"Thirteen"

one of many an unfinished piece... in particular, one I wrote when my eldest child turned thirteen, two and a half years ago

Though you’re discriminating in taste, you generally value the written word and trust the wisdom passed on in books. Before you hear a heartbeat you purchase a variety of parenting manuals and even though each one conflicts with the next, you scrap the nonsense and make your plans.

Your birth plan presumes a natural birth, of course, for which your ample hips were clearly designed. Pitocin would undam the cascade of interventions and are you even a real mother if you don’t experience every single searing ember of that ring of fire? No! Nipple tweaking it is! That’ll get them ready for what’s next on the agenda: nothing but breast milk for at least four months. and co-sleeping, obviously.

Sooner than you realize, you’re sleeping on your left side, which the books advise as optimal for prenatal blood flow. You wake up to a bright yellow sunrise shining over the Mississippi River and a warm torrent of wet pouring down your left thigh, saturating your clothes, the mattress, and the body pillow sandwiched between your knees.

You labor at the clinic, in between bites of tuna sandwich at the neighborhood deli, facing backwards in the car. At the hospital, in between contractions, you walk and laugh and soak in an enormous tub whose microbic history you don’t overthink. You grunt and cry and bear down for thirteen animal-channel minutes and she’s here. She’s the sun and moon and stars and she smells good, like every earthy thing combined, and her eyes are oceans and you expect you’ll drown in their depths.

She’s not what you expected. She’s scrawny and tense, sleepless and paranoid. Her scalp sheds, her fingers scratch. She falls asleep the moment she latches. You’re a pacifier but what she needs is sustenance. On her fifth day breathing air you learn she’s shed a fifth of her meager birthweight. You feed her with a medicine dropper. You sing and cry and tell her how much you love her, how wonderful she is, how much better the planet is for having her in it. She furrows her brow and startles at the slightest sound.