Tukul

The mud walls of my tukul are perfectly smooth, like a flat brown beach at low tide after the distant waves have worn it even. In one place a large handprint is textured next to the doorframe, a quasi-permanent reminder of someone who used earth and trees to make my home. Small creatures I have never seen or heard live in the walls, and every day with appreciative guilt I delicately crumble the tiny tunnels of their front-doors that have emerged like coral in the night. The seaside imagery is ironic of course; it is unfathomably hot. The tukul (also mocking irony of a name too if you ask me) tries it’s best to cool off at night and cling to the few degrees it has on the world outside but by early afternoon there is a suffocating feeling of claustrophobia in the complete absence of anywhere cool to go that is hard, yet very important, to keep in check. But blessed evening does eventually come, and the sun that has by now bleached even the sky dead and white, slips below the horizon. We eat outside, we bathe the babies outside, and then we sit outside, me with my skirt hiked up in the modest cover of darkness, and talk under an orange moon. After we have bathed (also outside, but behind matted walls) we join the babies indoors, crawl under our mosquito net and kick the beautiful Kashmiri bedspread that I insisted we bring with us to make our tukul more homey (and it was money well spent) to the floor. If you lie just still enough you can almost will yourself to stop sweating. The tarps under the grass roof breath in and out softly with the night air making it feel almost like sleeping inside a warm, earthy animal. And amazingly or obviously, I’m not always sure which, I rest.

The first few days were really hard. The girls were adjusting to the heat (weren’t we all) and it has taken us a while to get unpacked and settled into our two room hut. There was lizard skin in my wok. You get sun-burned in awkward places if you stay in our roofless latrine for too long at the wrong time of day. My two-year old was running around saying “landmine” (a Danish company is clearing mines in the area; we’ve heard three since we’ve been here). My baby refused to be held by anyone except me for all twelve hours of the day she wasn’t sleeping. It wasn’t fun. Exciting, fulfilling, hilarious…yes; but not fun.      

But around day six that changed. My little gas stove and plastic shelves full of pots and pans are set up and I have made some beautiful bread in the charcoal oven that sits outside under the neem tree. Annabelle, my filthy beautiful Annabelle, is loving being outside 90% of the time and experimenting with words in new languages. We had her second birthday party last week, incidentally the same day we bought a donkey and cart to haul water from the borehole or cargo from the airstrip (as I’ve said before, we’re that ghetto organization that parks their donkey next to the fleet of Land Cruisers…) and I’m pretty sure she is expecting a camel for her third birthday. Mary Katherine, though still a mama’s girl, is now happy to sit in her sweaty sweet fat rolls in her swing for a while. Trips to the market in the slinky folds of my cumbersome tobe are so much fun. People ask where I learned Arabic as I pick through their piles of onions. It’s good to talk. Friends from our years in K who now live in the camp stop by to visit and we catch up as we drink warm juice in the shade. Our guards, Harun and Jafar, two older Rotana men with sinewy arms and deep-set eyes are kind to our children who rummage through the rope they braid out of fan-plants; they teach us words in their language.

A few days ago I gashed my upper arm on the zinc of our front door as I dodged a lizard that I was sure was going to fall on my head as it slipped on the tarps of our ceiling. The cut hurt and will leave a raised scar. But even that is fun to me. To watch my husband patch me up and watch my body heal…that is exciting or interesting or fulfilling or something. To live somewhere where you get dirty every single day. Where you always know how full the moon is or which way the wind is coming from. Where you always have a pitcher or something set aside for the visitor that you don’t know about, who you can be sure will be here before too long. Where you stay up talking about what Arabic word your daughter learned today and what we should name the donkey. Somehow, even as I sweat my eyeballs out, breath curses on the freak-of-nature plant growing up through my cement floor and contort my brain for vocabulary and conjugations I haven’t used in a long time, I am having fun. Which makes me think I must be in the right place.

Back

Some people are such great writers that that make the hum-drum of ordinary life profound and interesting to read about. I feel those are the real writers, the people who can take the everyday and make it fascinating and meaningful.

I am not that kind of writer.

After several month in Kenya, a beautiful and interesting place to be sure, but one where my life takes on the easy flow of nice grocery stores, hot showers and computer office work, my blog has just about flat-lined. (Granted, Annabelle and Mary Katherine are as much to blame as indoor plumbing.)

The good news though is that I am now back in North Africa and after only four hours in my senses have been absolutely assaulted. If my daughters will allow it, I am looking forward to more time writing in the months ahead. It certainly won’t always be profound, but I think I undoubtedly live in one of the most fascinating places on the planet and if I don’t write about it I think I will explode.

To say that you live in such a marvelously interesting place though is not to say that you love everything about it. Far from it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I am experiencing a fair amount of culture stress right about now. When we boarded our flight in Entebbe, I had just collapsed into my seat with a sleeping MaryKat attached to me and a ridiculously overstuffed diaper bag and purse shoved to the floorboards when an irritated and heavily accented voice in the aisle a few rows bag grumbled loudly, “Ah, who is causing this jam?” The voice belonged to a slick looking politician type in a suit and pointy shoes, probably the kind of guy that could easily affect whether or not I get to stay in this country, and who clearly meant nothing more than to vent a little. And yet, I spent the first twenty minutes of the flight going over my Arabic verb conjugations for phrases that involved words like “jerkwad” (or their near equivalent anyway).

We landed in the capital city and stepped into what truly must be one of the most hellishly entertaining airports in the world. We hit at rush-hour, something I wasn’t aware that airports even have. Along with about three hundred other people (literally) we were pushed through a single door and into a crush of people that vaguely resembled clumpy lines all melted together. Long air-conditioners looked down at us from the walls like a practical joke. UN officials, aspiring politicians, soldiers and one other family with little kids (turned out to some South Africans working for the local brewery) all shuffled forward patiently, cheerfully even, in the passport waving chaos. Mark Katherine strained her sweaty head out of the ergo baby to gaze up at tall faces towering over her. Annabelle nestled comfortably in the undergrowth of humanity, eating her fruit snacks and following her Papa’s shoes.

When we made into out into the open-air of the airport parking lot, and old Eritrean woman who had been on the plane with us came up and patted MaryKat’s pudgy led pitifully. She then shook her head and said, “The heat…?” followed by “And the mosquitoes…?” I smiled and shrugged, to which she raised her hands upwards and said, “Allah.”

My thoughts exactly.

Before we got to the guesthouse where we are overnighting before heading up to the camp where we live tomorrow on the bush plane, we stopped to change some US dollars into local currency. Our skinny taxi driver with scarred arms eased the van onto the side of the road near the market and we were immediately besieged by a dozen guys with shiny watches or ivory bracelets and bockets bulging with bank notes. The taxi driver casually told us to lock all the doors then started passing wads of cash between the driver’s window and backseat while Annabelle made faces at the crowd pressing their faces up to the glass to see her. After the adrenaline rush of the black market, we only stopped once more, this time for the driver to sample and try out some vibrating, blinking car freshener the dashboard from a street vendor (he bought two of them).

After offloading our stuff we walked down the road to a local restaurant to grab a quick bite to eat. We crossed a busy street full of as many women as men, some dressed in leggings and denim and loping down the road in flocks like dark supermodels, others were swathed in the sheer folds of their tobes, like memories of another era. Dinner was nostalgic for me, bringing back memories of eating on the street in a northern town when we lived across the border. We ate bread and grilled chicken. A platter of sliced fruit was blended into juice as thick and sweet as pudding. And for dessert we picked at the cloyingly sweet folds of basta peppered with nuts that we selected from a glass case full of delicacies. Smoke clouded the room and pleasantly burned our eyes; Rihanna and an Arab voice nextdoor competed for prominence in our eardrums. The girls soaked it all up like this was as normal a dinner as any other for them. Which in some ways maybe it was.

I am writing from the mosquitoey porch of the guesthouse now and should close before the generator goes off. We fly “home” tomorrow and I am full of mixed emotions. I am more exhausted than I hoped to be going into life in a mud hut at the peak of dry season and that intimidates me a little bit. This is going to be hard. But I’ve realized that in life, you really just get to pick your stresses, not whether or not you are going to have them. And at this point, I will take the stress of a mud hut over the stress of floating through life in other people’s houses hands down. It feels like time to be back. The honeymoon high I feel at being back tonight (and I do feel it if I didn’t make that very clear..) is sure to burst in a week or two, no doubt. But when it does it will be replaced by the intimate frustrations of living in a place that drives you out of your mind but that, on most days, you wouldn’t leave for the world.   

It’s good to be back.  

Elections

I keep wanting to say “It’s so good to be home!” but considering this is one of over half-a-dozen places we have “lived” in the past six months that doesn’t quite feel right. But it is so good to be together again. Last week was one of the hardest of my life, (which is probably a good indication of just how easy my life has been up to now). There is nothing like watching your babies struggle though. Just like I was all jittery about our physical safety only after we were a thousand miles out of harm’s way when we evacuated North Africa over a year ago, I was similarly sick with worry about Mary Katherine only after I felt pretty confident she was going to be ok and could let down a little bit. Now I think about that drive to the hospital and look on the nurse’s face when we got there and just feel shaky inside. But we are all together again now, and all healthy and moderately rested. To those of you who have been praying for our family, thank you so very, very much.

We have spent the last two weeks in a house that is new to us here in Nairobi. It belongs to some good friends of ours who also work in North Africa, but travel back to Kenya as a family several times a year. They were looking for someone to help cover rent and we were happy to spend some time as a family in a place a little more private than where we were before. It’s in a housing estate across town from where we usually stay and backs up to the Nairobi National Gamepark. There is a treadmill upstairs which I have been making good use of as I try to get rid of those last lovely pounds Mary Katherine left me with. As I run I can see over the game park fence; a couple of weeks ago I counted over 200 zebra strolling by only a few hundred feet away, oblivious to the sprawling suburbia all around them. A sweet Rhodesian Ridgeback named Uchie is part of the package and she has been quite hospitable. There is satellite TV and Annabelle has been soaking up enough “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” and “Charlie and Lola” to last her through a childhood in the boonies. (Bryan has also gotten hooked on American Idol after years of mocking me for liking it, but I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone.)

However, as nice as playing house is right now, I still haven’t completely relaxed into it. It’s on a side of town much less familiar to me and harder to access by public transport. I haven’t gotten to know any of the neighbors yet. And like in any house any where, there are sounds at night that make me curious and uneasy for no good reason.

Perhaps part of the reason for my unease may have something to do with the elections going on in this country right now. You may have seen something about it on the news. Five years ago the presidential elections left over 1,000 people dead so people are understandably concerned this time around. And now that results have been delayed for a second day, people are getting anxious.

We are traveling to Tanzania for branch meetings on Sunday, a little bit later than we had planned on since the doctor didn’t want us to travel with MaryKat for at least a week after she was discharged from the hospital (and even that took a little bit of convincing). So we are just lying low this week, catching up on piles of office work at home and keeping the TV on the local news channel. But the week in the hospital put some of our contingency planning on the back-burner so we had to make a quick trip out yesterday to stock up on things like groceries, phone credit, gas and a few extra US dollars just in case. Town was noticeably quiet. The grocery store was picked over - there was no UHT milk or frozen food of any kind. A handful of us rummaged through the left-over produce with polite urgency. Police with AK’s strolled quietly down the aisles and a couple of soldiers nonchalantly bought cigarettes from the cashier. Everyone seemed normal. But uneasy normal. 

Every time my phone blinks out or the electricity cuts off I give Bryan a dramatically ominous look, something I attribute to a childhood spent planning for coups and crises that never actually took place. But as an adult, an adult with a little more experience in political instability, and, probably most importantly, an adult with babies, these things aren’t just exciting now. Yes, my college roommates can rest assured I am still the crazy girl who daydreams of dramatic escapes and harrowing get-aways that make great stories years later over a cup of tea. That side of me exists I think to make me well-suited for the life I feel like I have been called to lead. 

But tonight, that side of me sleeps lightly next to the side of me that checks the locks on the doors an extra time and prays for peace.     

Tattoons and other random thoughts tonight

The thing about hospital stays is how magnified everything feels. The smallest bit of good news warrants a parade down Main Street. The smallest bit of disappointing news has you sitting in sackcloth and ashes. At least it’s been that way for me. 

Mary Katherine’s fever disappears and I’m on cloud nine. Her oxygen levels drop a few percentage points and I am tearful all evening. The facts of our general situation stay relatively unchanged, but my heart is swinging back and forth like it’s dragging behind MaryKat’s little purple swing.

Just to give you an update, we are generally in a good place. Her temperature, heat rate, respiration rate, blood work and overall demeanor are all great. She is eating and sleeping well and has even smiled a time or two at the nurses. But her oxygen still isn’t what it should be. They want her over 90 (I’ve heard someone say 94…?) and she is jumping back and forth from 82 to 87. So right now we are really just waiting for those blinking digital numbers on the screen to stop dropping once we turn her oxygen off.

I am so grateful for the good medical care here and am in no rush to take a still-unwell baby home. I am no longer sick with worry now that she seems more like her old (still-quite-new) self. And as something of an introvert I haven’t minded the walls of this tiny room 24/7 and four days of no sunshine nearly as much as you might think. Now that I am a bit caught up on sleep I read a lot and piddle around on the internet. Thank goodness for Kindles.

Even so, last night I went to bed with a knot in my stomach I felt like I could feel with my hand if I wanted to. (My emotions and body often get their wires crossed like that. Homesickness feels like thirst to me, a weird thing my sister claims to experience too.) The blah-ness may have something to do with hearing the little kid crying in discomfort next door or reading an eerie book about genetic research and civil rights abuses that made me feel yucky (a Kindle special. Go figure). But more than anything I think I am just missing Bryan and Annabelle, my firstborn who is still just a baby too. The nursing staff don’t really want her to get exposed to more germs up here visiting, especially as she is just getting over something too, and she isn’t really happy stuck in a little room with sick baby sister and no toys anyway. She adores her Papa and is having a blast with him. But generally, our little family doesn’t do well apart for too long.

That being said I had the great joy of having a lunch date with Annabelle today. Bryan hung out with MaryKat while Annabelle and I crossed the street to a Java House where we finished off lunch with ice-cream cones and milk-shakes. I still can’t believe sometimes that I can sit in a restaurant booth and have hilarious conversations with my not-quite two year old. My favorite thing she does these days is ask a question, (“That is?”), receive the answer (“That’s an external hard-drive for the computer,”), after which she thinks for a second then throws her head back in affected laughter and says “Oh yeah…” as though she had just momentarily forgotten something she had known all along.

 

Before she left the hospital Annabelle and I each put on one of her stick-on tattoos (“tattoons” she calls them, which seems appropriate to me). She picked out a koala bear for her tummy. I got a butterfly for my hand. I told her it would help me not miss her so much while we are apart. And even though her Papa says she is a little clingy and emotional while I am away, she says goodbye very matter-of-factly and doesn’t make a big scene. This helps my heart.

So I crawl into bed tonight so thinking of all the families that have to do this for weeks or months even and say thank you that only five days apart feels so sad. I kiss the baby beside me in her little hospital gown that makes her look like an old-fashioned baby doll; I talk for a long time to Bryan on the phone and then tell him I love him; and I kiss my tattoon. 

It will be good to have all this behind us.

Back to the Hospital

It seems unfair to the last month to be writing in the pale glow of a hospital room again, with the soft ripple of bubbles in an oxygen filter nearby and my baby’s raspy breathing in the cot next to me. I have had so many blogs churning in my mind that never made it out – blogs about long walks on the beach of my childhood with my baby, leaving footprints in the damp fanfare of sand strewn from crab holes; blogs about three weeks with my mama, drinking chai after we finally got the girls to sleep and talking and crying about mothers and daughters and the fierce connection between them; blogs about the steady ache to be back in North Africa instead of the comfortable drift of roaming from one nice house to another here in Nairobi while we wait for a place to call home.

But I never wrote the words down, mostly because of the chaotic beauty of being a fulltime mother these days. Blogs, like sleep, have been hard to come by. But, one of the odd upsides to being in the hospital is a little more time to myself to do things like write. Time that I would happily give back.

Bryan was the first to come down with upper respiratory crud but Annabelle and Mary Katherine quickly followed suit. The mysterious super-shield that keeps mamas’ immune systems up in order to take care of the family has held up for me so far (though I am preparing for the inevitable crash when this is all said and done.) We took everyone to the doctor on Saturday morning and by Sunday Annabelle and Bryan were improving. But MK was not. She had fits of violent coughing that made my heart stop and then she started vomiting. All day Sunday I could hardly rouse her to eat much less do anything else. By evening we started deliberating whether or not we could wait until morning to see our pediatrician or if we should go ahead and take her to the ER. But when she started looking pale and frighteningly lethargic, our decision was easy.

It was around nine when I threw the diaper bag in the car and strapped a listless MaryKat into her seat. Bryan stayed behind with Annabelle who was already in bed, though I could tell it was killing him not to come with us. But with a toddler and a nursing baby there was little choice. I haven’t driven in Nairobi at night before and I was a little nervous. As I made my way through poorly lit round-abouts, harrowing high-speed two lane roads and a couple of wrecks I was just imagining scratching out the eyes of the corrupt cop that pulled me over to ask for a bribe. Normally I am an intimidated mess around police (at least on the inside) but God help the unsuspecting person that chose to mess with me that night. Thankfully, no one did and I made it to the hospital in good time. Mary Katherine was coughing the whole way and as I turned into the parking lot she started vomiting and choking. I screeched into a parking spot and scrambled to get her inside.

By the time I got her into the hospital she was white as a sheet and limp on my shoulder. Her breathing, which I was obsessively checking, was shallow and irregular. After what felt like months of paperwork I was directed to the pediatric waiting area where I sat down with a dozen coughing kids and their sleepy parents listening to a journalist wax on about the looming Kenyan elections on the TV above. Eventually a triage nurse called me back to look at MaryKat. Moments after checking her out she was ushering us down a hall to a room full of curtained off beds and fitting an oxygen mask over my baby’s face. At the time the number “65” didn’t mean anything to me. But now knowing that it should have been over 94, I feel sick to my stomach.  

The 48 hours after that have been a blur. I feel like I remember everything that has happened – the breathing treatments, the x-rays, the visits from Bryan and Annabelle - but I have no sense of chronology or time. I sleep when MaryKat sleeps, which is often only 20 minutes at a time with no respect to night or day. I can’t remember what was an hour ago or a day ago. She and I are both exhausted.

But, thank God, her heart rate and respiration rate have settled and on oxygen she is alert and hungry. The chest x-rays showed this was not pneumonia but just a really bad virus so now we just wait until she can pull enough oxygen into those little lungs on her own. Tonight when they took her off O2 her numbers were at 78 – still not good enough to go home. But her congestion is clearing, just slowly.

My precious cousin Terron who is working here for a year spent the day with Annabelle (having tea-parties and comforting baby dolls no doubt. She has a huge crush on her cousin-uncle) so that Bryan could be with Mary Katherine and me. Just a few hours with him and I think we both feel like we can go on with a little more grace. Four am last night was not our finest hour with all her tubes only allowing about a three foot circle to pace in when she (we) was crying. At one point a poor nursing student tiptoed in to take MK’s vitals and when he saw me I could see him mentally scanning his textbooks for the chapter on “What to do when you walk in on a bawling sleep-deprived anxiety-ridden white woman at 3am.” But tonight I think she and I are both encouraged and optimistic about a few hours sleep. She’s squeaking away in her little swing that her Papa brought up and I will curl up under the circus sheets on the hospital bed. We’ll see how the night goes.

As always, thank you for your prayers. 

Post Script: I ran out of internet credit for my computer last night so I didn’t get to post this until now, twelve hours later with about six hours of sleep under my belt and almost double that for MK. Plus her O2 levels are now at 90%. I am so happy!

This Time Around...

When we were pregnant with Annabelle, all our friends with kids said, “Get ready. Having a baby changes everything.” At the time, I had to be careful not to roll my eyes. Of course it changes everything. Who gets pregnant thinking that everything will stay the same? But then nine months later I was the wild-eyed crazy woman clinging to my pregnant friend’s arms saying in the raspy voice of a disregarded prophet, “No, really. Having kids changes everything.” I think for a while there I really thought I might die from lack of sleep. Like one of those contestants on a radio program who stays awake for four days straight and wins a million dollars only to spend the rest of his brain-dead life in a nursing home. Yeah, I thought I was going to be that guy for a while.

So when those same friends said, “Your second baby is so much easier than the first,” I was both skeptical and hopeful. Experience told me I was in for a sleepless marathon. But their counsel had proved reliable in the past. I stepped into motherhood the second time around with trepidatious hope.   

And, granted, I am only two weeks in. But it has been two weeks of living in one-room as a family of four, changing two sets of diapers, and recovering from a touch-and-go week in the hospital with a preemie. And you know what? I still think this is easier than the first time around.

I have only cried irrationally once (by my count anyway; Bryan might define “irrationally” differently) and if you find civil war particularly heart-wrenching then maybe you would have cried at the opening scene of “The Hatfields and McCoys” miniseries too. The point is, overall, I have just been really, really happy.

Expectations have a lot to do with it. There is nothing like that first experience of being jerked by your hair right out of contented selfishness. By now I am already used to privacy in the bathroom being a rare treat and sleep being something that only comes one someone else’s terms. Confidence is another. I remember half of my sleeplessness a year and a half ago had less to do with Annabelle and more to do with me staying up panicking over my mothering skills. Am I letting her cry too much? Too little? Is she getting enough to eat? Is she too fat? Is she already destined to a lifetime of counseling because I wondering if she is too fat at two months old? But now I hardly wake up for nighttime feedings at all. I feed her when she is hungry and let her sleep with me when she wants to. And I don’t stress about it. I’m a mama, her mama. And right now, that’s enough.

But maybe more than anything, the peace I am experiencing this time around has to do with living just a little bit longer. When Annabelle was born I actually spent time thinking about things like whether she had enough cute outfits with matching bows for her first couple months of church, or how much I regretted not having access to a photographer who would take black and white portraits of her asleep naked in a basket sitting in a field of flowers. But this time around those things have scarcely crossed my mind. She hardly fits into any of her sister’s hand-me-down newborn onesies much less anything else and I couldn’t care less. Why? Because this time around I have friends with months and years of disappointments and maybe even a handful of miscarriages behind them, and still no big round belly to show off. Because this time around I have friends with babies due mere days before their husbands are deployed for months overseas. Because this time around I spent time in the nursery with women who had been coming though those swinging doors every day for two months to pump milk for the two pounds of life they still couldn’t even cradle in their arms. Because this time around I have seen the bush hospital where, with just a few days difference, Mary Katherine could so easily have been born and maybe forever changed in a heart-wrenching way, our experience of Christmas day.

But she didn’t. She forever changed it in a beautiful way. (On a side note, several Americans who have heard about MK’s birth story have said things along the lines of, “Oh, poor thing! She was born on Christmas? Now she will get jipped on presents for the rest of her life!” But I love the way Africans have responded. Almost without exception their answer has been, “She was born on Christmas Day? Wow, how lucky! She must be so special.” As though in some mysterious way that none of us can quite put our finger on, her birthday means something. I love it.)

This time around I feel just a little more grounded, a little more open-eyed, a little more aware of just how priceless the treasures in my arms really are. So even in those crazy-mama moments of wondering how in the heck I am going to do this (I still have them), I feel an overwhelming sense of peace and thankfulness. In this crazy world of imperfect beauty, I know just a little more fully how blessed I am.

Now if I can just keep in my mind my friends’ third piece of advice. I think their exact words were, “I don’t care if your comfort drink of choice is chamomile tea or gin and tonic, but you better have plenty of it on hand for that first year of having two under two.”

 Oh boy… 

Mary Christmas!

The pain started around 3 o’clock on Christmas Day. At first it was just a few regular contractions tightening painlessly across my stomach. But in minutes the tightening became achiness and then gradually cramps until eventually even the allure or Turkey and apple pie to a very hungry stomach couldn’t keep me up. I guzzled a few glasses of water and went to lie down. After 30 minutes I started watching the clock. After an hour Bryan started loading the car.

Even though I already couldn’t talk through contractions on the drive to the hospital, I still wasn’t convinced we were in actual labor. Our baby was due January 20^th, and this was Christmas Day. Surely, just a few days of running just a little too hard were catching up with me. I was already preparing myself for the awkwardness of the “No, honey. Just go home and put your feet up…” speech from the nurse on call. What I got instead was the “Yup. You’re dilated to a five. I’ll go call your doctor…” speech to which I think I stupidly replied, “You mean this baby is coming today, for sure?” The nurse smiled and said, “This baby will be here in a couple hours.”

As you can imagine I experienced a dizzying blur of emotions in those moments. On one hand there was the incredible excitement of thinking how close I was to holding my baby in my arms, of meeting her for the first time and looking into her eyes. On the other hand there was the fear of her coming too early. What if she wasn’t ready for the world yet? What if something was wrong? I also felt a pang of guilt mixed with gratitude because for weeks I had talked about our daughter coming early. I was concerned about her showing up while we were still in North Africa and even back in Nairobi I had my doctor perform a couple unnecessary pelvic exams just to make sure she wasn’t showing any signs of coming while Bryan was still a thousand miles away. Now I was so thankful I had sensed this for so long. But I also worried, had my seemingly needless concerns prompted the very thing I feared?

As much as I missed my mother while the contractions gathered and grew, I have to admit, there was something incredibly intimate about being alone with Bryan as we labored to bring our baby into the world. I sank deeper into my own little world of hurt, bent over the bed, counting my breaths and moaning the almost comically inadequate word “ow” over and over again while Bryan led sips of water to my mouth, whispered encouragement in my ear and constantly, endlessly, faithfully rubbed my back. It was just the two of us together working side by side to usher into this world the life we had created.

Mary Katherine was born ay 8:35pm on Christmas Day at 5lbs and 14 ounces, 19 and ¾ inches long. From the first pang to the final push, my labor lasted just over five hours. Though she came out squealing, under the harsh glare of a heat lamp the pediatrician quickly decided that her weak grunts were not sufficient for breathing and carted her off to the NICU. Shaky and weak myself, I just got a glimpse of long bluish legs and big dark eyes before she was taken out of the room. Bryan got a closer look but didn’t get to hold her either.

The past forty-eight hours have felt like an eternity. In fact I still can’t believe I have only been a mother of two that briefly. Having both of my babies out of my arms and body leaves me feeling naked and alone. In all honesty, the sheer novelty of complete solitude was a bit of a luxury at first, but it didn’t take long for the ache in my heart to replace the aches in my body. I have been grateful for the culture of breast-feeding that I find myself in. The walk down empty corridors with blinking Christmas trees at 3am to go pump in a quiet nursery full of impossibly tiny babies attended by sleepy nurses is strangely comforting. I think I have been grateful for a physical outlet to express love for my little one when the only other thing I can do is sing lullabies through holes in an incubator while stroking her toes.

I was especially sad earlier this evening when Mary Kat’s breathing was still uneven and the latest test results on her infection still unavailable. I sat in my Easter-green hospital gown pumping with only partial success while a cheerful Kenyan woman chattered away to a bundle in a bassinet across from me. Eventually we struck up a conversation. I noticed her business shoes under the hospital robe and realized she must have come from home to nurse her baby. When I asked her about it I learned that her son was born several months early and has been in the NICU for almost two months. He was supposed to go home tomorrow but instead are going in for surgery to try and remove an accumulation of water on her baby’s brain. I asked her what her son’s name was as she said, “Gifton. But of course we just call him ‘Gift’.” I can’t imagine.

After supper and a bath tonight I got my own gift when I went back to the nursery to pump. A nurse was changing my Mary Katherine who for once was wide-awake and rooting with her IV bandaged fist. When I asked if I could please try nursing, expecting yet another, “Not yet” I was overjoyed to instead hear a “yes.” A chair was pulled up to her little incubator an IV stand, and swaddled and bleary-eyed, my beautiful daughter was placed in my arms for the first time. It was heaven.

My tiny daughter has a surprisingly strong suckle and we were soon working together perfectly. I never cease to be amazed at how much more than mere individuals we are, how even our biology seems to exist in community, in relationship. She created in my physical body what no machine could. Her tiny mouth pulled more milk from me than I knew existed and the thirst I had yet to feel after two full days of pumping soon had me guzzling water. She eventually fell sound asleep in my arms but only after a long time did I begrudgingly returned her to the nurse and her little pretend-womb. Hopefully she is only hours away from being free to stay with me. Until then I am counting the hours until I can get back to her.

I better go to sleep now while I can. In just a few hours my alarm will go off for another walk down late-night hospital halls and after that is a day-full of conversations with doctors and visits from precocious almost-two year olds who still don’t know exactly what “big sister” means. I’m not even going to read back over this before I post it because I know I will probably trash it if I do. I just had to get something up in the moments I had. Thank you all so much for your prayers. This has bee one of the most amazing Christmases ever. We have been given such an amazing gift.

(And if you think about it tonight, say a little prayer for Gift who is in the nursery with my daughter and his mama too. I know she would appreciate it.)