Postpartum

The labor to bring you forth almost broke me.

I don’t know how your grandmother labored with me. But she mentioned once that she did it naturally which I take to mean, without medication. Giving birth naturally was something I aspired to by taking hypnobirthing, creating a birth plan that involved laboring in water, and hiring a doula. I made the preparations to birth you like your grandmother birthed me, with as few interventions as possible. Perhaps you knew I’d soon forget everything I learned in hypnobirthing and recoil at the sight of the birthing tub.

When my body contracted to make way for you, I became a different person. Active laboring was grueling, nothing like the weeks I spent in early labor experiencing uncomfortable cramps on and off. At the hospital, I was induced with Pitocin. You were about a week late. You were sunny side up, meaning you were positioned almost correctly (with your head down) but you were facing towards me, instead of away from me. Your heartbeat was concerning, “too chill” as the midwife said. I wanted so badly to see you; to know you were okay and in between my worrying, I was overtaken by pain. It felt like someone was attempting to split me in two, every few minutes. With each wave of contractions, I found myself in a vortex, an insular space where my body reeled with aching. It was so strange to be in so much pain, while everyone around me looked on, their bodies in a completely different state. The dissonance between me and everyone else felt so stark, I wondered if I was losing my mind.

With each rush of contractions my body contorted. I stood up, then sat down, then stood again. The pain required movement. The midwives guided me to breathe. I wanted to thank them and scream at them. I wanted to leave my body. This was the start of mothering, a desire and hope for the pain to stop, to get through the entire thing alive.

Your grandmother had four children and one of those births were twins. She survived all of those births, which is a feat in itself. What did she think of her pain? How did she get through it? In the 1990’s, when your grandmother had all of her children, the rates for maternal mortality for Black mothers was more than three times the rate of maternal mortality for white mothers. This disparity has increased since then.

Your grandmother and I beat many odds by surviving. I can’t compare our birth experiences, yet I know they are in the same universe. Louise Erdrich says every birth is profoundly original, yet not at all.2 It doesn’t make sense to me that birth is unoriginal, happening all the time, when it feels like the most revelatory thing, I’ll ever experience. Birthing is a contradiction, both mundane and ethereal, one that leaves you both like and unlike yourself. It’s in the aftermath that we attempt to make our way back to ourselves, even when we’ve crossed over into a different state of being.

When you’re born, I learn a different type of seeing. One in which I examine you with worry. One in which I observe you with protection. Perhaps it’s true what they say about birthing, that you develop an instinct to fight anything that might threaten your child. I feel this feeling of fighting when I noticed your lip tremors.

“Why is he shaking?” I ask the nurse pointedly.

You’ve just been born, and I am still recovering from trying to push you out and the c-section I underwent when my cervix closed back up. I am still recovering from the shaking and chills from the anesthesia meant to ensure I don’t feel anything at all.

“Oh, he’s okay, sometimes when the parent takes Citalopram the baby can have slight shakes when they’re born. It’s nothing to worry about.”

The nurse is measured in her response. Yet, my mind races. What if something is wrong with you? What if you have tremors for the rest of your life. I ready myself for a fight to figure it out, to make sure you’re okay.

I Google: “Citalopram shaking baby”

The internet affirms the nurse. My mind races. I shouldn’t have been on medication. I’ve done something wrong. I’ve ruined you. I’m going to get better, so I don’t need to take it. I want to protect you, I want to fight for you, even if I’m fighting against something I need for myself.

“You’re on a good path, already being on the SSRI,” another nurse says.

It’s the same one who held me while I had contractions during the placement of the epidural. I can tell she’s from Massachusetts because she pronounces SSRI as “SS-AHR-I.”

“Even that woman in Duxbury struggled, before she, you know… and she was a maternal medicine nurse,” she says. “This time can be difficult.”

She’s referring to Lindsay Clancy, a woman who, within a postpartum psychosis, killed her three children. It doesn’t dawn on me then, that maybe this isn’t the story to tell a new mom, but perhaps it wasn’t. Yet, even so, perhaps the nurse was trying to warn me, gently, that mothering is something fierce, and unlike anything I’ve ever known.

———

When babies are born, they don’t know that they are their own person. Meaning, you didn’t know that I was your mother and that you were my son. You perceived us as one being, as one in the same.3 This is how I enter the fourth trimester, or the postpartum period—inextricably linked to you, as if you never left my body. I was once this linked to my mother too. I can’t remember when I started to tell us apart, but the realization came, along with the severing.

“I walked you home after you were born. It was just you and me.”

This is the only story I know about my mother’s postpartum period after I was born. I can’t imagine doing the same with you. In my own story, your father runs back and forth to the car with baby items and the car seat. He packs us into the car and is nervous to drive. At each redlight he asks, “How’s he doing?” about you. I assume my father isn’t there when I’m born. My mother doesn’t drive so there’s no car or car seat. There are no rides or a taxi. She walked home like she walked to so many other places in her neighborhood. After what I know must have been a life-altering experience, my mother returned to normalcy, her home in the South End, this time with me in tow. I don’t know if I was the type of baby to cry endlessly. You weren’t, surprisingly. You were the most upset when you were hungry. I started calling you “hungry bird” because of the way you opened and closed your mouth while reaching your chin upwards. I learned to soothe you by letting your bare body lay on my bare body. It is no wonder you could not have seen yourself as separate from me. Perhaps I did not want you to. I found surprising ways to soothe you in the moments you did cry. Bouncing on a balance ball while holding you, making loud “shhhing” sounds to drown out your wails, patting your back feverishly, letting you sleep on me instead of putting you in your crib.

I don’t remember how your grandmother soothed me. Yet I want to believe she did the same thing. I want to believe she never wanted me to leave her arms. I want to believe she called me something endearing and loved me with the same ferocity that I love you. There is no right way to soothe or to calm a newborn. Part of the journey is learning. Some mothers cry in the middle of the night trying to figure it out. Others drive in circles until their baby falls asleep. Others contort their bodies to their cribs to soothe them. Some hand them off to their partners, friends, or a babysitter and rest. Some mothers take medication each day, to help them meet the demands of mothering. Some walk away because they don’t know what else to do.

It took me having you to begin to understand why your grandmother walked away from us and never came back, all those years ago. Why I repressed the memory of her lurching her body through the window of my childhood home, only to be stopped by my father. It surprises me how often my body remembers all those moments my mother wanted to leave me. How often my body remembers the final leaving, that cold December day when we were forced from our home, forced from our mother. Each time I remember this moment, I think of your grandmother’s back, turned to us. I wonder why she never looked back at us or took us with her.

I’m a mother now and I still don’t know why she kept walking. Yet in having you, I’ve been gifted with a different knowing, an awareness of the depth and wrecking the comes from mothering.

Of the chasms and ruptures, and the choices we make to survive them.

Written By Tatiana Johnson Boria