Writing Prompt: Quirky
When my son was a baby I needed to feel good. It was a hard birth, he
had a hole in his lung that made him sound like a migrating goose when
he cried and we were broke. I had midwives that made me livid, one of
them reading my copy of Prodigal Summer while I suffered in back labor
in my kitchen, and the other who told me to stop listening to my "monkey
mind" after she overheard me telling a nurse in labor and delivery that
I had a hard pregnancy. My home birth didn't work out. I didn't feel
like an accomplished earth mother with every contraction. I wasn't able
to produce milk (something the midwives made me feel was my fault "for
not trying hard enough").
To feel better, after his lung was healed, we were home and my
partner was back at work, I listened to Desi Arnaz and Frank Sinatra. I
couldn't tolerate modern music or anything that felt sad. I held my big
baby against my shoulder, patting his back and dancing him around in our
funky small kitchen, moving across tattered brown and yellow vinyl
flooring and cooing into his ears. I sang and danced and smelled his
beautiful baby head, so full of hair that by six months he had his first
hair cut.
My little baby boy, big of eyes, small of nose, tiny of hands. Us
together, dancing in the kitchen to the music from the past, from an
imagined less complicated time. I would take any illusion I could get to
feel less worried about his future, about his life, about the amount of
time I would have to be with him as his mother.
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