It’s been nearly eight weeks and I want to say ‘it’s been a blur’ but it’s been a blur not in the sense of time rushing past us but the blurring of our bodies as time passes through us.
The days don’t have edges, though they have more definition than they did. In his first two weeks we became different creatures. The days so soft they became mush. Do you know what happens inside a chrysalis? Disintegration before transformation. Caterpillar soup.
In the beginning I deprived myself of sleep. I dreaded night so much I tried to draw out the day. We’d go to bed at one AM, two. Reducing the space between darkness and dawn. In those lonely hours I would sit against the wall, propped up with pillows, feeding a baby I was afraid to turn away from. Too fearful to sleep. I brought my baby into bed so I could hear his breathing, feel his rise and fall. Irregular rhythms of a new life. I curled my body around his without touching, protecting the space between us. The cat jumped into the bassinet.
While I leant against the wall in the quiet dark, feeding the baby and watching his father sleep beside me, the only thing I could hold was my phone. I began to write in the notes app to spare staring at the curtain. I kept a vigil, stayed awake until I couldn’t. Everyone told me to sleep when he slept, but I couldn’t. I refused to give the day up to the dark.
❋
J asks me which Australian city I think will be the next to host the Olympics. ‘Perth,’ I say. He sits on the edge of the single bed we use as a couch, referring to it as a daybed in denial. The nice midcentury sofa I bought off Instagram at the beginning of pregnancy - olive green, chrome feet - had become unbearably uncomfortable as soon as I started breastfeeding. After lying down all through pregnancy I was shocked to finally sit on it. It was on Gumtree a week after Raphy was born.
‘“Queensland have put in an enthusiastic bid for the summer Olympics and Paralympics of 2032”,’ J reads. ‘Makes sense. Great Barrier Reef, Gold Coast. People want to see that stuff.’
‘If the Great Barrier Reef still exists by then,’ I say, looking down at Raphy, attached to my breast.
The daybed felt symbolic: the first instance of trading taste for comfort. It felt practical - it felt like parenthood. I rebelled against it by spending the last of my maternity leave on clothes for my altered postpartum body. Clothes to hide inside, and to reinvent. Clothes that - crucially - allow me to whip out a breast at a moment’s notice. Another practicality.
❋
A butterfly is built from the cells that survive the self-digestion of the caterpillar. They’re called imaginal discs. Before it hatches from its egg, before the beginning of its life, a caterpillar grows imaginal discs for the adult body parts it will need later to become a butterfly, or moth. Some lie dormant, some mature early. Some caterpillars carry fledgling wings inside their bodies.
It’s easier to write my vulnerabilities here, for public consumption. My eyes are closed out here, or yours. It’s hard to say it’s hard to someone’s face.
Don’t mistake me - this is not a cry for help. My life brims with joy, and occasionally overflows. My phone is full of nighttime notes describing the details of my son I never want to forget; my phone is full of photos. Cupid’s bows and conch shells. It’s a strange sensation, to live in the awe-inspiring everyday. To live in caterpillar soup. It is mundane and it is extraordinary. I have my baby and my baby has me. It is motherhood, and I am here.
"Days so soft they became mush". Can so relate. Beautiful.