Baby Love

“Oh my god, what have we done?” Mary was so sleep-deprived she didn’t know whether she’d said it aloud or just thought it. She was too hot; slick with sweat so her thighs slipped across each other when she rolled. Her wet hair matted at the nape of her neck and her face was a landscape of puffy and drained rises and dips; she could feel this as she squinted her eyes open. The gray digital display read 3am. 

The room was a soft blue, with moon yellow stripes on the comforter like caution tape, stenciled through the slatted blinds. An otherwise peaceful setting disturbed by the gravity of a too-late sense of alarm. The weight of the question hit her like a wayward piano. What have we done that we cannot take back?

Rustling noisily in an attached bedside crib was the bright mound the size of their small calico cat, Purrl. Corners of soft white unfurled around his face as he freed himself from a loose swaddle. Mary wasn’t good at swaddling, and besides, the baby didn’t seem to like it. She was unconvinced that wrapping an infant like a burrito was appropriate, and she would likely give up on it in a few days.

Mary hadn’t heard the baby cry yet; he communicated in grunts and whines as he squirmed, eyes closed and bald as a naked mole rat. Every squeak and snort that slipped through his small vocal chords pierced her exhaustion like an epipen to the heart; yet somehow Greg, a much bigger, hairier mound, snored deeply beside her, a rumbling French horn, blissfully unaware of the baby’s needs.

No sleep for the wicked. Mary laughed deliriously as she lifted the bundle, slipping one hand under his peach fuzz head and another around his lower back. There was one surefire way to stop the fussing, and she—her body—was the magic ingredient. She lifted him briefly to her mouth and kissed his soft, sweet-smelling head. Then, cradling him in the nook of her elbow, she laid him down beside her, so that she could see his wispy eyelashes and the perfect rounded edges of his face in the moonlight. 

The baby turned his head frantically from side to side, smacking his lips and clicking his tongue on the roof of his mouth, while she hastily unfastened the plastic clasp on her tank top and released the boob.

#

It was an uneventful pregnancy until it wasn’t. Mary would get sick driving herself to work in the morning, red meat made her queasy and so did fruit—but otherwise, she was giddy with joy. She’d left work early for the “big” ultrasound. About an hour in, it was obvious that something was wrong. Her bulging belly, doused in lubricating jelly, was starting to feel raw. The ultrasound tech kept rubbing the wand across the same spot, as if the image would change if he kept looking. 

He told them, “I’m trying to get a better view of the heart,” but his distressed expression betrayed too much. The young tech wasn’t permitted to make a diagnosis, so he was stalling until the radiologist arrived. What was meant to be a half hour appointment stretched into two hours, and the radiologist, a tall, curt woman with a tight bun, confirmed it: there was a problem. 

The phrase “his heart was in the right place” took on a new, literal meaning. For, this baby’s heart was not, and there was no way to predict whether it ever would be. A defect that appeared as glowing green fluorescence on the scan, radioactive-looking enlarged lungs that were pushing other organs out of place.

“We’ll set you up with the genetic counselor so you can discuss your options,” the radiologist had said, turing her focus back to the screen. She typed percussively, then hit ‘enter’ with her index finger.

Your options. That word seemed too benign for what it alluded to: whether or not to terminate the pregnancy then, at 20 weeks, because sooner would be safer than waiting, if he died anyway.

Mary and Greg were pro-choice, atheist liberals. But that option was never on the table. They’d waited for so long for this child, invested so much time and money and body and soul into making him. They’d had so much compulsory sex that it wasn’t fun anymore.

After the tests, the surgery, the poking and prodding, fingers and ultrasound wands shoved into what used to be her private pleasure center, Mary’s body wasn’t hers any longer. Mary’s body was the vessel that would carry and grow another human. This was what her body was for, and it was what she’d been raised to want, what she thought she wanted.

#

The baby’s broad, bobbing, seeking mouth seemed as big as his entire face as he locked onto his swollen, dripping target, his blind animal instincts detecting odor, heat, hormones. Drawing life from Mary’s body, his plump pink cheeks pulsated rhythmically. It was a sensation like nothing else Mary had experienced, indescribably unique, a steady tugging, like sipping a thick milkshake through a straw, only you’re the straw and the milkshake. 

Mary’s body, if you could call it that, wasn’t a child-full vessel anymore; it was a delivery service, and now it was a milk jug, a soft serve machine, a soda dispenser, the whole damn dairy cow. What have we done? Suffered and sacrificed to give up my body, reframe my identity, be needed.

She lay on her side, immobile, the baby nestled into her arm, his feathery hair tickling lightly against her bare skin, her neck propped awkwardly (certain to be sore later) to achieve the best angle for nursing. He was firmly attached and smiling (as a newborn does, reflexively) in the lucent light; and she tried to smile, too, but she was thinking of the bright ultrasound, and her own chest was tight picturing the baby’s bloated lungs, the tense weekly scans looking for clues of hope, or doom, but willing to endure the emotional torment for a chance. Mary was a terrible poker player; she saw only potential, not the odds. Yet, against the odds, here he was, utterly content, and as he drained her, he also filled her with love, as a mosquito numbs its victim to its sting. 

Mary mused that what the baby felt wasn’t love; not like what she felt for Greg. It was dependency, instinct, hormones; the baby was using her. And she didn’t care. Isn’t that what love is, anyway? Is it love when we feel it, or when we choose to define it?

Mary closed her eyes, watched the rods and cones kaleidoscope across her view, felt the pull of the baby’s soft suckling lips, his snaps and smacks of satisfaction and sleepiness, slipping into slumber and, maybe, dreams of nipples, to the rhythmic bass of Greg’s thunderous snores. Mary smiled now. She had an inkling of what the future might hold: tomorrow—no—today, whenever the baby chose to start his day, bright-eyed, rested and fed—she was going to be so fucking tired.