What I Do When She Naps

NB: Please. I know how privileged my experience of Covid is. I'm not suffering here. I know my brothers and sisters are. I don't write here, though, in order to express a need for sympathy. I write in order to find this post again, perhaps on a snowy afternoon in February 2025, when my baby is four and a half years old and taking her afternoon nap, and we've come home from a church service. I'll read this and remember. 

Covid was simultaneous with my pregnancy and the birth of our daughter last fall. We had already decided that I would take a year off of teaching to be with Tess, and Jake already had a sweet deal where he worked from home four out of five days. When we look at our life changes, it's hard to see what changed because of having a child and what changed because of the pandemic. 

I miss smiling at strangers, going to church, meeting for coffee, going to restaurants, birthday parties, and any parties. In fact, church is its own category of things I miss: singing together, passing babies around, standing in the kitchen and giving hugs to anyone who happens to come in, seeing kids grow up, and hearing a sermon the whole way through, without lag and with an open mind because it's not just more content—it's someone's thoughts who I know, who feels real. All of that is strictly pandemic loss. 

How do I even begin to narrate the losses you experience when you have a child? Let me just say the hardest thing for me is the two together, the losses that result from having a baby during a pandemic: I can't share my baby. I can't sit in the church service while you walk around the back of the room with her, a long-held West End tradition if ever there was one.  

And you can't come over for coffee and give me a hug and tell me how sweet this stage is and to soak it up because it goes by so fast. I wish you could, because while you tell me that, you could hold her in your arms and smile at her and notice the birthmark at the nape of her neck. You'd see what wonderful, toothless smiles she will give back. You'd hold her in front of the mirror and laugh as she talks to herself, delighted to find another baby who she understands exactly. Because there aren't very many babies for her to hang with just now. 

When Tessa is taking one of her four naps a day, I get a few sets of 30-45 minutes to do things that require two hands. If I don't come at those time periods with a plan, it's very likely I'll mope about how many things I miss. She's napping right now. I'm moping right now. 

Textbook

 "Textbook" has been the word that keeps coming to mind as I learn new things about pregnancy, birth, and babyhood. Before finding out I was pregnant, I thought it might be difficult or a particularly long wait to have children. It wasn't. 

I had a textbook pregnancy that started with textbook symptoms and ended with a textbook labor. As the experience progressed, I kept repeating the word "textbook" to myself like a mantra, reminding myself that my experience would probably be statistically sound, the middle of each bell curve, nothing to worry about. 

Our story is not harrowing, and I'm so grateful. 

Tessa is continuing the progression by hitting the teeny milestones to the day. Born exactly a week after her due date, she has grown within the center margins, she cluster fed at week three for 48 hours, which almost did me in, which is also normal. She smiled at week five-and-a-half, and cluster fed at week six for 48 hours. 

I give thanks to God for each normal day, each one both ordinary in a textbook and extraordinary to me.  

 

We Have a Daughter

 We have a daughter!

We have a daughter, can you believe it!?

She has big, trusting eyes, and Jake and I both swear she's smiled at us sometime in the last week, her fifth week of life outside the womb. 

Almost as unbelievable is that I went through labor. 

I labored at home from 1 AM to 10:30 AM, supported by Jake and our doula, then finally knelt on the backseat while Jake drove us to the hospital. There's a story in there I'd like to tell elsewhere, but this is the quick version. When we arrived at the labor and delivery room, we were surrounded by a team of health workers, asking questions, getting measurements, taking blood, testing for Covid-19. Contractions were on top of each other by then, so I don't remember a lot of that. The midwife said I was measuring at 6 centimeters when we arrived at 11:30. 

 By 12-something I was at 8 centimeters. I could not stand it anymore, though. I was in the thick of labor, throwing up and doing all sorts of things that I won't narrate to you. I was losing my concentration, getting scared, and I said so, "I'm afraid! I'm afraid! What do I do?" The nurse to my left kept coaching me to breathe out the contraction, breathe it out. The doctor offered an epidural, and I said, "yes, I want that!"

Jake reminded me that my goal had been to go unmedicated, a goal I made so I could recover quickly. I said I wanted the epidural. The doc had already called for the anesthesiologist, then measured dilation one more time. He said in a monotone way that I was at 10 centimeters. I recognized that as the golden number! Why was no one celebrating? "That's good, right!?" I said somehow. I was already pushing. A knock at the door and the anesthesiologist was sent away by a nurse, who said, "we're going to have the baby instead. Thanks!"

Pushing felt almost like a relief after the last two hours of ever-more-intense work. Five pushes brought Theresa into the daylight! 

They whisked her away because of a meconium scare, and Jake followed to the other side of the room to see our baby. He returned to my side, all awonder. I was shivering a lot, and worried about shivering, having never heard of it happening, and worried that something had happened to our baby. I had to ask a distracted Jake, and he told me about our Theresa, that she was fine and perfect as could be, and I shivered in joy as they stitched me up. 

We had been in the hospital for about an hour and a half before she was born. And so our new life has begun.