Everything is wet

Everything is wet. Is it sweat? Did I pee myself again? Is it breastmilk?  What time is it? Breathe. I hear a whimper. I go to sit up but everything still hurts. I grunt and pull myself up to the edge of our bed, leaning over the crib. I wrap my hands around our tiny creature. It's 3:07am. A sacred time for all moms with newborns. It's the darkest, quietest, and loneliest hour of the night, even in a city like Paris. 3am is the time where all mamas unite, sitting up in our beds drenched in mysterious fluids, nourishing our babies while our husbands snore peacefully. At least that's what I tell myself to feel less alone. 

Tonight I get lucky: she falls back asleep while nursing. Never did I think that I would feel lucky to have another human fall asleep with one of my body parts in her mouth. I manage to get her back into her crib without waking her, and get a few more hours of sleep before the day really begins.

It's 6:00am now and husband and baby are both up. We get an hour or so together before he is out the door and I am left alone with our human, to shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast before heading out to our weekly Tuesday morning baby-and-me meet-up. It’s only a 15 minute walk, so if I want her to nap for the hour before the class starts I’ll have to walk around in circles in the nearby square, dragging my feet in the dirt and cigarette butts like a zombie while she sleeps in the stroller. When you’re a mother, your day’s activities are timed according to your baby’s last, current, or next nap. That’s just the way it is.

The baby-and-me meet-up is just what I need: an hour of being around crying, drooling, squirming little beings, sleep-deprived women who can’t take their eyes off of their creations, a few songs and rattly toys, and plenty of questions and confusion. For some reason hearing other people’s babies cry makes everything a little more ok. 

On the walk home I listen to a podcast about creativity and social change, and I forget for a moment that I’m pushing a stroller carrying a whiny baby that I made. Instead I picture myself living in a favela outside of Rio de Janeiro, launching a nonprofit that works with at-risk youth to paint murals in the slums. But when I get home I remember that my dreams and my days are no longer mine, and my body either. Everything is hers now. At least for a little while. So I surrender again, nursing her to sleep for another nap so that I can fix myself up some leftovers from last night’s dinner, which themselves were leftovers from some other previous meal. If it smells alright, it’s probably fine. And these days, “probably fine” is good enough. 

When she wakes up I carefully shift our living room furniture to make space for a mat on the floor for her and I to play on. I lay her down on her back, she kicks her legs and arms around. She looks like a little fish. I sing a song that I used to sing to her on my morning commute while I was pregnant. She smiles. I show her pages in a black-and-white picture book. Her gaze widens and she stares, still, like a cat. I tickle her cheek and she turns her head. Success. I look into her giant eyes and wonder what she’s thinking about. I figure the room must look like a bright fuzzy confusing world to her. I make bicycle movements with her legs, and then roll her on her belly and watch as she struggles to lift up her head which seems so large, attached to such a tiny body. She pushes up with her arms, grunting like I used to during circuit workout classes at Sweat Fitness. I can still hear our trainer: “Push yourselves, ladies! I can’t do the work for you!” She starts to cry and I figure she must feel stuck, so I turn her back around and pick her up with a “sshhhh… there there…” The crying continues. So I walk over to my all-faithful yoga ball and start bouncing. Up and down we go until her cries become cute gurgles again. 

Tuesday afternoons are my weekly therapy sessions. New mothers need therapy, and lots of it. Any new mother who says otherwise is in serious denial. It’s a steep climb up 3 flights of stairs to my therapist’s office, and I learned the hard way not to bring the stroller. Instead, I strap my daughter to my chest and fill a backpack with about three times as many things as I need for a two-hour outing: enough diapers for three whole days, a change of clothes for her, toys for an entire family, a spare shirt for me, cereal bars by the dozen, two pacifiers (God forbid one of them fell on the ground in this city), four muslin blankets, a second change of clothes for her, a first-aid kit, her birth certificate and medical records, and two liters of water. I’m a sweaty out-of-breath mess by the time I make it to my therapist’s door, and I nearly collapse in her oversized armchair. 

I try to free myself from my backpack and baby and regain some level of decency. “So how are you today?” she asks. She is kind, but rather dry. “Ummm, hold on.” Baby is crying and I’m all tangled in straps. I manage to lay out a muslin blanket on the floor, I lay her down on it and hand her a soft fabric book that makes a crackling noise when you scrunch it. “It’s basically an empty chips bag in a sock,” my husband once said. It magically stops her crying, and she seems pretty entertained. I take a deep breath and chug a quarter of my water supply in 35 seconds flat. “I’m alright,” I start. “Still getting those flashbacks and waking up gasping for air and soaked in sweat.” We talk at length about my PTSD from the night she was born. Losing enough blood to warrant two doctors and four medical students probing and poking me with IVs and talking about blood volumes and stitches while my husband is with my twenty-minute-old child in a different room, and I won’t see them again for hours because I’ll be kept in post-op while they check up on me every fifteen minutes to make sure I don’t start bleeding to death. Again. I guess it takes a little while to recover from something like that. Then we talk about the days I have lately where I just sit on the floor of our apartment and cry for no reason, staring at my daughter who feels a million miles away, but then I feel her kick again inside of me. She tells me about different ways that our brains distort our thoughts, and about how to recognize and correct those distortions ourselves. 

I forget for a while that my baby is still on the floor chewing away at her chips-bag book, but near the end of the session she starts crying and I pick her up to sit her on my lap. She squirms and I try to focus on our conversation because we’re paying more than we can afford for this lady to listen to my problems. Then I feel a weird rumbling vibration followed by warmth on my lap. Too much of it. Warm wetness, from my crotch down to my knees. I look down. Oh dear God. It’s everywhere. Luckily I wore my black pants and it’s not super obvious that I’m covered in a lovely excretion cocktail. “Well, that’s all we have time for today,” she says. I look up. “Ummm, can I use your bathroom to change her?” I’m a bit embarrassed. “Well, my next client will be here in a minute, and it’s a really small restroom...” Screw it. I can’t be bothered. “Never mind,” I say. I pay her and strap everything back on, wet baby and all, and walk home as if I suddenly realized I had left the stove on. It’s a relief to be home again and not have to leave the apartment for the rest of the day. I change her diaper and clothes and my clothes, and try to wind down for the rest of the afternoon. More books and songs and googoo-gaagaa’s, while I wonder continuously if I’m doing enough, if I’m doing too much, if I’m doing it right. 

The last couple of hours of the day always feel like the home-stretch to the finish line, but I also know what’s coming. It usually starts right after her bath, and sure enough: I pick her up from her warm soapy soak, after a few minutes of her looking relaxed and soothed from the day, and that sets her off. Her cries and screams pierce right through me. Her wails burn my ears. I reach for earplugs and put on noise-cancelling headphones, because I know it cannot be stopped, and it could last for hours. I diaper her and dress her in her pyjamas and wrap her in a tight swaddle. That seems to soothe her for a few seconds, but then she doubles down. I just can’t. So I wail too.

I lay her on our bed and hover over her, sobbing, and she sobs, and we face each other, our hearts breaking and streaming down our faces. Our hearts break for lives we used to have, which we will never have again. Hers was a life of blissful warm weightlessness, the whooshing sound of my blood, the beating of my heart, the gurgling of my stomach and the muffled sound of my voice. All her needs were met before she even realized she needed anything. She was comfortable, always. We were together then. But now she’s out here in this big, scary world. It’s cold, dry. It’s bright, loud, full of sights that seem too sharp and harsh for such soft skin, for such innocent eyes. And so, at the end of the day, no matter how gentle and calm of a day it was, she grieves for this life. She wishes she could be back there. But she can’t. She never will. And maybe, subconsciously, we all spend the rest of our lives wishing we could go back, too. 

And I grieve. My heart also breaks, every night. It breaks for a life I also used to have. A life of predictability, independence, freedom. A life during which I could know with certitude that if I work hard enough at something, I’ll manage to get it right. But that is no longer the case. Now, for 36 days, I've watched what I eat and drink because what I eat and drink feeds her. I used to dream of traveling the world. My body is stretched and scarred forever. I get at most three consecutive hours of sleep. And no matter what happens, I will never not be a mother again. I often wonder why no one ever warned me. Alongside “Breastfeeding 101” and “Labor and birth positions,” why isn’t there a baby-prep class called “Saying goodbye to your former self because you’re about to become someone else and you will be this new person for the rest of your life”? And so, mother and daughter, exhausted and desperate, together we cry. 

Then I remember a suggestion from the morning’s baby-and-me class. Something about playing white noise on YouTube to help with witching hour cries. I reach for my laptop, flip it open, and look up “hair dryer sound.” I crank up the volume and sure enough: 6 seconds in, she’s out cold. Like a light. I stare in disbelief. I sniffle and wipe my eyes, looking down at this little sleeping burrito of a baby. Her eyes closed, her little chest rising up and down. I take off my giant headphones and pull out my earplugs. I pick her up and hold her against my chest for a minute, swaying side to side, feeling her head heavy on my shoulder. It's bliss. I place her in her crib and give her a kiss on the forehead. I let my lips linger there for a little bit. I take in the smell of her hair and the taste of her skin. For a second I understand why some animals eat their young. Then I pick up my laptop from our bed, walk out of the room and close the door. I go to collapse on the couch. “One day,” I think to myself, “I’ll long for days like today.”