What Is A Baby Literary Essay

[Willy Aucoin]

Sheswitches us to Prilosec, which is expensive and not covered by our insurance, tells me to make an appointment to see a pediatric GI specialist, pats me ineffectually on the shoulder, and sends us home. There we work to find the easiest way to dose a screaming baby. Hold her upright? Do it fast? Droplets at a time? Pin her down and stick the syringe into the side of her cheek while her mouth is already an open chasm of pain. Watch in horror as she chokes and gags and spits most of it back up.

We notice for the first time the commercials for antacids that feature happy little purple pills and cleverly animated fire-creatures dancing fiendishly but playfully in a cartoon stomach. How can anyone think this kind of pain is fun or funny? With each medication we try, the 5-7 day wait for efficacy is horrible, interminable. We pass the hours, days, and weeks bouncing her while sitting on the purple yoga ball under the maddening whir of the oven fan in the kitchen. One day, while my husband teaches his classes, my two-year-old son sits glued to episode after episode of Blues Clues and Dora, and I bounce her for seven hours straight. We joke sometimes that with all of this bouncing, our abs ought to be rock-hard and fabulous, but what we really feel is shredding pain in our lower backs and numb fatigue in our arms and shoulders from holding her. We bounce and know that improvement, when it comes, if it comes, will likely be incremental, but still we bounce and pray for immediacy. We long for a switch to flip, to turn this unhappy child into the smiling happy imp we imagined she would be by now.

Wow, Sheila. I remember that day, but had no idea you went through such an ordeal afterward. This is so well done. I was feeling your pain, her pain, all of the pain.

Thanks so much for sharing it.

I hope you do a follow up.

Judy

What a beautiful, and difficult, piece of writing. Thank you for doing the hard emotional work to produce this story and transcend your pain into art. This story benefits so many. In reading of your experiences, I am filled with gratitude for the connection I have with my daughter, one which was so easily forged through nursing her. I am awed by your ability to not give up, to remain undaunted in connecting with your baby. Your determination to be the best mother you can for your daughter is astounding. You inspire me!

Thank you. It helps to read your experience. My first child was only love and harmony, even with the milk protein problem. My second has no allergies and no screaming. Just wouldnt look me in the eyes for the first nine months. It changed me as a person and as a mother and I dont like myself much now. I do love my second, but its not the same as the first. And I am still in that depression. But reading you helps. Thanks again. Helena

Eventually, someone called Child Protective Services about the, arguably, pornographic artwork. But the situation was a unique one: typically, the medium under investigation would be photography or film. Not a painting.

And so, McMasters grapples with this question throughout her essay: what does it mean to make art as a parent? If your children are a chief part of your identity, how do you express that part of yourself without violating their privacy and autonomy?

Politically correct or not, I have to admit that the reason I picked Jennifer Maiden's The Winter Baby out of three available possibilities, was the title. Babies and motherhood get to me quicker than anything else. So, opening the book to the Contents and finding four sections with the eponymous one being the fourth and final one, was a bit disconcerting. Especially since, reading the parts in order showed that the earlier ones had little to do with a 'Winter Baby'.

At first, I rushed through the first three parts - 'Contemporary References', 'Psalms' and 'The Midwife' - eager to get to the fourth part, 'The Winter Baby'. An initial reading is more like comparing notes, sharing the pages of a mother's diary. Spread over twenty one printed pages, this part has eighteen poems, centered round the poet's daughter Katherine Margot. You nod your head sagely with the opening wisdom in 'The Winter Baby' (Maiden, 44): "babies are primal". It is what every mother knows - the solid beloved self-centeredness of her baby, ignorant of the world's artificialities. You follow the growth of little Katherine who at nine and a half months in 'Doing Beautifully'(Maiden, 47) stands with ease holding on to the edge of a couch, reaching out for Mom's pens and books rather than the "decoy" toys Dad puts out; in 'Edges' (Maiden, 52) trying to force objects she is holding to her chest together; her 'First Birthday' (Maiden, 57-58); till fifteen months in 'Memo' (Maiden, 60) with a mother's wish to be loved and accepted on certain terms; her enthusiasm for animal books and her "vowel elongation" in 'Nose' (Maiden, 61); the game with the 'First Tea Set' (Maiden, 62); right down to 'Christmas Poem, 1987' (Maiden, 63) for David celebrating parenting "tired and tense" but "each other's element."

There is a perceptibly acute power of observation at play. The knowledge that Jennifer Maiden also paints (the book's cover has her own oil painting of Katherine at twenty one months) came later but with little surprise - the artist's eye for detail is obvious. The game with the first tea set, for instance:

The next thing that strikes is the close attention to style and form. Jennifer Maiden is clearly a poet who is meticulous about how she writes as well as what she writes. Her poetry is a play of ideas, thoughts, expressions and form, diction, syllables, stresses, paradoxes, images. However, early readings capture the mind in grasping the sights and scenes, thought and their articulation, and entice it into coming back to unravel the mysteries of the form that make all this more effective.

So, the mother's diary takes on an enhanced personality, extending powers of precise observation and expression to thought. 'First Tea Set' ends with a mother's realization that somewhere in the near future empty miming will no longer satisfy. 'The Rocker' compares the control of this child's rocker to the wild abandon of a rocking horse, the "less thrills / and fewer accidents" to a "harder to master" but a more exhilarating liberty of action and thought. "Vulnerability', true to the professed "ripe-mooded for metaphors", ponders on the brittleness of a glass stick with scratches that can be snapped into two as a metaphor for human vulnerability born of "tension" that "tears". A deceptively innocent title, 'Nursery Rhymes' (Maiden, 50-51) addresses theology and mythology. 'The Process' (Maiden, 56) charts in charming detail a child's sketching that parallels the process of the development of "a sense of personality" - and perhaps even is a comment on art in our world as these sketches

Just as 'Observation' (Maiden, 59) transforms the picture of rings on fingers, shapely baby fingers and reminiscence about the poet's father's "white fingers ... omnipotent as knives" into an uneasiness at revealing personal details "for art". Not that it is entirely humourless. You do manage an understanding grin as the poet's "daughter laughs aloud" at her mother's likening the clumsily ambling polar bear on television to herself in the morning in 'Nature Program' (Maiden, 49).

It then becomes less disorienting to revert to the earlier two sections: 'Contemporary References', a nineteen-page collection of sixteen poems, and 'Psalms', a six-page collection of six poems. Part Three - 'The Midwife' - although printed as 'verse' reads more like a twelve-page short story or a play and excels in creating atmosphere and character largely through dialogue and conversation among a convict turned midwife, Isobel, the elder child, Eleanor, bewildered at being left in charge of a new born sibling on the death of her mother at child birth, an equally befuddled widower, farmer Thomas, trying to come to terms with the situation, and Dr. Arthur Spencer. Again, it is the details that enliven: the choice of words and the style of their running on, the exchange about the brown and the white eggs, the hinted soft corner the midwife has for the doctor, the shift to the Ogilvies and the unflappable pragmatism of the midwife. At the risk of over-extending an analysis, at times it seems this section is the bridge between the first two parts and the last part for which the work is named: a thinking, articulate woman having a baby and extending that intelligence and articulation into another stage in life in a way that precludes mindless motherhood.

Part Two is titled 'Psalms'. It is initially as unsettling as the title 'Nursery Rhymes' in Part Four is as a heading for a poem that mentions Elektra, the Furies and God as "She". The six 'psalms' are sacred songs and hymns in that they celebrate the human as God's creation and acknowledge and address God, but they demand a shift from the traditional mind set that you are involuntarily put into on reading the section heading. Four psalms are sandwiched between an opening and a concluding psalm talking about the heart. In the beginning the heart is light-accepting and conveying, responsive, bright. The warmth changes to the "brilliance of winter" in the 'Sixth Psalm' (Maiden, 27), trickling "niggardly". There are sensations of "numbing" and invalidation. Where the heart was once "like a ruby in a laser" (Maiden, 22), it is now "like a sullen river [...] to silt orchards" (Maiden, 27). However, the slowness is not hopeless. The poet avers at the end, "This is not frightening". Although there is "mist", there is a sense of life and growth even in the ice at the "light's edge" (Maiden, 27). The benefits of flooding and soaking, in spite of risk or injury, is somewhat reminiscent of the drowning in the "deep down as the Titanic" in 'Contemporary References' (Maiden, 17-18) or in 'For Schools' (Maiden, 6).

The Psalms portray the human condition. The 'Second Psalm' (Maiden, 23) is the most effective, wonderfully using the analogy of being unable to look directly at the sun for long and the contradiction of clarity and definition in a moment of blur and cloudiness. The 'Fifth Psalm' (Maiden, 26), mentions the "negative" and the situation of a "whole bereavement" that makes the human condition "tragic", a "tragedy" that finds mention again in the later 'First Birthday' (Maiden, 57-58). While the presence of God is acknowledged in these poems - even considered reassuring as a comforting and guarding presence - God is also seen as causing "dichotomies" and unfairness. There is the fear and helplessness at the transience and possibility of decay of the flesh even though it may be an incarnation or embodiment of God. The world in which God is also a player is an unequal one, where rewards are distributed to "the articulate" (Maiden, 26). Fittingly, God is akin to the writer who "excerpts" and "re-uses" parts to form a "symmetry" that "has no meaning beyond itself" (Maiden, 25). All in all, Part Two is an intensely personal world, coloured by the happenings outside that are visible to all, yet an individual equation of acceptance and doubt with a supremacy. In fact, any attempt to unravel all of the threads within it soon starts feeling uncomfortably like an invasion of somebody else's private space.

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