BATTLEFIELD

When I look back on those first few days after Huck was born it like I am looking through a glittery soft-focus lens. I miss those days. I miss that throbbing feeling of new emptiness in my abdomen, and the way his squishy face would give way to the tiny fluttering of barely open eyes. I miss my nurses and the ugly hospital gowns and the impossibility of knowing whether it was day or night outside.

It has been two weeks since Huck was born, and already my memory has started to fade. I can't remember what it felt like to be pregnant at all. I don't remember where my back ached, I can't even picture my pregnant belly. My memory of the pain of childbirth is already so dim that I feel like I could have seven more babies, right this minute. Pretty please? The bruise on my arm from where the nurse blew out my vein trying to insert an IV is finally healing, my stomach is flat again, and even my outtie belly button is back to being an innie, something I really thought might never happen. I've already asked Brandon when we can start trying for another one.

But smoldering hot in my memory still are those first few days at home. Those first days with a newborn are like warfare, and I was its loyal soldier. Bruised on the battlefield of delivery, my body so so sore, I'd reach for that squiggly body through the pain like he was the very air I breathed. Through exploding rounds of fire and hormones, while exhausted and aching from every muscle, and with eyes aching from the fatigue of all-night skirmishes, I couldn't even force myself to sleep. I had to catch his every expression, memorize the outline of his cheeks before they changed any more, and be alert for every fleeting second of his perfect little life. He would latch on and my toes would curl through the pain, until slowly I was relieved, my every cell vibrating with purpose.

I have never felt more alive. I've also never felt more like the walking dead.

My aunt Stacey texted me a few days before Huck was born. (Marco!) She told me she was jealous of what I was about to do. She described her childbirths and hospital stays and first days home as "magical." It sounded ridiculous to me at the time, but now I remember sitting on an ice pack in the recovery suite, my still sweaty hair pulled back in a sloppy ponytail, staring at this beautiful creature as he nursed, feeling blissfully happy and under the influence of all kinds of crazy cocktails of new mom hormones, and I got it. It made perfect sense.

Those fantastic, frustrating, horrible, aching, incredible, soul-explodingly joyful days, those first days are straight up magic.

I can't wait to do it again.