Baby!

so then my gynecologist sees me on monday and says, you might as well come to the hospital tonight, your uterus is starting to get ready... your c-section will be tomorrow.

and then on tuesday at 11:42 am the team of doctors and nurses (it definitely was not me giving birth) brought a baby into the world--or one of those spaces that are more like the world's waiting rooms, nowheres in particular, a surgery room in a hospital--and took her quickly away before i saw her. i heard a nurse say, "pero si es preciosa!" and thought that that was a good sign. a few minutes later, 5?, 10?, the "matrona" came in with the baby and put her so close to my face that i could kiss her, and let me look at her for a few seconds before taking her outside for her dad (and grandmother and aunt) to see.

then they sewed me up and that took forever. i kept thinking of the precious time that my daughter--whose name was by then, after having seen her, Aitana, and not Sabrina, the poor thing--and i were losing. those first minutes of human contact that any other mammal needs and knows as essential for survival in the wild. it's a good thing we don't live in the wild. but if she does badly in math, i know it's that stretch of time in which the poor newborn human was carried around and placed in plastic boxes without actual embracing into the family of humans that engendered and birthed her. like mammals do.

then they took me to this other place called "recuperación" and left me there for, what, two hours?, as long as it took for the anesthesia to leave my body. as long as it took for me to move my legs. i realized Aitana would not just do badly in math, she would have all sorts of emotional and mental issues related with distance and self-alienation.

then they took me to what would be my room for 6 days. the first thing i saw was ignacio, with his shirt unbuttoned, with the baby held against his chest. so it would just be the math, then!!

alejandro was there. he seemed scared or anxious, of course, because of the way i looked and having been told that to take the baby out i had to be opened up a bit and that i would be in some pain and weak. he was playing on his DS.

ignacio showed me the baby and the nurse put her on my chest. she said i should immediately try nursing her. i did. she sort of pouted and slept on, lying on my bare chest.

that night she did suckle, but i thought it was just instinct, that there was no milk. my chests were not swollen. but she swallowed, something, i thought. turns out indeed, she was by that night already drinking my milk. i was a pround c-section mom who produced milk on her first evening!

my mom and my sister stayed all the while. my in-laws came to meet their grandchild. ignacio left to take alejandro to judo class. then he came back with the boy, who stayed until 7:30. too many visitors for the first day with my baby! i slept a bit, but the room was too full of people. i gazed into the child's face, and thought that indeed, she was surprisingly cute for a newborn baby--no wrinkles, no weirdness. my mother-in-law kept saying, she didn't suffer, that's why. my mom said, yeah, her head didn't get deformed coming out.

that made me think of the child's experience--she's calmly sitting in my womb, sort of hunched over, and suddenly without much having changed except for the womb moving oddly every other day, there's an opening and the space which was wet and dark is no longer enclosing her and these hands come and tug her out, and they lift her away from her home and bring her into the world. suffering? pain? trauma? stress? no. but shock and surprise and utter discombobulation?? totally. i wonder what that means, what that does, how that was taken in by this tiny newborn human mammal...

in any case. so the days went by in the hospital room. i showered every morning. ignacio slept there every night--by the third night, he did so on the spare bed in the room which had been occupied 'til then by a woman who had given birth--how i envied her swift motions about the room!--and he would get up to give me Aitana from her little "nest" and put her on my chest, and get up when i need to go pee, to take Aitana and put her on his chest... and get up again when she woke up, and... so on and so forth...

it was a whole week there. my mom and my sister came everyday at noon because before then, no visitors were allowed. before then and after 9. ig would stay with us, i'd have breakfast... we had our little routines...

we came home yesterday. no routines! the bed is flat, no palanca can bring up the back! no meals cooked by cooks! nobody cleans the bathroom! and my mom and my sister are gone! i cried a bit this morning. i am not depressed, but teary. i cried because when i came home my cat Maqroll was waiting anxiously for my love and attention, and i could give him only love from the distance of my 5 feet 10 inches, and not from the closeness that he is used to... but it's just tears. not sobs. tears of sadness. i think it's tears of sadness for what is gone, for the life that i do not have anymore, for the things that i will miss and the cat's feelings, which are hurt and i cannot soothe with words.

it's also tears of loneliness in this country. i have my best friend here to help. that will carry me through the next two weeks. then that's it. humans are not meant to live in couples only--they live in families. that is because you need families to raise newborn human mammals, who take forever to be a bit independent, who need a lot of time and attention.

and right now, my newborn human mammal needs me to feed her.

i have only known her for one week, and i love her soooooo much...

-y

but susana is here. ignacio asked, is susana a good cook? sus, it is up to you to answer that!!!

Peed pants

Alejo is at it again: today he peed on himself while we were having lunch--he liked his food, we were talking and eating normally, it was not a stressful or different lunch in any way... and when he got up I saw that he had soiled the chair. He said nothing about it and if I had not noticed the chair, he would've stayed wet and dirty all day. He had already changed into his kimono to go to judo class, and of course, that got a bit wet because his underpants were totally wet. His father asked him about him having peed, and Alejo lied saying that in school the teacher had done this or that, but when I showed him the seat cushion he had to admit that he had wet his pants at home, not in school.

We made him wear a Pull-Up, and he was a bit flustered and asked if he was going to have to wear it to go to his mom's house. We said: your underpants and your pants are totally wet and dirty: what do you think? He cried a bit, but he always cries when his father reprimands him, so it is hard to know if peeing his pants and being caught and being made to wear diapers causes him a particular distress, or not at all... I am starting to see that it does not distress him much at all--that it is an annoyance that he prefers to put up with, the whole reprimand-diaper thing, instead of actually going to the toilet...

I told him that the Pull-Ups are not to humiliate him or make him feel bad, but because we are literally concerned about him getting rashes, since he does not change or clean himself and simply spends all day with wet, and then dry, urine on the sensitive skin of his private parts... and we are worried about him smelling so bad that the other kids will notice and make fun of him. He sometimes does smell bad enough that at ten feet away from him we know he is walking around in clothing that has dry urine all over it. He is not happy about wearing diapers but he is not unhappy enough to stop his behavior... I have asked him to please think hard about why he does this, so that we can think of a solution, but he simply stays quiet or says that he doesn't know... His father keeps telling him to go to the bathroom when he feels the slightest need to do so--as if Ale were peeing his pants after having held it in so long that he couldn't make it to the bathroom on time. This happened sometimes throughout his 4th and 5th year of age, but the end result would be pants with some urine, underwear with some urine, not totally peed through and through. I know that the boy does not pee on himself because he cannot hold it in: he simply lets go and pees on himself, period. It is not when he is doing something fun, or when he is doing something that he does not like. It is not when he is anxious or angry, or when he is happy or relaxed. There is something, some reason, some physiological thing, I guess, that is behind this behavior... does he like the sensation of letting go and peeing on himself? Could that be it? It is not for attention per se, because he tries to hide his soiled underwear, and he doesn't say anything, letting it dry on him. Is it a cry for help in some way? Maybe--but help in what??

I looked up "my 6-year old pees on himself" in google and saw tens of parents, many of them stepparents, asking similar questions in situations that were similar: kids who had already learned to use the toilet, and who do not wet their beds at night, suddenly start, at age 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9, even, to we themselves. But nobody had answers, just questions!

Over Christmas vacation he did not pee on himself as much but only because every couple of hours we would have him stop what he was doing and go to the bathroom. He would sometimes say, "I have nothing, I cannot do anything" but most of the time, he actually peed. I guess we will simply have to make ourselves remember that he cannot do this on his own, that, like his homework, he needs to be supervised regarding peeing... but we cannot do anything about school, and sometimes he stinks from having peed his pants in school and spent all day drying it out on him...

So that's it for today--I don't know how to help him, and that drives me crazy!

Sorullitos de maíz

so i am about to make sorullitos de maíz for the first time since i came to spain. (my dad wonders if i have something against capital letters. i think i do, actually). it is not easy, finding the right cornmeal. but i think i found it, and so i will now go into the kitchen and make some sorullitos, minus the gouda/edam cheese because they sell those in slices here, not in a ball or a quarter of a ball that you can grate... oh, well...

i will make the sweet kind. you know, following this recipe:

http://www.publiboda.com/cm/pbreceta/3327/SORULLITOS_DE_MAIZ.html

there they have both the sweet and the non-sweet variety.

for the sauce, which i may or may not make, i'm not sure, i always add secret ingredients which make people say, oh, this is the best mayoketchup sauce ever, or, depending on the country, this is the best ever pink sauce.

besides the mashed garlic, mayonnaise, and ketchup, squeeze half a lemon (small), put in some salt (just a small bit), some sugar (even less), some pepper (more than the salt), and half a teaspoonful of mustard, the grainy kind... um, what's it called... you know, the one with little mustard seeds.

that is my advice for the day: go out into the world, buy cornmeal, and come back home to make sorullitos. fry them and have some with coffee or hot chocolate or tea-with-milk or whatever warm thing you may want to drink this wintry day...

i am now officially starving. which sucks, because once the masa is ready you have to wait a while for it to cool down a bit. not a half hour, that's insane, just enough so that you don't burn your hands... argh!

c-section!!!

so i went to the doctor today and she looked at me with a mean face and said, "haven't you told this baby that she has to turn around?"

Aitana is just sitting there, instead of being upside down, she's just sitting there waiting... fool!

i said, "she's only human: its uncomfortable for a human being to be upside down for weeks and weeks..." ignacio said, "see? she is just being logical to the extreme, like you, regardless of how not logical it is to be logical at certain times."

so that's the news. BUT the doctor said that she will not perform the c-section until at least the 20th of january--THIS doctor says that it's better if i actually go into labor. the doctor who saw me before, and the matrona, said the opposite: that it's better, for my own recovery, if the c-section is performed before i go into labor, and not in the middle of the process, because i cannot deliver a child who's sitting.

that's the news: i have another appointment in a week, to see what's happening, to monitor the baby's progress, and i wish they let me, if it is indeed going to be a c-section, have it done on the day i should've given birth, the 17th... it's a good number, and my mom can spend a longer time with me and help me recover... and be with her grandchild...

anyway. we have to go buy Reyes gifts now...

ciao!!!