TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.  

Once upon a time, I was a new mother with a baby girl in my arms, and I was her whole world. It was seventeen years ago, but sometimes I swear I can transport myself back there just by closing my eyes and taking a deep breath. I remember reading that a baby’s first three months of life are called the fourth trimester. Three trimesters are spent in the mother’s body, bobbing around like a little fish, but the "fourth trimester" is when everyone is adapting to life in the outside world. The babies seem bewildered, trying to adjust to nursing and sleeping, but I think parents are just as bewildered. The physical and emotional recovery from labor is intense, on top of caring for another human being around the clock.

The first three months—the first six months, if I’m honest—were really difficult. I was exhausted, depleted, emotional. I loved my daughter, and I missed my solitude. I loved her father, and I resented his freedom. I loved my life, and I didn’t know how to live it. 

Mercifully, we all forget much of the fourth trimester. We forget the missed naps and 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. cluster feedings. We forget the creature-like newborn cry and the bad latches and the desperate calls to the lactation specialist. We forget so much, but if I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I can remember the smell of the top of my daughter’s head, and the feeling of it cupped in the palm of my hand, and those two things alone are enough to make me weep. She is turning seventeen, and she is taller than me, and she is still—and always—my baby.

Today’s poem transported me back to the long days when my baby girl and I were the whole universe. Long days but short years, as they say.

A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind
by J. Hope Stein

To something beautiful flapping in the wind above the 
beach houses—A blue bird?—No, a blue bag.

To her breath— raindrops in the begonia bed.
My eyesight is rainstorms.

                  Drop.


                                                        drop—

To 4 a.m., her first ocean—
Everyone is sleeping
except Oona and the ocean,
Oona and the ocean.

I try to explain in whale song I try to explain in
cloud and water droplet.

                                      Drop,



drop—

Spending time with a baby is spending time with something
that has lived her entire life in an ocean and just sprouted
legs for land—

I am Copernicus using the planet of my body
to umbrella the wind
as she feeds—Ouch!—

I stick my fingers in her mouth
and she’s grown sharp little fish teeth—

                                                         Drop,

Everyone is sleeping except Oona and the ocean,
Oona and the ocean
and the little fish teeth.

                                                       Drop,

                                                                                         drop,

                                    drop

             drop,

I tell time by counting teeth-marks around the crooked 
nipple.

"A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind" by J. Hope Stein. Used by permission of the poet.