20 Things that Changed When I Became a Mother

Image by Denis Giles, used under Creative Commons license

1. Before becoming a mom, even when I was pregnant, I always envisioned myself as “me” with a baby.
2. Now, I know better. I feel like a whole different person, as if someone entirely new inhabits my body.
3. I feel like a Fifteen Game puzzle, with too many squares out of order and not enough room to maneuver.
4. I focus less on more things and I focus more on one thing.
5. My body is (still) no longer my own. It has a function beyond me – sustaining another human being.
6. I really understand, perhaps for the first time in my life, the beauty of free time.
7. I steal free time in twenty minute bursts while my husband helps the baby sleep.
8. I think much more about how my actions and words appear, reflected in my daughter’s eyes.
9. It hasn’t stopped me from cussing too much, but it should.
10. I wear mom jeans, while I wait for my post-pregnancy stomach to shrink. Really.
11. A party that starts at 8:00 PM seems awfully late.
12. I wake up at 5:00, even on the weekends.
13. My hair is thinning out, after months of remaining thick.
14. I don’t mind (as much) the bits of silver I see, peaking out from my curls.
15. When I can’t sleep at night, I listen to the way my husband and baby sleep.
16. I no longer leave the bed.
17. I realize that every person has a mother, that he or she was loved enough to be carried and born.
18. I wonder if that person still loves him or her and if that is enough.
19. I am softer now.
20. Softer in my skin, softer in my mind, softer in my heart.

 

Heart

                            Photo by Andreanna Moya Photography, Creative Commons

When my son was twenty weeks old, we first saw his heart on the ultrasound screen. It was Valentine’s Day, 2011. The sonographer showed us the walls of the four chambers, fluttering white on the black screen. She told us nothing to evaluate the shape of his heart, its strength, its rhythm. She just showed it to us. Here. This is what you have built. And we watched the miracle of its motion, the way it expanded and contracted like hope. We waited for the doctor, who told us how beautiful our child was, as though we did not know. That night, at home, I wrote to my child. I told him how the undulating contractions of his heart looked like a pale butterfly on the black screen. In the dark of our bedroom, I whispered to him of metamorphosis.

The next time I caught a glimpse of my son came just hours before he was born. Healing hands glided over my knotted muscles, slowly untwisting the tension of three days and nights of labor, unsticking the stubborn bone blocking my baby’s path. The hands hovered over my hips and their owner told me what she saw. A black butterfly. Blue and yellow on its wings. Here, in the clean white arc of your hips. Fluttering forward and back. Forward and back. Do you see it? I thought of his heart, undulating like wings, and I nodded. He came quickly then. Within hours, he emerged slick and wet and alive, as if from a color-stained chrysalis. His father and I held him as he cried and his pulse raced with life.

Less than a month later, my husband and I sat in a dimmed room with a man examining our child’s heart from every imaginable angle as it quivered blue and red on another screen. The ceiling was lit with hundreds of tiny lights like stars which did nothing to drive away the dark. He angled the wand against our son’s thin chest and froze frame after frame after frame of his ghostly heart, searching for some fragility to explain his thinness and the blue cast to his lips. I thought of my heart, of his father’s, which were both born faintly whispering secrets. I wondered what our son’s heart had to tell; I wondered if it were over-burdened by the murmuring of secret things. Finally, the man spoke. Here. I’m not the cardiologist. This is not official. But his heart is beautiful. We carried the mystery in our arms along with our son as we left the hospital, and I began to understand the uncertain footing I stood on as a mother. But after that, he grew. His beautiful butterfly heart grew. And I grew, too.

Samwise,

I have seen your heart from a hundred angles. I have seen it in black and white. I know its depth and width and height. I know its walls and hollows. I have seen how it beats against your ribs like a winged thing and throbs with color. And for all that I have seen, your heart is a coffer of secrets. This is what it means to be a parent: to know you from before your first breath yet spend a lifetime waiting for you to reveal who you are. Here I stand, watching you open your chest of secrets one shining sliver at a time.

What It’s Like (Two Weeks In)

Returning to work after maternity leave is learning that more than one person lives inside of me, the mother and the other.

The mother is newer and more uncertain, having only just been born. The other is impatient, ready to regain the life she once lived. The mother knows that other life is long gone.

The mother thinks only about the home, the child, the small chores that need to be done each day. She forgets appointments, ignores emails. The other lays awake at night, thinking about the work waiting for her tomorrow.

Both of them get ready in the morning, taking turns. Feeding and cuddling, grooming and packing. Both of them are afraid of forgetting something. Both of them leave.

The mother mourns the lost time with her baby, thinks of all the diaper changes and naps she is missing. The other dives back into her element, finally feeling competent at something again. It’s seductive for both of them, the lure of being needed. Secretly, both of them are terrified of being needed too much or not enough, at work and at home.

The mother goes throughout her day knowing she has left something essential at home, another limb, another heart. The other says, “See what it’s felt like for me, all of these weeks?” Neither of them feel whole, day or night.

Living like this, we long for what we once held: the sleeping little one breathing on our neck, the pen drooling ink onto our fingertips. We want more out of our days and nights, but wind up feeling less.

We spend so much time wanting, together. Wanting to be elsewhere, wanting to finish one more story, one more email. Together, we must learn to take turns, to want presence in each moment. For now, we only hold hands in the middle and stretch in opposite directions, just to see how thin and flexible we can become.

The Story I Want to Tell Her

I can spread my fingers across her chest, span
the width of her rib cage. Asleep, she seems so fragile,
but that is not the story I want to tell her.

I want her to know that she is strong enough
to endure nine months of gestation, thirty-two
hours of labor and all of the living she has ahead.

But this will come later.  Today, I steady her breathing
with my palm, feel her heart beat under my thumb
and help her sleep a few minutes more.

Holding On

I want to remember the ride home from work, with Aaron driving. How I said to him: “Fuck it, let’s have a baby“, as if any of it was up to me.

I want to remember that we said to each other, “Fuck it, let’s have a baby,” throughout the birth, to keep us laughing.

I want to remember my fear as I tracked my contractions and they varied in length and distance apart. I want to remember how Kathy laughed at me over the phone as she told me that this is what labor is like and there was nothing to do but eat, drink and rest.

I want to remember the hours of drinking and resting, the solitude in those moments, the quiet between each contraction.

I want to remember the notes I took throughout the night as I tried even then to remember what was happening. How I wrote them in the dark, in a looping, barely legible scrawl.

I want to remember being in my body, that evening and afternoon and morning. How I didn’t think for minutes at a stretch as I focused only on breath and sensation.

I want to remember the next morning, how we rose too early. I want to remember the big bowl of oatmeal and honey that Aaron cooked for me, the hours it took to eat it. I want to remember how good it tasted at first, before it cooled and hardened.

I want to remember how easy it was for me to carry on conversations, up until the very end. I want to remember discussing, with Aaron and Kathy, parenting and crop circles (not at the same time).

I want to remember my fear when it was time to leave for the hospital. How I didn’t want to leave the warm confines of my home and go somewhere that was sterile and safe.

I want to remember padding down the halls of the labor and delivery ward, in my dress and mismatched fuzzy socks. How the three of us, Kathy, Aaron and I, paused for contractions, then kept moving.

I want to remember the woman screaming down the hall, in a high-pitched shriek. We could only cringe and laugh and whisper to her to moan lower.

I want to remember my fear when my body started pushing and I couldn’t stop it, how I reared my leg like an angry horse with each new push.

I want to remember how long it took, when it was time to finally push. How the doctor, the nurses, the doula and my husband kept telling me that they could see her hair. How I wished they would stop saying it.

I want to remember that in those last moments, I had a white washcloth over my eyes and I couldn’t see anything. I could only hear my grunts and the doctor and nurses cheering me on, and Kathy saying, “Use all of that strength you have inside of you.”

I want to remember trying to slow down my pushes into controlled bursts, as her head crowned. How I thought that this was the hardest thing in the world, after tapping into the source of my strength, only to have to use it in tiny bits.

Mostly, I want to remember that feeling of relief when her body finally rushed out of me, when I could feel her separate from me for the first time. How I knew just then, as I know now, that her whole life will be her separating from me more and more. How I knew that we would never again be as close as we were all or those weeks and months.

And of course, I want to remember cradling her tiny body for the first time, wet in my arms, and feeling her shit in my hands and down my stomach.

How I laughed and knew I would never feel the same ever again.