The sudden awareness of mortality
A chapter from Part II of my book on motherhood, Milk and Blood.
This is the first chapter of Part II from my book, Milk and Blood. The 50,000 words make up a quick read, broken down in the form of personal essays and some modern odds and ends, including a four line poem about the marks on one’s belly, a list of questions for a 6-week postpartum check up, and a FAQ for the first trimester. This book is easy to pick up, put down, and pick up again, though the topics range from heavy (miscarriage) to light and bubbly (bath time).
This story is centered around Evelyn, a first-time mother who prepares meticulously for her baby to arrive only to find herself without any understanding of what motherhood would actually entail—this sudden realization I found all too common among mothers myself when I had my first child, Candland.
I’m currently querying this book and looking for agent representation. Please share with anyone you feel who may want to make a connection. I’m finding this space to be quite overwhelming, and I know this is just the beginning. That said, if I’m unable to find representation, I may jump in and create the damned thing myself—trust me, you’ll be the first to know if I decide to go the self publishing route.
Either adventure sounds rather exciting. Wish me luck. And in the meantime, enjoy one of the chapters below.
The first three days of my son’s life were the most difficult three days in my life I had ever experienced. The first two weeks of my son's life were the hardest two weeks I had ever experienced, with the first month being the hardest month as well. No baby class I took (this is how you burp the baby) and no advice other parents gave me (Just be kind to yourself) even came close to preparing me for what was to come.
After labor and delivery, my body was wheeled out by a nurse while I held the soft, damp infant in my arms. My husband wheeled our bags, pillows, and car seat beside me. When I had first been offered a wheelchair when I arrived at the hospital, I had turned down the offer thinking it was silly because I was so…able to walk. When I sat in the wheelchair being rolled from labor and delivery to the recovery room, I found the idea of walking silly. After 17 hours of labor and a 2nd degree tear somewhere in the dark gaping hole between my legs, I had made it to the “recovery” room where it feels like I did everything but recover.
I was transferred from the wheel chair to the bed. My husband put the cargo down in the corner. He walked to the corner of the room where a nurse showed him how to swaddle the baby for the first time. From the bed, I strained to see the rest of my family. I could see my baby’s legs and the serious look my husband had on his face as he watched the first of many blanket wrappings our son would be conquered… or not conquered… by.
There were many women in the room surrounding my husband and my baby. It was bright and then it was dark. And without being able to piece it together through bright, lively, swift chatter, my husband and I were somehow left alone in the dark room with our baby. Our son was in a small plastic-looking hospital bed on wheels next to me. My husband on the pull out sofa. The catheter was still attached to me, so I didn’t have a need to use the restroom just yet. The IV was still attached as well. When would these things be removed? It was quiet. So unbelievably quiet…I took a deep inhale to launch into my first sob for a much needed meltdown—when I was interrupted. My vent session balked.
A small cry cut through the silence, through the darkness, through the sob forming in my throat. My child. My newborn’s cry. How can I explain how it sounded? Like I had taken this soul from its peaceful place and wretched it out into a world full of cold and hot and loud and bright. To a place where hunger was relentless; and yet nutrition must be consumed from another body with a new, difficult, and exerting act rather than how it was before: continuously flowing from one body to its own, effortlessly. It was the sound of a being that knew I had taken him from that safe, warm, easy harbor and wanted me to know that for the rest of my life I would pay for it.
From this realization, the baby let out this anguish. I felt bewildered, but before I had the time to cry angrily in response (for this little tyke was stealing my terrible and great thunder), I realized the strength of the cry was still…small. The breath was short. The cry only contained the beginning and endings of shrieks with no middle tone. The baby was too small, too young to let out the long bellowing wails he desired. He was too fragile. And I knew he couldn’t communicate all of the pains he wanted to tell me about. So, he chose one pain to communicate—a pain a deeper part of me, a primal part could not ignore: hunger.
My pain, my anguish, my fear. It all disappeared. I rushed to my baby. I only needed to turn and prop myself up, to lift my baby from his box to my own hospital bed. But it took more effort and coordination than I had anticipated. The process just to bring him to my breast was enough to prompt the trembling of my body. It didn’t matter though, at least not once he latched onto my nipple. And whenever he did and began sucking, I thanked God I didn’t have any latching issues that I had heard others had had. I sat in the darkness, tears sliding down my cheeks for the mothers who could not respond to the hunger cry in the way they had hoped.
I had often heard mothers say “I bore you into this world.” I always shrunk back from that kind of mentality. The mentality that children owed their mothers for bringing them into the world. I was told that once I had had a child, I would understand the sentiment. Now on the other side, I’m relieved to know my resentment of that ideology has not gone away. Instead, I now understand why I disagreed. It was common sense: All mothers owed their children for bringing them into this world.
That is why when they’re cold, we warm them. Why when they’re wet, we change them. And why when they’re hungry, we feed them. And we do those things until death, where we return to wherever we go before and after life, where we will leave this world of constant bodily needs, and our children will eventually join us and confront us with a smug and simple: If the world was so great, why did you come back here?
In the recovery room, I was unable to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. I was woken up to take medication, to sign medical papers, to submit a birth certificate, to learn how to breastfeed, to be asked of my pain, to be helped to the toilet, to be detached from my catheter, from my IV, to order food, to be given food, to permit my son to be tested for hearing and sight, to vaccinate my child, to do more things than should have been possible in the 48 hours or so we were there.
I remember my son being rolled away for the hearing and vision test. The nurse said he would be gone for 15-30 minutes. I realized this would be 15-30 minutes where I would not be disturbed. Where no cry of hunger could send me into action. I agreed with the hope of sleep in mind. And as soon as the door shut and my baby was no longer in the room, I wondered about him. I worried about him. I obsessed over the absence of him in our room as well as the existence of him elsewhere.
What if they got mixed up and returned the wrong baby? What if he was deaf or blind or both? What if they found something else wrong with the test? What if they were too rough with him? What if he was crying and needed me and I was in here sleeping? What if—.
And before I could think of another scenario, he was returned to me. Hungry. And I welcomed him, completely and utterly sleep deprived and exhausted. But he was safe. And that was the only thing that I could process. No sleep or rest could defeat my demons now. Only his safety.
When we left the hospital, still under the 72 hour mark, I recall watching one of the nurses show us how to fit our son into his brand new car seat. I nodded, watching carefully and taking in her instruction. However, I looked at my son. Examined him. Closed eyes, red-pigmented face, no neck, tiny fists, soft, fleshy skin. He would not survive a car accident. There was just no way a human this small with all of the fancy straps in the world could survive it. I doubted he could survive much at this point. He was so small, so delicate. It was then a line came to me I had read once: “His mortality was always with me, constant as a second beating heart.” I couldn’t recall then where it was from. But I related to these words too much, and they haunted me as we clicked him into the car seat base in our SUV.
I was relieved to find my husband believed the same. We did not speak when he drove, but I knew he felt the same because he drove 5 under the speed limit and we avoided the highway. This was very unlike Henry. And as if worrying about a small baby wasn’t enough, it was then that I realized I was desperate for Henry to continue living as well. It wasn’t just my baby I would worry about. As capable as I thought I once was, I could not raise Oliver on my own. My eyes scattered as we approached each intersection. I was ready to holler at the sign of any impending danger. Please God. I thought. If one of us must die, make it me. I cannot bear the idea of my son or husband’s death. And Henry is stronger than me. Let them live and take me instead.
There was no accident. No member of the family was called by the reaper. It was somehow unbelievable to me that all three of us had been spared and made it safely home.
When we pulled up to our house, I recall how I felt. My eyes were so tired, they were dry, causing me to constantly blink. My lips cracked and flaky. My tailbone throbbing. My labia burning. My spine tingling on the inside, itching on the outside. I took slow careful steps and used both rails when taking the 5 stairs up to our front door. My husband carried our son. The welcome mat laid in front of us. We looked at each other for a moment, each of us realizing our home would never be how we had left it again. That we were beginning a new era. I unlocked the door and opened it. My husband waited until our eyes locked before he took his first step inside our house…The first time in our house as parents.
The next 24 hours would continue to be part of the hardest 3 days of my life. There was no sleep. There was no strength. There was no escape. Survival, I had accepted, was impossible. I was simply waiting for my body and soul to fade away and dissolve into nothing as I continued to try to function and run on no sleep, no nutrition, and—most obvious—no experience.
There were peaceful moments, but even in the most peaceful moments, when Oliver suckled from my breast, eyes closed, hands slowly loosening from a demanding fist to a content open palm…I still worried something might go wrong. And I could not smile, I could not laugh without wondering if Henry or Oliver would unexpectedly, for lack of a better phrase, drop dead.
And the only time I wasn’t worrying was when another irritant had superseded my anxiety. It might have been screams from Oliver, it might have been our baby’s unwillingness to negotiate sleeping without our touch, or visitors trying to push their way through the door to give baby a kiss. It was all a type of stress. The adoring smiles, the baby coos, the little moments of joy I had been promised by every diaper commercial I had come across. Where were they? I wondered. They weren’t to be found. How old were the babies who were on the Gerber baby ads? When did my baby start to look like that? When would my baby be able to track me with their eyes? Know me with their fingers? Smile by my voice?
When?
No. I think back. No class. No advice. Nothing prepared me for this. No one painted the picture of the ordeal we had faced. However. Only one thing had brushed the surface of the experience. That line on mortality that had come and haunted me. I had remembered where it was from—An excerpt from the book Circe, by Madeline Miller.
It starts with, “I did not go easy to motherhood. . Thank the gods I did not have to sleep. Every minute I must wash and boil and clean and scrub and put to soak. Yet how could I do that, when every minute he also needed something, food and change and sleep? That last I had always thought the most natural thing for mortals, easy as breathing, yet he could not seem to do it. However I wrapped him, however I rocked and sang, he screamed, gasping and shaking until the lions fled, until I feared he would do himself harm.”
This precious section of the book ends with a line that gave me what I needed to—perhaps not to survive—but to understand. The line is the following: “This was the child I deserved.”
The awareness of mortality that motherhood brings is the most gut wrenching thing.
I can't wait to read the rest of this book!