Thursday, February 17, 2005

voices

So when I climbed back in bed with "breakfast" – a piece of cream cheese toast and a chocolate bar, then later found myself "lunching" as I cracked open my second Coke, I knew it was a "day". We get by, day by day, with the resources at our disposal. Please, no one call Child Protective Services. No one write me and tell me about caffeine or high fructose corn syrup. I can write the pamphlet. Two Cokes, if it stops Baby’s mom from convulsing with more wracking sobs, is just fine and preferable to the effect from the wracking sobs. (I have more concern for my teeth than my offspring in this particular case.) We’re working it out. Baby promises less hip pressure, and I promise not to greet his/her father with a two by four when he gets home. Baby gets orange juice and black beans and rice, mom gets Coke and indigestion. It all works out.

If I could just fall down with this pain, it would be so much easier. It’s the coping that does me in.

My midwifery team has talked about incidents where a baby may be born who is slow to respond to its new world, and the mother’s voice is what brings it to breath, to life. After the last, brief episode of hysteria, I calmed myself in an attempt to soothe my little stow away with my voice, should s/he be absorbing my emotional distress.

I know that my baby knows my voice, will recognize it when s/he finally emerges. I know Baby can hear me just fine from where it is and where my voice is, but sometimes I can’t help feeling like I should lean down closer to my distended bellybutton to get my point across. Kinda like you want to do at those customer service windows there aren’t that many of anymore except in subway stations – the ones with that little half-circle of window at elbow level that you use to push through money or signatures. It’s the only opening save those useless holes in the plexiglass that the clerks seem to talk to you through, and even though they can presumably hear you fine, you stick out your butt toward the person behind you in line and place your mouth closer to the opening. It’s like that. Of course with Baby, I have the advantage of hands on belly – like co-conduits of sound – the baby hears better if you rub the belly while you are talking, or so goes the theory.

There, there, Baby. It’s me, mom. We’re okay. We're okay.

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