Francesca Lia Block - Guarding the Moon

Francesca Lia Block

Guarding the Moon

A Mother's First Year

For Jasmine

THE BIRTH OF THE MOON

In a hospital room overlooking a twinkling, winking sleep of city I am stumbling. I am gripping onto the backs of chairs and onto my husbands shoulders that ripple as if trying to absorb my pain. I am crying out as my mother whispers softly to me, as if I were her baby again, her baby for the last time. The thunder through my pelvis is the truest sensation of life I can remember experiencing. Finally my body feels as if it is achieving what it had been insisting on since the first eggs came. I understand why I have been so hungry, why I have raged, why I have hurt myself trying to find love, why I have felt as if I would shatter if I did not find it. Now I prepare to shatter as I believe I was meant to all along. R. Carlos Nakai plays his flute on the stereo. The music is melancholy, windy, spanning deserts and skies burning red, spanning a universe of stars. The music is the shudders of pain that are telling me why I was born.

This goes on through the night. When the sky begins to pale and the city no longer looks like an enchantment of lights, the doctor comes to tell me I am still only three centimeters dilated and this could go on another ten hours or so, leaving me too exhausted to push. I decide to give up the startling, stunning education of the pain and get an epidural. The pain is preparation, an initiation into the selflessness and challenges of being a mother. And yet, Creation created these ways to alleviate the pain, toocreated balms, potions, relief. I lie on my side as the soft-spoken anesthesiologist administers the drug. I am swept into a lullaby sleep tasting of lemons and sugar, smelling of lavender and almond oil, sounding of flutes, and feeling like the silk that is spun on the moon. I wake fully dilated and begin to push. The impatient doctor, unabashedly eager to get to his weekend plans with his son, yells at me to bear down. I do so, hard enough that blood vessels burst in my face. My mother and husband are on either side of me, speaking gently, feigning calm. I am slow and numb below the waist. It seems to go on forever. Finally I reach down between my legs and feel where my body is splitting open to let my daughters head emerge. It is slippery and hard and round. It is my daughters head. The moon herself. That is when I fully awaken and see God. I cannot tell you any more than this. I announce to everyone, even my hurried, distracted doctor, that I see God. The universe cracks open and light pours into me, out of me. I push and scream to Creation. She emerges. In one split second I witness the transformation that is life. This never happened before. My father died behind a closed door.

But now my baby comes. Everything has changed.

She is laid upon my breast, slick with blood, her body tiny and still curled in the shape of my womb, her tucked-up froggy feet, her head perfectly round and smooth. She is whimpering and I speak softly into her Buddha ear. I tell her how much we love her. I tell her how we have waited for her forever. How grateful we are that she has chosen us. How we will do everything to make her happy. How she is our great treasure. My tears spill over us.

I weep in a different way when they take her away from me to wash her. I wonder how I will bear being without her even for moments. It is as if the best part of my body has been severed and swept off to be cleaned, swaddled, and topped with a pink knit cap.

When she is gone I feel clumsy and weak, incompetent. I dont even know how to diaper a baby yet, let alone nurse her. I am choked with worry and grief that she is not with me. But then they bring her back.

Miss Pink gazes up at me with the heavy-lidded smoke-and-sea blue eyes that seem to stretch across her entire face. Her body molds to mine, as if we still share nerves, blood, excretions, sensation, emotion. I remember the umbilical cord, much thicker and bloodier than I would have imagined. I only got to glimpse it for a second before it was cut, leaving us separate. Now only our sweat makes us stick together.

But I feel fearless. With love. We are one again for now.

MOON MILK

The fear begins again.

In the womb it was so easy to nourish Baby. Now I wonder about pain, if there will be enough milk; are my nipples too small? The lactation expert rushes in, eager to get on with her Easter vacation, and asks impatiently if I have taken breast-feeding classes. When I say no she gives me an irritated smirk and proceeds to manipulate Bubela into the awkward football hold. I tense, imagining my darling whisked away to be given formula while my breasts dry up.

Instead, a few hours later, with the guidance of a real lactation expert, my mother, Baby Girl is feasting peacefully. Milk seeps through my clothes; jets squirt into her mouth. I can almost see how it makes her grow as she drinks, makes her turn pink pearl. She looks up drunkenly, nose rose, eyes dazed stars, bubbly mouth. She drinks until my breasts hang empty and I have to eat ravenously to fill themvegetable soup, watermelon slices, and rice milk/almond/banana shakes. Then she wants more, squawking with delight, panting like a pup, curling and uncurling her toes, anchoring my elbow between her ankles, rolling her eyes with pleasure, smacking her cherry-pie lips. Later on, Milk Maiden begins to smile while she nurses, her mouth curving up tenderly around my nipple and her eyes sparked with mischief as she strokes, pinches, and scratches my waist and plucks at the fabric of my shirt, snapping it back against my body.

There is pain, too; my raw nipples feel like fragile silk, ready to tear off, or like hot coals, sizzling at the tips of my breasts. I apply gobs of lanolin until all my clothes are stained, but nothing helps. Maybe the painful tug near my heart is a way to relieve the buildup of so much love; it has to spill this way. Pain is grounding; it brings me back to reality where I have to be to raise a girl. It keeps me in safe shoes, although I long for my pale blue platform sandals. The glasses that I used to avoid wearing are now placed securely on the bridge of my nose so I dont miss a loose button that might choke a baby, a pin that might poke. Without pain, especially during those first days after her birth, Id be floating out there on sunset clouds, ice cream, and daisies. Pain keeps me on mother earth. It makes me become mother earth with her ravaged survivors body.

The pain lessens as my nipples toughen, thicken, but over time I begin to feel the nursing breaking down my body in other ways. I was told that in the yoga tradition breast-feeding is considered the equivalent of running five miles each time you do it. I am always hungry, my bones feel miniature and brittle, I have practically no libidoeverything thinned where during my pregnancy there was voluptuousness. I am getting deeper grooves chiseled around my eyes from lack of sleep. I sit squinting at my computer as I try to finish a book for my editor, my vision getting worse every day. My hair, which was thicker than ever while my baby grew inside me, is falling out steadily. Strands of it end up gripped firmly in Bambinas fists as if she is planning on making a nest or a wig. I imagine myself as a bald, sexless stick figure, crudely stitched together, groping blindly in the dark.