So...
Olive screamed and screamed AND SCREAMED last night.
No milk stained miracle cure for this girl.
(Though she did sleep for five straight hours after her wailing and arching and red-faced crazy-making.)
There is a fine line between shaking a baby and SHAKING a baby. One I will never cross but I understand how someone without support, resources or a deep well of empathy could. It just takes a moment to succumb to anger, to slip from the protective parent to the fried victim of your child's needs.
I understand why Elias grits his teeth and squeezes his fists when Olive screams. He doesn't have the pragmatic language skills to express his annoyance, his jealousy, or his sheer exhaustion at the sound of it all.
But man when she smiles...
Or finally relaxes her tensed muscles and falls asleep on my shoulder...
It's as if angels stitched her cells together with silken threads. Man do I love her then.
(Even Elias thinks she's cute when she's sleeping.)
And I love her when she screams but it's a desperate, confused, exasperated love that's unsure where to land, tired of pacing, rocking, swinging, and dancing to please only to be greeted by more indecipherable wails. It's a messy ugly love. Not the kind I want to write home about. Not one that fills me with pride.
Not a butterfly purple sky kind of love. A love with pimples and scars and question marks where the exclamation points should be.
In this newborn haze I find it hard to read, hard to concentrate on the lines on the page. But Louise Erdrich's book, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year, with it's un-sequential page-long chapters, allows me to read a paragraph here, a page or two there, without re-reading to remember where I've been.
When I read the following two paragraphs yesterday I stopped after each one and read them again:
"A baby in a true snit, screaming uncontrollably for hours can reduce the most loving mother or father to a low extreme. The rise and fall of the voice is primal and relentless. One is driven to exquisite levels of frustration as each remedy fails. There's very little nonplatitudinous intelligence written on this problem. Even in these millennial times, perhaps, we don't care to admit that we don't live up to the combination Victorian Angel of the House and sixties and seventies Earth Goddess as well as the supremely competent Power Mother of our current age--a woman who is never made helpless by infant dissatisfaction...Anger or frustration, it comes to the same thing, is a shameful subject when its cause is a physically powerless infant. Yet more honesty would help here."
"One Reason there is not a great deal written about what it is like to be the mother of a new infant is that there is rarely a moment to think of anything else besides the infant's needs. Endless time with a small baby is spent asking, What do you want? What do you want? The sounds of her unhappiness range from mild yodeling to extended bawls. What do you want? Our baby's cries are not monotonous. They seem quite purposeful, though hard to describe. They are a language that changes every week, one so primal that the meaning I gather is purely physical. I do what she "tells" me to do--feed, burp, change, amuse, distract, hold, help, look at, help to sleep, reassure--without consciously choosing to do it. I take her instructions without translating her meaning into words, but simply bypass straight to action. My brain is a white blur. I lose track of what I've been doing, where I've been, who I am."
Exactly.
So what was I saying?
