When my son is born, he feels more like an amphibious creature than a human. Having gotten quite comfortable with our previous aquatic living arrangement, we both quite literally feel like fish out of water.
The very first time he cries from a gas pain, I burst into tears. I am naive and completely shocked that my love alone will not suffice to soothe him.
The first few nights baby Snow is home, my partner Alain is a super human force. He is zealous, swaddling and rocking and carrying the baby, walking him 80 times around the kitchen island until he falls asleep. He is confident. He has had a baby before. He discovers that Snow likes to fall asleep to a story (told in French) which is three sentences long and repeats itself over and over. It begins with, “L'autre jour, a la chasse au escargots...” One day, while I was out hunting snails…
It becomes clear that my body is healing slowly, and my mental health is fragile at best. After using all my strength to push a baby out of my body it feels like I have none left. We are also in a global pandemic. The weeks following Snows is birth are the worst Los Angeles has seen during the pandemic. I scroll through my phone and read about bodies piling up in LA morgues with no place to go, about ICU unites being at 0 percent capacity, about president Trump refusing to step down from office and making accusations of election fraud.
As I lie in bed recovering, honoring the traditional period of post natal rest of 40 days, the shock of suddenly having a human child to care for for the rest of my life dawns on me. It feels like we are on a ship, embarking from the shore. Images of the mountains of mid-coastal Maine where I grew up flash into my mind. The view of the coast from the sea, as seen from an island ferry. We are close enough to shore to think that we will be back there soon, and yet as the shore begins to recede in the distance and the waves begin to get choppy and I see the silhouette of the mountains fading in the evening light. The realization starts to sink in: the shore was my life before having a child. I will never return to it again. For a little while I’ll still see the strip of land getting smaller, able to orient myself and my life by my past, but soon it will disappear altogether. I must find my sea legs, and fast.
Alain and I take turns breaking down, and then resurrecting ourselves. He cooks me wagyu steak and mushrooms when I’m starving at 5 am. He stays up and feeds baby Snow for 16 consecutive nights and feeds him my breastmilk with a syringe and his pinky finger, releasing the milk drop by drop into Snows mouth for hours.
One night a week into our new life, Alain is up taking care of baby while I desperately try to sleep. As I fight with my own insomnia and sleep deprivation I lie in bed my mind rolling back and forth worrying: of do I have post partum depression? Am I going crazy? Both? I hear Snow crying from the guest bedroom. Around 4 am something in my gut tells me ‘Go to him, now'. When I arrive in the doorway of the dimly lit room I find both baby and Alain in tears. My super human partner has reached the end of his rope. I tell him to go back to bed, and I curl up next to Snow on the guest bed in my size XL maternity panties and nursing bra covered in milk stains. The stitches from my third degree vaginal tear straining as I bring my knees in to my chest, wrapping myself around his tiny body.
Weeks later I am awoken in the middle of the night, not by Snows cries but by an intense love, radiating from the very core of being.
As a family, we learn. We unravel, we re-connect, we grow. Its an endless cycle, and somewhere in-between the long blur of days and nights, of the crying and the calm we start to find a new rhythm. Without even realizing it, we have begun to find our way. Sea legs.
At some point I realize that I have become the strength I didn’t even know I had. My vaginal tear is now completely healed. But a scar remains, reminding me of how strong I am.