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Writing inspired by the following SWC prompts:
Uxorious
In the literary world, today is ‘Bloomsday’, the day to celebrate the writer James Joyce and his novel Ulysses – which takes place on 16th June. In Ulysses, Joyce invented several new words, with perhaps the most famous being ‘uxorious’. It describes a person who is totally besotted with, and dotes upon, their wife. Write a story or a poem which includes an uxorious character. Why so much love? (Is it reciprocated?)
Uxorious
by Doxa Papachartofyli
The wailing is loud and pierces through the night’s quiet, a needle being jammed unceremoniously in a pin cushion. My actual cushion is soaked by a bucket of early postpartum sweat, potently infused by fenugreek. Trying to peek through the dense cloud of sleep, I absently notice what the midwife told me. When fenugreek is making your sweat smell like maple syrup, it has hit the threshold needed for the milk supply to increase. The wailing now is more familiar of a sound, but I am still unable to wake up. Let’s hope the milk supply will go up indeed. Wait. Milk. Yes. Baby. I have one of those now. And it is crying.
I open my eyes forcefully, probably tearing a few eyelashes in the process, and I roll to my side before sitting up, because my abdominal muscles are cooperating with one another as successfully as a group of three year-olds at their first ballet recital. I wince at the heaviness of my breasts, noting the wet milk stains that are now covering them. Yes, milk supply has increased.
“Adam,” I croak to my husband. “The baby.” He mumbles in his sleep and turns his back to me. “Adam,” I say again, amazed at how he can still sleep through the baby’s disproportionate-to-her-size volumes of crying. Despite the fact that I myself was also asleep mere seconds ago.
He finally stirs and looks at me, eyes crusted by a thick layer of the midnight exhaustion.
“What?” he mutters.
“The baby,” I say, as I grab the breastfeeding pillow and position it in front of me. He gets up and gently picks up the baby from the Moses basket next to him.
Something that I didn’t know before I had a baby? Well, there is a whole encyclopaedia that can be filled with things I didn’t know, and one of them is that newborns grunt like an old man straining on the toilet when asleep. So, after three nights of virtually no sleep for me with her by my side, wondering if I will ever sleep again, and googling how long I can go with no sleep before dying (apparently the record is eleven days), Adam moved the baby to his side. “You need to sleep more than I do, sweetie.” he had told me. With her on his side, I seem to be able to sleep a bit better, or at least without trying to interpret whether her little noises are normal evolution at work or something sinister happening to her.
He changes her diaper before bringing her to me, then goes to prepare the breast pump equipment, so I can sit and pump after the baby is done nursing and he tries to rock and burp her back to sleep .
I wince as the baby latches, praying a day will come that I won’t feel her trying to bite her way into my lungs. I feel the letdown of the milk happen forcefully, as the baby happily settles in. Looking down, I smile as I watch her, caressing her wispy hair with a palm covered by skin so dry, it will probably perish into dust by a stiff breeze. Another thing I hadn’t anticipated before? How frequently we need to wash our hands.
My thoughts of motherhood and the importance of hand moisturisers are rudely interrupted by the sights of the t-shirt I am wearing. It’s red and one I pilfered from Adam. It’s covered by milk stains and sweat stains, and some baby vomit stains (which I prefer referring to as fermenting milk stains, as it makes me feel less disgusting and slightly more haute cuisine).
Adam returns and gets started with the assembling of the breast pump. I love how he knows I can do it on my own, but he also knows I am left with two functioning brain cells which are both occupied otherwise at the moment. “It’s the Medela Symphony,” he had told me proudly. “The lady at the pharmacy said it’s the NASA rocket equivalent of breast pumps.”
He sits next to me while I nurse and the look in his eyes is soft. “You are so pretty,” he tells me and I make a sound in protest. The oxytocin I am producing must be affecting his own scarce handful of brain cells.
“Sweetie, I love you but please, be serious”.
“I am!” he protests with all the might someone who has awoken already three times and will do so a couple more times before sunrise.
“Adam,” I admonish. “That’s an insult to the times I do actually look pretty. I’m covered in bodily fluids of two people, my boobs are engorged to levels that cannot possibly be normal, I am wearing adult diapers, I haven’t showered in a week, and all I can think of is whether I should google if it is stunting her development having her sleep by your side rather than mine!”
Baby fusses at that. Or maybe it’s time for her to change sides. I lift her up carefully and cradle her to the other breast.
Adam smiles. “Like I said, pretty.”
I roll my eyes at him very slowly. It’s not a statement. My eyeballs are just so very tired, I can’t even eye-roll properly. Adam gets up and leaves the room. He disappears into the corridor, and I hear clanging in the kitchen, only for him to return with a banana and a small yoghurt tub.
“You should eat something. The midwife said fenugreek capsules can be hard on your stomach,” he says and hands me the banana first. Wise. We have already gone down the road of googling: “is a coffee drop spilled on baby’s head an emergency.” And by we, I mean me. I did that. Both the spilling and the googling.
I finish eating the banana at the same time the baby is done drinking. Adam picks her up and
drapes her belly on his shoulder, patting her back in soothing circles, as I eat my yoghurt.
I somehow manage to get yoghurt stains on me and audibly complain how repulsive I feel.
“Hey!” Adam says. “Wouldn’t hurt for either one of us to shower in the morning, and we will, but don’t talk about yourself like that. I have had a decade of you complaining about non-existent blemishes and eye-bags and panicking whenever the scale saying you gained half a gram, but that’s enough! You created and birthed, and you are now feeding one of my two favourite people in this world, and I won’t have you talk shit about the other.”
I feel emotional and I am about to reply something sweet, as he giggles. “Shit? Remember?” he asks.
I grunt as I move to the milking station that was formerly known as my home office. “Too soon, Adam, too soon”, I tell him and he keeps giggling as our daughter bellows a burp loud enough to be heard from our upstairs neighbours.
I remember. Of course I remember. I fear I will never forget.
Just ten days ago, as the midwife came in to check on me, and Adam broadly gestured at the area of my lower body and said, “Houston, we got a shit-uation,” only to be met by our stoic midwife’s tired silence. “Get it? Shit-uation. Not s-i-t. S-h-i-t. Because she pooped herself.”
I have to admit that I did know this would probably occur during labour, but I adopted blissful ignorance instead.
Despite myself, I smile at the memory. “Go away!” I’d told him, horrified, as the midwife took over to restore some of my dignity.
“Who cares? You are pushing a human out. I love you so much.” he had yelled as the midwife sent him outside to fetch me an extra pillow. What an idiot. What an amazing, uxorious idiot.