Who Am I Now?

*Content Note* We recognize that The Nourished Postpartum Challenge may stir up past trauma, or feel confronting to folks currently pregnant or in the early postpartum months. What may feel clarifying and cathartic to one person may be another person’s deepest trigger. Please care for yourself this week, share what feels safe to you, and if you realize you need deeper mental health support, we have created a Resources page which you can find here. 

Dear Pre-Kid Self (that knows the seasons are changing but plans to remain in a white linen mini dress),

OMG. You’re so cute. Seriously, I love you so much. Your hope, your fire, your energy, your conviction that your parenting will be so total and holistically sound that you will heal every ancestral struggle your lineage ever had and make no negative imprints into your kid’s psyche. I really want you to know how much I love you for all of this. 

Now the real shit. 

There is so much you don’t know. And some you just can’t know. If you knew it… well maybe people would stop having kids? Maybe humans would just… stop being a thing? 

I’m not trying to freak you out. But it gets… freaky. You will be more tired than your face will feel is possible. You literally will not know yourself anymore. At times you will hate the lump of a human sleeping beside you solely based on their USELESS NIPPLES. You will be mad at everyone, especially when the tired and the hungry stack. The home visits from your midwife will feel like an oasis in the desert and also a total joke because thanks for that hour… what about the next TWENTY THREE?! You’ll want to punch people with kids who smirk and say “Told ya” (ummm when and how did they tell me cause I remember hearing NONE OF THIS) and the people without kids more (WHAT DO YOU DO ALL DAY?! TELL ME EVERYTHING! ACTUALLY NO, TELL ME NOTHING BECAUSE I HATE YOU). 

You’ll wonder if it's normal to feel these things. You’ll be certain that it isn’t. Then you’ll be certain that it must be? Then you’ll convince yourself you feel nothing of this and you’ll find a new show to binge while breastfeeding for a couple days. Then you’ll feel terrible about that. You should have been reading poetry to the baby! Then a friend will come by and do your dishes and you’ll take a shower and then everything will feel kind of okay for another couple of days. Then your partner will come home at 6:27 instead of 6PM one day and you’ll google “Definition of ‘irreconcilable differences’ at 3am while they sleep soundly A-FUCKING-GAIN. 

Baby’s growth curve will get on track, and sidelying will get easier and now you’ll start getting 2 and 3 hour stretches of sleep some nights. You’ll also wake up guilt ridden about co-sleeping and when you try the basinet again you’ll feel guilt ridden about that and 15 seconds of squawking will flush your nervous system and tears will fall as you lay back down again with baby to your breast, wondering what the actual fuck you are supposed to do for the rest of your life at bedtime. Everyone will have an answer. No one will have the answer. Remember that.

Your partner will get a new job and money will get better and also he will come home and without realizing it, talk for 90 straight minutes of nuance about work. You’ll register none of this generously, as his desire to prove and provide and be a good partner and worker and instead SCREAM inside “WHAT ABOUT MY NEW JOB!? I HAVE BEEN IN A NEW JOB AND IT HAS TERRIBLE WORKING CONDITIONS FOR LITERALLY NO PAY AND WHEN I TALK ABOUT IT EVERYONE GLAZES OVER. FUCK YOUR NEW JOB.” You’ll fight that urge and instead pretend to go to the bathroom, climbing out onto the fire escape to suck back an emergency cigarette (that you keep stashed in a makeup bag that is otherwise laughably unused these days). 

Eventually you will go survey a daycare. Your doctor says you should try and get some space here and there to sleep, reset, and also… you need to start making an income. The building looks pretty shitty on the outside, which probably means it's in your budget. It has bars on the widows and there is a room full of cribs where babies of various sizes, some as young as a few weeks, cry and wriggle. You want to vomit. Why is everyone acting like this is normal? You ask for the price anyway. It is $2,000 per month full time for an infant or toddler. What even is this country that screams LIFE and FAMILY VALUES from the roof and yet has no adequate standard parental leave? You leave shaken, the world feels like a nightmare.

You find another mother to share childcare with. One day a week you work and she is with the kids. The next you swap. You hate being with both kids, it feels so much harder than any out of the house job could be. You used to be the world's greatest babysitter. You had songs! You had games! You couldn’t WAIT to be a mother. None of that is relevant now. Childcare and parenting… not the same. You laugh and cringe thinking of people in your baby group with twins. SURELY they are dead now? 

Things get a little better. It's been a year. Then they get worse again. Days where panic floods you. Days where you’re not sure if the feeling of dread is stronger at night or in the morning? The night before the first birthday you feel pulled into the somatic memory of the birth. Its length. Its intensity. The fact that it felt like assault. The moments immediately after when you were sure you were destined to fail everything else to come because you were just SO FUCKING TIRED. The fact that your asshole FOR SURE flipped inside out… and everyone acted like that was totally supposed to happen? The fact that when people came to visit after, it seemed like NO ONE WAS ACKNOWLEDGING WHAT ACTUALLY JUST HAPPENED?! It was like standing at the edge of a car wreck with onlookers remarking at how cute the survivor's outfits were? 

I am not going to tell you the good parts. You know them. You long for them. You have seen them in movies, and tv. People have told you about the good parts. You have always known deep in your bones that the good parts will be the most transcendental moments of your existence. You know you will sing everyday to this tiny person and live to make them smile. You know story time will be your favorite. You know you’ll suck at crafts but secretly love that your house is always lightly recovering from a glitter outbreak. You know you will watch them sleep and sometimes lay beside them just to breathe them in, and make sure for sure it is real.

You know that you’ll be proud of their every fart. You know you’ll panic at every poop after introducing a new food. You know you will advocate for them when the doctor tells you “it’s not that serious” but your gut is on fire so you rush to the hospital anyway to find out they have a 105 degree fever. You know you will show the fuck up. You know you will love them with full ferocity. You know they will be the most amazing person you have ever met. 

You know all of this. That isn’t the problem. 

The problem is everything you do not know. 

And before I go on I want to tell you something that only the day in day out, chop wood carry water, walking medicine of your own parental relentlessness could ever have taught you: you can feel lost under an ocean of depression AND also feel the good parts… at the same time. Adjacent moments will feel like completely discordant universes. You will be able to fully drink in the smell of your baby’s head (which is the smell of love) and then collapse in on yourself when you realise it's only 9:17am and the day feels too cavernous to face. I beg of you, don’t let the pain/struggle/loneliness convince you that the joy isn’t valid. You were never meant for static feeling, you were never entitled to one benevolent being state. You were always more complex than that; feeling all of it does not dilute your love or your devotion.

So, as I was saying - the problem is everything you don’t know. Everything that is left off greeting cards and out of sitcoms and baby showers. Everything that your care provider fails to mention or only does in the form of a pamphlet that feels both useless and condescending. The problem is that your partner has literally no fucking clue what his role is here because no one has shown him or taught him (in his cellular memory fatherhood starts when the kid is 3? 5? How many people’s father’s did a significant portion of infant care and soothing?) The problem is that you have been conditioned to value yourself through a male gaze of physical beauty and now… you’re not it. The problem is that you have been taught literally NOWHERE about what your breasts do besides attract attention. You have NO context for basic biology in the moment you need it most. The only thing you know about your hormones is that they “make you crazy.” 

You will get through this. And you won’t bypass it. You’ll harness every crack to let in as MUCH light as possible. You will seek the information (that has been provided to you nowhere) and you will share it with as many people you can wrangle to listen. You will learn that eating enough food boosts your mental health (WHO KNEW!) and that your body and breasts are magical and productive far beyond the kaleidoscope of ex-boyfriend's eyes imprinted on your self esteem. 

I am so sorry for everything you didn't know. Some of it you could never have known in an embodied way (there is no way, beyond torture, to teach sleep deprivation). But some of it you could have. The longer you ponder this, the more wholly unacceptable this will feel to you. There must be a way. Surely, knowledge of our own bodies, beyond sexual consumption, isn’t ACTUALLY controversial? Surely a new parent fighting off suicidal ideations is more controversial than basic biological empowerment?

I want you to know that the pain you feel in the most acute moments of suffering are unfortunately not exclusive to you. The more families you work with, the more you will see a piece of you in them and a piece of them in the collective. You will see that socially and structurally we routinely fail and abandon new parents. You were not a special case. The collective ancestral wounds of untended mothers and caregivers will shoot out of the mouth of your client's Great Aunt Susan, “I don’t know why people make such a big deal about it all. In my day we just got on with it.” In those moments you will feel the space that never was, the missed opportunities to heal, and the projection forward of the suffering we have come to normalize and even celebrate as necessary rites of passage for parents. 

A few years later you will in fact have twins. Your nightmare will become your lived reality. And it actually won’t be a nightmare. It will be hard but you will prepare so fully for your healing and adjustment that you will feel supported and able to transition slowly. There will be so much medicine here. You will reverse gaslight yourself into receiving what you need to thrive… and you’ll have a more realistic idea of what thriving looks like. Your two babies will have different temperaments than your one baby, and you’ll find “normal” between bed snuggles and bassinet balance. You will see that while struggle was always inevitable with your first, your depth of suffering should never have been and even though you have 3 kids 3 and under, you will unapologetically center your mental health above all else, and you and your family will be fine. Your twins will breastfeed with ease, grow on a curve beyond your expectations and the oxytocin waves will be plentiful. Even though the logistics with twins will be continuously nightmarish, because you feel well, you will find the first year of life with twins… easier. Shock of shocks.

At the time of writing, you’re not divorced. Seriously, well done on that because twin parents divorce TWICE as often as singleton parents. #doubleblessings. At the time of writing, parenthood is still more or less kicking the shit out of your relationship but you are learning to listen better, he understands more of what he doesn’t understand and works to fill that gulf, and you even sometimes make out in the kitchen while the mediocre midweek dinner overcooks on the stove. 

What I am trying to say is… this shit is a mess. But you will be okay. I really do promise that. You are an excellent mother who also yells a little and isn’t that tidy. But I promise you’re doing okay. 

Postscript: One day you really will see that the hard things were never actually you + your baby. The hard things were: lack of community, no foundation in your own body literacy, ancestral stories of martyrdom, gender inequality within your partnership (so engrained neither of you will see it until it’s almost too late), structural gaslighting within medical health, misogyny within mental health, past trauma resurfacing, and genuine torture-like sleep deprivation. You will also come to understand that in the matrix of your inevitable internal demise you are also supported invisibly by privileges you will continue to be blind to for a few more years. You will come to understand that the roots of reproductive health and family care are so rotten that almost no one makes it through unscathed - and some are stacked with so much risk, against so many intersections of oppressive odds that you will buck the fuck up and double down on the both AND of your own healing and the healing of the systems that disproportionally degenerate the most marginalized among us.