-- For Nicholas, For Natasha
When my first-born entered the world
through an opening in my body
I did not even know how to hold him.
No maternal instinct like the knowing
bitch's to tongue her puppies off and even gnaw
away the umbilical cord that joined her
offsprings' lives to hers
informed me. I, a member of the reading breed,
for once did not know
did not know anything at all about
what a mother is supposed to do,
so I held my poor first-born like some
crazy running back desperately clutching
a football
as he dodges and darts down the playing field
to score a touchdown.
The beaming delivery room nurse
who presented my first child to me
deposited him sunnily in my outstretched arms
surely would not have done so had she known about
the glaring blank panic
behind my eyes in my mind,
the mind that had read a hundred
how-to-do-it baby books
and now, in practice, knew absolutely nothing at all
about this life of the body.
In privacy, then, in my own room,
I tried to put him to my nipple as I had been told I should do
but the poor child could not latch on. He clenched his eyes
shut against the terrifying brightness of the
hospital room. Poor little stranger to this light and
arid exterior world of ours, I thought, as my eyes filled
with tears for him,
thinking how homesick he must now be and how
outside me forever, out of my wise body which had,
so far, always known exactly what to do for him.
I wept.
After a while, exhausted, both of us dozed; he,
bundled in my arms.
And then a miracle happened in our sleep:
somehow he nosed his way past the blue hospital gown
to my breast, and nursed.
When I see the mother birds, even after
these dozen years, I feel inadequate. How do they know the ways
of mothering, how do they read it in their blood?
How do they find faith to push their babies from the nest
even as cats pretend to sleep in dappled shadows below?
I watch in admiration as a tiny wren crams a bit of food from her own beak
deep down the throat of her offspring, already a full three-quarters
her own size.
The baby bird beats its wings in anticipation and lets out shrill,
insistent cries. It seems to be impatient with its mother.
It wants so much to eat and live.
