When they flung him onto my chest, he flopped like a silent swamp creature, dripping with yellow goop. Gaping and groping, staring with crazy eyes, toes flexing far apart like monkey hands, he didn’t resemble anyone I knew. As I gazed into the uncanny valley of this newborn baby, I lay frozen in horror.
Amit said, “Look at him move; he’s like a robot. Maybe he’s jerky because he’s moving through air instead of liquid for the first time.” They took him into the corner to be suctioned and poked and processed. He let out his first sound, a wail.
“Don’t look over there,” Amit said. Turning away from the cluster of nurses with their tubes, I glanced down where a doctor was blithely stitching me up while chatting with another doctor. “Don’t look down there either,” Amit said. “Look at me. How do you feel?”
“Weirded out. Relieved it’s over.” I thought the baby was gross, but I didn’t want to say that in front of all these women who probably thought he was adorable. “Do you feel love at first sight for this baby?”
We both shook our heads no.
All in all, labor lasted 16 hours. I hadn’t slept in more than 24 hours, so I took a nap. Upon waking maybe an hour later, my first words were, “My vag is on fire.”
When we settled into our hospital room, the baby was in another room under a heating lamp. Amit said, “I was looking at him through the window laying in his box. No one was paying attention to him and he’s all alone. I feel sorry for him. He’s too small to be alive.”
I felt a surge of love for Amit’s compassion and soft heartedness. “Aw, you’re so caring. He still doesn’t feel like he’s ours.”
“I hope he’ll be happy.”
Amit’s helpless pity for this creature triggered my pity too. The feeling was familiar, like my pity for cats and dogs and most animals. I didn’t know it then, but this pity quickly segued into love.
We hired a confinement nanny “yue sau” to live with us and take care of everything for up to the first 26 days. She cooked, cleaned, and mainly kept the baby in her room, only bringing him out for me to breastfeed. She promised to take care of everything, but I found I didn’t want her to. She kept wanting me to sleep, but I often couldn’t. At the hospital, I only slept 2 hours a night because of all the interruptions, but at home I still couldn’t sleep. Maybe I was still amped up on hormones.
I wanted to know everything about the baby. My modus operandi was the same as how I cared for my cat— keeping notes on her ailments and patterns, constantly inspecting her for changes, continuously testing new theories in hopes of understanding her better. Similarly, I wanted to change his diaper so I could see all his poops so I knew their colors and textures to discern how he was digesting what we’d fed him 2 hours prior, I wanted to inspect every fleeting rash and groom the gunk in all his folds and pry open his fingers to get the lint he’s clutching, I wanted to learn all his noises and signals so I could anticipate his needs before he felt discomfort.
Because of the connection between my breasts and his stomach, I knew he was awake and went to feed him in the middle of the night before he made a peep. After the second day of me constantly knocking to check on him, the nanny put a pillow on the floor of her room as a doorstop to keep the door open enough for me to stick my head in to watch him breathe.
After 6 days, she said, “Maybe I should go home early. You don’t need me. You’re strong, and you delivered vaginally. Most of my customers don’t leave the bed for 10 days, but you went out walking and shopping today. The baby’s also particularly sweet and well behaved. It must be because he came 2 weeks late so he’s actually older.”
Although sending the nanny home early was what my husband and I had been thinking because the nanny was expensive, that night I burst into tears. “She’s supposed to want to take care of me but I’m too annoying. She wants to take care of the baby, not me.”
My husband got the nanny. “Nancy’s crying because she thinks you hate her.”
“I don’t hate you!” the nanny said. “Don’t cry or it’ll poison your milk. I’m thinking of you as my daughter because I don’t have a daughter. I’m too expensive for what you have me doing. Usually the grandparents pay for me. Of course I like you. Anyone who’s vegetarian is a good person.”
She eventually convinced me that it was purely a cost calculation she’d been making on our behalf. That night, we moved the crib into our room to do a trial run of what would happen if she left.
At 4am, Amit found me crying and desperately asking chatgpt what to do about milk blisters that had appeared on my nipples after my pump had been adjusted to the wrong setting. “This is the nanny’s fault. She insisted I had to go on a higher suction but now I have milk blisters! And it made almost no milk whereas I was doing great on the lower setting so now I have to stay awake to breastfeed even though it hurts. She sucks! And I hate breastfeeding. Why am I doing this? My clogged ducts hurt and I’m scared of getting an infection. On reddit, this woman had a huge abscess inside her boob that had to get drained. The lactation consultant is an idiot and wants me to wake up every hour to feed him. She didn’t even ask me any questions about my goals or anything. I hate her. Why am I hurting my body? Everyone else is on formula!”
At around 5am, the nanny woke up and came out. Seeing my sleepless, tearstained face, she said, “Give me the baby. Get some rest.”
Amit said, “This was a successful trial. Now we know what could happen if we have her leave.” We moved the crib back into the nanny’s room.
A week later, I had throbbing pain in my arms and hands from holding the baby for breastfeeding 12 hours a day. I had the special breastfeeding pillows but the internet said it was the relaxin hormones deforming my joints. I could barely move. Amit and the nanny had to dock the baby’s mouth and the breast pump onto my boobs while I sat in pain, ice packed around both arms and hands. When Amit turned on the pump, the default setting was the highest suction possible and I gasped in pain. Trying to put the flange on my nipple, the nanny spilled breast milk over me and the couch, causing me to yelp and exclaim, “You put it on upside down!” Ignoring my pain, the baby guzzled away at the other breast.
Later that night, I burst into tears again. “I peed myself heading to the bathroom and was struggling to change my ice packed, blood soaked underwear when the baby started crying. I couldn’t even move my arms to put on new underwear and had to go get the nanny without underwear. She’d seen my boobs before but not my vag. I hate this! What if I’m incontinent forever? What if I have tendonitis and carpal tunnel and arthritis and swelling and sciatica forever? My face and feet are so swollen. I can’t even sleep because of the pain radiating everywhere. What if I can’t use my hands and arms and have to learn to be like that Olympics archer who shoots with her feet? Why am I hurting my body?”
Breastfeeding was so much harder than pregnancy or labor. Many times, I wanted to quit, but I’d decided to breastfeed till 6 weeks because that’s when people said it normalized, so I kept suffering through it. I could always quit then. This was all temporary. This was a universal human experience that I needed to endure if only to build character and empathy for other moms. How did everyone else do this? Did everyone really do this? I spent sleepless days and nights icing, heating, and massaging my breasts, icing my hands and arms, and researching newborns and breastfeeding.
Just like with pregnancy, I tried many tactics and theories for breastfeeding. Just like with pregnancy, things improved due to time passing. He changed and grew every day. At 2 weeks postpartum, we moved the crib back into our room to do another trial. This time, I took care of the baby through the night by myself without incident and wrote up a checklist for nighttime, general instructions that I translated into Chinese for the nanny, and notes on my key learnings. After a few days of this, the nanny said she was going to look for flights to go home.
I got the urge to be with other moms and babies. I went from knowing almost nothing about babies and breastfeeding to reading and watching everything I could find, but I still only had experience with my baby. I wanted to breastfeed another baby to gain context for what they were like. I texted other moms asking for advice. “You’ve changed,” my friend said. “When we FaceTimed I used to angle the camera away from my kid and avoid mentioning him because I thought it’d make you mad, but now you want to talk to him and you’re showing him to your husband.” Having a baby has unlocked the part of my brain that used to be devoted to animals. If you want to talk about babies, ping me.
He seems like the archetypal baby, doing things that probably all newborns do, but that I’m seeing for the first time: his squeaky hiccups, his tragic frown mask, his instant placid calm when he’s soothed, his inchworm-like arches and faceplants, his blind motorboat mouth, his unproductive kicks and beating fists as I’m trying to give him what he wants, his flapping hands when he’s relaxed, his fingernails pricking my chest, his sudden fling backwards when he’s had enough, his hands mashing his face as he grins with his eyes closed, his beautiful smile, his creepy laugh as he sleeps, his smears of bright orange or mustard poop that smell like fresh bread (apparently normal), his glowing skin with angry rashes that come and go in hours and days, how intently he feasts like it’s his job, which it is… So many things. I feel awe when I find his tiny, perfectly curled eyelash on my chest. Everything he does makes me laugh. His cries are so cartoonish with his quivering chin, pouting frown, vibrating tongue, and toothless mouth. His butt really is insanely soft. He’s like what all babies are like, and yet it seems freshly delightful. It’s like how all cats are similar and I can love them all, but I especially know and love the random one that’s mine.
Breastfeeding’s release of oxytocin is like a partial dose of MDMA every 2-3 hours every day. Like with MDMA, as soon as each session starts, I feel insanely thirsty, my individual teeth clicking dryly in my mouth. After a few days of this, I was obsessed with my baby. After a week, I felt universal love for all humans. “You’re ooey gooey now,” Amit said. “You love all babies, and anyone who has ever been a baby. Don’t forget, you made me promise to prioritize us above the baby. You vowed you’d love us first, then our dog, and babies last.” But the hormones were changing me.
I saw a homeless addict and cried. This person had probably been treasured by their mother. And even if not, someone had cared about them enough to keep them alive as a helpless newborn that needed feeding every 2 hours for months. Attention had gone into this person, and now this was their life. What if this happened to my boy? There would be nothing I could do to fight the world and its suffering and my kid’s choices. I could only love him and let the heartbreak of existence wash over me without drowning in it.
A video of kids killed in a war zone made me sob. Eyes closed, they looked just like my kid when he slept. I let myself feel the heartbreak of their pain, feeling the cuts on their bodies slice through my heart. I felt how we’re all connected, and that as long as there’s indifference, ignorance, scarcity, blame, and danger in the world, my child wouldn’t be safe. I wanted to protect him so the world could never hurt him, but I saw the futility of it, because cruelty, ignorance, and violence are inside each of us, born from the same womb as love, curiosity, and drive. All I want is for my child to be happy, but I can’t control that. I can only love him, and let my heart break again and again as long as the world exists with us in it. My child, I already weep for your inevitable hurts, but my heartbreak deepens my awe that you or any of us are alive.
