I’ve been wanting for a few weeks now to muster up some writing to send, and all I have is an excerpt from a longer project-in-progress — because shouldn’t all this writing become something bigger? I’m beginning to have that hope for it. (A book? Could all of this be a book? Somewhere, somehow?) Unfortunately, that means I must be a little less haphazard with it, though I love to fling words about. The paradox of writing, hiding things away so someone can read them later. I’m trying to become better at that.
So here’s a part of a draft, pre-revision. Here’s little parcels of thought, like cookie dough doled out on a sheetpan, not cooked yet.
Sometimes cookie dough is better uncooked?
If all this were a book, would you read it?
(or, do you know any literary agents who want to take on half-crazed new mothers who write nonfiction and poetry, lol? can query!)
Well, on with the tiny drafty show!
fragmented
Fragmented sleep, fragmented thoughts, my life feels lived in fragmented naptimes, little short spurts of solitude, lilypads, floating chunks of ice, my imagination never quite sure when it’s safe to come out from where it’s hiding away. I didn’t realize how essential quiet and alone-ness was to my internal self. When I’m “on” for the baby, taking care of him, I am not alone. This is costly when it’s all the time, when the naps are too short, when I’m the only caregiver for too long, when the day marches forward with no time to rest. I think only half-thoughts, breathe only half-breaths, sleep only half-sleep, so I have to assume my perception of this time is only half-perceptive. What’s in this other half of reality that I’m missing? What would you see of us if you looked?
The days drip on and melt away. We are alone at home.
getting dressed
Strange outfits, new uniforms. Wool slippers all day every day, my feet feel naked without them. Pajamas, changed out of by lunchtime, but often not before. Soft pants alternated with jeans. Jeans feel good to wear. I’ve begun to want to wear a ballcap every time I leave the house, I’m not sure why. I wish I had a thin delicate necklace. It feels fancy to put on earrings, I do so when I leave the house to meet up with anyone, even my family, or have an “important” zoom call (which is not very frequently). No makeup, but I’ve been wanting some sort of lip color lately. Long sleeve tees. My three precious wool cardigans. I haven’t shaved my legs in a long time. Neither my underarms. Shaving has become something I don’t really want to do. I wish I could buy a full closet of new clothes, and I am tempted to do so. I online window shop with a force I haven’t felt in years. Nothing I own fits me right. I want to cut my hair. All of this is normal, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. Can I justify the expense of this existential crisis, my need to reinvent my appearance as my interior is rearranged, rug pulled out from under me?
I pile things in an online cart and let them wait there for later. I wear my insufficient clothes. My body keeps changing. I do not leave the house.
childcare
On a Monday, my vaccinated mom comes over and takes care of my baby between feedings. Five-and-a-half-months postpartum, my first profound break. I go into the front room where my work things are and close the door. Strange feeling. I am sad? I am happy? Something feels lost, some section of my life finished? But also something new beginning?
If I have any reflection, it’s loss of reflection. I used to be able to name what I felt with clarity and precision. Now I am flustered by my own feelings, the sparseness of language in me.
I think about this alone in a room while my mother cares for my child. I cut fabric, piece some flying geese quilt blocks. I migrate away, in a v.
damage
I read news of Israeli airstrikes targeting Palestinian militants in Gaza, with collateral damage being the death of many civilians, including sixty children. On my phone while I’m nursing my baby, I look at an image of a father holding his dead twelve-year-old daughter, covered in a blue body bag. I am speechless at this information, confused by a complicated conflict I cannot pretend to understand, things I don’t feel at liberty to have opinions about beyond the shock and grief of loss of life. And I am shocked and grieved.
I remember at some point reading something written by a woman who said that once she had children the sorrow of the world became so much more heavy than it had been before, almost as if she were everyone’s mother, could imagine each child as her child. The kind of visceral empathy that sickens.
I stand knee-deep in this. I feel vulnerable and angry. I am fine. My child is fine. Other mothers, other children, are not. What do I make of this world that does not keep us safe, all of us who are only trying to live?
dreams ii
My baby miraculously sleeps in a string of three-hour chunks, and I have some thin dreams. In one, the only dream I remember now, tiny red bugs cover every outdoor surface, growing into big cicadas over time. In the dream, I tell my husband, “I will not let those bugs touch our baby.” In the dream, I feel rage.
enormous
I’m shocked by my own ambivalence in the face of the enormity right in front of me. The first time my pandemic baby and me are indoors with my family, no masks. The first day of childcare. Even just the hugeness of waking up each morning and my baby is there, my life completely changed from what it was a year ago. I can tell now that my shift from 0-1 kid will be the biggest of my life. Apparently some people cite that 1-2 is bigger, harder, weirder, but I can’t imagine that it would be for me. This is huge — my life with a child in it. I could be both panicked and jubilant in each moment, in the face of what has happened, is happening. But I’m not. I’m placid. I hold my son’s tiny hand, his own hand, and I don’t freak out. How? There’s a deep well of fear in me that I refuse to dip into. Like a geyser being held down with a large metal lid, a padlock. Dark worries I try not to give space to in my mind. With enormous love comes enormous fear. With enormous responsibility comes enormous exhaustion. In the midst of it all, I have the audacity to still feel boredom, to still wish the time would pass more quickly. I don’t know what this feeling is — regret, grief, ennui, nostalgia? None of those are right. I wish I could fully inhabit each moment of my child’s babyhood, but I can’t. I wish I could experience this time in my life perfectly. I feel so aware that this will never happen again — my first child’s first year. But to cling too tightly to the wildness of this means I don’t welcome what comes next. I wish to remain open. I am not sure how. I didn’t know how arresting it would feel.
affirmation
In reflecting on how she would like to be affirmed in her own motherhood, my friend says the words, “You are a delight. You are immense.”
I am a delight. I am immense.
How do I know this is true?
dyad
Almost more than pregnancy, I am continually amazed that I can keep my baby alive by feeding him with my body. Each day I’m breathlessly grateful that there’s still milk, that my body’s still making it somehow. Pregnancy felt so obvious, so abstract — though I knew there was a baby in there, I could very easily step away from that reality in my mind. He was present, but not. Needy, but not. My body was sustaining him, but I didn’t have to experience that sustenance so vividly. Everything happening behind the curtain, hidden by a veil. With breastfeeding, my body and my mind are both deeply implicated in it, even purely logistically. Everything present. My body tells me when my baby might be hungry by literally prompting me to feed him — with urgency and clarity that feels nothing short of miraculous each time. It’s sort of unsettling. Though there is pleasure in breastfeeding, I would not call it “pleasant”. I expected myself to feel weird about it, and I do. But I also feel pride. And amazement. And sometimes even euphoria. It’s so convenient and tidy. So streamlined and honest. To remain one flesh in this way with another person is humbling and even holy, to return again and again, to be as simple as one’s meal. To be needed in such a tangible way. To hold his whole body in my arms and feed him, to be such a small system, we two together.
I do not mean to glorify breastfeeding in a way that is unhelpful — this is only my experience. This is how I have fed him. I have been able to exclusively nurse my baby for months now, the pump gathering dust on the shelf. I could cry with relief at it being as simple as it is, especially because the beginning was so dicey for us. Exclusive nursing is often not possible, but it’s what’s working for us. And it’s still difficult, frustrating. It still feels so complicated in me, so tenuous, tedious, obscure. I can be grateful and frustrated at once, right?
When I meet with the lactation consultant to discuss my baby’s possible food allergies, she tells me “Do what you can to get to the bottom of the problem, but be gentle on yourself. You two are a dyad after all — what is good for your baby is only what is good for both of you.”
I didn’t realize before experiencing breastfeeding how mutually-needy both my baby and me are within our relationship. I need him to nurse as much as he needs me to nurse him. There have been times that I’ve wanted to feed him more than he’s wanted to eat — a physical need to feed my baby. Engorgement is a horrible feeling — in fact, the day my milk came in was more terrifying and possibly more painful than giving birth. I wept and wept, felt so afraid, out of control of my body. I’d been mentally prepared for what labor would require of me — I was not mentally prepared for this. I’d call that day the lowest point so far of my short experience of motherhood. Milk is heavy. Bodies are strange. A constant reminder even when my baby is not right by my side that he is alive and needs me. I can never forget. We two are a dyad, completing each other in this way. My body is not my own, it belongs to him, just as he belongs to me. We belong to each other in this delicate balance of reciprocity, trust, angst, reverie, pain, fear, love.
As I type this, my mom is playing with my baby and I can feel that I will need to feed him soon. He will approach me with open mouth, pull his hair or his ears as he eats, maybe rub his eyes. Play with the buttons on my cardigan, look into my eyes. I often feed him to sleep, the perfect warmth. And my back will ache. He might not eat as long or with as much focus as I need him to. I may walk away frustrated, still half-full. But it will have been what it is, we two together staying alive.