The Language of Flowers

She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.

“Does she have a name?” Renata asked when she returned.

“I don’t know,” I said, stroking the baby’s fuzzy ear as she continued to suck. I hadn’t ever thought about it. “I don’t know her yet.”

But I would. I would keep her, and raise her, and love her, even if she had to teach me how to do it. Holding my own daughter in my arms, only hours old, I felt that everything in the world that had been so far out of my reach was now possible.

The feeling stayed with me for exactly a week.

Mother Ruby stayed until almost midnight and returned early the next morning. In the eight hours I spent alone with the baby, I listened to her breathing, counted her heartbeats, and watched her fingers stretch open and close into fists. I smelled her skin, her saliva, and the oily white cream that had resisted Mother Ruby’s washcloth and nestled in the creases of her arms and legs. Rubbing every inch of her body, my own fingers became slick with the thick residue.

Mother Ruby had told me the baby would sleep for six or more hours the first night, exhausted from the birth. It’s the first gift that a child gives its mother, she had told me before she left. Not the last. Take it, and sleep. I tried to sleep, but my mind was full of wonder at the existence of a child, a child who had not existed in the world only the day before, a child whose life had come from within my own body. Watching my baby sleep, I understood that she was safe, and that she knew it. I felt a rush of adrenaline at this simple accomplishment. The next morning, when I heard Mother Ruby fit a key into the downstairs lock, I hadn’t slept for even a moment.

Mother Ruby pulled her great birthing bag up the steps and unzipped it at the door of the blue room. The baby was awake and nursing. When she pulled away from my breast, Mother Ruby listened to her heart and slipped her into a cloth sling with a metal spring that was somehow also a scale. She exclaimed at the ounces the baby had gained—unusual, she said, in the first twenty-four hours. The baby whimpered and began to suck air. Mother Ruby pressed her against my other breast, checking the baby’s latch with her index finger.

“Keep eating, big girl,” she said.

We both watched the baby nurse, her eyes closed, temples beating. It was the last thing in the world I had ever expected to do, breast-feed a baby. But Mother Ruby insisted it was what was best for us both; that the baby would thrive and we would bond and my body would regain its shape. Mother Ruby was proud, and told me so two or three times an hour. Not all mothers have the patience, she said, or the selflessness, but she knew I would. I had not disappointed her.

I was proud, too. Proud that my body was producing everything my baby needed, and proud that I could tolerate the relentless clamping of the baby’s jaw, the sensation of liquid transferring from deep within my body to deep within my daughter’s. The baby nursed for more than an hour, but I didn’t mind. The feeding gave me time to study her face, memorize her short, straight eyelashes; her naked brow; the pinprick white dots scattering her nose and cheeks. When her eyes flitted open, I studied the dark gray, looking for signs of the brown or blue they would become. I wondered if she would resemble me or Grant, or if she would look like a maternal or paternal relative, none of whom I had met. I did not yet recognize anything about her.

Mother Ruby scrambled eggs while reading aloud from a book on newborn care. She fed me small bites while quizzing me on the text. I listened to every word and repeated every answer verbatim. Mother Ruby stopped reading when the baby fell asleep and refused to continue, even when I pleaded with her to keep going.

“Sleep, Victoria,” Mother Ruby said, closing the book. “It’s the most important thing. Postpartum hormones can warp reality if they aren’t tempered with generous stretches of sleep.” She reached her arms out for me to hand her the baby. Although sleep was already pulling me under, I was reluctant to hand her my daughter. Separation, I feared, could be irreversible. The pleasure I found in the baby’s touch was new and unreliable; I was afraid if I gave her up I wouldn’t be able to bear her touch when she was returned.

But Mother Ruby did not understand my hesitation. She reached in and withdrew the baby, and before I could protest, I was asleep.