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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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Babies

Posted August 26, 2008
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Birdy

I'm cozied up to Birdy in her little bed while the cool night air washes over us. Me, I'm dozing on and off, my head heavy and drooling on her pillow, but Birdy's too excited to sleep. "You know what was so tiny on those babies?" "What, honey?" "This. Mama, look: this." She's pointing to the place between her nose and lips. "That spot between their nose and lips," I say, and she says, "Yeah - that little, like, ditch."

Calling Birdy a "baby lover" is like saying the Green Giant "has a way with vegetables" - it doesn't begin to do justice to her passion. When I got off the phone with our deliriously happy friends and told Birdy that we could visit them - and their hours-old twins Abigail and Claire - in the hospital, she cried, "Oh my God! You are kidding me! Oh my God!" and twirled all around the house in a blur of neonatal excitement. At the hospital, though, she grew serious and shy, and held my hand quietly. Our friends Judy and Liz were so blissed out that you felt their happiness like a drug when you stepped into the room. I have never had the pleasure of entering an opium den, but perhaps it would be something like the sweet, heavy joy of the air around them. And the babies. Oh, the babies! If ever any two people deserved two such blindingly beautiful babies, well, these friends of ours are those people.

At the risk of sounding like Ben when he says, as if he is unique in all the world, "I just love goody bags!" - well, I just love visiting newborn babies in the hospital! I love holding the little laundered bundles of new person. I love the birth stories. I love figuring out what little treats to bring, partly because I love remembering the treats that friends brought us: the flowers and smoothies, the fragrant shower gel and chocolate. But unpacking them in this pink-lit room - one door down from the very room where Birdy and I fell in love five years ago while heavy flakes floated down outside our window like we were inside the magic world of a snow globe - I felt a heaviness in my ribcage. A heaviness that might be described as nostalgia, but that might even better be described as envy.

"You sound broody," my mom had teased me over the phone, when I called to tell her about the twins. "Broody" is English for "dreaming of babies." My English grandmother accused me lovingly of broodiness the last time I saw her - right before I got pregnant with Ben, in fact. But now. Oh. It's the same old boring story, the same old boring highway that connects heart to mind over endless miles of rational landscape. Longing versus reason in their ancient battle. Ho hum. We just rented a human-body video from the library - the kids have had a million questions recently about the workings of their insides - and during the narration of conception, the line, "there are about 400 chances to make a baby in one lifetime," ballooned a kind of panicky sadness into my chest. How many chances are there now?

Now I'm the prehistoric mama lumbering in with my thousand-year old youngest child to visit the Peachland of new-parenthood. Birdy was quiet for a long while, though she smiled at me and raised her eyebrows every time one of the babies snuffled, sneezed, grimaced, cried, winked, nursed, grunted, or did any of their other crazy newborn tricks. But then Judy - brave, kind Judy - sat Birdy down in a chair and gave her each baby to hold in turn. Birdy jiggled the babies to soothe them, sang "Twinkle Twinkle" in such a high, clear voice that we grown-ups couldn't help exchanging expressions of saccharine disbelief - it was almost comically angelic.

Of course, as is often the case, this week has mixed joy with sorrow. A friend of my brother's lost two children in a freak accident while he was vacationing with his family in Oregon. He and his wife were walking on the beach with their older daughter, and a plane crashed into the house where their other children were sleeping. It is beyond imagining, and yet this is the human contract: love's twin is loss, and you don't get one without risking the other. That loss will flap around those parents like aching butterflies, like angels, for the rest of their lives. I don't even know what to wish for them. I wish for grace. For beauty in their pain.

But Birdy, sleepless Birdy, is still thinking about those squirmy, huge, and healthy newborns. "Also their fingers," she says, and when I say, "What?" she adds, "were really teeny. And their fingernails." "They look so alike," she muses, and then adds - because inadvertent comedy always gets the last laugh - "But I think it's just because they have the same hair-do."

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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