Side-Sleeping

She squirms, scrunches her legs up, knees crooked, and tilts to her right. Always to her right. In a little while, she will dig her face into the mattress, twisting her torso even more, but the end of the mattress blocks further rotation and she is, for the moment, stymied. Slow rhythmic breathing attests to the singular fact: all this has been done while she is yet asleep. Soon, she will slowly uncurl; it is barely perceptible in the grey of our darkened bedroom, but you suddenly are sure that her arm has unbent, her hand unfurled like a flag of surrender. If you're unlucky, her frustrated attempts thrust consciousness upon her and she begins to cry herself awake. If you're lucky, she sighs and continues to sleep. But if you're very lucky, she does it all over again while you smother giggles and try to convince yourself to stop watching and go to sleep.

A Scale is Never Neutral

This morning, I walked into the women's restroom in our administration building and was surprised to find a scale tucked into the corner. My thoughts went something like the following:

Why is this here?

Is there one in the men's bathroom too? I bet there isn't!

Oh, calm down - maybe someone is just trying to lose some weight and this is helping her.

But still! how is this not a suggestion to every woman in this building that she needs to measure up and might be failing?

Who can I complain to about this?

Wait, I wonder how much I'm weighing these days, after Al's birth...hmmmm.....

Wait, if I weigh myself, am I showing myself totally hostage to an image-based assessment of myself?

Relax and stop overanalyzing - just have a look at how much you tip the scale

[check to see if I can read it without my glasses]

Shoes or no shoes? No shoes.

[Result: just shy of 150, near my pre-pregnancy weight]

Hunh. That was unexpected.  I weigh practically what I weighed before, but still have lots of new pooches.  How does that work? Will they ever go away?

Should I feel guilty that I weighed myself?

...Well, at least now I have something to write my 500 words about!

As a woman in this culture, a scale is never neutral; it poses a dilemma and a temptation. 

During most of my pregnancy, I ignored the scale except when at the doctor's office.  Since I lost weight early on due to feeling sick to my stomach, I was happy to be gaining weight, happy to eat just about any full meal, no matter how atypical.  Somehow, In 'N Out burger never seemed to pose problems to my appetite, even though home-cooked chicken stew was noxious to me.  I'm not even sure what I weighed towards the end (I think just over 170, just shy of 25 pounds of gain) and I didn't care what I weighed in the first 6 weeks after birth. But after those first two months, people start wondering aloud at you about your weight. My dear mother, bless her, started hinting that we should get out and walk the pounds off together. I was (and still am) still wearing maternity clothes and began to wonder when (and if) I would get a semblance of my body back. The necessity of buying new (and bigger) clothes loomed before me. Even affirming comments ("wow, you already look great!") prompt internal criticism ("I guess she can't see the pooch, and the extra loads in the legs and arms that tighten my sleeves and necessitate wide-leg pants"). 

My body is not only a bit larger; it has changed its overall shape from pear to hourglass/apple. After years of dressing as a "pear", I no longer know how to dress myself. Nursing has wreaked havoc on my ability to fit into tops: to get shirts to fit on my ample top (and be easy to nurse with), they have to be huge on the bottom as well as long for my lengthy torso.  Hence, I'm still wearing maternity shirts! And let's not talk about bathing suits beyond the observation that with a long back and a nursing upper half, the tankini is the only option.  As there are almost no modest tankini's with the ability to support my upper half, hoochie-mama here I come. 

Nursing mothers typically need to consume lots of water and about 500 extra calories a day. I'm hungry all the time, and mostly crave sweets. Just drinking water doesn't do it for me, but give me some juice (or even better, a Jamba Juice!) and I'm in heaven...until the extra calories pull me back to purgatory.  Now I feel that I have "watch what I eat" and just be a bit hungry all the time so I don't gain weight.

So here I am, an educated, confident woman, slightly obsessed with her weight and body. Much as I know my own value in the sight of God and those who love me is secure, I am not immune to the siren song of the scale and what I think it purports to say about me. 

The dilemma posed to me was to know or not to know a measure that says little about my overall health or about my self.  Idle curiosity versus a pretense of indifference. If I truly were indifferent, it would be no dilemma.

The temptation posed to me was to use the scale's measure as a measure of things beyond my weight: of my self-discipline, of my time management, of my desirability to Pancho, of my professional stature (sadly, pudgy women professors command less respect). It could never have been registered as anything but a rebuke.  I could have weighed in at my college weight (135) and still felt chastened. 135? Nice going! Now you have to weigh even less to lose this extra pudge! That it doesn't matter what the scale says shows how I already tie the scale's measure to a critical view of my body and my self. In that sense, the scale only furnishes me an opportunity to articulate what I already think about myself. It is a mirror only in the sense that it shows me what I already imagine myself to be. Thus, it is no mirror at all, but a canvas upon which I paint my self-caricature.

Freed from sin and from the wounds inflicted on me by our image-obsessed culture, I will one day relish tiptoe-ing onto the scale out of a true and holy curiosity that can look at any number as a fact about the world and about myself to be celebrated and enjoyed. I will be able to walk into a bathroom with a scale and regard it as a child, who will feed a quarter to to that giant scale staunchly stationed on the train platform. Neat! I get to see how much I weigh - how fun!

Daddy's Dodger Girl

Al has been taking forever to get to sleep lately, so after a long nursing, I passed her off to daddy to finish the night-night routine. But, a Dodgers game is on, and lo and behold, what do I see but daddy and little girl peeking out around the hallway at the end of an exciting inning. Al had been pretty drowsy, but all of a sudden she realized the game was on and jerked awake, alert to the crucial part of the inning. Daddy!!! It's a half an hour later now, and I hear her sputtering in our bedroom, wanting to watch the rest of the game. I should have just let them watch the game, instead of giving daddy the "are you kidding me?" look and shooing them back into the boring, dark bedroom while the Dodgers took the lead during the 6th.

I guess she's daddy's little Dodger girl. My fault for dressing her in the Dodgers shirt this afternoon.

Laughing takes work

A few minutes after Alison's first laugh, we recorded the following:



Clearly, it was just a one shot-deal, and the first of many times that we realized that while she always laughs in company, she never laughs at what we find funny. Later that day, we did manage to catch her at it, but only with quite a lot of effort on mama's part:



In fact, when we laugh, it tends to startle her into solemnity. So how exactly did she learn how to laugh???

A meets Daddy

Whither my girl?

My chatterbox seems to have gone into hiding. From when she was only a few weeks old, you could hold her head in your hands and coo back and forth with her for ages (ages = 15-20 min in baby-time). Early last week she began to increase the volume of her hiyas, gurgles, tongue-rolls, and ha-uuiuuhhhs, but she's gone strangely quiet of late.

It's hard not to ask myself if I did something wrong. Did I make her more passive by wearing her in the sling too much? Am I not playing enough or engaged enough with her? Am I letting her sleep too long because it's convenient for me? Did we shush her too much? ... I suspect these to be foolish questions driven by my perfectionism, not by her good.

Or is she just becoming more interested in observing the world and therefore splitting her time between quiet observation & playing with lips, palate, and tongue?

I don't know her well enough to say. She is my enigma as well as her own. We stare at each other: I, wondering who I'm seeing; she, wondering at her seeing, but perhaps not yet at me.

The Sea

It seems that sometimes, for her, existence is so overwhelming that it feels like a burden, and then she cries and cries, sputtering, choking, gasping for air like a drowning woman. And I lean over her, wanting to throw her my self as a lifeline, but perhaps offering her only more waves of the sea to buffet her little soul. She stares at me with incomprehension widening her eyes and grimacing her face. She is dry, recently sated with food, and not in physical pain, but she has been gripped by something outside of her control, let alone her understanding. To be held is her deepest desire; all else is the vast, heaving sea: my murmurs and little touches, my fingers stroking her forehead, my eyes locked woth hers, my arm cradling her body in the car seat, all wind and waves to her. But still I must buffet her with my presence, for I have nothing else to give. And since she has been given to me and I to her, I know that is enough to be faithful to the call that is also the gift. I cannot mend this plight, but it is not mine to mend. It is mine to bear with her, and hers to bear with me.

Jesus didn't have Pampers

You don't really ponder much at 3am in the morning with a whimpering baby trying to communicate her needs to you, but as I changed her second diaper in 30 minutes...

(aside: she's really sneaky about doing her business right after you changed a diaper that was merely wet but you felt too guilty to leave on her, even though Pampers is so darn efficient at wicking moisture away from the skin you weren't sure she was urinating at all at first)

...and marveled groggily at diaper technology...

(in a stroke of brilliance, Pampers has a little stripe that turns green when wet, thus notifying you when you need to invest another $0.23 or so in their remarkable company. Al is quite the avid investor)

I realized that Jesus didn't have Pampers.

And Mary was taking care of a newborn in a stable without easy access to a washing machine or a host of eager relatives willing to help her in those early days (they didn't even have family housing, for heaven's sake!). So the Word who created all that there is humbled himself to the point of periodically sitting in his own waste and having to cry out to one of his own creatures for help and relief.

We burn through our wipees and cloths and disposables and desitin at an alarming rate with a little one who eats every couple of hours or so and digests what she eats in 90 minutes; these luxuries are in handy little dispensers next to anti-bacterial hand gel for mommy and daddy after the clean-up is through. We call this a stressful period of life with a newborn, but oh how easy it has been made! How often did Jesus have to chafe in a soiled diaper of some sort due to poverty, I wonder? How often did He whimper and cry for relief of His discomfort?

The nitty-gritty of the humility of the Son in the Incarnation strikes me more and more. How often I have agreed that for the Son of God to become a baby is to become so vulnerable, and yet the depth of that vulnerability is in the details, not in the easy generalization. Jesus required near-constant care and attention to the most basic of needs for living creatures, every day, for months on end. He who is life to us chose to need a young woman to sustain His body and to train His limbs, to teach His lips to smile and His mouth to laugh. As I care for our little one, changing yet another diaper and wiping up half-digested milk from her face, I remember Him and worship.

Such is the glory of our God!

Christmas and other babies

Christmas was low-key - we just hung out with baby while the rest of the family were elsewhere celebrating. They eventually brought us some of the dinner and cuddled Al while we ate it. I cried while listening to Sixpence None the Richer's "Last Christmas". I thought more about the vulnerability of the Son as a wee baby and the incomprehensible humility of that (diapers! spitup! can't hold his own head up!). I thought of the women of the past and around the world who may have lost their baby in the kind of labor I could have had sans drugs, and the blessing of the knowledge we have of the human body and how to help labor along.

I remembered Eve's "with the help of the Lord I have brought forth a manchild" - not a mere platitude of thanks. She had never seen a baby born before; no experienced mother was available to explain to her how to help her bear the pain and what the process would be like. More and more I wonder if "the help of the Lord" was quite direct and engaged in an embodied fashion of some sort--an incredible mercy in what appears to be the grip of the curse. In Paradise Lost, Eve contemplates killing herself so that she won't spread the curse to other humans born of her, but our God is bigger than mere damage control. Amazing. Still thinking about this - Eve and Mary and the seed of the woman.

You can call her Al

Vital stats:

• DOB: 23 December, 3:26am
  
• 6 lb. 13 oz.
• 19 1/4 in.
• 25 hours of labor beginning around 2am when Ladybug sprang a leak; took 18 hours to get to 4cm and then held there while contractions got stronger and stronger and I got tireder and tireder and Al went nowhere fast; last 6-7 hours were mercifully helped along by drugs with about 45 min. of pushing at the end (because the midwife was slow in getting ready to catch).
  
• copious quantities of light brown hair
• daddy's feet
• long fingers
• can do daddy's raised eyebrow trick
• perhaps right-handed (oh well)