holy time with an angel

When Rosie was an infant, I breastfed her. I loved the time we spent together in the middle of the night. I have heard a lot of grousing about nighttime feedings of newborns but never understood the complaining.  My then-husband wouldn't even hear Rosie. I would hear her as she just began to stir her body. She seldom needed to cry out for I would be on the move towards her when she just began to move to wake herself up, to get to the point of calling out for me.  Note:  I did not consider the sounds she made when she was hungry as crying. She was communicating with me, not crying. If I had not always rushed to her side and waited until she got worked up, made her wait while hungry, that would have been crying.

Rosie did not cry much as a baby.

So I would arise and be at her side, in the room next to ours, almost instantly. I'd change her diapers. The diaper changing table felt like a holy altar. I swear she was more beautiful, more dazzling, more radiantly wonderful in the middle of the night, her little hands and mouth moving, her body wiggling a bit, her deep, big, dark brown eyes taking 'everything' in. And I was pretty much her everything in these moments. She knew the room, which was static. Like her, I was moving, my being radiating before her and she was paying the same close attention to me as her.

I usually talked, cooing and soothing in the of the night, more chatty in the day time. As I changed her, I tried to kiss at least each foot, each hand, sometimes all ten fingers, less often all ten toes. Hard to kiss each teeny tiny toe separately, ya know?

Oh wow, those middle of the night diaper changes were such holy times with my daughter.

After I changed her, I would go into our third bedroom, which had two twin beds for houseguests we never had except when each of my parents, separately for they were divorced, trekked to our home to meet their first grandchild. My sister, then fourteen, came with my mom. Those were the only times while I lived in that house that the guestbeds were used by guests.

While I nursed Rosie, I would nurse her in one of those guest beds, often falling asleep with her, sleeping alongside her for some time before stirring and returning her to bed.  I always knew my time with her was limited, that her infancy was flying by, that these sacred times would not last long.

I think most mothers understand their babies as I did.  Her dad used to make fun of me when I said I knew what she wanted or needed. Once, on my first official Mother's Day, he had forgotten to make any reservations. I was happy to stay home. I didn't want to face a long wait in a crowded restaurant. And his failure to plan to celebrate by making a reservation demonstrated to me that he didn't really care either.  He rarely took me out to eat by then. We were unhappy together, only happy together about Rosie.  He placed a lot of weight on what other people might think, even when no one in the world would ever know how he might have behaved. If he had not taken his wife out for Mother's Day brunch, esp if his wife did not particularly want to go, who would know? And wasn't Mother's day, ahem, about pleasing the mom, making her the special focus of the day?

I dallied that first Mother's Day, hoping he'd forget about taking me out.  He was so OCD, doggedly stubborn once an idea took hold. Finally, around 2 pm (how fascinating that I remember these times) he said "That's it, we're going, I just called So-and-So and they said the wait for a table is not too long, that we should be seated by three, including our drive time. Come on, let's go."

I said "If we are seated in about an hour, that is just when Rosie will be wanting to eat.  You don't like me to breastfeed her in public. And I don't want to go, not when I know she'll be hungry just as we are seated."

"You must be out of your fucking mind if you think I believe for one minute that you know when that baby is going to be hungry."

I thought, but did not say, "You have no idea who she is or who I am or what kind of bond I have with this baby, your baby. You could have such a bond if you weren't a workaholic. If you knew her at all, you would understand her as I do. She's going to want to eat in about an hour and I know this because I've been nursing her for the past ten months."

I was hurt by his scornful dismissal of my bond with our baby. I see that I am lapsing into referring to her collective as 'our' baby. If I ever slipped when we were still together and said 'my baby' or 'my daughter' he would become furious, verbally berate me for what sometimes seemed like hours, repeating the same insults over and over. I had adapted during the few years of our marriage, trying to accomodate his obsessive behavior.

For example, if he started to lecture me, which he did often, and I interrupted him, he would have to start all over, repeating virtually verbatim everything he had said until I had interrupted him. And by interrupted him' I mean I might have tried to participate in what I wrongly thought was a conversation. It took me awhile to learn he did not converse when anger. He angrily, abusively attacked and criticized me, but in his mind he was teaching me lessons, telling me what was wrong so I could contort myself into being someone else.  I would have converted to that someone else, just to get him to shut the fuck up sometimes, but whatever he wanted always morphed into something else. If I capitulated on one thing, he wanted to bully me into another capitulation.

It was a weary, miserable time in my life. And in his, I suppose.

I had told him during the pregnancy that I would not allow our baby to grow up with him being openly abusive towards me, that I would not let my baby see his or her mother being mistreated and learn that was ever acceptable. And I did leave him when she was about eighteen months old.  It took me awhile to get it together to leave. First I was so dumbstruck by the bliss of motherhood and then I was afraid of filing, of challenging him.

He would regularly take me into the shower stall of our master bath, with her bedroom door closed, our bedroom door closed, the bathroom door closed and then the shower door closed. He said he wanted all those closed doors between us and the baby for my lectures because he didn't want her to pick up on the energy of what he said. And here is what he said, repeating this lecture virtually verbatim many nights until he finally scared the beejesus out of me long enough that I fled.  He would say "If you sue for custody, you will lose. You don't have any money and my sister the medical doctor has money and she wants to raise Rosie with me.  She has promised to pay all my legal fees and she and I are going to raise Rosie. I will crush you if you ask for custody but if for some unforeseeable reason, you end up with custody here is what will happen. Someday, down the road a bit, so no one suspects me, you are going to be awakened one night and the horror will begin. I won't go into detail of what the men I will hire are going to do to you. I will just say that I will instruct them to mutilate you and torture you but make sure you live, so you have to live as the mutilated monster you are inside. I will hire pros. No one will suspesct me for I will wait, bide my time. Don't ask for custody or you will regret it."

He really did say that to me many nights, often daily, in the final, most miserable weeks of that marriage, when we both knew it was miserably over but each of us, I guess, waiting to decide on what moves we would make. He finally forced my hand. He called me from work one day and said "I am sending my mother and my sister the medical doctor over to the house to get Rosie. If you resist, my sister the medical doctor will call the police and have you hospitalized for a 72 hour psych hold. Have the baby dressed and ready."

I got the baby dressed and ready all right. I bundled her up and drove to the airport without doing more than grabbing my diaper bag. I was terrified that my mother-in-law and sister-in-law would show up before I got away.    And I knew my former sister-in-law would actually try to get me under a 72 hour hold, although since I had a psychologist, I could have him contacted and he would have stopped any 72 hour hold nonsense. But my baby would have been subjected to some crazy scenes.

I learned that my husband had cancelled all our credit cards and closed our checking account. I went to withdraw some money from our brokerage account, which we kept with his brother who was a broker. And his brother and the brother's boss refused to give me my money, even when I pointed out that as joint owner of the account, they could not legally refuse me. They did.

Then I thought of one way to get an airplane ticket to my mom's. We had credit at the local department store. I guessed, accurately, that he would have forgotten about that credit card and also have forgotten that the store had a travel department. I went in there with my infant and got my plane ticket.

His sister and mother rushed to the airport and tried to get the local police to stop me but with no court order, they had no authority to act. A nice stewardess came to my seat and said "There are some police at the gate, with your sister-in-law and they would like you to leave the plane or at least give them your baby." Then she whispered "United Airlines has no court order so we cannot and will not force you off the plane. If I were you, I would not go. no one can force you and the folks out there are acting crazy." I loved her.

My plane to Pittsburg had a short layover in Chicago. My sister-in-law the medical doctor had called the Chicago police, too, telling them she was a medical doctor, I was a wild woman and a child's welfare was at stake.
Once again, a United Airlines stewardess came to my seat to tell me that police were at the gate, asking UA to remove me but without a court order, and saying something about the rules of flight travel, the stewardess told me UA had no authority to order me off the plane, that I had done nothing wrong and my baby seemed just fine. Again, this stewardess, different from the first, whispered 'Don't get off. They can't make you get off, we won't make you get off and I don't know what is going on but you and your baby seem just fine."  I loved her too.

It is easy, more than thirty years later, to remember those crazy threats my ex made, about the horror of mutilation by hired villains awaited me if I sought custody and removed my child from that state, which I did as soon as a judge said I could do so. It took a few years and cost a fortune that destabilized me financially and careerwise but a judge finally did give me permission to remove my minor child from the jurisdiction of that state. Of course I left. He stalked me all the time, and his family stalked me. Developing evidence, my sister-in-law the medical doctor called that stalking. 

Gee, I have gotten so far away from the treat I sat down to give myself. I was going to write about one very sweetly happy memory from Rosie's earliests months.

Once in awhile, I would hear that she was awake but she was not ready to eat. She was awake and being with herself in the dark. Brand new to this world, I guess she did not have clear distinctions between night and day. Who was to say she should not awaken in the dark and coo to herself?

She would sometimes awaken, coo for a half hour, even longer, melodious notes up and down in tone and on and on. It was a bit like a bird song but more glorious than any bird. It was my baby daughter, my perfect angel.  She awakened and sang to herself, age two months, age three months, several times. I have often wished I taped some of her night singing, her wordless cooing music.

Her father was hard of hearing and never heard her, cooing, crying or anything, in the middle of the night. Which was fine by me. Those nighttime times with my Rosie were some of the best moments I have had in this life. Those times alone were worth all the heartache of losing her.

Sing, my sweet baby. Billow and coo.

Once, I brought her into a beauty shop to get a much-needed hair cut. Like many new moms, I let a few things go while I was absorbed with my new baby but finally, I made that haircut appointment. I carried her into the shop in the car seat, put her at the station next to me so she could see me. And she did her cooing singing the whole time we were in that shop. All the women in the shop gathered around her to listen. Many said they had never heard a baby billow and coo like that. Everyone said "she must be a very happy baby to sing this way, I've never heard anything like it" and "None of my children ever did this" and "Oh, how prescious and how blessed you are."

My baby. My happy billing and cooing angel.

What happened to that angel?