The Other Side of the World

let’s catch it all up, shall we?

1. Somewhere in the sky; baby-child writhed in her very own small, red seat-belt. An in-utero-seasoned traveller, she slept through a multitude of voyaging indignities including a stint in a precariously positioned bassinet.

2. Then we got to New Zealand which can best be described presently as; Winter, Green. Our new bed is a Family Bed. Ok, it’s two beds jammed luxuriously together. In any case, it is fantastic. Sometimes I lose people at night and have to organize impromptu search parties to source them out. Compare here.

3. School is a little mind numbing. All those pesky things you forgot you were forgetting and subsequently forgot to panic about forgetting. Seemingly important things too like; how to not be responsible for untimely deaths of innocents. However, I can still take a mean blood pressure, so all is not lost.

4. I’m on call again and it’s not scary yet. Probably because I have not actually been called - how trite! But, anyway, my bag is packed with a spare shirt and a spare breast pump and I am falling asleep with whispered prayers to either get the Knock on the Door (because that’s exciting) or, conversely, to not get the Knock on the Door (because I’m tired and want my whole night to sleep!). Haha, all hail the contradictory life of the student midwife.

5. Baby-thing has suddenly decided that food is delicious and what’s more, worthy of swallowing. Be warned should you try to snack on the leftover pizza sauce in her vicinity without sharing. Back arching is so very threatening to the peace. Family dinners and family baths and family nesting together like a perfect double eggcup + egg makes the whole universe right and whole and glazed in honey-light.

All good then?

good.

Way back, when baby-child was just an extraneous blob newly slipped from my body (so new, in fact, she was just named baby-child) I had cracked nipples that I thought would murder me with spikes of just-over-the-top pain every evening. Thanks to an infamous man named Bob Rae (or maybe no thanks to him, I just like to mention him to see if any of my readership remembers their Ontario politics) we have publicly funded midwives here, and that seems to translate into publicly funded breast pumps of great, quiet, streamlined, efficient, almost-painfree milk extraction. So, my ever-patient midwife visited twice that day, the second time to bring me the black mantra-hushing tube-rich contraption. And out came some lovely colostrum that made it seem as if I had spent the previous weeks nourishing myself on fresh spring grass (you know, the proper colour like proper cow’s milk should be).

Then things got better and it sat very deep and very far in the vast tundra of my mother’s deep freezer. Which is even on another floor of the house, so definitely out if sight and mind.

And then since we are, swooping off, trudging South, bungling our way into the pitch-blackness of here, just start this family stuff all over again somewhere new, it won’t be so complicated, really - since all of this - I removed it, broke it into precious pale watery-sun chunks and offered it up to my newly crab-crawling breast-milk savvy baby-thing.

And breathed a sigh of. . . relief? contentment? remembrance? sheer emotional exhaustion?

as she loved on it with all the fervour of her little clutched hands and cold lips

mmmmm mamasicle . . . .