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.

Sleep, sleep, sleep

In the daytime, baby usually sleeps on me, or on my husband. He sometimes sleeps in the baby wrap (Solly Baby, I love you), or while we take our evening walk with him. Other times of the day he sleeps on my chest or while one of us holds him. He sleeps in his bed at night, but during daylight hours he is usually attached to another body while he sleeps.

I think I am meant to be concerned about this and anxious about my child developing bad habits. But I am not! I am not one tiny bit concerned. I love cuddling my baby while he sleeps.

There are downsides, of course. He is getting big (5.6 kilos at his last pediatrician’s appointment) and carrying him all day makes my arms hurt a little. And, while I am grateful for baby carriers in all their variety, they don’t free up my hands as much as NOT carrying a small person would. It’s a handicap in the getting-stuff-done race to carry a baby. 

I don’t care, though. I feel happy that my son is spending a lot of his first weeks on the planet being cuddled within kissing distance of his parents. Coming out of the womb into the cold harsh world where he will spend the rest of his life is difficult enough. I can offer him a few short weeks of warmth and affection before he starts cultivating the skills of self-sufficiency. I don’t mind being less productive during that time, don’t mind spending a lot of my time looking for a place to sit down or being stuck in place with a baby immobilizing one or both of my arms. The new-baby smell alone makes me forget about other stuff.

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.

Mom guilt ... I see you.

One thing that has been terrifying about parenting — now, almost exactly eight weeks in — is how much it has amplified my screen time. I’m not even retreating to the safety of my phone, as I have done during other stressful times. I don’t feel I need a retreat. I love hanging out with my baby. But having him in my life has made me paradoxically closer to my phone as well as to him and to my husband. 

Part of it is breastfeeding. A new baby breastfeeds basically all the time. In our first few days at home, my brain was a sieve, so tracking things like how long it had been since the baby had last eaten was impossible without my phone. This meant I had my phone with me constantly. I couldn’t nurse or change the baby without it, since I needed to record how often he ate and filled his diaper to know if he was getting adequately nourished. My phone, specifically the BabyFeedingLog app, was a lifeline. Once he regained his birthweight and the urgency was gone, there was a new urgency, that of staying awake during night feedings. Again, the bright light of my iPhone was my support system while my husband snored beside me. In the early days of motherhood, I have relied heavily on my phone.

All this makes me feel guilty. Why am I not engaging more with my child while he nurses? Why am I not spending more time admiring the soft fuzzy hair on his head or counting his precious fingers, one through ten, over and over again? 

 Although I do plenty of this stuff, sometimes I want to browse what is on the Zara app or Google ‘baby heat rash’ or read about what Boris Johnson’s government is up to. And now, part of my emerging mom identity is feeling a bit guilty about looking at my phone to do that instead of looking at my baby. The guilt sneaks up on me. I think I am just having a break and before I know it I am thinking, shit, my baby is not being stimulated enough, he is going to be feeling bored or neglected or disconnected from me. It’s funny, because the baby looks content, or at least vacant. But I see the specter of the guilt, how he lurks everywhere, waiting to chime in.