DAY ONE AS MOM, UNSETTLED AT HOME
By Susan M. Henderson
 

We had been home only hours.  I didn't dare sleep.  Fatigue couldn't compete with the fear of being completely in charge of this new baby. He lay against me, fidgety but stiff.  He didn't fall into my arms the way other people's babies seemed to.  I felt stretched out, but nothing hurt yet.  I was still too numb.

David never held a baby before.  He kept smelling the baby's head and looking at him, already in love and already seeing me as a mom.  I still worried about the tests done in pregnancy that gave the baby a high chance of abnormalities.  I kept checking him for something wrong, for something that would grow into a deformity.  I was terrified I wouldn't love him any more than this.

I held my breast toward his mouth, jiggled the nipple against his cheek.  He turned toward it, but we were both clumsy, and giving him a drink was not a long comforting suck but more like drinking from a water fountain when someone else is holding the button.

My body felt light now, but was fat in all the places I didn't anticipate.  I was not fat up top, as my milk hadn't come in, and my weight was only seven pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight.  But my back was fat, and the backs of my arms, and my hips looked like my mother's.  This was a mother's body, but I didn't feel like one yet.

I looked at my baby and tried to call him by the name on his birth certificate, but it sounded stupid now.

When David and I tossed the baby name books aside and said, "That's it!" it sounded like a great name.  It sounded like a boy's name.

The baby finally opened his mouth wide and chomped down.  It hurt.  In 20 minutes I'd switch him to the other breast, then I'd expect to feed again in four more hours.  It worked that way in the midwifery and it worked that way in the books I'd read.

David fed me a cough drop to distract me from the pain then curled behind me and  tried to sleep.

"How can you fall asleep?" I said.

"Because this is so nice," he said.
 
I looked down.  My baby's head flopped back, over my arm.  The nipple had slipped out and the milk spilled from his open mouth.  He didn't move.

"David!  David, quick, call my brother!"
 
I lifted my baby's arm and it fell back in place.  He was breathing but not like before.  For once, his body was not restless.  It was soft and limp.

"Something's wrong," I told my brother into the phone.

"Don't call me.  Call 911," he yelled back.

"David's calling them from the other phone."
 
My brother's a doctor.  He knows how much I fear doctors.  He knows the call about the miscarriage, the call during this pregnancy when I bled again, the call when we had the bad ultrasound and the two-week wait on tests that came back "normal" but still didn't explain why the back of the baby's neck was measuring "too large."

"He only fed for a few minutes and then he just--"
 
David swapped phones with me so I was talking to the hospital.  I was picking up the baby and holding him up but he was limp and his head was loose into his chest.

"He's not moving," I said.  "He's gone all soft."

"Is this your first?" the nurse asked.

"It is.  I mean, there was a miscarriage before him, but he's--"

"You say he's breathing?  He's normal coloring?  His mouth is open?"
 
"Yes.  Yes.  He was born last night."
 
"Honey," she said.  "He's sleeping."

"He's--?  Oh God, he's sleeping?  He's all right?"

"This is something they do."

Now I cried.  David took the phone and I cried hard with my baby pulled in close.  I loved him now, I knew it.  And I said his name and it was just perfect.  And I was his mother.
 

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SUSAN M. HENDERSON is an Associate Editor of the Massachusetts-based print magazine, Night Train.  She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets award and won an Honorable Mention in the Green Hills Literary Lantern 2003 Fiction Contest as judged by DeWitt Henry.