We come into this world together.
We three, now named Mom, Dad, and Baby, dance a sacred dance: screaming and swaying and burps. And by sacred I don't mean revelatory. It's eat, sleep, poop. Wipe butt.
My cheeks swell red hot with tears of love and hatred.
My body has birthed a new family, my son my fruit. The petals are long gone from that beautiful thing I used to be, leaving something new then ripe then rotting.
Now I fear the pain of being separated from my family, because I created one. Now I fear death. Not because I would stop living but because I would abandon them.
But, oh god, I want to die.
I am trapped in bed, I am trapped in my home, with this little alien parasite grub sucking my blood. Will it ever end? Will I ever want to dance again?
I am hungry but don't want to eat. The baby cries, hungry too, but he spits out my teat. I itch out of my skin. I bulge out of my pants and spill out of my bras. Bulging and spilling and itching with nowhere to go.
I can't get new pants because it is hard enough to get food. It is hard enough to do laundry. I used to enjoy these things! But now the joy is sucked out of everything - even the smiles of my own newborn. How cruel of me. I should be happy.
Where did the joy go? I had it, a blinding light after birth. Ecstatic, exhilarated, perfect. Long wet dripping hair, bloody legs, triumphant. Before I rotted into goo.
Postpartum is a purple twilight swamp. I feared this: when the most beautiful thing in the world is happening in my arms but I feel dead, sad, and angry. Hollowed out.
I want to tell you it was all wonderful. Some parts are so beautiful beautiful. The parts between me and my husband and between us and my mother in those first days. Every time my son smiles. (often, actually).
But I can't even really remember what happened in those first days, and I certainly couldn't write about it. Now I am in the much longer place of tired, tired, tired.
People offer to help but then they don't.
"Call me!" I won't. Because when I do you don't pick up. And when I need it most I am busy being curled up. Show up or fuck off. Don't lie. Just let me rot.
I need someone to clean my bathroom, I need someone to do my laundry. I need someone to bring food to our door. Few do. I get a lot of congratulations on Instagram. That's nice I guess. I say thank you.
We have so many kids’ books but no bookshelf. So many clothes that don't fit us. The mess presses in on me and the little grub who just threw up in my already fluid-filled bed.
Will it ever end?
We drown but there is nothing to be done. I planned to drown. I think we will resurface someday.
We do. In a burst of energy and a bout of naps I tidy. On the weekend Dad cooks a big stew. Our noses puncture the surface of the murky bloody marshland. We breathe its ambrosias: deep and delicious like woodsmoke. Afterbirth, baby poop, milk breath. Addictive. Intoxicating.
Hard to talk about, only to be experienced.
what about the grand entrance?
My midwife tells me:
When women lose their memories late in life they will remember their births, even after they forget their own names.
My first birth went perfectly. Averagely, smoothly. I can tell you the logistics.
I labored for about nineteen hours at home, in my car, at a birth center in Astoria, Oregon; I labored with the support of my husband, mom, and a team of capable midwives and nurses; I labored until eventually my son was born "the right way" through my hips and birth canal.
Yes, ouch. Yep, no drugs. Wow!
When I think about how it went with my body to try and describe it to you, I can't. I want to bring you right there into the intensity, to tell you what a "contraction" feels like, but I can't. It "hurts" more than anything, but also the pain of sutures was more "painful."
Birth is a space out of time, a journey-space like you might enter with hallucinogens or deep ceremony or a vision-dream from the heavens—a journey space except sober and straightforward and all all Earth.
I became my body, became Gaia. I became so soft and powerful, a force of nature, the great river. I can't explain it.
I can tell you I was a queen disheveled. My litter was the backseat. We wound through wet piney hills towards the sea under thunderclouds as the dawn broke.
I can tell you I was a naiad in a bathtub, reposed. I was a naiad on the toilet, retching.
I can tell you I wished he would go back inside me and shrivel up, that I wanted to change my mind about the whole thing and say no and go back, but once you're that far in it's a bit too late.
I can tell you I came out harrowed and happy and very very tired.
I can tell you I'm different now.
All I could write in the weeks after was an untitled poem.
my heart is soup warm
simmering softening since
my son was placed in my arms.
I don't know how to hold him,
I thought. But then I did.
I type slowly because my arm
is bent around his warm body,
having a nightmare already.
it is terrifying to be born.
My belly is jelly broth, my body torn open sore.
My husband chops and simmers a stew
as I sew together meat and bone.
My greatest real worry
is that he will die.
A horror, to be alone.
I have never known the frailty of life
as I do now.
We are battered from
coming into this world anew
screaming not as one but
now as two.
I am proud of my screams:
not a shriek but a warcry.
The streets could hear me winning my battle.
Good. Hear me, hear me
Birthing the continuation of my blood.
When it was done I stood,
shoulders square, dripping.
My arm holding my son
to my breast, drinking.
the nurse balked. How are you doing that?
I thought, is this not
how it should be?
How is it? How was it?
my mother tells me
in hushed breaths a story about my great-grandmother, whose name I don't remember, (probably, it was another Margaret).
The doctor was golfing, or out to dinner, when she went into labor. He said, tie her legs together. So they did.
She lived and her son died. She was never the same.
My husband's grandmother tells me
It was the dead of winter when her daughter was ready to be born. A snowstorm left snowbanks high on the road, blocking her path. She donned her husband's snowboots, waded through the banks, and drove herself to the hospital.
She fought off the nurses and doctors who asked her questions and bade her sit in unwanted positions and poke her with needles and who knows what else.
She did it alone. Next time, she birthed at home.
The elders of the valley tell me
For both of their children, the midwife didn't make it in time. Various constraints, weather or a long road out meant they were on their own.
When the time came, ya'kno, we shooed the dog off the couch. Dad laughs.
It worked out.
for me, after,
For a few moments I am grateful for a clean bed
I am astounded by the gift of flowers, luxurious and beautiful
I weep when my friend lines our shoes up by the door.
My feeble gratitude leaks from my mouth, bubbles from my lips upturned. I learn to ask: will you wash my dish?
One day as the first glimmers of spring tease us, I find I can walk without pain. I can clean for myself again. My feet are in contact with the silty dark banks of those dissolving waters. I press my toes down and stand with my shoulders above the surface.
I look forward into the forest of my future. It is dark and endless and full of dishes.
I tell myself with a sore sad heart, I should be happy, I have it all.
Somedays, sometimes, I will.