Happy Birthday, Little Big Girl Now

When we arrived in Barbados, Virginie was only 3 1/2 months old.  Much of my fear and paranoia came from feeling unable to protect her (and Lily and myself).  I did not know this country, the Caribbean, anyone here at all and could not figure out how we'd found ourselves, a New York couple of something or others in the middle of this developing country, nearly out in the jungle.  There were lizards and monkeys and a mongoose and huge moths, bats, mosquitoes and debilitating heat surrounding me in a house full of boxes with wrought iron fencing on every window and door.  We had no neighbors on either side and the street was quiet and dark once the sun went down.  Virginie was nursing (ha! Still is, made you look.), could hold her head but could not sit up, and had not even gone to solid foods.  New mothers feel inadequate, but this was ridiculous.  I already had Lily but did not feel like I could even do any of the basics.  Virginie, though healthy and chubby and cherubic, seemed more vulnerable than tiny little angelic Lily had seemed.  The sensation was primal.  I felt terror and my fight or flight mechanism was on a hair trigger 24-7.  After the soporific experience of my pregnancy with her, this was a strange turn of events.


I carried Virginie heavy and low.  And by that I mean I had a big fat ass.  Seriously.  Each week as my ever increasing belly was measured, I was two centimeters larger than expected.  For example, at 20 weeks, one is usually about 20 centimeters and I was 22.  Funny, in the first trimester I actually lost one pound from the all-day-long sickness but made up for it in spades during the rest of the pregnancy.  At 25 weeks, with 15 weeks to go my doctor, in her sweetest "I am incredibly concerned you are going to be fork lifted out of your apartment to the hospital" voice asked if I was perhaps indulging in too many "too manys."  I really hadn't been, but Virginie was an insanely hungry caterpillar.  With Lily, I craved bananas and peanut butter on toast at 4 am and drank more orange juice than I would ever care to.  But with Virginie, we were so concerned about keeping her in there that I fed her everything under the sun under the guise of making sure she was inspired to stay.  Uh, yeah.  It wasn't that I ate too much, but I certainly didn't follow any plan to maintain a weight increase of 25-30 lbs.  I think that was pretty obvious to everyone.


My belly was just so big and I was still carting Lily around.  By early afternoon, I was on my face, even though Lily had a sitter 5 days a week in the mornings!  I was so nervous that Didier would get called away to Barbados before the baby was born that I had regular freak outs.  I wondered if I would have to give birth alone.  If I was capable of doing it.  If I wasn't, who would I ask to hold my legs, grip my hand, listen to me scream, have one of the most private moments of my life with in the place of my husband.  It did not come to that.


We already knew that we would be moving to Barbados and thanks to shoddy file management (It seems paperwork kept going missing while visas et al were in the process of being procured.) Didier was able to stay for the birth and even a few weeks after.  I suppose that should have been a premonition of things to come, but what did we know.  We were exhausted, overwhelmed, hopeful about a new position, a little scared about a new place to live, wondering how Lily would take to it all.  Secretly, I feared for this little wiggly worm.  I just wondered how this little girl would follow in the footsteps of Lily?  Lily who is so intelligent and sensitive and beautiful and kind and funny.  I cried so many nights imagining future confrontations between the "second sister" and the angel.  Lily with that gorgeous head of curls and the baby, yet unnamed looking all squishy and gooey on the ultrasound.  I said a prayer for her and told her I would look out for her, poor thing.


Didier had chosen Lily's name from the Marlene Dietrich song, "Lily Marlene" so it was "my turn" with Virginie.  We batted a few names around, leaning heavily on the French, mainly my suggestions.  I loved Eugenie and Clemence, deemed too old and too religious by Didier.  I also liked Vincent before we knew the babe would be a girl.  Didier liked Theophile.  Again, ah no.  When Virginie rolled off my lips, we both looked at each other knowingly.  That my father is from Virginia and that her name could hold a significance for the Penns too made it all the more certain. We chose Clementine as a softened Clemence and Belen for the woman who cared for us (my sister, brother, and me) when we were children, Belen Nortez Jones, a beautiful Cuban woman who sang songs to us in Spanish and taught us dance moves and demonstratively loved us.  I don't know that I ever showed her back the love she'd given me.  But I could share her forever with my child by giving Virginie her name.


Virginie let me wait it out until the end.  I'd heard rumor that second children often came earlier than expected and as big as I was, it seemed like a no brainer that even at 37 or 38 weeks that little babe would be fully cooked.  She came on her due date.  Thanks to the workings of my inventive doctor and something called "stripping the membranes" my water broke after an early morning appointment at both the hospital and her office.  Dilated 4 centimeters.  Not a contraction in sight.  And then--whoosh!  Walked into the hospital smiling and waving like a princess on parade.  Was screaming like a banshee minutes later and in well under an hour the most beautiful brown eyes I'd ever seen were staring at my naked, howling face.  Naked because I was so hot while giving my personal information to the nurse that I'd started to remove my clothes to put the gown on and found myself at 10 centimeters dilated before I had the chance to get the damned thing or the admitting bracelet on! 

I loved that baby right then and knew in an instant that she could hold her own.  I'd had nothing to worry about this one.  Virginie, though born in New York and a New Yorker, is a little Bajan girl at heart.  She loves the sea, the sand, the sun.  She is naked and cool and fresh faced and relaxed.  She loves Lily.  She loves Mommy and Papa and chatting and just being.  She is so Zen.

Each night before bed, when I kiss the ladies and we watch the plastic glow-in-the-dark stars slowly fade, Virginie tells me that she is a "little sesser and a big girl now."  Sometimes she gets tangled up in her excitement to talk and tells me that she is Mommy's little big girl now.  And she is.  Happy Birthday, Little Big Girl Now.  I love you so and learned to love Barbados for both you and Lily.  I'm a lucky mommy...and I know it.

 (c)  Copyright 2011.  City Mom in the Jungle.