Newborn Eye Ointment & Other BS
When they asked us if we had applied the antibiotic eye ointment to the crystalline gaze of the newborn, we lied. Would you smear Elmer’s Glue on the Mona Lisa?
“I think so?” My husband squinted convincingly at the baby’s soupy pupils, crass verification.
“There has just been so much ointment around,” I added. I spooned yesterday’s cold butter fish, which basically looked like melted ointment, into my mouth from a tupperware, trying to enhance the overall ointment-y feel in the postpartum bed, still smudged with my blood.
They came back 10 minutes later. The baby was still gazing at the atoms in the air. “Has the eye ointment been applied?”
“Definitely, likely,” I gestured in the directions of her eyes, each of them tracing a wandering star.
“We got it,” my husband reassured them, with the patriarchy’s absolute confidence in its own capabilities.
The nurse blinked at us intolerantly through her “I wasn’t born 1.5 hours ago” glasses. She held out the chart as if it were a valid form of life. Maybe even something that itself needed to be fed and burped. And appeased.
I kept voraciously putting butter fish into my mouth, the baby in my husband’s elbow, observing how hunger works from the middle distance. Yes, birth inundates you with a world of potential harms, but also with garlic sauce, hot showers, eyebrow stroking. The untouched ointment lay on the closest shelf, like a fresh catch minnow, stranded on a shore it couldn’t comprehend, a tube as bulging full as a Colgate commercial.
When my new daughter was first placed on my chest, I couldn’t unlock my face. No angels horned. The universe did not exhale. I was still arched, still wincing, and with some coaxing, collapsed back into the bed.
Holding her body ventral, I waited for the first angel to clear its throat. It was July, the hospital AC making the vents hum. The baby opened her mouth like an opera singer and the nipple waited there, still and stalwart like a school bus whose riders were being dismissed from the yard. “It’s right there, Close your mouth!” I whispered-commanded to her, “And give off that ointment vibe.”
She didn’t listen to either piece of advice, as parenting is full of sinkholes.
They came back. “She needs the ointment now. It’s not charted!”
In order not to go blind from a disease we, her parents, didn’t have, and so couldn’t have transmitted?
I raised my water bottle in a sordid toast. “Well, Let’s name her Chlamydia, then? Shall we? From the Ancient Greek, ‘Small Cloak?’” My husband nodded. We take names fucking seriously.
Her mouth was still open like a diva’s in the moment after her cadenza, before the grand theater is torn apart by violent applause. She wasn’t going to latch on my breast: she was going to sing to it forever. So she would be Aria.
In myths, the blind sing. The power of truth reverbs off the pure sense of their voice. The charts flap in the throaty wind, and all the bullshit scatters.
In the end, I did not give my informed refusal hard enough and they coated her eyes with the unnecessary antibiotic. “I am pretty sure the other nurse already applied it,” my husband tried one last time as they popped the cap. But the finger of the hospital was already upon her.
As soon as she was in my arms again, we wiped it off with her swaddle. Off fell her useless newborn hat. Enamored at life being life, we stared at her big, fishy stare. Her body felt like the verse of a song I had always known but never sang.
When we had our fill, she fell asleep with my husband’s upturned finger giving comforting pressure to the roof of her mouth. That tiny cathedral where the angels tuned their tiniest harps, where her reflexes tied us in a primordial knot.
This felt like the least of the lies we live on: that inside every moment, no matter the bullshit our conditioning and institutions try to coat us in, there is a nearly imperceptible 8th note of Completely OK.
Maybe Mona Lisa coated her own nipples, too, raw with pain for the child she’d never nurse. Maybe she’d take Elmer’s glue after all, if that was all they had to patch a wound, pushing a smile out through the fog, eyes on an indeterminate future where antibiotics both saved us and clouded our visions.
The goop had come and gone, and we were bare, fleetingly asleep. Is it more frightening for our children to see us clearly, or not to see us clearly? I’m not sure.
