I Am Not Alone

When I was a little girl I spent my days playing with babies . . . not real ones, of course. The ones who never cried or had irregular breathing patterns or got hungry or had gas. No, I played with the ones who had permanent smiles on their faces as I pushed them through my house in a tiny stroller where their legs dangled over the edge. I loved them as if they were my own real babies. 

After them, it was babysitting jobs that filled my weekends and after school calendars. And those were real babies. The ones who needed to be fed, and rocked, and read to but never the ones who cried every two hours of every night for what felt like an eternity.  

Fast forward when I became pregnant with my first baby, I was twenty eight years old and was married to a man who had never held a baby in his entire life. It didn’t matter. I had held every baby that had been within 20 feet of me. And I had been practicing for this job, you could say, for over twenty years. Plus, I had all of humanity on my side. 

Just so you know, my formal degree is in anthropology and I spent many hours in college learning about what it means to be human. I had one of the deepest human experiences right in front of me, or right inside of me, depending on how you look at it.  

During my pregnancy I spent my days as a Montessori preschool teacher telling people how to parent their children when I had very little experience parenting other than those dolls I told you about earlier. Clearly, I was an expert on parenting. Almost every evening, I walked Peet’s hill talking to my little babe telling her how I couldn’t wait for her to be here with me, to experience the fresh air, the trail and all of nature. 

She will be seven next month and I’m pretty sure she could walk Peet’s hill with a blind fold on. I was a voracious reader of anything birth related, I took childbirth education, watched hundreds of birth videos on youtube and even convinced my husband to sign up for Hypnobirthing. I spent the last month of my pregnancy falling deeply asleep to the sound of my husband's voice reading me a rainbow meditation.

I know, it sounds crazy. But when you are wound as tight as me, going to another planet from time to time is a good thing. 

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on who you ask, at 38 weeks my darling daughter decided she would make her entrance into the world.  Those of you who know me, know I HATE surprises. I am a planner. I hadn’t packed a bag, put my carseat in, I hadn’t finished folding all the tiny clothes, and for god’s sake, I hadn’t learned the magical J breath that was supposed to help me birth my baby without pain. 

But how could I hate that I was getting ready to meet the one who would break my heart into every emotion I never knew existed.  I know you thought this was a postpartum story, and it is. 

And the more I look at it, the more I realize I am no different than many of you. I was so wrapped up in knowing what to expect when you’re expecting that I forgot about the little piece called the rest of your life. 

Ready or not, my girl was coming.  After 24 hours of the most intense work of my entire life, Talia was born.  In the first moments I held her tiny body close to mine, all I could say was “I did it, I did it.” I had brought my baby into the world just as I had planned. 

It wasn’t until leaving the warm glow of the birth center that I felt my elation starting to fizzle. We returned home in the afternoon with Talia wearing the same yellow sweater that I had worn 29 years ago, greeted by my mom and our dog Kinga, who licked the salt furiously from my body. It was as if she was trying to taste the new me. 

When I look back on it, she was the first one to notice that I was vulnerable, new and overwhelmed by the unknown of up ahead. I mean, I knew I was different — I had a baby in my arms that fully depended on me to keep her alive, but I’m not sure I realized the depth of change that happens when you bring another person into the world. 

Everyone always talks about how your heart explodes with joy when you have a baby, but no one really talks about birth changes you on a cellular level and you are never, ever the same. I wish I had been more prepared for that feeling. 

To show you just how unprepared I was, I invited my mom to be with us for SEVEN days as I was certain that was enough time for us to settle into our new roles.  Despite my error in planning, my mom cooked for us, cleaned for us, went to Target at least 10 times and did everything she possibly could do for the first 168 hours of my new life, without stepping on the toes of her daughter who had it all figured out.  

And during my birth, as beautiful and peaceful as it was, I still suffered from the physical trauma of childbirth, lost a little more blood than I could handle and for the first few days after Talia’s birth I couldn’t even stand upright. To top that off I had an incredibly hard time nursing her.  Her latch destroyed my nipples . . . and my confidence. Breastfeeding was the thing I dreamed about during my pregnancy, maybe because I am a nerd who studied a lot about evolution, or maybe because I could picture that as the perfect mother. 

Either way, in the first days, weeks and months after Talia’s birth, I would cry every time I fed her. The feeling of failure was like a monster, always lurking. If you were with me, you may not have seen the tears but that’s because I had an incredible way of swallowing them down. At night when I would try to get her back to sleep, I would pace the floor plan of our house with my dog following every step as if to say “you’re not alone, you’re not alone.” Instead of listening, I would snap. “go away, don’t wake the baby.” I wish I had listened. 

Usually this scene would end in me collapsing on the couch in tears until my husband came out to remind me, “you’ve got this, take a deep breath.” And all I could think was “how many times can I unravel like this in front of him before he too wants to jump out of this picture?” At the moments when I would feel like giving up, everything would slow down, I would breathe and watch my tears run down the cheeks of my baby girl as she nursed from the mama who loved her so deeply it hurt.  

You know, on the outside, I had it all . . . or so I was told. I was back in my jeans, lost all my baby weight, had a beautiful baby girl, I was back on the trail and had a clean house. But as the days went on, I couldn’t keep up and mothering for me became tinged with an overwhelming sense of fear fueled by exhaustion.  I didn’t sleep for fear that I would have to wake up. It became a horribly vicious cycle, one that is so hard to break. 

But I would tell myself “that’s just part of being a mother, right?” As my girl slept beside me I would startle at her every move, every breath that didn’t sound like the one before. My mind raced as sleep deprivation started to torture me. I never dreamed. I felt like I could never turn off my brain.

And wrapping her tiny screaming body in a swaddle for what felt like the hundredth time each night, this voice inside of me kept saying, “I wasn’t cut out for this, why is this so hard for me?, I wanted this so badly?” I could see myself failing and none of it made sense.  I was so prepared but I knew nothing. 

One day, I couldn’t get Talia to stop crying no matter what I did to comfort her.  I called my midwife as my blood started to boil and said, “she won’t stop crying, she cries when I feed her, when I rock her, I just feel like throwing her out in the snow.” Sensing my frazzled state but knowing me on such a deep level, she said "Suzanne, put her in a safe spot, go outside and scream at the top of your lungs.”

I did it. I put T in the crib and went to the back door, took the biggest breath I had ever taken and screamed at the top of my lungs. Who knows what my neighbors must have been thinking!? But you know what, I was finally heard. I could finally say that this was the hardest job I had ever done. 

Lucky for me, my best friend had a baby six weeks after me and it was her who I called every morning when I felt like screaming or crying or throwing my baby in the snow. We compared notes from the night before and almost everyday made a plan to get together. To do this together. The way it was meant to be. 

I didn’t realize it at the time but my cells craved her presence, her strength, her calmness and her ability to be so raw and understand the overwhelm of a new mother.  

As spring turned into summer in my first year as a new mother, I was always able to hold onto this feeling of bringing Talia into the world on my own, just as many mothers had done before me. This feeling of the collective strength of women pushed me through the dark days and into the light of the mother I knew I was to become. This job I had been practicing for . . . was right in front of me and it was by far the hardest thing I had ever done.  

As I prepared to bring my second baby into the world, I realized I didn’t need youtube videos, or books about childbirth. I needed to open my heart to the feeling of support, love and connection that is necessary in the days, weeks, months, even years after birth. I needed to be prepared to feel the messiness, the rawness and the vulnerability that is new motherhood, without judging myself and my performance as mother. I realized that it’s okay to feel scared, overwhelmed, anxious when faced with the most challenging, heart wrenching, soul opening experience of life.  

My son is three and my daughter almost seven.  I would be lying if I told you it was always easy for me.  It’s not. And sometimes I still wonder, “what the hell am I doing?”

But you know what, I know I’m not alone. 

~Suzanne Bendick