One Month Old
Sava is one month and one week old now. It is surreal, how long it has been since she came into our lives; how normalized our lives have become around this new person- as if she has always been a part of us, flesh of our flesh; and yet, at the same time so utterly strange and foreign and unknowable- One month! We have known her for such a very short time.
A time of intense highs and lows, both fueled by the mind-altering drug of sleep deprivation.
The highs: Sleeping chest to chest at night, the rise and fall of her breathing contentment as her little arms and legs sprawl out like tent stakes. Her face, moments after breastfeeding, when I lift her up to my shoulder to burp, and she angles her big moonface up to look at me, blinking slowly with slitted eyes and with such milky bliss, as if her heart could break from her love of the nipple, the milk, my face looking down at her. Daily walks, with Nico running wildly ahead and Sava bundled against my chest in the sling so that I again feel pregnant with her- as we walk up into the hills above our town, feeling the leaves crunch under my feet and the trees throbbing with their last bursts of color- the air and the light equally golden and warm in this yellow time. Sava making her little burps and mews and grunts of sound, while I try out my rusty voice and sing scratchy akward made-up lullabies in preparation for the time in which such songs will be demanded of me.
The lows: To prove that I am possibly the worst mother in the history of motherhood, Sava got her first head cold at the tender age of one month. I know that is setting some type of record, and proof that we have been pushing her too much, have been going out into the world too often and exposing her to the wickedness of it all... My punishment was a horrific night in which Sava could not breathe through either nostril, and thus could not breastfeed, and just got hungrier and hungrier, until she was basically just screaming in helpless pain, while I sat up in bed sobbing alongside her. No sleep, until we both just passed out from exhaustion, at which point salvation arrived in the form of a phone call from my lovely friend Molly, who wanted to know if she could drop off a squash lasagna and was this a good time? Molly, my angel acupuncturist, two-time mother, and I sobbed the problem to her and she said no problem- she would pick up saline drops and a nasal syringe on her way over..... Nasal syringe? I had never heard of such things. We manually sucked the goop out of Sava's nose and just like that, she was good as new, and nasal syringes were added to the tiny arsenal of things I know about child-raising, against the vast frightening mountain of things that I don't.
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