“What am I forgetting?,” I think. I watch her sleep, but do not sleep myself. I doze, dream, wake. Strange images snatch through me and I open my eyes with a start, patting my chest to find her still there, tied to me with a receiving blanket. I am vague, foggy. I will not let C off me. “What am I forgetting?” The thought plagues me. Something really important. What is it? I sit up and watch as she suckles. She latched right away, as soon as I put her to my breast.
After she was born, the water in the birth pool quickly filled with blood. Karen gave me an injection because I was bleeding too heavily. I cut the cord and C was handed to Ricky to hold in the bloodbath. She was separate from me for the first time, but I barely clocked it. I got up with the cord dangling between my legs. Bianca handed me a linen saver to put between my legs and I walked to the bathroom awkwardly with her half holding it. Karen leaned over me in the bath. “Don’t push, hey,” she said. But almost immediately as she did a contraction came and I simply could not help it, I pushed, and my placenta came flopping out, along with my uterus. There was a small flurry of panic while Karen pushed it back in and massaged my belly. There was a lot of blood. As I showered I watched the blood fall down my legs. What happened?, I wondered.
In the bedroom I lay down on a sheet that made a loud plastic crunch – the drop sheet was on the bed covered in a towel. Then C was handed to me. She lay across my chest and immediately latched onto my left breast. It was excruciating. But I was pleased. “She’s latched,” I told Ricky when he returned from the shower. After she was weighed (3.6kg) and measured (53cm), Karen and Bianca left. It was 8.30pm. Ricky went outside to help them carry stuff and it was suddenly quiet. On my chest was C, my baby.
Now as I watch her I feel she is beautiful beyond words. But I cannot wholly focus on her in the dawn light, or is it the afternoon? I am forgetting something, something very important. My parents come. Ricky’s parents come. Friends come. The bedroom swells and wanes with people and sound, then silence and a low darkness held back by the cool glow of a battery-operated lamp: there’s loadshedding again. Did it rain? I ask Ricky about the labour and he tells me bits of it. I don’t sleep; I stagger to the bathroom and back, otherwise never leaving the bedroom. I am supposed to sit in a salt bath to heal my three tears, but I cannot find the time. Instead I pat bits of dried seaweed onto my vagina. Later they give me a turn when I find them mangled and strange smelling in my underwear. C begins to stay on the breast for longer and longer, eventually basically never coming off, crying and falling asleep then suckling again. It is getting more and more painful.
On the third day she begins to cry and does not stop. The gardener and domestic worker come and both tell me she’s hungry and to get some formula. I ignore them. Then Karen arrives. There is true panic when she is weighed and we find she has lost 13% of her body weight. Karen tells me in her 20 years of midwifery, a child has never lost so much. I weep. How could I have not seen it? My child has been starving. Where have I been? Lost, I’ve been lost, floating adrift somewhere. While she tried to feed she was expending more energy than she was receiving.
I snap to. Now we must pump colostrum and feed C with a syringe and a pinkie finger in her mouth. We must top up with formula. This is after we try each round to get her to latch again to try to save the breast feeding. Day and night, we reset every three hours and have to fit everything in, plus sleeping. We begin to lose time. I must take a thyroid pill in the morning, but morning never comes. There is no day, no night, just this three-hour cycle that refreshes itself over and over. Everything must be sterilised. My boobs are hard, red and inflamed, full of lumps; my nipples are cracked. I am in constant agony, but I power pump in the half light while Ricky catches a few minutes’ sleep and C lies between us. In the intensity she is almost an afterthought, though everything is for her. Don’t forget her, I keep thinking. Don’t forget; don’t forget.
I don’t sleep but I don’t feel tired. Ricky falls asleep sitting up holding a syringe full of colostrum. I am hyper aware of C’s every breath. “This is the part where…,” I think in a quiet patch. “This is the part where we lose the latch and have to pump and then squirt colostrum. This is the part where we battle to try to get her on to the breast, waiting for my milk to come in. This is the part where…” The story is unfolding, the narrative is moving along, but I can’t find the seam along which runs the thread of this new life.
C: I ache for her even while she’s with me. She is made of poured porcelain, with eyebrows, a mullet and a widow’s peak. We don’t dress her at all in the first week, keeping her on my bare skin. I don’t know how to handle her, but I also feel I know her edges, my body near her body remembers a shape. I watch her sleep, follow her lines, the small moons of her eyes, the wild, cupid’s-bow lips, the tiny, hairy ears. I love her. Every part of me loves her. The depth of the feeling surprises me. This is what I could not account for in my pregnancy. Though my life is unrecognisable, I am given a gift larger than I gave. I am glad, even in this 3am burrow listening to the hiss and suck of a hired, hospital-grade double pump, I am glad. I am glad.
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