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judy wilson
a different kind of neverending

The obstetrician turns the blood-streaked baby to face you, a presentation of sorts, his gloved hold almost mechanical. Beyond the tiny red contorted face--a son--the doctor smiles, his thick lips pressing against the surgical mask. You mumble, "my baby, my poor baby, poor, poor baby," and stretch to finger a slippery heel, minute toes. You’ll remember later, much later, how peculiar that moment was, those words were. My poor baby. Of all the things to say, you’ll think, but you’ll shake it out of your head--a mere coincidence.

Your smiling, balding husband leans against the delivery bed, rubbing your hair away from your forehead until it becomes irritating. You glance at him and smile. He’s won his nine-month standing bet that it was a boy. The nurses take the baby to the far side of the room. You’re not worried. They are taking care of him. The doctor tends to you, the afterbirth, the stitches. In his charming South African accent he tells you that he was paged from midnight mass--that he knew he had to hurry because you’d been slowly dilating for two weeks. He’s pleasant and his hands move warm, quick. Many babies, he tells you, never once was he tardy. He draws the green sheet over your legs, pats your foot, and leaves you and your husband alone in the delivery room. The nurses had slipped out with the baby--when did they do that? you wonder.

"Why don’t you rest?" your husband says and even though he’s always been a gentle man, you’ve never seen his eyes that soft. "They’ll probably bring the baby back in a minute. They’re cleaning him up. I’ll wake you," he says. You close your eyes against the chrome and lights of the room, just for a minute, you think.

____

You hear a different voice beside the bed. The pediatrician that you’d chosen stands beside you, wearing a gray Duke sweatshirt, no makeup, making polite conversation with your husband, but even in your daze, you know it’s strange that she’s been called to the hospital at three something in the morning. It has to be three something. She sees you’ve opened your eyes and begins her explanation--why she’s there. Something a little odd with the baby, so they called her. The nurses panicked, she says. Nothing very serious, it could have waited until morning rounds. But the nurses, they were jumpy. So then she goes into the marrow of the story. The baby has a small opening in the roof of his mouth, a cleft palate, but not a very serious one. Didn’t affect the lip or gum at all. Simple surgery to repair it, nothing to worry about. She’s more concerned, she tells you, with the jaw--it’s very undeveloped, doesn’t give the baby much room for breathing unless he is lying on his stomach. The name for the anomaly, she says, is Pierre Robin Syndrome.

"Didn’t you notice the jaw?" she asks. "Haven’t you seen the baby?"

You sputter, "For a second--I thought he looked fine, but I only saw him for a second."

Your husband withdraws from stroking your hair and sinks his elbows into the edge of the bed, his head turned toward your feet, and you can’t make out his expression.

"I’m sorry, I thought you’d probably noticed and would be concerned. I’ll have the nurse bring him in," she says. "It’s nothing frightful, actually, just a bit odd."

An awkward quiet replaces her when she leaves the room. There isn’t one single thing you have to say to your husband as he stares at the bed, fingering the sheets. Nothing at all that can be said or should be said. You wish he wasn’t there, in fact, you wish he’d go away, before they bring the baby. You don’t want him to see it, see him react to it. You don’t want to worry about what he thinks of it, of you--of this, your ultimate screw-up.

Then the baby is in your hands--it’s what you’ve wanted for months, for years, for almost half your life, to have your baby in your hands--and you squint, studying his face and you don’t see it, the problem, the so-called oddity. Of course, he’s screaming and his face is bunched up in the outburst and maybe that’s the reason, you think, but when you look at your husband, you know--he sees it. And you blink the tears away and look again, trying to be totally objective, but you can’t see it. The doctor hands you a medical glove and says, "Slip this on. You’ll be able to feel the narrow cleft in his palate. I want you to feel it. I don’t want you thinking that it’s something worse than it is." You prop the baby on your thighs while you slip the glove on your right hand. Your fingertip seems too large as you slip it into his tiny warm mouth and you feel it, the small, V-shaped opening in the palate that widens toward the back. You smile because it’s not so bad. Not so bad at all and the problem with the jaw, why, you can’t even see it. They can, of course, you know that, but it can’t be all that bad if you can’t.

You tug the glove off and hold him to your cheek, breathe in his newborn smell and whisper to him, "Yes, we’re going to fix it. We’ll make it all better. It doesn’t matter, no it doesn’t," and his crying stops. In the corner of your eye you see your husband watching and you want to smack him--for the look on his face. You want to tell him "Go away, then, we’ll be fine--you don’t have to worry yourself with us." The doctor is saying, "The jaw will grow, correcting itself, but the cleft will require surgery in about a year."

"A year?" you say. "Why a year? Can’t they fix it now--well, I don’t mean right now. But a month, two?" You shift the baby to lie flat in your arms and suddenly he’s struggling to breathe and the crying resumes. And for the first time, you think you can see it, the lack of the lower jaw, a tiny face with an extreme overbite. The doctor tells you to put the baby on your shoulder, "Mustn’t lay him on his back. His jaw settles and disrupts his air flow."

"Twelve to eighteen months," she says, "that’s the age for this type of surgery. Besides, he’s got the respiratory problem as well, and that could prove dangerous as far as anesthetizing." She has an irritating habit of carrying her blond hair behind her ears with her fingertips. Your husband has turned his back now, gazing toward a wall shelved with green sheets and small boxes, one hand in his pocket, his change, his keys, sounding through the room.

"You’ll learn to care for him, to feed him, how to hold him and position him so that he doesn’t experience too much distress. Tomorrow is soon enough. We’ll let the nurses have him for now and get you in a room."

You kiss the baby’s velvet cheek and, even though you want to keep him, pass him to the nurse.

Alone again with your husband, he turns, gives you a dry kiss on the cheek, a brush of his lips, and says, "I guess I’ll go make the phone calls." He’s tearful and you know when he gets away from you he won’t go make the calls, not right away. He’ll go sit in the car and cry and beat his fist on the steering wheel. You know this--can see this happening. It’s what you would do if you were he.

____

A buxom, gray haired nurse wheels a clear acrylic bassinet into your room, your son on his tummy, legs and arms tucked beneath him, like a fat, resting frog. Content. A blue card is taped to the foot of the bassinet--Tisdale Baby. The nurse raises the head of your bed. She’s a noisy breather. "Did you get any sleep?" she asks, but doesn’t wait for you to answer, and has yet to look at you. "Oh, you’ll have to get used to that--not getting any sleep for a while. This little guy here is going to demand attention at the strangest hours," she says, pulling the covers away from the baby. "Yes, you’ll be ready to snatch your hair out before he’s done with you," she says chuckling, and you despise her. How dare she make assumptions? How dare she tell you how difficult it will be? She hasn’t even looked at you, for Christ’s sake, doesn’t know the grief of even your first night. She lifts the baby, "C’mon, sleepyhead," and hands him to you. His head is warm in your hand, his small diapered bottom almost weightless in your other. He arches his back, arms stretching up, fist balled tight, and then the legs extend and you know these movements, have felt them from within. Instantly, like a sleeper who feels himself falling, he pulls his hands and feet back in, a horrible frown on his face, red lips quivering, and you harbor him to your chest, kiss his fuzzy head, explore the contours of his back with your fingertips, and his crying tapers off into earnest snorts. You lift him higher so that his head rests on your shoulder, his body molding to yours, and his breath warms your neck. A blue vinyl band circles his wrist matching the one on yours: Boy Baby #1821. The nurse stands beside the bed, holding a strange looking bottle with a red, unnaturally shaped nipple.

"A cleft palate bottle," she says, flippant. She pushes her heavy glasses up along the bridge of her nose, sniffs, clears her throat, and says, "The bottle is wide and flat, squeezable," and she holds it in front of you, squeezing, her demonstration better suited for a six-year- old. You kiss your son on the cheek and run your finger around the curve of his ear.

"The nipple, you see, is also flattened and it has no hole at the tip. Instead, the hole is here," she holds it a foot and a half from your face, pointing to a hole on one side of the wide, flat nipple. "Your baby can’t suck, so you’ll squeeze the bottle for him off and on while he feeds. You’ll have to learn to regulate the flow, the rhythm of the squeezes, to accommodate him--how fast he’ll swallow, how often he’ll pause--that sort of thing." She looks at you for the first time, pausing, as if she’s asked a question and is waiting for a response. Annoyed, you nod for her to continue. "You want the hole to rest toward his tongue to prevent the milk from entering the sinus cavity. Take it slow at first, you don’t want to flood his mouth with milk. He will have to learn this right along with you. You two will figure this thing out between yourselves." She filled the bottle then with formula from a small glass bottle, the kind the other babies would drink out of, you think. Holding the bottle toward you, she says, "Make sure you keep him propped up while feeding. And if you put him down in the bassinet, turn him on his tummy. Can’t breathe otherwise." You take the warm bottle and she asks, "You want me to stay or would you be more comfortable if I left?"

You smile and say, "You can go. We’ll be fine."

When she leaves, you put the bottle between your thighs to keep it from tipping and hold your son out to look at him. The jaw is visibly anomalous to you now, but the rest of him is so beautifully perfect. His eyes are large and round and dark and you know that once the jaw grows, those eyes will dominate. "What a handsome baby you are, do you know that? Do you know how much your mommy loves you, do you know?" Why am I whispering? you wonder. After all, he’s real now. Still, you’re conscious of not having anything significant to say as you sit staring at him, lifting the edge of his shirt--you want to see every part of him.

"Are you hungry, little man?" you ask, and settle his bottom on your legs, holding the back of his head, making sure to keep him propped. You pick up the bottle, your hand trembling, but you pretend you’re confident because this is something you have to do. You have to feed the baby. They will send you home with him and you will have to feed him. Solo.

You make sure the hole faces the tongue as he takes the nipple in his mouth. You do nothing at first as he mouths it and then he’s bunching his face up to cry so you lightly squeeze the sides of the bottle. There’s no reaction of satisfaction from him and the nipple only seems to be muffling a wail. You take it out and look at it and at his screaming mouth. No sign of milk having been expressed. You take a deep breath and imagine the nurses huddling outside the door, listening to the baby scream, waiting to charge in. You touch the nipple to his gums and he takes it and as his lips close around it, you squeeze the bottle again, this time a bit harder. His crying ceases immediately, but he flails his arms out to the sides, his fingers extended. His head pushes back against your hand, eyes wide, and he’s violently rigid. You pull the bottle away and see milk oozing from his nostrils and he looks like he’s just been dunked under water. "Oh, God," you whisper, and the bottle falls from your hand. You wipe the milk away with your hospital gown, shaking, and tuck him over your shoulder, patting his back, listening for a breath, wishing he’d relax, wishing it was easier. Then you hear it--the caught breath--and it’s followed by furious wails as he balls himself toward you. You’re crying and rocking back and forth on the bed, your stitches feeling like thorns, and you know you should try again. But you rock and pat, rock and pat, cry, until the moment the pediatrician walks in and you hate her for just walking in. She’s smiling and you know you must look like an idiot, rocking and patting while your baby screams away and the bottle lies leaking on the sheets between your legs.

"Not going so well?" she asks and takes the baby, the bottle, and puts the nipple in his mouth. With her first squeeze of the bottle, milk comes through the baby’s nostrils. She wipes it away, gives him time to catch his breath, all the while smiling, and tries again. On the second squeeze, the baby swallows, and on the third and the fourth, yet with every squeeze he pushes his head backwards and his hands grasp the air, as if he’s anticipating being overwhelmed again. After about twelve squeezes, she puts the baby on her shoulder, rubbing his back, and sits on the side of the bed. "He’ll learn," she says, and now you love her. "I wanted to talk to you about the cleft--that’s why I came in." She stands again with the baby and reaches to the wall, pulling a medical glove from its square holder. She hands you the glove and you say, "I felt it, remember?" She shakes her head, "It’s different now." You slide your hand in the glove as she continues, "The skull and facial bones are compressed in the birthing process. Now that the bones are resuming their normal shape, the cleft appears somewhat larger. I wanted you to feel it then, and I think you should feel it now."

Again, you prop the baby against your thighs and slip a gloved finger in his mouth. "Jesus," you say as you feel the gap between the upper gums, "it’s gone. He has no roof in his mouth." You can’t imagine how it could be fixed. There is nothing there to work with. "Can they fix that?" you ask.

The pediatrician smiles, her fingers working her hair around her ear, "Heavens yes, you can build an entire mouth these days. But his feeding problems will be worse and he’ll have trouble with his ears. Sometimes, too, babies that are born with one defect will have other defects that aren’t so readily apparent. We’ll have to watch." She rubs the baby’s cheek with the back of her fingers. "He looks sleepy, mom."

You break off staring at her, your mind working on "defect" and "other defects," and remove the glove. You lift the baby to your chest and settle back on the pillows. His tiny knees press into you round and soft. You wonder if he’s had enough to eat, but he’s sleeping and you won’t wake him. With your hand, you cover his back and you can barely feel his breathing. The pediatrician says, "We’ll talk more later." You smile goodbye and watch her pull the door to, look over to the closed blinds at the long window, the sunlight forming a halo around the edges. A picture hangs on the wall near the window, the soft blur of pastels gone gray without light. Your baby warm on your chest, you wonder where your husband is.

The nurse comes back and stands over the bed. "How did we do?" she asks.

"Fine," you say and rub the hair around on the baby’s head.

"I heard him fussing. Nothing wrong with his lungs, huh?" She’s breathing as if she’s been jogging.

"They all fuss, don’t they? He was fine once he got started," you say.

She smiles, looking at the mostly full bottle on the bed-table, and reaches for the baby. Lifting him from your chest, she says, "We’ll see if we can get some more in him for you. Not to worry."

____

The phone rings by your bed, sounding foreign, not at all like the one at home, and you hesitate before answering. It’s your brother. "Congratulations. You finally did it." He’s coughing sporadically--quick, dry coughs at the end of every sentence--a nervous tic.

"You know--right?" you ask.

"Yeah," he says and he’s quiet.

You sit upright in the bed, your stitches tugging, burning, and say, "I want you to get some books from the library there at the university. Medical books. Anything you can find on cleft palate and Pierre Robin Syndrome."

"Can do," he says and he sounds almost happy. "I’ll run by the library after my first class and bring them right out to you. About two hours. That ok?" Then, as an afterthought, he says, "Mom said tell you that she and Dad would be coming in this afternoon, most likely around two. I don’t know where they’re planning on staying. Didn’t ask. Sis’s probably."

"Wonderful," you say and your head pounds. You slip back down against the pillows.

When you hang up, you feel your exhaustion. Your husband made the calls--this you know at least. Maybe he went to work. You think about calling the house, but you don’t want to move. You want to sleep and close your eyes, but you cry instead. You don’t want to, you’re tired of it, it’s not a good cleansing cry anymore, just a draining, an endless grieving that you can’t seem to control and it gives you no rest, no peace.

____

The next nurse that comes in with the baby is young and at least halfway through her own pregnancy. She’s efficient and polite, and you wouldn’t mind, you think, if she wanted to talk to you, but she doesn’t. The feeding works into a nightmare, milk consistently coming through the baby’s nose, and you feel like a torturer. You try to remember how the pediatrician did it and to imitate her method, but he’s fighting you on this. He refuses to swallow. The nice nurse comes back. "Did he take any for you?" she asks.

"Not enough to do any good, I’m sure," you say. "You might want to tell them in the nursery to try to get a bit more down him." You watch her handle him and she’s comfortable with him, and careful, the way she wraps him and lays him in the bassinet. She’ll be a good mother, you think.

"Well," she says, "I’ll see what they say, but they may tell me to bring him back to you. They’re pretty busy down there. And he’s a slow feeder, you know." She looks at her thin watch, writes on a metal-back tablet, and rolls the baby away.

____

Your brother comes in, two large books under his arm, sets them on the bed-table and kisses you on top of your head. You wish you’d combed your hair. Something. You haven’t even considered it since you walked into the hospital, in proud labor. You imagine you must have been beaming then, smug with confidence in your pressed maternity dress. You’d taken the time to shower and shave your legs, for Christ’s sake.

Your brother squeezes your arm, not realizing that it hurts you, that your muscles ache from hours of pulling at the handles of the delivery bed. You smile when he tells you he’s seen the baby.

"He’s a good looking baby. I was afraid to look at him at first. The way your old man talked. And the pictures in these books--I wasn’t sure what I’d see." His eyes are honest, warm brown, and his cough is gone.

"He is wonderful, isn’t he," you say and sit upright, running your hands through your tangles. He nods and you’re glad to see him.

"So what’s his name? Your old man said he doesn’t know yet."

"Doesn’t know yet? Of course he knows, there’s never been any question," you laugh nervously. "He’ll be Dean, Jr.--why the hell would he tell you that? Is that what he said, exactly? He doesn’t know yet?" Your voice is too loud for the cramped hospital room.

"Actually, he didn’t say anything. Just shrugged his shoulders," he says and imitates your husband, and even though your brother is young and physical, not at all like him, you can picture your husband doing this.

"Where is he? Do you know?" you ask. You notice for the first time how flat your tummy has gotten. With your hand resting there, it’s almost as if you were never pregnant.

Your brother pulls the guest chair closer to the bed, sits with his elbows resting on his knees, looking down at the gray tile floor, and says, "I imagine he’s at home. I put him in a cab about seven this morning. His car was still at my apartment when I left."

"Must be nice," you say, and lean back on the pillows, but they feel flat, stiff. Your brother stands and walks to the window, opening the blinds and color comes to the picture. You run your hands through your hair again, feeling as though that incessant crying is going to return. "God, I want a shower," you say.

____

By the time your parents arrive in the afternoon, you’ve showered, put on a stiff green gown from your overnight case, French braided your hair, and fed the baby again, this time a bit more successfully. You still haven’t had any real sleep and you’re cross, even as you greet them--your kisses stiff and hugs quick. But you hold your father’s hand as you sit propped against the pillows, the sheets fresh, tucked and folded precisely by the nurses. The sheets are rough on your skin--your elbows feel rug-burned. You take the complimentary bottle of lotion from the tray on the bed-table, start rubbing it on your hands, your elbows. Your father takes the bottle, takes over, rubbing the greasy pink into your skin.

Your niece, your sister’s child, sits in your mother’s lap, her perfect blond curls spread against your mother’s burgundy sweater. The child’s hand reaches up and toys with your mother’s beads while staring at you. She says, "What’s wrong with her eyes?" Your mother’s arms squeeze around her, an affectionate gesture, and, not quite whispering, says, "She’s been crying. Having a baby hurts and she’s been crying." Then your mother kisses her on the cheek and looks at you, smiling still, smug in her correctness. The child stares at you again and you can’t imagine why your mother brought her.

"Where’s your mommy?" you ask.

She looks up at your mother who is holding the child’s hands between her own now, and your mother looks back at her, saying, "Tell her she’s at work. Say ‘she’ll come by when she gets off.’"

The child looks down at her hands and says, "At work. She’ll come by. . ." and her face turns back to your mother’s, questioning. Your mother whispers in her ear and the child finishes, "when she’s off." Your mother squeezes her again and they look at each other, there’s a quick kiss between them, and then smiles.

You turn your attention to your father. "Have you seen the baby?"

He nods, grinning, screwing the cap back on the lotion, and in a teasing voice, says, "Looks like a baby. They all look the same to me." You laugh and it feels nice between you. He puts the lotion in the tray of the bed-table and you notice the smile fade and then his eyes settle on you somberly.

"Has this happened before, Daddy? In our family? Do you know? It seems to me I remember someone telling me about something like this, years back. . . ."

Your mother laughs, having missed the transition somehow, missed the fact that your father is no longer in a teasing frame of mind, that it’s serious. "Of course not," she says, her cheeks, her fat neck blotching red now under your father’s stare, rocking back and forth with her arms around the child.

You ignore her and look back at your father. He’s shaking his head no, "Not that I know of, darling." And the room is quiet. A baby is crying down the hall. Your father shifts his stance by the bed and says, "This is something genetic, then? Is that what they say?" You touch the books on the bed beside you. "That’s what these say." You haven’t had time to look at them much, to read much, but you’d skimmed through them before your parents arrived, reading here and there, and the pictures were so shocking, the grotesque images presented were such that you steer your father’s hand away as he reaches for them, saying, "No, Daddy, you don’t want to." A baby cries down the hall again and you know it isn’t yours. "My baby’s not that bad. His case is not that bad." You feel the damn tears skirting your eyelids, hot, and you sit and say, "Daddy, hand me my robe there. Let’s walk down to see the baby." He helps you slip into your matching robe and you wiggle your feet into the almost matching slippers. When you stand, tying the robe at your waist, pleased that you have one again so soon, your mother says, "We’ll wait here," and she and the child stare at you. You take your father’s arm and walk down the hall toward the nursery.

____

Your sister puts in an appearance, mannered at best. There’s nothing between you but years of fighting over crayons, the front seat of the car, the hair dryer, makeup, attention. Nothing warm or affectionate in your relationship. You don’t like her very much, her ways, her extremely proper behavior and plastic kisses. She, you know, doesn’t approve of you, of your not quite traditional sense of things. So there you are.

When she leaves, you settle back into reading the books. Like a masochist, you soak it up page by page, the horrid pictures, black gaping holes in infant faces, disfiguring scars, children that would have been beautiful, the cross sectioned, numbered processes of surgical repair, thick tubes jutting from the mouths of severe cases, tongues located in throats. You read of the certainty of speech impediments, the likelihood of hearing loss, the possibility of retardation. And you learn that it usually takes more than one surgery to fix it, a cleft like your son’s--sometimes three or four. And then later, when puberty comes, and he’s outgrown his surgically created mouth, they’ll have to build him a new one and his tongue will have to learn to use it again, to speak all over again. But he’ll get through that, and you will too. Then he’ll pick a beautiful bride from one of the dozens that will fall in love with his eyes and you’ll inflict your final pain--because no one will do it but you. You’ll sit beside your happy, strong son and show him books like these and he’ll turn the pages in horror and you’ll tell him, you’ll have to tell him--you have a 50-50 chance of passing this to your child.

You close the book in your lap, the pages falling past your fingers, and swipe angrily at the tears, but they won’t quit coming. There’s nothing in you now to stop them.

____

Your face is still wet when your husband wakes you, lifting one of the books from your lap. He switches on the lamp beside the bed, settles in the guest chair, and starts flipping through the pages. He’s changed his clothes from the night before, but his shirt doesn’t match his slacks, and you would have told him not to wear those shoes. In the light of the lamp, you see creases in his face you’ve never noticed before and his eyes are shadowed, red-rimmed. You’re almost ashamed because you can’t find it in yourself to pity him. It feels as though you’ve lived an entire week without him. As he turns the pages of the book, you know he won’t see what you saw. He won’t bother to read the words. He won’t grasp the thing the way you have. He’ll live it a day at a time, you think.

He looks up at you from a pictured page and says, "We should thank God--it could have been so much worse."

You frown at him and say, "Thank God? Thank him for what? That he saved the worst for that poor child?" and you point towards the pitiful baby in the picture. He closes the book and leans back in the chair, staring at you, puzzled.

"And what do you suppose that poor baby’s parents had to be thankful for?" You’re staring him down; you won’t budge on this.

He leans toward you, almost whispering, "No one knows why these things happen, but--" You hear your mother in his words.

"Do you know why no one knows? Is it not obvious to you why no one can figure this out?" You’re almost shouting now, and your stomach is cramping. "Because it is illogical, absolutely inexcusable!"

Your husband stands and places the book hard on the bed-table. "That--you--that attitude of yours--that’s probably why." He’s breathing hard, his face reddening, and leaning toward you, his hands firm on the bed, he says in a whisper, "Nature has a way of preventing this. It’s called miscarriage, and it’s what your body tried to do, if you’ll remember, when you were three months pregnant. But your great doctors stepped in and you popped Brethine for the next six months every time you felt the least contraction."

The gray haired nurse comes through the door, wheeling the baby in front of her. You roll your eyes to the ceiling and take a deep breath. Your husband turns away, facing the window, wiping his face with his hand.

"Are we ready to try this again?" asks the nurse.

Your husband walks to the door, a slight glance toward the baby.

"Yes," you say. "Why don’t you run along to the chapel now, or the bar which seems more likely and, in the meantime, I’ll stay here and try to figure out a logical way to feed our baby without drowning him." You don’t know if he’s heard you, because he’s long gone out the door and the nurse, whom you despise, is standing over you, holding your baby, looking over her glasses at you. You hold your arms out for the baby and after she hands him to you, she steps back and says softly, "You know, I’d like to see this little fella go home to a happy, stable environment. He’s got troubles enough as it is."

You stare up at her. Incredulous, you think, and you say, "Well, you won’t be there, so that’s one pleasantry we can count on, isn’t it." And you can’t believe you’ve said it, you would never have said it, but there--it’s done.

As you prop the baby into feeding position, you see her out of the corner of your eye. She sets the bottle on the bed-table and walks out on silent soles, her hosed thighs rubbing. You take the bottle, turn it so the hole faces the baby’s tongue, and as he eagerly takes it in his mouth, you say, "There now. It’s all done now." You squeeze gently on the bottle and the arms flail out, the head pushes back. You remove the bottle, grab a tissue from the bed-table, and wipe the milk from his nose. You hold him to you, the warmth of his head against your cheek, his mouth near your ear, to hear the breath catch. And in that moment, when the tiny gasp sounds, you feel a satisfaction that you’ve never known. You kiss his cheek, his eyes, his nose, his red milky mouth and prop him on your lap again. You hold the nipple to his mouth and he takes it. Again.

 

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