I tried to Google what I’m experiencing and the internet gives me two options: the baby blues or postpartum depression. It’s more than feeling blue and more complex than just sadness. It’s not quite postpartum depression or any clinical diagnosis from what I’m told. But these are the only results when researching postpartum clouds. The baby blues are experienced right after birth due to a dramatic shift in hormones — a couple days to one week postpartum — and then resolves. Postpartum depression is a medical condition that lasts a long time after birth and has more significant depressive symptoms. What I’m grappling with has no name but gets a wide-eyed nod from other new mothers when I describe it. It’s the Jenga tower I manage to build over days, even weeks, where all is going well and I feel amazing, but then someone makes one single comment or one small thing happens that sends the tower crashing down with me left somewhere under the pile. It’s how vulnerable I feel in every room I’m in where I’m asked how I’m doing and I say I’m doing great, and I mean it, because I am. But what I don’t say is how terrified I feel because I know I’m about one “what are you gonna do when you have to go back to shiftwork?” away from the Jenga collapse. I’m one disagreement, trigger or one idiot almost crashing into me on the road away from picking myself up from under the blocks. And it’s a silent mess. It looks quiet, it sleeps a lot and it runs to the other room to cry so the baby won’t see mama in tears. But she gets up and picks up the blocks with determination. She cooks, cleans, exercises, sleeps, reads a book, watches her favourite movie, meets up with other moms, accepts visitors and lets sunshine back in. She dries herself off from the rain and focuses on the flowers until it storms again. That. That is what I have. Maybe it doesn’t have a name because it’s simply being a new mother. But that feeling of being an emotional butterfly wing and the anxiety of being something everyone wants to touch but is always one touch away from ripping into shreds, that’s what this is. I’m calling it postpartum fragility.
Stanford Medicine Children’s Health devotes a page on their website to the new mother taking care of herself after baby. It’s what I landed on at 3:00 AM looking into this. I appreciate their Jenga-positive language specifying that “communication is important in preventing hurt feelings or misunderstandings when emotions are fragile.” But they start by reminding us that the postpartum period begins “after the delivery of your baby (…) and lasts 6 to 8 weeks.” As I end my eighth week postpartum, I can’t help but feel like we are being fooled. Postpartum fragility seems to peek at this time for me. If postpartum depression develops within the first three months after birth and can last years, what do they base the postpartum period length on? Answer: postpartum ends when your body has returned to its pre-pregnant state. Curious about this, I searched how long after birth our body goes back to “normal.” What is normal anyway? Does your body have to look like you did not have a baby? Or do you have to show a certain level of mental clarity and alertness? Some say six months, some say it takes one year to recover physically and emotionally from birth, and some argue there are many permanent changes that lead us to never returning to a pre-pregnancy state at all, as the entire body and all its systems and organs are affected by pregnancy and birth. I agree with the last one the most. I don’t believe I’ll ever be back to the state before giving birth. It has changed me forever and there seems to be no life before my daughter. I will never be the same person I was before I met her. I don’t want my body back. I want my body now. I want my hips to remain strong. I wish my linea nigra would never fade. I want the body that feeds my baby. I want the body that bleeds and leaks. I want the mind that got me through labour. I want every piece of evidence that my body was someone’s home. My body will never be the same again. It has grown and carried a child. It has birthed the love of my life. I don’t want to bounce back to a pre-pregnancy state. I want the mind and body that made me a mother and adore every part of it that is proof of what we made together.
I have postpartum fragility. I’m not sure how long it will last. I’m not sure when it started. I move through this chapter of my life with it for the first time. I see myself as an emotional butterfly wing: delicate and colourful, but so close to being crushed all the time. I surround myself with the right people and take care of myself while I wait for it to pass or evolve into something else. My house is my cocoon and it’s where I want to be until I feel ready to come out. They say the caterpillar’s body while in the cocoon is broken down to a fluid, built back up and emerges into a butterfly. Yes. I’m broken down to a fluid at this time: breastmilk. That’s my purpose and priority. I will evolve into something else eventually. But right now, I’m a liquid-gold machine that my baby depends on and loves and I have no other focus. I’m everything to my daughter, I feed her with my body and that’s all I want to be doing. I have less capacity to deal with things that affect me negatively, perhaps because all my energy is focused on making this fluid and delivering it. Perhaps my energy levels are low everywhere except where my baby needs them. In other words, I don’t have patience for much, but can nourish my child awake or half asleep. I don’t have tolerance for inconsiderate remarks, but I have all the time in the world for a new mom’s birth story. I don’t have much interest in subjects that don’t make me a better mom. I have too much of a mental load to make decisions others can make for themselves. While I used to go about my day counting minutes before starting work and going home, I now count in ounces, feeds, diaper changes, days since bath time, hours of wake windows, days until next appointment, hours until next nap, days until visitors, months left to my maternity leave, number of people on the daycare list ahead of me, pay checks, EI payments, savings, time that breastmilk was left out, minutes for sterilizing pump parts, number of layers based on temperature, and I’m now counting ages in weeks just to make time seem to go by faster than it already did. I count in weeks and ounces while building my tower of good days and good feelings and most of the time I genuinely feel on top of the world. So if anything is negative or ill-intentioned, or if it simply takes energy I don’t have, it will crash my Jenga. I want to break out of here and spread my wings, spread my vibrant colours around without being scared of the tower falling apart. I want to be more to everyone I love. But I’m not quite there yet.
The butterfly needs the struggle of growing and battling inside the cocoon. It needs to have a hard time breaking it open for it to succeed out in the world. That’s why we don’t go rip open a cocoon to help the creature in metamorphosis inside. We must let it struggle. We must let it figure it out. We must leave it untouched and unbothered and let it come out to us. Leaving it untouched is important for its wellbeing. Yes. I know I will emerge better from this. It’s temporary. But right now, I’m broken down to a fluid and have very little energy for anything else. I want to be in my cocoon and focus on my growth. I’m well aware of my fragility. I am delicate and I am vulnerable.
So leave me unbothered.
I’m a goddamn butterfly.
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