I wanted Blake to win but I knew he wasn’t going to.
I’d invested so much emotionally in this season and now here I was at the end of it, in a hospital bed with my newborn baby lying on my chest, painkillers making me less “me”.
Jordan won instead.
As American Idol blared in the background, the nurse walked in and told me we were going to get this baby to breastfeed no matter what!
Eventually she was right, but it took a while and her patience and mine too.
At one point she held him in her lap, directing the few drops of my “liquid gold” from the small syringe, into his mouth.
I looked at her shoes and wondered how long she’d been wearing them just THAT day.
I thought of the hundreds of thousands of times she walked those halls with conviction, wielding the power to make mother and baby bond and become feeder and feed-ee.
She smiled as she picked him up and delivered him back to my chest, her long, nice-smelling hair brushing my arm.
Her English accent lilted through the air as she talked to my baby and directed us both and then suddenly he was doing it and we both cried out in joy.
After a few more minutes her “nurse” shoes carried her from our room and we only saw her again briefly the next morning when she came to see how we were doing.
“Brilliantly,” I beamed. She smiled back and left us, my baby suckling like a champ.
That was four years ago. I wonder how many pairs of shoes she’s gone through since then… And how many mommies and babies she’s helped. I’m guessing a lot on both counts.
The sweet nurse who got us nursing and my newborn baby boy…
the prompt was…. write about your character (or yourself) and a pair of his or her shoes…
this is more of a memory than anything else but this is what first came to mind…
