Postpartum | Week 6
“My body is wrecked. As in there is 10% or less of me that doesn’t feel like some wounded animal anatomy. I literally didn’t know what today was when I woke up and this last week plus of waiting has felt brutally & hopelessly endless.”
It’s been 6 weeks since I wrote this and it somehow already seems so distant. So much has already changed.
Pain by general definition has changed. It’s no longer caused by the stitches holding together the moment 8lbs 2 oz of life entered this plane. Nor is it from the mounting desperation for balance of these new lives. It’s the mid-night nod of (sleep) deprivation, pending milk regulation and surging rage as rest in it’s truest and most necessary form eludes me. It’s my all too capable body & its overzealous delivery of life supporting sustenance now manipulating all time and attention.
Experience tells me two things: this will pass & before it does to find the beauty in this slow vanishing season of pain and cling to it. Experience however has done little to nothing to prepare me. I’m confident my experience postpartum will forever elicit a trauma response within my currently battered but soon functional frame. Its demands, far exceeding any and all of my physical limitations, continue to be met. Its so powerful it seems almost to bend time. To slow it to an excruciatingly slow cadence that somehow simultaneously swallows the days before you.
I don’t know if its self preservation or some other subconscious phenomenon but I recall so few of the details of my first postpartum journey. So little of that time is clear. The physicality of it I remember vividly but the emotional experience is so hazy. Maybe it’s better that way. I’m almost sure that’s why I could again find myself wading in the waters of the 4th trimester.
I anticipate this to be my last time navigating this postpartum road. For a plethora of reasons greatest among them I’m just too old and generally too tired to find myself here again. I’m a firm believer in knowing your limitations. All things pregnant & postpartum related are among them. All of this said I am grateful - endlessly & eternally grateful - for the fruit of this current season. My littlest and last love..