Letters from Grenada

It started when he was newborn. 

It’s funny, you know? Because you’re pregnant for nine months, waiting for the baby. Anticipating the baby. Imagining the baby. Et cetera. And then! Labor and delivery, which is basically like military basic training, except condensed and in your vagina. And then you bring home the baby!

And what does the baby do? The baby SLEEPS.

Or at least Bean did. He slept for hours and hours on end, and all I could do was sit there and watch him. I watched his chest rise and fall. I listened to him breathe. I watched his nose wiggle and wondered if he was dreaming. I saw him smile and said to myself, I don’t care what “the book” says, that’s not gas. 

That phase lasted for maybe four weeks. Four weeks in which I couldn’t wait to look in his eyes, talk to him, play with him, but couldn’t because you wake a sleeping newborn like you simply walk into Mordor.

Also, because he was a newborn, his limbs were still all tucked in while he slept. I hear this is typical, that most babies spend their first weeks still sleeping the way they did in the womb, where they had to make the best possible use of the available space, and so tucked their limbs in, neatly folding them against their bodies. 

Try to picture that. He WAS a bean. The same shape, anyway. And so I, in my post-birth quasi-delirium, in this weird state of grace where words were just coming to me, seemingly out of the ether, started calling him bean. 

I started calling him bean, which evolved into Bean, and it stuck.

His full, complete and official nickname is Joaquín the illustrious Bean. 

Lucky for both of us, he likes it.

Posted on April 27th, 2010 under Grenada • Tags: babies, backstory, joaquin the illustrious bean, motherhood, newborns, nickname. •  Print This Post •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback