[Field Note] Writing With a Newborn in the Other Hand

Writer, Undone is where I write about the life around the writing — the mess, the quiet, the things that don’t fit anywhere else.

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Twenty minutes upright after every feed. That’s the number. Everyone hands you the number — the paediatrician, the internet, a woman in the pharmacy queue, the other mothers and in this case my own memories. Hold her vertical for twenty minutes and let gravity do the rest.

I have held her vertical for twenty minutes. O have held her upright onger. I tried having her in the kangroo even longer. I have laid her down after. Then the whole feed comes back up, onto the floor and down my arm. Well, if I do the longer wait it is more stomach acid than feed.

So: there is no number. There is a number people give you, one that everyone seems to have memorised from a manusl, and then there is what actually happens, and I have not been able to establish any relationship between them.

Some nights it doesn’t even wait. She is still feeding and it is already coming back, and I haven’t got her onto my shoulder yet, and she is choking on it while I lift her.

In the dark I go through the rotation like a woman trying keys on a door. None of them are labelled.

Upright on the shoulder. If that fails, her stomach flat against my chest, which she sometimes wants and sometimes will not tolerate for a second. A pacifier, which I have watched her accept and then eject with real force. Then the forearm hold — her face-down along my arm, my other hand stroking her back — walking the corridor with a slow bounce in the knees. Up and back. Up and back. For however long it takes.

Some nights one of them works. Some nights none of them do and I hold her anyway, because the only other option is putting her down. Some days I think it worked then in ten minutes she reminds me it has not. And the putting her in her crib hoping she turns her head to the side with the reflux is not really an option, is it?

It is never cold here. People picture a stone house in the countryside and they picture cold — inland Anoia in August doesn’t do cold, at any hour, in any room. At four in the morning it is warm, and I’m holding a baby against my chest, and a baby is a small furnace with a hot head, and we are both damp. I am trying to burp her and my mind goes ‘Dont they do this with like wet towels in changing rooms in movies to hurt each other?’' The aerothermia system runs all night. It has no opinion on the fact that she needs to be against a body, and the body is mine.

The dogs used to bark at everything that moved out there. They have stopped barking at her. They were barking when she cried or did thst bird like squeal. Not anymore.

We have divided the house.

Gabriel sleeps upstairs with Victor. Valeria and I are downstairs in the dining room, which is the furthest room from him. There is a cot beside a coffee table nobody relaxed around since May. When she wakes she does not grizzle or work up to it. She goes straight to a scream that carries across the village. I find it very fitting that i got her a multipack of baby bodies from Next with animals on them and two of them came with seagulls, very cute seagulls that sound like her probably.

The first time it reached him through two doors, he woke into the middle of it with no idea what had happened. That’s the part I can’t get past. He has no name for that sound and nowhere to put it. It simply arrives in the dark and he has to be in the room with it. I do not know how to describe his reaction and honestly I don’t think I want to think long to find the words.

So there is a chair in the dining room whose shape I now know better than my own bed’s. Upstairs my son sleeps through it. That’s the arrangement. It costs me the nights and it buys him the dark back, and I would make the trade again.

I know reflux. Gabriel had it. I have walked a corridor before this one, with a different baby in my arms, and I know the sound it makes.

That has helped less than you’d think.

Gabriel’s was the kind where the acid comes up and stops the breathing. It happened to him more times than I let myself count. The vomiting is the part you can see. The other part is quieter: Valeria has had hundreds. Most are small — a catch, a few seconds, over before I have finished registering it. Four were not small. Four times it came up and stopped her, and hurt her badly enough that she screamed afterwards — which I wasn’t ready for, because Gabriel never screamed. Gabriel went quiet.

And Gabriel never threw up like this. Not once.

So I’m experienced. The experience is for a different baby.

Except in one respect, where it fits exactly, and that is worse.

Magnesium first. It did nothing for Gabriel and it has done nothing for her, and the prebiotics we tried after it did nothing either, both times. Then omeprazole, which is where we ended up with him too, alongside a specialised formula he stayed on for months, until he was old enough that we could start giving him less of it.

Valeria is on the omeprazole. She is not on the formula. I have said it to three different doctors now: she cannot digest the one she’s on. They tell me she’s gaining weight. They tell me it’s manageable. A growth chart is not an argument I know how to have. What I have is her face when it comes up — the eyes gone wide and fixed, the mouth open with nothing out of it yet.

I knew, at least, what the first two rungs were going to do. Sitting in that room the second time I could have told them: magnesium won’t work, and I gave it to her anyway, because it is the first rung and you are not permitted to skip it. The prebiotics went the same way.

The doctors are not incompetent. This is simply the order you are made to go in. You climb it a rung at a time in the dark, with a child screaming through all of it, and you arrive exactly where you said you would arrive — except this time the last rung isn’t there yet, and nobody will move it up for you.

Here’s what this has done to the writing, and it isn’t what the essays about writing with a baby tell you.

Short windows I could work with. What I can’t work with is not knowing which kind of window I’m in until it’s already over. It might be forty minutes. It might be forty seconds. There is no way to tell from the front of it.

So I’ve stopped writing sentences that need finishing. I write until I stop, and then I stop, and the file is full of things that end in the middle of

like that. Because guess what, I am writing with one hand again.

You can’t plan a paragraph under those conditions. You can’t set anything up, because setting something up is a promise, and I have no way of keeping one.

There’s a version of this where the constraint turns out to have been a gift. Where I used to need the right hour and the right lamp, and now I can write anywhere, and look how I’ve grown. I can see that essay from here. It’s a nicer one than this. I wrote it after my time with Gabriel and the pink light.

I wrote three books flat on my back this year. But it means I already know the thing I’d rather not — that the work will accept far worse terms than I would ever accept on its behalf. Nobody should mistake that for freedom. And definitely should not tell me I am thriving considering the conditions. I. AM. NOT.

I’m writing badly, and I’m doing it anyway. Those are two facts, and people keep gluing them into a moral.

Four months, they say. It settles by four months.

They gave me a number for the twenty minutes, too.

Gabriel’s took more than a year. And when it finally stopped, I didn’t believe it. I kept him on the medication two weeks after he needed it, because I thought I had invented the quiet, and that the moment I trusted it we would be back at the beginning.

So I’m not counting. I have nothing to count towards. People keep handing me a date. I have been handed a date before, and I know exactly what one is worth. Somewhere on the far side of this there is a week in which I will notice it has stopped, and that will be the whole ending — and I will probably sit there awake, watching her waiting for the queue I missed and to her to start making that sound again for a while.

I have already been told I’ll miss it. The whole, it is the blink of an eye, the whole you will miss the tiny Valeria. They say it like everyone has been programmed to. Yes tiny Valeria is amazing. Tiny Gabriel was too. Gabriel entering his terrible twos and being jealous of his sister getting attention also does not mak him any less cute. So I probably will miss the tiny Valeria but who decided I need to also miss the bad parts? Yes the bad and the good come together. Does not mean I have to miss them tigether. I’d just like to arrive there in my own time and decide what to miss.

With teeth and prayer, Luna 🌙

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