Seven Days

I’ll always remember your first seven days. The smell of you everywhere in our Santa Monica apartment. That sweet oily birthy scent on every blanket, in every room, stuck in our new parent noses. Little fingers reaching out like tentacles of an anemone against my breast. Your sweet moving nonsensical faces and desperate newborn cry “il-la il-la.” Pudgy pursed lips and little sighing snorts of effortful breath out your side creased newborn nose. Your amniotic fluid chokes that send your father flying out of bed for your survival. Sleepy coos, hungry lip suckles and head butts against my chest. Your first little flutter sucks on my thick colostrum nipples. Slate blue blind eyes open wide and wading through the shadows and light of this new universe. This time to you is a blur of instinct, but these days will be burned forever in my mind. Sweet passage to motherhood, a change as absolute as womb to world. I’ll always remember the way you wiggled out of my body, a few pushes of the head and then the whole of you in one swoop. Your slick vernixed body crawling up my chest, full head of hair and wide opened eyes. Soft hot skin so connected to mine. Your total trust. Your terribly dependent being reaching up and out for your mother-home. So new but right away, so distinctly you. Determined and alive.