The year after a baby could be the title of a memoir of mine, so profound and life altering it is for me. I see women who have a baby and briskly, Mary Poppins*ly move onward with a ferocious and single minded movement in their bodies. They aren't fucking around. They are getting shit DONE. I understand these ladies, I so get it, because although I'm not like that I know the motivation, the propelling force behind this baby as much loved but inconvenient accessory to my life movement: sanity. Women want to have a baby and stay in the world the way they were before because the emotions and unsettling, free falling, strange and at times terrifying emotions that come with new motherhood feel as though they will drown us forever.
I'm drowning.
I'm not saying I'm drowned. I'm saying, I'm drowning. I am in the great hormone bath of falling progesterone levels. I am watching bubbles form between my lips and float to the surface, popping at the top of the water like small shotgun announcements to myself: I'm still here.
I'm Still Here
Sugar on my lips, sugar milk in my babies mouth, sugar in her urine, hard on her kidneys, and caffeine, too, hard on my baby girl, and her wet red mouth. The black dog of depression meets the transformative rise of the Phoenix and all hell breaks loose inside of a woman. I have a baby girl and I find my touchstones all accounted for and useless. New ones must be made. New thoughts. New feelings. Old frustrations and insanities and habits come blazing up from the cellular storebank and I become furious at their entrapment. You must do yoga, I whisper to myself. I eat a donut. You must pray, I hiss. I drink coffee. You must move your body, I implore. I sleep. You must engage in your life, I know. And disengagement is my choice and I ask myself why and I know it's because I am exhuasted, so deeply bone tired that facing hard things, one of those gone away touchstones, is hibernating. I can feel the choices at my fingertips. You must shower. You must eat before noon. A sick baby is a universal experience in work camp. You are underfed, exhausted, overworked, unshowered, on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and the baby doesn't give a shit. Honeybadger doesn't give a shit, right Stacey?
Do you ever feel you are drowning and waiting to be pushed? Pushed to the top? I am drowning inside of this great and watery cocoon and I can hear my husband's husky hard working voice but it doesn't quite reach me. I reach to touch his stubbly cheeks and look into his large hazel eyes and cannot find the ribbon of energy that usually flows freely between the two of us. I close my eyes in the darkness and burrow into his armpits and the great manly smell of him is my safest place but I do not feel safe.
My Dakota is struggling and this means that my heart is twisted metal thing like the remains of the car wreck that happened on Pomerado Road against the back of my house where they had to amputate the teenage girl's leg after the drunk boy in the driver's seat crashed them into a tree.
I can do. I can take care. I can take the right steps. And still there is the high metallic whine of distress emanating from my heart. I am his mother. I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever
stop mothering him. I will stop doing his laundry, making his daily meals, his appointments, being his 'caretaker' but I will never stand down. Some people get adrenalin rushes in tragedy that enable them to do what seems impossible. Love does this for me.
Two intersections. A new baby and an almost man boy in our house. Two completely different paths and needs and two children in between those.
Some things are obvious to me. I must take better care of myself or soon I will be crying uncontrollably in the grocery checkout line when the nice girl with long blonde hair asks me how my kids are. Some things are not obvious to me. Where to find the strength to do so.
A new life in our family means that I must lean backward, backward, backward, until I am almost completely drowned and gone, before I spring forward for the experience. Like an orgasm. Like a revival moan. Like a great Southern storm.
I'm Still Here.
ps
the title is from one of my favorite older kid books EVER<Gone-Away Lake (Gone-Away Lake Books)
i read the first book a million and four times growing up. it has that special magic.
