Second Kid, Second Wind

Two months ago – about the time I went quiet here – Emmett and I had a second son, Kipling Clarke Fraser.

In sharp contrast to Finnegan’s dramatic arrival, Kip’s birth was smooth, sweet, and, well, standard. In fact, the most remarkable thing about it was that it coincided with New York City’s biggest snowstorm in five years. We entered the hospital on a Monday morning as the squall’s first flakes fell, and left two days later to lakes of slush at every street corner and boulders of soot-colored ice separating lanes of traffic. 

In the month before our snow-baby was born, I read ravenously, devouring several books a week, sometimes even a book a day. I read believing that, once Kip arrived, I wouldn’t be able to do it again for a long time. That the demands of early parenthood – the sleep deprivation, the scattered attention, the endless breastfeeding that required one hand on my breast and another on my baby – would make consuming anything more strenuous than old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy impractical. 

I had good reason to believe it’d be that way. When Finnegan was born, I read at his hospital bedside, though I scarcely remember what. Everything from that time, apart from the omnipresent question of his recovery, feels muted and recessive in retrospect. Goodreads tells me that in the three months after Finnegan’s birth, I read just six books, all but one of them memoirs written by women (my literary comfort zone). When I re-read one of those memoirs in 2019, I had no memory of having read it before. Again, like some therapist gently taking my hand, it fell to Goodreads to break the news to me. “But you already marked this as read 8 months ago, dear,” I could practically imagine the platform saying.

And yet, much as Kip’s birth diverged wildly from Finnegan’s, my postpartum reading habits have been markedly different this time around too. In the first three months of 2021 – the period immediately before and after Kip’s birth – I read 18 books. I tore through memoir manuals, business books, short story collections, Insta-poetry, hyped book club fiction, and narrative non-fiction. I haven’t read so ravenously, or so diversely, in years. 

So what made the difference? I’m tempted to lie – to credit some experienced-parent wisdom I don’t have, some scheduling hack I haven’t discovered, or some newfound mania for multi-tasking I don’t possess. Or I could chalk the change up to Kip’s relative health, or to Emmett, who has always done the lion’s share of household work around here. But the true reason I was able to read so much through my postpartum haze (to say nothing of also being able to shower regularly, edit my manuscript for submission, and otherwise dabble in non-baby-related activities) is that I had my mom here.

For nearly three months, my mom stayed with Emmett, Finnegan, Kip, and me. She sweet-talked her way across a closed US/Canada border, calmed me before Kip’s arrival, cared for Finnegan at home while the rest of us were in the hospital, and then, in her lovely and unassuming way, made herself absolutely indispensable. Highlights of her visit (to me) include the dozens of walks she took Finnegan on, the hundreds of muffins she made, and the untold number of bottles and pump parts she washed while claiming that she liked doing it because “it feels nice to have her hands in warm water.”

Now, after delaying her departure several times, she’s gone – back to the life on the lake that we greedily kept her from for so long! – and we are, frankly, a little lost. I haven’t read a page. 

Of course, we’ll figure it out. I managed to clock 15 minutes on the Peloton yesterday by distracting Finnegan with a game in which I repeatedly tried and failed to throw a toy pig into a bucket from my perch atop the bike. That’s what Emerson meant when he wrote, “We do what we must,” right? And in time, I’m sure I’ll devise something similar with books. Listening to them while Finnegan and I make our morning smoothies? Training Finnegan to turn the pages for me while Kip breastfeeds? Reading them aloud to my children in lieu of actual children’s books? I’m open to suggestions. Including the suggestion that we just entice my mom to come back to Brooklyn and stay with us forever.