one month / two things
We’ve survived the first four weeks.
I miss the clothes I wore a year ago, but I like that I wake earlier now. Breastfeeding has come surprisingly easily, so I’m surprised how much I just don’t like it. I didn’t think we’d need so much newborn clothing. I thought I’d be more independent one month out.
Who knew? Who knows.
Linked below are a couple conversations and soft places I’ve seen myself reflected in during these first few weeks.
On Matrescence
This conversation between authors Katherine May and Lucy Jones hit me hard. There’s a point in the podcast1 where Jones discusses a fitness group for pregnant folks that celebrated when a birthing person returned from labor and delivery and shared they had made it through the ordeal sans pain management or stitches.
I had internalized this empty ideal. I watched the Ricki Lake documentary.2 I hired a doula (who was fantastic). I’m not sure when I’ll make sense of the experience of how my healthy, textbook birth took on an urgency that propelled me from a dimly lit delivery room with my own “push playlist”3 serving as the soundtrack to the finale of my long labor into a florescent, echoing surgical theater teeming with people. When complications arose during my recovery and invasive interventions sent me spiraling, I wept to the nurses: I couldn’t even get him here on my own. And yet, in the light of day, back in my bearings, I know that isn’t true. And yet, and yet, this shame festers.4
On Myles
Marc Typo is writing a series of letters on Substack to his infant son. By the time I finished the letter linked below about his son’s first day of daycare, I could barely see my screen anymore. I was hiccupping through my sobs.
I love you, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Somewhere between minutes 35 and 40
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995061/
