“Legs down please, darling”

Week 7: vile heat, pram, failing to impress the GP

Imagine bursting into a restaurant yelling your head off that you need to eat RIGHT NOW and everyone’s rushing around trying to get your food and you’re bellowing and bellowing until finally, seconds later, someone skids to a halt in front of you and shoves a piece of bread into your open, screaming mouth. Then you calmly and pleasantly start to eat it as if nothing untoward had happened, like, “Ah, excellent. Thank you, madam.”

That’s what it’s like feeding the baby when she wakes up from an overlong nap.

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Seven weeks old now. It was another difficult week with the heat and fussing and her poor little digestive system still grinding into gear.

The heatwave was fucking awful, for many reasons. It’s impossible to stay hydrated. This is generally true while breastfeeding, as the second the baby latches you’re gripped by intense thirst, but it’s so much more true in a heatwave that I almost feel like giving up entirely. Maybe I’ll simply stop drinking water until the heat breaks, is that a good idea?

I made my peace with just staying indoors for the duration. Luckily, some visitors came to us which was incredibly wonderful. Thank you, A, Z and J, for bringing lunch and gifts and ibuprofen and for holding the baby so sweetly — and A, for folding our laundry more beautifully than it’s ever been folded. Maybe more beautifully than anything has ever been folded.

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We dragged our way to the end of this week. Then on Sunday we had a major success: getting the baby to tolerate the pram! She slept the entire way to our favourite bakery and made it most of the way home too before she woke up needing a feed. I fed her sitting on a handy bench in the park, and then she happily went back in the pram home.

Please compare this to the last pram attempt: she screamed the entire time and I had a vision of my future where, back broken, arm muscles in tatters, I’m never able to put her down at all.

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We had our routine six week postpartum GP check up, half for me and half for the baby. It was very anti-climactic. As I said to my partner on our way out, the doctor could’ve made more of the fact that everything was good, the baby is doing well, she’d put on more weight and there was nothing concerning about my recovery. A well done! would’ve been nice, you know? Maybe some kind of small trophy, or at least a sticker saying Great Job. The GP also didn’t mention anything about returning to exercise or sex, so presumably I can never do either of these ever again.

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She’s beautiful gorgeous amazing. Sweet little face. Tiny fingers.

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We read somewhere that if you say the same things again and again while changing a nappy, the baby starts to learn what you mean. As a result, for several weeks now the Nappy Man has been saying “Legs down, please, darling” when he needs the baby to de-scrunch so he can access the nappy.

The update is that she’s started doing an explosive kick down when he says it: both legs firing out horizontally. We don’t think this is intentional. But importantly, it’s very dramatic.

And no, I also can’t believe that once again I’m including a nappy change update. I’m sorry, my daughter, if you ever read this. But to be fair, if you were less funny, I wouldn’t need to.

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It’s not that I hadn’t realised how much I disliked being heavily pregnant. Pregnancy is body horror! I got through the final stages by not looking directly at it, like turning your face away from a harrowing news story — it’s too upsetting to think about directly so you take the coward’s way out and distract, protect. But when I look at pictures of me, especially towards the end, the only phrase that comes to mind is, what the fuck.

A key difficulty is that the little kicks coming from the inside of my stomach are incredibly hard to reconcile with the personality-filled baby I now know. It’s hard to believe they’re the same person. One was so theoretical while the other is firmly, all encompassingly real.

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If I make anything about this sound easy or at least manageable, it’s because of my support system, and specifically my partner. His constant hard work to think about food, to shop and cook, to stay on top of the laundry, to do baby admin like book the appointment to register her birth and learn how to install the car seat and fold the pram — it makes space for us all, and especially me, to find the fun in it. I wouldn’t have risked having a child with anyone I thought wouldn’t make a brilliant parent, but it’s worth saying. I’d be lost without him. He’s also got so good at changing nappies now. A medal for the Nappy Man.

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She’s now fully grown out of all the first size clothes and is moving up a nappy size! No longer size 1. Our chunky queen.

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My favourite thing when she’s feeding, lying on her side, is when her arm flops backwards to lie limply against the cushion — the epitome of relaxation. Or when her hand rests on my breast like a little starfish while she methodically sucks, staring straight ahead with her trademark intensity of focus.

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I feel myself forgetting things even in the moment. Late at night, I can’t even remember how the previous wake up went.

The bizarre thing is, I haven’t slept more than two hours in a row for months, yet usually in the day I feel fairly normal — or at least not as insane as I would’ve expected.

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I’ve realised I speak to her in a deeply gender-confusing way — am equally likely call her e.g. Little Miss Baby, Mister Baby, Little Fella. What is gender if not a construct, and what are babies if not gender neutral? They have no visible gender markers. They all have the same capacity to be hairy, bald or balding. The only time the sex becomes relevant is when you change a nappy and either do or don’t put yourself in danger of being wee’d on in the face.

Having said that, my partner has pointed out that we really do need to start using her name, or she’s never going to learn it. So I’ve committed to try, and also to stop calling her the potato. She’s much less of a potato now anyway, now she spends so much time with her eyes beautifully open.

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Still constantly hiccoughing, in an adorably tragic and piercing way. I heard it from the front of the house through a closed door. I long for the day when she has a functioning digestive system.

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Made myself cry one night thinking about the baby and how it feels like such an enormous privilege to get to be her guardian; to be the person who grew her with my body, and now feeds her with my body in this alchemical process where all the nutrients and energy she needs to grow come from me.

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Extract from a nappy change transcript by the Nappy Man: “All right poopy baby. Have you gone feral! Have you gone feral. [Singsong voice] Feral baby! [Normal voice, as an aside] She actually looks annoyed at me saying that. Someone’s done a poop. It’s me! Oh my goodness. What a poopy butt. [Baby coughing] Oh dear! [Baby, pleasantly: “Bweh”] Bweh. Darling! No fighting. Legs down please. Thank you.”