Protecting patterns

The worst thing about quarantine for me is the fear of other people. With the baby, it’s so acute, it’s sometimes physically painful. I was walking down the street alone with the baby on a rainy day once, carrying an umbrella, and a beggar approached me trying to sell me something. I actually spun the umbrella out in front of me, between my body and his, and said please, stay away from me. I was a little surprised to see this reaction emerge from my body, but it didn’t feel bad, it felt like the right thing. I was not about to let this stranger near my child. 

This has been the thing about being a new mom in a pandemic: it has brought me in touch with this feral protective impulse. The only thing uglier than following this impulse (as demonstrated above, when I put a physical barrier between my baby and a person in poverty) is what happens when I suppress it. That’s really unpleasant, the feeling of being impotent in the face of a threat to the little one in my arms.

When I was pregnant and trying to figure out how I wanted my delivery to go, how I wanted my space to feel when I came home from the hospital with a newborn, when I embarked on this new life stage, the thing I kept coming up with was a bear. I wanted to be like a mama bear in her cave, deep underground, fed for the winter, and safe in the darkness. I spoke about this with a friend, and she said, well, you know what to do about boundaries. Everyone knows what happens if you piss off a bear. She was right about bears. Bears have courage, and I wanted to summon courage.

Minutiae

Today I am deeply preoccupied with my son’s nose. It seems to be full of boogers. Every morning I put a bit of physiomer, a saline solution, into his nose to clear out anything blocking his airways. My pediatrician recommended it. He also warned against overuse of the NoseFrida, on grounds that it probably didn’t feel good. It was hard to argue with this logic.

This morning in the nursery, I put in the solution, like normal, and he sneezed out a big booger. Success.

I carried him into the sitting room and handed him to my husband. ‘Wow,’ he said, peering up the baby’s nose. ‘He’s got a very big booger in his nose. How are we going to get that out?’ 

I peered up his nostrils. It was big. ‘Give me a Kleenex,’ I said. I wiped his little nose from the side and out came a substantial chunk of snot. ‘Look at that,’ I said to my husband.

‘Bravo, Mama,’ he said. I considered it a win, keeping my baby’s nose clean.

 But as the day went on, little specks of dried snot continued to accumulate on the rim of his nostrils. Determined not to stick my fingers into his nose, I resorted to blowing on them, pinching his nostrils together, or rubbing my fingertip over his top lip over and over. I annoyed him profoundly and the specks would not go away. Clearly they were doing nothing to the baby, he could breathe fine despite his nose looking a little dirty. But the look of it bothered me. He looked so unkempt with snot in his nose. People who visited would think I did not keep my child clean.

Of course, no one is visiting these days, except my mother-in-law. 

My fight against the boogers continued. Eventually they disappeared on their own.