Babies and Stories
Welcome Maia Mae, daughter of Malaika, daughter of Karen Louise, daughter of Donna Mae.
This small person arrived in the world on April 8th, 2021, reminding us that there is so much to celebrate even now. She looks gorgeous when we see her in her mother’s—or her father Cristian’s—arms, via Zoom. We’re besotted, of course. And boastful in that manner of people who bear no direct responsibility for getting or keeping her here.
To explain who baby Maia is to us, I have to say who her mother Malaika is.
“Larry’s niece,” doesn’t really cover it. Better to say that to our five children, she’s the sixth sib on the sibling chat. That she’s the reason that our family minivan had to have eight seats. That when Malaika married Cristian, Larry and his brother walked her down the aisle.
Our five adult children have been testing variations of their names attached to “Auntie” and “Uncle.” And after years of taunting us with potential (awful) grandfather monikers, Larry has settled on one he likes. We wonder, will Maia use it too?
As for what a new generation might call me, a few years ago when we took a road trip to Georgia, we discovered that Mimi is what they call grandmothers there. Yes, my husband did get a big kick out of calling me “Granny”. I was less amused. But what the hell, I’ve decided to own it. Mimi is already what most young children call me. Maia and her cousins are welcome on the bandwagon.
A baby’s arrival stirs up stories.
Larry has been remembering the day Malaika was born. Waiting up, while his sister laboured.
What I’ve been remembering is the trials of those early postpartum days. (Ok, weeks.) Not—thank goodness!—because Malaika’s experience is like mine. I’m remembering how we learn to be parents—and thinking about what it means to offer love and support, when someone’s parenthood is new.
Yes, I AM wearing a shirt that says The Inbreds…
My two bio children were both born at home, in an attic bedroom, in the middle of heat waves. Their births were fast and furious. For minutes and hours afterwards, I was steeped in a sense of grand accomplishment.
The postpartum time had little of that elation. The first weeks were challenging with my first daughter, but the weeks after my second daughter was born were more difficult than anything I’d ever known before, or maybe since. I don’t know how I would have made it through without the support and wisdom of the midwives who continued to care for me, after my baby was born.
“We don’t talk enough about how hard it can be.”
That’s what a friend said recently. I agreed, and said that’s why I’d started a postpartum peer support group after I had Beatrice. “I didn’t know you did that,” said my friend. And though we’ve been close for more than a decade, I’d never told her that my first book was on midwifery—a practical guide, that included multiple stories from parents about their own experiences in pregnancy, birth and postpartum. (An unrelated, but fun fact about that book can be found at the end of this post.)
I wonder then, if it’s not that we don’t talk about things, but that we stop talking about them when that time in our lives has passed. Why is that? Do we want to put some distance between those hard things, and our lives now? Or maybe we feel that it’s not our turn? That our experiences will be deemed historical, and irrelevant?
It’s not because we forget. I know that.
I remember very well the dark cloud and difficulties of that time postpartum. But also what I took from it, the things that helped me through.
In particular, I remember crying and holding my two-week-old daughter, while a midwife kept me company and warmed our tea. I remember that we’d been sitting there for hours when I sobbed, “But I can’t even feed her!” And I remember how gently the midwife said, “But Miranda, you’ve been nursing her this whole time.”
I’ve carried that moment for twenty-two years.
It’s with me even when I’m not conscious of it. And it’s been there whenever I needed to reach for it, to be reminded that I can make it through some other hard thing.
Among the delights to a new baby, is thinking of the things that we might give.
At Christmas, we were already buying board books. I’ve been embroidering for weeks, practicing my Mimi-skills. But since Maia was born, I’ve been thinking that the gift I’d most like to give is to her parents. (And to the other kids, when they are parents too.) To be like that midwife, who believed I was strong and capable, and kept me company until I could see it too.
You’ve got this, Malaika and Cristian.
And we’ve got you.
***
Now, about that midwifery book…
I am really proud of this book (published in 2003, and now nearly out of print) and was glad to pitch and write it with Sarah Knox. But doing it damn-near flattened me. I was getting a divorce, and trying to figure out how to survive as a single parent, and it felt bittersweet that my first book would be so practical, and not a collection of poetry or stories, as I’d always hoped. But I told myself that someday, someone might say, “You wrote that book? It meant so much to me!” And then, it would have been worth it.
No one did. But four years later, I was excited to be accepted into the Creative Writing MFA at UBC. Before classes began in Vancouver, there was a dinner in Toronto for all the local students. I was nervous, still feeling self-conscious about my publishing history.
Maybe that’s why I chose a seat near a fresh-faced woman who was very pregnant. Somewhere during the main course, I overheard her say that she was using a midwife, and had she had read “this really helpful book…” And so I got my chance to say “I wrote that book,” and I got to have it with my new writing peers. The person who made it happen was future thriller author Amy Stuart.
Last week, Amy told me that the boy in her belly has just turned 14.