tiny

If I haven't held you, I don't hold your baby. Not because I don't love your baby, it's just that I think that holding babies for the sake of holding babies is strange and weird and unnatural.

I'll hold your baby if you leave the room to pee (as if! Everyone knows that good mothers hold it for the first twelve weeks of their baby's lives) or if you go get something to eat, or if you just need to get off the damned couch for a minute because you've been stuck there for seventeen days with no shirt on or surrounded by heaps of dirty bottles with dried, curdled formula on the bottoms. Other than that, I'm not holding your baby unless I will see your baby on a regular basis for the next eighteen years and I am working on kicking off some sort of bonding process.

Friday I held a ten day old baby girl. She was born at thirty-seven weeks, just like Jake was. She was a full inch shorter than Jake was (he was 20 inches) and a full pound heavier (he was 5lbs 12 oz, she 6-12) and even though I held her for close to an hour I couldn't wrap my brain around the fact that Jake was ever that tiny and his legs must have been skinnier than her scrawny little sticks at some point and his belly must have been flatter or that his face was ever so tiny. I remember him being dark like this baby was; a result of the bili levels that are high in early babies, and those weird little shudders thatt new babies do that remind you of how it felt when they did that from inside your belly. I remember the constant worry that the kid would somehow suffocate on his hand or shirt or me but that's about it. I am awfully good at repressing stuff, I guess.

This new baby could hold her head up, unlike Jake who couldn't do it until he was four months old. She could also practically burp herself as soon as she sat up. Jake couldn't do that forever either. He was chronically slow with the physical development milestones until he was about seven or eight months old. Of course that caused severe anxiety for me. I remember that much.

Because I don't think I was born with the mothering instinct, holding a baby didn't give me that huge rush of oxytocin. I didn't ovulate. In fact, my entire chassis kinda cringed and my libido plummeted to near nothing for a day and a half. My still-leaky right boob didn't lactate. I didn't want to kiss this baby everywhere and put entire limbs in my mouth or check to see if there was any downy back hair that I could lick. I didn't want one of my very own.

I did, however, want Jake. I wanted to pass off this baby to her mom and scoop my own baby up and eat him whole. Because I'm a mean mommy, I made a big show in front of Jake that I was holding a baby and giving the baby all my attention. I did this until he got jealous and let me pick him up and cradle him in my arms and play with his face and kiss the top of his (giant, btw, only 1.5 inches smaller than mine in circumference) head and put my finger in his palm to trigger that reflex and tickle his belly and stick my pinky under his little row of toes and make him nuzzle into me. He got what he wanted and I got what I wanted and we all went home happy.