and the simple fact that there would not be another; one look at Chris filling my underwear drawer with breast pads, clean and warm from the dryer, and I did not think I could bear the luck of her.  Early I could plunge the wells of gratitude for my strength and fast recovery as easily as I could sink with the fear that those seemingly enormous clots would not stop coming out of me and I would be dead before morning.

When Grace was born I was pulled under by these shifts; I was knocked over by one after the other and I emerged between them, sputtering, seaweed in my hair, and barely caught my breath before the next one bowled me over.  When June was born I was under those same strong waves, but I knew something about them—when to dive, when to try and keep myself above.  With June, I felt the thrill of that first smack of water, and the ride.  With June the feelings were powerful and beautiful and temporary and sometimes even fun.  Because by the time she was born I knew that most of my emotional life is spent in the shallows, and while I am grateful for that, I loved some of those dives.  I really did.

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June stopped nursing a few weeks before her first birthday.  It wasn’t my choice for her to stop.  I pumped for a few days to keep my supply up, and offered her my breast at naptime and before bed, but she refused and refused again until I stopped offering.  And then we were done.  Now she is content to have her pacifier and the left side of the refrigerator (lord, can this 17-pound child eat) and I am sovereign in this body once again.   June does things on her own time.  Sometimes she makes us wait longer than we think we can, sometimes she doesn’t make us wait at all.

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Yesterday we had a party for June.  It was mostly a party for Grace, and for Chris and me.  I made chili and peanut butter sandwiches and Peri from The Creamery made the world’s best cupcakes.  Some of our dearest friends came over to celebrate with us, friends who have offered us a year of love and dinners and playdates and baby clothes and advice about sleep and food allergies and sisterhood.  We sang Happy Birthday to June, and I held her, and she held onto my shirt and looked around at everyone, and for the first time was that lovely mix of shy and pleased that we all are when people sing for us.  She is one!  I thought then, as I had been thinking all day, and all week really, as her birthday came and went.  She is one, the baby is one, and soon the baby won’t be a baby anymore.

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I am making a picture book for her, one of those Shutterfly books where you download lots of pictures and then they bind them into a little book.  I hope it will make up for the fact that we don’t have nearly as many pictures of her as we have of Grace.  When I look at the early pictures, ones taken when she was two or three or four months old, I have a hard time distinguishing her from the baby she is now.  I know that sounds crazy, I know that I’m supposed to hardly believe how big she has gotten and how much she has changed, but June is so close to me, she has been so very close to me since the day she was born, that looking at those pictures is sort of like looking at pictures of my own hand.  She looks a bit different, yes, but mostly she looks like June.

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When June was born she wasn’t breathing and the midwife tried and tried to get her going so that I could hold her right away, so that she wouldn’t have to go up on the cart with the doctors.  But she couldn’t, and so she passed June over and they suctioned her and did whatever else doctors do to newborns and soon enough she was breathing.  During the moments when she was not, Chris and I called out to her, called out her name and told her she was going to be fine, and that we were right there, right there ready to hold her.  When she was stable and the nurse brought her over to me, I pulled my shirt over my head so hard that it ripped.  I wanted to hold June on my bare chest, I wanted her skin on mine, just like it had been with Grace.  When I held June she looked up at me and her face seemed to say, Oh Mama, you didn’t need to bother with your shirt. Can’t you see I’m yours?