« Cassie | A story. » |
Getting used to quietness has taken a little bit of adjustment. Sleepy mornings with the baby snoring until late, me on tiptoes to preserve the calm, midmornings where I am confined to the couch with her, again, snoozing on my belly and letting out a yell whenever I move to reposition myself, and late nights with my arm (again falling numb) hanging awkwardly off the edge of the bed to rock the cradle. I listen to her, for that moment when I think I can take my chances, and I let go, turn to my husband, bury my face in his shoulder, and fall asleep before I can even settle in. I wake up at 4AM with limbs numb and still wearing my glasses. I've found that this little buggie requires a lot of sleep and attention. If I expected caring for a baby would be complicated, I was wrong - there is nothing complicated about it - but where I once considered sleep to be a bit of a waste of time, I now see that *some people* consider it to be completely vital to growth and development. Surprisingly enough to me, I have come to enjoy the odd nap here and there, if for no other reason than the fact that I have no choice; if I move, she wakes unhappy. As difficult as it is for me with my restless leg syndrome/ADD/fidgets issues, it's easier to deal with my body itching and aching to move than it is to hear her wail. And so, I sleep.
On the days I work, I leave a forty-five minute long trail of guilt and motor exhaust behind me until I get onto the unit to take up my assignment and care for the polar opposite of Amelia's place on life's spectrum, the aging and the nearly-dying. I have a mind that can only keep track of a certain number of things at once, which is why my little paper brain I carry with me at work is a thing honed by time and experience, full of information on the complexities of my patients' care. I know what each of their tubes is draining, what medications are dripping into their veins, what is floating around in their blood, the color and makeup of their pee, the electrical currents of each beat of their heart, the sounds of their lungs, and have planned out their day for them on the basis of all of these things and more. They are complicated, these people, they fill up my brain with very real worries about their health, their emotions. I put my heart and soul into helping them limp slowly towards an acceptable level of health. I encourage them, sometimes with tears of my own, and watch as sometimes all that I do is not enough to fix their needs. I find it happy, fulfilling, exhausting, sad. Bodies begin to shut down and it may take a hundred things, done in perfect order with perfect precision, ordered by a perfectly brilliant mind, and with interventions and medications working in exactly the manner that they are meant to work. But I am imperfect, not brilliant.
I come home to find this baby, ten weeks out in the sunshine and full up of milk and poop and goofy smiles (when she is not in a mood), who is perfectly, gloriously simple in her own little complicated way. As fast as the old are shutting down, her cells are busily weaving this matrix of a little person. I can't help but rejoice in her simplicity. That she is here with so little effort on my part. That she is a little person. I am renewed.