A Different Room

A Different Room

I cradle my newborn the night

before he sleeps in a different room. 

Neck craned over his heart, I nurse 

by salt lamp, desperate to memorize 

the sheen of his forehead—

peach fuzz in August—

and the motor of his glossy lips

pumping bitter, then sweet, milk.

Fifteen years ago, my mother

held me in her Hospice bed,

her neck hooked over my hair,

the sheen of her forehead

like dull wax. Her cracked lips pursed.

“Hold still,” she said.

Lifted my chin to the fluorescent light.

“I just want to look at you.”

__________________

Reflection:

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would have been 69.

The other night, a memory of her came to me. I had not thought of it in over a decade.

It was midnight. I was nursing my four-week-old son in the chair by the salt lamp. His arms were still swaddled, his eyes closed, his lips pumping. As I watched how content he was, I was overcome by the need to memorize him—the squishiness of his face, cooing sounds, powdery smell. The tenderness of him rooting with his eyes still closed. 

In the pink glow, I could not look away. 

It was the charged kind of presence before nostalgia forms. The intense presence I experience when I aware I am going to lose something.

 Here is the context: I was exhausted—the kind of tired that feels tinny between your ears—rattling. For the month since he was born, I had been up every two hours at night to nurse my son. I could not fall into restfulness even when I did sleep. My brain felt jittery, my emotions and hormones like pinballs.

To make up some of my sleep deficit, I had asked my husband to give our son a bottle at midnight so I could sleep for six consecutive hours upstairs. But before we started this arrangement, I wanted one more middle-of-the-night feeding. 

 Despite the impermanence of this—the ease of pivoting to a new arrangement—I felt conflicted. I needed my husband’s help, but didn’t want to miss anything.

So, the night before sleeping upstairs—just three rooms away—I was overwhelmed by the need to remember what nursing by salt lamp at midnight felt like. I was desperation to memorize him, to drink him, almost. I felt the weight of time passing, like sand in an hourglass. He was bigger than yesterday, already. Opening his eyes more. Had rounder cheeks. He would soon outgrow this groggy midnight feeding stage.

 I ran my finger along his jawline and lifted his tiny face toward me.

 Tears streamed down my face.

All I wanted to do was look at him.

*

As I was sitting in the chair, I—quite literally—heard my mother’s voice. “I just want to look at you,” she said.

It was a memory. I was back in May, 2006. My mother was probably two weeks from dying. I was home from college, curled in her hospital bed. Someone, a Hospice nurse perhaps, was trying to take a photo of us holding a bouquet of sunflowers. I told my mother she had to keep her eyes open for the picture. 

“I’m trying,” she said groggily.

I pulled her arm around me like a wing. After the photo, we just stayed there, snuggling, until she cleared her throat.

 “You okay?” I sat up. Her bones were so fragile by that point I thought I’d hurt her.

“Oh yeah,” she said, half asleep. “I am just going to miss this place.”

“What place?” 

She waved her hand in a circle, around her, and then up to the sky. “Ya know—Earth.”

I swallowed, my eyes prickling. We were past the stage of saying oh Ma, don’t talk like that, but I didn’t want her to see me cry, so I readjusted on the bed.

“Hold still,” she said.

I stopped moving.

Slowly, she lifted her hand toward my face. She put her index finger under my chin, tilting it up to the light. A tear formed in the corner of her left eye.

She opened her eyes.

“I just want to look at you.”

* 

And thus, the poem was born. As I reflect on the timing of this memory — just two weeks before her birthday — I think of it as her gift: she gave me words, her words, to capture the sentiment I could only feel in my body.

I just want to look at you.

How simple. How true. How… profound.

The irony and similarity of these moments became the hinge of the poem: how similar the feeling, and yet, dissimilar the moment—how I was only about to climb a flight of stairs and my mother was about to die.

“And yet, you were both just going to different rooms,” a woman in my poetry workshop said. The veil, so thin.

And yet, when faced with any loss related to our children—the passing of any stage, and ultimately, saying goodbye—all we want to do is look at them.

Capture them.

Find some way to express that they are the most beautiful thing we’ve ever made.