Fever dreams

sick days and remembering what was

This past week my daughter came down with a fever and everything else in my life got pushed to the waving fringe-line of the heat. For two days she refused to be put down by me, so I held her hot body to mine day and night. She slept using my neck for a pillow and refused any other food but nursing. My breasts, unaccustomed to such constant need, developed a deep ache. On the third day of her fever, I called the doctor and burst into tears on porch, holding myself and rocking after such a long week.

Then, she got better. The fever broke, the hot need melted away and she gained enough energy to saunter again up to the apple tree. I was so relieved to see her walking, eating, talking again. And yet, as life moved back towards its normal rhythms, I felt a very strange sensation tug inside of me—part of me missed it.

I didn’t miss her suffering, that was terrible to witness. But I missed the intensity of such single-minded presence. The feeling of knowing, for certain, what mattered in that exact moment—and what didn’t. I missed having everything else in my life pushed to the fringes, put into perspective, made small in the face of such fierce clarity. I missed holding her day and night like I used to, even though I know this would never be sustainable now. I missed those early days. The globe we used to make with our two bodies, the world we created of what we alone could give each other, the flowers that grew in-between.

As I nursed her to sleep again and again this past week, I found myself thinking about a poem I had written when she was three months old. The afternoon I wrote it, I had been sitting in a dark bedroom, nursing her to sleep and staring at the crack of light on the other side of the door. There was sunshine and springtime happening just outside that door, but I was content to be where I was, holding my daughter and praying.

It’s a strange sensation. To both be so glad that those early newborn days of intensity and hardship are over…and to miss them tremendously. But it’s one of those paradoxes of motherhood. You look backwards with joy, you look forward with ache. You look backwards with ache, you look forward with joy.

And part of you will always be that mother nursing in a dark room, content just to be in that fragile, fertile darkness with the one you love.

A woman praying in a dark room

For as long as there
have been rooms
there have been women 
with children
in the circle of their arms,
praying in the dark

praying for her child’s safety
praying for love
praying for the light
that appears at the 
corners 
of the door

praying that the milk continues
to flow
that her child
continues to grow

praying that there are flowers
blooming
outside her door,
even if she cannot 
see them now

praying for flowers
and for a world
that needs them.

A woman nurses
in a dark room

the baby sleeps
the woman prays
flowers
flowers
continue.