postpartum, balletic

on ballet documentaries, monasticism, middle-of-the-night feedings

When my baby had only just been born, one or two weeks old, I watched every ballet documentary I could get my hands on while clusterfeeding him. I was a dancer once, spending most high school afternoons in a leotard and tights. Though I wasn’t a good dancer, not naturally talented (except for my great feet), I was dedicated and I really loved it. I’ve always been enchanted by the parallel universe of professional dance — immersive relentlessness, fictionalized perfection juxtaposed over actual blood-sweat-tears. Now I was a first time mother in my late twenties and I could barely walk across the room let alone pirouette. I let the dancers on the screen move for me. It was tantalizing and compelling, watching dancers swim in their own waters, talk about their careers, rehearsal footage of a choreographer figuring out a new sequence, trying it on two people who seem to memorize it instantly, look incredible even as they fail. 

Meanwhile, I was learning new choreography of my own. Lifting my baby’s limp body up to my breasts, wrapping my arms around him, pillows like props. I was wearing costumes — nursing bras, soft pants, a giant pad soaked in witch hazel always underneath the place where a baby had somehow emerged from my body. Two weeks after giving birth, unmedicated and uncomplicated except for a last-minute episiotomy, the fatigue lingered in every part of my body, even surprising places. My arms, my voice. I felt profoundly used, and not necessarily in a bad way. Sort of the way I used to feel after a particularly strenuous rehearsal, when I’d get home at 10 pm and drink chocolate milk, eat pizza bread, finish my homework after all of it. There is a sort of satisfaction in exhaustion that is productive. My body had surprised me, done unimaginable things. My body had carried me through a strange new narrative. My body knew the story better than my mind did. 

As soon as one ballet documentary would end, I’d queue up another one. Some I watched twice, three times. On my phone in the dark, on tv, on the ipad balanced atop the cardboard box of diapers beside the rocking chair. In stressful times, I am prone to obsession. The mind needs somewhere to lay down a while, some safe cul-de-sac to inhabit, a dog circling her bed. I’d labored all night long, arriving at the birth center after 11 pm. Thomas, my son, was born at 5:37 am. In the euphoria after birth, I remember having the coherent thought — “oh, I am not going to sleep anymore.” I felt exhausted, but I didn’t want to sleep. Too much adrenaline running through every part of my body. My husband dozed off a few hours after the birth beside me in the bed, skin to skin with the baby. We had both already been awake more than twenty-four hours. He could rest then, even in a small way, finally. I couldn’t. My eyes were wide open. I watched the baby breathing on his rising and falling chest. Awake. Awake. 

Such physicality, the likes of which I’d never experienced before. And not only labor, not only birth. It took me three tries to successfully pee after giving birth. The nurses recommended I chug apple juice. Each time I tried to walk to the bathroom, my legs felt like they were made of bread dough. I couldn’t remember how to relax the muscles of my pelvic floor on the toilet.

Sleep deprivation is such a quiet emergency in the body. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between being well-rested and being starved of sleep. As I write, I’m seven months postpartum and still haven’t been able to string more than three hours of sleep together at once. Shouldn’t I feel completely horrible? I don’t. Maybe I can’t remember what it was like to drink endless sleep like running water. Maybe my body is suffering but not bothering to alert my mind — she’s busy, my body thinks, “don’t bother her.” 

There are many things I love about ballet documentaries, but hearing the way dancers talk about their lives is one of the best parts to me. I’m enthralled by “shop talk” in nearly any creative occupation, the way it’s all the same, yet all so distinct. The way a painter can draw inspiration from ballet, a musician from a historian, a writer from a gardener — everyone living someone else’s metaphor, everyone muddling through, doing the work, thinking about the work, talking about the work. During one interview with a dancer, it occurred to me that the life of a ballet dancer is strikingly monastic — maybe that’s why I’m drawn to it, being a reluctant lifelong Christian who is more interested in weird mysticism than the overbearing culture of evangelicalism. Monasticism is a big reason that I’m still willing to align myself with a religion that often has done more harm than good — I figure if there are still people willing to devote their entire lives to quiet service and prayer there must be something in it still for me to uncover, some deeper layer to brush off and find.

Ballet is definitely monastic, and I learn through experience that new motherhood is too. The devotion, the asceticism, the praying the hours, up all night. The performance, the relentlessness, the literal choreography. Reading literary monk Thomas Merton’s journals during one of my baby’s too-short naps, I feel a sudden kinship to his inner-turmoil about trying to reconcile his writing with his identity as a monastic. He calls writing’s various occupations “distractions” from his life of devoted faith — but isn’t writing his art? 

Maybe it will help me to do something about distractions if I restrain my famished appetite for the things that distract me — new books about the Order, my own work in print, etc. I don’t expect to be without distractions: they are my cross. I suffer them with love in the sense that I am resigned to the drab business of remembering to sink below them when I can and keep with the God Who holds my will in His darkness. 

But can’t art be holy too? Isn’t it worthwhile? Isn’t it his calling? I want to shout at him, “keep writing” — but it’s clear in his journals that he wishes he could really, truly put down the pen sometimes, and he can’t. That’s so interesting to me. It makes me question my own motives. Is mothering the most meaningful thing I’m doing? What does it all mean? What are all these quiet hours at the barre, at prayer, pacing back and forth in the nursery past midnight for? 

I guess in ballet it isn’t so muddled. The problem for the ballerina is anything that isn’t ballet. And that’s kind of how I feel about motherhood too. Like Merton, I get tripped up by the distractions, by my work, the force of my sudden idea that I should write a novel about new motherhood (mirroring Merton’s “distraction” of books about the Order), by my hopes of any sort of continuance of my own tripping sense of self. I envy the ballerinas, the way they show off their spartan little apartments — just a place to sleep between rehearsals. The way they say “I’ve given up everything for this,” fully admitting that it’s all they have going on. This isn’t the only narrative though, of course. The plot thickens when the aging ballerinas (and by aging, they mean like mid-thirties) talk about the panic that comes with seeing the end of their career looming before them. Injuries, side-jobs, some thinking about becoming parents (which would all but halt their career, wreak who-knows-what havoc on the women’s bodies — I know this all too well now.) So it is muddled. Even that is a fantasy, something I’m reading into it. Just as the monk’s life isn’t simple devotion, but also riddled with distractions. 

I hate that I am distracted from my mothering. I wish I could do it single-mindedly, wholeheartedly, but I can’t! I have a job! I have a self! I was multitasking — thinking about ballet while feeding my baby, writing this very essay in my mind! I can’t help it. But I sort of want to. Sometimes I wish I could just sink down deep underneath it all, alone with my baby. I wish I could drop out of every expectation I have for myself and be very present in this first year of my son’s life. I want to float away on the river of motherhood, maybe never to be heard of again. I want to disappear into it. I worry that this is an embarrassing or un-feminist thing to want, but I feel it anyway. 

But here I am an unreliable narrator, even just to myself. I don’t want to disappear! I want to keep working. I want to write. I’m in the beginning stages of a long-hoped-for work project that will be very time consuming. I am ongoing. I honestly owe it to myself to not disappear into it. So why does that devotion to myself rather than to my baby feel like a distraction. Why does that feel like the world outside the ballet studio?

I don’t know. It’s complicated. Maybe it’s the sleeplessness. Maybe all this has been a dream. 

Whole days lost to putting the baby to sleep. Sitting in quiet rooms breastfeeding, shushing, bouncing, rocking, walking, sometimes doing all of these things at once like a weird one-man-band. It takes technique! It takes finesse! This is an art. I begin to feel like a craftsman, the foremost living expert in making this particular baby sleep. Should I host a seminar? Jokes I make with myself while I slowly lose my mind.

Because it does feel that way, like I’m losing my mind. It feels that way both when all my tricks work and when my tricks don’t work. To transfer a sleeping baby to a crib takes such precision that you’d think I’d been practicing for years. But sometimes even using all the precision, technique, finesse, I still have to try to do the transfer five or six times — scooping the baby back up for three minutes, doing the bouncewalkshushdance, trying again, gently, gently. Many times a day, many times a night. The baby sleeps a lot, but for every time he sleeps he needs to be put to sleep. 

I rarely get angry that it doesn’t work, except in the early morning when I’m desperate for two more hours of sleep. That’s when my patience is fully gone from me. I’m honestly amazed I don’t lose it more often. 

My husband’s arms are too big, it doesn’t work for him. He rarely can do a successful crib transfer. He gets frustrated. I understand. I can’t really help him with this though. Must I do everything myself? 

In some cases, yes. This is a strange pas de deux we two are in. You can’t expect a different partner to swoop in and execute the choreography seamlessly. It’s us two. And that’s sort of beautiful, as intense, as relentless, as exhausting as that is. To be the one whose arms he trusts to always be there underneath him as he falls asleep. That’s a big thing to be for someone. That’s a worthy life’s work, even if only for this short span of time. That’s a meaningful accomplishment. I think that’s part of what I’m trying to claim here — that what I’m doing in motherhood is difficult, beautiful, and real. It isn’t valuable to the marketplace, it isn’t seen by anyone else’s eyes, but it is tangible, actual, it is real work and it means something. 

The monk understands — his quiet unseen hours of prayer are cosmically meaningful but invisible, like precious water carried for miles then poured into the ocean. Who would know? Who would see?

We have become good at all of these things, we two together. Breastfeeding, falling asleep, all our little partnerships. We dance our little private pas de deux. It’s physical, it’s beautiful. Then everyone (no one) claps. The curtain goes down. We take off our tights — now what? Invisible audience. Invisible dance. Right now this is my whole life, my art, the thing I am focused on with all of my attention. I give myself over to it.  What will we do after this, when we can’t do ballet anymore? No idea, none at all. Don’t think of that right now.  The monk intends to spend his whole life in the monastery. But this — so immersive, so complete, then so quickly over. It’s sort of wonderful when I let myself focus on motherhood, on this strange nonsensical devotion. Maybe sometime all these hours at the barre will add up to something real. Even only for me — my time, my energy, my body, my art flung into the void, all this I did for love.