serena
my daughter serena lucille (a.k.a. beans) was born april 11, 2005 at 8:14pm. you'll excuse me if I've been a stranger but my seed gets priority over the computer. it was bound to happen.
so it's been a couple weeks since serena and I were discharged from the hospital...it felt like I'd been there lifetimes upon eons upon forever, and it feels like even longer since I was there. my daughter is three weeks old and I can't really figure out where the time went. you'd think I was exaggerating if I told you the number of times I sat down to continue writing this entry until I got too tired to continue, or serena started hollaring for my attention...finishing this shit has become the bane of my existance...plus my mother and her husband, my brother, blue, and my two youngest nieces have all been over to visit, coo over the shorty, and monopolize my precious time. now that it's just me and the baby at home for most of the day, theres very few moments I can find to collect myself...I can't do it when she sleeps because that's when I sleep...so most of the time I just carry her around with me or sit with her at my desk. she digs the glow of my computer monitor...she'll probably have a weblog by age five or six chronicling the fine art of fingerpainting, beating boys up on the jungle gym, and barney. I spend a lot of time talking to her since she seems to recall my voice from the womb...she studies my face and tries to imitate my expressions. its mad cute but I have to try to remember not to look irritated too often. I kiss her on her chubby cheeks a lot too, and if my nose brushes her face, she will latch onto it at the speed of light and start sucking on it...so it hasn't yet quite caught on with her that my nose doesn't produce milk. I let her do it cause its the cutest; like a sloppy wet kiss for my nose. haha, and that, by far, by leaps and bounds, by miles is the mushiest shit I have ever written ever in my life. ever. must...resist...urge...to edit...reputation as a hardcore bitch...failing...failing...
my friends that already have kids keep asking me "soooo...how y'all holding up?!" like they're waiting for me and christopher to snap. the hardest part thus far was getting over my physical pain...swollen legs, sore muscles, painful stiches...I could hardly walk until a few days ago...labor and birth is like going to war. lack of sleep is cake in comparison to hurting as bad as I did...and even that isn't a big deal. beans sleeps in like four, five hour chunks and thus far she's not big on crying for extended amounts of time - although she has her moments, mostly when her diaper is wet or she's hungry...when it starts to get on my nerves I remind myself of how hard she fought to be here. after we feed her at around 6:30, 7am every morning and put her back down christopher and I lay in bed and make out slow and sleepy...and then its time for him to get ready for work. I thought I would really lose it when he went back to his job last week, but I'm making it thus far...its mostly, as aforementioned, sleeping when beans sleeps and tending to her when she's not, but I have freelance work piling up and clients only understanding I'm a new mom to a certain degree. I can see the whole post partum depression thing in the horizon as I'm prone to bouts of depression anyway but whatever. most of my free time I've spent writing the long, harrowing labor/birth tale...once it grew to over seven thousand words I decided against posting it as an entry, but it will reside here, all seven thousand words of it, on it's own special page for all time. it's quite the action adventure complete with pain, tears, blood, and love...all the drama once-in-a-lifetime moments are made of.
I will acquiesce that it hit me very hard and very early, probably the day christopher and I brought beans home (and call this the understatement of the year), that life will never be the same. I feel the most incredible weight of responsibility, but whereas before this would've made me feel overwhelmed and depressed, I welcome it. my heart could burst with all this love; its stuffed and overflowing with it, leaking all over my internal organs, making me thankful for the existance of the universe itself from the inside out. plus I'm fascinated with the kid...everyday she does something new. she sucks on her fingers and hands with such voracity before she gets the boob or a bottle...like she's starving...before I read that it was normal I was feeling bad, like we were starving the child and all she could do to appease her staggering hunger was shove her hands into her mouth and pretend they tasted like breastmilk. but apparently a lot of newborns do it...and it's actually hilarious. she's discovering how cool hands are, so she scratches herself alot, particularly when she's pissed off, i.e. being changed. she's not feeling the whole wet wipe deal in her buttcrack...christopher reminds her that it's only during babyhood that someone actually wipes your ass for you, but as she doesn't speak english yet she's like "whatever nigga". she peed on the weighing table when we took her to her first pediatrician's appointment...see, she'd been asleep during the trip there, so when she woke up she was laying on a cold table, butt naked, with some cherubic white lady hovering over her with a tape measure...she wasn't feeling it...she was like "whatever bitch". when I took her again a few days ago to make sure shes putting on proper weight she one bettered herself and shat. I like saying shat...its very british...I've also added codswallop to my vocab, so look for me to work that in sometime in the near future.
our parents call every single day to check on their granddaughter...they don't even ask me or christopher how we're doing...its all about serena. its incredible how spoiled she is already; but everyone knew that was going to happen...I mean, c'mon. topher and I are our parents youngest children, and therefore favored...not to mention I was the first girl born in the young family in eleven years...I was the spoiled. and as I mentioned in the baby shower entry, serena has a hot wardrobe...she just hit 8 pounds at her latest weigh-in so she's still a bit too small for all the clothes we received for her. she kicks it in diapers most of the day but when she does start fitting all her outfits she's going to think a camera is her third parent. I already take pictures of her everyday. she's so pretty I'm damn near jealous...my brother didn't think she looked like me or christopher at first, but now he thinks she looks just like me. so now I've found a new appreciation for my own features through my daughter and there's something kinda deep about that. also this mother's day will be my first as an actual mother and it goes without saying it takes on a new meaning this time around. shit that may've mattered before doesn't mean anything now - deep like anthills i-net jafakens, fairweather friends...who has time to expell worrying about that codswallop (!) anymore when a tiny redbone baby who looks sorta like me depends on me for her very survival? not I, kid. I'm not half stepping this parent shit. I've resolved that at least in the immediate future teletubbies will substitute for strippers, water and juice for apple martinis, diapers in lieu of special addition adidas kicks and mac makeup. while I was still pregnant a small part of my subconscious felt like immediately after pregnancy I could go back to being blissfully self-absorbed, and although I've, for the most part, gotten my body back, its not about me at all. every facet of my life is dictated by serena's sleep/eat/shit schedule. leisurely kickin it in europe was on my list of things to do before my pregnancy...nothing that spontaneous can ever go down now, but don't cry for me argentina - its a worthy sacrifice. I just have to go about being young and spur of the moment in a responsible and planned out way.
I thought my love for christopher pre-beans filled every available cavity in my body and inflated me on some veruca salt in willy wonka shit...once I was pregnant I realized more room had been created for all the love that grew along with our child...but there is nothing now that could possibly top how I feel when I watch christopher hold her and feed her. I think about marrying him...and not just cause my cousin is beating me to it...but because I've turn into a sap. and honestly, before I got pregnant, I wasn't in any semblence of any hurry to have a child or be forever tied to someone through a child. now I can't imagine my life had it not jumped off the way it did. heads went all operation: shocked and awed when they heard I was pregnant cause it was like "huny? with a kid? miss strip clubs and alcoholic beverages and weed induced blank verse?" but there's a reason the start to finish time is forty weeks...I damn near became another person. and at the risk of sounding like an episode of any teenage drama on the wb, I'm anxious to get to know who I've become.
there are a few more things I have learned through this experience:
my cramps are gonna be cake after this.
baby forumula smells like butt.
unconditional love is cleaning someone's gooey ass umbilical cord stump, having them spit up on you, and cleaning their sticky yellow poo and still thinking they must be an angel from the same happy place that produces roller coasters, perfect hair days , and peanut butter creme oreos.
there are no words in any languages I speak fluently or somewhat efficiently to express the intense love and protectiveness I feel for my daughter. my father always tells me and my brother that he'd willingly and without pause die for us...I never really overstood how that felt until april 11th, 2005.
there's beauty in the breakdown.