The Watch

Here’s the story behind this post – when I was still suffering from post-pertum delusions of grandeur (“Look at me!  I just pushed something heavier than most laptop computers and only slightly less angular out of my body!  I can do ANYTHING!”), I decided I was going to become a writer.  Not just a blogger, but a Real Writer (sorry to all you bloggers out there, myself included).  So I started writing about my experiences as a new mother, because hey, the fact that dead batteries in the remote control could trigger a total psychological meltdown during the third feeding of the night is so unique and interesting that everyone wants to read about it, right?  Anyway, I wrote this fairly cheesy piece, and then promptly submitted it to my favorite mothering journal, despite the fact that their guidelines for submission clearly state “Poignancy is fine; sentimentality isn’t”. Now that I have emerged from my post-partum state (in more ways than one), I totally get why they didn’t publish it.  But I wrote it, and I kind of like it, so I’m inflicting it on you.  Sorry about that.

The Watch

I used to measure my time in hours – the 50 minute hour of my clinical sessions, the endless hours of staff meetings, and those precious evening and weekend hours spent with friends and family.   I have a beautiful stainless steel watch which I always wore.   It kept me on track, moving me through each day, hour by hour.

About two weeks before my due date, I put that stainless watch in my bedside table drawer, and took out my digital Timex with the Velcro strap.  I had read numerous articles about what to take to the hospital (and what not to take), and valuables were definitely a no-no.  Besides, I might need the digital watch to time my contractions.

A few weeks later, I was lying in the medical bed in a small room on the post-natal floor.  Josh was snoring on the cot next to me; Choochie was swaddled and asleep in a clear plastic bassinet on a tall wooden frame at the foot of my bed.  I pushed the upper right button on my watch – the Indiglo light told me it was 5 am.  Choochie had been only been born a few hours earlier.   My mind was hazy with fatigue, yet I couldn’t sleep.  I kept thinking about breastfeeding, which I had tried once right after Choochie was born.  The brief ordeal was just that – an ordeal – an awkward, unnatural, and difficult attempt at something that was supposed to happen organically.

The nursing didn’t improve much during our stay in the hospital.  Every few hours, the nurse on duty would come to help us try again.  “Don’t worry,” she would say as she casually grabbed my nipple between her thumb and forefinger, squeezed it into shape, and forced it into the baby’s mouth.  “Don’t worry, she’ll get the hang of it.”  I felt tense and anxious, worried that it wouldn’t work, that I wouldn’t be able to feed my daughter.  Sometimes Choochie would take a few long sucks, but more often than not, she would lay in my arms, crying in frustration or limp with fatigue.

We came home on a Saturday.  The discharge nurse had carefully reviewed what we needed to know – Choochie should have one dirty and several wet diapers every 24 hours and she needed to eat every 2-3 hours during the day, every 3-4 at night.  We’d figure everything else out, she reassured us, as we both stared in fear at our glassy-eyed baby.

I spent a lot of time looking at my watch during those first few days of Choochie’s life at home, keeping track of how long each feeding session lasted, and when she would need to eat again.  I felt such triumph and relief when she would finally latch on and suck, when I felt the slight movement in the back of her neck each time she swallowed.   I carefully recorded each attempt, each success and failure, in a little notebook – 10 am, 8 min, L side.  11:25 am, nothing.  12:15 pm, 5 min, R side.  Within a day or two, I had a whole system in my head, an inexact but consistent method of tracking exactly how long she nursed for, taking into account time spent burping and changing sides.  Hours were no longer my primary unit of measurement; minutes became crucial.  Fractions of time that had previously seemed inconsequential were now the focus of my attention.

Within a week, I was using almost every feature on my digital watch.  Each time we started nursing, I pushed the lower left button once to get to the “chrono” screen, then the lower right button twice to stop and reset, then the large button on the bottom of the face to start the timing.  As Josh and I settled into bed at night, I would push the button on the lower left twice to get to the countdown timer, then the large middle button once to start.  It was set for three hours, and if Choochie didn’t wake me in time for her next feeding, the watch would.  Finally, I would set the alarm (lower left button three times, lower right to set, middle bottom to start) for six hours ahead, a reminder that I needed to take more ibuprofen to help reduce the swelling and pain.

The only feature on the watch I didn’t use was the clock.  My schedule was no longer dependent on the rising or setting of the sun, the open hours of various businesses or even the digital numbers on the face of my watch.  As my colleagues were still working their way through the day in 50-minute hours, and Josh was going to work from 9-5 and sleeping as much as possible at night, Choochie and I had entered our own hazy world.  My internal clock had become jammed with fatigue, and was no longer of any use to me.  The chronograph on my watch (lower left once, lower right button twice, middle button once) became my only clock, telling me when to wake, when to sleep, when to feed, and how much time I had between feedings.

Several weeks later, I started to re-engage with the movement of time in the world beyond Choochie’s nursing schedule.  I went back to work part-time, taking Choochie with me to meetings, appointments, and mother’s groups.  The stainless steel watch remained in my dresser drawer.  Regardless of where we were or what we were doing, the chronograph on my digital watch kept running, disentangling me from the details of daily life, bringing me back to those first days, when it was just Choochie and me, and the minutes belonged only to us.