The mother and the child

I've got words stumbling around inside of me that have been sifted loose by my reading lately on postpartum practices in America. They don't feel very eloquent, but then again they might be. There seems to be a fair bit of pain and confusion around becoming mothers - matrescence as one of my books puts it. I can't speak for many of my friends because this isn't something that comes up casually, but, as I start on the earliest stages of trying and preparing to understand and help other postpartum women, the stories I've come across suggest that perhaps my story isn't so very different from other women.

My journey into motherhood was a fragile, brittle thing. My mother is a broken woman as was her mother. My paternal grandmother was reserved and had fought her own battles. My mother-in-law is a dear woman but can't quite seem to meet me on my own impulsive yet over-thought level. Her mother was rather similar. Possibly the most motherly woman I've ever met was my husband's paternal grandmother - Mamaw. A little woman living on a farm with her garden and her cows who loved people. She might not appreciate me saying this, but she had just enough squish for proper grandmotherly hugs. Her enthusiasm for her children was boundless. Although I only knew her briefly, I loved her dearly. She was, in some ways, the most mothering woman I knew for some years.

So when I say my journey into motherhood was brittle or fragile, I mean that it was like spanning a gorge with a thick cable and asking me to climb into a basket and hoist myself to the other side. I didn't have generations of women around me to make the way across plain and safe and carry me over on their experience, compassion, and wisdom. Looking back, I believe I felt alone. A man cannot take you there. It takes a man to be a mother, but I'm not sure he can make you one. Men have different burdens, and it's like asking a freight train to grow wings and fly to Cairo. Eventually you just can't get any closer no matter how hard you try.

All through my pregnancy I tried to face my fears and worries about becoming a mother. I read the books and talked to my counselor and took a childbirth class and tried to soak up the faith that I too could make this journey. If you'd seen me wresting through transition it might have all looked like a front. I don't know because I didn't make it that far. After I started to bleed they rolled me back into a very bright room with a very narrow table full of people who suddenly looked very different in their surgical gear. I remember thinking, insofar as I could think while pumped full of drugs, that there was supposed to be a cry. There is supposed to be crying at births. I waited and waited for that first cry. In my heart I think I'm still waiting for it - that moment when your baby cries and you're flat on your back on a narrow metal table, but it doesn't matter because life has snapped back into focus because your son has arrived. Instead I had a very quiet birth and a near sighted squint at a very baby looking baby (drugs remember) in a plastic box before everyone got wheeled away to their respective destinations.

I'm not sure what happened afterwards. If I tell you a thing didn't happen, and you happen to be one of the few people reading this blog who can say for sure that it did then don't feel the need to call me out. Why? Because it wasn't enough. If you think that words said once or twice to a woman who has just been through that sort of birth are supposed to sustain her through the process of matrescence then you're wrong. You are fully and completely wrong. I've had two people come back to me later and say they should have been more supportive - my husband and my childbirth educator. This is not to say that other people didn't do other things for me. This isn't about what they said but about what they left unsaid.

When I really met Jacob it was over twelve hours later. Allen was there as well as the NICU nurse. Other people had gotten to hold him and watch him sleep before I'd done much more than touch his hand. Instead of me, his mother, introducing him to the world I felt like I was the stranger being introduced. Not having the benefit of that birth rush I've heard about and being under the influence of some pretty powerful painkillers the whole experience felt awkward and somewhat flat. In my head I was telling myself over and again,

This is my baby. My baby. The baby that isn't inside me anymore. The baby that surprised us nine months ago. This is my baby. This is Jacob. I don't know how to hold him, but this is my baby. This is Jacob. I was afraid he wouldn't be cute. I like him. He's a sweet little boy. My little boy.

Just about every single one of those thoughts had a tiny little question mark hovering over it. It's like I was having to remind my numbed and drugged body of something that I thought it would know instinctively - that it should have known instinctively. What I desperately needed was someone to affirm my motherhood. I needed a cloud of witnesses to say "These two belong together. They are mother and child and therefore holy in the same way that all God's most common and precious miracles are holy." Instead I had a parade of nurses telling me how to care for him, grandparents who were impatient to hold him (which they can't do in NICU), and a stream of uncles and aunt and friends who cooed and smiles and spoke warmly of modern medical technology. It was an atmosphere of love and thankfulness and yet it did so little to help me cross that great gorge of motherhood. My cord across the chasm felt fragile indeed.

I felt, oddly, like a conduit. Now that I had born a child my husband had a son. Our parents had a grandson. Our church had a new member. I could see rather clearly my son's relation to all the other people around him, but I had a hard time seeing his relationship to myself. I saw my role as trying to manage and foster all these other relationships when I should have been cocooned safely away with my son learning how our relationship worked. What I needed desperately was someone who looked at Jacob and saw a child and his mother, and my faltering, needy heart never heard that message as loudly as I wished. Instead Jacob would insist on nursing when other people wanted to hold him or fuss at loud noises instead of being cheerfully passed around to one and all, and if he was "good" and I expressed concern at being gone while someone watched him I was dismissed as almost extraneous. I had people whom I thought were my friends who didn't even bother to learn our story before making flippantly unhelpful remarks about parenting.

So what did I want? I wanted to be surrounded by people - women of my family and church - who would sit with me while I tried to make my cut and drugged body catch up with reality and encourage me again and again that Jacob and I belonged together and that I would be a good mother. I wanted these women to take their experience and their kindness and build a tall fence about my baby and me so that we could be shielded from ordinary cares and instead learn to love each other. No - so that I could learn how best to love him. Jacob needs no training. He used to bob and shift his head around until his could see my face before he fell asleep, and he'd swing an arm up over me to touch my chest or my neck. He still does that. I have always been the uncertain one. There's still a corner of my heart that wants that birthing experience of having someone see your child for the first time and say "Him - he belongs with her, and that's exactly where he's going to go."

Now, nearly eight months later, I feel as though I've crossed the chasm safely. This isn't about whether or not women require certain things in order to become mothers. This is about the loneliness and uncertainly that I encountered in my own journey to motherhood. It's about a postpartum culture that start and stops (if you're lucky) with some homemade meals and a few late night facebook chats with the mom up the street and just how very little that does to succor a mother who is finding her own journey across the gorge more perilous than she hoped. Someday I hope to find that mother and say, "He belong with you. You're going to do great. I'll be in the kitchen cleaning up if you need me."

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I wrote the above in those highly philosophical hours between midnight and 2am, and now in the daylight I wish to add a couple more observations. First, this is the story of a woman who has very few real connections to wise and loving mothering and who entered motherhood in a rather traumatic fashion. Take away one of those factors - a loving and present mother or a peaceful birth and bonding experience - and you'll likely end up with a woman who is rather more satisfied with her postpartum experience. Secondly, upon reading this story, you may at some point feel like asking, "Well, why didn't you just ask for help or support or encouragement." The simple truth is that I and, according to my recent reading on matrescense in Western Culture, many other women simply do not have the voice to ask for these things and for some women it's only years later that they realized what was lacking in their own postpartum experience. That said, I agree that if I'd been able to ask for them that there were women in my life who would have tried to support and help me in the way that I needed. However, the more common experience - my experience - is that when the feelings don't work the way we wish, when we get tired and discouraged, when we doubt ourselves and our connection to our child our instinct is to turn inwards and seek the problem within ourselves.  We are encouraged to be ok with being exhausted and emotional. There are plenty of "there there's" and "that will pass" and "I remember those days" to go around. What was missing were more statements like "Look how happy he is with you" and "Don't you love that new baby smell" and "I'm so proud of how you're taking care of him." Mothering is not all by instinct, and we need a safe and supportive place to begin to feel like mothers. We know we're tired - we've been up all night. We know we're tough - we've been through physical and emotional turmoil different and/or harder than anything previous to this. What we need is constant reassurance that we're ok - because we feel so very inadequate to care for this tiny soul who looks at us with big eyes that take and take and take from us because we are Mother and yet somehow reflect all the wonders on the universe.


For more reading on this subject I recommend Mothering the New Mother by Sally Placksin.

When curses break

In the movies or books when someone comes out of a barren and lonely wilderness experience it's, to my recollection, often portrayed as straight triumph. Squeals, giggles, and jumping around in circles (or roars, fist bumps, and chest thumping if you're the sterner sex) seem like the natural accompaniment to engagement rings, entrance letters, positive pregnancy tests, and last minute touchdowns. In many cases they are. Today though, I thought about a time when deliverance and triumph brought confusion and weeping - namely, at the empty tomb of Christ. We, living several centuries later, jump straight into the glory and victory of Christ's resurrection. We sing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today!" with bursting throats and glowing faces, and we revel in all that the atonement has bought us. We look forward to being with Christ and being reunited with our loved ones in Heaven. We rest in the thought that our future in secure in the one who defeated death and made it possible for us to live in friendship with God. However, as our pastor pointed out, Mary stood weeping and wondering where Jesus' body was. Simon Peter and John didn't have any answers either. The very symbol of our joy was initially a time of sad bewilderment to those who first saw it.

Why is this important to me? One of the dangers of denigrating or downplaying literature is that people stop learning to understand narratives. They don't study how actions and characters play out in a variety of circumstances. This plays out in real life as well. Who's the bad guy? Where's the unreliable narrator? Who's the quiet force for good whose life is overlooked by those who seek power to change in obvious places? What, you may ask, does this have to do with answering my question? The Bible is at it's heart a book of stories. It's a narrative of redemption. In it we find people in a myriad of circumstances encountering the God of creation - from a faithful young Jewish girl to a bed hopping Samaritan woman to old prophetess. It doesn't matter if you're weeping or laughing or tapping your toe with a stern look in your eyes - there is a story that touches your life somewhere. This really hit me when I was listening to our pastor recount the Easter story because for a while I thought I had a story that didn't fit anywhere until suddenly I saw it writ large in the confusion of Easter Sunday.

When I found out I was expecting our son I didn't have a picture worthy hallmark reaction. I didn't blush or cry or giggle or anything like that. I swore. I'd been waiting for years to see that positive test, and when it showed up I swore because I though surely this was a cruel hoax. After all these years (and after what my doctor last said about starting fertility treatments) I was sure this couldn't actually be what it obviously was. When I walked down the hall to tell Allen it was very much in the same way Mary might have approached the disciples - "You won't believe this - something must be wrong.
For weeks and months later I was uncomfortable with this part of my story. I thought there was something wrong that I reacted with disbelief and confusion, but listening to the Easter story at church today I finally saw my story in their story. I saw the wondering and the weeping and the questioning. I saw people who doubted what was in front of them. I saw a great curse defeated and heralded not with shouts or parades but with people running around trying to find where they'd left their sorrow and defeat. In some strange way I found it comforting to know that I was reacting the way other good and faithful people have reacted in assuming that this great blessing was only a new and varied sorrow. All that afternoon while I waited to hear from the nurse and tried not to think too hard, I was by the tomb of Christ not quite realizing that He had broken the curse and was bringing new life to me. (And I will add here that I have been deliberately and literally cursed in my life by someone who should have know better. Someone tried to speak words of death and condemnation over my life, but by the grace of God His grace and His power have prevailed.) Then I called the nurse and heard the good news and rejoiced. I saw as I had never seen before how curses fade away before the goodness of God, and I rejoiced.

Sitting there in the church where our son was recently baptized listening to our pastor describe Mary waiting beside the tomb it seemed as if I saw where my own quiet longings and desires had been buried in my at the time lifeless womb. Like Mary there were times when I would sneak away to weep beside this grave, and like Mary I was astonished one day to see that the stone had been rolled away. But to what purpose? Was this only another trial and disappointment to bear? No, it is life as perhaps Mary and I hardly dared dream. It is the story of resurrection, and it is the story of how we found out were expecting our little buddy. Roughly. The Bible doesn't report any swearing in the Easter story, but now that I think of it I'd be surprised if at least a couple of the disciples weren't muttering imprecations under their breath.

Nearly a year later

It's been nearly a year, and the words are coming back to me. I don't know why I take these long journeys into silence where writing feels impossible, but they tend to happen quite regularly. I feel like I'm constantly trying to re-invent myself as a writer who covers this topic or that. It doesn't really work for me though. Not right now anyway. I was reading a blog post though about the grace of everyday love, and the words started coming back.

I have what I once thought might never be mine - a four month old son. He's propped on the arm of the couch and probably about to demand my attention, and he's been teaching more than I can say. Ever since I found out about him he's been wiggling his way through my defenses and my reserves and my selfishness and all those false parts of my identity. He's got a face as familiar and uncanny as my own, and an otherness that utterly undoes me. He's a whole other part of me that I'm almost scared to touch in case I break the very thing that should receive my most tender care. I'm so tired sometimes that his newborn days seem like another lifetime ago, but then I stare in incredulous wonder at how big his feet have grown. When did he first smile at me or laugh or duck his head against my shoulder? I haven't a clue. Once done it was as though he'd always done it, and I was just waiting for him to do it again.

And this is why there are times I play video games or read stupid novels or watch junk food tv or do anything rather than think. I held Jacob, and it was as though I'd spent half my life just waiting to hold him. Years and years of traveling and writing and learning to keep house and wasting time all because I didn't want to think about looking into those eyes that are my eyes and yet not and seeing him flash his daddy's dimples at me. I didn't want to think that it might not happen. I still don't want to think about it. In the hospital I had a dream in which I gave birth to a girl, and I woke up in half panic looking over at his bassinet to make sure he was there. Before his birth I didn't care whether we had a boy or a girl (and in fact we didn't know). After his birth it had to be Jacob.