Our Baby Story
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
At first, I intended for this to be one of those posts where I just put up cute pictures of our sweet little baby… except that would be deceiving because he’s not always that cute or sweet for that matter either. In fact, there are times when I just want him out of my hair, times when I pray there was a decent daycare around here. There are moments when I wonder what the heck I was thinking when I put him in that helicopter, when I feel like a teen mom who made a mistake and has no idea what the heck she's doing. Other times, when I’m a little less sleep deprived I fantasize about how cool it would be if I could just fast-forward him to his three or four-year-old self. Four is a good age.
The truth is, this baby is high maintenance. He hits, he wails, and screams at the top of his lungs when he doesn’t get what he wants. He bit through my cotton pajama t-shirt tonight and went lock-jaw on my right boob. He wouldn’t let go and the more I tried to push him away, the harder he bit. It really really hurt. There were weeks when he first came here that I thought he was a baby insomniac and wondered how he could keep running on such little sleep, waking up 5 or 6 times a night and not going back to sleep for hours. At the end of the day when you’re exhausted and all you want to do is crash in bed, or watch a movie, or check your e-mail, and you have a screaming crying one year old who can’t be comforted it can drive you pretty much insane-off-the-wall-nutso. On top of that, I felt guilty for all of the attention I was diverting to the baby and not the other kids in the house who also needed me.
In the last few weeks, we’ve figured out that N’s restlessness is probably due to anxiety and of course the fact that he still really really misses breastfeeding and his real mommy. I knew his mother very well and I know for a fact that I’m a real shitty substitute. Pampa, his mother was hands down one of the most amazing women I’ve met on this earth. Everyone who knew her would vouch for that and no one could ever take that woman’s place or fill the role of the kind of mother she was.
When I got the call about her death I was in Kathmandu, coming off a high from my wonderful trip to Wales. I had just picked up two crates of books to take back for our library. I was thinking about how under control I had everything, sipping a cup of tea. And then all I could hear on the phone in the village dialect was “diarrhea” and “Pampa” and “dead.” My body went numb. I was shocked. I had a flashback to my last conversation with her outside of her little one-room mud hut a year and a half before with N (sister) in the doorway and Y on her breast. She told me she was pregnant with her 5th, soon to be N. She asked me for help. Her alcoholic gambling husband was 30,000 rupees in debt. Their kids were out of school, they had sold all of their land and their animals. She should have been as hopeless as hopeless can be, except she was just the opposite; she was still hopeful. My sister Kate was with me. We were both the most emotionally exhausted we had ever been in our lives having just lost Juntara and trekked 2 days to the village to bring J’s family all of her belongings. I told Pampa that the first thing I would do was take her husband down to Surkhet for some family planning and after that, he could help out around the house with construction, make a little money, get his act together and make back some of the money he had thrown away gambling. She pleaded with me to take one of her children down and give them an education. “Take my daughter, please take her.”
“I can’t didi. I can’t take any more kids. Everything will be okay. I’m here and I’ll do what I can to help you.”
“If anything ever happened to me you would look after my children right?”
“I promise, but you're going to be fine,” I told her, snapped a picture, and changed the topic of conversation to something a little lighter.
A few days ago Daju asked me if I remembered the conversation we had with Pampa that day outside of her hut. Both of our eyes filled up with tears, looking down at N who was happily playing and practicing his walking. Then Daju went into his room and pulled out a plastic bag that had been sent down from Kalikot. Inside was Pampa's gold nose ring, citizenship card, and a few other Nepali papers. Last I found an old worn picture of Pampa, holding Y, with N’s (sister) face peeking out of the doorway just exactly as I remembered them. I had printed the picture and sent it back up to Kalikot with someone going and then totally forgotten about it. N (sister), Y, and N in the belly.
The whole story seems so surreal. It’s taken me a while to put the pieces together and it’s taking us all some time to get over the emotional loss and grief of losing her, of feeling and knowing that we could have done something to save her. My biggest regret was not bringing her down to Surkhet with me to visit, just once so that she could see what a light bulb was or sit in a bus for the first time, just so that she could have seen life outside of that village or the home in which her children would ultimately end up living.
Sometimes it’s the best thing in the world, having a baby around, holding him in your arms, loving something more than yourself. He makes everyone laugh and smile and brings out our gentleness and is there anything better than having a sleeping baby in your arms? I mean really. I haven’t found anything yet.
N started sleeping through the night last week and thanks to my dad, who has him practicing, he is walking 30 and 40 steps and before I know it I know he’ll be four. But my deepest wish for N (sister) and Y and N is that they know how much their mother loved them.
And now, as promised for the “my baby is the cutest thing in the entire world” pictures.