Three Metaphors for the Postpartum Experience
< div>Because if I can’t describe exactly how it feels,
I can tell you what it resembles…
camp. You’ve had all these experiences that no one at home understands, in
fact, you know you’re profoundly changed, and yet you’re still in all the same
roles you had before. By about your third day home your parents are rolling
their eyes at every new fascinating detail you want to share about your best
friend from camp or the amusing anecdotes about things your infinitely wise
counselor told you, and there is nothing that would be more blissful than a
phone call from somebody you went to camp with, who shared the experience, who
understands. I think this is why we love sharing our birth stories — I would
have any of my children’s birth stories told to me every night before bed if I
could. Unfortunately, we’ve been too busy taking care of the new baby to really
relive the birth, and it happened too quickly for photos or video or even for my
best friend to be there and help recount it.
2. Being postpartum is Christmas
afternoon. All the presents are opened, and the anticipation is gone, and even
if you have received everything you thought you wanted, there’s still sadness –
what is there to look forward to now? All of the season of goodwill cheer and
friendliness is dissipated, pronto, and there is no crowd of more miserable
looking people than those out doing exchanges on December 26th. And yet this
feels somehow small and ungrateful, so you walk around trying to look happy, and
not feeling ok feeling how you really feel is worse than the feeling itself
(yeah, untangle that one!)
3. Being
postpartum, even after a fourth child, a homebirth, is leaving the hospital for
the first time with your firstborn wondering whose bright idea it was to trust
you with parenting this child. Your life is not the same life you had before
and you still have to proceed with confidence, but one of the common threads of
all of my postpartum experiences is a secret longing for a mentor, somebody with
authority who can give me a firm introduction to this new life, give me approval
and cheer me on and reassure me that it is all going to turn out fine, that I’m
doing a great job. I find it embarrassing to admit, but I think this is the
kind of care I need taken of me so that I can take care of everyone I have to
take care of. But it feels so silly to explain or ask for, especially since I
have more parenting experience right now than most of my friends, and am
uncomfortably sensitive to the faintest air of the condescending or patronizing.
It’s not really a role a husband or best friend can take because they are more
fundamentally equal relationships and offer an entirely different (and
important) form of support, that of co-struggler, the person who you can laugh
with or cry with or just puzzle things over with. But I know that this one is
somehow key, because writing about this is what makes me tear up. I joke about
joining AA in order to get a sponsor, and I am sure there are support groups I
could join, but honestly, when I’m struggling with getting meals and laundry
done, I’m not so up to forming new relationships. I guess in some ways writing
in a journal is my attempt to provide myself with a voice of reason and
encouragement,. Tthere is something sort of lonely about
that.
Two weeks after Rainer’s birth I
realized I really prefer labor and birth to being postpartum. Maybe this is the
universe being fair, because I have a pretty easy time being pregnant. But
the challenges of birth are so much more physical and you know there will be an
end to them, while the challenges of being postpartum are more mental and
emotional and you start questioning whether you were ever really sane to begin
with, you can’t remember what normal feels like. But six weeks out, I am tired,
I am frustrated that I cannot seem to get dinner on the table before 8 p.m., no
matter what time I start preparing it (and I am not living on peanut butter and
jelly or frozen pizzas, which I could prepare with one hand pretty easily) but I
am not crying so much — there are more good days in between the really hard
days. And I am trying to figure out what made it turn. Looking in my morning
journal there was a day when I acknowledged that postpartumness and birth were
part of the same process, and even if the challenges were different I could use
the tactics that got me through the one with the other, detaching a bit,
breathing, trying just to get through the next wave of discomfort, making sure I
had some good music on. And realizing that the process is not merely physical
or physiological, but spiritual, too, because life is sacred and these
challenges are how good things happen and help us in valuing the good things –
it ain’t cheap.
Why lay out this
terribly personal, vulnerable stuff? I had such a hard time being postpartum
after Sżren was born and never really talked about it, at least not until I
had struggled through the worst of it. And I hoped understanding it better
would help me through it this time, but it just didn’t. I have educated myself
on postpartum issues, taken a self-test and come up
healthier than I normally am except for the spontaneous tears thing — as
someone who has had plenty of self-destructive impulses in the past, I am pretty
comfortable saying that this is not what it is about. But Rainer is going to be
our last child, and I’ve gotten through the hard part, and I don’t have to
understand it or come up with any more creative ways of staying sane. I just
wanted to see the experience articulated because — and I know that
sleep-deprived, emotionally roller-coastered people are not always the most
eloquent or articulate — I haven’t seen this “normal” experience elsewhere, and
as somebody who reads way too many books, websites, and magazines, looking for
answers and evidence I’m not alone, that meant this needed to be written. It’s
not about lacking confidence, or needing sleep, or even about feeling
disconnected from my husband when he’s trying to catch up at work on the two
weeks he worked from home while dealing with his company’s acquisition
of another hotel company and the attendant conversion of the websites he is in
charge of, though I suppose those things can and do play a part in it. Just as
the divide between how I felt and how I thought I was supposed to feel only
intensified the sadness, the acknowledgment that I’ve faced something so
challenging for me and done pretty well is an important part of conquering the
challenge.
Created the greatest atrilces, you have.