#274: Misshapen bones
Observations from my week
Good morning! I wasn’t in the mood to publish a proper essay today, so I collected some observations from my week instead. I used to write more loosely in the early days of Maybe Baby, and I love reading other people’s diaries (long live blogs!), so today I’m dipping back in.
This morning we woke up at 8am again. We’ve been sleeping in this week, if you can call it that, because Sunny’s been waking in the night with a hacking cough. Avi jokes that we’ve been trading in the 7-8am awake hour for the 4–5am awake hour. When Sunny wakes in the night, she cries out our names with the run-on cadence of Mary-Kate-and-Ashley: “Mommy-and-Daddy!” she wails. “Mommy-and-Daddy, I need help!” It would be funny at another hour. When one of us goes in, she’s hot and sweaty, hair stuck to her neck. The air conditioning doesn’t reach her room very well, and the heat wave isn’t helping.
Sunny’s often strangely lucid in the night. “Before we get my water and sit in the rocking chair, can we get the booger out of my nose?” she asked me last night, circa 4:45am. She recently learned about before-and-after sentence construction and has been making heavy use of it, putting the world in order for herself. Of course, I said, grabbing a wet wipe and asking her to blow. “It didn’t work,” she said. “It’s still there. All I feel is the wetness.” When did she learn the word “wetness”?
I’ve been picking her up lately when she cries in the night. I used to resist this, reminding her it’s “crib time,” but now that I’m pregnant, I’d much rather sink sleepily into her rocking chair than crouch by her crib, blocking the blood flow to my legs in service of restraint and long-term independent sleep goals, one arm stuck through the bars of her crib searching for John (her blanket, which she tends to lose track of in the dark). So we snuggle instead. It’s what we both want, after all. With another baby due in October, I can’t help but think of these cuddling opportunities as receding, so I infuse them with anxiety and call it seizing the moment. In the chair, it’s finally quiet and we breathe together, her head heavy on my chest.
This morning we had to get to the doctor by 8:30am, which meant that upon waking we had 10 minutes to feed and dress a toddler. Those are NASCAR pit crew numbers. I held her with my left arm while spooning peanut butter into her oatmeal with my right. When she said she didn’t want peanut butter, I said, Okay! Then mixed it in quickly in the single second she looked away. Sucker. Arms through arm holes, legs through leg holes. We sang stupid songs to pretend our urgency was just a game. Smelling our desperation for things to go smoothly, Sunny took to whining at the precise pitch that spikes our cortisol. Whining makes problems bigger, I reminded her, and questions make problems smaller. This registered only briefly. When we got in the car, Avi spun her car seat around so quickly it hit the oatmeal bowl in my hand, flinging gloop on my jeans. Sorry, sorry, he said. When you’re in a hurry, slow down, we reminded each other. Turns out there’s an affirmation for everything.
The doctor’s appointment was for Sunny’s left thumb, which appears to be slightly but permanently bent. I noticed when she tried to do heart-hands for the first time the other day and made binocular-hands instead. The doctor did not know what was causing this, referred us out “to plastics.” All the referrals these days are burning a hole in my inbox. A referral to acupuncture, to pelvic floor therapy, to radiography, to osteopathic medicine. Referrals are little questions packaged as answers, and I resent them for not making my problems smaller.
When I finally saw an osteopath for my neck the other day, she was stern and offered to do “a manipulation,” which sounded intriguing so I agreed. I laid on the doctor’s table as she felt carefully around my spine while murmuring with dismay—close to a dream scenario. “There are things sticking out of your neck that shouldn’t be,” she said, elating and horrifying me simultaneously. “You will have chronic back pain for life,” she said casually, as she felt my scoliosis curve (this I also liked).
At the end of the “manipulation,” which entailed tugging on my joints and bones in a mysterious pattern, she pulled up the Google results for cervical lordosis, a.k.a. forward neck. “Your head goes forward like this,” she said, turning the monitor toward me and showing me several illustrations of hideous people. “And your shoulders curve forward.” I waited for her to tell me how to fix these things, but she was quiet, then supplied a referral for physical therapy. “So should I come back to you?” I asked, to which she replied, devastatingly: “If you want to, sure.”
One small victory: I fixed my Dyson vacuum this week. My family gave it to me in 2018 when I moved into my first solo apartment, and I pride myself on the fact that it’s still going. When people say Dysons never last more than a couple of years, I tisk tisk. Over my eight years of ownership, I’ve taken it apart entirely to diagnose various problems. I’ve replaced the filter and the battery multiple times, I’ve taken a mini pipe cleaner to tiny dust-filled grooves that are nearly invisible to the naked eye. My favorite part is cutting through the hair that wraps around the brush head with my haircutting sheers. It comes off in chunks that I slowly pull off the rotating motorhead.
Lately it feels like my days are mostly maintenance. Toys, friendships, misshapen bones, appliances. Affirmations, of course, are mental maintenance. There’s no good life without grief, I’ve been repeating to myself every time I’m struck with anxiety that I’m going to forget the details of Sunny’s toddlerhood. I must be loving to my body, not just loving to my mind, I say when I want to eat a pint of ice cream supine on the couch instead of doing my PT exercises. I appreciate the reminders (I think). I heed them over and over, as if following someone else’s guidance. I’m always saying life is cyclical; it was a more interesting observation when it wasn’t so obvious.
A couple nights ago, Sunny and I were rocking in her chair around 3am when she sat up suddenly and said, “I was surprised.” I asked what surprised her and she gestured toward the door in the darkness and said, “That thing coming toward me.” I demanded clarification and received none. Lovely. She settled back onto my body. After a while, I sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” then “Strawberry Fields” for the hundredth time, until I felt her body grow limp with sleep.
Last Friday’s 15 things included the $30-dollar purchase I considered for a year, my thrilling shower upgrade, Danny’s birthday outfit, and more.
Wednesday’s Dear Babies was about how to deal with a depressed partner.
The Rec of the Week was small-kitchen solutions.
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley
The start of this feels like Haley saying "I just threw this together" and then she drops a masterpiece. This was so fun to read!
John the blanket 😂