On my clothes this summer have been blueberries, blackberries,
peanut butter,
and other marks from the mouth of my baby daughter,
I think a cool addition to bridal showers and baby showers is storytelling. I know it happens without planning it... but does it? Or do we spend the entire four hours catching up and never get to the event? I'd love to attend a bridal shower where we the gift-giving is optional but the telling of a story is expected. That's the thing you bring. You wrap it up in a little forethought, and you limit it to three minutes or so. A bridal story shower, or a bridal telling (and a baby telling!). I want stories of real life more than I want the stuff. (Thank you for the stuff, I needed the stuff, too, though.)
Stories are the gift that grows the courage to step forward into the next part of life.
There isn't room in our houses for all the photos and letters and journals of our forebears. But we can tell the stories.
For a bridal telling, I would want my one friend to relate the story of their first night together, in all its honesty and heartbreak of disappointment. I would want my other friend to tell us about how she burnt dinner very often during her first two years of marriage, and served those meals wearing only an apron. It was a fun thing, not sad. You have to hear her tell it.
I would tell about our honeymoon in all its hilarity and spice, things that don't belong on a blog future employers may find.
For a baby telling, I would want my mother-in-law to talk about breastfeeding, how every time her first child latched, a white hot pain shot through her; every time, and she didn't give up. And Shelby to tell of her two c-sections, one traumatic, one peaceful.
I would tell about my fears, and almost suffocating Tessa by accident when we co-slept and she was swaddled. I shudder to think about it as I write. I would tell about how after nursing and nursing AND nursing on and off for hours, right around 9:30 PM one night, she fell asleep so deeply that I could lay her in her bassinet, and there she slept for hours. It happened all at once, just as I was about to despair, she surprised me by being a growing human being. I tell you, in the first month, I was exultant and miserable all at once, and didn't know if I was loving her. I was just trying to keep up and to take care of us both without hurting anyone's feelings in the meantime.
There is something pretty important about being surrounded by other women when you cross these thresholds. So we buy stuff. We go to Target and get gifts and wrap them, then bring them to the party to be unwrapped and suddenly all that paper is a burden and we throw it away, and pile up the goods in bags, after all... These are important items for life, yes. But our stories are our treasures.
"I see on this intake form that you're asking for my social. Why do you need that, though?" I asked the secretary politely.
She conferred with the secretary next to her, who had heard the exchange. "Tell her we need it as a secondary identification."
She turned back to me, "We need it as a secondary identification. You would be surprised how many people have the same names."
1. You have no idea what would surprise me.
2. The only people who need my social security number are people who are paying or lending me money. When the eye doctor starts paying me money instead of marking up eyeglass frames by 400%, I'll give 'em my SSN.
3. Fact: As of this writing, no one else has my name.
So I didn't give it. But the secretary I was not talking to said, quite audibly to me, "Tell her we at least have to have the last four digits." So I wrote my birth year there.
This whole scene was irritating to me, a person with a social security number. But what was merely loitering in the back of my mind came dashing to the front: people who are here without documentation would start to sweat in this moment. This tiny fit of solidarity does not move the needle on justice for folks who have come here for legit reasons, and I know this.
So what will move the needle toward justice? I'm not currently seeking out ways to help dismantle and re-create the immigration system. I suppose I'm waiting for a chance to fall into my lap. But if I wait, it will likely look like standing up for the little guy. Standing up for the little guy, as a little guy myself, is sure to land me in trouble. I'm just gearing up. I'm getting myself used to a little bit of trouble, making a little bit of noise, trying to see how the little guys would be treated if they were there, so I can stand with them.
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" 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, 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.
I don't have big events happening right now as I wait for our child to be born, maybe this week, maybe today. But I'm dying to write something down, anything, because I go back through my blog every now and then and wonder at the long silences: wasn't anything happening? The truth is, a sea change is taking place, but it's so quiet, there's no event to narrate, no pithy interactions with strangers to laugh at later.
So I went back through my Google Photos and chose a month and year at random to think and write about. From this exercise, February 1, 2015, I found pictures of a baby dedication! It seems fitting.
Maya, Josh, Nora, Andre, and Henry were being dedicated that day. They are all chubby-cheeked and beyond cute. Maya has these perfectly-shaped eyes and she stares off into the congregation from her father's arms, seeing her larger family from a new vantage. Josh, only a few months old, has his thick hair parted in the middle and is dressed in a dapper baby suit, complete with tie and pocket square. Nora looks at the Pastor with some curiosity at his touching her head, but is maybe ready to believe it is a blessing. Andre's mom, Janelle, holds him close and he looks positively angelic, even if half his face is covered by his pacifier. Henry might be the most baby-looking of them all, for some reason. His duck-fluff hair is barely settled on his sweet, round head. He is wide-eyed and alert, but quietly sitting in his father's arms, facing outward.
These little babies are a bunch of five-year-olds now! I see them on their parents' Instagram and on Zoom and through the occasional email; they're doing wonderful things like holding snakes, going to school, making friends in new places, learning to feed their baby brother. I hope I never underestimate seeing kids growing up close ever again. It broke my heart when I returned from Morocco, the growing I had missed seeing weekly and monthly at church. And now! The pandemic separates us, and our recent move, and several months, and in one case, an ocean, and I tell you, digital messages are something, but they're nothing compared to looking around the room at West End Church, and seeing each little kid troop in from Sunday School with their sticker sheets to sit with their families not quietly. I miss you and your kids, West End. So much.
