Where All the Babies Are Above Average

And Christmas is working its magic.

This morning we had to leave the farm before daylight to get to Savannah because Little Fawn, our new baby who should be our grandbaby, had a doctor’s appointment.

I’ve not been out at night in the last few weeks, so I had not seen Christmas lights appearing. Usually I look at Christmas lights with dismay because somewhere a nuclear plant or a coal plant is keeping them lit. But this year the tiny colored lights, strung into the shapes of stockings and bows, brought a sense of rightness.

It’s Christmas. This is what people do at Christmas. People still tack strings of lights around the eaves of their houses. They set up trees in bay windows and hang ornaments from them. Stars keep appearing, and a star is a metaphor I can believe in.

We are still doing what we always do.

We’re hauling our babies to check-ups. We’re leaving before daylight and taking a thermos of coffee. We’re stopping by a nice supermarket on the way home, because we don’t have anything like that in our village and also because of something the doctor said.

Fall was heavy. It fell on us. It tried to bury us in hurricane debris and mudslides and the shock of a president-elect without ethics and too-warm weather for too long. A baby fell into my arms, and I kept counting 62 years old plus 18 years of Little Fawn’s childhood, and it kept adding up to 80. The numbers piled up. Baby-love was growing in my heart but the numbers kept piling up, weighing me down.

Fall stole from me too. It stole hours of sleep as I tried to think how I could keep holding a baby who wants to be held all the time, day and night, and still get my books written and my workshops taught—and also how I could make sure I lived past 80.

I got slapped around by fall in some other ways. I trusted a few people I shouldn’t have trusted. I broke some things I didn’t want to break. I lost some things. I gave up on a few things.

Yes, fall was hard.

So this morning I was headed to a doctor’s appointment with my new love-baby who is four months old but looks half that. She’s tiny. Too tiny. In terms of happiness she’s in the 99th percentile. But in the other categories she’s low. I didn’t know that yet. I only knew that I was driving into Cobbtown, a little village north of my village, and every year the kind souls of Cobbtown line their median with lighted Christmas shapes and figures, a few hundred of them—Santa, peppermint sticks, angels, an entire nativity scene—and I was so relieved that I wanted to faint. Frosty the Snowperson standing beside a crucifix didn’t matter to me. What mattered was that it’s Christmas and people are still doing what they always do, even when the world is falling apart, and when I say “falling apart” I mean it literally.

Fall was all about falling apart. But now it’s Christmas. Those green and red lights twinkling in the darkness were beautiful.

Little Fawn weighed in at 11 pounds 7 ounces. That put her too low in the weight percentile. She’s still drinking the doll bottles—2 ounces of formula at a time. Occasionally she’ll drink 2 doll bottles, meaning 4 ounces, but the doctor said she needed to be doing that all the time. “She needs 24 ounces of milk a day,” the doctor said. I haven’t been counting bottles but Her Tininess does not drink 12 doll bottles a day. I started crying in the doctor’s office.

I’ve been crying a lot. I cried yesterday in the hairdresser’s chair. Bless my hairdresser. She was not afraid of tears. “Girl,” she said, “you ain’t the first and you won’t be the last. You’re in the therapy chair.” I had so many tears they were dripping on the black cloak. She stepped into the restroom and brought me back a paper towel to wipe my face. She kept snipping and giving me advice, which was actually wise advice that I intend to follow. “Go home and write this on your mirror,” she said. “Write: I’ve got this.”

After I started crying in the doctor’s office, a wonderful thing happened. The doctor started crying too. That’s the effect Little Fawn has on people. They fall instantly in love with her. If I have Little Fawn in my arms, people stop me in the grocery store to get a better look. They open checkout lines for me. They hold doors. If they are doctors they start crying. “The baby is gonna be okay,” she said. “We just have to get her drinking more.” She suggested we switch from the free WIC formula to goat-milk formula made in the Netherlands, which costs $50 per container but will be easier on the baby’s digestive system.

The doctor said, as well, that we need to practice tough love. We need to let the baby cry more. We need to put her down. She needs to learn to self-soothe. She needs to sleep by herself in her bassinet. She needs tummy time so she can strengthen muscles in her neck and upper body.

I’m not a big fan of self-soothing, needless to say. That’s why I cried with my hairdresser.

This brings me back to the Christmas lights. I think that all the things we do for each other during the holidays is how we soothe each other. Cards are soothing and carols are soothing and blinking Christmas lights are very soothing.

So no matter what’s been dumped on you, let me pass on the soothing advice from my hairdresser. You’ve got this.

And regarding what has been dumped on us collectively, we’ve got that too.