I’m so tired today. I could happily lay in bed with a book. I could happily curl up, hugging my pillow.
On my way out the door this morning I fell on my ass. The backpacks, a to-go breakfast plate with half-eaten butter toast, three stainless steal water bottles, and my diaper bag all scattered around me. I don’t know why I try to carry all the things in one trip. I don’t know why I can’t carry what’s appropriate to hold in two hands and go back for the rest.
Yesterday R peered into the dark cave of H’s mouth examining her uvula, and discovered molars pushing through her gums. “Mommy, there’s a white bump, the shape of an orzo.” Ha, the shape on an orzo.
It occurred to me recently that I’m two years postpartum. I’ve never been two years postpartum before. I got pregnant with H when R was 8 months old. Then pregnant again when H was 7 months.
That third time, I miscarried at 10 weeks. We didn’t know until a doppler ultrasound produced only a tense silence. A “missed miscarriage” they call it. A week later, choosing to miscarry without intervention, blood poured out of me as I stood up from the driver’s seat of my car. The sudden swoosh stained the royal blue Zara sweatpants I’d been wearing to accommodate my distended belly while I was and was not pregnant, a distinctly bleak purgatory.
I waddled to the front door where the babysitter was waiting. “I need to clean myself up,” I told her, but she was running late for another job, so I scooped H out of her arms and she sat on the bathroom floor next to me as placenta tissue and clots fell out. I wrapped the sweatpants in a plastic grocery bag and walked gingerly to the outdoor trashcan to throw them away. I was holding one baby in my arms — her warm cheeks, fuzzy hair, and pudgy thighs — as I lost another.
I sat on the toilet and in bed for two days and then proceeded to work and care for my daughters in a state of foggy despair. This was a kind of sadness I couldn’t recognize until it lifted — only perceptible by contrast. Oh that was bad I thought once it was all over.
I got pregnant again when H turned one, and miscarried again at 8 weeks. I was on a weekend spa trip with my sister and mom. Before it happened, I was debilitatingly afraid that it would: scared to hike or do yoga or eat too little or too much. This time there was just a small blot of blood when I wiped in the hotel bathroom. The blot grew larger in size each hour, and I spent the rest of the trip binge watching a Netflix show I remember nothing about.
The following months are marked by a heavy hope that felt like dragging a dead horse behind me everyday. “Come onnnn!” I’d grunt, heaving it along. Sometimes the heaviness gave way to desperation, which translated into lots of midnight googling, acupuncture and blood work and refined medical protocols: a prenatal with methylated folate in the event of a MTHFR mutation, baby aspirin to prevent blood clots, herbs, a rigid fertility diet.
By H’s 2nd birthday I was 5 weeks pregnant with E (my sweet boy!), unmoored by the possibility of another loss and the reluctant hope that this could be it! It was.
Within four years I had five pregnancies and three children.
—
Now E is two and I’ve weaned nursing and I think I understand what people mean when they talk about feeling like themselves again. I mean, I couldn’t conjure the me from before if I wanted to. I did want to, actually. I tried and I failed. And then — slowly and begrudgingly — I found great peace in accepting the futility of that effort.
But, two years later, I am a me I couldn’t access in the thick of pregnancy, postpartum, and extended nursing. These are the most potent parts of the maiden to mother passage and they are behind me. Here I am. A mom. Not at the beginning anymore. Just in it.
Yesterday H climbed the cabinet knobs onto the kitchen countertops and poured milk into an ombre pink champagne flute we haven't used since we had her. She sat on the kitchen island, legs dangling, as she absentmindedly sipped.
Milk in a champagne flute. It’s symbolic of something.
Later I loaded everyone into the car for a trip to the grocery store. When we arrived I clipped E into the grocery cart baby seat. By the time we passed through the sliding doors, he was tugging at the waist clip saying “ou, ou.” When I let him out, he alternated between walking with his arms wrapped around my calf and galloping down the aisles gleeful with independence. H followed close behind him, occasionally ushering him back to the cart. R and I giggled at the sight of it. He pointed at jam and cereal and cookies and when I said “we don’t need that today,” he moved on to something else. He knocked over a large plastic sign indicating the tortilla chips were on sale and I failed to wrangle him back into the cart. When we approached the fish counter he spotted an octopus carcus and silently pressed his nose up against the glass. H and R gathered beside him and they marveled together.
I haven’t been pregnant in two years. It feels like the sound of cracking open a soda can to say that. And E and H and R and me, we are each (I know it’s so obvious) an individual person, and also inextricably linked — fixtures in each other’s internal ecosystems. Mom and daughters and brother and sisters and son. Identities built from each other. I guess that’s what family is. I sometimes can’t believe I have my own.
Love,
Stephanie
PS: yes, my daughter did cut her bangs off to the absolute nub yesterday.
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