“Where’s my little girl?”
At the sound of her father’s voice, the baby swung her head so fast in his direction she wrenched on Ellen’s nipple and droplets of milk flew.
“Hello, my little Gracie girl, hello, hello, hello!” Patrick crouched down on the floor next to where Ellen was sitting. The baby crowed and gurgled and wriggled in an ecstasy of love. Patrick held out his hands and looked up at Ellen for approval.
“It’s OK. She was just snacking really.”
Patrick took the baby into his arms and buried his face in her neck. “Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of a yummy, yummy baby.”
Ellen refastened her bra and the buttons of her shirt, watching Patrick.
“Good Lord, I’ve never seen such a besotted father,” Anne had said the previous night after watching him play with Grace. She sounded mildly disapproving, even cranky. Ellen wondered if it was regret that Ellen had missed out on a besotted daddy, or envy because Anne had been a single mother, or if she thought there was something unmanly or unseemly about Patrick’s behavior.
“Sorry.” Patrick stood up with the baby on his hip and kissed the top of Ellen’s head. “Hello, you.”
“Oh, yes, don’t mind me.” Ellen shrugged.
She didn’t think it was unmanly. She couldn’t get enough of seeing Patrick interact with Grace. The very first moment she’d been wheeled back into her hospital room and seen him cradling the new baby to his bare chest (the nurses had told him to give Grace skin-to-skin contact while Ellen was in recovery, and so he’d unbuttoned his shirt and tucked her up against his bare chest like a sleepy koala), she’d felt such a powerful rush of feeling—something like lust—except not. It was just like the breastfeeding, an entirely new sensation. She wondered if it was biology: the satisfaction of seeing your mate bond with your offspring, so you knew that he would be likely to stick around and keep clubbing lions and tigers for you. Or was it because she was identifying with Grace, and Patrick was filling Ellen’s repressed need for paternal love?
Whatever it was, she was grateful for it. Now all that fuss over whether or not Patrick still had feelings for Colleen seemed so silly. Ellen looked back tenderly and condescendingly at herself a year ago: all that unnecessary drama! There was enough love to go around for everyone.
There was even enough love to cope with last Monday morning’s phone call from Harriet to say that Jon’s new wife was pregnant with twins.
(Nearly enough love anyway. It helped to imagine how badly Jon would cope with sleep deprivation. He’d always liked his sleep. She hoped his twin babies would be healthy and lively, particularly at three a.m.)
After Harriet’s phone call it had occurred to her how rarely she thought about her ex-boyfriends now. Gracie’s arrival had kicked them clean out of her head. It used to be that a big part of her satisfaction with her love for Patrick was because it compared so favorably to her feelings for her previous partners. It was like she’d entered their relationship in a permanent contest with all her past relationships. Yes, yet again, we’re the winners! Look at our superior sex life! Look at how happy we are!
Except no one was watching (not anymore) and no one cared.
Now her love for Patrick was just a fact, an intrinsic part of her life, as if it had always been so.
She did sometimes wonder if all this blissful contentment might be due to the fact that breastfeeding released the “love hormone”—oxytocin—which increased trust and empathy and reduced fear.
Oh, well. She was going to breastfeed for as long as Grace wanted. (“Promise me you won’t be one of those freaky hippie mothers still feeding her when she starts school,” said Anne. “What’s wrong with that?” asked Ellen innocently.)
Grace Lily Scott, named in honor of her maternal great-grandmothers, was born on Valentine’s Day by a planned C-section. A natural birth wasn’t an option because of the baby’s “low-lying placenta.” For a while there, that had seemed like the end of the world. Ellen had always imagined herself having a drug-free, natural labor, using the hypnosis skills she’d successfully taught so many other mothers-to-be. It had never occurred to her that she might not even get to try a natural birth.
“Yes, I can see you’d be upset,” said Julia at the time. (She had just recently moved in with Stinky and was incandescent with happiness, due also to the news that her ex-husband’s new wife had left him for another man: karma of the most satisfying sort.) “It’s because a cesarean doesn’t fit with your brand identity. You should be having a home birth with chanting and candles and incense.”
“It’s not exactly that,” sniffed Ellen, although Julia was exactly right.
“I always knew you’d be too posh to push,” said Madeline, before admitting that she was just jealous, because her sixteen-hour labor to bring little Harry into the world wasn’t exactly one of her favorite memories. (Madeline had also recently admitted that the reason she never asked Ellen about her hypnotherapy work was because she thought Ellen didn’t consider her “spiritual or deep enough” to understand. Ellen had been astonished.)
“Labor doesn’t make you a mother, darling,” said Patrick’s mother.
“If only you were born a hundred years ago, when you could have gone through days of natural labor before bleeding naturally to death,” said Ellen’s mother.
Of course, in the end, it hadn’t mattered. She’d used self-hypnosis to help keep her blood pressure stable through the surgery and there had been no complications. “Your wife is the most calm, serene patient I’ve ever had,” said the anesthetist to Patrick. “You should see her when she’s ninja fighting,” replied Patrick.
Ellen had stayed in her own peaceful little zone until the obstetrician held up her baby, at which point she’d gasped for air like she’d just been pulled from the bottom of a swimming pool, and everyone got concerned, and she couldn’t speak properly to tell them she was perfectly fine, it was just that— Oh my God, did you see, that’s an actual baby!
Apparently, while her conscious mind had been reading books and setting up a nursery, her subconscious mind had been thinking she was giving birth to a fish, or a teddy bear, or something other than a baby.
“What are we going to do while Mummy is busy hypnotizing?” said Patrick now to Grace. “Do you want to go down to the beach with me and your big brother? Or just hang out and shoot the breeze?”