Ori
Ori is born on a Tuesday.
I tell myself that people do this everyday, and the thought steadies me. Cara catches him as he slides free from my body, scooping him up to rest in my arms. He is slippery and purple. His face is pinched. He has fine, dark hair slicked to his head. I have never held anyone so small. He’s ours! says Cara. He’s completely ours.
Ori takes a breath with his gummy pink mouth wide. He wails in big huffs, his lungs clear and strong. Cara clamps and cuts the cord, his lifeline to me for nine months. I pass the placenta, for I am no longer his home. His wails subside and he looks at us both with large, dark eyes. He is beautiful in an unusual way. I think of baby gazelles, how quickly they must stand, walk, run. Ori can’t yet hold the weight of his head. Cara cradles us both in the birthing pool.
She warms the breast milk for Ori, donated by a local māmā who is producing extra. He will be fed a combination of breast milk and formula. I can’t feed him with my body—my milk ducts were removed years ago when I had top surgery. He nestles perfectly under my faded scars.
My body aches as Cara tucks me underneath our feather duvet. Ori has been fed and is sleeping in his bassinet. I dream that he is stolen in the night and replaced by a changeling. We are awoken by his cries.
We take turns to feed him, change him, hold him. My body continues to bleed, expelling the lining that he was cushioned by.
Ori begins to hit his developmental milestones. At around three months he can hold his heavy little head up. He smiles at us. His fingernails grow abnormally long. I trim them every week, but they wont stop growing. His Nana comes every Wednesday to see him and help with feedings. Nana and Poppa take him to swimming lessons at the local pool every second week. He hardly cries any more. He takes everything in with his round, dark eyes and I start to wonder.
Cara dismisses my wonderings. He’s growing, she says. He’s ours and he’s perfect. She isn’t concerned about his quietude, his unnaturally fast growing nails.
*
At five months, Ori is nearly able to roll over and he likes to chew everything. We start him on solid foods which proves messy. He makes raspy sounds and he reaches out for us with his chubby little hands. He seems to respond to his name. And he has grown two little nubs on the top of his head. I trace them with my finger and he grizzles.
We take him to the GP to ask about his nubs. He wails the entire time, a miniature siren. I’ve never seen anything like this! She says over his cries, and refers him to a skin specialist.
Cara and I lay on top of the duvet. Ori sleeps in between us. He’s growing in ways I never expected, I say to her. A wry little smile crosses her face. He’s so like you, she says. I smile as tears spring to my eyes and she reaches over to touch my face. I think of puppies, of felines. How helpless and dependent they are in the beginning, eyes squinted shut and squirming towards their mother’s bellies. I look at Ori’s chubby little fists, squeezing as though he is readying himself to fight.
I expected that having him would make me feel dysphoria, but that never manifested. My body changed to accommodate and to nurture him from a tiny speck into a nebulous body of his own. My body has once again proven its own plasticity, its own resilience.
*
Ori and I walk to the park most days, early in the morning before it gets too hot. Look at the ducks I say. Dadadadada! Says Ori. While I start to feel miserable about exploding duck populations and polluted waterways, he continues to babble, opening and closing his fists.
His horns have grown into small points. We Facetime Nana and Poppa. He’s getting so big! Says Poppa. Nana nods sagely in agreement.
Cara takes the day off work, and we take Ori to the lake. I carry him in a sling facing forward, so he can take in the landscape as we walk. He babbles—variations of Mama, Papa, Baba. Cara walks ahead of us, her platinum blond hair a beacon. She turns to Ori grinning and he grabs her fingers. Hey lil bud. I catch her other hand and she leans over to kiss me.
*
In the lake, we support Ori to float and he giggles happily. I marvel at how less than a year ago his tiny unborn body floated in the warmth and safety of my own. How his umbilical cord gave him everything he needed. How we witnessed him grow by the protrusion of my belly. How his unique features formed.
I look down at the skin of my belly. It is puckered and stretch marks ripple across it like the disturbed surface of the lake. I look over at Ori, playing in the black sand at the edge of the water, Cara beside him. He is a marvel. I will have to bathe him later to clean the sand out from his creases.
In the car on the way back, Ori points out the window at the cows. What do cows say? Cara asks him. Mooooo! I think about the native bush that would have once covered these green, cow studded hillsides. The fences like fingers with grass and weeds choking the palm of earth beneath. I lose myself in wondering who and what Ori will be. There is a crooked line of trees on the hillside. Solid blocks of shade. Of rest. Of sweeping branches. Horses in glaucous blankets: so pastoral.
I put Ori down for a nap under the shade of the fig tree in our back garden. The fruit are still small, hard and green. I can see the pram and I am in earshot of him. I glance over as I slowly and grudgingly work on a crochet project which has been sitting untouched since my third trimester. I am still learning and progress is slow.
The skin specialist says that his horn nubs are unusual and books him for a series of tests. They come up inconclusive. He is perplexed, and tells us to let our GP know if anything changes.
The fruit ripens. I make six jars of fig jam for my sisters and parents—and us of course. I sterilise the jars and cut the figs into chunks, adding some water and the lemon juice that I froze in winter. The fruit comes to a rolling boil, I stir constantly and add a large amount of sugar at the end.
When the fig tree begins to drop its leaves, I finish my crochet project—a multi-coloured blanket for Ori.
Ori’s first birthday is celebrated with his grandparents, his aunties and a banana cake, which he sinks his hands into and eats fistfuls of. The crumbs scatter across the floor, plaster across his face.
Cara leans over to whisper in my ear. He’s so like you. He is his own.
Elliot Harley McKenzie (they/them) lives in Aotearoa. Other places they have been published include Starling, NZ Poetry Shelf, Turbine | Kapohau, Tarot, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems and Sweet Mammalian.