April Musings

We met this baby plate mushroom while walking with our baby girl

Yuma,

Since we last met, I had a perfect little baby girl named Ember. She came premature, and the subsequent twelve days under the glow of hospital lights was fascinating for the anthropologist inside me, but excruciating for the forest goblin.

This newsletter iteration comes with a bit of a content warning: hospitals, blood, mental health.

If you would like to hear my sonorous tones, you can listen to the audio version of the newsletter here:

Our little Ember, taking a break from being fiery to focus on being milk-drunk

Prescription for an immediate and total life change: have a baby

You are born on April eighth.

You destroy all my plans for your calm, well-nourished birth.

Waters broken five weeks early, my womb becomes dangerous. I lie in a hospital bed for two and a half days. I am pumped full of antibiotics. Your home is pumped full of antibiotics. I pray. To you. "Kick me more, my baby. Move. Show me you're alive."

Then, there's the bleeding. At one point, a blood clot the size of a mouse falls out of my body. Eighteen hours after the bleeding starts, I ask them to cut you out. You come out screaming.

I am overjoyed by the volume of your tiny lungs. Your proof of life. I am overjoyed to have a girl who, from the very beginning, lets us know of her anger. Her hunger.

I have not yet processed much of this. It is not yet ready to be prose. I'll save my reader the trauma of more unfiltered detail. Here, instead, are some vignettes:

Your perfect body, covered in lanugo: your soft premature baby hairs. I hope you never lose them.

In your ear, the exact fold as your father's. Drawn in miniature.

The way the bottom falls out of my mind as the progesterone levels of pregnancy leave my body. Twenty-four hours of the cruelest withdrawals.

The way you fall asleep on your father's chest. The way that all of you falls asleep on your father's chest. Boneless. Home.

I sing Sufjan to you: I love you more than the world can contain in its lonely and ramshackle head.

The fate lines already etched on your palm

Despite spending almost all of April indoors, part of me feels far from civilisation. You are one of the most wild places I have ever been. How the first time I hold you, you swim your tiny, red body towards my breast, latching onto my nipple as your first act of greeting. How your startle reflex, to throw your hands up as if to catch a branch, is the same as all primate babies. How you are not comforted by promises, but by heartbeats: you cry until we lie you naked on our chests.

Always was, always will be (Aboriginal Land)

My baby girl was born on unceded Ngunnawal Land.

I have been thinking a lot about Blak babies. About the generation of Blak babies stolen from their families. About the grandmothers against removals fighting another stolen generation. I have been thinking about how my own matrescence has woven my life around my little girl, how I cannot imagine the sorrow of having her taken from me.

I have also been thinking a lot about the strength of Blak parents and Blak alloparents. The many ways that they are insisting upon culturally safe birth conditions, particularly birthing on Country. I have been thinking about the Yolŋu djäkamirr: caretakers of pregnancy and birth, and their current cultural resurgence. I have been thinking about how many of the principals that Blak birth advocates are fighting for are also things I needed in my own, very medical and very exhausting birth experience: continuity of care, more connection to Country, more empathy.