Six copies of a birth certificate
A meditation
Today my husband went to the local municipal office and got six copies of our daughter’s birth certificate. While he did that, I slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room, dozing in the bright morning light. I tried to ignore the incandescent envy burbling in my chest that he could leave, go down the stairs, drive our car, stand in line, talk to a clerk. Like warm air hitting a cold front, the envy hit the aching love that has newly plastered my insides. Next to me, in her bassinet, Midori also slept. From time to time, the startle reflex causes her limbs to windmill in the air, but the thrust of her body doesn’t wake her. Instead I find myself waking from my light slumber to see her white-cotton mittened arms sailing over the lip of her container. It looks like a hallelujah, like flags waving in something more hopeful than surrender.
Today my husband went to the local municipal office and got six copies of our daughter’s birth certificate. While he did that, I slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room. We moved into the living room the night we got home from the hospital. That first dusk fell and I found myself leaned up against the wall of our bedroom, weeping, inconsolable. I have always loved our bedroom, it’s spareness, the way it is a darkened, cool and quiet place with the sole task of sleeping. I have always loved our bed, one of the only things we purchased new when we moved into this house, a flat wide expanse of firm mattress where we find each other, rest, become beings and not doings. But Midori was born via emergency C-section and suddenly all the muscles that held my body up were shocked into submission. I had dreamt about cocooning in that beloved bed and beloved bedroom with our daughter when we were released from the stark institutional glare of the hospital, but once I was home, I was faced with the reality that my broken and healing body could not bend or hinge to get out of our bed.
It sounds so silly, so small, but that night I felt at a complete loss. Where was I supposed to find respite? Where would I feed our baby? I couldn’t see past my predicament so J sprung into action, dragging the floor mattress we use for guests into the front room for himself, loading the couch with cushions for me so that I could pull myself up along its edge. For ten days now we’ve camped in the living room, sleeping, eating, feeding, fighting, weeping, laughing, kissing here. I am starting to become more mobile, perhaps enough to move back to our room by week’s end, but I cannot forget the humility of my stricken body, the speed with which my love upended our home so that we might live in this new way.
Today my husband went to the local municipal office and got six copies of our daughter’s birth certificate. While he did that, I slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room. I do not normally sleep in the bright morning light, morning being my best time, but before falling asleep again I had exhausted myself to tears. (So many tears in this letter today! If it were a meal it would be flecked with salt.) Our daughter is growing and growth is not passive in the slightest. It is a labor to grow. I know this because each ounce she adds to her frame, each moment she becomes sturdier, existing more solidly, is the result of my feeding her from my very own body. It sounds metaphoric and perhaps narcissistic but I don’t mean it that way. I mean my baby started a growth spurt on Friday and has been demanding sustenance nonstop since. And I am privileged and so joyful to provide it to her just as I am in equal measure tired to the bone, sometimes desolately wondering if this will be my whole life. (I know it won’t be; I know this is fleeting; I am already nostalgic for this time even as I muscle through portions of it.)
As I grow this new person, my own blood becoming breast milk becoming tissue in her body, I am conscious of so many old selves standing around the rocking chair where I nurse her. I want my daughter to grow bigger and so I must confront the self that tried for so many years to disappear, to grow smaller. Oddly, perhaps superficially, I find myself thinking of my teenage athlete self—her double swim practices and countless intervals on the track the only physical touchstone to the constant physical task of feeding my daughter. I am confronted even by my own infant self in a box of clothes my mother drops off—pressed, ironed, preserved from age, the first clothes I ever wore now passed down to her. In the midst of them I feel myself trying to become someone new. This too is a labor, which is to say it is not the gloss and slide of what I see everywhere, the Hallmark-Barbie-GRWM-realistic-morning-routine-of-a-new-mama-tikotk type transformation. Rather it feels tight and burning, a site of beauty and also exquisite grief. The only thing I know is that this new person is stronger, must be stronger, than I have ever before been.
Today my husband went to the local municipal office and got six copies of our daughter’s birth certificate. While he did that, I slept on a mattress on the floor of our living room. We need six copies because we are filling out passport paperwork for both of our motherlands.
Later, in the car on the way to her second pediatrician’s appointment, high summer sailing past the window, I think about what it means to lay claim to a nation on behalf of my daughter. In the eyes of the Japanese state, surely my daughter does not qualify as an ideal citizen. Using the gnarled parlance of race science, she is 75% white, only 25% ethnically Japanese. Right now, her hair looks copper and her eyes are the gray blue shade the nurse told me is common of newborns. On weekdays, my mother comes over and murmurs to her in my mother tongue. Her father speaks to her in English; I often parrot the same sentence in Japanese. What I’m trying to say is to claim her right as a Japanese citizen is, in some respect, to continue to destroy the notion of an ideal Japaneseness. I know this and I delight in it. All of it is new and all of it is being broken down, open, apart. In the minutiae and drudgery of these days, the forms to fill and minutes that pass, I glimpse slivers of the borderless, bright, beautiful world I long for.