Friday, October 18, 2013

The Dim Gold Glow



I have not yet really written enough about you, Matteus.  You're eleven weeks old and twelve pounds, one ounce as of your last weigh in on Monday.  When I measured you yesterday you were twenty-three inches.  That measurement is less reliable though; I used an Ariel picture book at your crown and an Entertainment Weekly (featuring leather-jacketed motorcycle folk) at your feet to mark the distance.

You have brown hair that turns light and fuzzy when we bathe you and slicker and darker the further you get from your last immersion.  Your head is the sweet inverted Bermuda triangle of babyness: huge bulbous crown narrowing to a small chin.  The chin round, the doorknob of your face.  Below the chin are wrinkles that catch threads of breast milk and ferment them so that you always smell mildly of rotting milk.  Your eyes are two blue street lights and your eyelashes are coming in, thicker with each passing day.  You have luscious, pouty, movie-star lips, the lips of a woman named Violet or Scarlett or Annette.  Between the lips, not drool but bubbles so that always you resemble a mother frog carrying a sack of eggs.  Unlike your sister, your nose does not turn up but marches staunchly forward, a knob that matches the chin.

Your thighs and upper arms thicken and thicken.  Such soft sweet tubes of flesh.  Your chest is thinner than your belly, giving you a slight pear shape.  Your nipples almost entirely camouflaged in the skin of your torso.  There is almost always dark lint in the space between your toes, in the creases of your hands.  Below your fingernails, half-moons of dirt that must simply be the skin you slough off from your own body and ours.

Usually you have a good stretch of sleep from 7:00 to 12:30 or 1:30.  Then you wake again at 5:30 (sometimes with a feeding at 3:30 too).  Each time after I feed you I put your swaddled body upright against my chest and pat your back for a burp.  I turn on the heartbeat sound on your mobile and bounce you in time to it, the dim gold glow of the room like a beam sieved from the sun.  Then I put you in the bassinet and step just so on the carpet, near Pooh Bear's head so that I don't hit the floor board that creaks near Pooh Bear's foot.  You usually wake again after the 5:30 feeding and then I jab Daddy awake and he brings you to bed with us where you sleep on his chest, often fitfully, until around 7:30.  Then Thisbe stumbles in with Dog Do (may you choose a better name for your stuffed companion) and I prop you against my bent knees and first you stare at the Venetian blinds, those bars of light and dark, and once you truly wake you turn to your sister who sings invented songs or (today) a butchered version of the Barney theme. 

There is no regularity to your napping yet.  The only regularity is that you refuse to nap in your bassinet.  At night you have no problem with it.  During the day you'll only sleep nestled against a human chest or in the Ergo on a walk through the Natural lands with your father or in the cocoon of your stroller as we bump downtown to Blue Monday.  You always quiet (knock on wood) when we take you outside.  The air on your face is your favorite distraction.

You are trying to figure out how your hands work.  You raise your fist in front of you and direct it toward your mouth but it grazes your cheek instead.  You raise your other fist in front of you and contemplate it, forgetting that it belongs to you.  Sometimes you manage to get your knuckles in your mouth but you don't know how to open your fist yet so the suckling there never satisfies you for very long.

It is obvious, of course, but I am reminded as I celebrate each new dimple of flesh in your body, how inept we are at acknowledging (in a positive way) these changes in our bodies as we grow older.  We take changes as signs that we're creeping toward death, of course.  And we take them as signs that we have failed in yet another way to live up to an image the image of perfection the media mass-produces. 

I am completely guilty of this.  I'm quick to take off my glasses any time a photo is taken.  I apply blush in the morning to make it seem like I have more energy than I do; I apply mascara in the hopes that my eyes might be more striking.  I choose loose tops to cover the mound of muffin top flesh that bulges over the top of my pants.  I wince when I lean toward the mirror and see the gray hairs.  I purposefully don't try to find the white, spider-leg scars of the stretch marks on my inner thighs.  Where once there was taut muscles in my calves from running (marathons!), the flesh there, when touched, now just kind of sways, hammock-like.  I mark these changes as failure if I mark them at all.
This photo was taken yesterday.  Not.

When I was in my 20's I laughed haughtily at any book or television show or magazine that made reference to women who preferred to make love with the lights out.  I felt proud not only of my body but of my confidence in my body, my lack of shame.  And I am not yet to the place where I crave darkness in the bedroom.  But I do want the dim gold glow of the nightlight, the chance to blur my body back to what it once was.  Meanwhile, that 20-year-old self with the strong and gorgeous body leans over a man from long ago, longing for the slow comfort that comes from deep love and good work and children who grow and leap and run--my own cells swimming inside of them.


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